Skag knew something of what passed in the English officer's heart, because he himself was learning what love means. Before his hour with Carlin in the afterglow, on their way back from the monkey glen, he would never have dreamed that there was such feeling in the world; in fact, he would have been unable to read the vivid story of it in the officer's face. . . . So much in a second or two.
The cot had been partly lifted into the coach. The face now was uncovered—the white wasted face of a lovely woman, a woman still living; an utterly delicate face, telling the story of one who had never met a rough impact from the world. It was as if there had always been a strong hand between her and the grit and the grind of world-affairs—first her father's and then the lover's. In the great silence, the eyelids opened. It seemed that night and chill had suddenly come in. The lips moved. The most mournful and hopeless voice spoke straight into Skag's eyes:
"Oh, won't you please stop those fever birds!"
Skag supposed it an isolated sentence of delirium. He didn't understand. There was a drive of drama or tragedy back of it, but his mind did not give him details. He did not see the English officer again. He did not know if he entered the train. One thing Skag knew: Deep under that narrow masculine face there was a capacity for feeling that this officer's men never saw; that his closest associates never saw. The American reverenced the secret. . . . Sometimes during the hushes of the night, when the train stopped for a moment, Skag lying awake, heard the voice of the woman. There was a feeling from it utterly strange to him. It carried him out of himself, as if he shared something of her delirium and something of the man's agony.
The next day was one of the hardest that Skag ever lived, for Carlin was not at Hurda to meet him. She had gone with a strange elephant into the country. That was the day of the chase on the great young elephant Gunpat Rao, the day in which the story of the monster Kabuli unfolded. The face of the man at the mountain station and the sentence of the woman were completely erased from his surface consciousness, as the memory of an illness.
That was months away, and life had been very full in between. . . .
Carlin said she was just tired, when he went to her room in the morning. She looked at him long. It suddenly came to him vaguely, that she wasn't thinking; rather that her eyes were merely turned to his face. A queer breathlessness came to him a little later, as her head rolled to one side—such a sinking of weakness in the movement. It reminded him with a shock that she had never seemed quite tireless since that long ride on Mitha Baba's neck. But never before had her face turned away from him.
And now he saw a certain inimitable loveliness of her. There were no words to describe the last—only that it was Spirit made of all the dusks and all the white fires. There was something little about her that called an undreamed-of tenderness; and something superb and mysterious, so vast that he could be held in it like a toy in the hands.
Burning Indian day was walled and curtained and barred from the place where she lay. White of the walls, white of her face, white of the pallet—the rest a breathless, ungleaming shadow that held a heat not from the sun, as it seemed, but from the centre of the earth.
. . . Skag was away in timelessness and an unfamiliar space. This space was not fixed to one dimension, but moved back and forth. As Bhanah came to him, he saw more than Bhanah animate upon the features—like someone who had belonged always, whom he had known for ages, whom Carlin had always known. So many things struck him differently now; as if they belonged not just to this crisis, but to a crisis of eons.