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Melian looked at the speaker and her eyes filled. Her nerves had begun to go, and she was feeling utterly helpless and overwrought. Now this strong foreboding of danger aggravated this.

“Darling Uncle Seward, what should be going to happen to you?” she urged. “There now, you have been trying to keep me up; now I must try and keep you up. Surely they won’t harm you – us – if they expect to be paid for letting us go?”

“Yes. That’s right, little one. They won’t harm – us,” he answered. “Still, it’s best to be on the safe side. Once you get to the Nawab you’re safe. He’s a straight and square man, but unfortunately, these sub-tribal chiefs are virtually almost independent of the head, or it’s certain we should not be here.”

“I’ll remember,” she answered. “But,” – as though a sudden and illuminating idea had struck her. “Why don’t you appeal to him – now, before we go any further. Why leave it to what – isn’t going to happen – and me?”

Here was a question which it was impossible for him to answer, though to all appearances, nothing could have been more pertinent. He could not tell her that in his case the head sirdar of the Gularzai would be every whit as merciless as would Allah-din Khan and his followers. But her case was different. And that ghastly plan which he had overheard had resolved him to an even more hazardous course on her behalf – hazardous because one of sheer sink or swim.

“‘Why?’” he repeated. “‘Why?’ Always a woman’s query – Why?” And he looked at her with a very loving but very sad smile. “I can only tell you this, child, that you must leave that part of it to me, and do exactly as I tell you I know– and you don’t. That must be sufficient. This is the dim, mysterious East, remember, and I’ve spent the best years of my life in it.”

The sun was drooping now to the craggy, serrated ridge beyond the valley, flaming in red gold upon the cliffs beneath which they were riding. The figures of the wild, turbaned horsemen were picked out in the clear glow – the strange, fierce East indeed. Melian thought it was a picture that would remain stamped in her memory until her dying day. There were signs too, that the said figures showed an inclination to abandon their straggling order and to close up. Mervyn saw this – and at the same time came the thought that this was the last sun whose setting he would ever see.

“Quick, now, Melian,” he said. “Take this, but carefully. Watch your chance. No one must see. When you have it, hide it upon you. Don’t even look at it again. If you do, it must be at the very last extremity. You are more than ordinarily quick witted, and will be able to follow. If anything happens to me – no, don’t interrupt – and after a reasonable time has gone, say a month, and you are not restored, and especially if Allah-din Khan should attempt to pass you on to strangers – then produce it. Do you follow?”

“Yes – but – what – where – is it?” said the girl, her wide open, serious eyes upon his face.

“Take my pouch and pipe, and fill it, as they have often seen you do,” and he handed it to her. Wondering, she obeyed. Then as he reached forth his hand to take it, he slipped something into hers. One look at this, and she almost let it fall, but refrained, just in time.

For what she held in her hand was a tiny facsimile of the strange, star-shaped disc, which she had picked up on the sluice path at Heath Hover that lovely cloudless June morning, and the sight of which, in her grasp, had struck her uncle with such a terror of trepidation.

And he knew that she was possessed of that which upon production would entail upon her two alternatives – restoration, to liberty or death – the latter, swift, painless, unconscious. But the other ghastly fate, to which he had overheard allusion made, could now never be hers.

“Only in the very last extremity,” he reminded her, in an earnest undertone, for the band was now closing up around them. And she bent her head in grave, silent comprehension, and assent.

Chapter Twenty Seven
The Vault of Doom

The red fires shot up against shining rock reflection, throwing out exaggerations or silhouettes of the shaggy figures moving about. Wild, fantastic, as the surrounding crags were, thus thrown out into fitful light, yet the place was an ideal one for a snug and sheltered camp, where the keen mountain air struck chill at night, for it was sheltered on three sides by rock and cliff, while the fourth gave out on a steep drop into the valley beneath. To one, at any rate, the topographical situation did not fail in significance. Not by sheer accident, not for mere purposes of shelter had the situation been chosen.

In hanging clusters the stars shone brightly in the clear sky, but there was no moon. The two Europeans, seated in their own camp a little apart, had finished their evening meal – Mervyn incidentally, had been allowed to go out, under escort, and shoot a few chikor (the large red-legged hill partridge), early that morning, so they had fared better than heretofore. Now he had lighted a pipe, and was striving to conjure up all the stoicism of the dim mysterious East to his aid, the while keeping up the conversation with Melian, and doing so in such wise as to convey no apprehension to her mind. And the keeping up of ordinary conversation within an hour or so of one’s own death is not an easy undertaking; but then, John Seward Mervyn was not quite an ordinary man.

A few months ago, he would not greatly have concerned himself over this situation. But within that time, life had changed and brightened for him. It was more valuable up to date than it had been then. He turned the talk on to Heath Hover and their time together there, and for a little, the girl forgot their precarious and now depressing situation and surroundings, and was responsive, brightening up with this and that homely touch.

“Why, the heather must be flaming out in perfectly gorgeous crimson up above the Plane woods,” she said, “and we are not getting the benefit of it this time. And that bit, down below Chiltingford, where we took Violet the day before she left – that must be too ripping for anything. And the jolly old battered mill, standing out on the open – I wish we were there again, don’t you, dear? Say you do.”

The eager, retrospective tone had lapsed into seriousness. There was no difficulty in replying as she wanted, and that with perfect truth and candour. Mervyn, looking back on those fair scenes, spent with this child; marking and treasuring all her golden joyousness and appreciation of every sound and sight around her; thought that for a repetition of just that time alone he would have faced the fate in front of him a hundred times over. It was little enough of such sweet wholesome happiness he had known in the course of a hard, rugged, bizarre life, and that time about comprised it all.

Two wolves howled at responsive intervals away down in the valley beneath, and the red glow of the camp fires played upon the bronzed, hook-nosed faces, and fierce eyes, of the wild marauders of the desert, squatted around, smoking their hookahs, and conversing in a deep rumbling undertone. The owls would be softly hooting in the woods which dipped their edges into Plane Pond at this moment, and the bell-like plash of rising fish ring out on its starlit surface. Contrast indeed! Here in this savage wilderness death was to be his at any hour, at any moment. And now and thus, for the first time in his life, death seemed hard to face.

“You have – what I gave you – safe, child?” he broke in, as though moved by a sudden impulse. “Recollect, it is only to be produced in the very last extremity, if the appeal to Shere Dil Khan should fail.”

“Don’t,” she answered, startled by the solemnly spoken irrelevance of the remark, and thrusting a hand into his. “You must really shake off these dismal forebodings, dear – and yet, how can I undertake to lecture you —you– on things that this weird country may hold out?”

And then, as if to give point to her words, a tall figure seemed to grow out of the earth beside them. A murmured sentence or two, and as in response to it he rose.

“Sit still, darling, and wait for me,” he said. “I have to go and talk with some of them, and it will be wearisome – especially as it interrupts our talk about good old times.” He rested one hand lovingly upon the gold-crowned head, and then passed out with the man who had come to summon him. He would not even take a real, long farewell of her, if only that it might prove the reverse of advantageous to her, for he must still keep up the pretence of ignorance, and yet it was the last time he should behold her in this world, and he had but a shadowy belief in any other. For John Seward Mervyn knew as well as did the man he was accompanying that he was going to his doom.

It was a strange place, that in which he found himself but two or three minutes later – a cavernous hall, yet walled around by solid rock, and of some vastness. And yet, it seemed somehow as though it were not entirely the work of Nature, even here, where Nature ran riot in the production of wild freaks of her own masonry. It bore a look as though ages and ages of gradual working had wrought it to such a pitch of symmetry. In the centre a fire burned, the smoke escaping upwards somehow and somewhere, for the atmosphere of the place was quite clear of it.

Seated about this were some half dozen figures. Only one did Mervyn recognise as that of Allah-din Khan. The others all looked strangers to him. Stay. Only one? No, there was another; for in the one seated on the right of the chief Mervyn recognised the tall, somewhat remarkable looking man who had joined the rest at prayer. This one sat eyeing him, an embodiment of Eastern stateliness, in snowy flowing garments, the folds of his turban arranged round the conical kulla which just peeped above it, with an almost mathematical nicety. Mervyn took note of something else. Behind him, two tall, ferocious looking Gularzai had drawn up, standing so as to bar effectually the way by which he had been ushered in. So this was to be his death chamber, he thought? Well, the sooner it was over the better.

“Salaam, brothers,” he began, but only by way of saying something.

“It is not ‘salaam,’” (“salaam” – Peace) answered the distinguished looking stranger, speaking in a very deep chested tone. “You joined the Brethren of the Night whose sign is the Five Pointed Star – were made blood-brother with them, and – were false to them.”

“Therein is not truth,” answered Mervyn, who had expected this as an opening of the proceedings.

“Not truth?” went on the speaker. “In thine English home the Sign was delivered to thee; in thine English home – the long house with the cornering wings which shelter the centre, and which stands beneath the broad end of the water.”

But that Mervyn had learned to be astonished at nothing, he might well have felt surprised. Here was an exact description of Heath Hover, and yet the only man who had seen it, and who bore the terrible and mysterious Sign, had died within its walls, and the method of his death he alone in all England knew. And now here in this far Eastern wilderness was another – were others – who knew.

“The Sign was not delivered to me,” he answered.

“Not delivered?” repeated the other slowly, and fixing upon his face a glance that seemed to burn, so glowing was it with fell, vengeful intent. “Not delivered? It was delivered not once only, but twice.”

Now, indeed, the listener’s self possession all but betrayed the shock this announcement could not but cause him. How well he recalled that lovely summer morning when he had looked out to behold the two girls coming down the sluice path and Melian carrying the deadly shining thing in her white, unsuspecting fingers – and his own frost of horror at the sight. So all that time he had been shadowed, his every movement keenly watched from the recesses of those hanging woods – not as he had thought by honest English Nashby and his random, all-at-sea suspicions, but by this deadly Brotherhood, whose ranks, in an ill-starred moment, and moved chiefly by curiosity, he had joined. Yet how on earth could their emissary or emissaries have hung about the Plane woods all that time undetected by keepers, or unseen and uncommented on by the surrounding rustic population? Of a truth the problem was a record one for stiffness of solution. But he answered:

“It was not delivered once, nor yet twice. It was not delivered at all.”

The fierce, copper-hued, shaggy faces, the gleaming eyes reflected in the firelight, were bent still more threateningly upon the speaker. The latter, in sheer hopeless desperation, was probing behind his very brain to try and make out a case for himself, and at the same time realising its utter hopelessness; His remorseless indicter went on.

“The first who delivered thee the sign thou didst kill.”

“That did I not. On the very contrary, I saved him – saved him from the icy death. Listen brothers.” And then Mervyn went on to give the narrative of the events of that wild, sleet-tossed winter night, when we first saw him. He told it graphically and well, speaking in the Pushtu with, as had happened throughout all the dialogue, an odd word here and there of a coined language peculiar to the Brotherhood, thrown in.

“Now? Did I not save him from certain death?” he concluded, looking with an anxiety which he hoped did not appear, into the fierce faces that ringed him round. But his heart sank within him, as he realised that any hopes he might have entertained on that score were doomed; for no sign of softening could he trace. On the contrary, the set grimness on every countenance seemed to deepen.

“Not knowing him – then,” supplied the stranger, who seemed to have constituted himself – or been constituted – judge in chief, or president of the proceedings. “Afterwards – that was made good.” And his eyes again seemed fixed with a deeper, more compelling glow, upon those of the Englishman.

Mervyn stood as though petrified. The words, the mesmeric glance seemed to take him out of himself – to take him back; back to – something. Mechanically he raised a nerveless hand, and passed it over his eyes. He saw – yes, assuredly he saw himself in dreamland, as it were. The next words aroused him – brought him to himself – thoroughly, completely. And they were spoken by Allah-din Khan.

“Thou double traitor,” said the chief, in deep, growling tones. “For the act of disobedience thine end should have been sure – sure but swift – the Point of the Star. For this it shall be long, and lingering. Look.”

Following the out-darted finger, Mervyn did look, and —

For the first time he became aware of a curious object which stood within the grisly vault, and that not far behind him. It was a long, coffin-shaped thing, and now, as two of those who had been seated there arose, and, kindling torches from the fire, approached it, he saw that it took on another shape, that of a long, lounge bath in fact. It was raised from the floor on metal feet, and the thing itself was made of metal, but of such ancient and strange manufacture that the British Museum, say, would probably have given a very large sum to possess. As the flare of the torches gleamed upon this he could see something else. The fronting side of the structure was engraved with subjects of a hideous and revolting nature – that of human beings in process of being done to death under every circumstance of prolonged torment, and one of them, and the most prominent, by means of just such an implement as this. For there reproduced, was an exact facsimile of it. A fire was represented as burning underneath, and out of it the head and shoulders of a man appeared – the open mouthed, staring expression on the face conveying the indescribable and ghastly agony which the sufferer was undergoing.

Mervyn stared at the thing, and his blood froze. Here was his own fate represented. To lie for hours in that dreadful bath undergoing a process of slow boiling, this was what it meant. He had heard of this being done, knew that it actually was done. The cold sweat poured from his forehead, and he looked wildly in front for a means of putting a quick end to his existence. He had expected the quick, painless death, which his guest had died under his own roof at Heath Hover – but this! Allah-din Khan’s deep voice broke through the terror of the spell that was on him.

“Use no art to avoid this, double traitor, for it is thee or another. If not thee, then the sun-crowned woman who is with thee shall lie yonder. By the tomb of the Prophet it shall be so.”

A mist rose before his eyes and he swayed. The very fiend from Hell was speaking, of a surety. He wondered whether he could overcome his momentary faintness, lest they should think he had eluded them, and proceed to put their hellish threat into immediate execution. Great Heaven! was this some awful, shocking nightmare from which he should presently wake? Was ever any one confronted with such an alternative? Death he had expected, but these hours perhaps of fiendish torture? But it was himself or Melian. These devils were not to be balked.

Now he saw that there were piles of kindling wood standing beside the horrid implement. The ring of diabolical faces confronting him looked terrific in the fell, ruthless purpose, which he read therein. But for the alternative he would have made a frenzied dash at the nearest weapon and died fighting. Now, the alternative utterly disarmed him. He would make one appeal.

“Give me the Star, that I may die by it,” he said. “I have a right to.”

“Thou art no longer of its Brotherhood, double traitor,” answered Allah-din Khan. “For thee, the boiling fat.”

At a sign from him one of the two who had been mounting guard over the entrance advanced, and tearing out handfuls from the stacks of kindling wood, began to arrange them beneath the grim receptacle. The victim watched the process with a sort of dazed, numbed attention.

And then, as he looked again at the ring of his tormentors, something he saw made him wonder whether his head was going round with him, or whether his reeling brain had actually and indeed given way beneath the shock.

Chapter Twenty Eight
At Fault

The hitherto glowering, menacing countenances, had all of a sudden taken on a heavy, vacuous expression. The stare of the fierce eyes had become dull and lack-lustre. Even the forms were swaying. And then – what marvel was this? The whole group seemed to collapse as one man, subsiding to the ground. There they lay, breathing with a heavy, stertorous kind of snore. All save one.

This was the stranger who had taken so vindictive and ruthless a part in the questioning. He still kept his upright seat, and over his face had come no change. Now he arose, and strode over to the man who kept the entrance, deftly manoeuvring between him and the latter.

The Gularzai stared at the towering, authoritative form, but said nothing.

“Take this, brother, and swallow it,” said the stranger. “Have no fear. It is not death, only short sleep. But to hesitate will be death.” And the speaker produced a Browning pistol in one hand, and something quite small in the other.

This particular believer was in no hurry to taste the joys of Paradise just yet, possibly through some misgiving as to whether he had sufficiently earned them. He glanced at the weapon, then at his unconscious tribesmen. Without a word he reached forth his hand, took what was placed therein and – did as directed. But the effect upon him was well nigh instantaneous. He swayed, staggered, then collapsed upon the ground. There remained now only the man who was engaged in the preparation of the bath of torment. To him, too, were the same instructions given. And he, too, with Oriental stoicism, succumbed to the inevitable. There remained now, in full possession of their faculties, only two – Mervyn and the tall sirdar.

“I think, on the whole, I’ve managed that rather well – so far,” said the latter, in excellent and refined English.

More than ever did Mervyn think his brain was clean gone.

“Good God!” he ejaculated, giving a violent start and staring at the other in the wildest, blankest amazement.

“I don’t wonder you’ve got – er – something of a shock,” said Helston Varne, looking at him with a touch of concern. “It was a beastly ordeal, but it had to be gone through with.”

“But – why didn’t you contrive to let me know – to tip me the wink somehow?” asked Mervyn helplessly.

“It’d never have done. It’d have bungled the whole show. These worthies’ faculties are much too keen to take any risks with. But now there’s no time to talk. We must get along, and every blessed yard of start we steal is worth a lot. The effect of what I’ve given them may last three hours, but not many minutes longer. But it was the only chance. Come now. We shall find your niece all ready – Hussein Khan will have taken care of that – also of the residue of the Gularzai.”

“Well, Varne! Of all the geniuses this world ever produced,” – began Mervyn, as they got outside – “you’re that one. But, I had no idea you could patter the lingo, let alone so faultlessly.”

“I was caught young, you see. Born in this country. Now let’s lose no time.”

When Melian, seated in her sleeping quarters, eagerly and with a deepening anxiety, listening for the return of her uncle, heard herself softly hailed by an English voice which was not his – and stepped forth to find herself confronted by a tall Gularzai, her astonishment was not much less than that of Mervyn had been. Him, too, she promptly descried, standing behind the other.

“What on earth does it all mean?” she began. “Why – Mr Varne!”

“Quite right, Miss Seward. And now, are you ready to start?”

“Perfectly.”

“Come along then, and we’ll go and get the horses. It’ll save time, and Hussein Khan has his hands pretty full as it is.”

The girl drew back in instinctive alarm as they literally stepped over the slumbering forms of their fierce enemies. Arrived at the picket ropes, their horses were promptly bitted and saddled. To Mervyn’s suggestion that the Gularzai steeds should be cut loose and turned adrift, Helston objected that it would do more harm than good to set them stampeding in all directions, would raise the countryside on them perhaps even sooner than it would take their captors to recover from the effects of the drug. But already, in obedience to his direction, Hussein Khan had secured as much ammunition as he could find, and was hurling it over the khud. The Pathan was thoroughly enjoying himself now; would have enjoyed himself more, had he been allowed to send a few of these his fellow believers to Paradise – or Jehanum – but this he was not.

And as they fared forth beneath the stars, which fortunately shone with sufficient brilliancy to enable them to distinguish the narrow, treacherous, ledgelike paths which they mostly had to thread – conversing only in whispers, and that sparingly – the three Europeans at any rate, had food for thought. Mervyn was marvelling at the superhuman, and consummate cleverness of this friend in need. Why, the make-up alone was a work of genius, and he said as much.

“It was the easier,” answered Helston, “because of the beard. That’s genuine. I let it grow when I started to come out here – not altogether by accident either, but because I foresaw circumstances under which I might want to ‘make up’ – not your case, incidentally. A sham one you know, would never have humbugged these people for a moment.”

“Well, you’re a miracle all the same,” said the other.

Helston Varne felt justified in being rather pleased with himself. His unexpected and startling discovery that these two were being carried away prisoners into the fastnesses of this wild and lawless band, had entailed upon him such a shock as he had seldom, if ever quite, experienced. And with it had come the chilling, stunning thought as to how he, with all his infinite and practised resource, was going to rescue them, and at first it certainly seemed almost hopeless. But born and bred in the East, he had made an especial study of all its dark and undercurrent systems. And he held an important clue.

That find he had made in the old lumber room at Heath Hover he had by no means dismissed from his thoughts. He had pondered over it long and deeply, and had not failed to connect it with some episode of Mervyn’s earlier life. And the missing link in the chain had been, half unconsciously, placed within his grasp by his shikari, Hussein Khan, for the latter himself belonged to the Brotherhood of the Star.

But if Hussein Khan was bound to the Brotherhood of the Star, he was bound to his European master by an even stronger tie still. The former might take his life, and indeed sooner or later, under the existing circumstances would. For that he cared nothing. But should he fail the latter, in any point, at any crisis, why then his eternal weal, was not merely at stake – but doomed. For who shall explain the mysterious ravellings of the dim unfathomable East? Given these conditions, and Helston Varne’s unlimited powers of resource and unfailing intrepidity availed to do the rest.

Now, under the starlight, he looked at the figure of the girl riding next in front of him along the single-file, narrow path. This was the prize for which he had thrown the stake – and he had won. His nerves thrilled exultantly within him at the thought. It was a trifle unsteadying even to him. There had been no hesitation in his reply when his kinsman had put the matter to him point blank. The time for that had gone by. Now he had saved her – from a fate of which she was in blissful ignorance, fortunately, but whose purport he had gleaned during his brief sojourn with Allah-din Khan – and his own mind was telling him that he had saved her for himself.

From their first meeting on the day when he had been imprisoned in the chill mysterious vault at Heath Hover, her image had remained fixed upon his mind. He had not striven to resist the growing fascination; he preferred to watch its development – or the reverse – as a matter of psychological study; for as we have seen, he did not err on the side of coming to Heath Hover too often. And now, would he win? He thought he would.

Was it by a subtle telepathy that as they fared thus forward through the night, and in silence, that she should be thinking exclusively of him? Yet she was. She recalled how she had been looking forward to meeting him again – out here, in this wild, strange, and to her, new land. How, too, during the startling, then alarming occurrence of their captivity, her thoughts had flown at once to his propinquity as to a tower of refuge – she liked that simile and it would often recur. How, too, she had tried to impart that element of hope to her uncle, only to be told that their entanglement was even beyond Helston Varne’s powers of unravelment. Yet the reverse had befallen. She had proved right, and Helston Varne had come to the rescue, and brought them forth triumphantly. Indeed, that everything was bound to come right if he had the settling of it had now become an article of faith with her.

A short halt was made to rest the horses, then on again. It will be remembered that the course of the freebooters had been set so as to bring them much nearer to Mazaran, and now with luck, they hoped to reach that station in about twenty-four hours’ journeying. Why, Coates himself, who had started thither simultaneously with his kinsman’s venture, would hardly have arrived by then, even if he did not decide to wait at Fort Shabâl, a small post which lay between his camp and Mazaran – for safety’s sake.

But with the small hours of the morning came a change, and with it anxiety. For a mist was arising, blotting out the stars; whose light indeed they required in that labyrinthine winding through chaotic rocks, or along this or that steep mountain side with a precipitous drop not far down the slope. Hussein Khan, the hard, lifelong mountaineer, who was guiding, shook a gloomy head as he looked upward and around. None knew better than he what it might portend. None knew better than he that the most practised mountaineer might become helpless as a child when plunged in thick mist. And this mist, though not yet thick, showed every tendency to become so. Added to which a slight drizzle began to fall, and none knew better than Hussein Khan the perilous effect, on their none too safe paths, of slimy moisture. And they direly needed all the start they could obtain.

But the occurrence would equally check the pursuit of their enemies, for there was no doubt but that they would be pursued, and hotly, at the earliest available moment? No, it would not – that is, not necessarily – for these knew their way, and would take a line which would have the effect of cutting the fugitives off from Mazaran, did the latter lose much of the start they had obtained. For to Hussein Khan, practised mountaineer that he was, this was after all more or less strange country, and he was shaping his course only by reckoning.

The small hours passed into daybreak, but with the lightening of the atmosphere there came no light from without. The fugitives were swathed within dank, heavy, bewildering mist. They could hardly see each other at further than a horse’s length apart. Helston Varne and the shikari conferred hurriedly together, and in the result decided that there was nothing for it but to call a halt and wait until chance should enable them to obtain their bearings.

But chance seemed not inclined to befriend them. An hour had gone – a whole precious hour – and, if anything, the cloud seemed to settle down thicker than ever. There was no wind either, not enough stirring in the air to enable those experienced men to form the slightest idea of the lay of their course, by that not always reliable method of feeling on which side of their face the wind stirred. Mervyn had more than begun to feel gloomy – and looked it. Helston Varne was feeling nearly as gloomy, and did not show it. But Melian, looking from one to the other, felt – well, confident. Where Helston Varne was taking a hand there was no room for failure, had become part of her creed, as we have said.