The way in which the two accepted the situation was characteristic of both. Mervyn took it apparently as all in the day’s work, though he had reason to believe that his days were surely numbered. He conversed equably with his captors—or escort, as though he were accompanying them of his own free will, to pay a visit to their village for instance, for any other pacific purpose. Yet he knew that in coming to this country again he had deliberately—as Hussein Khan had put it—placed his head between the tiger’s jaws.
Even this, strange to say, did not perturb him, perhaps he had imbibed a large proportion of Oriental fatalism during his lifelong acquaintance with the strange peoples of the East. If his time had come—it had, and there was no more to be said. It had nearly come, he knew full well, when the cry through the winter midnight had led him to drag the perishing man forth from the icy death. Now, if it really had come, why—“it was written;” and in that case that he had returned to this land at all, and of his own free will—was part of the scheme. Thus he looked at it.
But—what of Melian? Had he not drawn her into peril? No—for he did not believe they would harm her. For himself, if what he suspected should prove true—why then his hours were certainly numbered. Well, what then? Until she had come to Heath Hover he had not been in love with life. He was often, in fact, honestly and genuinely sick of it. The brightening which her coming had shed upon it could not be other than temporary. In the due and ordinary course of things she was bound to leave him again sooner or later—and then, how could he return to the old solitude, the old depression of day in, night out? There was nothing to look forward to, and precious little to look back upon. So it mattered little enough now whatever happened to himself. All of which of course, he did not impart to Melian.
She for her part, seemed infected with his unconcern, and looked upon the whole affair as a decidedly interesting adventure. It had its inconvenient side—for instance the commissariat department was to her civilised tastes, abominable, and sleeping out among the rocks was chilly of a night. But she was allowed to come and go as she liked. No watch was set upon her, for in the first place she had volunteered to go with them rather than separate from her relative, and in the next where would she be in the midst of this craggy, and, to her, entirely unknown wilderness, even if she did change her mind, and take it into her head to try and escape. At night they would make her up a couch of mats in some cleft or hollow among the rocks and shelter off the entrance, and she would declare laughingly to her uncle that it was only an experience of camping out, after all.
Yet there were times when her efforts at keeping up her spirits would sorely fail her. Mervyn himself could not consistently find comfort in cold fatalism, and she would read in the gloom of his knitted brows that he was by no means so easy in his mind as he would have had her believe. And as they journeyed on, through the awful wildness of this savage, rock built region; threading gloomy gorges where the very light of the sun would not penetrate, or traversing a drear waste of desert where the friable soil rose and gyrated in “dust devils” and the sun blazed down as from the reflection of an opened furnace; wending the while, whither they knew not—her spirits began to droop. In short the situation was getting upon her nerves—and that badly.
The shaggy, turbaned horsemen, whom at first she had found fascinating in their picturesqueness, began to appear in her eyes more and more the predatory, merciless beings they really were. The wild savagery of the surroundings—which at first she had pronounced absolutely faultless in their fantastic chaos of rock and crag and chasm, now took on a Dantesque and hope-chilling aspect. Where would it all end?
Either Hussein Khan’s estimate of the distance to be travelled to arrive at the Gularzai chieftain’s stronghold had been very much under-rated, or they were bound for some other destination, for two nights had passed, and they seemed no nearer to any fixed ending of their journeyings. And then when her spirits had reached their lowest ebb, came a thought to Melian’s mind like the breaking of sunlight through a thick mist.
Helston Varne was at Coates’ camp, which had been their objective when their plans had been thus roughly and suddenly deflected. She would hardly own to herself how greatly she had been looking forward to meeting him again, and now it seemed to her that he, of all human agencies, would be the one to come to their aid and bring matters right. How on earth he was going to do it she had not the ghost of an idea, but that he would contrive to do it somehow, she felt assured—almost. For the very name of Helston Varne seemed to her now as before, a tower of refuge. And something of this she imparted to her uncle.
But he shook a gloomy head. A network was around him—around them both—which even Helston Varne’s acumen and infinite resource would be powerless to rend asunder. This he knew, but she did not, and—he could not tell her.
He had been very careful in his conversations with her, and had enjoined upon her like caution. It was highly probable, but still not absolutely safe to assume, that no one amid their captors understood English. She suggested French, but then Mervyn’s education, though excellent for purposes of passing through a crammer’s hands in his salad days, comprised no working knowledge of that courtly and useful tongue, so that fell through, and unless now and again, and then by dark hints, they were compelled to avoid any reference to the motive of their capture, and the ultimate chances of its satisfactory termination. And then it befell that the merest chance—a piece of overheard conversation—sufficed to throw him into the last stage of gloomy, hopeless despair.