Captain Desmond, V.C.

Excerpt

JUDGE FOR YOURSELF.

"Do we move ourselves, or are moved by an Unseen Hand at a game?"—Tennyson.

Honor Meredith folded her arms upon the window-ledge of the carriage and looked out into the night: a night of strange, unearthly beauty.

The full moon hung low in the west like a lamp. A chequered mantle of light and shadow lay over the mountain-barrier of India's north-western frontier, and over the desolate levels through which the train, with its solitary English passenger, sauntered at the rate of seven miles an hour. Even this degree of speed was clearly something of an achievement, attainable only by incessant halting to take breath—for ten or fifteen minutes—at embryo stations: a platform, a shelter, and a few unhappy-looking out-buildings set down in a land of death and silence—a profitless desert, hard as the nether millstone and unfruitful as the grave.

During these pauses the fret and jar of the labouring train gave place to a babel of voices—shouting, expostulating, denunciating in every conceivable key. For the third-class passenger in the East is nothing if not vociferous, and the itch of travel has penetrated even to these outskirts of empire.

Sleep, except in broken snatches, was a blessing past praying for, and as the moon swung downward to the hills, Honor Meredith had settled herself at the open window, to watch the lifeless wastes glide silently past, and await the coming of dawn.

She had been journeying thus, with only moon and stars, and unfamiliar scenes of earth for company, since eight o'clock; and morning was near at hand. The informal civilisation of Rawal Pindi lay fifty miles behind her; and five miles ahead lay Kushalghur, a handful of buildings on the south bank of the Indus, where the narrow line of railway came abruptly to an end. Beyond the Indus a lone wide cart-road stretched, through thirty miles of boulder-strewn desert, to the little frontier station of Kohat.

For six years it had been Honor's dream to cross the Indus and join her favourite brother, the second-in-command of a Punjab cavalry regiment; to come into touch with an India other than the light-hearted India of luxury and smooth sailing, which she had enjoyed as only daughter of General Sir John Meredith, K.C.B., and now, with the completion of her father's term of service, her dream had become an almost incredible reality.

It was not without secret qualms of heart and conscience that the General had yielded to her wish. For frontier life in those earlier times still preserved its distinctive flavour of isolation and hazard, which has been the making of its men, and the making or marring of its women; and which the northward trend of the "fire-carriage" has almost converted into a thing of the past. But sympathy with her mettlesome spirit, which was of his own bestowing, had outweighed Sir John's anxiety. On the eve of sailing he had despatched her with his blessing and, by way of practical accessory, a handsome revolver, which he had taught her to use as accurately as a man....