CHAPTER I.

Transcriber's Notes:

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http://books.google.com/books?id=QScXAAAAYAAJ

(Harvard University Library)

ON THE FACE OF THE WATERS

ON THE FACE OF

THE WATERS

A TALE OF THE MUTINY

BY

FLORA ANNIE STEEL

AUTHOR OF "MISS STUART'S LEGACY," "THE

FLOWER OF FORGIVENESS," ETC., ETC.

New York

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

1914

Copyright, 1896,

By PAUL R. REYNOLDS.

Copyright, 1897,

By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

* * *

First Edition January, 1897. Reprinted January three times, February

twice, March three times, April twice, May, July, September, November,

1897; May, October, 1898; June, 1903; November, 1909; September, 1911;

July, 1914.

Norwood Press:

Berwick & Smith Co., Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

PREFACE.

A word of explanation is needed for this book, which, in attempting to

be at once a story and a history, probably fails in either aim.

That, however, is for the reader to say. As the writer, I have only to

point out where my history ends, my story begins, and clear the way

for criticism. Briefly, then, I have not allowed fiction to interfere

with fact in the slightest degree. The reader may rest assured that

every incident bearing in the remotest degree on the Indian Mutiny, or

on the part which real men took in it, is scrupulously exact, even to

the date, the hour, the scene, the very weather. Nor have I allowed

the actual actors in the great tragedy to say a word regarding it

which is not to be found in the accounts of eye-witnesses, or in their

own writings.

In like manner, the account of the sham court at Delhi--which I have

drawn chiefly from the lips of those who saw it--is pure history; and

the picturesque group of schemers and dupes--all of whom have passed

to their account--did not need a single touch of fancy in its

presentment. Even the story of Abool-Bukr and Newâsi is true; save

that I have supplied a cause for an estrangement, which undoubtedly

did come to a companionship of which none speak evil. So much for my

facts.

Regarding my fiction: An Englishwoman _was_ concealed in Delhi, in the

house of an Afghan, and succeeded in escaping to the Ridge just before

the siege. I have imagined another; that is all. I mention this

because it may possibly be said that the incident is incredible.

And now a word for my title. I have chosen it because when you

ask an uneducated native of India why the Great Rebellion came to

pass, he will, in nine cases out of ten, reply, "God knows! He

sent a Breath into the World." From this to a Spirit moving on the

face of the Waters is not far. For the rest I have tried to give a

photograph--that is, a picture in which the differentiation caused by

color is left out--of a time which neither the fair race or the dark

race is ever likely to quite forget or forgive.

That they may come nearer to the latter is the object with which this

book has been written.

F. A. STEEL.

CONTENTS.

BOOK I.

Thistledown and Gossamer

CHAPTER

I. Going! Going! Gone!

II. Home, Sweet Home.

III. The Great Gulf Fixed.

IV. Tape And Sealing-Wax.

V. Bravo!

VI. The Gift of Many Faces.

BOOK II.

The Blowing Of The Bubble.

I. In the Palace.

II. In the City.

III. On the Ridge.

IV. In the Village.

V. In the Residency.

VI. The Yellow Fakir.

VII. The Word Went Forth.

BOOK III.

From Dusk to Dawn.

I. Night.

II. Dawn.

III. Daylight.

IV. Noon.

V. Sunset.

VI. Dusk.

BOOK IV.

"Such Stuff as Dreams are Made of."

I. The Death-Pledge.

II. Peace! Peace!

III. The Challenge.

IV. Bugles and Fifes.

V. The Drum Ecclesiastic.

VI. Vox Humana.

BOOK V.

"There Arose a Man."

I. Forward!

II. Bits, Bridles, Spurs.

III. The Beginning of the End.

IV. At Last.

V. Through the Walls.

VI. Rewards and Punishments.

BOOK VI.

Appendix A.

Appendix B.

ON THE FACE OF THE WATERS

ON THE FACE OF THE WATERS.

BOOK I.

_THISTLEDOWN AND GOSSAMER_.

CHAPTER I.

GOING! GOING! GONE!

"Going! Going! Gone!"

The Western phrase echoed over the Eastern scene without a trace of

doubt in its calm assumption of finality. It was followed by a pause,

during which, despite the crowd thronging the wide plain, the only

recognizable sound was the vexed yawning purr of a tiger impatient for

its prey. It shuddered through the sunshine, strangely out of keeping

with the multitude of men gathered together in silent security; but on

that March evening of the year 1856, when the long shadows of the

surrounding trees had begun to invade the sunlit levels of grass by

the river, at Lucknow, the lately deposed King of Oude's menagerie was

being auctioned. It had followed all his other property to the hammer,

and a perfect Noah's Ark of wild beasts was waiting doubtfully for a

change of masters.

"Going! Going! Gone!"

Those three cabalistic words, shibboleth of a whole hemisphere's greed

of gain, had just transferred the proprietary rights in an old tusker

elephant for the sum of eighteenpence. It is not a large price to pay

for a leviathan, even if he be lame, as this one was. Yet the new

owner looked at his purchase distastefully, and even the auctioneer

sought support in a gulp of brandy and water.

"Fetch up them pollies, Tom," he said in a dejected whisper to a

soldier, who, with others of the fatigue party on duty, was trying to

hustle refractory lots into position. "They'll be a change after

elephants--go off lighter like. Then there's some of them La

Martiniery boys comin' down again as ran up the fightin' rams this

mornin'. Wonder wot the 'ead master said! But boys is allowed birds,

and Lord knows we want to be a bit brisker than we 'ave bin with

_guj-putti_. But there! it's slave-drivin' to screw bids for beasts as

eats hunder-weights out of poor devils as 'aven't enough for

themselves, or a notion of business as business."

He shook his head resentfully yet compassionately over the impassive

dark faces around. He spoke as an auctioneer; yet he gave expression

to a very common feeling which in the early fifties, when the

commercial instincts of the West met the uncommercial ones of the East

in open market for the first time, sharpened the antagonism of race

immensely; that inevitable antagonism when the creed of one people is

that Time is Money, of the other that Time is Naught.

From either standpoint, however, the auction going on down by the

river Goomtee was confusing; even to those who, knowing the causes

which had led up to it--the unmentionable atrocities, the crass

incapacity on the one hand, the unsanctioned treaties and craze for

civilization on the other--were conscious of a distinct flavor of

Sodom and Gomorrah, the Ark of the Covenant, and the Deluge all

combined, as they watched the just and yet unjust retribution going

on. But such spectators were few, even in the outer fringe of English

onlookers pausing in their evening drive or ride to gratify their

curiosity. The long reports and replies regarding the annexation of

Oude which filled the office boxes of the elect were unknown to them,

so they took the affair as they found it. The King, for some reason

satisfactory to the authorities, had been exiled, majesty being thus

vested in the representatives of the annexing race: that is, in

themselves. A position which comes naturally to most Englishmen.

To the silent crowds closing round the auctioneer's table the affair

was simple also. The King, for some unsatisfactory reason, had been

ousted from his own. His goods and chattels were being sold. The

valuable ones had been knocked down, for a mere song--just to keep up

the farce of sale--to the Huzoors. The rubbish--lame elephants and

such like--was being sold to them; more or less against their will,

since who could forbear bidding sixpence for a whole leviathan? That

this was in a measure inevitable, that these new-come sahibs were

bound to supply their wants cheaply when a whole posse of carriages

and horses, cattle and furniture was thrown on an otherwise supplied

market, did not, of course, occur to those who watched the hammer fall

to that strange new cry of the strange new master. When does such

philosophy occur to crowds? So when the waning light closed each day's

sale and the people drifted back cityward over the boat-bridge they

were no longer silent. They had tales to tell of how much the barouche

and pair, or the Arab charger, had cost the King when he bought it.

But then Wajeed Ali, with all his faults, had never been a bargainer.

He had spent his revenues right royally, thus giving ease to many. So

one could tell of a purse of gold flung at a beggar, another a life

pension granted to a tailor for inventing a new way of sewing spangles

to a waistcoat; for there had been no lack of the insensate

munificence in which lies the Oriental test of royalty, about the King

of Oude's reign.

Despite this talk, however, the talkers returned day after day to

watch the auction; and on this, the last one, the grassy plain down by

the Goomtee was peaceful and silent as ever save for the occasional

cry of an affrighted hungry beast. The sun sent golden gleams over the

short turf worn to dustiness by crowding feet, and the long curves of

the river, losing themselves on either side among green fields and

mango trees, shone like a burnished shield. On the opposite bank, its

minarets showing fragile as cut paper against the sky, rose the

Chutter Munzil--the deposed King's favorite palace. Behind it, above

the belt of trees dividing the high Residency gardens from the maze of

houses and hovels still occupied by the hangers-on to the late Court,

the English flag drooped lazily in the calm floods of yellow light.

For the rest, were dense dark groves following the glistening curve of

the river, and gardens gravely gay in pillars of white _chum-baeli_

creeper and cypress, long prim lines of latticed walls, and hedges of

scarlet hibiscus. Here and there above the trees, the dome of a mosque

or the minaret of a mausoleum told that the town of Lucknow, scattered

yet coherent, lay among the groves. The most profligate town in India

which by one stroke of an English pen had just been deprived of the

_raison-d'être_ of its profligacy, and been bidden to live as best it

could in cleanly, courtless poverty.

So, already, there were thousands of workmen in it, innocent enough

panderers in the past to luxurious vice, who were feeling the pinch of

hunger from lack of employment; and there were those past employers

also, deprived now of pensions and offices, with a bankrupt future

before them. But Lucknow had a keener grievance than these in the new

tax on opium, the drug which helps men to bear hunger and bankruptcy;

so, as the auctioneer said, it was not a place in which to expect

brisk bidding for wild beasts with large appetites. But the parrots

roused a faint interest, and the crowd laughed suddenly at the

fluttering screams of a red and blue macaw, as it was tossed from hand

to hand, on its way to the surprised and reluctant purchaser who had

bid a farthing for it out of sheer idleness.

"Another mouth to feed, Shumshu!" jeered a fellow butcher, as he

literally flung the bird at a neighbor's head. "Rather he than I,"

laughed the recipient, continuing the fling. "_Ari!_ Shumshu, take thy

baby. Well caught, brother! but what will thy house say?"

"That I have made a fat bargain," retorted the big, coarse owner

coolly, as he wrung the bird's neck, and twirled it, a quivering tuft

of bright feathers and choking cries, above his head. "Thou'lt buy no

meat at a farthing a pound, even from my shop, I'll swear, and this

bird weighs two, and is delicate as chicken."

The laugh which answered the sally held a faint scream, not wholly

genuine in its ring. It came from the edge of the crowd, where two

English riders had paused to see what the fun was about.

"Cruel devils, aren't they, Allie?" said one, a tall, fair man whose

good looks were at once made and marred by heaviness of feature. "Why!

you've turned pale despite the rouge!" His tone was full of not

over-respectful raillery; his bold, bloodshot eyes met his companion's

innocent looking ones with careless admiration.

"Don't be a fool, Erlton," she replied promptly; and the even,

somewhat hard pitch of her voice did not match the extreme softness of

her small, childish face. "You know I don't rouge; or you ought to.

And it was horrible, in its way."

"Only what your ladyship's cook does to your ladyship's fowls,"

retorted Major Erlton. "You don't _see_ it done, that's all the

difference. It is a cruel world, Mrs. Gissing, the sex is the cruelest

thing in it, and you, as I'm always telling you, are the cruelest of

your sex."

His manner was detestable, but little Mrs. Gissing laughed again. She

had not a fine taste in such matters; perhaps because she had no taste

for them at all. So, in the middle of the laugh, her attention shifted

to the big white cockatoo which formed the next lot. It had a most

rumpled and dejected appearance as it tried to keep its balance on the

ring which the soldier assistant swung backward and forward

boisterously.

"Do look at that ridiculous bird!" she exclaimed, "Did you ever see

any creature look so foolish?"

It did, undoubtedly, with its wrinkled gray eyelids closed in agonized

effort, its clattering gray beak bobbing rhythmically toward its scaly

gray legs. It roused the auctioneer from his depression into beginning

in grand style. "Now, then, gentlemen! This is a real treat, indeed! A

cockatoo, old as Methusalem and twice as wise. It speaks, I'll be

bound. Says 'is prayers--look at 'im gemyflexing! and maybe he swears

a bit like the rest of us. Any gentleman bid a rupee!--a eight

annas?--a four annas? Come, gentlemen!"

"One anna," called Mrs. Gissing, with a coquettish nod to the big

Major, and a loud aside: "Cruel I may be to you, sir, but I'll give

that to save the poor brute from having its neck wrung."

"Two annas!" There was a stress of eagerness in the new voice which

made many in the crowd look whence it came. The speaker was a lean old

man wearing a faded green turban, who had edged himself close to the

auctioneer's table and stood with upturned eyes watching the bird

anxiously. He had the face of an enthusiast, keen, remorseless,

despite its look of ascetic patience.

"Three annas!" Alice Gissing's advance came with another nod at her

big admirer.

"Four annas!" The reply was quick as an echo.

A vexed surprise showed on the pretty babyish face. "What an

impertinent wretch! Eight annas--do you hear?--eight annas!"

The auctioneer bowed effusively. "Eight annas bid for a cockatoo as

says----" he paused cautiously, for the bidding was brisk enough

without exaggeration. "Eight annas once--twice--Going! going----"

"One rupee!"

Mrs. Gissing gave a petulant jag to her rein. "Oh! come away, Erlton,

my charity doesn't run to rupees."

But her companion's face, never a very amiable one, had darkened with

temper. "D----n the impudent devil," he muttered savagely, before

raising his voice to call: "Two rupees!"

"Five!" There was no hesitation still; only an almost clamorous

anxiety in the worn old voice.

"Ten!" Major Erlton's had lost its first heat, and settled into a dull

decision which made the auctioneer turn to him, hammer in hand. Yet

the echo was not wanting.

"Fifteen!"

The Englishman's horse backed as if its master's hand lay heavy on the

bit. There was a pause, during which that shuddering cough of the

hungry tiger quavered through the calm flood of sunshine, in which the

crowd stood silently, patiently.

"Fifteen rupees," began the auctioneer reluctantly, his sympathies

outraged, "Fifteen once, twice----"

Then Alice Gissing laughed. The woman's laugh of derision which is

responsible for so much.

"Fifty rupees," said Major Erlton at once.

The old man in the green turban turned swiftly; turned for the first

time to look at his adversary, and in his face was intolerant hatred

mingled with self-pity; the look of one who, knowing that he has

justice on his side, knows also that he is defeated.

"Thank _you_, sir," caught up the auctioneer. "Fifty once, twice,

thrice! Hand the bird over, Tom. Put it down, sir, I suppose, with the

other things?"

Major Erlton nodded sulkily. He was already beginning to wonder why he

had bought the brute. Meanwhile Tom, still swinging the cockatoo

derisively, had jumped from the table into the crowd round it as if

the sea of heads was non-existent; being justified of his rashness by

its prompt yielding of foothold as he elbowed his way outward,

shouting for room good-naturedly, and answered by swift smiles and

swifter obedience. Yet both were curiously silent; so that Mrs.

Gissing's voice, wondering what on earth Herbert was going to do with

the creature now that he had bought it, was distinctly audible.

"Give it to you, of course," he replied moodily. "You can wring its

neck if you choose, Allie. You are cruel enough for that, I dare say."

The thought of the fifty rupees wasted was rankling fiercely; fifty

rupees! when he would be hard put to it for a penny if he didn't pull

off the next race. Fifty rupees! because a woman laughed!

But Mrs. Gissing was laughing again. "I shan't do anything of the

kind. I shall give it to your wife, Major Erlton. I'm sure she must be

dull all alone; and then she loves prayers!" the absolute effrontery

of the speech was toned down by her indifferent expression. "Here,

sergeant!" she went on, "hold the bird up a bit higher, please, I want

to see if it is worth all that money. Gracious! what a hideous brute!"

It was, in truth; save for the large gold-circled eyes, like strange

gems, which opened suddenly as the swinging ceased. They seemed to

look at the dainty little figure taking it in; and then, in an

instant, the dejected feathers were afluff, the wings outspread, the

flame-colored crest, unseen before, raised like a fiery flag as the

bird gave an ear-piercing scream.

"_Deen! Deen! Futteh Mohammed_." (For the Faith! For the Faith!

Victory to Mohammed.)

The war cry of the fiercest of all faiths was unmistakable; the first

two syllables cutting the air, keen as a knife, the last with the

blare as of a trumpet in them. And following close on their heels came

an indescribable sound, like the answering vibration of a church to

the last deep organ-note. It was a faint murmur from the crowd till

then so silent.

"D----n the bird! Hold it back, man! Loosen the curb, Allie, for God's

sake, or the brute will be over with you!"

Herbert Erlton's voice was sharp with anxiety as he reined his own

horse savagely out of the way of his companion's, which, frightened at

the unexpected commotion, was rearing badly.

"All right," she called; there was a little more color on her

child-like face, a firmer set of her smiling mouth: that was all. But

the hunting crop she carried fell in one savage cut after another on

the startled horse's quarters. It plunged madly, only to meet the bit

and a dig of the spur. So, after two or three unavailing attempts to

unseat her, it stood still with pricked ears and protesting snorts.

"Well sat, Allie! By George, you can ride! I do like to see pluck in a

woman; especially in a pretty one." The Major's temper and his fears

had vanished alike in his admiration. Mrs. Gissing looked at him

curiously.

"Did you think I was a coward?" she asked lightly; and then she

laughed. "I'm not so bad as all that. But look! There is your wife

coming along in the new victoria--it's an awfully stylish turn-out,

Herbert; I wish Gissing would give me one like it. I suppose she has

been to church. It's Lent or something, isn't it? Anyhow, she can take

that screaming beast home."

"You're not----" began the Major, but Mrs. Gissing had already ridden

up to the carriage, making it impossible for the solitary occupant to

avoid giving the order to stop. She was rather a pale woman, who

leaned listlessly among the cushions.

"Good evening, Mrs. Erlton," said the little lady, "been, as you see,

for a ride. But we were thinking of you and hoping you would pray for

us in church."

Kate Erlton's eyebrows went up, as they had a trick of doing when she

was scornful. "I am only on my way thither as yet," she replied; "so

that now I am aware of your wishes I can attend to them."

The obvious implication roused the aggressor to greater recklessness.

"Thanks! but we really deserve something, for we have been buying a

parrot for you. Erlton paid a whole fifty rupees for it because it

said its prayers and he thought you would like it!"

"That was very kind of Major Erlton,"--there was a fine irony in the

title,--"but, as he knows, I'm not fond of things with gay feathers

and loud voices."

The man, listening, moved his feet restlessly in his stirrups. It was

too bad of Allie to provoke these sparring matches. Foolish, too,

since Kate's tongue was sharp when she chose to rouse herself. None

sharper, in his opinion.

"If you don't want the bird," he interrupted shortly, "tell the groom

to wring its neck."

Mrs. Gissing looked at him, her reproachful blue eyes perfect wells of

simplicity. "Wring its neck! How can you, when you paid all that money

to save it from being killed! That is the real story, Mrs. Erlton; it

is indeed----"

He interrupted his wife's quick glance of interest impatiently. "The

main point being that I had, or shall have to pay fifty rupees--which

I must get. So I must be off to the racecourse if I don't want to be

posted. I ought to have been there a quarter of an hour ago; should

have been but for that confounded bird. Are you coming, Mrs. Gissing,

or not?"

"Now, Erlton!" she replied, "don't be stupid. As if he didn't know,

Mrs. Erlton, that I am every bit as much interested as he is in the

match with that trainer man!--what's his name, Erlton? Greyman--isn't

it? I have endless gloves on it, sir, so of course I'm coming to see

fair play."

Major Erlton shot a rapid glance at her, as if to see what she really

meant; then muttered something angrily about chaff as, with a dig of

his heels, he swung his horse round to the side of hers.

Kate Erlton watched their figures disappear behind the trees, then

turned indifferently to the groom who was waiting for orders with the

cockatoo. But she started visibly in finding herself face to face with

a semi-circle of spectators which had gathered about the figure of an

old man in a faded green turban who stood close beside the groom, and

who, seeing her turn, salaamed, and with clasped hands began an appeal

of some sort. So much she gathered from his bright eyes, his tone; but

no more, and all unconsciously she drew back to the furthest corner of

the carriage, as if to escape from what she did not understand, and

therefore did not like. That, indeed, was her attitude toward all

things native. Yet at times, as now, she felt a dim regret at her own

ignorance. What did he want? What were they thinking of, those dark,

incomprehensible faces closing closer and closer round her? What could

they be thinking of, uncivilized, heathen, as they were? tied to

hateful, horrible beliefs and customs, unmentionable thoughts; so the

innate repulsion of the alien overpowered her dim desire to be kind.

"Drive on!" she called in her clear, soft voice, "drive on to the

church."

The grooms, new taken from royal employ,--for the victoria had been

one of the spoils of the auction,--began their arrogant shouting to

the crowd; the coachman, treating it also in royal fashion, cut at his

horses regardless of their plunging. So after an instant's scurry and

flurry, a space was cleared, and the carriage rolled off. The old man,

left standing alone, looked after it silently for a moment, then flung

his arms skyward.

"O God, reward them! reward them to the uttermost!" The appeal,

however, seemed too indefinite for solace, and he turned for closer

sympathy to the crowd. "The bird is mine, brothers! I lent it to the

King, to teach his the Cry-of-Faith that I had taught it. But the

Huzoors would not listen, or they would not understand. It was a

little thing to them! So I brought all I had, thinking to buy mine own

again. But yonder hell-doomed infidel hath it for nothing--for he paid

nothing; and here--here is _my_ money!" He drew a little bag from his

breast and held it up with shaking hand.

"For nothing!" echoed the crowd, seizing on what interested it most.

"For sure he paid nothing."

The murmur, spreading from man to man in doubt, wonder, assertion, was

interrupted by a voice with the resonance and calm in it of one

accustomed to listeners. "Nay! not for nothing. Have patience. The

bird may yet give the Great Cry in the house of the thief. I,

Ahmed-oolah, the dust of the feet of the Most High, say it. Have

patience. God settles the accounts of men."

"It is the Moulvie," whispered some, as the gaunt, hollow-eyed speaker

moved out of the crowd, a good head and shoulders taller than most

there. "The Moulvie from Fyzabad. He preaches in the big Mosque

to-night, and half the city goes to hear him." The whispering voices

formed a background to the recurring cry of the auctioneer, "Going!

Going! Gone!" as lot after lot fell to the hammer, while the crowd

listened to both, or drifted cityward with the memory of them

lingering insistently.

"Going! Going! Gone!" What was going? Everything, if tales were true;

and there were so many tales nowadays. Of news flashed faster by wires

than any, even the gods themselves, could flash it; of carriages,

fire-fed, bringing God knows what grain from God knows where! Could a

body eat of it and not be polluted? Could the children read the school

books and not be apostate? Burning questions these, not to be answered

lightly. And as the people, drifting homeward in the sunset, asked

them, other sounds assailed their ears. The long-drawn chant of the

call to prayer from the Mohammedan mosques, the clashing of gongs from

the Hindoo temples, the solitary clang of the Christian church bell.

Diverse, yet similar in this, that each called Life to face Death, not

as an end, but as a beginning; called with more insistence than usual

in the church, where a special missionary service was being held, at

which a well-known worker in the vineyard was to give an address on

the duty of a faithful soldier of Christ in a heathen land. With

greater authority in the mosque also, where the Moulvie was to lay

down the law for each soldier of the faith in an age of unbelief and

change. Only in the Hindoo temples the circling lights flickered as

ever, and there was neither waxing nor waning of worship as mortality

drifted in, and drifted out, hiding the rude stone symbol of

regeneration with their chaplets of flowers; the symbol of

Life-in-Death, of Death-in-Life. The cult of the Inevitable.

There was no light in these dark shrines, save the circling cresset;

none, save the dim reflection of dusk from white marble, in the mosque

where the Moulvie's sonorous voice sent the broad Arabic vowels

rebounding from dome to dome. But in the church there was a blaze of

lamps, and the soldierly figure at the reading desk showed clear to

the men and women listening leisurely in the cushioned pews. Yet the

words were stirring enough; there was no lack of directness in them.

Kate Erlton, resting her chin on her hand, kept her eyes on the

speaker closely as his voice rose in a final confession of the faith

that was in him.

"I conceive it is ever the hope and aim of a true Christian that his

Lord should make him the happy instrument of rescuing his neighbor

from eternal damnation. In this belief I find it my duty to be instant

in season and out of season, speaking to all, sepoys as well as

civilians, making no distinction of persons or place, since with the

Lord there are no such distinctions. In the temporal matters I act

under the orders of my earthly superior, but in spiritual matters I

own no allegiance save to Christ. So, in trying to convert my sepoys,

I act as a Christian soldier under Christ, and thus, by keeping the

temporal and spiritual capacities in which I have to act clearly under

their respective heads, I render unto Cæsar the things that are

Cæsar's, to God the things that are God's."[1]

There was a little rustle of satisfaction and relief from the pews,

the hymn closing the service went with a swing, and the congregation,

trooping out into the scented evening air, fell to admiring the

address.

"And he looked so handsome and soldierly, didn't he?" said one voice

with a cadence of sheer comfortableness in it as the owner nestled

back in the barouche.

"Quite charming!" assented another. "And to think of a man like that,

brave as a lion, submitting to be hustled off his own parade ground

because his sepoys objected to his preaching. It is an example to us

all!"

"I wouldn't give much for the discipline of his regiment," began Kate

Erlton impulsively, then paused, certain of her hearers, uncertain of

herself; for she was of those women who use religion chiefly as an

anodyne for the heartache, leaving her intellect to take care of

itself. With the result that it revenged itself, as now, by sudden

flashes of reason which left her helpless before her own common sense.

"My dear Mrs. Erlton!" came a shocked coo, "discipline or no

discipline, we are surely bound to fight the good---- Gracious

heavens! what _is_ that?"

It was the cockatoo. Roused from a doze by the movement of Kate's

carriage toward the church-door, it had dashed at once into the

war-cry--"_Deen! Deen! Futteh Mohammed!_"

The appositeness of the interruption, however, was quite lost on the

ladies, who were too ignorant to recognize it; so their alarm ended in

a laugh, and the suggestion that the bird would be a noisy pet.

Thus, with worldly gossip coming to fill the widening spaces in their

complacent piety, they drove homeward together where the curving river

shimmered faintly in the dark, or through scented gardens where the

orange-blossom showed as faintly among the leaves, like star-dust on a

dark sky.

But Kate Erlton drove alone, as she generally did. She was one of

those women whose refinement stands in their way; who are _gourmets_

of life, failing to see that the very fastidiousness of their palate

argues a keener delight in its pleasures than that of those who take

them more simply, perhaps more coarsely. And as she drove, her mind

diverted listlessly to the semicircle of dark faces she had left

unanswered. What had they wanted? Nothing worth hearing, no doubt!

Nothing was worth much in this weary land of exile where the

heart-hunger for one little face and voice gnawed at your vitality day

and night. For Kate Erlton set down all her discontent to the fact

that she was separated from her boy. Yet she had sent him home of her

own free will to keep him from growing up in the least like his

father. And she had stayed with that father simply to keep him within

the pale of respectability for the boy's sake. That was what she told

herself. She allowed nothing for her own disappointment; nothing for

the keen craving for sentiment which lay behind her refinement. All

she asked from fate was that the future might be no worse than the

past; so that she could keep up the fiction to the end.

And as she drove, a sudden sound made her start, for--soldier's wife

though she was--the report of a rifle always set her heart a-beating.

Then from the darkness came a long-drawn howl; for over on the other

side of the river they were beginning to shoot down the hungry beasts

which all through the long sunny day had found no master.

The barter of _their_ lives was complete. The last "Going! Going!

Gone!" had come, and they had passed to settle the account elsewhere.

So, amid this dropping fire of kindly meant destruction, the night

fell soft and warm over the shimmering river and the scented gardens

with the town hidden in their midst.

CHAPTER II.

HOME, SWEET HOME?

"You sent for me, I believe, Mrs. Erlton."

"Yes, Mr. Greyman, I sent for you."

Both voices came reluctantly into the persistent cooing of doves which

filled the room, for the birds were perched among a coral begonia

overhanging the veranda. But the man had so far the best of it in the

difficult interview which was evidently beginning, in that he stood

with his back to the French window through which he had just entered;

his face, therefore, was in shadow. Hers, as she paused, arrested by

surprise, faced the light. For Kate Erlton, when she sent for James

Greyman in the hopes of bribing him to silence regarding the match

which had been run the evening before between his horse and her

husband's, had not expected to see a gentleman in the person of an

ex-jockey, trainer, and general hanger-on to the late King's stables.

The diamonds with which she had meant to purchase honor lay on the

table, but this man would not take diamonds. What would he take? She

scanned his face anxiously, yet with a certain relief in her

disappointment; for the clean-shaven contours were fine, if a trifle

stern; and the mouth, barely hidden by a slight mustache, was

thin-lipped, well cut.

"Yes! I sent for you," she continued--and the even confidence of her

own voice surprised her. "I meant to ask how much you would want to

keep this miserable business quiet; but now----" She paused, and her

hand, which had been resting on the center table, shifted its position

to push aside the jewel-case; as if that were sufficient explanation.

"But now?" he echoed formally, though his eyes followed the action.

She raised hers to his, looking him full in the face. They were

beautiful eyes, and their cold gray blue, with the northern glint of

steel in it, gave James Greyman an odd thrill. He had not looked into

eyes like these for many a long year. Not since, in a room just like

this one, homely and English in every twist and turn of foreign

flowers and furniture, he had ruined his life for a pair of eyes, as

coldly pure as these, to look at. He did not mean to do it again.

"But now I can only ask you to be kind, and generous, Mr. Greyman! I

want you to save my husband from the disgrace your claim must

bring--if you press it."

Once more the monotonous cooing from the outside filled the darkness

and the light of the large, lofty room. For it was curiously dark in

the raftered roof and the distant corners; curiously light in the

great bars of golden sunshine slanting across the floor. In one of

them James Greyman stood, a dark silhouette against an arch of pale

blue sky, wreathed by the climbing begonia. He was a man of about

forty, looking younger than his age, taller than his real height, by

reason of his beardless face and the extreme ease and grace of his

figure. He was burned brown as a native by constant exposure to the

sun; but as he stooped to pick up his glove which had slipped from his

hold, a rim of white showed above his wrist.

"So I supposed; but why should I save him?" he said briefly. The

question, thus crudely put, left her without reply for a minute;

during which he waited. Then, with a new tinge of softness in his

voice, he went on: "It was a mistake to send for me. I thought so at

the time, though, of course, I had no option. But now----"

"But now?" she echoed in her turn.

"There is nothing to be done save to go away again." He turned at the

words, but she stopped him by a gesture.

"Is there not?" she asked. "I think there is, and so will you if you

understand--if you will wait and let me speak." His evident impatience

made her add quickly, "You can at least do so much for me, surely?"

There was a quiver in her voice now, and it surprised her as her

previous calm had done; for what was this man to her that his

unkindness should give pain?

"Certainly," he said, pausing at once, "but I understand too much, and

I cannot see the use of raking up details. You know them--or think

you do. Either way they do not alter the plain fact that I cannot

help--because I would not if I could. That sounds brutal; but,

unfortunately, it is true. And it is best to tell the truth, as far as

it can be told."

A faint smile curved her lips. "That is not far. If you will wait I

will tell you the truth to the bitter end."

He looked at her with sudden interest, for her pride attracted

him. She was not in the least pretty; she might be any age from

five-and-twenty to five-and-thirty. And she--well! she was a lady. But

would she tell the truth? Women, even ladies, seldom did; still he

must wait and hear what she had to say.

"I sent for you," she began, "because, knowing you were an adventurer,

a man who had had to leave the army under a cloud--in disgrace----"

He stared at her blankly. Here was the truth about himself at any

rate!

"I thought, naturally, you would be a man who would take a bribe.

There are diamonds in that case; for money is scarce in this house."

She paused, to gain firmness for what came next. "I was keeping them

for the boy. I have a son in England and he will have to go to school

soon; but I thought it better to save his father's reputation instead.

They are fine diamonds"--she drew the case closer and opened it--the

sunshine, streaming in, caught the facets of the stones, turning them

to liquid light. "You needn't tell me they are no use," she went on

quickly, as he seemed about to speak; "I am not stupid; but that has

nothing to do with the question. I want you to save my husband--don't

interrupt me, please, for I do want you to understand, and I will tell

you the truth. You asked me why? and you think, no doubt, that he does

not deserve to be saved. Do you think I do not know that? Mr. Greyman!

a wife knows more of her husband than anyone else can do; and I have

known for so many years."

A sudden softness came into her hearer's eyes. That was true at any

rate. She must know many things of which she could not speak; a sort

of horror at what she must know, with a man like Major Erlton as her

husband, held him silent.

"Yet I have saved him so far," she went on, "but if what happened

yesterday becomes public property all my trouble is in vain. He will

have to leave the regiment----"

"He is not the first man, as you were kind enough to mention just

now," interrupted James Greyman, "who has had to leave the army under

a cloud. He would survive it--as others have done."

"I was not thinking of him at all," she replied quietly. "I was

thinking of my son; my only son."

"There are other only sons also, Mrs. Erlton," he retorted. "I was my

mother's, but I don't think the fact was taken into consideration by

the court-martial. Why should I be more lenient? You have come to the

wrong person when you come to me for charity or consideration. None

was shown to me."

"Perhaps because you did not need it," she said quickly.

"Not need it?"

"Many a man falls under the shadow of a cloud blamelessly. What do

they want with charity?"

He rose swiftly and so, facing the light again, stood looking

out into it. "I am obliged to you," he said after a pause. "Whether

you are right or wrong doesn't affect the question from which we

have wandered. Except--" he turned to her again with a certain

eagerness--"Mrs. Erlton! You say you are prepared to tell the truth to

the bitter end; then for Heaven's sake let us have it for once in our

lives. You never saw me before, nor I you. It is not likely we shall

ever meet again. So we can speak without a past or a future tense. You

ask me to save your husband from the consequences of his own cheating.

I ask why? Why should I sacrifice myself? Why should I suffer? for,

mark you, there were heavy bets----"

"There are the diamonds," she interrupted, pointing to them; their

gleam was scarcely brighter than her scornful eyes.

He gave a half smile. "Doubtless there are the diamonds! I can have my

equivalent, so far, if I choose; but I don't choose. It does not suit

me personally; so that is settled. I can't do this thing, then, to

please myself. Now, let us go on. You are a religious woman, I think,

Mrs. Erlton--you have the look of one. Then you will say that I should

remember my own frailty, and forgive as I would be forgiven. Mrs.

Erlton! I am no better than most men, no doubt, but I never remember

cheating at cards or pulling a horse as your husband does--it is the

brutal truth between us, remember. And if you tell me I'm bound to

protect a man from the natural punishment of a great crime because

I've stolen a pin, I say you are wrong. That theory won't hold water.

If our own faults, even our own crimes, are to make us tender over

these things in others, there must be--what, if I remember right, my

Colenso used to call an arithmetical progression in error until the

Day of Judgment; for the odds on sin would rise with every crime. I

don't believe in mercy, Mrs. Erlton. I never did. Justice doesn't

need it. So let us leave religion alone too, and come to other

things--altruism--charity--what you will. Now who will benefit by my

silence? Will you? You said just now that a wife knows more of her

husband than a stranger can. I well believe it. That is why I ask you

to tell me frankly, if you really think that a continuance of the life

you lead with him can benefit you?" He leaned over the table, resting

his head on his hand, his eyes on hers, and then added in a lower

voice, "The brutal truth, please. Not as a woman to man, or, for the

matter of that, woman to woman; but soul to soul, if there be such a

thing."

She turned away from him and shook her head. "It is for the boy's

sake," she said in muffled tones. "It will be better for him, surely."

"The boy," he echoed, rising with a sense of relief. She had not lied,

this woman with the beautiful eyes; she had simply shut the door in

his face. "You have a portrait of him, no doubt, somewhere. I should

like to see it. Is that it, over the mantelpiece?"

He walked over to a colored photograph, and stood looking at it

silently, his hands--holding his hunting crop--clasped loosely behind

his back. Kate noticed them even in her anxiety; for they were

noticeable, nervous, fine-cut hands, matching the figure.

"He is not the least like you. He is the very image of his father,"

came the verdict. "What right have you to suppose that anything you or

I can do now will overcome the initial fact that the boy is your

husband's son, any more than it will ease you of the responsibility of

having chosen such a father for the boy?"

She gave a quick cry, more of pain than anger, and hid her face on the

table in sudden despair.

"You are very cruel," she said indistinctly.

He walked back toward her, remorseful at the sight of her miserable

self-abasement. He had not meant to hit so hard, being accustomed

himself to facing facts without flinching.

"Yes! I am cruel; but a life like mine doesn't make a man gentle. And

I don't see how this trivial concealment of fact--for that is all it

would be--can change the boy's character or help him. If I did----" he

paused. "I should like to help you if I could, Mrs. Erlton, if only

because you--you refused me charity! But I cannot see my way. It would

do no one any good. Begin with me. I'm not a religious man, Mrs.

Erlton. I don't believe in the forgiveness of sins. So my soul--if I

have one--wouldn't benefit. As for my body? At the risk of you

offering me diamonds again,"--he smiled charmingly,--"I must mention

that I should lose--how much is a detail--by concealment. So I must go

out of the question of benefit. Then there is you----"

He broke off to walk up and down the room thoughtfully, then to pause

before her. "I wish you to believe," he said, "that I want really to

understand the truth, but I can't, because I don't know one thing. I

don't know if you love your husband--or not."

She raised her head quickly with a fear behind the resentment of her

eyes. "Put me outside the question too. I have told you that already.

It is the simplest, the best way."

He bowed cynically. She came no nearer to truth than evasion.

"If you wish it, certainly. Then there is the boy. You want to

prevent him from realizing that his father is a--let us twist the

sentence--what his father is. You have, I expect, sent him away for

this purpose. So far good. But will this concealment of mine suffice?

Will no one else blab the truth? Even if concealment succeeds all

along the line, will it prevent the boy from following in his father's

steps if he has inherited his father's nature as well as his face?

Wouldn't it be a deterrent in that case to know early in life that

such instincts can't be indulged with impunity in the society of

gentlemen? You will never have the courage to keep the boy out of your

life altogether as you are doing now. Sooner or later you will bring

him back, he will bring himself back, and then, on the threshold of

life, he will have an example of successful dishonesty put before him.

Mrs. Erlton! you can't keep up the fiction always; so it is better for

you, for me, for him, to tell the truth--and I mean to tell it."

She rose swiftly to her feet and faced him, thrusting her hair back

from her forehead passionately, as if to clear away aught that might

obscure her brain.

"And for my husband?" she asked. "Have you no word for him? Is he not

to be thought of at all? You asked me just now if I loved him, and I

was a coward. Well! I do not love him--more's the pity, for I can't

make up the loss of that to him anyhow. But there is enough pity in

his life without that. Can't you see it? The pity that such things

should be in life at all. You called me a religious woman just now.

I'm not, really. It is the pity of such things without a remedy that

drives me to believe, and the pity of it which drives me back again

upon myself, as you have driven me now. For you are right! Do you

think I can't see the shame? Do you think I don't know that it is too

late--that I should have thought of all this before I called my boy's

nature out of the dark? And yet----" her face grew sharp with a

pitiful eagerness, she moved forward and laid her hand on his arm. "It

is all so dark! You said just now that I couldn't keep up the fiction;

but need it be a fiction always? What do we know? God gives men a

chance sometimes. He gives the whole world a chance sometimes of

atoning for many sins. A Spirit moves on the Waters of life bringing

something to cleanse and heal. It may be moving now. Give my husband

his chance, Mr. Greyman, and I will pray that, whatever it is, it may

come quickly."

He had listened with startled eyes; now his hand closed on hers in

swift negation.

"Don't pray for that," he said, in a quick low voice, "it may come too

soon for some of us, God knows--too soon for many a good man and

true!" Then, as if vexed at his own outburst, he drew back a step,

looking at her with a certain resentment.

"You plead your cause well, Mrs. Erlton, and it is a stronger argument

than you perhaps guess. So let him have this chance that is coming.

Let us all have it, you and I into the bargain. No don't be grateful,

please, for he may prove himself a coward, among other things. So may

I, for that matter. One never knows until the chance comes for being a

hero--or the other thing."

"When the chance comes we shall see," she said, trying to match his

light tone. "Till then, good-by--you have been very kind." She held

out her hand, but he did not take it.

"Pardon me! I have been very rude, and you----" he paused in his

half-jesting words, stooped over her outstretched hand and kissed it.

Kate stood looking at the hand with a slight frown after his horse's

hoofs died away; and then with a smile she shut the jewel case. Not

that she closed the incident also; for full half an hour later she was

still going over all the details of the past interview. And everything

seemed to hinge on that unforeseen appeal of hers for a chance of

atonement, on that unpremeditated strange suggestion that a Spirit

might even then be moving on the face of the waters; until, in that

room gay with English flowers, and peaceful utterly in its air of

security, a terror seized on her body and soul. A causeless terror,

making her strain eyes and ears as if for a hint of what was to come

and make cowards or heroes of them all.

But there was only the flowerful garden beyond the arched veranda,

only the soft gurgle of the doves. Yet she sat with quivering nerves

till the sight of the gardener coming as usual with his watering pot

made her smile at the unfounded tragedy of her imaginings.

As she passed into the veranda she called to him, in the jargon which

served for her orders, not to forget a plentiful supply to the

heartsease and the sweet peas; for she loved her poor clumps of

English annuals more than all the scented and blossoming shrubs which

in those late March days turned the garden into a wilderness of

strange perfumed beauty. But her cult of home was a religion with her;

and if a visitor remarked that anything in her environment was

reminiscent of the old country, she rejoiced to have given another

exile what was to her as the shadow of a rock in a thirsty land.

So, her eye catching something barely up to western mark in the

pattern of a collar her tailor was cutting for her new dress, she

crossed over to where he squatted in the further corner of the

veranda.

"That isn't right. Give me something to cut--here! this will do."

She drew a broad sheet of native paper from the bundle of scraps

beside him, and began on it with the scissors; too full of her idea to

notice the faint negation of the man's hand. "There!" she said after a

few deft snippings, "that is new fashion."

"Huzoor!" assented the tailor submissively as, apparently from

tidiness, he put away the remainder of the paper, before laying the

new-cut pattern on the cloth.

His mistress looked down at it critically. There was a broad line of

black curves and square dots right across the pattern suggestive of

its having been cut from a title-page. But to her ignorance of the

Persian character they were nothing but the curves and dots, though

the tailor's eyes read clearly in them "The Sword is the Key of

Heaven."

For he, in company with thousands of other men, had been reading the

famous pamphlet of that name; reading it with that thrill of the

heart-strings which has been the prelude to half the discords and

harmonies of history. Since, quaintly enough, those who may hope to

share your heaven are always friends, those who can with certainty be

consigned to hell, your enemies.

"That is all right," she said. "Cut it well on the bias, so that it

won't pucker."

As she turned away, she felt the vast relief of being able to think of

such trivialities again after the strain and stress of the hours since

her husband had come home from the race course, full of excited

maledictions on the mean, underhand bribery and spying which might

make it necessary for him to send in his papers--if he could. Kate had

heard stories of a similar character before; since Major Erlton knew

by experience that she had his reputation more at heart than he had

himself, and that her brain was clearer, her tact greater than his.

But she had never heard one so hopeless. Unless this jockey Greyman,

who, her husband said, was so mixed up with native intrigue as to have

any amount of false evidence at his command, could be silenced, her

labor of years was ruined. So long after her husband had gone off to

his bed to sleep soundly, heavily, after the manner of men, Kate had

lain awake in hers after the manner of women, resolving to risk all,

even to a certain extent honesty, in order to silence this man, this

adventurer; who no doubt was not one whit better than her husband.

And now? As her mind flashed back over that interview the one thing

that stood out above all others was the bearing, the deference of the

man as he had stooped to kiss her hand. For the life of her, she--who

protested even to herself that such things had no part in her

life--could not help a joy in the remembrance; a quick recognition

that here was a man who could put romance into a woman's life. The

thought was one, however, from which to escape by the first

distraction at hand. This happened to be the cockatoo, which, after a

bath and plentiful food, looked a different bird on its new perch.

"Pretty, pretty poll," she said hastily, with tentative white finger

tickling its crest. The bird, in high good humor, bent its head

sideways and chuckled inarticulately; yet to an accustomed ear the

sound held the cadence of the Great Cry, and the tailor, who had heard

it given wrathfully, looked up from his work.

"Oh, Miffis Erlton! what a boo'ful new polly," came a silvery lisp. She

turned with a radiant smile to greet her next door neighbor's little

boy, a child of about three years old, who, pathetically enough, was a

great solace to her child-bereft life.

"Yes, Sonny, isn't it lovely?" she said, her slim white hand going out

to bring the child closer; "and it screams splendidly. Would you like

to hear it scream?"

Sonny, clinging tightly to her fingers, looked doubtful. "Wait till

muvver comth, muvver's comin' to zoo esectly. Sonny's always

flightened wizout hith muvver."

At which piece of diplomacy, Kate, feeling light-hearted, caught the

little white-clad golden-curled figure in her arms and ran out with it

into the garden, smothering the laughing face with kisses as she ran.

"Sonny's a little goose to be 'flightened,'" came her glad voice

between the laughs and the kisses. "He ought never to be 'flightened'

at all, because no one in all the wide, wide world would ever hurt a

good little childie like Sonnykins--No one! No one! No one!"

She had sat the little fellow down among the flowers by this time,

being, in good sooth, breathless with his weight; and now, continuing

the game, chased him with pretense booings of "No one! No one!" about

the pansy bed, and so round the sweet peas; until in delicious terror

he shrieked with delight, and chased her back between her chasings.

It was a pretty sight, indeed, this game between the woman and the

child. The gardener paused in his watering, the tailor at his work;

and even the native orderly going his rounds with the brigade

order-book grinned broadly, so adding one to the kindly dark faces

watching the chasing of Sonny.

"My dear Kate! How can you?" The querulous voice broke in on the

booings, and made Mrs. Erlton pause and think of her loosened hair

pins. The speaker was a fair, diaphanous woman, the most solid-looking

part of whose figure, as she dawdled up the path, was the large white

umbrella she carried. "Here am I melting with the heat! What I shall

do next year if George is transferred to Delhi, I don't know. He says

we shan't be able to afford the hills. And he has the dogcart at some

of those eternal court-martials. I wonder why the sepoys give so much

trouble nowadays. George says they're spoiled. So I came to see if

you'll drive me to the band; though I'm not fit to be seen. I was up

half the night with baby. She is so cross, and George will have it she

must be ill; as if children didn't have tempers! Lucky you, to have

your boy at home. And yet you go romping with other people's. I

wouldn't; but then I look horrid when I'm hot."

Kate laughed. She did not, and as she rearranged her hair seemed to

have left years of life behind her. "I can't help it," she said. "I

feel so ridiculously young myself sometimes--as if I hadn't lived at

all, as if nothing belonged to me, and I was really somebody else. As

if----" She paused abruptly in her confidences, and, to change the

subject, turned to the group behind Mrs. Seymour:--an ayah holding a

toddler by the hand, a tall orderly in uniform carrying a year-old

baby in his arms; such a languid little mortal as is seldom seen out

of India, where the swift, sharp fever of the changing seasons seems

to take the very, life from a child in a few hours. The fluffy golden

head in its limp white sun-bonnet rested inert against the orderly's

scarlet coatee, the listless little legs drooped helplessly among the

burnished belts and buckles.

"Poor little chick! Let me have her a bit, orderly," said Kate, laying

her hand caressingly on the slack dimpled arm; but baby, with a

fretful whine, nestled her cheek closer into the scarlet. A shade of

satisfaction made its owner's dark face less impassive, and the small,

sinewy, dark hands held their white burden a shade tighter.

"She _is_ so cross," complained the mother. "It has been so all day.

She won't leave the man for an instant. He must be sick of her, though

he doesn't show it. And she used to go to the ayah; but do you know,

Kate, I don't trust the woman a bit. I believe she gives opium to the

child, so that she may get a little rest."

Kate looked at the ayah's face with a sudden doubt. "I don't know,"

she said slowly. "I think they believe it is a good thing. I remember

when Freddy was a baby----"

"Oh, I don't believe they ever think that sort of thing," interrupted

Mrs. Seymour. "You never can trust the natives, you know. That's the

worst of India. Oh! how I wish I was back in dear old England with a

real nurse who would take the children off my hands."

But Kate Erlton was following up her own doubt. "The children trust

them----" she began.

"My dear Kate! you can't trust children either. Look at baby! It gives

me the shudders to think of touching Bij-rao, and see how she cuddles

up to him," replied Mrs. Seymour, as she dawdled on to the house;

then, seeing the bed of heartsease, paused to go into raptures over

them. They were like English ones, she said.

The puzzled look left Kate's face. "I sent some home last mail," she

replied in a sort of hushed voice, "just to show them that we were not

cut off from everything we care for; not everything."

So, as if by one accord, these two Englishwomen raised their eyes from

the pansy bed, and passing by the flowering shrubs, the encircling

tamarind trees framing the cozy, home-like house, rested them on the

reddening gold of the western sky. Its glow lay on their faces, making

them radiant.

But baby's heavy lids had fallen at last over her heavy eyes as she

lay in the orderly's arms, and he glanced at the ayah with a certain

pride in his superior skill as a nurse.

CHAPTER III.

THE GREAT GULF FIXED.

It was a quaint house in the oldest quarter of the city of Lucknow,

where odd little groves linger between the alleys, so that men pass,

at a step, from evil-smelling lanes to cool, scented retreats, dark

with orange and mango trees; where birds flutter, and squirrels loll

yawning through the summer days, as if the great town were miles away.

It was in the furthest corner of such a flowerless, shady garden that

the house reared its lessening stories and projecting eaves above its

neighbors. The upper half of it was not unlike an Italian villa in its

airiness, its balustraded roof, its green jalousies; but the lower

portion was unmistakably Indian. It was a perfect rabbit warren of

dark cells, crushed in on each other causelessly; the very staircase,

though but two feet wide, having to fold itself away circumspectly so

as to find space to creep upward.

But no one lived below, and the dark twists and turns of the brick

ladder mattered little to Zora _bibi_, who lived in the pleasant

pavilions above; for she had scarcely ever left them since the day,

nearly eight years past, when James Greyman had installed her there

with all the honor possible to the situation. Which was, briefly, that

he had bought the slip of a girl from a house of ill-fame, as he would

have bought a horse, or a flower-pot, or anything else which he

thought would make life pleasanter to him. He had paid a long price

for her, not only because she was beautiful, but because he pitied the

delicate-looking child--for she was little more--just about to enter a

profession to which she was evidently a recruit kidnaped in early

infancy; as so many are in India. Not that his pity would have led him

to buy her if she had been ugly, or even dark; for the creamy ivory

tint of her skin satisfied his fastidiousness quite as much as did the

hint of a soul in her dark, dreamy eyes. Romance had perhaps had more

to do with his purchase than passion; restless, reckless determination

to show himself that he had no regrets for the society which had

dispensed with his, had had more than either. For he had begun to rent

the pleasant pavilions after a few years of adventurous roving had

emphasized the gulf fixed between him and his previous life, and

forced his pride into leading his present one as happily as he could.

As for the girl, those eight years of pure passion on the housetops

had been a dream of absolute content. It was so even now, when she lay

dying, as so many secluded women do, of a slow decline. To have

flowers and fruit brought to her, to find no change in his tenderness

because she was too languid to amuse him, to have him wait upon her

and kiss away her protests; all this made her soft warm eyes softer,

warmer. It was so unlike anything she had ever heard or dreamed of; it

made her blind to the truth, that she was dying. How could this be so

when there was no hint of change, when life still gave her all she

cared for? She did not, to be sure, play tricks with him like a

kitten, as she used to; but that was because she was growing

old--nearly one and twenty!

"She is worse to-day. I deem her close to freedom, Soma, so I have

warned the death-tender," said a tall woman, as she straightened

the long column of her throat to the burden of a brass water-pot,

new-poised on her head, and stepped down from the low parapet of the

well which stood in one corner of the shady grove. Sometimes its

creaking Persian wheel moaned over the task of sending runnels of

water to the thirsty trees; but to-day it was silent, save for an

intermittent protest when the man--who was lazily leaning his back

against the yoke--put out his strength so as to empty an extra water

can or two into the trough for the woman's use. He was in the undress

uniform of a sepoy, and as he also straightened himself to face the

speaker the extraordinary likeness between them in face and figure

stamped them as twins. It would have been difficult to give the palm

to either for superior height or beauty; and in their perfection of

form they might have stood as models of the mythical race-founders

whose names they bore. For Tara Devi and Soma Chund were Rajpoots of

the single Lunar or Yadubansi tribe. She was dressed in an endless

scarf of crimson wool, which with its border of white and yellow

embroidery hung about her in admirable folds. The gleam of the

water-pot matched the dead gold circlets on the brown wrists and

ankles; for Tara wore her savings thus, though she had no right to do

so, being a widow. But she had been eight years in James Greyman's

service; more than eight bound to him by the strangest of ties. He had

been the means of saving her from her husband's funeral pyre; in other

words of preventing her from being a saint, of making her outcaste

utterly. Since none, not even other widows, would eat or drink with a

woman rejected by the very gods on the threshold of Paradise. Such a

mental position is well-nigh incomprehensible to western minds. It was

confusing even to Tara herself; and the mingling of conscious dignity

and conscious degradation, gratitude, resentment, attraction,

repulsion, made her a puzzle even to herself at times.

"The master will grieve," replied Soma; his voice was far softer than

his sister's had been, but it had the effect of hardening hers still

more.

"What then?" she asked; "man's sorrow for a woman passes; or even if

it pass not, bears no fruit here, or hereafter. But I, as _thou

knowest_, Soma, would have burned with my love. _But for thee_, as

thou knowest, I would have been _suttee_ (lit. virtuous). _But for

thee_ I should have found, ay! and given salvation."

She passed on with a sweep of full drapery, bearing her water-pot

as a queen might her crown, leaving Soma's handsome face full of

conscious-stricken amaze. His sister--from whom, despite her

degradation, he had not been able to dissociate himself utterly--had

never before rounded on him for his share in her misfortune; but in

his heart of hearts he had admitted his responsibility at one moment,

scorned it the next. True, he had told his young Lieutenant that his

brother-in-law was going to be burned, as an excuse for not

accompanying him after black-buck one morning; but who would have

dreamed that this commonplace remark would rouse the Huzoor's

curiosity to see the obsequies of a high-caste Rajpoot, and so lead,

incidentally, to a file of policemen and the neighboring magistrate

dragging the sixteen-year old widow from the very flames?--when she

was drugged, too, and quite happy--when the wrench was over, even for

him, and she, to all intents, was a saint scattering salvation on

seven generations of inconstant males! Much as he loved Tara, the

little twin sister who, so the village gossips loved to tell, had left

the Darkness for the Light of Life still clasping his hand, how could

he have done her such an injury? As a Rajpoot how could he have

brought such a scandalous dishonor on any family?

But being also a soldier, as his fathers had been before him, and so

leavened unconsciously by much contact with Europeans, he could not

help admiring Tara's pluck in refusing to accept the life of a dog,

which was all that was left to her among her own people. And he had

been grateful to the Huzoor, as she was, for giving her good service

where he could see her; though he would not for worlds have touched

the hand which had lain in his from the beginning of all things. It

was unclean now.

Still he could not forget the gossip's story any more than he could

forget that James Greyman had been his Lieutenant, and that together

they had shot over half Hurreeana. So when he passed through Lucknow

on his way to spend his leave in his wife's village, he always gave a

day or two of it to the quaint garden-house.

And now Tara had definitely accused him of ruining her life! Anger,

born of a vague remorse, filled him as he watched her disappear up the

plinth. If it was anybody's fault it was the Huzoor's; or rather of

the _Sirkar_ itself who, by high-handed interference with venerable

customs, made it possible for a poor man, by a mere slip of the

tongue, to injure one bound to him by the closest of ties.

"It will leave us naught to ourselves soon," he muttered sulkily as he

went out to the doorstep to finish polishing the master's sword; that

being a recognized office during these occasional visits, which, as it

occurred to him in his discontent, would be still more occasional if

among other things the _Sirkar_, now that Oude was was annexed, took

away the extra leave due to foreign service. They had said so in the

regiment; and though he was too tough to feel pin-pricks in advance,

he had sneered with others in the current jest that the maps were

tinted red--_i. e_., shown to be British territory--by savings stolen

from the sepoy's pocket.

It was very quiet on the paved slope leading up from the alley to the

carved door beyond the gutter. The lane was too narrow for wheeled

traffic, the evening not sufficiently advanced for the neighbors to

gather in it for gossip. But every now and again a veiled figure would

sidle along the further wall, passing good-looking Soma with a

flurried shuffle. Whereat, though he knew these ghostly figures to be

old women on their way to market, he cocked his turban more awry, and

curled his mustachios nearer his eyes; from no set purpose of playing

the gay Lothario, but for the honor of the regiment, and because War

and Women go together, East and West.

After a time, however, the workmen began to dawdle past from their

work, and some of them, remembering Soma, paused to ask him the latest

news; a stranger in a native city being equivalent to an evening

paper. And, of course, there were questions as to what the regiment

thought of this and that. But Soma's replies were curt. He never

relished being lumped in as a simple Rajpoot with the rest of the

Rajpoots, for he was inordinately proud of his tribe. That was one

reason why he stood aloof, as he did, from much that went on among his

comrades. He drilled, it is true, between two of them who were entered

as he was--that is to say, as a Rajpoot--on the roster. But the three

were in reality as wide apart as the Sun, the Moon, and the Fire from

which they respectively claimed descent. They would not have

intermarried into each other's families for all the world and its

wealth. A causeless differentiation which makes, and must make, a

people who cling to it incomprehensible to a race which boasts as a

check to pride or an encouragement to humility that all men are born

of Adam, and which seeks no hall-mark for its descendants save the

stamp of the almighty dollar.

Soma, therefore, polishing his master's sword sulkily, grew irritable

also; especially when the frequenters of the opium and hemp shops

began, with wavering steps and lack-luster eyes, to loaf homeward for

the evening meal which would give them strength for another dose.

There were many such habitual drug-takers in the quarter; for it was

largely inhabited by poor claimants to nobility who, having nothing to

do, had time for dreams. That was why people from other quarters

flocked to this one at sundown for gossip; since it is to be had at

its best from the opium-eater, whose imagination is stimulated, his

reason dulled, beyond the power of discriminating even his own truth

or falsehood. One of these, a haggard, sallow fellow in torn muslin

and ragged embroidery, stopped with a heavy-lidded leer beside Soma.

"So, brother, back again!" he said with the maudlin gravity of a

hemp-smoker; "and thou lookest fat. The bone dust must agree with

thee."

It was as if a bomb had fallen. The Hindoo bystanders, recognizing the

rumor that ground bones were mixed with commissariat flour, drew back

from the Rajpoot instinctively; the Mohammedans smiled on the sly.

Soma himself had in a moment one sinewy hand on the half-drunk

creature's throat, the other brandishing the fresh-polished sword.

"Bone dust thyself, and pigs meat too, foul-mouthed slayer of sacred

kine!" he gasped, carrying the war into the enemy's country. "Thou

beast! Unsay the lie!"

His indignation, showing that he appreciated the credence some might

be disposed to give to the accusation, only made the Hindoos look at

each other. The Mohammedans, however, dragged him from the swaying

figure of the accuser, who, after all, was one of themselves.

"Heed him not!" they chorused appeasingly. "'Tis drug-shop talk, and

every sane man knows that for dreams. Lo! his sense is clean gone as

horns from a donkey! Sure, thy mother ate chillies in her time for

thou to be so hot-blooded. It is not morning, brother, because a hen

crows, and a snake is but a snake, and goes crooked even to his own

home!"

These hoarded saws, with physical force superadded, left Soma reduced

to glaring, and renewed claims for a retraction of the insult.

The hemp-smoker looked at him mournfully. "Wouldst have me deny God's

truth?" he hiccuped. "Lo! I say not thou didst eat it. Thou sayst not,

and who am I to decide between a man and his stomach, even though he

looks fat? Yet this all know, that as a bird fattens his tail shrinks,

and honor is nowhere nowadays. But this I say for certain. Let him eat

who will, there is bone dust in the flour--there is bone dust in the

flour----"

He lurched from a supporter's hold and drifted down the lane,

half-chanting the words.

Soma glared, now, at those doubtful faces which remained. "'Tis a lie,

brothers! But there, 'tis no use wearing the red coat nowadays when

all scoff at it. And why not? when the _Sirkar_ itself mocks our

rights. I tell thee at the father-in-law's village, but now, a man who

titled me sahib last year puffed his smoke in my face this. And

wherefore not? May not every scoundrel nowadays drag us to court and

set us a-bribing underlings as the common herd have to do? We,

soldiers of Oude, who had a Resident of our own always, and----"

"Nothing lasts for always, save God," said a long-bearded bystander,

interrupting Soma's parrot roll of military grievances, "as the

Moulvie said last night at our mosque, it is well he remains ever the

same, giving the same plain orders once and for all. So none of the

faithful can mistake. God is Might and Right. All the rest is change."

"_Wah! wah!_" murmured some respectfully; but the Rajpoot's scowl lost

its fierceness in supercilious indifference.

"That may suit the Moulvie. It may suit thee and thine, _syyed-jee_,"

he replied, with a shrug of the shoulders. "It suits not me nor mine,

being of a different race. We are Rajpoots, and there is no change

possible to that. We are ever the same."

The pride in his voice and manner reflected but faintly the

inconceivable pride in his heart. Yet he was on the alert, salaaming

cheerfully, as James Greyman came riding with a clatter down the

alley, and without drawing bridle, passed through the low gateway into

the dark garden heavy with the perfume of orange-blossom. His arrival

ended the incident, for Soma followed him quickly, and in obedience to

his curt order to see the groom rub down the horse while it waited, as

it had been a breather round the race course, walked off with it

toward the well. It was such an opportunity for ordering other men

about as natives dearly love; so that the more autocratic a master is,

the better pleased they are to gain dignity by serving him.

James Greyman, meanwhile, had paused on the plinth to give a low

whistle and look upward to the terraced roof. And as he did so his

face was full of weariness, and yet of impatience. He had been telling

himself that he was a fool ever since he had left Kate Erlton's

drawing room half an hour before, and even his mad gallop round the

steeple-chase course had not effaced the curious sense of compulsion

which had made him promise to let her husband go scot-free. Even now,

when he waited with that dread at his heart, which of late had been

growing stronger day by day, for the answer which Zora loved to make

to his signal, his fear lest the Great Silence had fallen between them

was lost in the recollection that, if it were so, his freedom had come

too late. He hated himself for thus bracketing death and freedom

together, but for all that he would not blind himself to its truth.

Now that his profession had gone with the King's exile, Zora was,

indeed, the only tie to a life which had grown distasteful to him, and

when the Great Silence came, as come it must, he had made up his mind

to leave James Greyman behind, and go home to England. He was nearing

forty, and though the spirit of reckless adventure was fading, the

ambitions of his youth seemed to be returning; as they so often do

when the burden and heat of passion passes. He was tired of perpetual

sunshine; the thought of the cold mists on the hilltops, the wild

storms on the west coast, haunted him. He wanted to see them again.

Above all, he wanted to hear himself called by his own familiar name,

not by the one he had assumed. It had seemed brutal to dream of all

this sometimes, while little Zora still lay in his arms smiling

contentedly; but it was inevitable. And so, while he waited, watching

with the dread growing at his heart for the flutter of the tinsel

veil, the half-heard whisper "_Khush amud-eed_" (welcome), it was

inevitable also that the remembrance of his promise to Kate Erlton

should invade, and as it were desecrate, his real regret for the

silence that seemed to grow deeper every second. It had come too

late--too late! There could be no solace in freedom now. That other

silence in regard to Major Erlton's misdeeds meant the loss of every

penny he had scraped together for England. He might have to sell up

almost everything he possessed in order to pay his bets honorably; and

that he must do, or he gave away his only hope of recouping his bad

luck. Why had he promised? Why had he given up a certainty for that

vague chance of which he had spoken, he scarcely knew why, to these

cold blue northern eyes with the glint of steel. The remembrance

brought a passionate anger at himself. Was there anything in the world

worth thinking of now, with that silence new-fallen upon him, except

the soft warm eyes which were perhaps closed forever? So, with a quick

step, he passed up the stairs and gave his signal knock at the door

which led on to the terraced roof.

Tara, opening it, answered his look with finger to her lip, and a

warning glance to the low string-bed set close to the arches of the

summer-house so as to catch the soft-scented breeze. He stepped over

to it lightly and looked down on the sleeper; but the relief passed

from his face at what he saw there. It could only be a question of

hours now.

"Why didst not send before?" he asked in a low voice. "I bid thee send

if she were worse and she needed me." Once more the anger against that

other woman came uppermost. What was she to him that she should filch

even half an hour from this one who loved him? He might so easily have

come earlier; and then the promise would not have been made. Was he

utterly heartless, that this thought would come again and again?

"She slept," replied Tara coldly. "And sleep needs naught. Not even

Love's kisses. It is nigh the end though, master, as thou seest; so I

have warned mother Jewuni, the death tender." She had spoken so far as

if she desired to make him wince; now the pain on his face made her

add hurriedly: "She hath not suffered, Huzoor, she hath not

complained. Had it been so I would have sent. But sleep is rest."

She passed on to a lower roof softening her echoing steps with a

quaint crooning lullaby:

"My breast is rest

And rest is Death.

Ye who have breath

Say which is best?

Death's Sleep is rest!"

Was it so? As he stood, still looking down on the sleeper, something

in the lack of comfort, of all the refinements and luxuries which seem

to belong by right to the sickness of dear ones in the West, smote him

suddenly with a sense of deprivation, of division. And though he told

himself that Death came in far more friendly fashion out there in the

sunlight, where you could hear the birds, watch the squirrels, and see

the children's kites go sailing overhead in the blue sky; still the

bareness of it seemed somehow to reveal the great gulf between his

complexity, his endless needs and desires, and the simplicity of that

human creature drifting to death, almost as the animals drift, without

complaint, without fears, or hopes. It seemed so pitiful. The slender

figure, still gay in tinsel and bright draperies, all cuddled up on

the quilt, its oval face resting hardly on the thin arm where the

bracelets hung so loosely, had an uncared-for look. It seemed alone,

apart; as far from Death in its nearness to Life, as it was from Life

in its closeness to Death. In swift pity he stooped to risk an

awakening by gathering it into his warm friendly arms. It would at

least feel the beating of another human heart when it lay there. It

would at least be more comfortable than on the bare, hard, pillowless

bed.

But he paused. How could he judge? How dare he judge even for that

wasted body, which, despite its softness, had never known half the

luxuries his claimed? So he left her lying as he had often seen her

sleep, all curled up on herself like a tired squirrel, and passing to

the parapet leaned over it looking moodily down into the darkening

orange trees. Their heavy perfume floated upward, reminding him of

many another night in springtime spent with Zora upon this terraced

roof.

And suddenly his hand fell in a gesture of sheer anger.

Before God! it had been unfair; this idyl on the housetops. The world

had held no more for her save her passion for him, pure in its very

perfection. His for her had been but a small part of his life. It

never was more than that to a man, in reality, and so this sort of

thing must always be unfair. That she had been content made it worse,

not better. Poor little soul! drifting away from the glow and the

glamour.

A resentment for her, more than for himself, made him go to where Tara

sat gossiping with her fellow-servant on the other roof and bid them

wait downstairs. If the silence were indeed about to fall, if the glow

and the glamour were going, then she and he might at least be alone

once more beneath the coming stars; alone in the soft-scented darkness

which had so often seemed to clasp them closer to each other as they

sat in it like a couple of children whispering over a secret.

Closer! As he leaned over the parapet his keen eyes stared down into

the half-seen city spreading below him. Wide, tree-set, full of faint

sounds of life; the wreaths of smoke from thousands of hearths rising

to obscure it from his view. Obscuring it hopelessly with their tale

of a life utterly apart from any he could lead. Even there on the

housetop he had only pretended to lead it. It was not she, drifting to

death so contentedly, who was alone! It was he. Yet some men he had

known had seemed able to combine the two lives. They had been content

to think half-caste thoughts, to rear up a tribe of half-caste

children; while he? How many years was it since he had seen Zora

weeping over a still little morsel of humanity, his child and hers,

that lay in her tinseled veil? She had wept, mostly because she was

afraid he might be angry because his son had never drawn breath; and

he had comforted her. He had never told her of the relief it was to

him, of the vague repulsion which the thought of a child had always

brought with it. One could not help these things; and, after all, she

had only cared because she was afraid he cared. She did not crave for

motherhood either. It was the glow and glamour that had been the bond

between them; nothing else. And, thank Heaven! she had never tired of

it, had never seen him tire of it--for Death would come before that

now.

A chiming clash of silver made him turn quickly. She had awakened, and

seeing him by the parapet, had set her small feet to the ground, and

now stood trying to steady herself by her thin, wide-spread arms.

"Zora! wait! I am coming," he cried, starting forward. Then he paused,

speech and action arrested by something in her look, her gesture.

"Let me come," she murmured, her breath gone with the effort. "I can

come. I must be able to come. My lord is so near--so near."

A fierce pity made him stand still. "Surely thou canst come," he

answered. "I will stay here."

As she stood, with parted lips, waiting for a glint of strength ere

she tried to walk, her swaying figure, the brilliance of her eyes, the

heaving of her delicate throat, cut him to the very heart for her sake

more than for his own. Then the jingle of her silver anklets rose

again in irregular cadence, to cease at the next pillar where she

paused, steadying herself against the cold stone to regain her breath.

"Surely, I can come; and he so near," she murmured wistfully, half to

herself.

"Thou art in too great a hurry, sweetheart. There is plenty of time.

The stars are barely lit, and star-time is ever our time."

He set his teeth over the words; but the glow and the glamour should

not fail her yet. He would take her back with him while he could to

the past which had been so full of it.

"Come slower, my bird, I am waiting," he said again as the jingling

cadence ceased once more.

"It is so strange," she gasped; "I feel so strange." And even in the

dim light he could see a vague terror, a pitiful amaze in her face.

That must not be. That must be stopped. "And it is strange," he

answered quickly. "Strange, indeed, for me to wait like a king, when

thou art my queen!"

A faint smile drove the wonder away, a faint laugh mingled with the

chiming and clashing. She was like a wounded bird, he thought, as he

watched her; a wounded bird fluttering to find shelter from death.

"Take care! Take care of the step!" he cried, as a stumble made him

start forward; but when she recovered herself blindly he stood still

once more, waiting. Let her come if she could. Let her keep the

glamour.

Keep it! She had done more than that. She had given it back to him at

its fullest, as, close at hand he saw her radiant face, and his

outstretched hands met hers warm and clasping. The touch of them made

him forget all else; he drew her close to him passionately. She gave a

smiling sob of sheer content, raising her face to meet his kisses.

"I have come," she whispered. "I have come to my king." Her voice

ended like a sigh. Then there was silence, a fainter sigh, then

silence again.

"Zora!" he called with a sudden dread at his heart. "What is it? Zora!

Zora!"

Half an hour afterward, Tara Devi, obeying her master's summons, found

him standing beside the bed, which he had dragged out under the stars,

and flung up her arms to give the wail for what she saw there.

"Hush!" he said sternly, clutching at her shoulder. "I will not have

her disturbed."

Tara looked at him wonderingly. "There is no fear of that," she

replied clearly, loudly, "none shall disturb Zora again. She hath

found _that_ freedom in the future. For the rest of us, God knows! The

times are strange. So let her have her right of wailing, master. She

will feel silent in the grave without the voices of her race."

He drew his hand away sharply; even in death a great gulf lay between

him and the woman he had loved.

So the death wail rang out clamorously through the soft dark air.

CHAPTER IV.

TAPE AND SEALING-WAX.

"I can't think," said a good-looking middle-aged man as he petulantly

pushed aside a pile of official papers, "where Dashe picks these

things up. I never come across them. And it is not as if he were in a

big station or--or in the swim in any way." He spoke fretfully, as one

might who, having done his best, has failed. And he had grounds for

this feeling, since the fact that the diffident district-officer named

Dashe was not in the swim, must clearly have been due to his official

superiors; the speaker being one of them.

Fortunately, however, for England, these diffident sons of hers cannot

always hide their lights under bushels. As the biographies of many

Indian statesmen show, some outsider notices a gleam of common sense

amid the gloom, and steers his course by it. Now Mr. Dashe's intimate

knowledge of a certain jungle tract in this district had resulted in a

certain military magnate bagging three tigers. From this to a reliance

on his political perceptions is not so great a jump as might appear;

since a man acquainted with the haunt of every wild beast in his

jurisdiction may be credited with knowledge of other dangerous

inhabitants. So much so that the military magnate, being impressed by

some casual remarks, had asked Mr. Dashe to put down his views on

paper, and had passed them on to a great political light.

It was he who sat at the table looking at a broadsheet printed in the

native character, as if it were a personal affront. The military

magnate, who had come over to discuss the question, was lounging in an

easy-chair with a cheroot. They were both excellent specimens of

Englishmen. The civilian a trifle bald, the soldier a trifle gray; but

one glance was sufficient to judge them neither knaves nor fools.

"That's the proclamation you're at now, isn't it?" asked the military

magnate, looking up, "I'm afraid I could only make out a word here and

there. That's the worst of Dashe. He's so deuced clever at the

vernaculars himself that he imagines other people----"

The political, who had earned his first elevation from the common herd

to the Secretariat by a nice taste in Persian couplets suitable for

durbar speeches, smiled compassionately.

"My dear sir! This is not even _shikust_ [broken character]. It is

lithographed, and plain sailing to anyone not a fool--I mean to anyone

on the civil side, of course--you soldiers have not to learn the

language. But I have a translation here. As this farrago of Dashe's

must go to Calcutta in due course, I had one made for the Governor

General's use."

He handed a paper across the table, and then turned to the next

paragraph of the jeremiad.

The military magnate laid down his cigar, took up the document and

glanced at it apprehensively, resumed his cigar, and settled himself

in his chair. It was a very comfortable one and matched the

office-room, which, being in the political light's private house, was

under the supervision of his wife, who was a notable woman. Her

portrait stood in the place of honor on the mantelpiece and it was

flanked by texts; one inculcating the virtue of doing as you would

be done by, the other the duty of doing good without ceasing. Both

rather dangerous maxims when you have to deal with a different

personal and ethical standard of happiness and righteousness. There

was also a semicircle of children's photographs--of the kind known as

positives--on the table round the official ink-pot. When the sun shone

on their glasses, as it did now through a western window, they dazzled

the eyes. Maybe it was their hypnotizing influence which inclined the

father of the family toward treating every problem which came to that

office-table as if the first desideratum was their welfare, their

approbation; not, of course, as his children, but as the

representative Englishmen and women of the future. Yet he was filled

with earnest desires to do his duty by those over whom he had been set

to rule, and as he read, his sense of responsibility was simply

portentous, and his pen, scratching fluently in comments over the half

margin, was full of wisdom. This sound was the only one in the room

save, occasionally, voices raised eagerly in the rehearsal going on in

the drawing room next door. It was a tragedy in aid of an orphan

asylum in England which the notable wife was getting up; and once her

voice could be heard distinctly, saying to her daughter, "Oh, Elsie,

I'm sure you could die better than that!"

Meanwhile the military magnate was reading:

"I, servant of God, the all-powerful, and of the prophet Mohammed--to

whom be all praise. I, Syyed Ahmed-Oolah, the dust of the feet of the

descendants of _Huzrut Ameer-Oolah-Moomereen-Ali-Moortuza, the Holy_."

He shifted uneasily, looked across the table, appeared discouraged by

that even scratching, and went on:

"I, Syyed Ahmed, after preferring my salaams and the blessings of Holy

War, to all believers of the sect of Sheeahs or the sect of Sunnees

alike, and also to all those having respectful regards to the Faith,

declare that I, the least of servants in the company of those waiting

on the Prophet, did by the order of God receive a Sword of Honor, on

condition that I should proclaim boldly to all the duty of combining

to drive out Infidels. In this, therefore, is there great Reward; as

is written in the Word of God, since His Gracious Power is mighty for

success. Yea! and if any fail, will they not be rid of all the ends of

this evil world, and attain the Joys and Glories of Martyrdom? So be

it. A sign is ever sufficient to the intelligent, and the Duty of a

servant is simply to point the way."

When he had finished he laid the document down on the table, and for a

minute or so continued to puff at his cigar. Then he broke silence

with that curious constraint in his tone which most men assume when

religious topics crop up in general conversation. "I wonder if

this--this paper is to be considered the sign, or"--he hesitated for a

moment, then the cadence of the proclamation being suggestive, he

finished his sentence to match--"or look we for another?"

"Another!" retorted his companion irritably. "According to Dashe the

whole of India is one vast sign-post! He seems to think we in

authority are blind to this. On the contrary, there is scarcely one

point he mentions which is not, I say this confidentially of course,

under inquiry. I have the files in my confidential box here and can

show them to you now. No! by the way, the head clerk has the key--that

proclamation had to be translated, of course. But, naturally, we don't

proclaim this on the housetops. We might hurt people's feelings,

or give rise to unfounded hopes. As for these bazaar rumors Dashe

retails with such zest, I confess I think it undignified for a

district-officer to give any heed to them. They are inevitable

with an ignorant population, and we, having the testimony of

a good conscience,"--he glanced almost unconsciously at the

mantelpiece,--"should disregard these ridiculous lies. Of course

everyone--everyone in the swim, that is--admits that the native army

is most unsettled. And as Sir Charles Napier declared, mutiny is the

most serious danger in the future; in fact, if the first symptoms are

not grappled with, it may shake the very foundations. But we are

grappling with it, just as we are grappling, quietly, with the general

distrust. That was a most mischievous paragraph, by the way, in the

_Christian Observer_, jubilant over the alarm created by those first

widow remarriages the other day. So was that in _The Friend of India_,

calling attention to the fact that a regular prayer was offered up in

all the mosques for the Restoration of the Royal Family. We don't want

these things _noticed_. We want to create a feeling of security by

ignoring them. That is our policy. Then as for Dashe's political news,

it is all stale! That story, for instance, of the Embassy from Persia,

and of the old King of Delhi having turned a Sheeah----"

"That has something to do with saying Amen, hasn't it?" interrupted

the military magnate, with the air of one determined to get at the

bottom of things at all costs to himself.

The political light smiled in superior fashion. "Partially; but

politically--as a gauge, I mean, to probable antagonism--Sheeahs and

Sunnees are as wide apart as Protestants and Papists. The fact that

the Royal Family of Oude are Sheeahs, and the Delhi one Sunnees, is

our safeguard. Of course the old King's favorite wife, Zeenut Maihl,

is an Oude woman, but I don't credit the rumors. I had it carefully

inquired into, however, by a man who has special opportunities for

that sort of work. A very intelligent fellow, Greyman by name. He has

a black wife or--or something of that sort, which of course helps

him to understand the natives better than most of us who--er--who

don't--you understand----"

The military magnate, having a sense of humor, smiled to himself.

"Perfectly," he replied, "and I'm inclined to think that perhaps there

is something to be said for a greater laxity." In his turn he glanced

at the mantelpiece, and paused before that immaculate presence. "The

proclamation, however," he went on hurriedly, "appears to me a bit

dangerous. Holy War is awkward, and a religious fanatic is a tough

subject even to the regulars." He had seen a rush of Ghâzees once and

the memory lingered.

"Undoubtedly. And as we have pointed out again and again to your

Department, here and at home, the British garrisons are too scattered.

These large accessions of territory have put them out of touch with

each other. But that again is being grappled with. In fact,

personally, I believe we are getting on as well as can be expected."

He glanced here at the semicircle of children as if the phrase were

suggestive. "We are doing our best for India and the Indians. Now

here, in Oude, things are wonderfully ship-shape already. Despite

Jackson and Gubbins' tiffs over trifles they are both splendid

workers, and Lucknow was never so well governed as it is to-day."

"But about the proclamation," persisted his hearer. "Couldn't you get

some more information about it? That Greyman, for instance."

"I'm afraid not. He refused some other work I offered him not long

ago. Said he was going home for good. I sometimes wish I could. It is

a thankless task slaving out here and being misunderstood, even at

home. Being told in so many words that the very system under which we

were recruited has failed. Poor old Haileybury! I only hope

competition will do as well, but I doubt it; these new fellows can

never have the old _esprit de corps_; won't come from the same class!

One of the Rajah's people was questioning me about it only this

morning--they read the English newspapers, of course. 'So we are not

to have sahibs to rule over us,' he said, looking black as thunder.

'Any _krani's_ (_lit_. low-caste English) son will do, if he has

learned enough.' I tried to explain--" Here a red-coated orderly

entering with a card, he broke off into angry inquiries why he was

being disturbed contrary to orders.

"The sahib bade me bring it," replied the man, as if that were

sufficient excuse, and his master, looking at the card, tossed it over

the table to the soldier, who exclaimed: "Talk of the devil! He may as

well come in, if you don't mind."

So James Greyman was ushered in, and remained standing between the

civilian and the soldier; for it is not given to all to have the fine

perceptions of the native. The orderly had unhesitatingly classed the

visitor as a "gentleman to be obeyed"; but the Political Department

knew him only as a reliable source of information.

"Well, Greyman! Have you brought any more news?" asked the civilian,

in a tone intended to impress the Military Department with the fact

that here was one grapnel out of the many which were being employed in

bringing truth to the surface and securing safety. But the soldier,

after one brief look at the newcomer, sat up and squared his own

shoulders a bit.

"That depends, sir," replied James Greyman quietly, "whether it pays

me to bring it or not. I told you last month that I could not

undertake any more work, because I was leaving India. My plans have

changed; and to be frank, I am rather hard up. If you could give me

regular employment I should be glad of it." He spoke with the utmost

deliberation, but the incisive finality of every word, taking his

hearers unprepared, gave an impression of hurry and left the civilian

breathless. James Greyman, however, having said what he had come to

say, said no more. During the past week he had had plenty of time to

make up his mind, or rather to find out that it was made up. For he

recognized frankly that he was acting more on impulse than reason.

After he had buried poor little Zora away in accordance with the

customs of her people, and paid his racing bets and general

liabilities,--to do which he had found it necessary to sell most

things, including the very horse he had matched against Major

Erlton's,--he had suddenly found out, rather to his own surprise, that

the idea of starting again on the old lines was utterly distasteful to

him. In a lesser degree this second loss of his future and severing of

ties in the past had had the same effect upon him as the previous one.

It had left him reckless, disposed to defy all he had lost, and prove

himself superior to ill-luck. Then being, by right of his Celtic

birth, imaginative, in a way superstitious, he had again and again

found himself thrown back, as it were, upon Kate Erlton's appeal for

that chance, to bring which the Spirit might be, even now, moving on

the waters. It was that, that only, with its swift touch on his own

certainty that a storm was brewing, which had made him yield his

point; which had forced him into yielding by an unreasoning assent to

her suggestion that it might bring a chance of atonement with it. And

now, in calm deliberation, he confessed that he might find his chance

in it also; a better chance, maybe, than he would have had in England.

His only one, at any rate, for some time to come. Those gray-blue

northern eyes with the glint of steel in them had, by a few words,

changed the current of his life. The truth was unpalatable, but as

usual he did not attempt to deny it. He simply cast round for the best

course in which to flow toward that tide in the affairs of men which

he hoped to take at its flood. Political employment--briefly, spy's

work--seemed as good as any for the present.

"Regular employment," echoed the civilian, recovering from his sense

of hurry. "You mean, I presume, as a news-writer."

"As a spy, sir," interrupted James Greyman.

The political light disregarded the suggestion. "Your acquirements, of

course, would be suitable enough; but I fear there are no native

courts without one. And the situation hardly calls for excess

expenditure. But of course, any isolated _douceur_----"

His hearer smiled. "Call it payment, sir. But I think you must find

job-work in secret intelligence rather expensive. It produces such a

crop of mare's-nests; at least so I have found."

The suspicion of equality in the remark made the official mount his

high horse, deftly.

"Really, we have so many reliable sources of information, Mr.

Greyman," he began, laying his hand as if casually on the papers

before him. The action was followed by James Greyman's keen eyes.

"You have the proclamation there, I see," he said cheerfully. "I

thought it could not be much longer before the police or someone else

became aware of its existence. The Moulvie himself was here about a

week ago."

"The Moulvie--what Moulvie?" asked the military magnate eagerly. The

civilian, however, frowned. If confidential work were to be carried

out on those lines, something, even if it were only ignorance, must be

found out.

"The Moulvie of Fyzabad--" began James Greyman.

"And who--?"

"My dear sir," interrupted the other pettishly. "We really know all

about the Moulvie of Fyzabad. His name has been on the register of

suspects for months." He rose, crossed to a bookshelf, and coming back

processionally with two big volumes, began to turn over the pages of

one.

"M--Mo--Ah! Ma, no doubt. That is correct, though transliteration is

really a difficult task--to be consistent yet intelligible in a

foreign language is---- No. It must be under F in the first volume. F;

Fy. Just so! Here we are. 'Fyzabad, Moulvie of--fanatic, tall, medium

color, mole on inside of left shoulder.' This is the man, I think?"

"I was not aware of the mole, sir," replied James Greyman dryly, "but

he is a magnificent preacher, a consistent patriot, a born organizer;

and he is now on his way to Delhi."

"To Delhi?" echoed the civilian pettishly. "What can a man of the

stamp you say he is want with Delhi? A sham court, a miserable

pantaloon of a king, the prey of a designing woman who flatters his

dotage. I admit he is the representative of the Moghul dynasty, but

its record for the last hundred and fifty years is bad enough surely

to stamp out sentiment of that sort."

"Prince Charles Edward was not a very admirable person, nor the record

of the Stuarts a very glorious one, and yet my grandfather----" James

Greyman pulled himself up sharply, and seeing an old prayer-book lying

on the table, which, with the alternatives of a bottle of Ganges water

and a copy of the _Koran_, lay ready for the discriminate swearing of

witnesses, finished his sentence by opening the volume at a certain

Office, and then placing the open book on the top of the proclamation.

"It will be no news to you, sir, that prayers of that sort are being

used in all the mosques. Of course here, in Lucknow, they are for my

late master's return. But if anything comparable to the '15 or the '45

were to come, Delhi must be the center. It is the lens which would

focus the largest area, the most rays; for it appeals to greed as well

as good, to this world as well as the next."

"Do you think it a center of disaffection now, Mr. Greyman?" asked the

military magnate with an emphasis on the title.

"I do not know, sir. Zeenut Maihl, the Queen, has court intrigues, but

they are of little consequence."

"I disagree," protested the Political. "You require the experience of

a lifetime to estimate the enormous influence----"

"What do you consider of importance, then?" interrupted the soldier

rather cavalierly, leaning across the table eagerly to look at James

Greyman. There was an instant's silence, during which those voices

rehearsing were clearly audible. The tragedy had apparently reached a

climax.

"That; and this." He pointed to the Proclamation, and a small fragment

of something which he took from his waistcoat pocket and laid beside

the paper. The civilian inspected it curiously, the soldier, leaving

his chair, came round to look at it also. The sunny room was full of

peace and solid security as those three Englishmen, with no lack of

pluck and brains, stood round the white fragment.

"Looks like bone," remarked the soldier.

"It is bone, and it was found, so I heard in the bazaar to-day, at the

bottom of a Commissariat flour-sack----"

James Greyman was interrupted by a relieved pshaw! from the Political.

"The old story, eh, Greyman! I wonder what next these ignorant

fools----"

"When the ignorant fools happen to be drilled soldiers, and, in

Bengal, outnumber our English troops by twenty-four to one," retorted

James Greyman sharply, "it seems a work of supererogation to ask what

they will do next. If I were in their place---- However, if I may tell

you how that came into my hands you will perhaps be able to grasp the

gravity of the situation."

"Won't you take a chair?" asked the soldier quickly.

James Greyman glanced at the Political. "No, thanks, I won't be long.

There is a class of grain carriers called Bunjârahs. They keep herds

of oxen, and have carried supplies for the Royal troops since time

immemorial. They have a charter engraved on a copper breastplate. I've

only seen a copy, for the original Jhungi and Bhungi lived ages ago in

Rajpootana. It runs so:

"While Jhungi Bhungi's oxen

Carry the army's corn,

House-thatch to feed their flocks on,

House-water ready drawn.

Three murders daily shriven,

These rights to them are given,

While Jhungi Bhungi's oxen

Carry the army's corn."

"Preposterous," murmured the civilian. "That's at an end, anyhow."

"Naturally; for they no longer carry the corn. The method is too slow,

too Eastern for our Commissariat. But the Oude levies used to employ

them. So did I at the stables. This is over also, and when I last saw

my _tanda_--that's a caravan of them, sir--they were sub-contracting

under a rich Hindoo firm which was dealing direct with the Department.

They didn't like it."

"Still you can't deny that the growth of a strong, contented

commercial class with a real stake in the country----" began the

civilian hurriedly.

"That sounds like the home-counties or a vestry board," interrupted

his hearer dryly. "The worst of it, in this case, being that you have

to get your content out of the petty dealers like these Bunjârahs. I

came upon one yesterday telling a circle of admirers, in the strictest

confidence of course, lest the _Sirkar_ should kill him for letting

the cat out of the bag, that he had found that bit of bone at the

bottom of a Commissariat sack he bought to mend his own. The moral

being, of course, that it was safer to buy from him. But he was only

half through when I, knowing the scoundrel, fell on him and thrashed

him for lying. The audience approved, and assented to his confession

that it was a lie; but only to please me, the man with the stick. And

as for Jhungi, he will tell the tale with additional embellishments in

every village to which the caravan goes; unless someone is there to

thrash him if he does."

"Scoundrel," muttered the soldier angrily.

"Or saint," added James Greyman. "He will be that when he comes to

believe his own story of having burned the sack rather than use it.

That won't be long. Then he will be much more dangerous. However, if

there is no place vacant for me, sir----"

"If you would not mind waiting a minute----" began the military

magnate, with a hasty look at the Political.

James Greyman bowed, and retired discreetly to the window. It looked

out upon just such another garden as Kate Erlton's, and the

remembrance provoked the cynical question as to what the devil he was

doing in that galley. Racing was a far safer way of making money than

acting as a spy; to no purpose possibly, at least so far as his own

chance was concerned.

Yet five minutes after, when the Political was writing him out a safe

conduct in the event of his ever getting into difficulties with the

authorities, he interrupted the scratching of the pen to say,

suddenly:

"If you would make it out in my own name, sir, I should prefer it.

James Sholto Douglas, late of the ----th Regiment."

"Hm!" said the military magnate thoughtfully when the new employee in

the Secret Intelligence Department left the room. "So that is Jim

Douglas, is it? I thought he was a service man by the set of his

shoulders. Jim Douglas. I remember his case when I was in the A.-G.'s

office."

"What was it?" asked the civilian curiously.

"Oh, a woman, of course. I forget the details, she was the wife of his

major, a drunken beast. There was something about a blow, and she

didn't back him up; saved her reputation, you understand. But he was

an uncommonly smart officer, I know that."

CHAPTER V.

BRAVO!

The Gissings' house stood in a large garden; but though it was

wreathed with creepers, and set with flowers after the manner of

flowerful Lucknow, there was no cult of pansies or such like English

treasures here. It was gay with that acclimatized tangle of poppies

and larkspur, marigold, mignonette, and corn cockles which Indian

gardeners love to sow broadcast in their cartwheel mud-beds; "powder

of flowers" they call the mixed seeds they save for it from year to

year.

In the big dark dining room also--where Alice Gissing, looking half

her years in starch, white muslin, and blue ribbons, sat at the head

of the table--there was no cult of England. Everything was frankly,

stanchly of the nabob and pagoda-tree style; for the Gissings

preferred India, where they were received into society, to England,

where they would have been out of it.

It had been one those heavy luncheons, beginning with many meats and

much bottled beer, ending with much madeira and many cigars, which

sent the insurance rate for India up to war risks in those days.

And there was never any scarcity of the best beer at the Gissings',

seeing that he had the contract for supplying it to the British

troops. His wife, however, preferred solid-looking porter with a

creamy head to it, and a heavy odor which lingered about her pretty

smiling lips. It was a most incongruous drink for one of her

appearance; but it never seemed to affect either her gay little body

or gay little brain; the one remained youthful, slender, the other

brightly, uncompromisingly clear.

She had been married twice. Once in extreme youth to a clerk in the

Opium Department, who owed the good looks which had attracted her to a

trace of dark blood. Then she had chosen wealth in the person of Mr.

Gissing. Had he died, she would probably have married for position;

since she had a catholic taste for the amenities of life. But he had

not died, and she had lived with him for ten years in good-natured

toleration of all his claims upon her. As a matter of fact, they did

not affect her in the least, and in her clear, high voice, she used to

wonder openly why other women worried over matrimonial troubles or

fussed over so slight an encumbrance as a husband. In a way she felt

equal to more than one, provided they did not squabble over her. That

was unpleasant, and she not only liked things to be pleasant, but had

the knack of making them so; both to the man whose name she bore, and

whose house she used as a convenient spot wherein to give luncheon

parties, and to the succession of admirers who came to them and drank

her husband's beer.

He was a vulgar creature, but an excellent business man, with a knack

of piling up the rupees which made the minor native contractors, whose

trade he was gradually absorbing, gnash their teeth in sheer envy. For

the Western system of risking all to gain all was too much opposed to

the Eastern one of risking nothing to gain little for the hereditary

merchants to adopt it at once. They have learned the trick of fence

and entered the lists successfully since then; but in 1856 the foe was

new. So they fawned on the shrewd despoiler instead, and curried favor

by bringing his wife fruits and sweets, with something costlier hidden

in the oranges or sugar drops. Alice Gissing accepted everything with

a smile; for her husband was not a Government servant. The contracts,

however, being for Government supplies, the givers did not

discriminate the position so nicely. They used to complain that the

_Sirkar_ robbed them both ways, much to Mr. Gissing's amusement, who,

as a method of self-glorification, would allude to it at the luncheon

parties where many men used to come. Men who, between the intervals of

badinage with the gay little hostess, could talk with authority on

most affairs. They did not bring their wives with them, but Alice

Gissing did not seem to mind; she did not get on with women.

"So they complain I rob them, do they?" he said loudly, complacently,

to the men on either side of him. "My dear Colonel! an Englishman is

bound to rob a native if that means creaming the market, for they

haven't been educated, sir, on those sound commercial principles which

have made England the first nation in the world. Take this flour

contract they are howling about. I'm beer by rights, of course, and,

by George, I'm proud of it. Your men, Colonel, can't do without beer;

England can't do without soldiers; so my business is sound. But why

shouldn't I have my finger in any other pie which holds money? These

hereditary fools think I shouldn't, and they were trying a ring, sir.

Ha! ha! an absurd upside-down d----d Oriental ring based on utterly

rotten principles. You can't keep up the price of a commodity because

your grandfather got that price. They ignored the facility of

transport given by roads, etc., ignored the right of government to

benefit--er--slightly--by these outlays. Commerce isn't a selfish

thing, sir, by gad. If you don't consider your market a bit, you won't

find one at all. So I stepped in, and made thousands; for the

Commissariat, seeing the saving here, of course asked me to contract

for other places. It serves the idiots uncommon well right; but it

will benefit them in the end. If they're to face Western nations they

must learn--er--the--the morality of speculation." He paused, helped

himself to another glass of madeira, and added in an unctuous tone,

"but till they do, India's a good place."

"Is that Gissing preaching morality?" asked his wife, in her clear,

high voice. The men at her end of the table had had their share of

her; those others might be getting bored by her husband.

"Only the morality of business," put in a coarse-looking fellow who,

having been betwixt and between the conversations, had been drinking

rather heavily. "There's no need for you to join the ladies as yet,

Mrs. Gissing."

Major Erlton, at her right hand, scowled, and the boy on her left

flushed up to the eyes. He was her latest admirer, and was still in

the stage when she seemed an angel incarnate. Only the day before he

had wanted to call out a cynical senior who had answered his vehement

wonder as to how a woman like she was could have married a little

beast like Gissing, with the irreverent suggestion that it might be

because the name rhymed with kissing.

In the present instance she heeded neither the scowl nor the flush,

and her voice came calmly. "I don't intend to, doctor. I mean to send

you into the drawing room instead. That will be quite as effectual to

the proprieties."

Amid the laugh, Major Erlton found opportunity for an admiring

whisper. She had got the brute well above the belt that time. But the

boy's flush deepened; he looked at his goddess with pained, perplexed

eyes.

"The morality of speculation or gambling," retorted the doctor,

speaking slowly and staring at the delighted Major angrily, "is the

art of winning as much money as you can--conveniently. That reminds

me, Erlton; you must have raked in a lot over that match."

A sudden dull red showed on the face whose admiration Alice was

answering by a smile.

"I won a lot, also," she interrupted hastily, "thanks to your tip,

Erlton. You never forget your friends."

"No one could forget you--there is no merit----" began the boy

hastily, then pausing before the publicity of his own words, and

bewildered by the smile now given to him. Herbert Erlton noted the

fact sullenly. He knew that for the time being all the little lady's

personal interest was his; but he also knew that was not nearly so

much as he gave her. And he wanted more, not understanding that if she

had had more to give she would probably have been less generous than

she was; being of that class of women who sin because the sin has no

appreciable effect on them. It leaves them strangely, inconceivably

unsoiled. This imperviousness, however, being, as a rule, considered

the man's privilege only, Major Erlton failed to understand the

position, and so, feeling aggrieved, turned on the lad.

"I'll remember you the next time if you like, Mainwaring," he said,

"but someone has to lose in every game. I'd grasped that fact before I

was your age, and made up my mind it shouldn't be me."

"Sound commercial morality!" laughed another guest. "Try it,

Mainwaring, at the next _Gymkhâna_. By the way, I hear that

professional, Greyman, is off, so amateurs will have a chance now; he

was a devilish fine rider."

"Rode a devilish fine horse, too," put in the unappeased doctor. "You

bought it, Erlton, in spite----"

"Yes! for fifteen hundred," interrupted the Major, in unmistakable

defiance. "A long price, but there was hanky-panky in that match.

Greyman tried fussing to cover it. You never can trust professionals.

However, I _and my friends_ won, and I shall win again with the horse.

Take you evens in gold _mohurs_ for the next----"

There was always a sledge-hammer method in the Major's fence, and the

subject dropped.

The room was heavy with the odors of meats and drinks. Dark as it was,

the flood of sunshine streaming into the veranda outside, where yellow

hornets were buzzing and the servants washing up the dishes, sent a

glare even into the shadows. Neither the furniture nor appointments of

the room owed anything to the East--for Indian art was, so to speak,

not as yet invented for English folk--yet there was a strange

unkennedness about their would-be familiarity which suddenly struck

the latest exile, young Mainwaring.

"India is a beastly hole," he said, in an undertone--"things are so

different--I wish I were out of it." There was a note of appeal in his

young voice; his eyes, meeting Alice Gissing's, filled with tears to

his intense dismay. He hoped she might not see them; but she did, and

leaned over to lay one kindly be-ringed little hand on the table quite

close to his.

"You've got liver," she said confidentially. "India is quite a nice

place. Come to the assembly to-night, and I will give you two

extras--whole ones. And don't drink any more madeira, there is a good

boy. Come and have coffee with me in the drawing room instead; that

will set you right."

Less has set many a boy hopelessly wrong. To do Alice Gissing justice,

however, she never recognized such facts; her own head being quite

steady. But Major Erlton understood the possible results perfectly,

and commented on them when, as a matter of course, his long length

remained lounging in an easy-chair after the other guests had gone,

and Mr. Gissing had retired to business. People, from the Palais

Royale playwrights, downward--or upward--always poke fun at the

husbands in such situations; but no one jibes at the man who succeeds

to the cut-and-dried necessity for devotion. Yet there is surely

something ridiculous in the spectacle of a man playing a conjugal part

without even a sense of duty to give him dignity in it, and the curse

of the commonplace comes as quickly to Abelard and Heloise as it does

to Darby and Joan. So Major Erlton, lounging and commenting, might

well have been Mrs. Gissing's legal owner. "Going to make a fool of

that lad now, I suppose, Allie. Why the devil should you when you

don't care for boys?"

She came to a stand in front of him like a child, her hands behind her

back, but her china-blue eyes had a world of shrewdness in them.

"Don't I? Do you think I care for men either? I don't. You just amuse

me, and I've got to be amused. By the way, did you remember to order

the cart at five sharp? I want to go round the Fair before the Club."

If they had been married ten times over, their spending the afternoon

together could not have been more of a foregone conclusion; there

seemed, indeed, no choice in the matter. And they were prosaically

punctual, too; at "five sharp" they climbed into the high dog-cart

boldly, in face of a whole posse of servants dressed in the nabob and

pagoda-tree style, also with silver crests in their pith turbans and

huge monograms on their breastplates; old-fashioned servants with the

most antiquated notions as to the needs of the sahib _logue_, and a

fund of passive resentment for the least change in the inherited

routine of service. Changes which they referred to the fact that the

new-fangled sahibs were not real sahibs. But the heavy, little and big

breakfasts, the unlimited beer, the solid dinners, the milk punch and

brandy _pâni_, all had their appointed values in the Gissings' house;

so the servants watched their mistress with approving smiles. And on

Mondays there was always a larger posse than usual to see the old Mai,

who had been Alice Gissing's ayah for years and years, hand up the

bouquet which the gardener always had ready, and say, "My salaams to

the missy-baba." Mrs. Gissing used to take the flowers just as she

took her parasol or her gloves. Then she would say, "All right,"

partly to the ayah, partly to her cavalier, and the dog-cart, or

buggy, or mail-phaeton, whichever it happened to be, would go spinning

away. For the old Mai had handed the flowers into many different

turn-outs and remained on the steps ready with the authority of age and

long service, to crush any frivolous remarks newcomers might make. But

the destination of the bouquet was always the same; and that was to

stand in a peg tumbler at the foot of a tiny white marble cross in the

cemetery. Mrs. Gissing put a fresh offering in it every Monday, going

through the ceremony with a placid interest; for the date on the cross

was far back in the years. Still, she used to speak of the little life

which had come and gone from hers when she was yet a child herself,

with a certain self-possessed plaintiveness born of long habit.

"I was barely seventeen," she would say, "and it was a dear little

thing. Then Saumarez was transferred, and I never returned to Lucknow

till I married Gissing. It was odd, wasn't it, marrying twice to the

same station. But, of course, I can't ask him to come here, so it is

doubly kind of you; for I couldn't come alone, it is so sad."

Her blue eyes would be limpid with actual tears; yet as she waited for

the return of the tumbler, which the watchman always had to wash out,

she looked more like some dainty figure on a cracker than a weeping

Niobe. Nevertheless, the admirers whom she took in succession into her

confidence thought it sweet and womanly of her never to have forgotten

the dead baby, though they rather admired her dislike to live ones.

Some of them, when their part in the weekly drama came upon them, as

it always did in the first flush of their fancy for the principal

actress in it, began by being quite sentimental over it. Herbert

Erlton did. He went so far once as to bring an additional bouquet of

pansies from his wife's pet bed; but the little lady had looked at it

with plaintive distrust. "Pansies withered so soon," she said, "and as

the bouquet had to last a whole week, something less fragile was

better." Indeed, the gardener's bouquets, compact, hard, with the

blossoms all jammed into little spots of color among the protruding

sprigs of privet, were more suited to her calm permanency of regret,

than the passionate purple posy which had looked so pathetically out

of place in the big man's coarse hands. She had taken it from him,

however, and strewn the already drooping flowers about the marble.

They looked pretty, she had said, though the others were best, as she

liked everything to be tidy; because she had been very, very fond of

the poor little dear. Saumarez had never been kind, and it had been so

pretty; dark, like its father, who had been a very handsome man. She

had cried for days, then, though she didn't like children now. But she

would always remember this one, always! The old Mai and she often

talked of it; especially when she was dressing for a ball, because the

gardener brought bouquets for them also.

Major Erlton, therefore, gave no more pansies, and his sentiment died

down into a sort of irritable wonder what the little woman would be

at. The unreality of it all struck him afresh on this particular

Monday: as he watched her daintily removing the few fallen petals; so

he left her to finish her task while he walked about. The cemetery was

a perfect garden of a place, with rectangular paths bordered by shrubs

which rose from a tangle of annual flowers like that around the

Gissings' house. This blossoming screen hid the graves for the most

part; but in the older portions great domed erections--generally

safeguarding an infant's body--rose above it more like summer-houses

than tombs. Herbert Erlton preferred this part of the cemetery. It was

less suggestive than the newer portion, and he was one of those

wholesome, hearty animals to whom the very idea of death is horrible.

So hither, after a time, she came, stepping daintily over the graves,

and pausing an instant on the way to add a sprig of mignonette to the

rosebud she had brought from a bush beside the cross; it was a fine,

healthy bush which yielded a constant supply of buds suitable for

buttonholes. She looked charming, but he met her with a perplexed

frown.

"I've been wondering, Allie," he said, "what you would have been like

if that baby had lived. Would you have cared for it?"

Her eyes grew startled. "But I do care for it! Why should I come if I

didn't? It isn't amusing, I'm sure; so I think it very unkind of you

to suggest----"

"I never suggested anything," he protested. "I know you did--that you

do care. But if it had lived----" he paused as if something escaped

his mental grasp. "Why, I expect you would have been different

somehow; and I was wondering----"

"Oh! don't wonder, please, it's a bad habit," she replied, suddenly

appeased. "You will be wondering next if I care for you. As if you

didn't know that I do."

She was pinning the buttonhole into his coat methodically, and he

could not refuse an answering smile; but the puzzled look remained. "I

suppose you do, or you wouldn't----" he began slowly. Then a sudden

emotion showed in face and voice. "You slip from me somehow,

Allie--slip like an eel. I never get a real hold---- Well! I wonder if

women understand themselves? They ought to, for nobody else can,

that's one comfort." Whether he meant he was no denser than previous

recipients of rosebuds, or that mankind benefited by failing to grasp

feminine standards, was not clear. And Mrs. Gissing was more

interested in the fact that the mare was growing restive. So they

climbed into the high dog-cart again, and took her a quieting spin

down the road. The fresh wind of their own speed blew in their faces,

the mare's feet scarcely seemed to touch the ground, the trees slipped

past quickly, the palm-squirrels fled chirruping. He flicked his whip

gayly at them in boyish fashion as he sat well back, his big hand

giving to the mare's mouth. Hers lay equably in her lap, though the

pace would have made most women clutch at the rail.

"Jolly little beasts; aint they, Allie?"

"Jolly altogether; jolly as it can be," she replied with the frank

delight of a girl. They had forgotten themselves innocently enough;

but one of the men in a dog-cart, past which they had flashed, put on

an outraged expression.

"Erlton and Mrs. Gissing again!" he fussed. "I shall tell my wife to

cut her. Being in business ourselves we have tried to keep square. But

this is an open scandal. I wonder Mrs. Erlton puts up with it. I

wouldn't."

His companion shook his head. "Dangerous work, saying that. Wait

till you are a woman. I know more about them than most, being a

doctor, so I never venture on an opinion. But, honestly, I believe

most women--that little one ahead into the bargain--don't care a

button one way or the other. And, for all our talk, I don't believe we

do either, when all is said and done."

"What is said and done?" asked the other peevishly.

There was a pause. The lessening dog-cart with its flutter of ribbons,

its driver sitting square to his work, showed on the hard white road

which stretched like a narrowing ribbon over the empty plain. Far

ahead a little devil of wind swept the dust against the blue sky like

a cloud. Nearer at hand lay a cluster of mud hovels, and--going toward

it before the dog-cart--a woman was walking along the dusty side of

the road. She had a bundle of grass on her head, a baby across her

hip, a toddling child clinging to her skirts. The afternoon sun sent

the shadows conglomerately across the white metal.

"Passion, Love, Lust, the attractions of sex for sex--what you will,"

said the doctor, breaking the silence. "Nothing is easier knocked

out of a man, if he is worth calling one--a bugle call, a tight

corner---- God Almighty!--they're over that child! Drive on like the

devil, man, and let me see what I can do."

There is never much to do when all has been done in an instant. There

had been a sudden causeless leaving of the mother's side, a toddling

child among the shadows, a quick oath, a mad rear as the mare, checked

by hands like a vise for strength, snapped the shafts as if they had

been straws. No delay, no recklessness; but one of these iron-shod

hoofs as it flung out had caught the child full on the temple, and

there was no need to ask what that curved blue mark meant, which had

gone crashing into the skull.

Alice Gissing had leaped from the dog-cart and stood looking at the

pitiful sight with wide eyes.

"We couldn't do anything," she said in an odd hard voice, as the

others joined her. "There was nothing we could do. Tell the woman,

Herbert, that we couldn't help it."

But the Major, making the still plunging mare a momentary excuse

for not facing the ghastly truth, had, after one short, sharp

exclamation--almost of fear, turned to help the groom. So there was no

sound for a minute save the plunging of hoofs on the hard ground, the

groom's cheerful voice lavishing endearments on his restless charge,

and a low animal-like whimper from the mother, who, after one wild

shriek, had sunk down in the dust beside the dead child, looking at

the purple bruise dully, and clasping her living baby tighter to her

breast. For it, thank the gods! was the boy. That one with the mark on

its forehead only the girl.

Then the doctor, who had been busy with deft but helpless hands, rose

from his knees, saying a word or two in Hindustani which provoked a

whining reply from the woman.

"She admits it was no one's fault," he said. "So Erlton, if you will

take our dog-cart----"

But the Major had faced the position by this time. "I can't go. She is

a camp follower, I expect, and I shall have to find out--for

compensation and all that. If you would take Mrs. Gissing----" His

voice, steady till then, broke perceptibly over the name; its owner

looked up sharply, and going over to him laid her hand on his arm.

"It wasn't your fault," she said, still in that odd hard voice. "You

had the mare in hand; she didn't stir an inch. It is a dreadful thing

to happen, but"--she threw her head back a little, her wide eyes

narrowed as a frown puckered her smooth forehead--"it isn't as if we

could have prevented it. The thing had to be."

She might have been the incarnation of Fate itself as she glanced down

at the dead child in the dust, at the living one reaching from its

mother's arms to touch its sister curiously, at the slow tears of the

mother herself as she acquiesced in the eternal fitness of things; for

a girl more or less was not much in the mud hovel, where she and her

man lived hardly, and the Huzoors would doubtless give rupees in

exchange, for they were just. She wept louder, however, when with

conventional wailing the women from the clustering huts joined her,

while the men, frankly curious, listened to the groom's spirited

description of the incident.

"You had better go, Allie; you do no good here," said the Major almost

roughly. He was anxious to get through with it all; he was absorbed in

it.

So the man who had said he was going to tell his wife to cut Mrs.

Gissing had to help her into the dog-cart.

"It was horrible, wasn't it?" she said suddenly when, in silence, they

had left the little tragedy far behind them. "We were going an awful

pace, but you saw he had the mare in hand. He is awfully strong, you

know." She paused, and a reflectively complacent smile stole to her

face. "I suppose you will think it horrid," she went on; "but it

doesn't feel to me like killing a human being, you know. I'm sorry, of

course, but I should have been much sorrier if it had been a white

baby. Wouldn't you?"

She set aside his evasion remorselessly. "I know all that! People say,

of course, that it is wicked not to feel the same toward people

whether they're black or white. But we don't. And they don't either.

They feel just the same about us because we are white. Don't you think

they do?"

"The antagonism of race----" he began sententiously, but she cut him

short again. This time with an irrelevant remark.

"I wonder what your wife would say if she saw me driving in your

dog-cart?"

He stared at her helplessly. The one problem was as unanswerable as

the other.

"You had better drive round the back way to the Fair," she said

considerately. "Somebody there will take me off your hands. Otherwise

you will have to drive me to the Club; for I'm not going home. It

would be dreadful after that horrid business. Besides, the Fair will

cheer me up. One doesn't understand it, you know, and the people crowd

along like figures on a magic lantern slide. I mean that you never

know what's coming next, and that is always so jolly, isn't it?"

It might be, but the man with the wife felt relieved when, five

minutes afterward, she transferred herself to young Mainwaring's

buggy. The boy, however, felt as if an angel had fluttered down from

the skies to the worn, broken-springed cushion beside him; an angel to

be guarded from humanity--even her own.

"How the beggars stare," he said after they had walked the horse for a

space through the surging crowds. "Let us get away from the grinning

apes." He would have liked to take her to paradise and put flaming

swords at the gate.

"They don't grin," she replied curtly, "they stare like Bank-holiday

people stare at the wild beasts in the Zoo. But let us get away from

the watered road, the policemen, and all that. That's no fun. See, go

down that turning into the middle of it; you can get out that way to

the river road afterward if you like."

The bribe was sufficient; it was not far across to peace and quiet, so

the turn was made. Nor was the staring worse in the irregular lane of

booths and stalls down which they drove. The unchecked crowd was

strangely silent despite the numberless children carried shoulder high

to see the show, and though the air was full of throbbings of tomtoms,

twanging of _sutaras_, intermittent poppings and fizzings of squibs.

But it was also strangely insistent; going on its way regardless of

the shouting groom.

"Take care," said Mrs. Gissing lightly, "don't run over another child.

By the way, I forgot to tell you--the Fair was so funny--but Erlton

ran over a black baby. It wasn't his fault a bit, and the mother,

luckily, didn't seem to mind; because it was a girl, I expect. Aren't

they an odd people? One really never knows what will make them cry or

laugh."

Something was apparently amusing them at that moment, however, for a

burst of boisterous merriment pealed from a dense crowd near a booth

pitched in an open space.

"What's that?" she cried sharply. "Let's go and see."

She was out of the dog-cart as she spoke despite his protest that it

was impossible--that she must not venture.

"Do you imagine they'll murder me?" she asked with an _insouciant_,

incredulous laugh. "What nonsense! Here, good people, let me pass,

please!"

She was by this time in the thick of the crowd, which gave way

instinctively, and he could do nothing but follow; his boyish face

stern with the mere thought her idle words had conjured up. Do her any

injury? Her dainty dress should not even be touched if he could help

it.

But the sightseers, most of them peasants beguiled from their fields

for this Festival of Spring, had never seen an English lady at such

close quarters before, if, indeed, they had ever seen one at all. So,

though they gave way they closed in again, silent but insistent in

their curiosity; while, as the center of attraction came nearer, the

crowd in front became denser, more absorbed in the bursts of

merriment. There was a ring of license in them which made young

Mainwaring plead hurriedly:

"Mrs. Gissing!--don't--please don't."

"But I want to see what they're laughing at," she replied. And then in

perfect mimicry of the groom's familiar cry, her high clear voice

echoed over the heads in front of her: "_Hut! Hut! Ari bhaiyan! Hut!_"

They turned to see her gay face full of smiles, joyous, confident,

sympathetic, and the next minute the cry was echoed with approving

grins from a dozen responsive throats.

"Stand back, brothers! Stand back!"

There were quick hustlings to right and left, quick nods and smiles,

even broad laughs full of good fellowship; so that she found herself

at the innermost circle with clear view of the central space, of the

cause of the laughter. It made her give a faint gasp and stand

transfixed. Two white-masked figures, clasped waist to waist, were

waltzing about tipsily. One had a curled flaxen wig, a muslin dress

distended by an all too visible crinoline, giving full play to a pair

of prancing brown legs. The other wore an old staff uniform, cocked

hat and feather complete. The flaxen curls rested on the tarnished

epaulet, the unembracing arms flourished brandy bottles.

It was a vile travesty; and the Englishwoman turned instinctively to

the Englishman as if doubtful what to do, how to take it. But the

passion of his boyish face seemed to make things clear--to give her

the clew, and she gripped his hand hard.

"Don't be a fool!" she whispered fiercely. "Laugh. It's the only thing

to do." Her own voice rang out shrill above the uncertain stir in the

crowd, taken aback in its merriment.

But something else rose above it also. A single word:

"Bravo!"

She turned like lightning to the sound, her cheeks for the first time

aflame, but she could see no one in the circle of dark faces whom she

could credit with the exclamation. Yet she felt sure she had heard it.

"Bravo!" Had it been said in jest or earnest, in mockery or---- Young

Mainwaring interrupted the problem by suggesting that as the maskers

had run away into a booth, where he could not follow and give them the

licking they deserved because of her presence, it might be as well for

her to escape further insult by returning to the buggy. His tone was

as full of reproach as that of a lad in love could be, but Mrs.

Gissing was callous. She declared she was glad to have seen it.

Englishmen did drink and Englishwomen waltzed. Why, then, shouldn't

the natives poke fun at both habits if they chose? They themselves

could laugh at other things. And laugh she did, recklessly, at

everything and everybody for the remainder of the drive. But

underneath her gayety she was harping on that "Bravo!" And suddenly as

they drove by the river she broke in on the boy's prattle to say

excitedly: "I have it! It must have been the one in the Afghan cap who

said 'Bravo!' He was fairer than the rest. Perhaps he was an

Englishman disguised. Well! I should know him again if I saw him."

"Him? who--what? Who said bravo?" asked the lad. He had been too angry

to notice the exclamation at the time.

She looked at him quizzically. "Not you--you abused me. But someone

did--or didn't"--here her little slack hands resting in her lap

clasped each other tightly. "I rather wish I knew. I'd rather like to

make him say it again. Bravo! Bravo!"

And then, as if at her own mimicry, she returned to her childish

unreasoning laugh.

CHAPTER VI.

THE GIFT OF MANY FACES.

Mrs. Gissing had guessed right. The man in the Afghan cap was Jim

Douglas, who found the disguise of a frontiersman the easiest to

assume, when, as now, he wanted to mix in a crowd. And he would have

said "Bravo" a dozen times over if he had thought the little lady

would like to hear it; for her quick denial of the possibility of

insult had roused his keenest admiration. Here had spoken a dignity he

had not expected to find in one whom he only knew as a woman Major

Erlton delighted to honor. A dignity lacking in the big brave boy

beside her; lacking, alas! in many a big brave Englishman of greater

importance. So he had risked detection by that sudden "Bravo!" Not

that he dreaded it much. To begin with, he was used to it, even when

he posed as an out-lander, for there was a trick in his gait, not to

be Orientalized, which made policemen salute gravely as he passed

disguised to the tent. Then there was ignorance of some one or another

of the million shibboleths which divide men from each other in India;

shibboleths too numerous for one lifetime's learning, which require to

be born in the blood, bred in the bone. In this case, also, he had

every intention of asserting his race by licking one at least of the

offenders when the show was over. For he happened to know one of them;

having indeed licked him a few days before over a certain piece of

bone. So, as the crowd, accepting the finale of one amusement

placidly, drifted away to see another, he walked over to the tent in

which the discomforted caricaturists had found refuge. It was a

tattered old military bell-tent, bought most likely at some auction

with the tattered old staff uniform. As he lifted the flap the sound

of escaping feet made him expect a stern chase; but he was mistaken.

Two figures rose with a start of studied surprise and salaamed

profoundly as he entered. They were both stark naked save for a

waistcloth, and Jim Douglas could not resist a quick glance round for

the discarded costumes. They were nowhere to be seen; being hidden,

probably, under the litter of properties strewing the squalid

green-room. Still of the identity of the man he knew Jim Douglas had

no doubt, and as this one was also the nearest, he promptly seized him

by the both shoulders and gave him a sound Western kick, which would

have been followed by others if the recipient had not slipped from his

hold like an eel. For Jhungi, Bunjârah, and general vagrant,

habitually oiled himself from head to foot after the manner of his

profession as a precaution against such possible attempts at capture.

His assailant, grasping this fact, at any rate, did not risk dignity

by pursuit; though the man stood salaaming again within arm's length.

"You scoundrel!" said Jim Douglas with as much severity as he could

command before the mixture of deference and defiance, innocence and

iniquity, in the sharp, cunning face before him. "Wasn't the licking I

gave you before enough?"

Jhungi superadded perplexity to his other show of emotions. "The

Huzoor mistakes," he said, with sudden cheerful understanding. "It was

the miscreant Bhungi, my brother, whom the Huzoor licked. The

misbegotten idler who tells lies in the bazaar about bones and sacks.

So his skin smarts, but my body is whole. Is it not so, Father Tiddu?"

The appeal to his companion was made with curious eagerness, and Jim

Douglas, who had heard this tale of the ill-doing double before,

looked at the witness to it with interest. That this man was or was

not Jhungi's co-offender he could not say with certainty, for there

was a remarkable lack of individuality about both face and figure when

in repose. But the nickname of Tiddu, or cricket, was immediately

explained by the jerky angularity of his actions. Save for the faint

frostiness of sprouting gray hairs on a shaven cheek and skull he

might have been any age.

"Of a truth it was Bhungi," he said in a well-modulated but creaky

voice. "Time was when liars, such as he, fell dead. Now they don't

even catch fevers, and if they do, the Huzoors give them a bitter

powder and start them lying again. So, since one dead fish stinks a

whole tank, virtuous Jhungi, being like as two peas in a pod, suffers

an ill-name. But Bhungi will know what it means to tell lies when he

stands before his Creator. Nevertheless in this world the master being

enraged----"

"Not so, Father Tiddu," interrupted Jhungi glibly, "the Huzoor is but

enraged with Bhungi. And rightly. Did not we hide our very faces with

shame while he mimicked the noble people? Did we not try to hold him

when he fled from punishment--as the Huzoor no doubt heard----"

Jim Douglas without a word slipped his hand down the man's back. The

wales of a sound hiding were palpable; so was his wince as he dodged

aside to salaam again.

"The Huzoor is a male judge," he said admiringly. "No black man could

deceive him. This slave has certainly been whipped. He fell among

liars who robbed him of his reputation. Will the Huzoor do likewise?

On the honor of a Bunjârah 'tis Bhungi whom the Huzoor beats. He gives

Jhungi bitter powders when he gets the fever. And even Bhungi but

tries to earn a stomachful as he can when the Huzoors take his trade

from him."

"The world grows hollow, to match a man's swallow," quoted Tiddu

affably.

The familiar by-word of poverty, the quiet mingling of truth and

falsehood, daring and humility in Jhungi's plea, roused both Jim

Douglas' sense of humor, and the sympathy--which with him was always

present--for the hardness and squalidness of so many of the lives

around him.

"But you can surely earn the stomachful honestly," he said, anger

passing into irritation. "What made you take to this trade?" He kicked

at a pile of properties, and in so doing disclosed the skeleton of a

crinoline. Jhungi with a shocked expression stooped down and covered

it up decorously.

"But it is my trade," he replied; "the Huzoor must surely have heard

of the Many-Faced tribe of Bunjârahs? I am of them.'

"Lie not, Jhungi!" interrupted Tiddu calmly, "he is but my apprentice,

Huzoor, but I----" he paused, caught up a cloth, gave it one dexterous

twirl round him, squatted down, and there he was, to the life, a

veiled woman watching the stranger with furtive, modest eye. "But I,"

came a round feminine voice full of feminine inflections, "am of the

thousand-faced people who wander to a thousand places. A new place, a

new face. It makes a large world, Huzoor, a strange world." There was

a melancholy cadence in his voice, which added interest to the sheer

amaze which Jim Douglas was feeling. He had heard the legend of the

Many-Faced Tribe, had even seen clever actors claiming to belong to

it, and knew how the Stranglers deceived their victims, but anything

like this he had never credited, much less seen. He himself, though he

knew to the contrary, could scarcely combat the conviction, which

seemed to come to him from that one furtive eye, that a woman sat

within those folds.

"But how?" he begun in perplexity. "I thought the Baharupas [_Lit_.

many-faced] never went in caravans."

Tiddu resumed the cracked voice and let the smile become visible, and,

as if by magic, the illusion disappeared. "The Huzoor is right. We are

wanderers. But in my youth a woman tied me to one place, one face;

women have the trick, Huzoor, even if they are wanderers themselves.

This one was, but I loved her; so after we had burned her and her

fellow-wanderer together hand-in-hand, according to the custom, so

that they might wander elsewhere but not in the tribe, I lingered on.

He was the father of Jhungi, and the boy being left destitute I taught

him to play; for it needs two in the play as in life. The man and the

woman, or folks care not for it. So I taught Jhungi----"

"And brother Bhungi?" suggested his hearer dryly.

A faint chuckle came from the veil. "And Bhungi. He plays well, and

hath beguiled an old rascal with thin legs and a fat face like mine

into playing with him. Some, even the Huzoor himself, might be

beguiled into mistaking Siddu for Tiddu. But it is a tom-cat to a

tiger. So being warned, the Huzoor will give no unearned blows. Yet if

he did, are not two kicks bearable from the mulch-cow?" As he spoke he

angled out a hand impudently for an alms with the beggars' cry of

"_Alakh_," to point his meaning.

It was echoed by Jhungi, who, envious of Tiddu's holding the boards,

as it were, had in sheer devilry and desire not to be outdone, taken

up the disguise of a mendicant. It was a most creditable performance,

but Tiddu dismissed it with a waive of the hand.

"_Bullah!_" he said contemptuously, "'tis the refuge of fools. There

is not one true beggar in fifty, so the forty-and-nine false ones go

free of detention as the potter's donkey. Even the Huzoor could do

better--had I the teaching of him."

He leaned forward, dropping his voice slightly, and Jim Douglas

narrowed his eyes as men do when some unbidden idea claims admittance

to the brain.

"You?" he echoed; "what could you teach me?"

Tiddu rose, let fall the veil to decent dignified drapery, and fixed

his eyes full on the questioner. They were luminous eyes, differing

from Jhungi's beady ones as the fire-opal differs from the diamond.

"What could I teach?" he re-echoed, and his tone, monotonously

distinct to Jim Douglas, was inaudible to others, judging by Jhungi's

impassive face. "Many things. For one, that the Baharupas are not

mimics only. They have the Great Art. What is it? God knows. But what

they will folk to see, that is seen. That and no more."

Jim Douglas laughed derisively. Animal magnetism and mesmerism were

one thing: this was another.

"The Huzoor thinks I lie; but he must have heard of the doctor sahib

in Calcutta who made suffering forget to suffer."

"You mean Dr. Easdale. Did you know him? Was he a pupil of yours?"

came the cynical question.

Tiddu's face became expressionless. "Perhaps; but this slave forgets

names. Yet the Huzoors have the gift sometimes. The Baharupas have it

not always; though the father's hoard goes oftenest to the son. Now,

if, by chance, the Huzoor had the gift and could use it, there would

be no need for policemen to salute as he passes; no need for the

drug-smokers to cease babbling when he enters. So the Huzoor could

find out what he wants to find out; what he is paid to find out."

His eyes met Jim Douglas' surprise boldly.

"How do you know I want to find out anything?" said the latter, after

a pause.

Tiddu laughed. "The Huzoor must find a turban heavy, and there is no

room for English toes in a native shoe; folk seek not such discomfort

for naught."

Jim Douglas paused again; the fellow was a charlatan, but he was

consummately clever; and if there was anything certain in this world

it was the wisdom of forgetting Western prejudices occasionally in

dealing with the East.

"Send that man away," he said curtly, "I want to talk to you alone."

But the request seemed lost on Tiddu. He folded up the veil

impudently, and resumed the thread of the former topic. "Yet

Jhungi plays the beggar well, for which Fate be praised, since he

must ask alms elsewhere if the Huzoor refuses them. For the purse is

empty"--here he took a leathern bag from his waistband and turned it

inside out--"by reason of the Huzoor's dislike to good mimics. So thou

must to the temples, Jhungi, and if thou meetest Bhungi give him the

sahib's generous gift; for blows should not be taken on loan."

Jhungi, who all this time had been telling his beads like the best of

beggars, looked up with some perplexity; whether real or assumed Jim

Douglas felt it was impossible to say, in that hotbed of deception.

"Bhungi?" echoed the former, rising to his feet. "Ay! that will I, if

I meet him. But God knows as to that. God knows of Bhungi----"

"The purse is empty," repeated Tiddu in a warning voice, and Jhungi,

with a laugh, pulled himself and his disguise together, as it were,

and passed out of the tent; his beggar's cry, "_Alakh! Alakh!_"

growing fainter and fainter while Tiddu and Jim Douglas looked at each

other.

"Jhungi-Bhungi--Bhungi-Jhungi," jeered the Baharupa, suddenly,

jingling the names together. "Which be which, as he said, God knows,

not man. That is the best of lies. They last a body's lifetime, so the

Huzoor may as well learn old Tiddu's----"

"Or Siddu's?"

"Or Siddu's," assented the mountebank calmly. "But the Huzoor cannot

learn to use his gift from that old rascal. He must come to the

many-faced one, who is ready to teach it."

"Why?"

Tiddu abandoned mystery at once.

"For fifty rupees, Huzoor; not a _pice_ less. Now, in my hand."

Was it worth it? Jim Douglas decided instantly that it might be. Not

for the gift's sake; of that he was incredulous. But Tiddu was a

consummate actor and could teach many tricks worth knowing. Then in

this roving commission to report on anything he saw and heard to the

military magnate, it would suit him for the time to have the service

of an arrant scoundrel. Besides, the pay promised him being but small,

the wisdom of having a second string to the bow of ambition had

already decided him on combining inquiry with judicious horse-dealing;

since he could thus wander through villages buying, through towns

selling, without arousing suspicion; and this life in a caravan would

start him on these lines effectively. Finally, this offer of Tiddu's

was unsought, unexpected, and, ever since Kate Erlton's appeal, Jim

Douglas had felt a strange attraction toward pure chance. So he took

out a note from his pocket-book and laid it in the Baharupa's hand.

"You asked fifty," he said, "I give a hundred; but with the branch of

the neem-tree between us two."

Tiddu gave him an admiring look. "With the sacred '_Lim ke dagla_'

between us, and Mighty Murri-am herself to see it grow," he echoed.

"Is the Huzoor satisfied?"

The Englishman knew enough of Bunjârah oaths to be sure that he had,

at least, the cream of them; besides, a hundred rupees went far in the

purchase of good faith. So that matter was settled, and he felt it to

be a distinct relief; for during the last day or two he had been

casting about for a fair start rather aimlessly. In truth, he had

underrated the gap little Zora's death would make in his life, and had

been in a way bewildered to find himself haunting the empty nest on

the terraced roof in forlorn, sentimental fashion. The sooner,

therefore, that he left Lucknow the better. So, as the Bunjârah had

told him the caravan was starting the very next morning, he hastily

completed his few preparations, and having sent Tara word of his

intention, went, after the moon had risen, to lock the doors on the

past idyl and take the key of the garden-house back to its owner; for

he himself had always lodged, in European fashion, near the Palace.

The garden, as he entered it, lay peaceful as ever; so utterly

unchanged from what he remembered it on many balmy moonlit nights,

that he could not help looking up once more, as if expectant of that

tinsel flutter, that soft welcome, "_Khush-âmud-und Huzrut_." Strange!

So far as he was concerned the idyl might be beginning; but for her?

All unconsciously, as he paused, his thought found answer in one

spoken word--the Persian equivalent for "it is finished," which has

such a finality in its short syllables:

"KHUTM."

"Khutm." The echo came from Tara's voice, but it had a ring in it

which made him turn, anticipating some surprise. She was standing not

far off, below the plinth, as he was, having stepped out from the

shadow of the trees at his approach, and she was swathed from head to

foot in the white veil of orthodox widowhood, which encircled her face

like a cere-cloth. Even in the moonlight he could see the excitement

in her face, the glitter in the large, wild eyes.

"Tara!" he exclaimed sharply, his experience warning him of danger,

"what does this mean?"

"That the end has come; the end at last!" she cried theatrically;

every fold of her drapery, though she stood stiff as a corpse, seeming

to be instinct with fierce vitality.

He changed his tone at once, perceiving that the danger might be

serious. "You mean that your service is at an end," he said quietly.

"I told you that some days ago. Also that your pay would be continued

because of your goodness to her--to the dead. I advised your returning

north, nearer your own people, but you are free to go or stay. Do you

want anything more? If you do, be quick, please, for I am in a hurry."

His coolness, his failure to remark on the evident meaning of her

changed dress, calmed her somewhat.

"I want nothing," she replied sullenly. "A _suttee_ wants nothing in

this world, and I am _suttee_. I have been the master's servant for

gratitude's sake--now I am the servant of God for righteousness'

sake." So far she had, spoken as if the dignified words had been

pre-arranged; now she paused in a sort of wistful anger at the

indifference on his face. The words meant so much to her, and, as she

ceased from them, their controlling power seemed to pass also, and she

flung out her arms wildly, then brought them down in stinging blows

upon her breasts.

"I am _suttee_. Yes! I am _suttee!_ Reject me not again, ye Shining

Ones! reject me not again."

The cry was full of exalted resolve and despair. It made Jim Douglas

step up to her, and seizing both hands, hold them fast.

"Don't be a fool, Tara!" he said sternly. "Tell me, sensibly, what all

this means. Tell me what you are going to do."

His touch seemed to scorch her, for she tore herself away from it

vehemently; yet it seemed also to quiet her, and she watched him with

somber eyes for a minute ere replying: "I am going to Holy Gunga.

Where else should a _suttee_ go? The Water will not reject me as the

Fire did, since, before God! I am _suttee_. As the master knows,"--her

voice held a passionate appeal,--"I have been _suttee_ all these long

years. Yet now I have given up all--all!"

With a swift gesture, full of womanly grace, but with a sort

of protest against such grace in its utter abandonment and

self-forgetfulness, she flung out her arms once more. This time to

raise the shrouding veil from her head and shoulders. Against this

background of white gleaming in the moonlight, her new-shaven skull

showed death-like, ghastly. Jim Douglas recoiled a step, not from the

sight itself, but because he knew its true meaning; knew that it meant

self-immolation if she were left to follow her present bent. She would

simply go down to the Ganges and drown herself. An inconceivable state

of affairs, beyond all rational understanding; but to be reckoned

with, nevertheless, as real, inevitable.

"What a pity!" he said, after a moment's pause had told him that it

would be well to try and take the starch out of her resolution by fair

means or foul, leaving its cause for future inquiry. "You had such

nice hair. I used to admire it very much."

Her hands fell slowly, a vague terror and remorse came to her eyes;

and he pursued the advantage remorselessly. "Why did you cut it off?"

He knew, of course, but his affected ignorance took the color, the

intensity from the situation, by making her feel her _coup de theatre_

had failed.

"The Huzoor must know," she faltered, anger and disappointment and

vague doubt in her tone, while her right hand drew itself over the

shaven skull as if to make sure there was no mistake. "I am

_suttee_--" The familiar word seemed to bring certainty with it, and

she went on more confidentially. "So I cut it all off and it lies

there, ready, as I am, for purification."

She pointed to the upper step leading to the plinth, where, as on an

altar, lay all her worldly treasures, arranged carefully with a view

to effect. The crimson scarf she had always worn was folded--with due

regard to the display of its embroidered edge--as a cloth, and at

either end of it lay a pile of trumpery personal adornments, each

topped and redeemed from triviality by a gold wristlet and anklet. In

the center, set round by fallen orange-blossoms, rose a great heap of

black hair, snakelike in glistening coils. The simple pomposity of the

arrangement was provocative of smiles, the wistful eagerness of the

face watching its effect on the master was provocative of tears. Jim

Douglas, feeling inclined for both, chose the former deliberately; he

even managed a derisive laugh as he stepped up to the altar and laid

sacrilegious hands on the hair. Tara gave a cry of dismay, but he was

too quick for her, and dangled a long lock before her very eyes, in

jesting, but stern decision.

"That settles it, Tara. You can go to Gunga now if you like, and bathe

and be as holy as you like. But there will be no Fire or Water. Do you

understand?"

She looked at the hand holding the hair with the oddest expression,

though she said obstinately, "I shall drown if I choose."

"Why should you choose?" he asked. "You know as well as I that it is

too late for any good to you or others. The Fire and Water should have

come twelve years ago. The priests won't say so of course. They want

fools to help them in this fuss about the new law. Ah! I thought so!

They have been at you, have they? Well, be a fool if you like, and

bring them pennies at Benares as a show. You cannot do anything else.

You can't even sacrifice your hair really, so long as I have this

bit." He began to roll the lock round his finger, neatly.

"What is the Huzoor going to do with it?" she asked, and the oddness

had invaded her voice.

"Keep it," he retorted. "And by all, these thirty thousand and odd

gods of yours, I'll say it was a love-token if I choose. And I will if

you are a fool." He drew out a small gold locket attached to the

Brahminical thread he always wore, and began methodically to fit the

curl into it, wondering if this cantrip of his--for it was nothing

more--would impress Tara. Possibly. He had found such suggestions of

ritual had an immense effect, especially with the womenkind who were

for ever inventing new shackles for themselves; but her next remark

startled him considerably.

"Is the _bibi's_ hair in there too?" she asked. There was a real

anxiety in her tone, and he looked at her sharply, wondering what she

would be at.

"No," he answered. In truth it was empty; and had been empty ever

since he had taken a fair curl from it many years before; a curl which

had ruined his life. The memory making him impatient of all feminine

subtleties, he added roughly, "It will stay there for the present; but

if you try _suttee_ nonsense I swear I'll tie it up in a cowskin bag,

and give it to a sweeper to make broth of."

The grotesque threat, which suggested itself to his sardonic humor as

one suitable to the occasion, and which in sober earnest was terrible

to one of her race, involving as it did eternal damnation, seemed to

pass her by. There was even, he fancied, a certain relief in the face

watching him complete his task; almost a smile quivering about her

lips. But when he closed the locket with a snap, and was about to slip

it back to its place, the full meaning of the threat, of the loss--or

of something beyond these--seemed to overtake her; an unmistakable

terror, horror, and despair swept through her. She flung herself at

his feet, clasping them with both hands.

"Give it me back, master," she pleaded wildly. "Hinder me not again!

Before God I am _suttee!_ I am _suttee!_"

But this same Eastern clutch of appeal is disconcerting to the average

Englishman. It fetters the understanding in another sense, and

smothers sympathy in a desire to be left alone. Even Jim Douglas

stepped back from it with something like a bad word. She remained

crouching for a moment with empty hands, then rose in scornful

dignity.

"There was no need to thrust this slave away," she said proudly.

"Tara, the Rajputni, will go without that. She will go to Holy Gunga

and be purged of inmost sin. Then she will return and claim her right

of _suttee_ at the master's hand. Till then he may keep what he

stole."

"He means to keep it," retorted the master savagely, for he had come

to the end of his patience. "Though what this fuss about _suttee_

means I don't know. You used to be sensible enough. What has come to

you?"

Tara looked at him helplessly, then, wrapping her widow's veil round

her, prepared to go in silence. She could not answer that question

even to herself. She would not even admit the truth of the old

tradition, that the only method for a woman to preserve constancy to

the dead was to seek death itself. That would be to admit too much.

Yet that was the truth, to which her despair at parting pointed even

to herself. Truth? No! it was a lie! She would disprove it even in

life if she was prevented from doing so by death. So, without a word,

she gathered up the crimson drapery and what lay on it. Then, with

these pathetic sacrifices of all the womanhood she knew tight clasped

in her widow's veil, she paused for a last salaam.

The incomprehensible tragedy of her face irritated him into greater

insistence.

"But what is it all about?" he reiterated. "Who has been putting these

ideas into your head? Who has been telling you to do this? Is it Soma,

or some devil of a priest?"

As he waited for an answer the floods of moonlight threw their shadows

together to join the perfumed darkness of the orange trees. The city,

half asleep already, sent no sound to invade the silence.

"No! master. It was God."

Then the shadow left him and disappeared with her among the trees. He

did not try to call her back. That answer left him helpless.

But as, after climbing the stairs, he passed slowly from one to

another of the old familiar places in the pleasant pavilions, the

mystery of such womanhood as Tara Devi's and little Zora's oppressed

him. Their eternal cult of purely physical passion, their eternal

struggle for perfect purity and constancy, not of the soul, but the

body; their worship alike of sex and He who made it seemed

incomprehensible. And as he turned the key in the lock for the last

time, he felt glad to think that it was not likely the problem would

come into his life again; even though he carried a long lock of black

hair with him. It was an odd keepsake, but if he was any judge of

faces his cantrip had served his purpose; Tara would not commit

suicide while he held that hostage.

So, having scant leisure left, he hurried through the alleys to return

the key. They were almost deserted; the children at this hour being

asleep, the men away lounging in the bazaars. But every now and again

a formless white figure clung to a corner shadow to let him pass. A

white shadow itself, recalling the mystery he had been glad to leave

unsolved; for he knew them to be women taking this only opportunity

for a neighborly visit. Old or young, pretty or ugly? What did it

matter? They were women, born temptresses of virtuous men; and they

were proud of the fact, even the poor old things long past their

youth. There was a chink in a door he was about to pass. A chink an

inch wide with a white shadow behind it. A woman was looking out. What

sort of a woman, he wondered idly? Suddenly the chink widened, a hand

crept through it, beckoning. He could see it clearly in the moonlight.

An old wrinkled hand, delicately old, delicately wrinkled,

inconceivably thin, but with the pink henna stain of the temptress

still on palms and fingers. A hand with the whole history of seclusion

written on it. He crossed over to it, and heard a hurried breathless

whisper.

"If the Huzoor would listen for the sake of any woman he loves."

It was an old voice, but it sent a thrill to his heart. "I am

listening, mother," he replied, "for the sake of the dead."

"God send her grave peace, my son!" came the voice less hurriedly.

"It is not much for listening. I am pensioner, Huzoor. The

King gave me three rupees, but now he is gone and the money

comes not. If the Huzoor would tell those who send it that

Ashrâf-un-Nissa-Zainub-i-Mahal--the Huzoor may know my name, being as

my father and mother--wants it. That is all, Huzoor."

It was not much, but Jim Douglas could supplement the rest. Here was

evidently a woman who had lived on bounty, and who was starving for

the lack of it. There were hundreds in her position, he knew, even

among those whose pensions had been guaranteed; for they had not been

paid as yet. The papers were not ready, the tape not tied, the

sealing-wax not sealed.

"It will not be for long, Huzoor, and it is only three rupees. I was

watching for a neighbor to borrow corn, if I could, and seeing the

Huzoor----"

"It is all right, mother," he interrupted reassuringly. "I was coming

to pay it. Hold the hand straight and I will count it in. Three rupees

for three months; that is nine."

The chink of the silver had a background of blessings, and Jim Douglas

walked on, thinking what a quaint commentary this little incident was

on his puzzle. "Ashrâf-un-Nissa-Zainub-i-Mahal." "Honor-of-women and

Ornament-of-Palaces." If the King's paymaster had thought twice about

such things, the poor old lady might not have been starving. He was

the real culprit. And three months' delay was not long for sanctions,

references, for all the paraphernalia and complex machinery of our

Government. But a case like this? He looked up into the star-sprinkled

riband of sky between the narrowing housetops, and wondered from how

many unseen hearths and unheard voices the cry, "How long, O Lord! How

long!" was rising. But even to his listening ear there was no sign, no

sound. And as he went on through the bazaars, the crowds were passing

and repassing contentedly upon the trivial errands of life, and the

twinkling cressets in the shops showed faces eager only after a

trivial loss or gain.

And the world of Lucknow was apparently awakening contentedly to a new

day, when, before dawn, he passed out of it disguised by Tiddu as a

deaf-and-dumb driver to the bullock which carried the tattered

bell-tent and the tattered staff uniform. It was still dark, but there

was a sense of coming light in the sky, and the hum of the housewives'

querns, early at work over the coming day's bread, filled the air like

swarming bees. The spectral white shadows of widow-drudges were

already at work on the creaking well-gear, and the swish of their reed

brooms could be heard behind screening walls.

But on the broad white road beyond the bazaars the fresh perfume of

the dew-steeped gardens drifted with the faint breeze which heralds

the dawn. And down the road, heard first, then dimly seen against its

whiteness, came a band of chanting pilgrims to the Holy River.

"_Hurri Gunga! Hurri Gunga! Hurri Gunga!_"

Jim Douglas, swerving his bullock to give them room, wondered if Tara

were among them. What if she were? That lock of hair went with _him_.

So, with a smile, he swerved the bullock back again. There was a hint

of a gleaming river-curve through the lessening trees now, and that

big black mass to his left must be the Bailey-guard gate. He could see

a faint white streak like a sentry beside it; so it must be close on

gunfire. Even as the thought came, a sudden rolling boom filled the

silence, and seemed to vibrate against the archway. And hark! From

within the Residency, and from far Dilkhusha, the clear glad notes of

the reveille answered the challenge; while close at hand the clash of

arms told they were changing guards. Then, though he could not see it,

the English flag must be rising beyond the trees to float over the

city during the coming day.

For one day more, at least.

BOOK II.

THE BLOWING OF THE BUBBLE.

CHAPTER I.

IN THE PALACE.

It was a day in late September. Nearly six months, therefore, had gone

by since Jim Douglas had passed the Bailey-guard at gunfire, and the

English flag had risen behind the trees to float over Lucknow. It

floated there now, serenely, securely, with an air of finality in its

folds; for folk were becoming accustomed to it. At least so said the

official reports, and even Jim Douglas himself could trace no waxing

in the tide of discontent. It neither ebbed nor flowed, but beat

placidly against the rocks of offense.

But at Delhi there was one corner of the city over which the English

flag did not float. It lay upon the eastern side above the river where

four rose-red fortress walls hemmed in a few acres of earth from the

march of Time himself, and safe-guarded a strange survival of

sovereignty in the person of Bahâdur Shâh, last of the Moghuls. An old

man past eighty years of age, who dreamed a dream of power among the

golden domes, marble colonnades, and green gardens with which his

ancestors had crowned the eastern wall.

The sun shone hotly, steamily, within those four inclosing walls, save

on that eastern edge, where the cool breezes from the plains beyond

blew through open arches and latticed balconies. For the rest, the

palace-fort--shut in from all outside influence--was like some tepid,

teeming breeding-place for strange forms of life unknown to purer,

clearer atmospheres.

It was at the Lahore gate of this Delhi palace that on this late

September day a tawdry palanquin, followed by a few tawdry retainers,

paused before a cavernous arch, ending the quaint, lofty vaulted

tunnel which led inward for some fifty yards or more to another

barrier. Here an old man in spectacles sat writing hurriedly.

"Quick, fool, quick! Read, and let me sign," called the huge unwieldy

figure in the palanquin, as the bearers, panting under their gross

burden, shifted shoulders. Mahboob Ali, Chief Eunuch and Prime

Minister, groaned under the jolt; it was a foretaste of many to be

endured ere he reached the Resident's house, miles away on the

northern edge of the river. Yet he had to endure them, for important

negotiations were on foot between the Survival and Civilization. The

heir-apparent to those few acres where the sun stood still had died,

had been poisoned some said; and another had to be recognized. There

was no lack of claimants; there never was a lack of claimants to

anything within those walls, where everyone strove to have the first

and last word with the Civilization which supported the Survival. And

here was he, Mahboob, Prime Minister, being delayed by a miserable

scrivener.

"Read, pig! read," he reiterated, laying his puffy hand on his jeweled

sword-hilt; for he was still within the gate, therefore a despot. A

few yards further he would be a dropsical old man; no more.

"Your slave reads!" faltered the editor of the Court Journal.

"Mussamât Hâfzan's record of the women's apartments being late to-day,

hath delayed----"

"'Twas in time enough, uncle, if thou wouldst make fewer flourishes,"

retorted a woman's voice; it was nothing but a voice by reason of the

voluminous Pathan veil covering the small speaker.

"Curse thee for a misbegotten hound!" bawled Mahboob. "Am I to lose

the entrance fee I paid Gâmu, the Huzoor's orderly, for first

interview--when money is so scarce too! Read as it stands, idiot--'tis

but an idle tale at best."

The last was an aside to himself as he lay back in his cushions; for,

idle though the tale was undoubtedly, it suited him to be its Prime

Minister. The editor laid down his pen hurriedly, and the polished

Persian polysyllables began to trip over one another, while their

murmurous echo--as if eager to escape the familiar monotony--sped from

arch to arch of the long tunnel, which was lit about the middle by

side arches on the guards' quarters, and through which the sunlight

streamed in a broad band of gold across the red stone causeway.

The attributes of the Almighty having come to an end the reader began

on those of Bahâdur Shâh, Father of Victory, Light of Religion,

Polestar and Defender of the Faith----

"Faster, fool, faster," came the fat voice.

The spectacled old man swallowed his breath, as it were, and went on

at full gallop through the uprisal and bathing of Majesty, through

feelings of pulses and reception of visitors, then slowed down a bit

over the recital of dinner; for he was a _gourmet_, and his tongue

loved the very sound of dainty dishes.

"May your grave be spat upon!" shouted the Chief Eunuch. "So none were

poisoned by it what matters the food? Pass on----"

"The Most Exalted then said his appointed prayers," gasped the reader.

"The Light-of-the-World then slept his usual sleep. On awakening, the

physician Ahsan-Oolah----"

Mahboob sat up among his cushions. "Ahsan-Oolah! he felt the Royal

pulse at dawn also----"

"The Most Noble forgets," interrupted a voice with the veiled venom of

a partisan in its suavity. "The King--may his enemies die!--took a

cooling draught yesterday and requires all the care we can give him."

"The King, Meean-sahib, needs nothing save the prayers of the holy

priest, who has piously made over long years of his own life to

prolong his Majesty's," retorted Mahboob, scowling at the speaker, who

wore the Moghul dress, proclaiming him a member of the royal family.

There was no lack of such in the palace-fort, for though Bahâdur Shâh

himself, being more or less of a saint, had contented himself with

some sixty children, his ancestors had sometimes run to six hundred.

The Meean-sahib laughed scornfully as he passed inward, and muttered

that those who went forth with the dog's trot might return with the

cat's slink, since the great question had yet to be settled. Mahboob's

scowl deepened; the very audacity of the interruption rousing a fear

lest the king's eldest son, Mirza Moghul, whose partisan the speaker

was, might have some secret understanding with Civilization. All the

more need for haste.

"Read on, fool! Who told thee to stop?"

"The Princess Farkhoonda Zamâni entered by the Delhi gate."

Mahboob gave a scornful laugh in his turn. "To visit the Mirza's

house, no doubt. Let her come--a pretty fool! Yet she had wiser stay

where she hath chosen to live, instead of being princess one day and

plain Newâsi the next. There are enough women without her in the

palace!"

So it seemed, to judge by the stream of female names and titles

belonging to the curtained dhoolies, which had passed and repassed the

barriers, upon which the editor launched his tongue. But Mahboob, as

Chief Eunuch, knew the value of such information and cut it short with

a sneer.

"If that be all! quick! the pen, and I will sign."

A bystander, also in the Moghul dress, laughed broadly at the

well-worn inuendo on the possibilities of curtained dhoolies in

intrigue. "Thou art right, Mahboob," he said, "God only knows."

"His own work," chuckled the Keeper of Virtue. "And the Devil made

most of the women here. Now pigs! Canst not start? Am I to be kept

here all day?"

As the litter went swaying out between the presented arms of the

sentries, the white chrysalis of a Pathan veil stepped lamely down

into the causeway. "That, seeing there is no news, will be something

to amuse the Queen withal," came the sharp voice.

"There may be news enough, when that fat pig returns, to make it hard

to amuse thy mistress, Mussamât Hâfzan," suggested another bystander.

The chrysalis paused. "My mistress! Nay, sahib! Hâfzan is that to

herself only. I am for no one save myself. I carry news, and the

more the better for my trade. Yet I have not had a real good day for

gifts of gratitude from my hearers, since Prince Fukrud-deen, the

heir-apparent, died." There was a reckless cynicism in her voice, and

he of the Moghul dress broke in hotly.

"Was poisoned, thou meanest, by----"

Hâfzan's shrill laugh rang through the arches.

"No names, Mirza sahib, no names! And 'tis no news surely to have folk

poisoned in the fort; as thou wouldst know ere long, may be, if Hâfzan

were spiteful. But I name no names--not I! I carry news, that is all."

So, with a limp, showing that the woman within was a cripple, the

formless figure passed along the tunnel through the inner barrier, and

so across the wide courtyard where the public hall of audience stood

blocking the eastern end. It was a massive, square, one-storied

building, with a remorseless look in its plain expanse of dull red

stone, pierced by toothed arches which yawned darkly into a redder

gloom, like monstrous mouths agape for victims. Past this, with its

high-set fretted marble _baldequin_ showing dimly against the end

wall--whence a locked wicket gave sole entrance from the palace to

this seat of justice or injustice--the Pathan veil flitted like a

ghost; so, through a narrow passage guarded by the King's own

body-guard, into a different world; a cool breezy world of white and

gold and blue, clasping a garden set with flowers and fruit. Blue sky,

white marble colonnades, and golden domes vaulting and zoning the

burnished leaves of the orange trees, where the green fruit hung like

emeralds above a tangle of roses and marigolds, chrysanthemums and

crimson amaranth. Hâfzan paused among them for a second; then, all

unchallenged by any, passed on up the steps of the marble platform,

which lies between the Baths and the Private Hall of Audience. That

marvelous building where the legend, Cunningly circled into the

decorations, still tells the visitor again and again that, "If earth

holds a haven of bliss, It is this, it is this, it is this."

Here, on the platform, Hâfzan paused again to look over the low

parapet. The wide eastern plains stretched away to the pale blue

horizon before her, and the curving river lay at her feet edging the

high bank, faced with stone, which forms the eastern defense of the

palace-fort. Thus the levels within touch the very top of the wall; so

that the domes, and colonnades, and green gardens, when seen from the

opposite side of the streams cut clear upon the sky, like a castle in

the air at all times; but in the sunsettings, when they show in shades

of pale lilac, with the huge dome of the great mosque bulging like a

big bubble into the golden light behind them as a veritable Palace of

Dreams.

She looked northward, first; along the sheer face of the rosy

retaining wall to its trend westward at the Queen's favorite bastion,

which was crowned by a balconied summer-house overhanging the moat

between the fort itself and the isolated citadel of Selimgurh; which,

jutting out into the river, partially hid the bridge of boats spanning

the stream beyond. Then she looked southward. Here was the sheer face

of rosy wall again, but it was crowned, close at hand, by the

colonnade and projecting eaves of the Private Hall of Audience.

Further on it was broken by the carved _corbeilles_ of the King's

balcony, and it ended abruptly at a sudden eastward turn of the

river, so giving a view of rolling rocky hillocks sweeping up to the

horizon where, faint and far like a spear-point, the column of the

Kutb showed on a clear day. The Kutb! that splendid promise, never

fulfilled,--that first minaret of the great mosque that never was, and

never will be built; symbol of the undying dream of Mohammedan

supremacy that never came, that never can come to pass.

As she paused, a troop of women laden with cosmetics and combs and

quaint baskets containing endless aids to beauty, came shuffling out

of the baths, gossiping and chattering shrilly, and clanking heavy

anklets as they came. And with them, a heavy perfumed steam suggestive

of warm indolence, luxury, sensuality, passed out into the garden.

"What! done already?" called Hâfzan in surprise.

"Already!" echoed a bold-faced trollop pertly, "_Ari_, sister. Art

grown a loose-liver? Sure this is Friday, and the King, good man,

bathes apart, religiously! So we be religious too, matching his humor.

That is the way with us women."

An answering giggle met the sally.

"Thou art an impudent hussy, Goloo!" said Hâfzan angrily. "And the

Queen--where is she?"

"In the mosque praying for patience--in the summer-house playing

games--in the King's room coaxing him to belief--in the vestibule

feeding her son with lollipops--he likes them big, and sweet, and

lively, and of his own choosing, does the prince, as I know to my

cost." Here a general titter broke in on the unabashed recital.

"_Loh!_ leave Hâfzan to find out what the Queen does elsewhere,"

suggested another voice. "We speak not of such things."

"Then speak lower of others," retorted Hâfzan. "Walls have echoes,

sister, and thy mistress would fare no better than others if thy talk

reached Zeenut Maihl's ears."

"Tell her, spy! if thou wilt," replied the woman carelessly. "We have

friends on our side now, as thou mayst understand mayhap ere

nightfall, when the answer comes."

Hâfzan laughed. "Thou hast more faith in friends than I. _Loh!_ I

trust none within these four walls. And out of them but few."

So saying she limped back into the garden, giving a glance as she

passed it into the Pearl Mosque, which showed like a carven snowdrift

against the blue of the sky, the green of the trees. Finding none

there, she went straight to the Queen's favorite summer-house on the

northern bastion.

It was a curious fatality which made Zeenut Maihl choose it, since all

her arts, all her cunning, could scarcely have told her that it would

ere long be a watch-tower, whence the chance of success or failure

could be counted. For the white road beyond the bridge of boats, and

trending eastward to the packed population of Oude, to Lucknow, to all

that remained of the vitality in the Mohammedan dream, was to be ere

long like a living, growing branch to which she, the spider, hung by

an invisible thread, spinning her cobwebs, seemingly in mid-air.

"Hush!" The whispered monition made Hâfzan pause in the screened

archway till the game was over. It was a sort of dumb-crambo, and a

most outrageous _double entendre_ had just brought a smile to the

broad heavy face of a woman who lay among cushions in the alcoved

balcony. This was Zeenut Maihl, who for nearly twenty years had

kept her hold upon the King, despite endless rivals. She was

dark-complexioned, small-eyed, with a curious lack of eyebrows which

took from her even vivacity of expression. But it was a man with

experience in many wives who remarked that favor is deceitful and

beauty is vain; he knew, no doubt, that in polygamy, the victory must

go to the most unscrupulous fighter. Zeenut Maihl, at any rate,

secured hers by ever-recurring promises of another heir to her

octogenarian husband; a flattery to which his other wives either could

not or would not stoop. But the trick served the Queen's purpose in

more ways than one. Her oft-recurring disappointments could have but

one cause: witchcraft. So on such occasions, with her paid priest,

Hussan Askuri, saying prayers for those _in extremis_ at her bedside,

Zeenut Maihl's enemies went down like nine-pins, and she rose from her

bed of sickness with a board cleared of dangerous rivalry. For none in

the hot-bed of shams felt secure enough to get into grips with her.

Ahsan-Oolah, the physician, might have; she had cried quarter from his

keen fence before now; but he did not care to take the trouble. For he

was a philosopher, content to let his world go to the devil its own

way, so long as it did not interfere with his passionate greed of

gold. And this master-passion being shared by Zeenut Maihl they

hoisted the flag of truce for the most part against mutual

spoliations. So the Queen played her game unmolested, as she played

dumb-crambo; at which her servants, separated like their betters into

cliques, tried to outdo each other.

"_Wâh!_" said the set, jubilant over the _double entendre_. "That is

the best to-day."

"If you like it, a clod is a betel nut," retorted the leader of

another set. "I'll wager to beat it easily."

The Queen frowned. There was too much freedom in this speech of

Fâtma's to suit her.

"And I will be the judge," she said with a cruel smile. "Fâtma must be

taught better manners."

Fâtma--a woman older than the rest--salaamed calmly; and the fact made

the other clique look at each other uneasily. What certainty gave her

such confidence as she plucked a gray hair from her own head and

placed it on the black velvet cushion which lay at the Queen's feet?

"That is my riddle," she said. "Let the world guess it, and honor the

real giver of it."

What could it be? Even the Queen raised herself in curiosity; a sign

in itself of commendation.

"Sure I know not," she began musingly, when Fâtma sprang to her feet

in theatrical appeal.

"Not so! Ornament of Palaces," she cried. "This may puzzle the herd;

it is plain to the mother of Princes. It lies too lowly now for

recognition, but in its proper place----" She snatched the hair from

the cushion, and, with a flourish, laid it on the head of a figure

which appeared as if by magic behind her. A figure dressed as a young

Moghul Prince, and wearing all the crown jewels.

"My son, Jewun!" cried the Queen, starting angrily. And the adverse

clique, taking their cue from her tone, shrieked modestly, and

scrambled for their veils.

Fâtma salaamed to the very ground.

"No! Mother of Princes, 'tis but my riddle--the heir-apparent."

Zeenut Maihl paused, bewildered for an instant; then in the figure

recognized the features of a favorite dancing girl, saw the pun, and

laughed uproariously, delightedly. The English sentry on the

drawbridge leading to Selimgurh might have heard her had there been

one; but within the last month the right to use the citadel as a

private entry to the palace had been given to the King. It enabled him

to cross the bridge of boats without the long circuit by the Calcutta

gate of the city.

"A gold mohur for that to Fâtma!" she cried, "and a post nearer my

person. I need such wits sorely." As she spoke she rose to her feet,

the smiles fading from her face as she looked out along that white

eastward streak; for the jest had brought her back to earnest, to that

mixture of personal ambition for her son and real patriotism for her

country which kept her a restless intriguer. "I need men, too," she

muttered. "Not dissolute, idle weathercocks or doting old pantaloons!

There are plenty of them yonder." So she stood for a second, then

turned like lightning on her attendants. "What time----" she began,

then seeing Hâfzan, who had unveiled at the door, she gave a cry of

pleasure. "'Tis well thou hast come," she said, beckoning to her, "for

thou must know God! if I were free to come and go, what could I not

compass? But here, in this smothering veil----" She flung even the

gauze apology for one which she wore from her, and stood with smooth,

bare head, and fat, bare arms, her quaint little pigtail dangling down

her broad back. Not a romantic figure truly, but one in its savage

temper, strength, obstinacy, to be reckoned with. "What time"--she

went on rapidly--"does the King receive his initiates?"

"At five," replied Hâfzan. Seen without its veil, also, her figure

showed more shrunk than ill-formed, and her pale, thin face would have

been beautiful but for its look of permanent ill-health. "The ceremony

of saintship begins then."

"Saints!" echoed the Queen, with a hard laugh. "I would make them

saints and martyrs, too, were I free. Quick, woman! pen and ink! And

stay! Fâtma's puzzle hath driven all else from my head. What time

was't that Hussan Askuri was bidden to come?"

"The saintborn comes at four," replied Hâfzan ceremoniously, "so as to

leave leisure ere the Chief Eunuch's return with the answer."

Zeenut Maihl's face was a study. "The answer! My answer lies there in

Fâtma's riddle; take two gold mohurs for it, woman, it hath given me

new life. Write, Hâfzan, to the chamberlain, that the disciples must

pass the southern window of the King's private room ere they leave the

palace. And call my litter; I must see Hussan Askuri ere I meet him at

the King's."

An hour afterward, with bister marks below her eyes, and delicate

hints of causeful, becoming languor in face and figure, she was

waiting the King's return from the latticed balcony overhanging the

river, where he always spent the heats of the day; waiting in the

cluster of small, dark rooms which lie behind it, on the other side of

the marble fountain-set aqueduct which flows under a lace-like marble

screen to the very steps of the Hall of Audience.

"Is all prepared?" she asked anxiously, as a glint of light from a

lifted curtain warned her of the King's approach.

"All is prepared," echoed a hollow, artificial voice. The speaker was

a tall, heavily built man with long gray beard, big bushy gray

eyebrows, and narrow forehead. A dangerous man, to judge by the mixed

spirituality and sensuality in his face; a man who could imagine evil,

and make himself believe it good. It was Hussan Askuri, the priest and

miracle-monger, who led the last of the Moghuls by the nose. It was

not a difficult task, for Bahâdur Shâh, who came tottering across the

intervening sunlit space, was but a poor creature. The first

impression he gave was of extreme old age. It was evident in the

sparse hair, the high, hollow cheeks, the waxy skin, the purple glaze

over the eyes. The next was of a feebleness beyond even his apparent

years. He seemed fiberless, mind and body. Yet released at the door of

privacy, from the eunuch's supporting hands, he ambled gayly enough to

a seat, and exclaimed vivaciously:

"A moment! A moment! good priest and physician. My mind first; my body

after. The gift is on me. I feel it working, and the historian must

write of me more as poet than king."

"As the king of poets, sire," suggested Hussan Askuri pompously.

Bahâdur Shâh smiled fatuously. "Good! Good! I will weave that thought

with mine into perfumed poesy." He raised one slender hand for

silence, and with the fingers of the other continued counting feet

laboriously, until with a sigh of relief, he declaimed:

"Bahâdur Shâh, sure all the world will know it,

Was poet more than king, yet king of poets."

Zeenut Maihl gave a cry of admiration. "Quick! _Pir_-sahib, quick!"

she exclaimed. "Such a gem must not be lost."

"But 'tis yet co be polished," began the King complacently.

"That is the office of the scribe," replied Hussan Askuri, as he drew

out his ink-horn. He was by profession an ornamental writer, and

gained great influence with the old poetaster by gathering up the

royal fragments and hiding their lameness amid magnificent curves and

flourishes.

"And now, _Pir_-sahib," continued the Queen, with a look of loving

anxiety at her lord, "for this strange ailment of which I spoke to

you----"

The King's face lost its self-importance as if he had been suddenly

recalled to unpleasant memory. "'Tis naught of import," he said

hastily. "The Queen will have it I start and sweat of nights. But this

is but the timorous dread of one in her condition. I am well enough."

"My lord, _Pir_-sahib, hath indeed renewed his youth through thy pious

breathing of thy own life into his mouth--as time will show," murmured

the Queen with modest, downcast look. "But last night he muttered in

his sleep of enemies----"

Bahâdur Shâh gave a gasp of dismay. "Of enemies! Nay!--did I truly?

Thou didst not tell me this."

"I would not distress my lord, till fear was over. Now that the pious

priest, who hath the ear of the Almighty----"

Hussan Askuri, who had stepped forward to gaze at the King, began to

mutter prayers. "'Tis that cooling draught of Ahsan-Oolah's stands in

the way," he gasped, his hands and face working as if he were in

deadly conflict with an unseen foe. "No carnal remedy--Ah! God be

praised! I see, I see! The eye of faith opens--_Hai!_ venomous beast,

I have you!" With these words he rushed to the King's couch, and,

scattering its cushions, held up at arm's length a lizard. Held by the

tail, it seemed in semi-darkness to writhe and wriggle.

"_Ouée! Umma!_" yelled the Great Moghul, shrinking to nothing in his

seat, and using after his wont the woman's cry--sure sign of his

habits.

"Fear not!" cried the priest. "The mutterings are stilled, the sweats

dried! And thus will I deal also with those who sent it." He flung his

captive on the ground and stamped it under foot.

"Was it--was it a bis-cobra, think you?" faltered the King. He had

hold of Zeenut Maihl's hand like a frightened child. The priest shook

his head. "It was no carnal creature," he said in a hollow, chanting

voice. "It was an emissary of evil made helpless by prayer. Give

Heaven the praise." Bahâdur Shâh began on his creed promptly, but the

priest frowned.

"Through his servant," he went on. "For day and night, night and day,

I pray for the King. And I see visions, I dream dreams. Last night,

while my lord muttered of enemies, Hussan Askuri saw a flood coming

from the West, and on its topmost wave, upon a raft of faithful

swords, as on a throne, sate----"

"With due respect," came voices from the curtained door. "The

disciples await initiation in the Hall of Audience."

Hussan Askuri and the Queen exchanged looks. The interruption was

unwelcome, though strangely germane to the subject.

"I will hear thee finish the dream afterward," fussed the King, rising

in a bustle; for he prized his saintship next to his poetry. "I must

not keep my pupils from grace. Hast the kerchiefs ready, Zeenut?"

There was something almost touching in the confidence of his appeal to

her. It was that of a child to its mother, certain of what it

demanded.

"All things are ready," she replied tartly, with a meaning and vexed

look at the miracle-monger; for they had meant to finish the dream

before the initiation.

"A goodly choice," said the royal saint, as he looked over the tiny

silk squares, each embroidered with a text from the _Koran_, which she

took out of a basket. "But I need many, _Pir_-sahib. Folk come fast,

of late, to have the way of virtue pointed by this poor hand. And thou

hast more in the basket, I see, Zeenut, ready against----"

"They are but begun," put in the Queen, hastily covering the basket.

"Nor will they, likely, be needed, since the leave season passes, and

'tis the soldiers who come most to be disciples to the defender of

their faith."

"I am the better pleased," replied the King with edifying humility.

"This summer hath too many pupils as it is. Come! _Pir_-sahib, and

support me through mine office with real saintship."

As the curtain fell behind them Zeenut Maihl crossed swiftly to the

crushed lizard and raised it gingerly.

"No carnal creature," she repeated. It was not; only a deft piece of

patchwork. Yet it, or something else, made her shiver as she dropped

the tell-tale remains into the basket. This man Hussan Askuri

sometimes seemed to her own superstition a saint, sometimes to her

clear head a mere sinner. She was not quite certain of anything about

him save that his delusions, his dreams, his miracles, suited her

purpose equally, whether they were false or true.

So she crossed over again to a marble lattice and peered through a

convenient peephole toward the Audience Hall, which rose across an

intervening stretch of platform in white shadow, and whiter light. She

could not see or hear much; but enough to show her that everything was

going on the same as usual. The disciples, most of them in full

uniform, went up and down the steps calmly, and the wordy exordium on

the cardinal virtues went on and on. How different it might be, she

thought, if she had the voice. She would rouse more than those faint

"_Wâh! Wâhs_." She would make the fire come to men's eyes. In a sort

of pet with her own helplessness, she moved away and so, through

another room, went to stand at another lattice. It looked south over a

strip of garden, and there was an open square left in the tracery

through which a face might look, a hand might pass. And as she stood

she counted the remaining kerchiefs in the basket she still held. They

were all of bright green silk and bore the same lettering. It was the

Great Cry: "_Deen! Deen! Futteh Mohammed!_" As dangerous a woman this,

as Hussan Askuri was a man; as dangerous, both of them, to peaceful

life, as the fabled bis-cobra, at the idea of which the foolish old

King had cried, "_Ouée, Umma!_" like any woman.

And now at last that wordy exordium must be over, for, along the

garden path, came the clank of accouterments. Zeenut Maihl's listless

figure seem galvanized to sudden life, there was a flutter of green at

the open square, and her voice followed the shower of silk.

"These banners from the Defender to his soldiers."

But as she spoke, a stir of excitement, a subdued murmur of

expectation reached her ear from outside, and, leaning forward,

she caught a glimpse of a swinging litter coming along the path.

Mahboob returned already! Vexatious, indeed, when she had turned and

planned everything so as to be sure of having the King in her

apartments when the answer arrived. None others would know it before

she did--unless!--the thought obliterated all others, and she flew

back to the further lattice. The King, returning from the initiation,

had paused in the middle of the platform at the sight of the

approaching litter, and his courtiers, as if by instinct, had grouped

themselves round him, leaving him the central figure. The cruel

sunlight streamed down on the tawdry court, on the worn-out old man.

It seemed interminable to the woman behind the lattice, that pause

while the fat eunuch was helped from his litter. She could have

screamed to him for the answer, could have had at his fat carcass with

her hands for its slowness. But the old King had better blood in his

veins. He stood quietly, his tawdry court around him; behind him the

marble, and gold, and mosaics of his ancestors.

"What news, slave?" he asked boldly.

"None, Light of the Faithful," replied the Chief Eunuch.

"None!" The semi-circle closed in a little, every face full of

disappointed curiosity.

"I have a letter for the Lord of the World with me. Its substance is

this. The _Sirkar_ will recognize no heir. During the lifetime of our

Great Master, whose life be prolonged forever, the _Sirkar_ will make

no promise of any kind, either to his majesty, or to any other member

of the royal family. It is to remain as if there were no succession."

No succession! Above the sudden murmur of universal surprise and

dissent, a woman's cry of inarticulate rage came from behind the

lattice. The King turned toward the sound instinctively. "I must to

the Queen," he murmured helplessly, "I must to the Queen."