Captain Morecombe stared at her. "Poor brute!" he said under his breath. "It was skin and bone. Starved to death. I expect they forgot all about it when they got really frightened. They are cruel devils, Mrs. Erlton."
The Major had used the self-same words to Alice Gissing eighteen months before, and in the same connection. But, perhaps fortunately for Kate in her present state of nervous strain, that knowledge was denied to her. Even so the coincidence of the bird itself absorbed her.
"It had a yellow crest," she began.
"Oh! then it couldn't have been yours," interrupted Captain Morecombe, rather relieved, for he saw that he had somehow touched on a hidden wound. "This one was green; yellowish green. I dare say the King kept pets like the Oude man----"
"It is dead anyhow," said Kate hurriedly.
And the knowledge gave her an unreasoning comfort. To begin with, it seemed to her as if those fateful white wings, which had begun to overshadow her world on that sunny evening down by the Goomtee river, had ceased to hover over it. And then this rounding of the tale--for that the bird was little Sonny's favorite she did not doubt--made her feel that Fate would not leave that other portion of it unfinished. The inevitable sequence would be worked out somehow. She would hear something. So once more she waited like many another; waiting with eyes strained past the last known deed of gallantry for the end which surely must have been nobler still. When that knowledge came, she told herself, she would be content.
Yet there was another thing which held her to hope even more than this; it was the remembrance of John Nicholson's words, "If ever you have a chance of making up." They seemed prophetic; for he who spoke them was so often right. Men talking of him as he lingered, watching, advising, warning, despite dire agony of pain and drowsiness of morphia, said there was none like him for clear insight into the very heart of things.
Yet he, as he lay without a complaint, was telling himself he had been blind. He had sought more from his world than there was in it. And so, though the news of the capture of the Burn Bastion brought a brief rally, he sank steadily.
But Hodson, coming into his tent to tell him of the safe capture of the King and Queen upon the 21st at Humayon's Tomb, found him eager to hear all particulars. So eager, that when the Sirdars of the Mooltanee Horse (a regiment he had practically raised), who sat outside in dozens waiting for every breath of news about their fetish, would not keep quiet, he emphasized his third order by a revolver bullet through the wall of the tent. Greatly to their delight since, as they retired further off, they agreed that Nikalseyn was Nikalseyn still; and surely death dare not claim one so full of life?
Even Hodson smiled in the swift silence in which the laboring breath of the dying man could be heard.