She would have turned and avoided him, but the bigness of him had held her riveted too long. He drew rein and swung himself to the ground beside her.
"I've brought you Richard," he said simply. He did not offer her his hand or greet her, although they had not spoken to each other for many weeks. He seemed to sweep all ceremony aside.
"I ought to have brought him before—I promised, didn't I?—but somehow I couldn't. It was like a slight to Wickie. He's had a rotten time though, poor chap. You'll make it up to him, I know."
She patted the mongrel's distrustful snout. The man's proximity shook her composure so that she seized eagerly on the first thought that came to her.
"What other passengers have you on board?" she said, with a little nod towards the heaving and mysteriously creaking basket at his saddle.
"My tabbies," he said solemnly. "They've got rather obstreperous since we've been civilized. My wife doesn't like them running about after me, so they had to be shut up, poor beggars, and there's nothing like shutting people up for bringing the devil out of them. Now I'm taking them with me to Heerut." He smiled a little. "I'm going back to the wilderness," he said.
He took off his helmet and ran his hand through the thick, tawny hair with a gesture like that of a sleeper freeing himself from the clouds of an evil dream. The light striking through the branches of the mohwa-tree lit up his face, and, looking up at him and reading all that the last months had wrought, she felt a pang of angry pity. If this was Siegfried, then it was not the Siegfried of Brünnhilde's fiery mountain, but the man of the Rhine Valley, Gudruna's man, fettered by civilization and weakened by its trickery and dishonesty. Had he also drunk of the cup of forgetfulness, she wondered? Had he lost his vision of the fire-girded rocks above where he had won his manhood? A flicker of the old mockery shone in her eyes.
"You don't look very well, Major Tristram," she said.
He shook his head.
"Oh, I'm well enough—physically at any rate." He laid his hand on his heart with a rueful laugh. "I've got a sort of spiritual indigestion though—it's this life—it doesn't suit me or my tabbies. It's too neat and tidy. I'm like that what's-his-name person who had to put his hand to his mother earth to keep strong. I need to be doing and fighting, struggling for existence in my mother wilderness to keep decent. Well, I shall have enough of that out there. Unless the drought breaks soon we're going to have more trouble. The unhappy folk in the village are beginning to die off like flies, and when the famine comes——?" He shrugged his shoulders.