But the ponies were content to climb hour after interminable hour, and Dawa Tsering sang about the wind-swept hills of Spiti as they rose and descended through every imaginable plane of vegetation, from steamy bottoms where dense jungle stifled them, up through bamboo and rhododendron to where oaks and maples flourished—up beyond those to the fir-line—up again until the firs gave out and raw wind rolled the clouds around them straight from Kanchenjunga—then down again into the suffocating tropics, where woodticks fell on them and a man’s hands were kept constantly busy picking leeches off the ponies and Diana had to be gone over carefully three times within the hour.
They crossed rock-cluttered torrents over bamboo bridges that swayed and danced under the weight of one pony at a time, and bivouacked again at midnight in the clouds, where icy wind shrieked through the chinks of a deserted herdsman’s hut; then descended two hours after dawn into a steaming cauldron where black water quarreled on its way through aromatic jungle.
Never a sign of the Lama’s party, although they passed stone chortens[[40]] every mile or so, and cairns built by pilgrims, to which every passer by had stuck little prayer-flags to flutter the eternal formula “Om mani padme hum.” There were messages on bits of paper from one pilgrim to another, weighted down with stones near some of the chortens, but none that the Lama had left.
And there were unaccountable delays. At times the two Tibetans seemed to think they had come too fast and, after a whispered consultation, unloaded the ponies whether they appeared to need a rest or not. The ponies rolled on sky-hung moss-banks within a dozen feet of the edge of an abyss, and the Tibetans chewed oily seed by the handful, offering Ommony some, and pointing out good places to sit down when he showed impatience. Dawa Tsering flicked at the edge of his knife with a suggestive thumb-nail, but they laughed at that, too, showing him a tough tree, dwarfed by the wind, that he could cut down if he needed exercise. In their own good time they started off again without excuse or argument, usually singing hymns to pacify the spirits of the mountains.
As he drew near Tilgaun Ommony’s thought dwelt more on Hannah Sanburn than on the Lama and Samding. Aware now that for twenty years she had kept a secret from him, in spite of mutual respect and confidence that in every other way he could think of had been almost absolute, he wondered how to tackle her about it. He did not care to know even a part of her secret without letting her know that he knew it.
There had been times when he had seriously thought of asking Hannah Sanburn to become his wife; other times, when the thought that he could hardly live at the mission without marrying her had been all that kept him from resigning his forestry job and spending the remainder of his life in active duty as a trustee at Tilgaun. He was too confirmed a bachelor not to flinch from matrimony when he reasoned out all the pros and cons, but in the back of his head there was a conviction that Hannah Sanburn would not refuse, if he should ask her. But he also had known, any time these past ten years, that he never would ask her to marry him unless—he wondered what the reservation was; he had never quite defined it.
Hunted through his mind and pinned at last into a corner, up there thirteen thousand feet above sea level with a view of Kanchenjunga to adjust mere human problems to their right proportion, he realized that he would marry Hannah Sanburn—gladly enough—at any time—if by doing so he could solve a difficulty from which she could not otherwise escape.
He was almost convinced that there was a page in Hannah Sanburn’s life which needed very careful protecting; something which called for limitless generosity. He had no use for generosity that hedged itself within conventional limits. He liked his freedom and the habit of consulting no one’s inclinations but his own in private matters, that becomes almost second nature in an independent man of forty-five, but he knew he could forego all that and be a reasonably companionable married man, if his interpretation of the law of friendship should impose that course on him. To Cottswold Ommony friendship was the highest law; no conceivable claims could outweigh it; Hannah Sanburn was his friend; there was nothing to argue about. But he hoped—without much confidence, but he hoped—that she was not in the predicament he guessed her to be in; suspecting that, since she had kept him in the dark for twenty years, she could quite easily have fooled Mrs. Cornock-Campbell, who notoriously believed the best of every one.
He rather dreaded meeting her—very much dreaded the inevitable interview; and although he fretted to overtake the Lama he was much more patient with delay than he might otherwise have been, leaving untried a good many methods with which he might have persuaded the Tibetans to hurry. He salved his conscience by grumbling aloud to them and sotto voce to Dawa Tsering, but there was not much energy in his complaints.
At last, toward the end of the fourth day out, they topped a fifteen-thousand-foot rise and looked over a sheer ravine, where eagles perched, toward Tilgaun that nestled in a valley with a Lamaist monastery perched on a crag three thousand feet above it. The mission buildings glowed warm in the westering sun—one instance where a rich man’s money had been spent on art as well as altruism, with good manners and respect for other men’s historical associations, such as missionaries commonly dispense with. The graceful contour of the buildings and the color of the carved stone matched the panorama. There was no assertiveness, no challenge. The Tibetan roof-lines paid acknowledgment to older art on crag and cliff around them. Without beauty there is no beatitude. Old Marmaduke, who tortured thirty million dollars from protesting pigs, had somehow learned that; so the mission buildings were a monument to beauty, not to his ambition or his zeal.