With all this mutual regard, Chute's dearest friend of the two was not the dead man, but Jerry Vane; yet there had been a great community of sentiment between them. This was born of the affection they fostered for the two sisters, and sooth to say, Beverley, while in India, loved his absent wife with a passion that bordered on something beyond either enthusiasm or romance. It became eventually spiritualised and refined, this love for the distant and the ailing, beyond what he could describe or altogether conceive, though times there were when in moments of confidence, over their cheroots and brandy pawnee, he would gravely observe to Trevor Chute that so strong, and yet so tender, was the tie between him and Ida, that, though so many thousand miles apart, they were en rapport with each other, and thus that each thought, or talked, and dreamt of the absent at the same moment.
Be all this as it may, a time was to come when Trevor was to recall these strange confidences and apparently wild assertions with something more than terror and anxiety, though now he only thought of the death-bed of his friend in India, the details of all that befell him, and the messages and mementoes which Jack Beverley had charged him to deliver to Ida on his return to England.
They had been stationed together, on detachment, at the cantonment of Landour, which is situated on one of the outer ridges of the Himalaya range, immediately above the Valley of the Deyrah Dhoon, where they shared the same bungalow.
The dulness of the remote station at which the two friends found themselves became varied by the sudden advent of a tiger in an adjacent jungle: a regular man-eater, a brute of unexampled strength and ferocity, which had carried off more than one unfortunate native from the pettah or village adjoining the cantonment; thus, as a point of honour, it behoved Trevor Chute and Beverley, as European officers and English sportsmen, to undertake its destruction. Indeed, it was to them, and to their skill, prowess, and hardihood, the poor natives looked entirely for security and revenge.
'I have sworn to kill that tiger, and send its skin as a trophy to Ida,' said Beverley, when the subject was first mooted at tiffin one day. 'She shall have it for the carriage in the Park, and to show to her friends!'
About two in the morning, the comrades, accompanied by four native servants, took their guns, and set forth on this perilous errand, and leaving the secluded cantonment, proceeded some three or four miles in the direction of the jungle in which the tiger was generally seen.
As he sat in reverie now, how well Trevor Chute could remember every petty detail of that eventful day; for an eventful one it proved, in more ways than one.
The aspect of Jack Beverley, his dark and handsome face, set off by his white linen puggaree, his lips clearly cut, firm and proud, his eyes keen as those of a falcon, filled with the fire of youth and courage, and his splendid figure, with every muscle developed by the alternate use of the saddle, the oar, and the bat, his chest broad, and his head nobly set on his shoulders, and looking what he was, the model of an Englishman.
'Now, Chute, old fellow, you will let me have the first shot, for Ida's sake, when this brute breaks cover,' said he, laughing, as he handed him a case worked by her hands, adding, 'Have a cheroot—they are only chinsurrahs, but I'll send a big box to your crib; they will be too dry for me ere I get through them all, and we may find them serviceable this evening.'
Poor Beverley could little foresee the evening that was before him!