The Hermit Doctor of Gaya: A Love Story of Modern India
quiet and peaceful in the face of a gathering force of sheer physical
revolt. His smarting body cried out for vengeance, but it had no power
to move him. He stood there, taking the punishment patiently, almost
listlessly.
Boucicault drew back from him a moment. He was breathing noisily
between his teeth. In him the fundamentals had gone to pieces, and he
was being carried forward on a flood-tide of ungoverned, monstrous
passions. His mind, in the midst of its disruption, reasoned with the
swiftness of insanity. This hulking, stupid giant who had set out to
ruin him--who bore insult and pain with less spirit than his dog--he
could be ruined, too. An inquiry? Good--let there be one--a
court-martial--cashiered, both of them. But first this block had to be
roused.
Possibly he was mad, but he had a madman's instinct and deep knowledge
of the secret madness in others. He stepped suddenly on one side. The
end of his stick was sharp and jagged. With the steel-wristed strength
practised on many a day's pig-sticking, he lunged forward, driving the
spike straight into Wickie's body.
Tristram had seen too late. He heard the yelp, broken and ending
piteously in a child's whimper. Then it was done. Something in him
snapped. Mind and body, instinct and reason leapt together. He struck
out with all the terrible strength of his great shoulders, with all the
force of his outraged love of life, with all his pity--struck to kill.
It grew very quiet. He had been battling in the midst of a titanic
natural eruption, and now suddenly the violently aroused elements had
dropped exhausted, leaving him standing in the midst of ruin. The tide
which had flowed through his veins receded, and he became oddly tired
and weak and helpless. The old blindness was creeping over him. Yet
some things he saw in a kind of vague bigness. He did not bend down, but
the man lying stretched in the dust seemed quite near to him--an
austere, sinister shadow floating on a grey mist which rose
higher--close to his face.
A faint sound reached him--a dull, soft thudding. He found himself on
his knees, muttering incoherently.
Wickie lay full length, his short, crooked paws stretched out, seeking
relief. There was blood on his brindle side. One brown eye looked out
of its corner, half-puzzled, half-reassuring, a little glint of the old
solemn humour showing through, as though the joke at Mrs. Smithers's
expense still lingered in the fading brain. The tail beat the dust
softly, and into that feeble movement there was compressed a love and
understanding, almost a pity which defied death and rose above all
language.
Tristram took the head on his arm. He saw that his hand was wet and
knew that he was crying. Wickie turned a little, licking his hand
feebly.
"Old fellow--dear old fellow--if I hadn't cared so much--if I'd been
able to drown a kitten--it wouldn't have happened----" He bent lower,
kissing the black snout. "My best pal!"
He went on talking under his breath. He did not know that he talked.
Some one quite close whispered the words into his ear. He was not
conscious of thinking. It began to grow very dark.
Presently Wickie sighed and stretched himself wearily, contentedly, as
though it were no more than sleep that were coming--sleep by the
camp-fire after a long day's march. Then lay still.
Tristram dragged himself to his feet. Out of the deepening blackness of
things, an instinct asserted itself dimly.
"Help--we've got to get help--somehow----"
He said it aloud. It seemed to him that it had been shouted by the
invisible monitor at his side. He stumbled over the prostrate figure
lying so simple and still in the dust, reeling back from it, his face
turned from Gaya. Then he began to walk. He walked long after the
blackness had become impenetrable. He was no more than the one
instinct, tragically dominant over the body which had betrayed him. His
body was dead. He could not feel it. It was a machine that he willed
to go straight forward to some dim, vast punishment.
He walked through hours and nights of darkness. At last there were
lights in front of him--great yellow balls of haloed flame, which danced
in ecstasy to a passionate rhythm. He heard voices--a sea of
whisperings which surged towards him on a great wave, breaking over him
in one hushed sound. He tried to cling to it through his fading
consciousness. It became a face, gazing down at him, serene,
triumphant, pitying--it became a hand which touched him, held him in its
iron gentleness. He could feel it holding to him surely, as all else
broke from him, flinging him down into a bottomless silence.
*CHAPTER XIII*
*CROSSED SWORDS*
In reality, he had not gone more than half a mile. But things had
happened to him of which he had had no knowledge--twice he had retraced
his steps and once fallen to his knees and groped his way through the
dust in a blind circle. The eternities had been less than an hour, the
darkness no more than the clear nightfall, the lights a dozen lanterns
twinkling from the trees of the dak-bungalow. His consciousness had
been a dull, distorted thing, presenting the reality to him in shapeless
exaggerations. He had heard music. It had sounded to him like a huge,
throbbing symphony in which these nights and days in Bjura, the passions
which had swept him out of his path, were mercilessly reiterated
motives. In reality, it was just Carreno's unsophisticated little waltz
which Sigrid Fersen drew out lightly from a Steinway already much the
worse for its Indian sojourn. He heard voices. It was young Radcliffe
lounging in the shadow of the trees, making a gloomy assault on the
susceptibilities of the latest sweetest thing from England, the while
his real deeply embittered self was in the drawing-room scowling at
Rasaldu, who, still crowned with laurels, leant against the piano
staring at Sigrid unrestrainedly and with a very naked passion.
The last voice that Tristram heard, the first and last face that he had
seen, had been Sigrid's, but that was because she had swamped all other
realization. It was Mrs. Smithers, roaming like a dutiful policeman
through the compound, who found him lying huddled together just inside
the gates. She made no sort of outcry. Having ascertained that he was
alive, she did not even hurry herself. She went and stood primly at
Sigrid's side, her mittened hands folded in front of her, her back to
Rasaldu, whom she openly detested.
"He's there," she said, jerking her head towards the compound; "lying in
a dead faint, poor dear. I guess it's your fault--you'd better do
something, hadn't you?"
After one swift glance at the grim face, and without a word either to
Smithers or Rasaldu, Sigrid had got up and gone down the steps into the
darkness where Tristram lay. She knelt down beside him and touched him
on his dry, burning forehead, on his throat, gliding down to his
powerless hand. She spoke to him, calling him by name, and she knew
that he heard, and recognized her. For a long minute she remained thus
motionless, tasting her power to probe beneath his physical
consciousness to the self in which he kept his dreams, his quaint
beliefs, his simple, world-embracing love of things. And she knew that
if he saw her, it was because her face lived in his inner vision, and
that if he felt her hand it was because the memory of her touch was
seared into his very flesh.
She granted him and herself that moment, and then she called for help.
It came quickly, noisily. But though others intervened, she remained at
Tristram's side. Her instinct told her that he knew she was there, and
that she held him back from the abyss towards which he was drifting.
They laid him between the faintly scented sheets of her bed. It was her
order. The shaded lamp threw a subdued glow on the room's costly
loveliness, on the scattered, cunningly grouped treasures of five
continents, on fragmentary, priceless testimonies to a rare and varied
taste. They exercised a curious influence on the grieved and troubled
helpers. It was like a subtle intoxication, as though all that these
things represented crept into their blood and fought there for mastery.
And in silent, austere contrast was the man lying dimly outlined beneath
the white sheet, the rugged, unkempt head tilted slightly back against
the pillow, the thin, suffering features composed in a passing phase of
grave serenity.
They knew whence he came and what he had accomplished, and the rarefied
atmosphere of exquisite Paganism jarred on them. It was a challenge, a
kind of sneer at his whole life. They did not reason about it, they
could scarcely define it. But it made Meredith's manner cold to the
point of antagonism as he turned presently to where Sigrid stood in the
shadow, her eyes fixed on the old Italian vase which she had picked up
casually. He hated her again--she was so calm, almost indifferent. He
came and stood beside her, hushing his full voice.
"I think we've done all we can. He's pretty bad, I'm afraid. I'll have
a wire sent to the next best station for a doctor and a nurse. Of
course, he can't stay here--we'll try and move him tomorrow."
"I prefer him to stay here," she said, without looking up.
He frowned, wishing that Rasaldu had not been one of those to help carry
Tristram and to share in the unconventional intimacy of the scene. It
revolted him that he should stand there, watching and listening. The
old ugly suspicions which he had sternly repressed in himself awoke
again. They were not justly roused--it was only that he was human and
incensed.
"I don't think Tristram would wish it," he said, and unconsciously his
voice took on its heaviest Anglicanism. "He would not wish you to be put
to any trouble. After all, he is almost a stranger to you."
"I know him very well," she returned. "I think he has known me all his
life. He would leave the decision to me."
"At least, he would not wish you to be burdened with
the--unconventionally----" He stammered, half expecting the vivid
contempt with which she turned to him, and conscious of deserving it.
"Oh, you priest! You would rather your friend died than that your
fetish of Other People's Respectability should be insulted." She waved
him aside and flashed past him to the doorway, pulling the curtains
noiselessly aside. In the second room, half-boudoir,
half-dressing-room, she found Mary Compton and Anne. The rest of the
guests had discreetly evaporated, or at most hovered afar off waiting
news of the man whom, oddly enough, they loved without intimacy. He had
lived so much his own life, they had so often laughed at his oddities,
and it was something of a revelation to them that, now the inevitable
disaster had overtaken him, they were sick and afraid and dumbly
remorse-stricken.
Captain Compton stood at the compound gates under the dying lights of
the lanterns with a couple of his brother officers, and smoked fiercely.
"Poor old Tristram--good old Hermit. It was bound to happen. No human
being could go on like that and not crock up. Damn it, we oughtn't to
have allowed it. We took him too much for granted. It's always the
way. Good Lord, why doesn't some one come? What's Rasaldu doing in that
_galere_, I should like to know? And what the devil is that tearing
down the road----?"
Rasaldu meantime, delightfully conscious of his utility, had followed
Sigrid and Meredith into the room where the two women waited. Mary
Compton had remained boldly. She sat upright in her chair under the lamp
with a rather bleak look of authority and ready-for-anything alertness,
which had made her an adored terror in the grim days at Chitral. Her