PAGE 7
The Nonentity
by
It all ended as unexpectedly as it had begun. The great reptile became suddenly inert, a lifeless thing; the monotonous crooning was resumed, proceeding as it were out of the chaos of the struggle, and round his neck and about his body the snake-charmer wound his vanquished foe.
The moment for backsheesh had arrived, and Beryl, coming suddenly out of her absorption, felt for her purse and awoke abruptly to the consciousness of a hand that gripped her arm.
She glanced at Fletcher, who at once slackened his hold. “Don’t you give the fellow anything,” he said, with a touch of peremptoriness, “I will.”
She yielded, considering the matter too trivial for argument, and watched his rupee fall with a tinkle upon the tin plate which the snake-charmer extended at the length of his sinewy arm.
Fletcher speedily made a way for her through the now shifting crowd; and after a little they found the saice, waiting with the mare under a tree. The animal was tormented by flies and restless. Certainly in this valley district it was very hot.
“We will go back by the hill road,” Fletcher said, as he handed her up. “It is rather longer, but I think it is worth it. This blaze is too much for you.”
They left the thronged highroad, and turned up a rutty track leading directly into the hills.
Their way lay between great, glaring boulders of naked rock. Here and there tufts of grass grew beside the stony track, but they were brown and scorched, and served only to emphasise the barrenness of the land.
For a while they drove in silence, mounting steadily the whole time.
Suddenly Fletcher spoke. “We shall come to some shade directly. There is a belt of pine trees round the next curve.”
The words were hardly uttered when unexpectedly the mare shied, struck the ground violently with all four feet together, and bolted.
Beryl heard an exclamation from the native groom, and half-turned to see him clinging to the back with a face of terror. She herself was more astonished than frightened. She gripped the rail instinctively, for the cart was jolting horribly as the mare, stretched out like a greyhound, fled at full gallop along the stony way.
She saw Fletcher, with his feet against the board, dragging backwards with all his strength. He was quite white, but exceedingly collected, and she was instantly quite certain that he knew what he was about.
There followed a few breathless moments of headlong galloping, during which they swayed perilously from side to side, and were many times on the verge of being overturned. Then, the ground rising steeply, the mare’s wild pace became modified, developed into a spasmodic canter, became a difficult trot, finally slowed to a walk.
Fletcher pulled up altogether, and turned to the silent woman beside him. “Mrs. Denvers, you are splendid!” he said simply.
She laughed rather tremulously. The tension over, she was feeling very weak.
The saice was already at the mare’s head, and Fletcher let the reins go. He dismounted without another word and went round to her side. Still silent, he held up his hands to her and lifted her down as though she had been a child. He was smiling a little, but he was still very pale.
As for Beryl, the moment her feet touched the ground she felt as if the whole world had turned to liquid and were swimming around her in a gigantic whirlpool of floating impressions.
“Ah, you are faint!” she heard him say.
And she made a desperate and quite futile effort to assure him that she was nothing of the sort. But she knew that no more than a blur of sound came from her lips, and even while she strove to make herself intelligible the floating world became a dream, and darkness fell upon her.
V
Gradually, very gradually, the mists cleared from Beryl’s brain, and she opened her eyes dreamily, and stared about her with a feeling that she had been asleep for years. She was lying propped upon carriage-cushions in the shade of an immense boulder, and as she discovered this fact, memory flashed swiftly back upon her. She had fainted, of course, in her foolish, weak, womanly fashion. But where was Major Fletcher? The heat was intense, so intense that breathing in that prone position seemed impossible. Gasping, she raised herself. Surely she was not absolutely alone in this arid wilderness!