He pressed her to him, seeking to pour something of his own seething vitality into her dying frame. With her life the threads of his fate seemed to be slipping through his fingers.
"Help me!" he implored. "Do not leave me!"
But he knew that she would never answer. She lay heavy in his arms, and the hand that clasped his relaxed and fell with a soft thud upon the marble. He rose to his feet and stood looking down upon her. It was not the first time he had seen death. In these last weeks he had met it in all its most hideous, most revolting forms; but none had moved him, awed him as this did. He knew that she had once been beautiful. Who had made her suffer till only a shadow of that beauty remained? What had she endured? Who was she? What did she know of him? Why did she call him by a name which rang in his ears with a vague familiarity? What was it in her poor dead face which stirred in him a memory which had no date nor place in his life?
Outside he heard the uneasy stirring of the thousands who awaited him. He looked up and through the open windows, saw the camp-fires and that one dark spot which was to be swept clear of all but death. What had she said? "Go back! Lay down your arms! You must—you know you must! To turn traitor is to inherit an endless hell!" A traitor? A traitor to whom—to what? To some blind instinct that had called him in those English voices, that had beaten out an answering cry of thankfulness from his heart when their cheers proclaimed his own defeat?
A soft step roused him from his troubled thoughts. He looked up and saw a servant standing in the curtained doorway. The man's eyes were fixed on the outstretched figure at Nehal's feet, and there was an expression on the dark face so full of fear and horror that the Rajah involuntarily drew back.
"Who was this woman?" he demanded. "Whence comes she?"
"Lord Sahib, she was a mad-woman whom the Lord Behar Singh kept out of mercy. She must have escaped her prison. More I know not."
The man was trembling as though in the shadows there lurked a hidden threatening danger, and Nehal turned aside with a gesture of desperate impatience.
"Why hast thou come before the time?" he asked.
"Lord Sahib, outside there are two English prisoners. They demand to be brought before thee. What is thy will?"