[1] Pull.
CHAPTER XX.
"Passion has but one cry, one only;—Oh to touch thee, my beloved!"
—Olive Schreiner.
Asiatic cholera is as capricious as a woman; capricious both as to her choice of victims, and as to the grisly fashion of her wooing. In one mood she will kill at a stroke, like a poisoned arrow; in another she will play with a tortured body as a cat plays with a mouse. And it was thus that she dealt with Eldred Lenox.
For two days and nights Desmond and the Pathan wrestled against the evil thing, and against that deadly apathy as to the result, which kills more surely than the disease itself. And since the regiment claimed many hours of the Englishman's day, the brunt of the nursing devolved upon Zyarulla, who scorned suggestions of sleep, and appeared to live on pellets of opium, and a hookah, which inhabited the verandah outside his master's room.
There were moments when they were tempted to despair. But they fought on doggedly, and without comment; and as the second night wore towards morning, they knew that they had conquered. The gong at the police station down the road had just clanged three times. Every door and window-slit stood open at their widest; and through them entered in the familiar, unforgettable smell of the Indian Empire under her yearly baptism of fire; a smell of dust, and baked brick work, and stale native tobacco. A hand-lamp on the mantelpiece diffused a yellow twilight through the room; a twilight flavoured with kerosine: and across the twilight the shadow of the punkah flitted, like a whispering ghost.
Zyarulla, crouching at the bedside, slid a cautious knotted hand between the buttons of the sleeping-coat, and laid it lightly on his master's heart. The flutter within was feeble, but regular; though the face, grey and shrunken almost past recognition, still bore the impress of death.
"God is great," the Pathan muttered into his beard. "The strength of the Heaven-born is as that of mine own hills; and my Sahib will live. It is enough."
On the farther side of the bed, Desmond, in gauze vest, and belted trousers, mopped his forehead, and drew a long breath. Then, measuring out a tablespoonful of raw-meat soup, he slipped a hand under the dark head on the pillow.
"Lenox, dear chap, drink this, will you?" he said, speaking as persuasively as a mother to a child.