Coventry felt a touch on his arm.
"What order, sahib? Protector of the poor, what order?" the syce was repeating.
"Make some arrangement," said the sahib, at last, mechanically; "I will walk home."
And mechanically, too, he walked up the street, noticing nothing, not heeding the loitering figures that got in his way, that muttered abuse as he moved them aside, till he came to the corner where, years ago as it seemed to him now, his path had been blocked by the camel caravan. As by instinct, he turned into the principal thoroughfare, passing in time by the house of rejoicing. It was quieter now, the crowd had dispersed, the lights in the pans had begun to burn low, and only a faint sound of singing and music came from within the building. With quick, regular tramp he continued his way through the stifling city, meeting again the odour of badly cured hides that drifted across from the place of the workers in leather; on through the hot, still streets that led to the squalid mud suburb outside, and thence to the broad, empty road where his steps sank soundless into the heavy dust.
He was barely conscious of physical being. All the time, as he walked automatically through the bazaars, mid the heat and the smells, his thoughts had been chained to the past. Trixie might not have existed--her puzzling absence, his quest, his doubts and his apprehensions had gone from his mind. He was living once more in those far-away days that had begun with such happiness, only to end in such failure and pain; they had seemed to him over and dead, as leaves torn out of his volume of life and destroyed, and now a result had arisen, alive and awful and tragic--the woman in the bazaar! Was it a dire pre-warning, those words that had haunted his dreams and his mind in the jungle, that had harassed him in the train, followed him up to the door of his house?
Memory tortured his soul, sparing him nothing. Again he found himself riding along in a country lane on a summer morning in England; he saw the vicarage garden, the tangle of blossoming shrubs, the ragged riot of flowers, and visioned a slender figure in blue crossing the unkempt lawn, with hair glinting gold in the sunshine. A clear young voice was trilling a verse of an old, familiar hymn:
"Other refuge have I none; Hangs my helpless soul on Thee; Leave, ah! leave me not alone, Still support and comfort me."
He went through it all in hopeless, despairing surrender--the simple wedding in the village church, the period of placid happiness, and then the doubt, the jealousy, the torment of suspicion, culminating in that dreadful night--the night of the ball. It returned to him now with cruel distinctness; he could see Rafella running to the door, her white arms lifted as she struggled with the bolt; he heard her fleeing from him through the compound.... "Other refuge have I none----" But she herself had chosen to seek other refuge, knowing full well what she did! Should he have tried to prevent her, to understand her distress, her condition of mind? She was frightened, indignant, and helpless, whatever her fault; and he had allowed her to go, had made no effort to save her, because he was blinded with fury, was jealous and hard, and perhaps unjust.... What was the story of all those years? He sickened to think. What had she suffered, endured, to bring her to this--poor little fair Rafella, with her gentle ways and her narrow knowledge of life?
"Still support and comfort me----" He remembered her protest--how shocked she had been at his personal rendering of the words, how he had said in the rain that morning--the morning on which he had told her he loved her--that he meant to protect and support her as long as he lived. How had he kept his vow?
"Leave, ah! leave me not alone----" Yes, he had left her alone, had been harsh and unyielding, without patience, without pity for the "helpless soul"; he had put her away, condemned her unheard, abandoned her to her fate....