Chapter Twenty Five.
Mervyn’s Dilemma.
We must glance back.
Mervyn’s camp was pitched not very far from the mouth of the Duran Tangi; that is, not very far from the scene of the sniping episode of a week or two previously, of which, of course, he was in ignorance, but far enough from the great overhanging wall of terraced cliff, to be beyond the possibility of a repetition of the same. He had been warned at Mazaran that the country was extra restless just then, and that moving about in it, in the happy-go-lucky way he proposed, was positively unsafe; but with his usual gustiness, he pooh-poohed every suggestion of the kind. No one was good enough to teach him his India, he declared. If it suited the military element to get up and foment a chronic scare, well that wasn’t going to interfere with him. It was of no use representing to him that this wasn’t India precisely, but the Northern border—whose inhabitants were a fierce, predatory set of fanatics caring for no show of authority, and that even now these were in a state of unrest—well, he knew them too. When he heard that his old friend Varne Coates—and especially the latter’s relative, and his friend, were on a shikar expedition two or three days out, that was sufficient. He only spent long enough at Mazaran to collect camp necessaries and hire servants, and at once set out to join them.
He had even demurred to the escort of four Levy sowars, which was pressed upon him. These damned Catch-em-alive-ohs, he declared, were of no—ditto—use. They couldn’t hit a haystack if it came to shooting, and even then they’d either clear or make common cause with the enemy, to whom, tribally, they as likely as not belonged. So—here he was.
They had made a very early start from their last camp, and the morning was yet young. They had not long finished breakfast, and were seated in camp chairs under the shade of a canvas awning.
“Oh, this is perfectly glorious,” Melian was saying, her eyes seeming to feed upon the sunlit wildness of the surroundings. “What a contrast to dear old Heath Hover, too. Look at that splendid mountain face, all terraced, as it were, with great cliffs; and even the openness of it all has a marvellous charm.”
Her uncle puffed meditatively at his cheroot, then looked at her, and in the result felt not unsatisfied. She had taken, with characteristic readiness, to this strange wild country and its life—and every phase of it afforded her a fresh delight. And its people, too, of every shade and type, but that which attracted her most, was the tall, turbaned, often scowling, mountaineer, with his primitive jezail and never absent and wicked looking tulwar—a very Ishmaelite in deed and in appearance.
They had come up the tangi in the early morning and she had been entranced with the vastness of the huge narrow chasm, the first of its kind she had ever seen. And now, as Mervyn contemplated the eager animated face, tinged with the golden glow of an open air life, the blue eyes clear and large in contrast, he found himself thinking satirically that it was small wonder if Mazaran had sought to throw stumbling blocks in the way of their leaving it. And then as though the mention of Heath Hover evoked a recollection she suddenly said: