No More Learning

She headed for
the Station at first. Then she wheeled round and set off for the river
through beds of burnt down jungle-grass, bad even to ride a pig over. In
cold blood I should never have dreamed of going over such a country
at night, but it seemed quite right and natural with the lightning
crackling overhead, and a reek like the smell of the Pit in my nostrils.
I rode and shouted, and she bent forward and lashed her horse, and the
aftermath of the dust-storm came up and caught us both, and drove us
downwind like pieces of paper.

I don't know how far we rode; but the drumming of the horse-hoofs and
the roar of the wind and the race of the faint blood-red moon through
the yellow mist seemed to have gone on for years and years, and I was
literally drenched with sweat from my helmet to my gaiters when the gray
stumbled, recovered himself, and pulled up dead lame. My brute was used
up altogether. Edith Copleigh was in a sad state, plastered with dust,
her helmet off, and crying bitterly. "Why can't you let me alone? " she
said. "I only wanted to get away and go home. Oh, PLEASE let me go! "

"You have got to come back with me, Miss Copleigh. Saumarez has
something to say to you. "

It was a foolish way of putting it; but I hardly knew Miss Copleigh;
and, though I was playing Providence at the cost of my horse, I could
not tell her in as many words what Saumarez had told me. I thought he
could do that better himself.
All her pretence about being tired and
wanting to go home broke down, and she rocked herself to and fro in the
saddle as she sobbed, and the hot wind blew her black hair to leeward. I
am not going to repeat what she said, because she was utterly unstrung.

This, if you please, was the cynical Miss Copleigh. Here was I, almost
an utter stranger to her, trying to tell her that Saumarez loved her
and she was to come back to hear him say so! I believe I made myself
understood, for she gathered the gray together and made him hobble
somehow, and we set off for the tomb, while the storm went thundering
down to Umballa and a few big drops of warm rain fell. I found out that
she had been standing close to Saumarez when he proposed to her sister
and had wanted to go home and cry in peace, as an English girl should.
She dabbled her eyes with her pocket-handkerchief as we went along, and
babbled to me out of sheer lightness of heart and hysteria. That was
perfectly unnatural; and yet, it seemed all right at the time and in the
place. All the world was only the two Copleigh girls, Saumarez and I,
ringed in with the lightning and the dark; and the guidance of this
misguided world seemed to lie in my hands.

When we returned to the tomb in the deep, dead stillness that followed
the storm, the dawn was just breaking and nobody had gone away. They
were waiting for our return. Saumarez most of all.

His face was white and drawn. As Miss Copleigh and I limped up, he came
forward to meet us, and, when he helped her down from her saddle, he
kissed her before all the picnic. It was like a scene in a theatre, and
the likeness was heightened by all the dust-white, ghostly-looking men
and women under the orange-trees, clapping their hands, as if they
were watching a play--at Saumarez's choice. I never knew anything so
un-English in my life.