'Tween Snow and Fire: A Tale of the Last Kafir War
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CHAPTER TWENTY SIX.
"AND THE SUMMER'S NIGHT IS A WINTER'S DAY."
For Eanswyth Carhayes the sun of life had indeed set.
The first numbing shock of the fearful news over, a period of evengreater agony supervened. He who had succeeded in setting free thewholly unsuspected volcanic fires of her strong and passionate nature--him, her first and only love--she would never see again in life. If shehad sinned in yielding to a love that was unlawful, surely she wasexpiating it now. The punishment seemed greater than she could bear.
She made no outcry--no wild demonstrations of grief. Her sorrow was tooreal, too sacred, for any such commonplace manifestations. But when sheemerged from her first retirement, it was as a walking ghost. There wassomething about that strained and unnatural calm, something whichoverawed those who saw it. She was as one walking outside the world andits incidents. They feared for her brain.
As the days slipped by, people wondered. It seemed strange that poorTom Carhayes should have the faculty of inspiring such intense affectionin anybody. No one suspected anything more than the most ordinary ofeasy-going attachment to exist between him and his wife, yet that thelatter was now a broken-hearted woman was but too sadly obvious. Well,there must have been far more in the poor fellow than he had generallybeen credited with, said the popular voice, and after all, those outsideare not of necessity the best judges as to the precise relationshipexisting between two people. So sympathy for Eanswyth was widespreadand unfeigned.
Yet amid all her heart-torture, all her aching and hopeless sorrow, poorTom's fate hardly obtruded itself. In fact, had she been capable of athorough and candid self-analysis she would have been forced to admitthat it was rather a matter for gratulation than otherwise, for undercover of it she was enabled to indulge her heart-broken grief to theuttermost. Apart from this, horrible as it may seem, her predominatingfeeling toward her dead husband was that of intense bitterness andresentment. He it was who had led the others into peril. Thataggressive fool-hardiness of his, which had caused her many and many along hour of uneasiness and apprehension, had betrayed him to abarbarous death, and with it that other. The cruel irony of it, too,would burst upon her. He had avenged himself in his very death--hadbroken her heart.
Had Tom Carhayes been the only one to fall, it is probable that Eanswythwould have mourned him with genuine--we do not say with durable--regret.It is possible that she might have been afflicted with acute remorse atthe part she had played. But now all thoughts of any such thing fadedcompletely from her mind, obliterated by the one overwhelming, stunningstroke which had left her life in shadow until it should end.
Then the Rangers had returned, and from the two surviving actors in theterrible tragedy--Payne and Hoste, to wit--she learned the fullparticulars. It was even as she had suspected--Tom's rashness fromfirst to last. The insane idea of bushbuck hunting in a small party inan enemy's country, then venturing across the river right into what wasnothing more nor less than a not very cunningly baited trap--all was dueto his truculent fool-hardiness. But Eustace, knowing that her verylife was bound up in his--how could _he_ have allowed himself to be soeasily led away? And this was the bitterest side of it.
To the philosophic and somewhat cynical Payne this interview was anuncomfortable one, while Hoste subsequently pronounced it to be the mosttrying thing he had ever gone through in his life.
"Is there absolutely no hope?" Eanswyth had said, in a hard, forcedvoice.
The two men looked at each other.
"Absolutely none, Mrs Carhayes," said Payne. "It would be shamkindness to tell you anything different. Escape was an impossibility,you see. Both their horses were killed and they themselves weresurrounded. Hoste and I only got through by the skin of our teeth. Ifour horses had `gone under' earlier it would have been all up with us,too."
"But the--but they were not found, were they? They may have been takenprisoners."
Again the two men looked at each other. Neither liked to give utteranceto what was passing through his mind. Better a hundredfold theunfortunate men were dead and at rest than helpless captives in thehands of exasperated and merciless savages.
"Kafirs never do take prisoners," said Payne after a pause. "At least,never in the heat and excitement of battle. And it is not likely thatCarhayes or Milne would give them a chance, poor chaps."
"You mean--?"
"They would fight hard to the bitter end--would sell their lives dearly.I am afraid you must face the worst. I wish I could say otherwise, butI can't. Eh, Hoste?"
The latter nodded. He had very willingly allowed the other to do allthe talking. Then, as all things come to an end sooner or later--evenWigmore Street--so eventually did this trying interview.
"I say, George. That just was a bad quarter of an hour," said Hoste, asthe two companions-in-arms found themselves once more in their favouriteelement--the open air, to wit. "I don't want to go through it againmany times in a lifetime. If ever there was `broken heart,' writ largein any woman's face, it is on that of poor Mrs Carhayes. I believeshe'll never get over it."
Payne, who had shown himself far from unfeeling during theabove-mentioned trying interview, regarded this remark as a directchallenge to the ingrained cynicism of his nature.
"You don't, eh?" he replied. "Well, I don't want to seem brutal, Hoste,but I predict she'll be patching up that same `broken heart' in mosteffective style at some other fellow's expense, before the regulationtwo years are over. They all do it. Lend us your 'bacco pouch."
Hoste said nothing. But for that little corner of the curtain of hersuspicions which his wife had lifted on the first night of Eanswyth'sarrival, he might have been three parts inclined to agree with hisfriend. As things stood, he wasn't.
But could they at that moment have seen the subject of theirconversation, it is possible that even the shelly and cynical Paynemight have felt shaken in his so glibly expressed opinion. In theseclusion of her room she sat, soft tears coming to the relief of thehitherto dry and burning eyes as she pressed to her lips, forehead, andheart, a little bit of cold and tarnished metal. It was the broken spurwhich Eustace had been wearing at the time of the disaster, and whichher recent visitors had just given her. And over this last sorry relicshe was pouring out her whole soul--sorrowing as one who had no hope.