exaggerated and compiled at second-hand, but a little of it is true; and
when an Englishman finds that little, it is quite as startling as any
passion in his own proper life. Bisesa raged and stormed, and finally
threatened to kill herself if Trejago did not at once drop the alien
Memsahib who had come between them. Trejago tried to explain, and
to show her that she did not understand these things from a Western
standpoint. Bisesa drew herself up, and said simply:
“I do not. I know only this--it is not good that I should have made you
dearer than my own heart to me, Sahib. You are an Englishman. I am only
a black girl”--she was fairer than bar-gold in the Mint--“and the widow
of a black man.”
Then she sobbed and said: “But on my soul and my Mother's soul, I love
you. There shall no harm come to you, whatever happens to me.”
Trejago argued with the child, and tried to soothe her, but she seemed
quite unreasonably disturbed. Nothing would satisfy her save that all
relations between them should end. He was to go away at once. And he
went. As he dropped out at the window, she kissed his forehead twice,
and he walked away wondering.
A week, and then three weeks, passed without a sign from Bisesa.
Trejago, thinking that the rupture had lasted quite long enough, went
down to Amir Nath's Gully for the fifth time in the three weeks, hoping
that his rap at the sill of the shifting grating would be answered. He
was not disappointed.
There was a young moon, and one stream of light fell down into Amir
Nath's Gully, and struck the grating, which was drawn away as he
knocked. From the black dark, Bisesa held out her arms into the
moonlight. Both hands had been cut off at the wrists, and the stumps
were nearly healed.
Then, as Bisesa bowed her head between her arms and sobbed, some one in
the room grunted like a wild beast, and something sharp--knife, sword or
spear--thrust at Trejago in his boorka. The stroke missed his body, but
cut into one of the muscles of the groin, and he limped slightly from
the wound for the rest of his days.
The grating went into its place. There was no sign whatever from inside
the house--nothing but the moonlight strip on the high wall, and the
blackness of Amir Nath's Gully behind.
The next thing Trejago remembers, after raging and shouting like a
madman between those pitiless walls, is that he found himself near the
river as the dawn was breaking, threw away his boorka and went home
bareheaded.
What the tragedy was--whether Bisesa had, in a fit of causeless despair,
told everything, or the intrigue had been discovered and she tortured
to tell, whether Durga Charan knew his name, and what became of
Bisesa--Trejago does not know to this day. Something horrible had
happened, and the thought of what it must have been comes upon Trejago
in the night now and again, and keeps him company till the morning.
One special feature of the case is that he does not know where lies the
front of Durga Charan's house. It may open on to a courtyard common to
two or more houses, or it may lie behind any one of the gates of Jitha
Megji's bustee. Trejago cannot tell. He cannot get Bisesa--poor little
Bisesa--back again. He has lost her in the City, where each man's house
is as guarded and as unknowable as the grave; and the grating that opens
into Amir Nath's Gully has been walled up.
But Trejago pays his calls regularly, and is reckoned a very decent sort
of man.
There is nothing peculiar about him, except a slight stiffness, caused
by a riding-strain, in the right leg.
IN ERROR.
They burnt a corpse upon the sand--
The light shone out afar;
It guided home the plunging boats
That beat from Zanzibar.
Spirit of Fire, where'er Thy altars rise.
Thou art Light of Guidance to our eyes!
Salsette Boat-Song.
There is hope for a man who gets publicly and riotously drunk more
often that he ought to do; but there is no hope for the man who drinks
secretly and alone in his own house--the man who is never seen to drink.
This is a rule; so there must be an exception to prove it. Moriarty's
case was that exception.
He was a Civil Engineer, and the Government, very kindly, put him quite
by himself in an out-district, with nobody but natives to talk to and a
great deal of work to do. He did his work well in the four years he
was utterly alone; but he picked up the vice of secret and solitary
drinking, and came up out of the wilderness more old and worn and
haggard than the dead-alive life had any right to make him. You know the
saying that a man who has been alone in the jungle for more than a
year is never quite sane all his life after. People credited Moriarty's
queerness of manner and moody ways to the solitude, and said it showed
how Government spoilt the futures of its best men. Moriarty had built
himself the plinth of a very good reputation in the bridge-dam-girder
line. But he knew, every night of the week, that he was taking steps
to undermine that reputation with L. L. L. and “Christopher” and little
nips of liqueurs, and filth of that kind. He had a sound constitution
and a great brain, or else he would have broken down and died like a
sick camel in the district, as better men have done before him.
Government ordered him to Simla after he had come out of the desert;
and he went up meaning to try for a post then vacant. That season, Mrs.
Reiver--perhaps you will remember her--was in the height of her power,
and many men lay under her yoke. Everything bad that could be said
has already been said about Mrs. Reiver, in another tale. Moriarty was
heavily-built and handsome, very quiet and nervously anxious to please
his neighbors when he wasn't sunk in a brown study. He started a good
deal at sudden noises or if spoken to without warning; and, when you
watched him drinking his glass of water at dinner, you could see the
hand shake a little. But all this was put down to nervousness, and the
quiet, steady, “sip-sip-sip, fill and sip-sip-sip, again,” that went
on in his own room when he was by himself, was never known. Which was
miraculous, seeing how everything in a man's private life is public
property out here.
Moriarty was drawn, not into Mrs. Reiver's set, because they were not
his sort, but into the power of Mrs. Reiver, and he fell down in front
of her and made a goddess of her. This was due to his coming fresh out
of the jungle to a big town. He could not scale things properly or see
who was what.
Because Mrs. Reiver was cold and hard, he said she was stately and
dignified. Because she had no brains, and could not talk cleverly, he
said she was reserved and shy. Mrs. Reiver shy! Because she was unworthy
of honor or reverence from any one, he reverenced her from a distance
and dowered her with all the virtues in the Bible and most of those in
Shakespeare.
This big, dark, abstracted man who was so nervous when a pony cantered
behind him, used to moon in the train of Mrs. Reiver, blushing with
pleasure when she threw a word or two his way. His admiration was
strictly platonic: even other women saw and admitted this. He did not
move out in Simla, so he heard nothing against his idol: which was
satisfactory. Mrs. Reiver took no special notice of him, beyond seeing
that he was added to her list of admirers, and going for a walk with him
now and then, just to show that he was her property, claimable as such.
Moriarty must have done most of the talking, for Mrs. Reiver couldn't
talk much to a man of his stamp; and the little she said could not have
been profitable. What Moriarty believed in, as he had good reason to,
was Mrs. Reiver's influence over him, and, in that belief, set himself
seriously to try to do away with the vice that only he himself knew of.
His experiences while he was fighting with it must have been peculiar,
but he never described them. Sometimes he would hold off from everything
except water for a week. Then, on a rainy night, when no one had asked
him out to dinner, and there was a big fire in his room, and everything
comfortable, he would sit down and make a big night of it by adding
little nip to little nip, planning big schemes of reformation meanwhile,
until he threw himself on his bed hopelessly drunk. He suffered next
morning.
One night, the big crash came. He was troubled in his own mind over his
attempts to make himself “worthy of the friendship” of Mrs. Reiver. The
past ten days had been very bad ones, and the end of it all was that he
received the arrears of two and three-quarter years of sipping in one
attack of delirium tremens of the subdued kind; beginning with suicidal
depression, going on to fits and starts and hysteria, and ending with
downright raving. As he sat in a chair in front of the fire, or walked
up and down the room picking a handkerchief to pieces, you heard what
poor Moriarty really thought of Mrs. Reiver, for he raved about her
and his own fall for the most part; though he ravelled some P. W. D.
accounts into the same skein of thought. He talked, and talked, and
talked in a low dry whisper to himself, and there was no stopping him.
He seemed to know that there was something wrong, and twice tried to
pull himself together and confer rationally with the Doctor; but his
mind ran out of control at once, and he fell back to a whisper and the
story of his troubles. It is terrible to hear a big man babbling like a
child of all that a man usually locks up, and puts away in the deep of
his heart. Moriarty read out his very soul for the benefit of any one
who was in the room between ten-thirty that night and two-forty-five
next morning.
From what he said, one gathered how immense an influence Mrs. Reiver
held over him, and how thoroughly he felt for his own lapse. His
whisperings cannot, of course, be put down here; but they were very
instructive as showing the errors of his estimates.
. . . . . . . . .
When the trouble was over, and his few acquaintances were pitying him
for the bad attack of jungle-fever that had so pulled him down, Moriarty
swore a big oath to himself and went abroad again with Mrs. Reiver till
the end of the season, adoring her in a quiet and deferential way as an
angel from heaven. Later on he took to riding--not hacking, but honest
riding--which was good proof that he was improving, and you could slam
doors behind him without his jumping to his feet with a gasp. That,
again, was hopeful.
How he kept his oath, and what it cost him in the beginning, nobody
knows. He certainly managed to compass the hardest thing that a man who
has drank heavily can do. He took his peg and wine at dinner, but he
never drank alone, and never let what he drank have the least hold on
him.
Once he told a bosom-friend the story of his great trouble, and how the
“influence of a pure honest woman, and an angel as well” had saved him.
When the man--startled at anything good being laid to Mrs. Reiver's
door--laughed, it cost him Moriarty's friendship. Moriarty, who is
married now to a woman ten thousand times better than Mrs. Reiver--a
woman who believes that there is no man on earth as good and clever as
her husband--will go down to his grave vowing and protesting that Mrs.
Reiver saved him from ruin in both worlds.
That she knew anything of Moriarty's weakness nobody believed for
a moment. That she would have cut him dead, thrown him over, and
acquainted all her friends with her discovery, if she had known of it,
nobody who knew her doubted for an instant.
Moriarty thought her something she never was, and in that belief saved
himself. Which was just as good as though she had been everything that
he had imagined.
But the question is, what claim will Mrs. Reiver have to the credit of
Moriarty's salvation, when her day of reckoning comes?
A BANK FRAUD.
He drank strong waters and his speech was coarse;
He purchased raiment and forebore to pay;
He struck a trusting junior with a horse,
And won Gymkhanas in a doubtful way.
Then, 'twixt a vice and folly, turned aside
To do good deeds and straight to cloak them, lied.
The Mess Room.
If Reggie Burke were in India now, he would resent this tale being told;
but as he is in Hong-Kong and won't see it, the telling is safe. He was
the man who worked the big fraud on the Sind and Sialkote Bank. He was
manager of an up-country Branch, and a sound practical man with a large
experience of native loan and insurance work. He could combine the
frivolities of ordinary life with his work, and yet do well. Reggie
Burke rode anything that would let him get up, danced as neatly as he
rode, and was wanted for every sort of amusement in the Station.
As he said himself, and as many men found out rather to their surprise,
there were two Burkes, both very much at your service. “Reggie Burke,”
between four and ten, ready for anything from a hot-weather gymkhana to
a riding-picnic; and, between ten and four, “Mr. Reginald Burke, Manager
of the Sind and Sialkote Branch Bank.” You might play polo with him one
afternoon and hear him express his opinions when a man crossed; and you
might call on him next morning to raise a two-thousand rupee loan on a
five hundred pound insurance-policy, eighty pounds paid in premiums. He
would recognize you, but you would have some trouble in recognizing him.
The Directors of the Bank--it had its headquarters in Calcutta and its
General Manager's word carried weight with the Government--picked their
men well. They had tested Reggie up to a fairly severe breaking-strain.
They trusted him just as much as Directors ever trust Managers. You must
see for yourself whether their trust was misplaced.
Reggie's Branch was in a big Station, and worked with the usual
staff--one Manager, one Accountant, both English, a Cashier, and a horde
of native clerks; besides the Police patrol at nights outside. The
bulk of its work, for it was in a thriving district, was hoondi and
accommodation of all kinds. A fool has no grip of this sort of business;
and a clever man who does not go about among his clients, and know
more than a little of their affairs, is worse than a fool. Reggie was
young-looking, clean-shaved, with a twinkle in his eye, and a head
that nothing short of a gallon of the Gunners' Madeira could make any
impression on.
One day, at a big dinner, he announced casually that the Directors had
shifted on to him a Natural Curiosity, from England, in the Accountant
line. He was perfectly correct. Mr. Silas Riley, Accountant, was a MOST
curious animal--a long, gawky, rawboned Yorkshireman, full of the
savage self-conceit that blossom's only in the best county in England.
Arrogance was a mild word for the mental attitude of Mr. S. Riley. He
had worked himself up, after seven years, to a Cashier's position in a
Huddersfield Bank; and all his experience lay among the factories of the
North. Perhaps he would have done better on the Bombay side, where they
are happy with one-half per cent. profits, and money is cheap. He was
useless for Upper India and a wheat Province, where a man wants a large
head and a touch of imagination if he is to turn out a satisfactory
balance-sheet.
He was wonderfully narrow-minded in business, and, being new to the
country, had no notion that Indian banking is totally distinct from
Home work. Like most clever self-made men, he had much simplicity in his
nature; and, somehow or other, had construed the ordinarily polite terms
of his letter of engagement into a belief that the Directors had chosen
him on account of his special and brilliant talents, and that they set
great store by him. This notion grew and crystallized; thus adding to
his natural North-country conceit. Further, he was delicate, suffered
from some trouble in his chest, and was short in his temper.
You will admit that Reggie had reason to call his new Accountant a
Natural Curiosity. The two men failed to hit it off at all. Riley
considered Reggie a wild, feather-headed idiot, given to Heaven only
knew what dissipation in low places called “Messes,” and totally unfit
for the serious and solemn vocation of banking. He could never get
over Reggie's look of youth and “you-be-damned” air; and he couldn't
understand Reggie's friends--clean-built, careless men in the Army--who
rode over to big Sunday breakfasts at the Bank, and told sultry stories
till Riley got up and left the room. Riley was always showing Reggie
how the business ought to be conducted, and Reggie had more than once to
remind him that seven years' limited experience between Huddersfield and
Beverly did not qualify a man to steer a big up-country business. Then
Riley sulked and referred to himself as a pillar of the Bank and a
cherished friend of the Directors, and Reggie tore his hair. If a man's
English subordinates fail him in this country, he comes to a hard time
indeed, for native help has strict limitations. In the winter Riley went
sick for weeks at a time with his lung complaint, and this threw more
work on Reggie. But he preferred it to the everlasting friction when
Riley was well.
One of the Travelling Inspectors of the Bank discovered these collapses
and reported them to the Directors. Now Riley had been foisted on the
Bank by an M. P., who wanted the support of Riley's father, who, again,
was anxious to get his son out to a warmer climate because of those
lungs. The M. P. had an interest in the Bank; but one of the Directors
wanted to advance a nominee of his own; and, after Riley's father had
died, he made the rest of the Board see that an Accountant who was sick
for half the year, had better give place to a healthy man. If Riley had
known the real story of his appointment, he might have behaved better;
but knowing nothing, his stretches of sickness alternated with restless,
persistent, meddling irritation of Reggie, and all the hundred ways in
which conceit in a subordinate situation can find play. Reggie used to
call him striking and hair-curling names behind his back as a relief to
his own feelings; but he never abused him to his face, because he said:
“Riley is such a frail beast that half of his loathsome conceit is due
to pains in the chest.”
Late one April, Riley went very sick indeed. The doctor punched him
and thumped him, and told him he would be better before long. Then the
doctor went to Reggie and said:--“Do you know how sick your Accountant
is?” “No!” said Reggie--“The worse the better, confound him! He's a
clacking nuisance when he's well. I'll let you take away the Bank Safe
if you can drug him silent for this hot-weather.”
But the doctor did not laugh--“Man, I'm not joking,” he said. “I'll give
him another three months in his bed and a week or so more to die in.
On my honor and reputation that's all the grace he has in this world.
Consumption has hold of him to the marrow.”
Reggie's face changed at once into the face of “Mr. Reginald Burke,” and
he answered:--“What can I do?”
“Nothing,” said the doctor. “For all practical purposes the man is dead
already. Keep him quiet and cheerful and tell him he's going to recover.
That's all. I'll look after him to the end, of course.”
The doctor went away, and Reggie sat down to open the evening mail. His
first letter was one from the Directors, intimating for his information
that Mr. Riley was to resign, under a month's notice, by the terms of
his agreement, telling Reggie that their letter to Riley would follow
and advising Reggie of the coming of a new Accountant, a man whom Reggie
knew and liked.
Reggie lit a cheroot, and, before he had finished smoking, he had
sketched the outline of a fraud. He put away--“burked”--the Directors
letter, and went in to talk to Riley, who was as ungracious as usual,
and fretting himself over the way the bank would run during his illness.
He never thought of the extra work on Reggie's shoulders, but solely of
the damage to his own prospects of advancement. Then Reggie assured him
that everything would be well, and that he, Reggie, would confer with
Riley daily on the management of the Bank. Riley was a little soothed,
but he hinted in as many words that he did not think much of Reggie's
business capacity. Reggie was humble. And he had letters in his desk
from the Directors that a Gilbarte or a Hardie might have been proud of!
The days passed in the big darkened house, and the Directors' letter of
dismissal to Riley came and was put away by Reggie, who, every evening,
brought the books to Riley's room, and showed him what had been going
forward, while Riley snarled. Reggie did his best to make statements
pleasing to Riley, but the Accountant was sure that the Bank was going
to rack and ruin without him. In June, as the lying in bed told on his
spirit, he asked whether his absence had been noted by the Directors,
and Reggie said that they had written most sympathetic letters, hoping
that he would be able to resume his valuable services before long. He
showed Riley the letters: and Riley said that the Directors ought to
have written to him direct. A few days later, Reggie opened Riley's
mail in the half-light of the room, and gave him the sheet--not the
envelope--of a letter to Riley from the Directors. Riley said he would
thank Reggie not to interfere with his private papers, specially as
Reggie knew he was too weak to open his own letters. Reggie apologized.
Then Riley's mood changed, and he lectured Reggie on his evil ways:
his horses and his bad friends. “Of course, lying here on my back, Mr.
Burke, I can't keep you straight; but when I'm well, I DO hope you'll
pay some heed to my words.” Reggie, who had dropped polo, and dinners,
and tennis, and all to attend to Riley, said that he was penitent and
settled Riley's head on the pillow and heard him fret and contradict in
hard, dry, hacking whispers, without a sign of impatience. This at the
end of a heavy day's office work, doing double duty, in the latter half
of June.
When the new Accountant came, Reggie told him the facts of the case, and
announced to Riley that he had a guest staying with him. Riley said that
he might have had more consideration than to entertain his “doubtful
friends” at such a time. Reggie made Carron, the new Accountant, sleep
at the Club in consequence. Carron's arrival took some of the heavy work
off his shoulders, and he had time to attend to Riley's exactions--to
explain, soothe, invent, and settle and resettle the poor wretch in
bed, and to forge complimentary letters from Calcutta. At the end of the
first month, Riley wished to send some money home to his mother. Reggie
sent the draft. At the end of the second month, Riley's salary came in
just the same. Reggie paid it out of his own pocket; and, with it, wrote
Riley a beautiful letter from the Directors.
Riley was very ill indeed, but the flame of his life burnt unsteadily.
Now and then he would be cheerful and confident about the future,
sketching plans for going Home and seeing his mother. Reggie listened
patiently when the office work was over, and encouraged him.
At other times Riley insisted on Reggie's reading the Bible and grim
“Methody” tracts to him. Out of these tracts he pointed morals directed
at his Manager. But he always found time to worry Reggie about the
working of the Bank, and to show him where the weak points lay.
This in-door, sick-room life and constant strains wore Reggie down a
good deal, and shook his nerves, and lowered his billiard-play by forty
points. But the business of the Bank, and the business of the sick-room,
had to go on, though the glass was 116 degrees in the shade.
At the end of the third month, Riley was sinking fast, and had begun
to realize that he was very sick. But the conceit that made him worry
Reggie, kept him from believing the worst. “He wants some sort of mental
stimulant if he is to drag on,” said the doctor. “Keep him interested in
life if you care about his living.” So Riley, contrary to all the laws
of business and the finance, received a 25-per-cent, rise of salary from
the Directors. The “mental stimulant” succeeded beautifully. Riley was
happy and cheerful, and, as is often the case in consumption, healthiest
in mind when the body was weakest. He lingered for a full month,
snarling and fretting about the Bank, talking of the future, hearing the
Bible read, lecturing Reggie on sin, and wondering when he would be able
to move abroad.
But at the end of September, one mercilessly hot evening, he rose up in
his bed with a little gasp, and said quickly to Reggie:--“Mr. Burke, I
am going to die. I know it in myself. My chest is all hollow inside, and
there's nothing to breathe with. To the best of my knowledge I have done
nowt”--he was returning to the talk of his boyhood--“to lie heavy on my
conscience. God be thanked, I have been preserved from the grosser forms
of sin; and I counsel YOU, Mr. Burke....”