SNOW UPON THE DESERT

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIX, Issue 21344, 19 November 1932, Page 12 (Supplement)

SNOW UPON THE DESERT

By J. RUSSELL WARREN

CHAPTER Vll.—(Continuod) Elisabeth was very sure that God was directly helping her that night. It was an awful journey to the spring—a slow, heart-breaking clambering over boulders, and round them, and in and out of tho deep pot-holes. Again and again sho thought sho lost her way; sho could no longer hear the, trickling sound; who had to keep quito still and listen very intently. But at last sho found the spring —nothing but ;i trickle from a cleft in a rock wall, dropping into a sort of Jittlo basin, trickling over tho lip and then vanishing somewhere underground. She drank some herself, and found she needed it more than she had realised; it was actually warm, and had a curious flavour, but Elisabeth never thought any drink could be so delicious. Then she filled her topi in tho basin, and started back to Lady Susan. Sho managed to find her way, but it was terribly difficult going; sho did not want to spill a drop of that precious waiter, and yet at times sho needed both her hands to help her among tho rocks. Half-way back she slipped and camo down heavily. Sho thought at first that she had broken her ankle, but she had only ricked it; it was not even a sprain. But in her fall she dropped her topi and lost all the water, and bad to go back for more.

Tlio second time she managed to get through with her topi still full, and found her way to Lady Susan again. She was lying quite still, exactly as Elisabeth had left her, and for one awful moment the girl thought she had gone. But when Elisabeth knelt down beside her, holding the helmet full of water, oh, so carefully, she could hear her breathing. Sho splashed some of the water on the woman's forehead, and Lady Susan moved sharply, tried to sit up, and fell back again with a gasp of pain.

" Oh," she said, very faintly. " I'd forgotten. Is that water, Tarleton 1 " Elisabeth said "Yes," and tried to hold the topi to her lips. It was very difficult, but somehow tho girl managed to lift her up a little without hurting her badly, and Lady Susan took the topi and drank. Even then she only drank a little; sho was always sparing of water. Good girl," she said, and handed back the helmet. Elisabeth lowered her back against the rock, and for a few moments she was silent. Then she said, in a stronger voice:

" Tarleton, before I go, I've got to tell you why I dragged you into this. I had a reason, although I expect you thought it was nothing but a mad old woman's whim. I felt, somehow, that I could trust you, Tarleton, as 1 couldn't trust anyone I knew. You wouldn't pester me with stupid questions; you'd do as I told you. And I had a queer feeling—an intuition—a presentiment—it doesn't matter what you call it—that I shouldn't come back, that I shouldn't be able to see it through, but that you would. Perhaps you may yet. There may bo help just round the corner; I've so often found that help comes miraculously, when things soem to bo at their very worst. You've got to do your best, Tarleton; promise me this. It's a sacred trust. Promise me that if you get through you'll do your best." Elisabeth promised. She could do nothing else, and she felt that Lady Susan was pleased. " Good girl," she said. " It's about—well, it really begins years and years ago, when I was as young as you are. Perhaps you wouldn't believe that I was a pretty girl then, but I was; perhaps you wouldn't believe that I had a—a love affair, but 1 had; the only one in my life, the one that has lasted all my life. How different everything would have been if—but another woman made mischief. I needn't tell you all the details. But I was proud then, and so was he, and we quarrelled about it. Never be proud, Tarleton; pride isn't a virtue, it's a vice, a sin. It ruins everything. Poeple sacrifice everything to their pride when they ought to sacrifice pride first of all, for it's worth nothing—nothing—compared with other things." She was silent for a little while. Elisabeth thought, then, that she was thinking about the past, but later she came to believe that the dying woman was making a tremendous effort to hold on to life until she had said all she wanted to say. Presently sho began again: "He was young, too, Tarleton. and quick-tempered and impulsive; poor Harry. And he went straight off and married another woman. Oh, it wns a terriblo mistake; sho wasn't tho right woman, They couldn't hit it off; she didn't even try to make him happy. But when Harry had given his word lie kept it. Ho didn't believe in divorce, and neither do I, Tarleton. ' Whom God hath joined together ' —you know. He'd married her and he wouldn't back out of the contract. They didn't even separate, legally, though they saw very little of each other, I believe. Ho took up wandering about tho world —exploring. prospecting, game-shooting--that kind of thing. I took it up, too. I had I to do something, and if we couldn't be ! doing the same things together, I wanted | to be doing them apart. [ didn't try to meet him—l couldn't have borno it. If 1 heard that he had gone north, I went south. But sometimes, sitting out at night, in a desert or on a mountain top, I liked to think that perhaps he was sitting out somewhere, 100, with the same moon and stars shining on us both, and that he was i thinking of me as I was thinking of him. ! I'm sure he did, too. Men aren't often : like that, Tarleton, constant through ' hopeless years and years—they're made : differently from women—but I'm quite, I quite sure that Harry was. If only his f wife had died—but she couldn't even do that. She's still alive, at home, playing at being Lady Bountiful." Again Lady Susan paused. Site seemed to be breathing with difficulty. Her voice sank so low, sometimes, at the end of sentences, that Elisabeth had to put her ear down close to hear the words. But she went on, finally: We wrote to each other now and again—letters that she might see, that anyone in the world might see. I never told him that my love, for him only grow stronger through the years of separation. Ho never told me that 1 was tho only woman in his heart. It wasn't necessary. We both knew. The last letter I had from him—l've got it here, Tarleton "—she put her hand to the breast-pocket of her shirt, and something rustled and crackled—" was written from Basra three months ago. He was going up into Persia —up here, Tarleton. He came tho way we did. We followed in his very footsteps, lie had heard gup in tho bazaars about a hakim, a native doctor, up here in the mountains, at a place called Kerhat, who had a marvellous, a miraculous cure for blindness. He could give sight to anyone, they said. Harry knew what blindness meant—ho had known many blind people, especially in tho war (ho was through that, Tarleton, as I was—l drove an ambulance—atid lie was blind for six months with gas) and his thought was, if he could learn the hakim's secret and give it to the world, it would be something worth doing with his life. All this he wrote to me before he started across the desert, but before the letter reached me, there was a paragraph in the newspapers —a wire from Basra—l read it one morning—" Susan's voice faded into silence, and for a moment Elisabeth thought sho had gone. But she rallied again, though now sho spoke through her shut teeth. " Gone, Tarleton. Dead. There were no particulars at first, but they came later. An accident. . . . He went in the cooler spring weather, before tho rains were over, and, crossing a river in flood, he was swept

AN INTRIGUING STORY OF THE EAST

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away. They didn't oven find his—body. A poor way for such n man to go out, Tarleton, a poor way. . . . and yet ... ho gavo his life for a cause—a man can't die better, really. Harry wouldn't liavo wished a better cud—only— if he could have found the secret first. . . .

" When his letter came, Tarleton, I knew what 1 had to do. It seemed to mo that, it had all been ordained by fate. It seemed that I had been prompted all those years before, to take up his life, to fit and equip myself for this trust, that Harry had left for me. I knew, as he knew, though ho didn't say a word of it, that if the wrong people got hold of this cure they would not give it to the world. They'd sell it —mako money out of other poor wretches' misery; make it impossible, perliaps. for the very poor ever to have tho benefit of it. Perhaps not—my life may have made mo suspicious of almost everyone—but (hat's how I feel.

" Something told me, as I've said, that I shouldn't get through. I knew I must take someone with nie, someone I could hand on the work to. I knew nobody I felt I could trust; but when I saw you, Tarleton, something seemed to tell me, someone seemed to whisper in my ear, that you wero the one I was to trust. It was as if Harry himself had said it. So before I loft London, I made a will leaving everything I have to you, so that if I wont out, you'd be able to carry on. It's with my lawyer in London; you'll find his address on the back of this letter of Harry's. Take it, Tarleton; take it out of my pocket and keep it, guard it. It's got directions and a little map. ... Is there any more water Tarleton ?"

Lady Susan drank a little more, and her thin lips curved in a little smile. " I've . . . failed, Tarleton, just when I felt that my presentiment had been mistaken, when I believed I was going straight through. But you're left and I feel that you will get away, in spite of everything. You're only a girl; you can't do anything yourself, but find some man you can trust, who'll take up the work as Harry took it up; not to profit himself but for the sake of those poor wretches who walk in darkness all their lives. . . . Perhaps I don't know . . . that man Cor coren. . . . He seemed straight. . . . Promise, Tarleton." Again Elisabeth promised. " Good girl," Susan said. She was silent for a little while, then she lifted a hand and drew it, slowly across her eyes. " It's very dark, isn't it, Tarleton ?" " Very dark," Elisabeth told her. "The moon has set." " And cold . . . oh, so cold. Are you very cold, Tarleton ?" " It's rather cold." " Yes. I . . . I'm not sorry to go, Tarleton. I m going to him. I'm only sorry to have let you down like this, but . . . you'll be—all right. . ." A shudder ran through her; she half lifted herself, and as Elisabeth made a liasty movement to support her, fell back again. From between her shut teeth came a thin whisper, scarcely more than a breath: "Harry. . . ." And then a choking sob, a dreadful rattling sound. . . Elisabeth knew she had gone; she could feel that there was no longer a soul in that broken body; that Susan Dangerfield was not there any more. She did not cry. She was too numbed with grief. She sat there besido Lady Susan, as still as she, in the black shadow, alone among all the wilderness of rocks, with that awful silence round her, shutting off the world; and the stars, mnny millions of miles above her, wheeling through the sky. CHAPTER VIH THE WAY 13ACK hor some time, Elisabeth's dominant thought still clung to the limp form beside her. She felt that she could not go away and leave Lady Susan's body lying in the open. She wanted to cover it with something, but there was nothing in tho ravine but rocks. She had heard of explorers building cairns of stones as graves, but these boulders were enormous; she could not have moved one of them. She walked about, looking for stones of a size she could lift, but there were scarcely any. She went back again and sat down, wondering what she could do, and at last realised that she could do nothing. And then, slowly Elisabeth began to appreciate fully the appalling peril of her own position. Until now, the whole episode of the capture and escape had still seemed more a dream than a reality, and Lady Susan's death had been a terrible shock—tho kind of numbing shock that deadens the senses to present realities. But by degrees her mind awoke to the facts of her position. She was alone, unarmed, without food or water, in these sterile hills, heaven only knew how many miles from civilisation, from people of her own kind. from help of any kind. She knew nothing of the country; her way lay down tho ravine, and if it led her to the track she and Lady Susan had taken on their way up, she supposed she would bo able to follow it down to the desert—if her strength held out, and she were not captured again. Already it must be nearly dawn; soon the Wall's people would find that she and Lady Susan had gone; and then the hunt would be up, hot foot on her heels, within a few minutes.

She must say a last good-bye to Lady Susan and make her way down the ravino as quickly as she could. Keeping in the shadows, she picked her way among the boulders, slipping and stumbling, miserably conscious that the quick ears of the hillmen would hear the noise sho made From a mile away, and once they saw her they would come running, sure-footed, across the boulders tcri times as fast as sho could travel. She would not have a chance.

But she went on. There was nothing else to do. She had made up her mind that as soon as it, was light she must hide among the rocks; she dare not risk moving in the daylight. She began to look, as sho Went, for a suitable hiding-place. And "then, quite suddenly, there was a man in front of her. How he came there, where he came from, she could not understand; sho did not see him approach. One instant he was not there; the next he was. She saw his black silhouette, in flowing draperies, against tho patchwork background of light and shadow. Elisabeth nearly cried out in her startled surprise, but instinctively choked back the crv. And then the man said ;

" Is that you, Miss Tarleton ?" Elisabeth was so astounded that she could not speak; she could only stand and stare. It was Roger Corcoran, of course, in the darkness, with his kofioh further shading his face. She could not. recogniso him by sight, hut she could not mistake his quiet, reassuring voice. In the reaction of that moment poor little Elisabeth collnpsod. Everything seemed to swing round and round her, and then she was clinging to the man and weeping uncontrollably, and ho was holding her up with one arm and patting her shoulder with the other hand. At last he told her to sit down, and she just dropped pn to a boulder, mechanically, and scarcely realising what she was doing, hunting in all her pockets for her handkerchief. And then, almost as suddenly as if someone had switched on a million electric lights at otice, the dawn came. Just for a few moments there was a faint paling of the sky, a dimming of the stars, an unearthly light in the ravine, and rocks and cliffs rapidly leaping into visibility, and then the sky was blue, and the light was picking out the mountain peaks to the west, racing down the slope, and flooding tiie ravine. Elisabeth's previous that sho must hide in daylight was still urgently dominant in her mind. She scrambled to her feet and turned instinctively to the eastward sido of the ravine, still in shadow. The next instant Corcoran had picked her up in his arms, and carrying her as if she wero a mere child, was picking his way among the boulders. He seemed to move over the treacherous ground without making ft sound, and he wa s extraordinarily sure-footed; not once did he show any sign of slipping. (To be continued daily)