Eveleen’s usual quickness of mind and speech was deserting her under the pressure of fatigue, and she could not even find kind words in which to reassure Carthew. She watched him dully as he went off to the circle of Arabits, who had been looking on and listening suspiciously as the colloquy proceeded, and spoke eagerly and confidentially to one and another. Guessing that the alternative instantly present to their minds was to rush upon Richard and rid themselves of him as they had intended, she was ready to protect him again as she had done before, but she could not bring her mind to bear upon less pressing issues. The Arabits were not easy to convince, that was evident, and she wondered whether they were trying to induce Carthew to keep her in talk or distract her attention in some way while they made an end of Richard—such a quick and easy thing to do, with so many against one! But she had confidence, now as heretofore, in the streak of faithfulness which formed part of the renegade’s weak nature. He might betray his compatriots as a body, but the friend of his early days, never! Her confidence was justified. When mind and body were alike worn out, and she was almost dropping asleep as she sat, he returned to say that the Arabits consented to carry Richard with them to the camp, that Kamal-ud-din might have the responsibility of deciding what was to be done with him. A camel-litter was brought forward—intended for Eveleen’s own use—and Richard was lifted and laid upon the cushions. It was the kind of long palanquin called in Persia a takhtrawan, and Eveleen was able to climb in as well, and settle herself in the place which otherwise would have been Ketty’s. Looking out anxiously before the blinds were drawn down, she saw the two servants accommodated—uncomfortably, but safely—behind two camel-riders, and then the camels which bore the litter rose grumblingly to their feet in response to the shaking of their neck-chains of blue beads and tin bells by the drivers, and she had time to remember that she was wet and cold, horribly hungry and most incongruously thirsty, and in spite of all, consumed with sleep. But how easy it would be for the enemy to keep watch upon her through the semi-transparent grass blinds, and so find an opportunity of striking at Richard! With infinite difficulty she crawled along the creaking, swaying box until she could pillow her head upon her husband’s breast, and then twisted a tress of her hair tightly round one of his buttons, so that if any attempt was made to reach him, she must be disturbed. Then at last she was able to resign herself to sleep, and in spite of her cramped position, the shaking of the takhtrawan, the loud voices outside, and the sun which presently blazed down upon the march, slept peacefully for hours. She did not wake until the sudden kneeling of the camels roused her to the knowledge that they had reached the camp, where she naturally expected to face the man whose fate was perversely linked with hers by the blue stone. But she found she was fortunate, for Kamal-ud-din was not there at all. He had hastened back to his army some distance to the north, and Tamas Sahib, who had so successfully carried through the capture, was to proceed with his captives to Umarganj at once. This meant that only the extreme heat of the day was to be spent in the few small tents which had been left for their accommodation, and which were like so many ovens on the shadeless sand. Happily the storm had left the nullahs and hollows of the neighbourhood well filled, and by means of Abdul Qaiyam, and with the aid of Tom Carthew, Eveleen requisitioned a salitah, the strong piece of canvas which, roped over all, serves to protect and hold together the various packages making up a camel’s burden, and this, dipped in water and hung over the takhtrawan, made it much cooler. Richard remained in the same unconscious state, and a little rice-water was all they could manage to force down his throat. Abdul Qaiyam promised that when they halted for the night he would try to make some broth, and with that Eveleen had to be content. While the bearer attended to his master, she was thankful to submit her own dishevelled person to Ketty’s ministrations, for it was torment to have her hair hanging about her face in the heat. The brushes and other things the old woman had pocketed—with whatever intention—came in usefully now, and Eveleen felt that if only Ketty were dumb, she could be quite fond of her for once. As things were, she was obliged to pay for her services by listening to her grumbles.
The halt was short enough, and the march that followed a long one, and so it went on for several days. Afterwards Eveleen thought she must have been light-headed with fatigue—so confused were her recollections of those unending rides in the takhtrawan, punctuated by brief periods of blessed repose on firm ground, from which she was invariably roused the moment she had fallen asleep. Makeshift meals, cooked in some mysterious way by Abdul Qaiyam and all tasting of sand; distant glimpses of Carthew, looking anxious and careworn, but conjuring up a reassuring nod when he found her looking at him; perpetual grumbling from Ketty, for which there was only too much excuse and over all the ever-present sense of threatening peril, which kept her always in a fever of devising expedients to safeguard Richard and not let him out of her sight—this was the waking history of those days for Eveleen. She did not know whether to be thankful or alarmed that Richard should remain in a state of coma, nor whether she ought to try to rouse him or not. The blow on the head had not fractured the skull—of so much she and the bearer were able to assure one another—but whether there was concussion they were not surgeons enough to know. On the whole, it seemed better to leave the patient undisturbed—save by the incessant noise and movement going on around him—and trust that nature might be healing him in her own way.
How long they took to reach Umarganj Eveleen would have found it very difficult to say. It might have been a week, it might have been more—or less—before the joyful shouts of the escort announced that they were within sight of their journey’s end, and she peeped through a private spy-hole she had discovered and enlarged in the grass blind to see what the place was like. There was nothing magical and mysterious about it as there had been about the vanished Sultankot; it was simply a straggling mud town, dominated by a mud fort. It was surprising where its builders had managed to get so much mud in such a dry region, but she supposed they made their bricks in the rainy season, and piled them up hurriedly on the first fine day, lest they should all melt into mud again. She noticed that Carthew led the way round the town, so that they could reach the fort without passing through more than a small part of it, and that he was evidently anxious to get in as quickly as possible. The people were largely defrauded of their spectacle, for only a few were aware of the arrival in time to rush to their house-tops, where Eveleen heard them chattering excitedly overhead as the camel-litter went swinging by. There was some discussion when the gate of the fort was reached, between Carthew and a stout negro who was waiting there—clearly an official of some importance—on the subject of the disposal of the prisoners, as it seemed, and it appeared that Carthew won, for he took matters into his own hands and bade the camel-drivers follow him, while his vanquished opponent strolled away with a contemptuous cock of his nose, as Eveleen called it, which nature had rendered wholly unnecessary.
The place in which Eveleen found herself, when she had crawled out of the litter, which was taken from off its camels and carried bodily inside, was apparently a kind of guard-room, cool enough with its thick walls and high roof of beaten mud supported on wooden beams, but open along the whole of one side, where a series of squat blunted arches led out upon a verandah, which in its turn gave upon what looked like the court of the guard—to judge by the number of stalwart Arabits in all stages of dress and equipment who were strolling about or preparing their food or sitting peacefully on similar verandahs.
“I’ll send some of the slaves in to clean the place up a bit for you, ma’am,” said Carthew, his look of trouble more pronounced than ever, “and some stuff to serve for a curtain to the arches. There’s chiks you can let down till it comes, but for any sake don’t you go for to set a foot beyond ’em. And don’t you have nothing to say to anybody that comes out of the zenana gate opposite”—he indicated a massive iron-bound portal, guarded by sentries sitting or lounging about it, on the other side of the courtyard,—“nor put your lips to any food, or sherbet, or what not, that may be brought you out of there, on no account whatever. And I’ll go straight to the Khan—who’s got here before us, after all—and do what I can to put a little decency into him, if he kills me for it!”
He spoke so strongly, almost savagely, that Eveleen felt her fears rising again. “Won’t you tell me now, what is it y’are afraid of?” she asked timidly, for her.
“If I must, I will, when I come back. I’m leaving two men that I can trust on your verandah here, and you keep behind the chiks, and never leave your good gentleman for a minute—but that I know you won’t do. And if I don’t come back, you’ll know that traitor though I may be—I did my best for you, Miss Evie.”
“Indeed and I know it now, Tom, and I thank you for it with all my heart, and so would Major Ambrose if he could speak.”
She held out her hand, and he wrung it and went off. Abdul Qaiyam and one of the guards let down the chiks, and in the semi-darkness Eveleen retired to the litter again, while two half-starved, furtive-looking youths came in with inadequate brooms and swept the more obvious dirt from the middle of the floor into the corners. Then they departed, and there remained the problem of arranging the room, with the aid of one charpoy, so doubtful in appearance that Eveleen declined to make use of it, and the cushions from the litter. These were spread on the salitah on the floor, and Richard laid on them—across a corner, in which Eveleen determined to fix her abode, with the litter and the charpoy as flanking defences on either hand. What Carthew’s vague warnings portended she could not divine, but she had a horror of being snatched away unawares and leaving Richard unprotected.
It was some time before Carthew appeared, and then he was accompanied by men bearing trays of food—each viand occupying the exact middle of an unnecessarily large tray,—which were received from them with joy by the bearer, and surveyed with approval even by Ketty. But while the servants were busy squabbling over the best way of arranging the food, Carthew was stooping across Richard to speak to Eveleen.