So in the cool of the next morning Afzul walked through the barren fields to see the pleader. A keen-faced sallow young man, seemingly glad to escape for the time from patent-leather boots and such like products of civilisation. The Pathan found him squatting over against a hookah and basking in the sunshine like the veriest villager. For all that he was fulfilled with strange knowledge of law and order as administered by the alien, and Afzul sat open-eyed while he discoursed of legacies, and settlements, of the feme covert and the Married Women's Property Act, with a side glance at divorces and permanent alimony--strange topics to be gravely discussed at the gateway of an Indian village through which men were carried to their rest and women to their bridal beds, with scant appeal to anything but custom. It utterly confused Afzul, though it sent him away convinced that the blue envelope must mean the loot of another lover to the mem-sahib.
"I will wait," he said to himself decisively; "yes, I will wait until she is faithful and goes back to the Major; then, as that pleader fellow says, he will get the money. But if he leaves her and takes his money instead, then I will send her the envelope. That is but fair. God and his Prophet! but their ways are confusing. 'Tis better to steal and fight as we do; it makes the women faithful."
That evening he spent half an hour with a needle and thread, borrowed from old Fâtma, in sewing the blue envelope safely into his skin-coat. Then he sat once more stirring the old Mohammedan's blood with tales of fight and adventure till far on into the night. Yet the earliest blink of dawn found him creeping away from the still sleeping household, and his right arm bare of a massive gold bracelet he had worn for years. That he had left lying on the baby's pillow; for was not the child the son of his brother? Had not his father saved Marsden sahib also? Ah! that score was not paid off yet. He still seemed to see the tall figure standing in the sunlight. Fool that he had been not to fire, instead of giving himself away at a mere word! Even now, though he knew that but for him Philip Marsden's bones would have been churning in a dreary dance of death at the bottom of some boiling pool in the Terwân torrent, he felt the bitterness of defeat. His very admiration, growing as it did with the other's display of pluck, added to his resentment. To take an order from a man when you had your finger on the trigger of your rifle! It was all very well to save a wounded comrade, to stand by him through thick and thin, but that did not show him, or convince yourself, that you cared as little for his menace as he had done for yours. Some day, yes, some day! he would stand up before Marsden sahib and defy him. Then he could cry quits, and go home to his own people in peace.
Nevertheless, the news of his master's accident which met him on his return to Saudaghur sent him without an instant's pause to the factory where Philip still lay unconscious. And when he walked, at the dead of night, into the big bare room where Belle sat watching, his face softened at the sight of that dark head on the pillow. It softened still more when something of the past--Heaven knows what--seemed to come with him, rousing a low, quick voice from the bed. "Afzul, it is cold; put on more fuel. Do you not feel the cold? Afzul, Afzul!" For that something had carried Philip Marsden back to the smoky cave among the snows, although the windows stood wide open to let in the tardy coolness of the summer night.
The Pathan drew himself together and stood at attention. "Huzoor!" he answered quietly. "It is done; the fire blazes."
Belle in the half-shadows thrown by the sheltered lamp stood up looking kindly at the new-comer. "I'm glad you have come, Afzul," she whispered; "he has been calling for you so often."
Behind his military salute the man smiled approvingly. She was of the right sort, faithful to the old love. Marsden sahib should marry her and get the money, if that was the way they managed things over the black water. And this solution of the question grew upon him as he watched her unfailing devotion when, between them, they helped the sick man through the dreary trouble which was all too familiar to the Pathan. "It was so in the cave," he would say, as time dragged on through days when the sick man lay still and silent, through nights when the quick hurried words never seemed to leave his lips and it was all they could do to keep on the bandages.
"It's the bullet in the shoulder blade that's troublin' him," said the clever little Irish doctor, who rode forty miles every day between two trains in order to see his patient and keep an eye on his hospital. "Put three more days' strength into him, Mrs. Raby, and I'll bring over another man and we'll have at it somehow. The wound has niver haled, and niver will till it gets a fair chance."
Shortly after this Belle found herself pacing up and down the verandah, scarcely daring to think of what was going on within. Would he die? Was this really the end? Was it to be peace at last, and no more struggle? And lo and behold! when the doctors let her into the room again he was lying with a smile on his face, because the pain, the ceaseless pain which had annihilated everything else in the world, was gone.
"I've given you a lot of trouble," he said; and even as he spoke fell asleep from sheer, blessed ease.