"Good night. Don't let Anne guess——"
"Never—on my word."
He went out. The night was dark and oppressive. A hush of exhaustion hung over the village. Afar off a jackal howled dismally, and was answered nearer by a prowling pariah dog. Tristram crossed the deep gutter which lined the uneven roadway. Though he could see nothing, he knew every stone, every turn; he could have named the invisible huts and their owners as he passed them. The pariah dog came snuffing round his heels, and he threw it a crust which it was his habit to carry in his pocket for the starving strays of the village. He heard the snap of its famished teeth, and a hurried scamper through the darkness.
At the cross-roads a breeze came down from the west. It rustled through the mysterious, never-silent leaves of the council-tree. It seemed to him that their whisperings were the ghosts of familiar voices now still. He stopped to listen. He could hear Ayeshi's voice, low-pitched and meditative, the harsher notes of the headman:
"Ah, those were the great days—the great days——"
The headman had been swept away in the last epidemic. Ayeshi was gone. He would never sit again by the red firelight and listen to the story of the Rani Kurnavati. He would never lie and stare up through the fret-work of peepul leaves and dream his boyish dreams of her. Gone—all gone.
He walked on rapidly. He had no consciousness of distance or any purpose—only a desire to be always moving. But at last a sound broke through to him—the dull, menacing roar of unseen water sliding past him into the darkness. He knew then that he had reached the limit of his respite. The menace was for him. This was the end of drifting—of all dreams. Here was the reality—the whole future to be faced.
He stood there listening—bracing himself....
It was close on daybreak when he returned. The lamp still burned dimly. Meredith lay on the camp-bed, fully dressed, apparently asleep. Tristram glanced at the composed face and then stumbled over to the table against the wall and sat down. The struggle was over, but it had left him exhausted, broken, his mind blank save for odd distortions of memory. He thought he heard Wickie patter over the floor to meet him—Ayeshi's soft and friendly foot-fall—a voice in his ear—-"I could make you a rich man—you could marry whom you pleased——" He heard a woman speaking gently with a subdued triumph—"Is this your confession, Major Tristram?"
But Meredith was not asleep. He had spent the night in a bitter conflict of uncertainties, in prayer, in alternating thankfulness and dread. Up to now, his growing purpose had been a light in his path, brightening as his eyes strengthened to the prospect it revealed. He had hugged sacrifice to himself and grown peaceful in his surrender. Now that his sacrifice and surrender had been made full and complete, he had lost his vision.