VIII
"Monty, I say! Monty!"
Again the gulf of years was bridged; again the voice he knew came down to him. Herne wrestled with himself, and opened his eyes.
The man in Arab dress was still kneeling by his side, the skeleton hands still supported him, but the face was veiled again.
He suppressed another violent shudder.
"In Heaven's name," he said, "what are you?"
"I am a dead man," came the answer. "Don't move! I will call your man in a moment, but I must speak to you first. Do you feel all right?"
"Bobby!" Herne said.
"No, I am not Bobby. He died, you know, ages ago. They cut him up and burned him. Don't move. I have stopped the bleeding, but it will easily start again. Lean back—so! You needn't look at me. You will never see me again. But if I hadn't shown you—once, you would never have understood. Are you comfortable? Can you listen?"
"Bobby!" Herne said again.
He seemed incapable of anything but that one word, spoken over and over, as though trying to make himself believe the incredible.
"I am not Bobby," the voice reiterated. "Put that out of your mind for ever! He belonged to another life, another world. Don't you believe me? Must I show you—again? Do you really want to talk with me face to face?"
"Yes," Herne said, with abrupt resolution. "I will see you—talk with you—as you are."
There was a brief pause, and he braced himself to face, without blenching, the thing that a moment before, his soldier's training notwithstanding, had turned him sick with horror. But he was spared the ordeal.
"There is no need," said the familiar voice. "You have seen enough. I don't want to haunt you, even though I am dead. What put it into your head to come in search of me? You must have known I should be long past any help from you."
"I—wanted to know," Herne said. He was feeling curiously helpless, as if, in truth, he were talking with a mummy. All the questions he desired to put remained unuttered. He was confronted with the impossible, and he was powerless to deal with it.
"What did you want to know? How I died? And when? It was a thousand years ago, when those damned Wandis swallowed up the Zambas. They took me first—by treachery. Then they wiped out the entire tribe. The poor devils were lost without me. I always knew they would be—but they made a gallant fight for it." A thrill of feeling crept into the monotonous voice, a tinge of the old abounding pride, but it was gone on the instant, as if it had not been. "They slaughtered them all in the end," came in level, dispassionate tones, "and, last of all, they killed me. It was a slow process, but very complete. I needn't harrow your feelings. Only be quite sure I am dead! The thing that used to be my body was turned into an abomination that no sane creature could look upon without a shudder. And as for my soul, devils took possession, so that even the Wandis were afraid. They dare not touch me now. I have trampled them, I have tortured them, I have killed them. They fly from me like sheep. Yet, if I lead, they follow. They think, because I have conquered them, that I am invincible, invulnerable, immortal. They cringe before me as if I were a god. They would offer me human sacrifice if I would have it. I am their talisman, their mascot, their safeguard from defeat, their luck—a dead man, Herne, a dead man! Can't you see the joke? Why don't you laugh?"
Again the grim voice thrilled as if some fiendish mirth stirred it to life.
Herne moved and groaned, but spoke no word.
"What? You don't see it? You never had much sense of humour. And yet it's a good thing to laugh when you can. We savages don't know how to laugh. We only yell. That is all you wanted to know, is it? You will go back now with an easy mind?"
"As if that could be all!" Herne muttered.
"That is all. And count yourself lucky that I haven't killed you. It was touch and go that night you attacked me. You may die yet."
"I may. But it won't be your fault if I do. Great Heaven, I might have killed you!"
"So you might." Again came that quiver of dreadful laughter. "That would have been the end of the story for everyone, for you wouldn't have got away without me. But that was no part of the program. Even you couldn't kill a dead man. Feel that, if you don't believe me!" Suddenly one of the shrivelled, mummy hands came down to his own. "How much life is there in that?"
Herne gripped the hand. It was cold and clammy; he could feel every separate bone under the skin. He could almost hear them grind together in his hold. He repressed another shudder; and even as he did it, he heard again the bitter cry of a woman's wrung heart, "Bobby is still alive and wanting me."
Would she say that when she knew? Would she still reach out her hands to this monstrous wreck of humanity, this shattered ruin of what had once been a tower of splendid strength? Would she feel bound to offer herself? Was her love sufficient to compass such a sacrifice? The bare thought revolted him.
"Are you satisfied?" asked the voice that seemed to him like a mocking echo of Bobby's ardent tones. "Why don't you speak?"
A great struggle was going on in Herne's soul. For Betty's sake—for Betty's sake—should he hold his peace? Should he take upon himself a responsibility that was not his? Should he deny this man the chance that was his by right—the awful chance—of returning to her? The temptation urged him strongly; the fight was fierce. But—was it because he still grasped that bony hand?—he conquered in the end.
"I haven't told you yet why I came to look for you," he said.
"Is it worth while?" The question was peculiarly deliberate, yet not wholly cynical.
Desperately Herne compelled himself to answer.
"You have got to know it, seeing it was not for my own satisfaction—primarily—that I came."
"Why then?" The brief query held scant interest; but the hand he still grasped stirred ever so slightly in his.
Herne set his teeth.
"Because—someone—wanted you."
"No one ever wanted me," said the Wandi Mullah curtly.
But Herne had tackled his task, and he pursued it unflinching.
"I came for the sake of a woman who once—long ago—refused to marry you, but who has been waiting for you—ever since."
"A woman?" Undoubtedly there was a savage note in the words. The shrunken fingers clenched upon Herne's hand.
"Betty Derwent," said Herne very quietly.
Dead silence fell in the darkened tent—the silence of the desert, subtle, intense, in a fashion terrible. It lasted for a long time; so long a time that Herne suffered himself at last to relax, feeling the strain to be more than he could bear. He leaned among his pillows, and waited. Yet still, persistently, he grasped that cold, sinuous hand, though the very touch of it repelled him, as the touch of a reptile provokes instinctive loathing. It lay quite passive in his own, a thing inanimate, yet horribly possessed of life.
Slowly at last through the darkness a voice came:
"Monty!"
It was hardly more than a whisper; yet on the instant, as if by magic, all Herne's repulsion, his involuntary, irrepressible shrinking, was gone. He was back once more on the other side of the gulf, and the hand he held was the hand of a friend.
"My dear old chap!" he said very gently.
Vaguely he discerned the figure by his side. It sat huddled, mummy-like but it held no horrors for him any longer. They were not face to face in that moment—they were soul to soul.
"I say—Monty," stumblingly came the words, "you know—I never dreamed of this. I thought she would have married—long ago. And she has been waiting—all these years?"
"All these years," Herne said.
"Do you think she has suffered?" There was a certain sharpness in the question, as if it were hard to utter.
And Herne, pledged to honesty, made brief reply:
"Yes."
There followed a pause; then:
"Will it grieve her—very badly—to know that I am dead?" asked the voice beside him.
"Yes, it will grieve her." Herne spoke as if compelled.
"But she will get over it, eh?"
"I believe so." Herne's lips were dry; he forced them to utterance.
The free hand fastened claw-like upon his arm.
"You'll tell me the straight truth, man," said Bobby's voice in his ear. "What if I—came to life?"
But Herne was silent. He could not bring himself to answer.
"Speak out!" urged the voice—Bobby's voice, quick, insistent, even imploring. "Don't be afraid! I haven't any feelings left worth considering. She wouldn't get over that, you think? No woman could!"
Herne turned in desperation, and faced his questioner.
"God knows!" he said helplessly.
Again there fell a silence, such a silence as falls in a death-chamber at the moment of the spirit's passing. The darkness was deepening. Herne could scarcely discern the figure by his side.
The hand upon his arm had grown slack. All vitality seemed to have gone out of it. It was as though the spirit had passed indeed. And in the stillness Herne knew that he was recrossing the gulf, that his friend—the boy he had known and loved—was receding rapidly, rapidly behind the veil of years, would soon be lost to him for ever.
The voice that spoke to him at length was the voice of a stranger.
"Remember," it said, "Bobby Duncannon is dead—has been dead for years! Let no woman waste her life waiting for him, for he will never return! Let her marry instead the man who wants her, and put the empty years behind! In no other way will she find happiness."
"But you?" Herne groaned. "You?"
The hand he held had slipped from his grasp. Through the dimness he saw the man beside him rise to his feet. A moment he stood; then flung up his arms above his head in a fierce gesture of renunciation that sent a stab of recollection through Herne.
"I! I go to my people!" said the Prophet of the Wandis. "And you—will go to yours."
It was final, and Herne knew it; yet his heart cried out within him for the friend he had lost. Suddenly he found he could not bear it.
"Bobby! Bobby!" he burst forth impulsively. "Stop, man, stop and think! There must be some other way. You can't—you shan't—go back!"
He hardly knew what he said, so great was his distress. The gulf was widening, widening, and he was powerless. He knew that it could never be bridged again.
"It's too big a forfeit," he urged very earnestly. "You can't do it. I won't suffer it. For Betty's sake—Bobby, come back!"
And then, for the last time, he heard his friend's voice across the ever-widening gulf.
"For Betty's sake, old chap, I am a dead man. Remember that! It's you who must go back to her. Marry her, love her, make her—forget!"
For an instant those mummy hands rested upon him, held him, caressed him; it was almost as if they blessed him. For an instant the veil was lifted; they were comrades together. Then it fell....
There came a quiet movement, the sound of departing feet.
Herne turned and blindly searched the darkness. Across the gulf he cried to his friend to return to him.
"Bobby, come back, lad, come back! We'll find some other way."
But there came no voice in answer, no sound of any sort. The desert had received back its secret. He was alone....