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Circumstances had enabled him to assume, and he had gladly accepted, the blame for John Charteris's iniquity, rather than let Anne Charteris know the truth about her husband and Clarice Pendomer. The truth would have killed Anne, the colonel believed; and besides, the colonel had enjoyed the performance of a picturesque action.
Owing to the combined influence of Charteris's strong hand, Gerrard's lavish promises to the army, and what Colonel Antony chose to style the "moderation" of Sher Singh, the succession of Kharrak Singh to his father's throne was effected without general bloodshed.
Gerrard's horse and groom came round, and Charteris's self-imposed task was not over until he had seen him safely mounted. Before starting, Gerrard turned and held out his hand. "Bob, old boy?" "Hang it, Hal! go in and win."
Gerrard could not detect the form crouched behind her spreading skirts, the face peering under her falling sleeve, and once again doubt attained mastery over his mind. If Honour had meant really to rebuke him for his backwardness, then was he indeed the most blessed of men, but perhaps she was only mildly chaffing Charteris's friend.
"No, my dear, he won't, for the very good reason that I have already passed her safely across the Ghara. But he will have a rod in pickle for poor Gerrard, who seems to me to have quite enough to bear already what with his wounds and the loss of all his belongings, to say nothing of the death of his friend." "You don't think, James, that he feels himself to blame for poor Mr Charteris's death?"
The cloud of dust was quite visible now, whenever a break in the jungle gave a view of the plain, and Gerrard found himself wondering whether the pursuers had a man of Charteris's type or of his own in command of them. He could not help hoping it might prove to be his own.
At first there was no cessation either in the cannonade poured into Charteris's force or in the musketry-fire, but gradually both slackened. Evidently Chand Singh was withdrawing his forces from this front, but whether it was to employ them against Gerrard or to make good his retreat there was no means of knowing.
She cried a little, though. "It it's because I remember him when he was turning out his first mustache," she explained, lucidly. But with the horror and irony of John Charteris's assassination the biographer of Rudolph Musgrave has really nothing to do save in so far as this event influenced the life of Rudolph Musgrave.
The comedy had been admirably enacted, he considered, on both sides; and he did not object to Jack Charteris's retiring with all the honors of war. The colonel had not gone far, however, before he paused, thrust both hands into his trousers' pockets, and stared down at the ground for a matter of five minutes. Musgrave shook his head. "After all," said he, "I can't trust them.
To those who knew John Charteris only through the medium of the printed page it must have appeared that the novelist was stayed in mid-career by an accident of unrelieved and singular brutality. And truly, thus extinguished by the unfounded jealousy of a madman, the force of Charteris's genius seemed, and seems to-day, as emphasized by that sinister caprice of chance which annihilated it.
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