He was
looking straight through the long vista of the past, right back to the
first hours of his memory, when he had wandered alone amidst strange
faces, a ruler in a palace which had never ceased to be his prison, an
exile whose home lay only in strange, fantastic dreams. And in this
final moment he seemed to stand high above the past, and ever swifter
and surer to trace through every incident of his life one same guiding
power. Through the snares of Behar Singh's hate-filled temptations it
had led onward; it had borne him to the temple--to the feet of the
woman he was to love through every torture of bitter deception; it had
swept him on a wave of impulse beyond his prison walls out into a
world which he at last hailed as his; and now, in the hour of fiercest
despair, of deepest loss, it was drawing him surely and swiftly
homeward. The past vanished. He saw again the face lifted to his--he
saw the tears--the Colonel's hand outstretched, waiting to clasp his
own. He heard the title that she gave him as a man hears a
long-forgotten watchword.
"You are English, Steven. You are English--you belong to us!"
He unfastened the sword at his side. For a moment he held it as though
in farewell. But there was no grief on his face as he laid the jeweled
weapon in the Colonel's hand.
"I have chosen," he said. "I can not go against my people."
CHAPTER XIII
ENVOI
With the surrender of one man the great Marut rising came to an end.
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