“Yes.”
“Well, he has. I’ve just got a ‘chit’ from him saying he’ll be here with us this evening, and he’s bringing his niece. They left Mazaran three days ago on purpose to join us. We’ll have a rare old bukh, over old times, but,” – with a shake of the head – “you remember what I was saying – that he’d be a damn fool if he did come out here again. Well, I only hope I was wrong.”
“I wish you were, but I’m afraid you’re not. Come into the tent here, and see that no one’s about who can understand us.”
Varne Coates stared at his kinsman. The concerned gravity in the latter’s tone affected him, taken in conjunction with his superhuman gift of finding out everything. He led the way into the tent in silence.
And then Helston put him into possession of the morning’s discovery. At the conclusion of the narrative Coates shook a very doleful head indeed.
“They weren’t with Allah-din Khan’s crowd of their own free will,” he declared. “Did Mervyn show any signs of having been in a scrap?”
“No. My glasses are extra powerful. He looked – normal. Well? What do you think of it – of the chances?”
“Chances? I think the chances for Mervyn are worth just that,” – with a snap of the fingers. “For the girl, it’s just possible that this budmash may give her up, at the price of lakhs of rupees, but who the devil’s going to pay it?”
“The Government?”
“No fear, Government may send an expedition, but that won’t help anybody, but it isn’t going to pay up.”
“Then I am.”
“You are?” with a stare of amazement.
“Certainly. Only too glad to get her back safe at any price, even if it costs me every damn shilling I’ve got in the world.”
Varne Coates looked at his kinsman and whistled.
“So that’s how the cat jumps, is it?”
“That’s how.”
Chapter Twenty Five
Mervyn’s Dilemma
We must glance back.
Mervyn’s camp was pitched not very far from the mouth of the Duran Tangi; that is, not very far from the scene of the sniping episode of a week or two previously, of which, of course, he was in ignorance, but far enough from the great overhanging wall of terraced cliff, to be beyond the possibility of a repetition of the same. He had been warned at Mazaran that the country was extra restless just then, and that moving about in it, in the happy-go-lucky way he proposed, was positively unsafe; but with his usual gustiness, he pooh-poohed every suggestion of the kind. No one was good enough to teach him his India, he declared. If it suited the military element to get up and foment a chronic scare, well that wasn’t going to interfere with him. It was of no use representing to him that this wasn’t India precisely, but the Northern border – whose inhabitants were a fierce, predatory set of fanatics caring for no show of authority, and that even now these were in a state of unrest – well, he knew them too. When he heard that his old friend Varne Coates – and especially the latter’s relative, and his friend, were on a shikar expedition two or three days out, that was sufficient. He only spent long enough at Mazaran to collect camp necessaries and hire servants, and at once set out to join them.
He had even demurred to the escort of four Levy sowars, which was pressed upon him. These damned Catch-em-alive-ohs, he declared, were of no – ditto – use. They couldn’t hit a haystack if it came to shooting, and even then they’d either clear or make common cause with the enemy, to whom, tribally, they as likely as not belonged. So – here he was.
They had made a very early start from their last camp, and the morning was yet young. They had not long finished breakfast, and were seated in camp chairs under the shade of a canvas awning.
“Oh, this is perfectly glorious,” Melian was saying, her eyes seeming to feed upon the sunlit wildness of the surroundings. “What a contrast to dear old Heath Hover, too. Look at that splendid mountain face, all terraced, as it were, with great cliffs; and even the openness of it all has a marvellous charm.”
Her uncle puffed meditatively at his cheroot, then looked at her, and in the result felt not unsatisfied. She had taken, with characteristic readiness, to this strange wild country and its life – and every phase of it afforded her a fresh delight. And its people, too, of every shade and type, but that which attracted her most, was the tall, turbaned, often scowling, mountaineer, with his primitive jezail and never absent and wicked looking tulwar – a very Ishmaelite in deed and in appearance.
They had come up the tangi in the early morning and she had been entranced with the vastness of the huge narrow chasm, the first of its kind she had ever seen. And now, as Mervyn contemplated the eager animated face, tinged with the golden glow of an open air life, the blue eyes clear and large in contrast, he found himself thinking satirically that it was small wonder if Mazaran had sought to throw stumbling blocks in the way of their leaving it. And then as though the mention of Heath Hover evoked a recollection she suddenly said:
“I do hope old Joe and Judy will take real care of our little black poogie, and not let it out at night to get shot, or get into a trap in the coverts – dear little pooge-pooge?”
“Oh, I’m sure they will. But – we couldn’t have done with it here, could we?”
“No, but I would like to have it all the same. Why, what’s this?”
A whirl of dust was coming down the road, and as it drew nearer, they could make out a band of horsemen, clad in the loose white garments of the mountain tribes. Through it, too, as the gleam of weapons.
“Oh, it’s some of these picturesque people, and they are so fascinating,” cried the girl. “It’ll be quite a sight to see them ride past.”
The road ran about a hundred yards below the site of the camp. For the first time some qualm of misgiving came into Mervyn’s self-sufficient mind, and he found himself actually hoping that they really would ride past. They looked a formidable gang enough, some two score strong, and armed to the teeth. It was not lessened as he saw that they were not on the road at all, and were heading straight for the camp.
Came another sight, which caused his face to pale and stiffen strangely.
“Melian, go inside the tent, and stay there till I tell you to come out,” he said sharply.
“Why? Mayn’t I see?”
“Do as I say – at once,” he repeated, with a stamp of the foot. “They may be a bit rough, but – I’ll settle them.”
She obeyed, greatly wondering. “Mayn’t I see?” she had said. Good! Then she had not seen – what he had, and he felt thankful.
Out on the plain two of his camp natives were herding the camels. He had seen several of the horsemen dart out upon these from the main body, and cut them down with their keen edged tulwars without giving them time so much as to utter a shriek. At that moment John Seward Mervyn realised that if ever he had been in a tight place in his life he was in one now, and if he did not, when too late, curse his own foolhardiness for bringing him into it, why it was only because he had not time.
The whole band rode down like a whirlwind upon the camp. The bearer and khitmutghar, and the cook, Punjabi natives, scared out of their lives, had crept into one of the tents and crouched trembling. The Levy sowars alone showed fight, and pointed their rifles, but it was plain they would have welcomed any chance offered to surrender.
“Melian, don’t move outside, do you hear,” said her uncle over his shoulder. He had risen, and stood confronting the wild array. These had now reined up, and were facing him, in a crescent formation.
“Salaam!” he said. “This is a strange welcome to a stranger in a strange land, brothers.”
A grunt broke from the fierce shaggy faces; and the gleaming, hostile eyes seemed to take on a further deepening of hate and greed.
“This is the Sirdar, Allah-din Khan,” said one, designating the man on his right.
“That is good to hear,” answered Mervyn, speaking in the Pushtu, “Salaam, Sirdar Allah-din Khan. I repeat this is a strange way of paying a friendly visit.”
“A friendly visit?” repeated the chief, in deep tones. “But what if this is not a friendly visit?”
The fierce eyes of the fanatical predatory Asiatic, and the hard, determined blue gleam in those of the European met, and there was no yielding in the glance of either.
“In that case,” replied the latter, “I invite the Sirdar to withdraw. It is not safe to stay – for him, for as the life of the Sirdar Allah-din Khan must be worth the lives of all his followers put together, it is not good policy to throw away so valuable a life.”
The tone was perfectly even, in itself containing no threat. Mervyn was at his best now, cool, desperate, therefore deadly dangerous. At his words a gasp of amazement escaped from the other side. The first thought was of a trap. Were there soldiers concealed in the tent, with rifles trained upon them through the canvas? And meanwhile Mervyn stood confronting them, calmly; one hand, however, always behind him.
“The life of so important a chief as the Sirdar Allah-din Khan must be of great value,” he went on in the same unconcerned tone. “And – he has but one.”
“And thou hast two, Feringhi,” answered the chief, darkly. “Two, and that means two deaths instead of one, lingering and painful deaths at that. One of thy ‘lives’ is behind in the tent. Good! I may fall or I may not, but I swear on the tomb of the Prophet that if thou so much as drawest the weapon now held behind thee, thou and thy daughter,” – this was a figure of speech – “shall be burnt alive. She first.”
Mervyn felt desperate. He tried not to pale as he gazed at the speaker. But his hand did not move from behind him. In that fierce, hard, set countenance, in the very words of the oath uttered, he knew there would be no going back from that sentence. He might shoot the chief dead, but no power on earth would turn the whirlwind rush of his followers. And they would be as good as their leader’s word, as to that he entertained no doubt whatever. Melian – writhing in a death of fiery torment – the bare idea was as a pictured glimpse into hell itself. A great roll of time swept over his mind in that moment or two, as he stood, confronting the man in whose power he was.
“She first,” this barbarian had said. There was a full refinement of diabolical cruelty in the words. God! the thing was unthinkable!
“I draw no weapon,” he answered. “What does the Sirdar Allah-din Khan require. Money?”
“Thyself.”
The answer was curt, deep toned, uncompromising.
“Myself?”
“Nothing else.”
“And what of my ‘daughter’ – who however is not my daughter, but my sister’s daughter?” went on Mervyn, who was puzzling hard over what took on more and more the look of a very hopeless and dreadful situation. “As believers you dare not harm a woman, the holy Koran itself forbids it. But how shall she find her way back to her people alone, she who has never before been in this land?”
“We want nothing of her,” said the chief. “She may go in peace. Two of my people here shall escort her safely to within view of the camp of yonder Feringhi,” with a nod over his shoulder in the direction of Varne Coates’ camp. “But for thyself thou must go with us.”
To say that Mervyn felt as if more than half the cloud had lifted would be to put it mildly. The awful deadly weight that had been crushing him, the consciousness to wit, that by his own foolhardy obstinacy, he had brought Melian into ghastly peril – was that which afflicted him most. He himself and his own potential fate was a matter of utterly secondary importance – and, here was a way out.
But could he trust the chief’s promises? He knew that in this instance he could. So he made answer, and that very earnestly.
“You will keep faith with me, Sirdar Sahib? My sister’s child shall be escorted to yonder camp by two of your people, and delivered there safe and unharmed either by word or deed, on condition that I go with you now? Do you swear that solemnly on the holy Koran and the tomb of the Prophet?”
“I swear it,” answered Allah-din Khan, “on the holy Koran, by the tomb of the Prophet, and on the holy Kaba.” And he raised his sword hilt to the level of his forehead. Mervyn knew that the oath would be kept.
“I would fain bid farewell to the child, and prepare her for the journey,” he said. “I, too, make oath, that nothing will be done inside the tent but that.”
It seemed strange, but to this the chief made no objection, nor did he require that one of his followers should be present. He merely bent his head in assent.
“Well, what has happened? You have been talking long enough, dear,” said the girl, as he entered the tent.
“Melian darling, you will have to go on to Coates’ camp a little ahead of me. The fact is – I must go with these people for a bit – but I’ll rejoin you soon. The chief is going to tell off two of his men as an escort for you, and you will be quite safe – quite safe. Tell Coates I’ll join him later.”
He tried to speak jauntily – to force a smile. But Melian was not to be taken in – not for a moment. She shook her head.
“I am not going to Mr Coates’ camp,” she said, “at least, not without you. If you have got to go with these people I go too.”
Mervyn had not reckoned upon this. He tried to reason with her, pointing out that a forced march with a gang of wild tribesmen and a sojourn in their more or less uncomfortable villages, was no fit experience for her. Of any clement of peril he purposely said nothing, knowing full well that to do so would be simply to rivet her opposition the closer. But he might as well have argued with the tent walls, or have tried to turn the Gularzai chieftain from his fixed purpose.
“Now be reasonable, my little one,” he concluded. “Say good-bye to me here, and I’ll see you started off all comfortably.”
But Melian set her lips, and those very pretty lips of hers could set very firmly indeed on occasion.
“I shall do no such thing,” she answered. “I’m going with you. We came here together, and I’m not going to leave you.”
She was clinging to him now, firmly, and kissing him.
“You won’t go to Coates’ then?” he said helplessly.
“No. I’m going with you. So now, let’s go out and tell them so.”
The chief might have been excused if he had grown impatient, but he had not. With true Oriental impassiveness he and his wild followers sat their horses, waiting – incidentally the camp servants crouching in their tent, went through the bitterness of death many times over during that period of waiting. Then Mervyn came out and announced that they would have to take two with them instead of one. But Allah-din Khan received the statement without great demur; it may have been that he scented advantage to himself in this addition to his own programme.
In not much longer space of time than it took them to bring in the two horses, and hurriedly put together a few necessaries, were they ready to start. The syce, who was ordered out on the first errand, showed no great concern. He was a Pathan and a believer, and stood in no fear of the scowling horsemen. But the bearer, who had perforce been convened for purposes of the latter, had wilted and cowered before the lowering glances darted at him from under fierce shaggy brows, as a Hindu dog and an idolater. But it did not suit their purpose to shed more blood on that occasion, else would he and the others have felt the tulwar’s edge there and then. The two already slain had been victims to a sudden, unthinking blood lust.
Again we must glance back.
Since the last visit of Helston Varne to Heath Hover, and the boding manifestation that same evening, of the opening door, an unaccountable and evil influence seemed to pervade the place. There was no gripping it, but it was there, and on Melian especially, it seemed to take a firm hold. All her bright sunny spirits, her joyousness in life, seemed to leave her, and that with a suddenness and rapidity that was little short of alarming. She grew pallid, and lost her appetite. She grew nervous, too, and would start at any and every sound; and when night time came, and with it solitude, she shrank from it with a very horror of shrinking. Nothing had happened, according to the tradition of that boding presage, but the fit grew upon her, and it affected Mervyn too, though differently. At last he took her to task about it, and she owned up to the whole thing.
“This’ll never do, little one,” he had said, looking at her with very grave concern. “We must go away for a change.”
The relief which sprang into her face confirmed her former revelation. Still she made protest.
“Why should I break up your peace and quiet, Uncle Seward?” trying to smile, but the smile was a wan one. “You have given me a home, when I had none – such a happy home, too – but somehow now, I don’t know what it is that has come over me. I seem to be always frightened – of something – or nothing.”
Yes, he had noticed that, but had hoped it would pass. But it had not.
“Where shall we go then? Where would you like?” he said.
“Anywhere you like, dear. It’s all the same to me.”
“H’m! How should you like to go to – India?”
“To – India? Oh, Uncle Seward, I should just love it,” and all the old animation returned, as if by magic.
“Very well. Pack up to-morrow and we’ll start the day after,” he had answered, with characteristic promptitude.
And so – here they were.
Chapter Twenty Six
The Dim, Mysterious East
The way in which the two accepted the situation was characteristic of both. Mervyn took it apparently as all in the day’s work, though he had reason to believe that his days were surely numbered. He conversed equably with his captors – or escort, as though he were accompanying them of his own free will, to pay a visit to their village for instance, for any other pacific purpose. Yet he knew that in coming to this country again he had deliberately – as Hussein Khan had put it – placed his head between the tiger’s jaws.
Even this, strange to say, did not perturb him, perhaps he had imbibed a large proportion of Oriental fatalism during his lifelong acquaintance with the strange peoples of the East. If his time had come – it had, and there was no more to be said. It had nearly come, he knew full well, when the cry through the winter midnight had led him to drag the perishing man forth from the icy death. Now, if it really had come, why – “it was written;” and in that case that he had returned to this land at all, and of his own free will – was part of the scheme. Thus he looked at it.
But – what of Melian? Had he not drawn her into peril? No – for he did not believe they would harm her. For himself, if what he suspected should prove true – why then his hours were certainly numbered. Well, what then? Until she had come to Heath Hover he had not been in love with life. He was often, in fact, honestly and genuinely sick of it. The brightening which her coming had shed upon it could not be other than temporary. In the due and ordinary course of things she was bound to leave him again sooner or later – and then, how could he return to the old solitude, the old depression of day in, night out? There was nothing to look forward to, and precious little to look back upon. So it mattered little enough now whatever happened to himself. All of which of course, he did not impart to Melian.
She for her part, seemed infected with his unconcern, and looked upon the whole affair as a decidedly interesting adventure. It had its inconvenient side – for instance the commissariat department was to her civilised tastes, abominable, and sleeping out among the rocks was chilly of a night. But she was allowed to come and go as she liked. No watch was set upon her, for in the first place she had volunteered to go with them rather than separate from her relative, and in the next where would she be in the midst of this craggy, and, to her, entirely unknown wilderness, even if she did change her mind, and take it into her head to try and escape. At night they would make her up a couch of mats in some cleft or hollow among the rocks and shelter off the entrance, and she would declare laughingly to her uncle that it was only an experience of camping out, after all.
Yet there were times when her efforts at keeping up her spirits would sorely fail her. Mervyn himself could not consistently find comfort in cold fatalism, and she would read in the gloom of his knitted brows that he was by no means so easy in his mind as he would have had her believe. And as they journeyed on, through the awful wildness of this savage, rock built region; threading gloomy gorges where the very light of the sun would not penetrate, or traversing a drear waste of desert where the friable soil rose and gyrated in “dust devils” and the sun blazed down as from the reflection of an opened furnace; wending the while, whither they knew not – her spirits began to droop. In short the situation was getting upon her nerves – and that badly.
The shaggy, turbaned horsemen, whom at first she had found fascinating in their picturesqueness, began to appear in her eyes more and more the predatory, merciless beings they really were. The wild savagery of the surroundings – which at first she had pronounced absolutely faultless in their fantastic chaos of rock and crag and chasm, now took on a Dantesque and hope-chilling aspect. Where would it all end?
Either Hussein Khan’s estimate of the distance to be travelled to arrive at the Gularzai chieftain’s stronghold had been very much under-rated, or they were bound for some other destination, for two nights had passed, and they seemed no nearer to any fixed ending of their journeyings. And then when her spirits had reached their lowest ebb, came a thought to Melian’s mind like the breaking of sunlight through a thick mist.
Helston Varne was at Coates’ camp, which had been their objective when their plans had been thus roughly and suddenly deflected. She would hardly own to herself how greatly she had been looking forward to meeting him again, and now it seemed to her that he, of all human agencies, would be the one to come to their aid and bring matters right. How on earth he was going to do it she had not the ghost of an idea, but that he would contrive to do it somehow, she felt assured – almost. For the very name of Helston Varne seemed to her now as before, a tower of refuge. And something of this she imparted to her uncle.
But he shook a gloomy head. A network was around him – around them both – which even Helston Varne’s acumen and infinite resource would be powerless to rend asunder. This he knew, but she did not, and – he could not tell her.
He had been very careful in his conversations with her, and had enjoined upon her like caution. It was highly probable, but still not absolutely safe to assume, that no one amid their captors understood English. She suggested French, but then Mervyn’s education, though excellent for purposes of passing through a crammer’s hands in his salad days, comprised no working knowledge of that courtly and useful tongue, so that fell through, and unless now and again, and then by dark hints, they were compelled to avoid any reference to the motive of their capture, and the ultimate chances of its satisfactory termination. And then it befell that the merest chance – a piece of overheard conversation – sufficed to throw him into the last stage of gloomy, hopeless despair.
It was during one of their noontide halts. The routine of prayer and prostration – which Melian had at first found so picturesque, even admirable, but now had wearied of – was over, and the men were scattered about in twos or threes, looking after the horses and other things. Two of them were chatting together in a drowsy undertone, and Mervyn, unnoticed by them, was just within earshot, and the substance of what they were saying was this. He himself must die, his time had come. That night they would reach the place —the place. Well, this as a personal consideration troubled him not much, he had only expected it. But the woman with the sun-tinged hair, they went on to say, she, unless the Sirkar at Mazaran paid the lakh of rupees which would be asked for her restoration – or made any move against them because of what had been done – why there were those over the Persian border who would give nearly if not quite as much for such an addition to their harîm.
In frozen horror he took in this, but it was essential to show no sign that he had heard. Would such a sum be paid, and if it were, would not official delay and official bungling be such as to render even compliance of none effect? Moreover, could the authorities responsible for the peace of the border allow so flagrant an act of dacoity to pass without retaliative measures? In either case – Good Heavens! He knew enough about the conditions of a vast tract of hardly penetrated country, and its inscrutable inhabitants, to realise that once Melian disappeared entirely she would be as completely swallowed up, as though the whole Indian army, and the official mechanism, from the Viceroy downwards, were not in existence. And this was the fate to which his own foolhardiness had consigned her. And she was as much to him as ever child of his own could have been!
He knew the two speakers as near kinsmen of Allah-din Khan, and that as such that they were not talking at random. He himself was to die that night, that was settled. That was nothing. “It was written.” But how to save Melian from the unutterable ghastliness of the fate mapped out for her? That was everything. No amount of fatalism would come to his aid there. In the hot swelter of noontide – for with all the keen chill of the nights on these high lands, the sun at noonday threw off from the rocks and arid ground in waves of glowing heat – his brain seemed to bubble. One weltering thought seethed through it – that of taking her life and his own at the same time, but as against this he remembered that he was unarmed. They had insisted upon his giving up everything in the shape of a weapon at the time of his surrender. Then again, she had the one chance in her favour, what right had he to deprive her of it? Well, there remained still some hours —some hours only– which he had left to him, and yet his reason told him that they could bring nothing. Of his own death, or even the manner of it, he did not think – so wrapped up was he in the desperation of extremity as the situation affected her.
“Why, Uncle Seward, buck up. You are looking dreadfully down,” she remarked, as they resumed their journey. “And you were the one who was always trying to hearten me.”
“Yes darling, I was, but – perhaps I am not quite the thing. Got a touch of the sun, or something. But I’ll be all right when it gets cooler. A tough old campaigner like me is never affected that way for long.”
He noticed that she herself was far from cheerful, and that her spirits were forced. But – great God! if she only knew what he had learned. In sheer desperation he ranged his horse alongside that of Allah-din Khan, and began to talk, haply in hope that the other might let fall some hint which should give him an idea. It even seemed to him that he himself was talking wildly and at random, for he surprised the chief looking at him more than once in a restrained and curious manner. Yet they had often talked together during their enforced march.
“I should not have consented to the Miss Sahib accompanying me,” he ventured. “I fear it has been too much for her. Could you not return her to her people, brother? It would be of great advantage to all concerned?”
He made the remark in sheer desperation, and emphasising the last words. But nothing came of it.
“We have come far,” replied Allah-din Khan, tranquilly, “but in time she will return. The teachings of the Prophet enjoin patience, but women – Feringhi women especially – have none of it. Let this one learn to acquire it.”
This was uncompromising, but Mervyn thought to see a loophole.
“In time she will return,” he repeated. “That is the word of a Sirdar of the Gularzai?”
To this the chief made no reply. He was looking straight in front of him as he rode, and his dark, clear-cut face was as impassive as a mask. He might, indeed, not have heard for all the sign he gave.
In the light of what he had overheard it was significant to Mervyn that a glance at the sun showed that they were travelling due west. What curious dash of wild hope was it that caused him to recall that this had brought them a great deal nearer to Mazaran than they were when at the point of their start? And yet, even if chance offered, there were ranges of craggy, tooth-like crests between them and the garrison station, and he himself was totally unacquainted with this part of the country. But what chance could offer? None. Absolutely none.
An hour before sundown they halted at a small, squalid looking village – and then the regulation performances of prayer were gone through. He did notice that several strangers had joined with Allah-din Khan’s band in this – presumably people from the squalid, mud-walled village. That one of them was a man of extra fine stature and presence, he also noticed, but barely so. For instance he overlooked the fact that this one was bowing down, and repeating the prescribed words with extra fervour, and a fanatical ecstasy in his dark eyes and swarthy countenance, and that the others were stealing at him glances of furtive veneration.
As they resumed their march he ranged his horse alongside that of Melian. No restriction was put upon such movements as this. The band was riding anyhow and in open order now – straggling order would be the better term for it, for some were quite far behind. In the first place their captives were mounted on inferior steeds, in the next the Gularzai were perfectly well aware that in such country as they now were in, any attempt at escape would meet with not the ghost of a chance.
“My child, I have brought you into a dreadful corner,” he said, and the dead note of hopelessness in his tone struck a chill into his hearer. “I ought never to have consented to your accompanying me, but now it’s too late. Listen. If anything should happen to me, you will still be set free on a ransom. The Government will pay it, I have very little in the world, but such as it is I have left it to you – and now but for me being such a fool as to bring you here we might have gone on in our old quiet, happy life; not necessarily at Heath Hover. Well, what I wanted to say, and I must say it quickly, is this, If anything should happen to me, ask to be taken to the Nawab Shere Dil Khan. He is the head chief of the Gularzai, and this one is under him. I’ll write the words down for you in Hindustani, and you can learn them by heart – and keep on asking – keep on asking.” He felt in his pocket, and even wrote in his pocket, on an envelope he found there. “And don’t show any fear, keep on steadfastly requiring the Nawab Shere Dil Khan – have you got the name, well, I’ve put it down here, only it’s not very distinct. Well now, take the bit of paper – That was well done. And – there’s another thing.”