Skag turned to the girl as they stood together at the low heavy door, leading into the library. Something in her face held him utterly—something of wisdom, something of dread—if one could, imagine a fear founded on knowledge. . . . A brilliant mid-afternoon. Bhanah and Nels had gone to the stockades. Since the chase and rescue of Carlin, Nels and the young elephant Gunpat Rao were becoming friends—peculiar dignities and untellable reservations between them—but undoubtedly friends.
There was a kind of stillness in the place and hour, as they stood together, that made it seem they had never been alone before. Deep awe had come to Skag. As he looked now upon her beauty and health and courage, with eyes that saw another loveliness weaving all wonders together—he knew a kind of bewildered revolt that life was actually bounded by a mere few years; that it could be subject to change and chance. Thus he learned what has come to many a man in the first hours after bringing his great comrade home—that there must be some inner fold of romance to make straight the insistent torture at the thought of illness and accident and death itself—something somehow to enable a man to transcend all three-score and ten affairs and know that birth and death are mere hurdles for the runners of real romance.
. . . The sunlight brought out faint but marvellous gleamings from the serpents. It was as if every scale had been a jewel. . . . Skag looked closer. It wasn't bad mounting. It was really marvellous mounting. His eye ran from one to another. Every cobra's head had been shattered by a bullet. The broken tissues had been gathered together, pieced and sewn—the art of the workman not covering the dramatic effect entirely, yet smoothing the excess of the horror away.
". . . I've heard of cobras always, yet I never tire and never seem any nearer them," Carlin was saying. "I remember the word cobra when I heard it the first time—almost the first memory. It never becomes familiar. They are mysterious. One can never tell the why or when about them. One never gets beyond the fascination. The more you know the more you prepare for them in India. It's like this—any other room would have windows that open. . . . Cobras have much fidelity. We think of them as reptiles; and yet they are life-and-death-mates, like the best of tiger pairs. One who kills a cobra must kill two or look out—"
Carlin had strange lore about mated pairs; about moths and birds and other creatures (as well as men-things) finding each other and living and working together; about a tiger that had mourned for many seasons alone, after some sportsman had killed his female; about another rollicking young tiger pair that leaped an eight foot wall into a native yard in early evening, made their kill together of a plump young cow, and passed it up and over the wall between them.
"The cubs were hungry," Carlin had said.
Still they did not leave the door-way of the cobra room. Skag saw that something more was coming. Once more he was drawn to the mystery of the holy men by her tale:
". . . I was a little girl. It was here in Hurda. . . . I had strayed away into the open jungle, not toward our monkey glen, but farther south where the trees were scarce. . . . Of course I shouldn't have been alone—"
Skag was staring straight at one of the cobras. Carlin turned and placed her hand upon his sleeve. She knew that he was fighting that old dread that had come upon him on the day of the elephant pursuit—a dread well enough founded, grounded upon many tragedies—of the pitfalls and menaces and miasmas of old Mother India; the infinite variety, craft, swiftness and violence of her deaths. (White hands were certainly clinging to Skag.) One's vast careless attitudes to life are fearfully complicated when life means two and not the self alone.
"This isn't a horrible story—" she said.