Presently, as he tramped up and down the drenched grass, a chill and numbing touch seemed to be laid upon him and to invade him with the blankness of the universal winter sleep. The recurrent waves of a lover's exaltation that had seized him at each reminiscence of the young bosom beneath his cheek, of the tear-wet face pressed so close to his, died down within him; and died, too, those spasms of horror over that moment when, by a single evil thought, he had betrayed the true facts of a lifetime.
His mind seemed to become nearly as dull as the sky above him—iron grey, flecked with meaningless wrack; his heart to grow cold, like the inert sod beneath his feet. And he let himself go to the respite of this mood. The robin was silent. He was glad of that. There was no sound but the drip of the boughs as he passed. Disjointed visions, foolish tags of memory, flashed through his brain—the echo of Baby's thrumming, the picture of the Eastern palace room, with its English illusions, as he stood waiting; Lady Gerardine, in the rosy radiance of the Indian evening, fitting her slender hand into the imprint of the queens' death-touches on the stone; her smile upon him over the languid Niphotis roses in the narrow varnished cabin, the open port-holes and the green sea-foam springing up across them in the lamplight, the mingled smell of the brine and the flowers; Aspasia dancing on the frozen grass, brown and red like a robin; Muhammed standing before him in his soldier-pride, the ironic smile on his face—son of the East, with the winter-lichened boughs of the English orchard above him!
At the end of his beat Raymond wheeled round and looked down the moss-grown avenue where that day the red-turbaned Eastern had met his gaze; and now, with the fantastic effect of a dream, he beheld the selfsame square-shouldered figure swing into sight between the grey boles with their ghostly look of age. Advancing with quick strides, it was bearing straight upon him.
Bethune stood as if held by a resistless force. He knew life would have no more crucial moment for him; yet his heart beat not a stroke the faster. He turned his face towards the inevitable. After all, a man can but endure. The illusion of Muhammed had quickly passed, as the steady step drew closer, into that reality that was stranger than any fantasm.
Harry English, with head bare to the tart airs, with strong line of clean-shaven chin catching the bleak light, and deep eyes lit with a very human lire—the old comrade in the flesh! He halted within a pace, and the two looked at each other for a second's silence. Then, while Bethune's countenance remained set in that iron dulness, the other's face was suddenly stirred.
"What the devil is the meaning of this?" cried Harry English, in a loud voice of anger. "I see your portmanteau packed. Do you think for a second that you can leave me now?"
The deepest reproach, the utmost note of sorrow or scorn, could not have touched Bethune so keenly as this familiar explosion. A thousand memories awoke and screamed. How often had not his captain rated him with just such a rough tongue and just such a kindly gleam of the eye! All the ice of his cold humour of reaction was shivered into bits under the rush of upheaving blood.
"Harry!" he stammered. "Harry ... I ... my God!" ...
He saw, as before, in that hideous moment in the little bedroom, but now blessedly, a reflection of his own thought on the face opposite to him.
Harry English put out his hand and clapped him on the shoulder.