Still she did not move.
The night sank into deeper darkness and stillness. The hours crept on their way, monstrous, heavy-footed. She measured her breathing to his, she held him in arms that had lost all feeling. The shadow about her lips crept over her whole face, blotting out its youth.
The dawn came at last, creeping in between the parted curtains, mixing pallidly with the dying lamplight. The rich embroideries and the glittering curios faded, the high carved chair by the dressing-table became spectral, unreal.
Ayeshi entered noiselessly, passing like a ghost to the quiet bedside. Tristram had turned over, his face to the coming day, his head resting in the curve of his arm. So Ayeshi had often seen him—by the camp-fire, after the day's work.
And beneath, on the great tiger-skin, huddled and still, a golden-clad, incongruous figure, which even in that moment retained something imperious, conquering, exultant.
Ayeshi bent down and touched the pale, disordered hair. He leant across and kissed the man's unconscious hand—lightly, as if it had been a sleeping child's.
Then, noiselessly as he had come, glided across the room to the open window and thence out into the morning.
CHAPTER XIV
TRISTRAM CHOOSES HIS ROAD
Dr. Martin from Lucknow had made his examination, and now he sat opposite to the woman on whose husband he was about to pass sentence, and told her the truth with all the delicacy at his command. He was a civilian with a considerable practice among women, and a corresponding belief in his understanding of the sex. But he did not understand Mrs. Boucicault. Possibly the long journey, partly on horse-back, partly on a bone-racking bullock-wagon, had upset his nerve and that nice balance of mind which made a correct analysis possible. He had felt oddly and ridiculously sickened by the man whose bedside he had just left. There was something revolting in that great hulk of over-developed, ill-conditioned strength, inert and helpless, without power of speech or motion, with nothing living in it but the eyes. Dr. Martin had seen a great many ugly sights in his career, but nothing uglier than those desperately living eyes in the dead body.