long enough, dear,"said the girl, as he entered the tent.
"Melian darling, you will have to go on to Coates' camp a little aheadof me. The fact is--I must go with these people for a bit--but I'llrejoin you soon. The chief is going to tell off two of his men as anescort for you, and you will be quite safe--quite safe. Tell CoatesI'll join him later."
He tried to speak jauntily--to force a smile. But Melian was not to betaken in--not for a moment. She shook her head.
"I am not going to Mr Coates' camp," she said, "at least, not withoutyou. If you have got to go with these people I go too."
Mervyn had not reckoned upon this. He tried to reason with her,pointing out that a forced march with a gang of wild tribesmen and asojourn in their more or less uncomfortable villages, was no fitexperience for her. Of any clement of peril he purposely said nothing,knowing full well that to do so would be simply to rivet her oppositionthe closer. But he might as well have argued with the tent walls, orhave tried to turn the Gularzai chieftain from his fixed purpose.
"Now be reasonable, my little one," he concluded. "Say good-bye to mehere, and I'll see you started off all comfortably."
But Melian set her lips, and those very pretty lips of hers could setvery firmly indeed on occasion.
"I shall do no such thing," she answered. "I'm going with you. We camehere together, and I'm not going to leave you."
She was clinging to him now, firmly, and kissing him.
"You won't go to Coates' then?" he said helplessly.
"No. I'm going with you. So now, let's go out and tell them so."
The chief might have been excused if he had grown impatient, but he hadnot. With true Oriental impassiveness he and his wild followers sattheir horses, waiting--incidentally the camp servants crouching in theirtent, went through the bitterness of death many times over during thatperiod of waiting. Then Mervyn came out and announced that they wouldhave to take two with them instead of one. But Allah-din Khan receivedthe statement without great demur; it may have been that he scentedadvantage to himself in this addition to his own programme.
In not much longer space of time than it took them to bring in the twohorses, and hurriedly put together a few necessaries, were they ready tostart. The syce, who was ordered out on the first errand, showed nogreat concern. He was a Pathan and a believer, and stood in no fear ofthe scowling horsemen. But the bearer, who had perforce been convenedfor purposes of the latter, had wilted and cowered before the loweringglances darted at him from under fierce shaggy brows, as a Hindu dog andan idolater. But it did not suit their purpose to shed more blood onthat occasion, else would he and the others have felt the tulwar's edgethere and then. The two already slain had been victims to a sudden,unthinking blood lust.
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Again we must glance back.
Since the last visit of Helston Varne to Heath Hover, and the bodingmanifestation that same evening, of the opening door, an unaccountableand evil influence seemed to pervade the place. There was no grippingit, but it was there, and on Melian especially, it seemed to take a firmhold. All her bright sunny spirits, her joyousness in life, seemed toleave her, and that with a suddenness and rapidity that was little shortof alarming. She grew pallid, and lost her appetite. She grew nervous,too, and would start at any and every sound; and when night time came,and with it solitude, she shrank from it with a very horror ofshrinking. Nothing had happened, according to the tradition of thatboding presage, but the fit grew upon her, and it affected Mervyn too,though differently. At last he took her to task about it, and she ownedup to the whole thing.
"This'll never do, little one," he had said, looking at her with verygrave concern. "We must go away for a change."
The relief which sprang into her face confirmed her former revelation.Still she made protest.
"Why should I break up your peace and quiet, Uncle Seward?" trying tosmile, but the smile was a wan one. "You have given me a home, when Ihad none--such a happy home, too--but somehow now, I don't know what itis that has come over me. I seem to be always frightened--ofsomething--or nothing."
Yes, he had noticed that, but had hoped it would pass. But it had not.
"Where shall we go then? Where would you like?" he said.
"Anywhere _you_ like, dear. It's all the same to me."
"H'm! How should you like to go to--India?"
"To--India? Oh, Uncle Seward, I should just love it," and all the oldanimation returned, as if by magic.
"Very well. Pack up to-morrow and we'll start the day after," he hadanswered, with characteristic promptitude.
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And so--here they were.
CHAPTER TWENTY SIX.
THE DIM, MYSTERIOUS EAST.
The way in which the two accepted the situation was characteristic ofboth. Mervyn took it apparently as all in the day's work, though he hadreason to believe that his days were surely numbered. He conversedequably with his captors--or escort, as though he were accompanying themof his own free will, to pay a visit to their village for instance, forany other pacific purpose. Yet he knew that in coming to this countryagain he had deliberately--as Hussein Khan had put it--placed his headbetween the tiger's jaws.
Even this, strange to say, did not perturb him, perhaps he had imbibed alarge proportion of Oriental fatalism during his lifelong acquaintancewith the strange peoples of the East. If his time had come--it had, andthere was no more to be said. It had nearly come, he knew full well,when the cry through the winter midnight had led him to drag theperishing man forth from the icy death. Now, if it really had come,why--"it was written;" and in that case that he had returned to thisland at all, and of his own free will--was part of the scheme. Thus helooked at it.
But--what of Melian? Had he not drawn her into peril? No--for he didnot believe they would harm her. For himself, if what he suspectedshould prove true--why then his hours were certainly numbered. Well,what then? Until she had come to Heath Hover he had not been in lovewith life. He was often, in fact, honestly and genuinely sick of it.The brightening which her coming had shed upon it could not be otherthan temporary. In the due and ordinary course of things she was boundto leave him again sooner or later--and then, how could he return to theold solitude, the old depression of day in, night out? There wasnothing to look forward to, and precious little to look back upon. Soit mattered little enough now whatever happened to himself. All ofwhich of course, he did not impart to Melian.
She for her part, seemed infected with his unconcern, and looked uponthe whole affair as a decidedly interesting adventure. It had itsinconvenient side--for instance the commissariat department was to hercivilised tastes, abominable, and sleeping out among the rocks waschilly of a night. But she was allowed to come and go as she liked. Nowatch was set upon her, for in the first place she had volunteered to gowith them rather than separate from her relative, and in the next wherewould she be in the midst of this craggy, and, to her, entirely unknownwilderness, even if she did change her mind, and take it into her headto try and escape. At night they would make her up a couch of mats insome cleft or hollow among the rocks and shelter off the entrance, andshe would declare laughingly to her uncle that it was only an experienceof camping out, after all.
Yet there were times when her efforts at keeping up her spirits wouldsorely fail her. Mervyn himself could not consistently find comfort incold fatalism, and she would read in the gloom of his knitted brows thathe was by no means so easy in his mind as he would have had her believe.And as they journeyed on, through the awful wildness of this savage,rock built region; threading gloomy gorges where the very light of thesun would not penetrate, or traversing a drear waste of desert where thefriable soil rose and gyrated in "dust devils" and the sun blazed downas from the reflection of an opened furnace; wending the while, whitherthey knew not--her spirits began to droop. In short the situati
on wasgetting upon her nerves--and that badly.
The shaggy, turbaned horsemen, whom at first she had found fascinatingin their picturesqueness, began to appear in her eyes more and more thepredatory, merciless beings they really were. The wild savagery of thesurroundings--which at first she had pronounced absolutely faultless intheir fantastic chaos of rock and crag and chasm, now took on aDantesque and hope-chilling aspect. Where would it all end?
Either Hussein Khan's estimate of the distance to be travelled to arriveat the Gularzai chieftain's stronghold had been very much under-rated,or they were bound for some other destination, for two nights hadpassed, and they seemed no nearer to any fixed ending of theirjourneyings. And then when her spirits had reached their lowest ebb,came a thought to Melian's mind like the breaking of sunlight