"Well, I rather think so. Do you know the man has flung away all shame and has gone to live like a beastly Bhootea--a hill man--a savage on the mountain side?"
"What!"
"Why, every one knows it here. It happened about three months ago--just after that affair," and he indicated the board in the hall with a turn of his hand.
"The man must be mad."
"Not he; only he hasn't pluck enough to blow his brains out. He's not alone either, but has taken a wife--a Bhootea woman. They're not far off from here--over there on that spur," and he pointed to a wooded arm of the mountains that stood out above a grey rolling mist.
"My God!" and I put my head between my hands. "The cad! the worthless brute!" I burst out. "See here, Paget: perhaps you're wrong--perhaps this story isn't true?"
Paget carefully dusted a speck from his coat-sleeve.
"I know what you're thinking of, Thring. That girl at home. I heard something about the affair. I used to feel inclined to kick him when I saw her picture in his rooms at Rangoon beside that of the other one--you know whom I mean. Yes, it's all true, and you can go and see if you like. The Boothea girl is called Rani; she's devilish pretty. It's the 'squalid savage' business, you know; but the man is a moral hog--damn him!"
Saying this, Paget, who was a good fellow after his kind, lit another cigar, and nodding his head in farewell went off to the billiard-room, and I sat still--thinking, thinking, with fury and shame in my heart. At last I could endure it no longer, and then suddenly rose and walked to my rooms--I lived in the club. I was hardly conscious of what I did, but I remember ordering my pony, and then my eyes fell on a case containing a small pair of dainty revolvers. I took them mechanically from their velvet-lined beds, loaded them carefully, and slipped them in a courier-bag. Then I mounted the pony and rode off to find Mazarion. The road was longer than I thought; but it seemed as if some instinct guided me--some power, I know not what, was over me, and led my steps straight to my goal.
It is curious how in moments like this unimportant and trivial incidents impress themselves on the mind. I remember tying the pony to a white rhododendron, and that in so doing I dropped my cigar. It was the only one I had, and it lay smouldering before me, crosswise on the petals of one of the huge lemon-scented flowers that had fallen from the tree. I kicked it from me, and then went onwards on foot. In about half an hour I came to a little tableland of greensward, which hung over a grey abyss. Huge black pines rose stiffly on the rocks that beetled over the level turf, and to the edge of the rocks there clung, like a wasp's nest, a wretched hut, with a thin blue smoke rising from between the rafters of its moss-grown roof.