Here was a question which it was impossible for him to answer, though to all appearances, nothing could have been more pertinent. He could not tell her that in his case the head sirdar of the Gularzai would be every whit as merciless as would Allah-din Khan and his followers. But her case was different. And that ghastly plan which he had overheard had resolved him to an even more hazardous course on her behalf—hazardous because one of sheer sink or swim.
“‘Why?’” he repeated. “‘Why?’ Always a woman’s query—Why?” And he looked at her with a very loving but very sad smile. “I can only tell you this, child, that you must leave that part of it to me, and do exactly as I tell you I know—and you don’t. That must be sufficient. This is the dim, mysterious East, remember, and I’ve spent the best years of my life in it.”
The sun was drooping now to the craggy, serrated ridge beyond the valley, flaming in red gold upon the cliffs beneath which they were riding. The figures of the wild, turbaned horsemen were picked out in the clear glow—the strange, fierce East indeed. Melian thought it was a picture that would remain stamped in her memory until her dying day. There were signs too, that the said figures showed an inclination to abandon their straggling order and to close up. Mervyn saw this—and at the same time came the thought that this was the last sun whose setting he would ever see.
“Quick, now, Melian,” he said. “Take this, but carefully. Watch your chance. No one must see. When you have it, hide it upon you. Don’t even look at it again. If you do, it must be at the very last extremity. You are more than ordinarily quick witted, and will be able to follow. If anything happens to me—no, don’t interrupt—and after a reasonable time has gone, say a month, and you are not restored, and especially if Allah-din Khan should attempt to pass you on to strangers—then produce it. Do you follow?”
“Yes—but—what—where—is it?” said the girl, her wide open, serious eyes upon his face.
“Take my pouch and pipe, and fill it, as they have often seen you do,” and he handed it to her. Wondering, she obeyed. Then as he reached forth his hand to take it, he slipped something into hers. One look at this, and she almost let it fall, but refrained, just in time.
For what she held in her hand was a tiny facsimile of the strange, star-shaped disc, which she had picked up on the sluice path at Heath Hover that lovely cloudless June morning, and the sight of which, in her grasp, had struck her uncle with such a terror of trepidation.
And he knew that she was possessed of that which upon production would entail upon her two alternatives—restoration, to liberty or death—the latter, swift, painless, unconscious. But the other ghastly fate, to which he had overheard allusion made, could now never be hers.
“Only in the very last extremity,” he reminded her, in an earnest undertone, for the band was now closing up around them. And she bent her head in grave, silent comprehension, and assent.