The next moment the train had started, and George, overcome by the rush of feelings evoked by the thought that the man whom he hated was so near to him, sank down into his corner seat in the wet white heat which strong excitement causes to the bodily weak. He hoped that Rahas, if indeed it was he whom Ella had seen, had not caught sight of him; in that case George was sure that he had only to follow the wily Arabian to be taken straight to the house where Nouna was. The journey seemed endless; he fell from time to time into fits of stupor, in which he heard the tramp of the warder through the rattle of the train, and Nouna calling to him in hoarse, broken accents unlike her own, and a rasping voice shrieking out to the beat of the wheels: “Never to meet! Never to meet!” With a start he would find that prison-walls and darkness had melted back into the cushioned carriage and the light of day, and remember in a vague, half-incredulous way that he was on his way to Nouna. Then the train would stop at a station, and he would look out eagerly, furtively, scanning the passengers who got out, searching for the man he wanted. At last, at Salisbury, where the train waited a quarter of an hour, his anxiety was set at rest. Wrapped in a long overcoat, and wearing a travelling-cap pulled low over his eyes, Rahas descended to the platform, walked two or three times up and down with his eyes on the ground as if in deep thought, and got in again without having given one glance at any of the other compartments. George had felt pretty safe from recognition, as he was much altered by illness and the loss of his moustache, and as, moreover, he was believed to be still a prisoner in France. Now he was altogether sure that Rahas was off his guard, and the knowledge gave him confidence. When, therefore, the Oriental merchant left the train at a little station a few miles from Plymouth, George only allowed him time to get through the door before he jumped out after him, and turning up his coat-collar, as the coolness of the evening gave him an excuse for doing, gave up his ticket and followed.
Once out of the station, Rahas, without a glance behind him, struck straight across the fields by a narrow path that led to the distant light of what George supposed must be some little village. It was half-past eight; the showers of an April day had saturated the grass, and a thick damp mist lingered among the trees, most of which as yet had but a thin spring covering. The moon had not yet risen, and George had to hurry after Rahas, fearing in the obscurity to lose sight of him altogether. The numbness which had seized his tired faculties from time to time on the railway journey now again began to creep over him, so that the surprise he would at another time have felt, the questions he would have asked himself as to the merchant’s leaving the train before he came to Plymouth, now merged into a dull confusion of ideas, the most prominent of which was that Rahas was trying to escape him. As the path descended into a little valley dark with trees, and the figure before him, now indistinct against the dark background, disappeared over a stile into the shadows of the copse beyond, this fancy grew stronger and, feeling that his limbs were unsteady with ever-increasing fatigue, which made him hot and wet from head to foot, he broke into a run, reached the stile in his turn, got over it, and stumbling over some unseen obstacle, slipped on the soft, muddy earth, and fell to the ground. The next moment he felt himself seized as he lay on his face, bound with a stout cord that cut into his flesh in his struggles to free himself, and then dragged through brambles and wet grass into the little wood. This last was a slow operation, for George was a big man, and though no longer in the full vigour of his health, he was too heavy for his dead weight to be pulled along with ease. He lay quite still, without uttering a sound, recognising, after a valiant but vain attempt to get free, that he was quite at the mercy of his assailant, he decided that entire passivity was his best chance of escaping such a quieting as would save him all further exertion. The first result of this was that Rahas, when he had continued his slow and tedious progress with his victim for what seemed a long time, stopped and peered into his face closely enough for George to make quite sure of his identity. To his surprise, the Oriental seemed quite relieved to find that he was not dead.
“Ah ha, you know me,” he muttered, as he encountered the shining of living eyes in the gloom. “You are not hurt. That is all right. I do not want to hurt you, be sure of that. I bear you no ill-will.”
“Thank you,” said George quietly. “That is satisfactory as far as it goes; but I should like to know whether this is the manner in which you treat chance acquaintances, for example.”
“No,” answered Rahas, quite simply; “I am forced to this last means of keeping you from the woman whom Heaven, as the planets declare, has given to me, and whom you have ruined by instilling into her your own soul, which is killing her fair body day by day. Do you understand? Her mother has given her to me, is only waiting for me to take her away to give her the dower you, in your proud folly, refused. I have waited long, I have tried many ways, to get what Allah intended for me. Nouna herself, weary of waiting, dying by inches, has at last given me permission to see her. Must I, at the last, with success in my very grasp after a year of waiting, see it wrung from me by the man whose touch has been fatal to this fair flower of the East? No. The will of Allah must be done. There are women enough in the world for you; there is only one for me. Nouna must come to my arms to-night; and for you, after to-night, I am at your disposal in any way you please.”
There was a strange mixture of cupidity, fanaticism and ferocious courage in his speech and manner which struck horror into George’s heart, at the thought that his wife might to-night have to come face to face, without a husband’s protection, with this man. He uttered a loud shout and made a sudden effort to rise, which the Arabian frustrated with a movement as nimble as a hare’s, accompanied by a short laugh.
“Keep still,” he said more harshly, “and keep your shouting until I am out of earshot.”
He made no threat in words, but his tone was so significant that George, to whom danger had restored his full faculties, resolved to save up his lungs. In a business-like manner Rahas then, with his knee on the young man’s chest, assured himself that the cord which bound him was secure, and with a civil and dispassionate “good-night,” to which the Englishman was in no humour to respond, he turned and walked rapidly away; his steps scarcely sounded on the soft, damp earth, and only the crackle of dead branches and the rustle of living ones, growing fainter and fainter until the sounds faded quite away, told George that he was retreating rapidly.
Then came a time for the poor fellow when he prayed for death at last. With the rotting leaves of the previous autumn forming a slimy pillow for his head, his body sinking slowly into the damp earth, while a rising wind moaned a low dirge among the surrounding hills and swept over the thinly-leaved branches above his head with a sepulchral “hush!” he felt all the horrors of the grave, all its loneliness, all its impotence, without the one blessing—peace, which we hope for there in spite of the clergy, who are ferocious as regards the next world to counter-balance their meekness in this. The deft Rahas had bound him sailor-fashion, beginning with the middle of the rope; and the knots were immovable as iron; he began to feel cramped and benumbed by the cold, the rising moisture amid the undergrowth of the wood, and the impeded circulation of his blood. Still his head remained hot as fire, his brain reeling in a mad dance of fantastic tortures, until at last frenzy came, and pictures of the past chased each other through his memory, but with a lurid light of horror upon them which distorted his fairest recollections, and turned them into ugly nightmares. Then in turn the pictures faded and his senses began to grow dull, and strange cries to sound in his ears to which he tried to reply; but his voice would not come, and even as his lips moved in this effort, the last gleam of sense left him, and he fell into unconsciousness.
As upon the blackness of night the fair, pure dawn comes gradually, so George, from the stupor of a deadly lethargy, woke by slow degrees to sensations of warmth, and light, and joy; and feeling, before the sense of sight came back to him, a soft touch on his flesh that set him quivering, and a breath against his lips that exhaled the very perfume of love, he fancied in the first moments of a still feebly moving brain, that his prayer had been granted, that he was dead, and in Heaven. Until suddenly there burst upon his ears a wild, joyous cry: “He is breathing! He has come back to me—back, thank God! thank God!”