At last she found him—all that was left of him.
How she had beaten and clutched her way down the footholdless sides of that high ravine was unthinkable. No man could have done it, no goat without snapping its legs, scarcely a snake without peeling off its skin and losing its sinuous balance.
But she had, and she crouched down, and moaned piteously over the broken, mangled remains—all that was left of him—left of a derelict cockney.
If England with her quiet waysides, her cowslip-flecked pastures, her gardens of roses, her fragrance of hop-vines, her red baubled cherry-trees, her flushed-face apples, her peaceful churchyards, her ivied gray village churches, her carol of cathedral bells, her emerald lawns, her oak-trees, her ribbon-hung May-poles with young health and happiness circling dance-steps about them, the ring of her playing fields, the sheen and the wealth of her rivers, her red-coats and her boys in blue, her clucking hens, and her sleek, lowing kine, her firesides and her castles, Oxford and Windermere, her sea-washed feet and her crown of fog—and her London slums—had shown him no womanliness, suckled him with no milk o’ human kindness, given him no love, Asia had.
Had he been kind to her, the native woman, tossed to him soul and body, by a despot carelessly?
It looked like it.
It looked like it, as she knelt there moaning beside him, whispering tenderness and love words to him between her sobs—straightening his broken twisted limbs as well as she could, lifting his one hand—the other was red pulp-stripped bone—to her forehead.
When she had stolen from the palace she had held in one hand a cluster of marigolds. All the way she had come she had carried them carefully. She had them still. She held them against her breast for a moment, then gently pushed them into his hand, and laid it down.
The birds had been there before her—but not many, it was too far down, palled in darkness by the high walls of rock between which the strip of ravine lay so narrow. One hand—had it ever struck her?—was beaked and defiled, but not much else. Most of the human body she had loved, caressed and served lay there, horrid now, but hers.
A vulture cawed high up in a cypress. The woman heard, and crouched lower, like a hen over her chicks.