Afterwards | Page 5

him quiet a bit. Of course when he comes round I expect he'll be pretty sick about it all, but at least the poor devil has got a few hours' respite."
"That's a blessing, anyway. Wonder what he'll do after this. Sort of thing to ruin a man's nerve, what?"
"Probably take to drink--or drugs," said Payton succinctly. "Some chaps would put a bullet through their brains, but I don't fancy Anstice is the sort to do that."
"Don't you?" For a second Colonel Godfrey hesitated, still looking out over the garden to where the line of the eternal snows glimmered white and passionless in the splendid moonlight. "Yet you know, my boy, one could hardly blame a man for blowing out his brains after a tragedy of this sort. No." With a last glance at the mystery of the snows he turned back to the lighted verandah and took out his cigar-case. "I think one could not blame this fellow Anstice if he chose that way out." He selected a cigar with care. "After all, he must feel as though he had murdered the girl, and though I fully agree with you that there was nothing else to be done, still one can imagine how the memory of the deed will haunt the poor chap all his life."
"Yes." Rex Payton lifted his cap from the table and prepared to take his leave. "Well, good-night, sir. I think I'll just step across and see how he's getting on. By Jove, what a magnificent night. It's as bright as day out here."
"Yes. Let me know in the morning how things are going."
"Right you are, sir." With another hasty good-night Rex turned and strode away across the compound in search of the doctor.
"Still asleep, thank God," was Morris' report. "Give you my word I dread his awakening."
"Seems a pity he's got to wake at all," said Payton moodily. "Couldn't you have given him a double dose while you were about it, and put the poor devil out of his misery?"
"That's not the way we work," returned the other dryly. "There's been one--miscalculation--to-day, and we can't afford any more. If he likes to do it himself, when he comes round, that's a different matter. I don't think he will, somehow. He doesn't strike me as that sort. He'll face it out, I believe, though it will go hard with him in the doing."
"When will he be himself again?"
"I don't know. I shall keep him under as long as I dare. After all"--the doctor, who prided himself on his lack of emotion, for once betrayed a glimpse of the real humanity beneath the rather grim exterior--"he'll have to serve a life-sentence in the way of regret, and one can't grudge the poor wretch an hour or two's Nirvana."
And:
"By God, sir, I agree with you," was all Rex Payton could find to say.

III
One evening three weeks later Anstice sat in the smoke-room of a well-known hotel in Bombay waiting for the arrival of the one person in the world whom he might have been expected to avoid.
The P. and O. boat had docked that afternoon; and among the passengers was the man to whom Hilda Ryder had been engaged--the man to whom Anstice must answer for the deed done as the sun rose on that fatal morning twenty-one dawns ago.
The news of the girl's death had been cabled to the young engineer in Cairo immediately, followed by a letter from Colonel Godfrey relating so much of the affair as he himself knew; and in response had come a laconic message to the effect that Bruce Cheniston had sought and obtained leave, and would be in India at the first possible moment. He had been delayed by one or two accidents, but now he had really arrived; and Anstice had come down to meet him, knowing that before he himself could leave this fatal country there must be an explanation between the man who had loved Hilda Ryder, and the one who had been too hasty in carrying out a promise.
To say that he shrank from this interview would hardly be true. As a matter of fact, in the weeks which had elapsed since that fatal morning Anstice had wandered in a world of shadows. Nothing seemed real, acute, not even the memory of the thing he had done. Everything was mercifully blurred, unreal. He was like a man stunned, who sees things without realizing them; or a man suffering from some form of poison--from indulgence in hashish, for instance, when time and space lose all significance, and the thing which was and that which is become strangely and unaccountably interchangeable.
That there must be a reckoning between himself and Cheniston, Anstice vaguely knew. Yet he felt no dread, and very little curiosity as to the manner of their meeting;