THE SEARING OF A SOUL

  II.  The Sword and the Snake

 III.  The Snake Appears

  IV.  The Sword and the Soul

   V. Lucille

  VI.  The Snake’s “Myrmidon”

 VII.  Love—­and the Snake

VIII.  Troopers of the Queen

  IX.  A Snake avenges a Haddock and Lucille behaves
      in an un-Smelliean Manner

   X. Much Ado about Almost Nothing—­A Mere
      Trooper

  XI.  More Myrmidons

PART III.

THE SAVING OF A SOUL

 XII.  Vultures and Luck—­Good and Bad

XIII.  Found

 XIV.  The Snake and the Sword

      Seven Years After

PART I.

THE WELDING OF A SOUL.

CHAPTER I.

The snake and the soul.

When Colonel Matthew Devon de Warrenne, V.C., D.S.O., of the Queen’s Own (118th) Bombay Lancers, pinned his Victoria Cross to the bosom of his dying wife’s night-dress, in token of his recognition that she was the braver of the twain, he was not himself.

He was beside himself with grief.

Afterwards he adjured the sole witness of this impulsive and emotional act, Major John Decies, never to mention his “damned theatrical folly” to any living soul, and to excuse him on the score of an ancient sword-cut on the head and two bad sun-strokes.

For the one thing in heaven above, on the earth beneath, or in the waters under the earth, that Colonel de Warrenne feared, was breach of good form and stereotyped convention.

And the one thing he loved was the dying woman.

This last statement applies also to Major John Decies, of the Indian Medical Service, Civil Surgeon of Bimariabad, and may even be expanded, for the one thing he ever had loved was the dying woman....

Colonel Matthew Devon de Warrenne did the deed that won him his Victoria Cross, in the open, in the hot sunlight and in hot blood, sword in hand and with hot blood on the sword-hand—­fighting for his life.

His wife did the deed that moved him to transfer the Cross to her, in darkness, in cold blood, in loneliness, sickness and silence—­fighting for the life of her unborn child against an unseen foe.

Colonel de Warrenne’s type of brave deed has been performed thousands of times and wherever brave men have fought.

His wife’s deed of endurance, presence of mind, self-control and cool courage is rarer, if not unique.

To appreciate this fully, it must be known that she had a horror of snakes, so terrible as to amount to an obsession, a mental deformity, due, doubtless, to the fact that her father (Colonel Mortimer Seymour Stukeley) died of snake-bite before her mother’s eyes, a few hours before she herself was born.