WHAT BÂL NARÎN HAD BEEN DOING
We return to Bâl Narîn, whom we left pondering deeply on the significance that might belong to a muslin thread and two little silver beads.
To make this part of my narrative clear, I must explain, having received the information from this cleverest of Ghoorka guides, that besides the robbers' path, as it was called, there were other narrow tracks running in every direction through the jungle. These were due to the animals that at this season make the kutcha-grass their haunt. Wild beasts, like civilised men, are the creatures of habit. They love their old lairs and their daily walks, and are given to ranging certain circumscribed areas, which, no doubt, are to them what our village, city, or club is to us. These animal highways, then, had, through repeated use, become widened and trodden down, so that it would have been easy for the inexperienced to mistake them for paths frequented by men. When Bâl Narîn so impetuously waved Tom away, the notion that thus it might have happened to the fugitives of whom he was in search had suddenly come to him. It was a terrible thought, for in such case they would probably have walked right into a wild beast's lair, and nothing could save them from destruction. The idea, however, having occurred to Bâl Narîn, he could not cast it off.
His mind was of that dogged type which often distinguishes men of his profession. From his boyhood it had been his meat and drink to struggle with difficulties and overcome them. The more arduous the task the better it pleased him, and the mere fact of his having entertained the possibility of undertaking it was stimulus sufficient to make him carry it through. By sympathy in the first place and severe personal effort crowned by partial success in the second, he had worked himself up to strong interest in this work of rescue, and passionate determination that nothing should be wanting on his part to bring it to a successful issue. All the force, all the dogged resolution of his nature was aroused. Working for the master whose kindliness and grace had won his attachment, he was also working for himself, that no man in the future might relate how Bâl Narîn had failed in the task he took in hand.
It was in this mood that the new idea met him, and he set himself immediately to work it out. On the robbers' road, where he had been told he might find the fugitives, he had seen indications which led him to believe that he was on their track. If these indications continued he would know, as far as it was possible to know anything, that the fugitives were on ahead of him. If, on the other hand, they stopped at any particular point, there would be every reason to suppose that the road had been abandoned, in which case he saw that there would be nothing for him to do but to try the likeliest of the jungle paths.
Quietly he stole on. A few yards ahead of the spot where he had paused to take his bearings the road was crossed by a path wider than itself, and of such character and appearance as to be almost certain to mislead any but the dwellers in the jungle, or those who, like Bâl Narîn, had traversed it so often as to be fully acquainted with all its peculiarities.
He happened to know it, for it led to a little marsh surrounded lake where the tigers went down at night to quench their thirst, and near which he had waited for them more than once with European sportsmen.
He had lighted his lamp meanwhile, for he always carried one in his belt, and with its help he was examining the ground. Close to the opening of this jungle-road, where it turned off the road to the right, he found a third bead. He went on for some distance and saw nothing, then he retraced his steps. A conviction amounting almost to certainty had come to him that it was down this pathway those poor souls had gone. If so he must follow them. Having looked well to the priming of his revolver, and taken from its sheath the short, murderous-looking knife, which he had used several times with effect in close encounters with his fierce jungle-foes, Bâl Narîn adventured himself into the wild beasts' highway.
At first he found nothing to confirm his conjecture. The character of his surroundings had changed. Instead of the tall kutcha-grass there were about him low, thorny bushes, with here and there a ghostly-looking tree; and nullahs, in which hideous forms of vegetable life were growing, stretched along the sides of the beast-trodden path. A strange way it was, and devious, going straight for a few yards, and then shooting from right to left, as, like the fire-flash from lightning-charged clouds, it followed the track of least resistance. A dangerous region, and Bâl Narîn, being too old a hunter to be caught napping, trod warily. Once, however, he almost lost his caution. It was when the light of his lamp fell on a shred of coloured stuff that clung to one of the spiked leaves of a sickly, stunted aloe. That moment, he has told me, was one of the strangest, the most triumphant of his whole fife. He knew now that the sagacity upon which he prided himself had not failed him in his need. Whether the fugitives were found or not, he had positive proof that they had passed this way.
Meanwhile the darkness that had made Tom curse his helplessness began to assail Bâl Narîn's more subtly tempered senses. He did not mind it. All his greatest enterprises had been carried out in the night time, for it was then that the foes with whom he waged war were at large, and the blackness of the heavens rather quickened than deadened his energies. He drew aside quietly from the beasts' highway, let his lamp, which was burning steadily, shine in front of him, and having twisted some of the gigantic stems of the kutcha-grass into a torch as he came along, he set light to it, and held it flaming over his shoulder. Thus equipped he was far too terrible an object for even the man-eating tiger to tackle. So he went on towards the marsh-surrounded lake.
But what was his distinct object? He could not, I think, have explained it to himself. I found, in fact, when I tried to pin him to this point of his narrative, that a peculiar confusion reigned in his mind. Up to it and beyond it he was perfectly clear. He could tell about everything, even the working of his own mind. Here he faltered and stumbled in his speech. 'Why did I go on?' he exclaimed to me one day. 'Sahib, I must confess to you that I cannot tell. I should have been mad to think that they were alive. I should have been mad to suppose that, if they were alive, I should find them in that darkness. I knew I was going into danger. Think, Sahib, of where I should have been if my lamp had gone out. I thought of that myself. "Billy," I said, "you are a fool. You are running into danger like an ass that has no wit to keep out of it. Go back! Tell them at the camp what you have found, and bring the rajah and his men with you to search this place in the daylight." That would have been the wisest plan, Sahib. Why did I not take it? As I live I cannot tell you. Sometimes,' his voice dropped mysteriously, 'I have thought that it was not of my own will I went forward. The Sahib, being a wise man, will understand. There are things of which it is not well to speak too plainly. The jealousy of the gods is easy to rouse, and difficult to stay.'
I knew what Bâl Narîn meant, and I nodded my approval, whereupon he proceeded with his story. Though, as he had confessed, he was going forward without any distinct aim, his vigilance did not sleep for a moment. His ear, trained to a subtlety of perception such as we, dwellers in towns, and inheritors of the grossness born of luxurious living, can scarcely imagine, was alive to every sound. His eyes searched the darkness. His sense of touch, which was not, as with us, confined to the effects that arise from actual contact, sent out feelers in every direction. Through his delicate nostrils—the subtlest of the nine gates of the body—he interrogated the humid atmosphere, finding separate odours where we should have distinguished nothing but the vaporous distilments of the jungle.
Presently he came to a full stop, lowered his torch, and drew a long breath. Something strange, subtle, impalpable, was floating towards him. He could not for a moment determine what it was or even through which of the sense-avenues it had come; but he knew, he was penetrated with a conviction as strong as death, that presences, either spiritual or corporeal, but other than the beasts of the jungle, were near him.
He paused for fully five seconds, making an effort to define his sensations, and in the meantime he made another observation.
Overhead the darkness grew darker, there was a curious agitation of the air, and he knew that the vast birds of the mountains—the eagle and the vulture—were flying round him in ever-narrowing circles. The dead or the dying, then, were near, and they had scented them from their eyrie in the hills. At this moment, when he had recognised the birds as blots on the blackness, and was straining his eyes to follow their flight, there was a faint glimmer of light in the east from the rising moon. Faint as it was it gave the shikari all the light he needed to enable him to see plainly. He looked up and saw a gigantic bird sailing slowly down the wind. His heart beat, and his blood seemed to bound in his veins as he watched it, for it was taking the direction whence his own sense-perception had come. A second followed, and then a third. By the help of the silver light in the east he was able to keep them in sight. Leaping nullahs, tearing through thick jungle, uttering fierce cries to frighten away the wild creatures that might be crouching in cover, he followed in their track. If he had stopped to think, as he has told me, he could not have done it. Nor would it ever have occurred to him to follow the birds, had it not been for that impression, inexplicable even to this day to himself, that unseen presences were near him. But once started he staggered on. Insects stung him, thorns cut into his flesh, his torch was extinguished, his lamp burned dim. Through all his excitement he realised that if he was left in darkness he was lost beyond hope of redemption. His life-foes would have him as their prey. No one would ever hear of Bâl Narîn again. Once he fell, but he sprang to his feet again and flourished his lamp, and a tiger, disturbed in his lair, rushed by with angry growling that would have chilled the blood of a man of ordinary courage.
But still he held on. The vulture sailed on, swooped down, rose into the air with a harsh cry—was it of disappointment?—swooped down again, and was lost in the jungle. But Bâl Narîn was triumphant, for he had marked the very spot of his disappearance. The second bird and the third sailed up. They helped him to mark the spot. He could not mistake it now, for a tall cotton-tree, whose candelabra-like branches stood out boldly from the silver grey of the eastern sky, was in its immediate neighbourhood. There were few of these trees in the Terai, and they indicated places where the soil was comparatively wholesome. So far as he could judge he was not now very far from the tree which made his landing mark, but there was still a wide nullah to be crossed. Torn and exhausted as he was he experienced some difficulty in getting to the other side, and he considered himself happy in meeting no tiger. He had scarcely force left to grapple with one.
And now, to his measureless surprise, he saw the jungle open out before him. A small clearing, such as those in which the Aswalia villages are planted, only of much more limited extent, lay under his eyes. A low fig-tree, a stunted bamboo, and the cotton-tree which he had already seen, could be dimly discerned through the darkness. Nothing else at first except the three vast birds. They sat side by side under the cotton-tree, as if in hideous expectation of a feast. Bâl Narîn stamped his foot and cried out, and they rose slowly, but they did not go far. They hovered overhead, and it seemed to him that they were watching his movements.
And now, pausing, he could hear distinctly sounds as of fluttered stirring to and fro, and breath drawn labouringly. He trimmed his lamp and went on cautiously, carrying it before him. In a few instants its light fell on a rude shed, made of branches of trees and dried leaves. On the side by which he had approached it there was no opening; but he could see, through the interstices between the branches, that figures were moving about within. Giving it rather a wide berth so as to see before he was seen, he came round to the front, and pulled up for a few moments to observe what was going on.
Within the small enclosure, which was such a hut as hermits dwell in, he saw three figures. Two were on the ground, whether dead or asleep he could not tell, and the third—a slender figure in woman's garments—was going from one to the other, stooping over them, and, as it seemed to Bâl Narîn, weeping bitterly. While he was considering how he should reveal himself without increasing her distress and alarm, she came out to the front of the hut, and, his lamp being turned that way, he saw her plainly. That was a moment which Bâl Narîn will never forget. For an instant he shut his eyes. He was seized with a tremor that seemed to be drawing away his power, and the presence of mind on which he prided himself. Wild as she was, with that haunting terror in her sweet eyes that was never, so long as she lived, to leave them again, there was a beauty and majesty in this face that awed him, he could not have told why. It was like the face of a spirit, he said—of one who had done with the earth for ever. Thus for a moment he saw it; in the next it was suffused with a horror and anguish, such as he had never beheld before. Looking up, he saw the heavens darkened with the wings of the birds of prey that were swooping nearer and nearer to the entrance of the hut, as if they would defy this weak living woman to keep them any longer from the dead.
A cry of unspeakable despair broke from the woman's lips, and she agitated her arms wildly above her head. They retired, settled, approached again, the girl still gesticulating wildly. Then the ping of the shikari's revolver rang through the jungle. Again it sounded, and again, the girl retreated trembling, and two of the birds fell to the ground mortally wounded, while their mate sailed away sullenly to his eyrie in the hills.
Before the echo of his last shot had died away, Bâl Narîn was standing with bowed head before the girl in the hut, and addressing her in his choicest Hindoostani. 'Let me entreat my gracious lady not to fear me,' he said. 'I am a poor hunter from the hills—a man of the Ghoorka nation, to whom the white races are honourable. I saw my gracious lady's distress, and I slew the birds that caused her fear. Can I help her further?'
'Could you help me—would you?' said the poor girl.
'Let my gracious lady try me?' said Bâl Narîn.
At this moment there rang another sound through the jungle—a low whistle, prolonged and flute-like, but curiously tremulous, that seemed to be floating down from above them. The girl pressed her finger to her lips, and a colour, soft as the crimson of the morning, flooded her pale face.
The tremulous, sweet sounds go on—they form themselves into a melody. Ah! What is this? What is this? In a moment—in less than a moment—the poor girl is back again in the past. Under her feet is a carpet of soft, green grass; above, swayed gently to and fro by the breath of a June morning in England, wave the light branches of a weeping willow-tree—the waters of a river lie before her—a boat is cutting through them—it has one rower. Oh! the fair, boyish face—the dreamy eyes—the rapture of adoring love!
'Come where my love lies dreaming,' he sings.
'Yes; I am dreaming. I must awake,' sobs poor Grace.
The sounds go on—distant but clear. 'Dreaming the happy hours away—Come—Come—Come where my love——' Groaning, she covers her face with her hands.
Bâl Narîn, in the meantime, is showing the most extraordinary excitement—shouting, dancing, tossing his hands about in exultation. Returning from her dream, the girl gazes at him in speechless surprise.
'Pardon your servant, gracious lady,' he says, 'if his pleasure lifts him off his feet! My master and I have waited for this moment. As the sick unto death long for the morning, so have we longed for it, and how can I help being triumphant?'
'Your—master?' says the girl, fixing her large, fever-bright eyes upon his face.
'My master—the Rajah of Gumilcund. He is on his way. He will be here soon, if—now the demons of the jungle guide him! Here! here!' he cries, lapsing into his native Ghoorka in his overpowering excitement. 'Look for the cotton-tree! Ah! what a fool I am! He does not know my tongue. Lady, you have a light within?'
Trembling with excitement, Grace ran inside and caught up a little rush-candle—their last!
'One moment, dearest Kit!' she cried, for a little moan had come up from the ground. 'They have found us. Tom—our Tom—will soon be here. He will frighten the dreadful birds away.'
She ran out to Bâl Narîn, who had torn off a dried stick from the cotton-tree and twisted a bunch of withered grass to its extremity. Anointed with the drop of oil left in his lamp and lighted from the rush-candle, it flamed out brilliantly in a moment. He waved it over his head and rushed forward with shouts into the jungle, 'This way, master; this way!'
But in a few instants he returned to the space before the hut, fed his torch with wisps of straw, and caught up the rush-candle. The whistling had ceased, and there was no answer to his frenzied cries. Grace looked up into his face and saw its hazard look.
'Is he not there?' she moaned.
'It is a dangerous road,' he answered, 'and my master is not a shikari like Bâl Narîn. Listen, Miss Sahib! Do you hear that?'
'Thunder. I have heard it several times to-night.'
'Not thunder—the tramp of a herd of wild elephants. Miss Sahib, I must go——'
But Grace did not hear. She had rushed back into the hut. With hands cramped together and beating heart she was crouched on the ground, near the couch of dried grass where she had laid her little Kit, praying that the Father in heaven, in Whom through all these dreadful days she had trusted, would, at this last moment, be gracious to them.
'Save him, oh! Father,' she sobbed. 'Let him take my darling Kit from this awful place, and then my work will be done, and I will go to Thee.'
Over and over again, while Kit's little arms were about her neck and his burning cheek rested on her shoulder, she whispered the same words, 'Save him! Save him!'
Moments passed into minutes. The hold of Kit's arms relaxed, as, lulled by the sound of her voice, he fell back upon the pillow. Her own head drooped. The long and awful watch by the dead that lay in the hut with them—the sudden shock of terror and joy—the suspense—the strain of expectation seemed to be more than her enfeebled frame could bear. Her mind wandered. 'Kit! keep me awake,' she whispered. 'Those awful birds will come again.' But Kit did not hear her. He was dropping off into a doze. Her eyelids fell. Oh! if she could only sleep! If somebody was here—a friend—some one who would watch for her, and keep the birds and beasts away! Ah!—she started up suddenly, wide awake and trembling in every limb. The light that was diffused through the tent—that shone on the rigid form of the old man who had protected them so far, giving at the last his life for theirs, and on the yellow matted curls of poor little Kit—was the light of the moon. There was nothing to keep the wild things out. A convulsive shudder agitated her frame, and she tried to rise but could not. Then she put her face down near Kit's. 'My poor darling,' she whispered. 'It is all over. I had a dream. It has gone—and I have no more strength to fight.'