The Sirdar's Oath: A Tale of the North-West Frontier

“Hilda, Hilda. What a witch you are. Is there anything you don’t know?”

“Yes, plenty. But I won’t bother you to go over all that again, because I know it already. In fact, I knew it on that very day, though not through you. Remember the dak may bring me momentous communications as well as you. Oh, by the way, I have a little present here for you. Will you take it?”

“Will I? Will I value anything from you! Darling, how can you ask?”

She did not return his kiss. Her manner was constrained – almost awkward. Turning to the table she placed in his hands a document – large, parchmenty, legal-looking. Then she turned away.

“Why, what on earth is this?” he said as he read through it, and at length mastered how it set forth, amid infinite legal terminology, how shares and property and cash to the amount of thirty-seven thousand pounds was conveyed to “the said Herbert Raynier by his said cousin, the said Hilda Clive.”

“Great Scott! What does it all mean?”

“What it says, dear,” she answered, still somewhat constrained. “I always thought you had been hardly treated in Cousin Jervis’s will. You were much nearer to him than I was, and a Raynier to boot. So I made up my mind to go halves with you – until – until – well, lately. Then I thought you ought to have the whole. I was always reckoned rather eccentric, you know. But I kept a little, just a little for myself. You won’t mind that, will you?”

He was staring blankly at her, then at the document.

“I don’t quite understand. What is this thing?”

“Well, it’s a restoration of what ought to have gone to you. The lawyers call it a deed of gift. It has to be put that way, you know,” she added shyly, apologetically.

Still Raynier was staring at her as though he had taken leave of his senses. For there suddenly rushed in upon his mind a scrap of a certain conversation with Mr Daintree in the Vicarage garden. This, then, was the distant cousin, Hilda Clive! He had not even known her name – and then he remembered how he would have learned it then and there but for the younger girl’s boisterous interruption. He remembered, too, the Vicar’s remark. “She’s bound to marry, and then where do you come in?” and his own answer, lightly, banteringly given, “Nowhere, unless I were to marry her myself,” and then —

There was a harsh, staccato sound of tearing. The parchment lay upon the floor, crumpled, and torn in several pieces. But she who had handed it to him seemed to share its violent treatment, for she was crushed to him in a close embrace.

“Hilda, darling, I wonder if you have anything approaching a parallel in the world. I never heard of such an act of magnificent generosity. But, unfortunately, it is all thrown away. I don’t want that,” pointing to the tattered deed. “I want you. I would rather be back in Mushîm Khan’s prison, with all it involved, and you as you were then, than take what you wanted me to there – without you. The only deed of gift I will accept is yourself. Yourself, do you hear? Am I to have it?”

She was thinking. Almost the spirit of her clairvoyance was in the vivid picture of the dread prison in the Gularzai stronghold that rose before her mind. Then she had stood with him on the brink of his grave, and soul had met soul undisguised. Then it was death – now life – life and such happiness! Her cheek was against his, her lips at his ear. She whispered, —

“Yes. You know you are.”

The End

notes

1

Government ordinarily. In this instance the representative of Government.