Carew turned from fondling the big bay that was nozzling him affectionately. “Pretty usually,” he answered, “it’s a bad habit one catches in the desert. But I’ve always wanted to try Suliman against that grey of André’s. He had him beaten from the start,” he added with a faint smile, “come have a drink.” And he led the way under the lance-propped awning into the cool dimness of the tent.
Meredith glanced about with interest. The costly but sparse furnishings were almost entirely of the country; a small camp table and a solitary deck chair, the sole concessions to European taste, looked incongruous in conjunction with the low inlaid stools and gay brocaded silk mats that were purely Arab. A wide divan, heaped with heavy cushions and covered with a couple of leopard skins, stood in the centre of the room. Looped back curtains of gold-embroidered silk hung before the entrance to the sleeping apartment.
At first sight Meredith thought the tent empty. But as his eyes grew accustomed to the soft light he saw, in a far corner, the slender figure of a child sitting on the ground swaying gently to and fro, his handsome little face upturned in rapt devotion as he crooned softly to himself while the beads of a long rosary slipped through his small brown fingers. The thick rugs on the floor deadened the sound of their footsteps and for a moment the entrance of the two men passed unnoticed. Then Carew moved and his foot struck sharply against a small brass bowl that had fallen from a nearby stool. At the sound the lad stopped swaying and sat rigid as if listening intently, his face turned eagerly towards them. Then with a glad cry he tossed the rosary away and scrambling to his feet came flying across the tent with outstretched hands. A thick cushion that in its bright-hued covering appeared perfectly obvious against the dark rug lay directly in his path but he blundered straight into it and fell headlong before Carew could catch him. And as Meredith watched the big man bending over the little white-clad figure and saw the stern lines of his face change into a wonderful tenderness, and heard the sudden gentleness of his voice as he murmured in soft quick Arabic, he recollected with a feeling of acute dismay the “queer stories” that Mollie Chalmers had referred to. Was this, then, the solution of Carew’s protracted sojourns in the desert? To the Anglo-Indian with his deep-rooted prejudices the supposition was repulsive. It was to him little short of a crime. And yet was there not perhaps an excuse? Sudden pity contended with repulsion as he remembered Carew’s devotion to his tiny son, and the tragedy that had robbed him of his child. Had the ardent desire for parenthood that had formerly been so strong in him risen even against racial restrictions and the misogyny with which he was now accredited?
Meredith was relieved when his disturbing thoughts were interrupted. The boy was on his feet again, talking excitedly, but Carew silenced him with a hand on his shoulder.
“There is a guest, Saba,” he said in French, “salute the English lord, and go bid Hosein hasten with the cooling drink.”
Suddenly shy the boy moved forward, bending his supple little figure in a deep salaam. Then drawing himself erect, he lifted his face to Meredith’s with a curiously uncertain movement. And looking down into the beautiful dark eyes raised to his the soldier saw the reason for that hasty tumble and an involuntary exclamation escaped him. He looked enquiringly at his host.
Carew nodded. “Yes, he’s blind,” he said in English, “but you needn’t pity him. He has never known anything different and he is a thoroughly happy little imp.” And drawing the boy to him with a quick caress he set him with his face towards the door and watched him grope his way from the tent.
Then, pulling forward the deck chair, he placed cigarettes beside his guest. From behind a cloud of smoke Meredith spoke with obvious constraint. “I’m awfully sorry—” he began awkwardly, and something in his voice made Carew turn quickly to look at him. For a moment his sombre eyes rested on the soldier’s embarrassed face, then he shook his head with a grave smile that had in it a trace of bitterness.
“It’s not what you think,” he said evenly, “though I admit the thought is natural. He is not mine—sometimes I wish to God he were. He’s only a waif picked up in the desert, five or six hundred miles away in the south, there. I found him six years ago, when I was helping to clean up an Arab raid, lying across his dead mother’s body and whimpering like a hungry kitten. He wasn’t more than a year old. I’ve had him ever since. I don’t think I could get on without the little chap now. He’s an interest, and fills up my time when I’m not otherwise occupied—fills it pretty completely, too, for he is as sharp as a needle and, when the mood takes him, as keen on mischief as any boy with the full use of his eyes. But tell me about yourself. Are you still on the Frontier?”
And Meredith, keenly anxious to renew the old intimacy, let himself be drawn and talked of his life on the Indian Border as he had never talked of it before. Baldly and jerkily at first and then with increasing ease he spoke of the years of arduous work that had claimed his whole time and thought; of perilous journeys and months passed in disguise amongst the savage northern tribes, of hairbreadth escapes and strange experiences, of periods of so-called leave which to the man intent on his job and absorbed in his occupation had only meant work in another form.