But in the fulness of time, bungalow, tea, and servants were all forthcoming: and between three and four of the morning their fantastic journey culminated in a prosaic meal of eggs and buttered toast. When it was over Quita vanished, leaving Desmond alone with his wife; and before moonset he was speeding back along the road they had come; covering the fifty miles at a hand-gallop, in something less than five hours.
A fortnight later two very unwilling grass-widows were rescued by
Lenox, who had secured his sick leave; and who escorted them from Dera
Ishmael as far as Lahore, where he left them to go on into the mountain
region beyond Kashmir.
Hillmen have a saying, 'Who goes to the hills goes to his mother'; and Eldred Lenox, a hillman both by love and lineage, confirmed it for the hundredth time, as he pushed his way upward, by leisurely enchanting stages, from the steaming Punjab, through the great natural gateway of the Baramullah Pass, a towering defile, thunderous with full-fed torrents and waterfalls, into the familiar Valley, . . a very sanctuary of peace; its terraced slopes splashed with the vivid green of rice-fields, the russet and gold of ripe orchards and cornlands; up through Srinagar, 'the City of the Sun,' of carved and gilded temples, thronged waterways, and flat house-tops blazoned with flowers; and yet again upward, by ways well known to him, into the hidden mysteries of the mountains massed about the valleys; a mighty conclave of immortals brooding in majestic meditation; shrouded at this season by dazzling continents of cloud; and plunging green arms to the rivers and lakes, that gleamed like molten silver under a pale sky.
To know a character rightly it should be seen in its natural element; and the Lenox of the Himalayas was by no means the same man as the Lenox of the Plains. All his latent energy and vigour blossomed out like flowers at the first whisper of spring. 'The glory of Himachal' drew and penetrated and inspired him like nothing else on earth.
Here he tracked and brought down oonyal, markhor, and the great mountain sheep; explored on a small scale, because the fever of going was upon him; and slept as a man only sleeps when he is living close to the heart of Nature. Here, also,—fortified by solitude, by the uplifting sense of things awful and divine which is the gift of great mountains to those who love them,—he fought doggedly and systematically against a craving that persisted in spite of improved health. For the tyranny of opium is as tenacious as it is deadly; and the habit of five years is not to be broken in as many weeks. But the man who wills to conquer evil has God and Nature fighting on his side: and in the teeth of several flagrant lapses, Lenox made steady progress.
In Srinagar he bought a bottle of chlorodyne; and two days later flung it down the khud. When his store of drugged tobacco ran out, he replaced it by a brand in which an innocuous admixture of opium just sufficed to produce the faint fragrance that he loved. The black fits of melancholy, which were native to his temperament, and which, in the past five years, had threatened to dominate him permanently, evaporated like morning fogs before the sun as the certainty grew in him that he must prevail: and Quita, who had done most of the harm, made unconscious reparation by letters whose consummate faith in the final issue was stimulating as the mountain air itself.
By October he was back at Dera Ishmael Khan;—a renewed man, bronzed and vigorous, the shadow gone from his eyes; testing his achievement and finding that it held good; bending all his energies to the task of fitting up a home for his wife; a task whereof Honor usurped as large a share as he would permit. Then, towards the end of the month, he wrote to Quita: "Come. We are ready, and waiting for you,—the house, Zyarulla, Brutus, and your impatient husband, who will pick you up at Lahore."
And on the last day of October, more than six years after their hasty wedding, Eldred and Quita Lenox entered upon their married life.
"Have you forgotten, darling, the nonsense I talked that day about the House, and the Enchanted Palace?" she asked, as they stood together on their first evening in the drawing-room, whose every detail he had planned with elaborate care.
"Is it likely? Why?"