A DESCRIPTION in detail of the journey from Bab-us-Sahel to the frontier would be as wearisome to the reader as the journey itself was to the travellers. Lady Haigh and Penelope learned to remain resolutely in the saddle for hours after they had determined that human nature could do no more than slip off helplessly on the sand, and they discovered also how remarkably little in the way of luxuries one camel could carry when it was already loaded with bedding and camp-furniture. They found that there was not much to choose, so far as comfort was concerned, between the acknowledged desert, diversified by sand-storms and mirages, and the so-called forests, where trees above and bushes below were alike as dry as tinder, and a spark carelessly dropped might have meant death to the whole party. An interlude in the shape of a river-voyage might have seemed to promise better things, but the small flat-bottomed steamers were cramped and hot, incredibly destitute of conveniences, and perversely given to running aground in spots where they had to remain until a levy had been made on the neighbouring population to drag them off. Scenery there was none, save banks of mud, for the river ran high above the level of the country through which it flowed; and it was with positive relief that the travellers disembarked at a little mud settlement embowered in date-palms, and prepared for a further ride. A fresh trial was awaiting Lady Haigh here in the shape of a peremptory order to Sir Dugald to push on at once to Alibad by forced marches, leaving the ladies to follow quietly under the care of the regimental surgeon. Major Keeling, with a portion of his regiment and the little band of picked men he had gathered together to help him administer his district, had preceded the Haighs’ party, travelling as fast as possible; and now it seemed as if his restless energy had involved him already in hostilities with the wild tribes. Lady Haigh turned very white as she bade her husband farewell; but she made no attempt to hold him back, and he rode away into the sand-clouds with his two or three horsemen. She would have liked to follow him as fast as possible; but Dr Tarleton, a dark taciturn man, remarkable for nothing but an absolute devotion to Major Keeling, had his orders, and meant to obey them. He had been told to conduct the ladies quietly to Alibad, and quietly they should go, taking proper rest, and not pushing on faster than his medical judgment allowed. The desert was even drier, hotter, and less inhabited than that between Bab-us-Sahel and the river, and to the travellers it seemed unending. Of course they suffered torments from prickly heat, and became unrecognisable through the attacks of mosquitoes; and Lady Haigh’s ringlets worried her so much that nothing but the thought of her husband’s disappointment restrained her from cutting them off altogether. As the distance from Alibad became less, however, her spirits seemed to revive, though this was not due to any special charm in the locality. Even Penelope was astonished at the interest and vivacity with which her friend contemplated and remarked upon a stretch of desert which looked like nothing so much as a sea of shifting mud, with a small group of mud-built huts clustering round a mud-built fort, like shoals about a sandbank, and a range of mud-coloured hills rising above it on the left. No trees, no water, no European buildings: decidedly Alibad, sweltering in the glaring sun, did not look a promising abode. Sir Dugald must be very delightful indeed if his presence could render such a place even tolerable. And why had he not come to meet his wife?
“Look there!” cried Lady Haigh suddenly. “What’s that?”
She pointed with her whip to the desert on the right of the town. A cloud of dust, followed by another somewhat smaller, seemed to be leaving the neighbourhood of the fort and the huts at a tremendous pace, crossing the route of the travellers at right angles.
“I think it must be one man chasing another,” suggested Penelope, whose eyes had by this time become accustomed to the huge dust-clouds raised by even a single horseman.
“Not quite, Miss Ross,” said Dr Tarleton, with a grim chuckle. “That’s the Chief taking his constitutional, with his orderly trying to keep up with him. There!”—as a patch of harder ground made a break in the cloud of dust—“you can see him now. Look there, though! something is wrong. He’s riding without any cap or helmet, and that means things are very contrary indeed. It would kill any other man, but he can stand it in these moods, though I got him to promise not to run such risks. Look out!”
He checked his horse sharply, for the two riders came thundering across the path, evidently without seeing those who were so near them—Major Keeling with his hair blowing out on the wind and his face distorted with anger, the orderly urging his pony to its utmost speed to keep up with the Commandant’s great black horse.
“Don’t be frightened. He’ll work it off in that way,” said the doctor soothingly to his two charges. “When you see him next, he’ll be as mild as milk, but it’s as well not to come in his way just now. Look, Lady Haigh! isn’t that your husband coming?”
It was indeed Sir Dugald who rode up, spick and span in a cool white suit, but with a worried look about his eyes which did not fade for some time. “You look rather subdued,” he remarked, when the first greetings had been exchanged. “I am afraid Alibad isn’t all you expected it?”
“Why, it’s perfectly charming!” cried Lady Haigh hurriedly. “So—so unique!”
Sir Dugald turned to Penelope. “I shall get the truth from you, Miss Ross. Has Elma been horribly depressed?”
“Not at all. In fact, I wondered what made her so cheerful.”
“Ah, I thought so. Sort of place that there’s some credit in being jolly in—eh, Mrs Mark Tapley? Whenever I find Elma in uproariously good spirits, I know she is utterly miserable, and trying to spare my feelings. Wish I had the gift of cheerfulness. The Chief has been biting our heads off all round this morning.”
“Yes, we saw him. What is the matter with him?” cried Lady Haigh and Penelope together.
“Well, it’s a good thing you ladies didn’t run across him just now. You’ve defeated one of his most cherished schemes. He meant to blow up the fort and use the materials for housebuilding, but he was kind enough to remember that either tents or mud huts would be fairly uncomfortable for you, so he spared the old place until we could get a roof over our heads. But meanwhile the Government heard of his intention, and forbade him to destroy such an interesting relic, so the new canal has to make a big bend, and all his plans are thrown out. And as if that wasn’t enough, in comes a cossid [messenger] this morning with letters from Sir Henry, hinting that his differences with the Government are so acute that he feels he’ll be forced to resign, and then we are safe to have a wretched civilian over us. Of course the Chief feels it, and we’ve felt it too.”
“Poor Major Keeling! I feel quite guilty,” said Lady Haigh.
“Oh, you needn’t. You’ll have a crow to pluck with him when I tell you why he sent me that order to hurry on from the river. It was simply and solely to test you—to see if you would keep your promise. If you had protested and raised a storm, Tarleton had orders to pack you both down-stream again immediately.”
“Really! To lay traps for one in that way!” Indignation choked Lady Haigh’s utterance, and she rode on in wrathful silence while her husband pointed out to Penelope the line of the projected roads and canals, now only indicated by rows of stakes, the young trees just planted in sheltered spots, and carefully fenced in against goats and firewood-seekers, and the rising walls or mere foundations of various large buildings. Crossing an open space, dotted with the dark tents and squabbling children of a wandering tribe of gipsy origin, they rode in at the gateway of the fort, where the great doors hung idly against the wall, unguarded even by a sentry. Sir Dugald helped the ladies to dismount, and led them into the first of a range of lofty, thick-walled rooms, freshly white-washed.
“You’ll be in clover here,” he said. “The heat in the tents is like nothing on earth. The Chief is a perfect salamander; but your brother, Miss Ross, has been living under his table with a wet quilt over it, and I have scooped out a burrow for myself in the ground under my tent. Porter” (the Engineer officer already mentioned) “makes his boy pour water over him every night when he goes to bed, so as to get an hour or so of coolness. By the bye, Elma, the Chief and Ross and Tarleton are coming to dine with us to-night.”
“Dugald!” cried Lady Haigh, in justifiable indignation. “That man will be the death of me! To dine, when there is no time to get any food, and the servants haven’t come up, and there isn’t any furniture!”
“Well, perhaps I ought to say that we are to dine with him up here. He provides the food, and we are to have it in the durbar-room over there. It’s a sort of festivity to celebrate your coming up. He really means it well, you know.”
Lady Haigh was perceptibly mollified, but she took time to thaw.
“It is a pretty idea of Major Keeling’s,” she said, in a less chilly tone. “At least, if—— Dugald, tell me: he hasn’t asked Ferrers?”
“Why should he? And he couldn’t, in any case. Ferrers is in charge of our outpost at Shah Nawaz, miles away.”
“And Major Keeling knows nothing—about Penelope?”
“How could he? I haven’t told him, and I shouldn’t imagine Ferrers has. Besides, I thought there was nothing to tell? But there are complications ahead. If the General goes home we are bound to have Ferrers’ uncle, old Crayne, sent to Bab-us-Sahel, and then I don’t think his aspiring nephew will stay long up here.”
“Well, Penelope shan’t go down with him. Did you call me, Pen?” and Lady Haigh rose from the box on which she and her husband had seated themselves to enjoy a brief tête-à-tête, and hurried after Penelope, who was exploring the new domain.
However troubled Major Keeling’s mind may have been when he started on his ride, he seemed to have left all care behind him when he appeared in Lady Haigh’s dining-room—as he insisted on calling it, although he himself was responsible for both the dinner and the furniture. He laid himself out to be amiable with such success that Sir Dugald averred afterwards he had sat trembling through the whole meal, feeling certain that the Chief could not keep it up, and dreading some fearful explosion. The ladies and Colin Ross, who were less accustomed to meet the guest officially, saw nothing remarkable in his courteous cheerfulness; and though Penelope’s heart warmed towards the man who could so completely lay aside his own worries for the sake of his friends, Lady Haigh, whose mind had recurred to her wrongs, could barely bring herself to be civil to him. He turned upon her at last.
“Lady Haigh, I am in disgrace; I know it. I have felt a chill of disapproval radiating from you the whole time I have been sitting beside you. What have I done? Ah, I know! Haigh has let the cat out of the bag. How dare you betray official secrets, sir? Well, Lady Haigh, am I never to be forgiven?”
“I could forgive your sending for my husband,” said Lady Haigh, with dignity, “especially as there was no danger; but to doubt my word, after I had promised——”
“I had no doubt whatever of your intention of keeping your word. What I was not quite sure about was your power. I expect heroism from you two ladies as a matter of course. Every British commander has a right to expect it from Englishwomen, hasn’t he? But I want something more,—I want common-sense. I want you, when your husband, Lady Haigh, and your brother, Miss Ross, and the rest of us, are all away on an expedition, and perhaps there’s not a man in the station but Tarleton, to go on just as usual—to sew and read, and go out for your rides as if you hadn’t the faintest anxiety to trouble you. While we are away doing the work, you’ll have to represent us here, and impress the natives.”
“Why didn’t you tell us that you only wanted people without any natural feelings?” demanded Lady Haigh.
“I did, didn’t I? You seemed to think so when I gave you leave to come up. At any rate, if you bring natural feelings up here, you must be able to control them. Whatever the trouble is, you must keep up before the natives, or our friends will be discouraged, and our enemies emboldened. Did you think I could allow the greatest chance that has ever come to this district to be jeopardised for the sake of natural feelings?” He emphasised the words with an almost savage sneer. “Think what our position is here. Alibad is an outpost of British India, not merely of Khemistan; we are the advanced-guard of civilisation—not a European beyond until you come to the Scythian frontier. We hold one of the keys of India; any enemy attacking from this side must pass over our bodies. And how do we expect to maintain the position? Not by virtue of stone walls. When I came up here first I found a wretched garrison shut in—locked in—in this very fort, with the tribes plundering up to the gates. I turned them out, and gave orders that the gates were never to be fastened again. Out on the open plain we are and we shall be, if we have to sleep in our boots to the end of our lives. Peace and security for the ryot, endless harrying for the raider until he gives up his evil ways. There shall not be a spot on this border where the ruffians shall be able to pause for a sip of water without looking to see if the Khemistan Horse are behind them, and before long their own people will give them up when they go back to their tribes. Teach the whole country that we have come to stay, that it pays better to be on our side than against us—there is the beginning.”
“And then?” asked Penelope breathlessly.
“And then—you know the old saying in Eastern Europe, ‘The grass never grows where the Turk’s hoof has trod’? Here it shall be, ‘Where the Englishman’s hoof has trod, the grass grows doubly green.’ Down by the river they called all this part Yagistan, you know—the country of the wild men,” he explained for Penelope’s benefit, “but now the name has retreated over the frontier. That’s not enough, though. We have the district before us like a blank sheet—a sea of sand, without cultivation or trade, and precious little of either to hope for from the inhabitants. What is our business? To cover that blank sheet. Canals, then cultivation; roads, then travel; fairs, then trade. The thing will be an object-lesson all the way into Central Asia. Only give me the time, and it shall be done. I have the men and the free hand, and——” He broke off suddenly, and laughed with some embarrassment. “No wonder you are all looking at me as if you thought me mad,” he said; “I seem to have been forcing my personal aspirations on you in the most unwarranted way. But as I have burdened you with such a rodomontade, I can’t well do less than ask whether any one has any suggestions that would help in making it a reality.”
“I have,” said Lady Haigh promptly. “If you want the natives to think we mean to stay here, Major Keeling, we ought to have a club, and public gardens.”
“So we ought, and it struck me only to-day that this old fort might serve as a club-house when your house is built, Lady Haigh, and you turn out of it. I won’t have it used for anything remotely connected with defence or administration, but to turn it over to the station as a place of amusement ought to produce an excellent effect. But as to the gardens——”
“Why, that space in front!” cried Lady Haigh. “Turn those gipsies off, and you have the very place, with the club on this side, and the church and your new house and all the government buildings opposite.”
“Excellent!” said Major Keeling. “The gipsies have already had notice to quit, and a new camping-ground appointed them, but I meant to use the space for godowns until my plans were thrown out. Really I begin to think I made a mistake in not welcoming ladies up here. Their advice seems likely to be distinctly useful.”
“What an admission!” said Lady Haigh, with exaggerated gratitude. “But don’t be deceived by Major Keeling’s flattery, Pen. Very soon you’ll find that he has set a trap to see whether you have any natural feelings.”
“How could I subject another lady to such a test when you have objected so strongly, pray? Miss Ross need fear nothing at my hands.”
“Well, I call that most unfair. Come, Pen. Why!”—Lady Haigh broke off with a little laugh—“we have no drawing-room in which to give you gentlemen tea.”
“Have you visited the ramparts yet?” asked Major Keeling. “You will find them a pleasant place in the evenings, and even in the daytime there will sometimes be shade and a breeze there. I had one of the tower staircases cleaned and made safe for your benefit, and if you will honour me by considering the ramparts as your drawing-room this evening, the servants shall bring the tea there.”
The suggestion was gladly accepted, and a move was made at once. The rampart, when reached, proved to afford a pleasant promenade, and the diners separated naturally into couples. Lady Haigh had much to say to her husband, while the doctor and Colin Ross gravitated together, rather by the wish of the older man than the younger, it appeared, and Penelope found herself in Major Keeling’s charge. They stood beside the parapet after a time, and he pointed out to her the watchfires of the camp below, the stretch of desert beyond, white in the moonlight, and beyond that again the distant hills, the portals of unexplored Central Asia.
“Do you hear anything?” he asked her suddenly.
She strained her ears, but beyond the faint sounds of the camp, the stamping of an impatient horse, the clink of a bridle, or the clank of a sentry’s weapon, she could hear nothing.
“I knew it,” he said. “It is only fancy, but I wondered whether this night-stillness would affect you as it does me. You know what it is to stand alone at night and look into the darkness, and listen to the silence? Whenever I do that on this frontier I hear footsteps—hurrying steps, the steps of a multitude, passing on and on for ever. I pray God I may never hear them turn aside and come this way!”
“Why?” asked Penelope, awed by his tone.
“Because they are the footsteps of the wild tribes of Central Asia, whose fathers poured down through these passes to the conquest of India. They wander from place to place, owning no master, obeying their chiefs when it suits them, always ready for plunder and rapine. And to the south, spread out before them, is the wealth of the idolater and the Kaffir. Of course, it would take something to move them—a cattle-plague, perhaps, leading to famine—and a leader to unite them sufficiently to utilise their vast numbers to advantage; but who is to know what is going on beyond those hills? There are men who have gone there and returned—that splendid young fellow Whybrow is there now—but they see only what they are allowed to see. I tell you, sometimes at night the thought of those wandering millions comes upon me with such force that I cannot rest. I get up and ride—ride along the border, even across it into Nalapur, to make sure that the tribes are not at our very doors.”
“You ride alone at night? But that must be very dangerous!”
“Dangerous? If I was afraid of danger, I should not be here.”
“But your life is so valuable. Has no one begged you to be prudent?”
“My officers used to preach to me, but I have broken them of it—all but the doctor. Poor Tarleton! he is a very faithful fellow. But will you think me quite mad, Miss Ross, if I tell you that there is another sound as well? It is as if the warder of a fortress should listen across a valley, and hear the tread of the sentry on the ramparts of a hostile fortress opposite. And the tread comes nearer.”
“Major Keeling, you frighten me. Who—what do you mean?”
He laughed. “Oh, the tread is a good thousand miles away yet. But it is coming nearer, all the same. Nominally it is stopped by the Araxes, but it is already pressing on to the Jaxartes. The Khanates will be absorbed, and then—will the two warders meet face to face then, I wonder? It may not be in my day, or even yours, but it will come.”
“You mean Scythia? But is she advancing? Why——?”
“Is it for me to say? She explains it as the trend of her manifest destiny; we say it is her hunger for territory. But she advances, and we remain stationary, or worse, advance and retreat again. But retreat from this point we will not while the breath of life is in me,” he cried passionately; “and when I die, I mean to be buried here, if there is any burial for me at all, that at least the bones of an Englishman may hold the frontier for England.”
“But,” hesitated Penelope, “if we don’t want to advance, why shouldn’t she?—up to our frontier, I mean, not beyond.”
“Because she wouldn’t stop there. How could she, after sweeping over all the barren worthless regions, pause when a rich fertile country lay before her? I couldn’t myself. Otherwise, one would say that at any rate her rule could not be worse than the present state of things. There are plague-spots in Central Asia, like Gamara, which ought to be swept from the face of the earth. But we ought to do it, not they. It’s our men who have been done to death there—not spies, but regularly accredited representatives of the Government—and we don’t stir a finger to avenge them. Whybrow takes his life in his hand when he enters Central Asia, and so will any man who follows him.”
“But why don’t we do anything?” asked Penelope, wondering at his impassioned tone, and little dreaming of the sinister influence which the wicked city of Gamara was to exercise over her own life.
“Because we are too lazy, too meek, too much afraid of responsibility—anything! Old Harry—I beg your pardon—Sir Henry Lennox would do it. I heard him say so once to the troops at a review—that he would like nothing better than to conquer Central Asia at their head, plundering all the way to Gamara. He got pulled up for it, of course. He isn’t exempt from official recognition of that kind any more than meaner people, though I really think I am particularly unfortunate. Just now I am in trouble with Church as well as State. I was so ill-advised as to write to a bishop about sending missionaries here.”
“Oh, I am so glad!” said Penelope. “Colin—my brother—is so disappointed that you haven’t asked for any.”
“Ah, but wait. I want to pick the men. To let the wrong man loose up here would be to destroy all my hopes for the frontier. There’s a fellow at the Cape named Livingstone—the man who made a long waggon-journey a year or two ago to look for some great lake the natives talked of, but found nothing, and means to try again—if I could get him I should be happy. He’s a doctor—physics the people as well as preaches to them, you see, and that’s the kind of Christianity that appeals to untutored savages like his flock and mine. Well, I asked the bishop if he could send us up a man like that, and his chaplain answered that I was evidently not aware that the Church’s care was for men’s souls, not their bodies. I wrote back that the Church must be very different from her Master if that was the case; and the answer came that in consequence of the unbecoming tone of my last communication, his lordship must decline any further correspondence with me. But that’s nothing. When I have fought for months to bring some exploit of the regiment’s to the notice of the authorities, and got an official commendation at last, I have had to insert in regimental orders a scathing rebuke of the insubordinate and unsuitable letters from me which had extorted it. But why am I telling you all this? It must have bored you horribly.”
“Oh no!” cried Penelope. “I have been so much interested. And even if not, I am so glad to listen, if it is any help to you——”
“Help?” he asked sharply. “Why on earth should it be a help?”
“I don’t know,” answered Penelope, with some surprise. “I only thought—perhaps you don’t care to talk things over with your officers—it might be a relief to say what you think sometimes——”
“I believe that’s it,” he answered; “and therefore I pour out the bottled-up nonsense of years on your devoted head, without any thought of your feelings. You should have checked me, Miss Ross. I ought to have been asking you if you adored dancing, or what the latest fashion in albums was, instead of keeping you standing while I discoursed on things as they are and should not be. Another time you must pull me up short.”