The eyes open wide with surprise.
"I will never tell her," says Saxham again. "I will not blacken any man's reputation to further my own interests." The vital strength and the white-hot passion of him, contrasted with the spent and utter laxity of the dissolving thing of clay upon the bed, seem superhuman. "Do you hear me?" he demands again. "Listen once more. Knowing the truth of you, I came here to force you to undeceive her. Had you refused, I would certainly have killed you. But I would never have betrayed you!"
That "never" of Saxham's carries conviction. The pale ghost of a laugh is in the dying eyes. The wraith of Beauvayse's old voice comes back again to say:
"Doctor, you're a ... damned good sort!" And then there is a long, long silence, broken only by those painful rattling breaths, never by her coming.
The end comes, and she is not there. A pale blink in the wild sky eastward hints to the night lookouts of hot drink, food, and welcome rest. The Chief stands beside the comfortless camp-bed, where the hope of a high old House is flickering out. The Doctor holds the wet and icy wrist, where the pulse has ceased to be perceptible. The sheet above the labouring breast rises and falls with those panting, rattling gasps; the beautiful eyes are rolled up and inwards. The light is very nearly out, when, with a last effort, the flame leaps up. He thinks that what is the barely perceptible whisper of a tongue already clay is a loud and ringing cheer. He thinks that he is shouting, his strong young voice topping a hundred other voices. It seems to him who, for the bribe of all the beauty he has coveted, and all the love that is yet unwon, could not speak one audible word or move a finger, that he waves his hat again and again. Oh! glorious moment when the white moonbeams blink on the grey dust-wall rolling down from the North, and the horsemen of the Advance ride out of it, and clustering enemies that have rallied again to the attack waver, and disperse, and scatter....
"Hurrah! They're running—running for their lives! Give it 'em with shrapnel! Oh, pepper 'em like hell! The Relief! The Relief! Hurrah!"
It is all over with the opening of the day-eye in the east. When they leave him, beautiful, and stern, and calm in that deep slumber from which only the Angel with the Trumpet may awaken him, and pass out between the curtains, the dark, short officer who was on the lookout when the Doctor came, stands very pale and muddy, and steaming with damp, waiting to report. And two troopers of the Irregulars, wet and muddy and steaming too, are waiting also, just inside the tarpaulins of the outer doorway. And she is not there.
A few rapid words, an exclamation from the Chief, shaken for once out of his steely composure, and quivering from head to foot with mingled rage and grief:
"My God, how unutterably horrible!"