IN THE VILLAGE.
The winter rains had come and gone, leaving a legacy of gold behind
them. Promise of future gold in the emerald sea of young wheat,
guerdon of present gold in the mustard blossom curving on the green,
like the crests of waves curving upon a wind-swept northern sea. Far
and near, wide as the eye could reach, there was nothing to be seen
save this--a waving sea of green wheat crested by yellow mustard. But
in the center, whence the eye looked, stood a human ant-hill; for the
congeries of mud alleys, mud walls, mud roofs, forming the village,
looked from a little distance like nothing else. Viewed broadly, too,
it was simply Earth made plastic by the Form-bringer, Water, hardened
again by the Sun-fire. The triple elements combined into a shell for
laboring life. Like most villages in Northern India this one stood
high on its own ruins, girt round by shallow glistening tanks which
were at once its cradle and its grave. From them the mud for the first
and last house had been dug, to them the periodical rains of August
washed back the village bit by bit.
There was scarcely a sign of life in the sky-encircled plain. Scarcely
a tree, scarcely a landmark. Nothing far or near to show that aught
lay beyond the pale horizon. The crisp, cold air of a mid-January dawn
held scarcely a sound, for the village was still asleep. Here and
there, maybe, someone was stirring; but with that deliberate calm
which comes to those who by virtue of early rising have the world to
themselves. Here and there, too, in the high stone inclosures serving
at once as a protection to the village and a cattlefold, some goat,
impatient to be roaming, bleated querulously; but these sights and
sounds only seemed to increase the stillness, the silence surrounding
them. It is a scene which to most civilized eyes is oppressive in its
self-centered isolation, its air of remoteness. The isolation of a
community, self-supporting, self-sufficing, the remoteness of a place
which cares not if, indeed, there be a world beyond its boundaries.
And this one, type of many alike in most things--above all, in
steadfast self-absorption--shall be left nameless. We are in the
village, that is enough.
Suddenly an odd, clamorous wail rang from among the green corn,
and a band of gray cranes which had been standing knee-deep in
the wheat rose awkwardly and headed, arrow-shaped, for the great
Nujjufgurhjheel which they wotted of below the horizon: in this
displaying a wider outlook than the villagers who toiled and slept
within sight of those fields, while the birds left them at dawn for
the sedgy stretches of another world.
At the sound a man, who had been crouching half-asleep against a mud
wall, rose to his feet and peered drowsily over the fields. Something,
he knew, must have startled the gray cranes; and he was the village
watchman. As his father had been before him, as his son, please God,
would be after him. He carried a short spear hung with jingles as his
badge of office, and he leaned upon it lazily as he looked out into
the gray dawn. Then he wrapped his blanket closer round him, and
walked leisurely to meet the solitary figure coming toward him,
threading its way by an invisible path through the dew-hung sea of
wheat.
"_Ari_, brother," he called mildly when he reached earshot, "is it
well?"
"It is well," came the answer. So he waited, leaning on his spear,
until the newcomer stood beside him, his bare legs glistening and the
folds of his drooping blanket frosted with the dew. In one hand he,
also, held a watchman's spear; in the other one of those unleavened
cakes, round and flat like a pancake, which form the daily bread alike
of rich and poor. This he held out, saying briefly:
"For the elders. From the South to the North. From the East to the
West."
"Wherefore?" The brief reply held vague curiosity; no more. The cake
had already changed hands, unchallenged.
"God knows. It came to us from Goloowallah with the message as I gave
it. Thy folk will pass it on?"
"Likely; when the day's work is done. How go the crops thy way? Here,
as thou seest, 'tis God's dew on God's grain."
"With us also. There will be marriages galore this May."
"Ay! if this bring naught." The speaker nodded toward the cake which
now lay on the ground between them, for they had inevitably squatted
down to take alternate pulls at a pipe. "What can it bring?"
"God knows," replied the host in his turn. So the two, with that final
reference in their minds, sat looking dully at the _chupatti_ as if it
were some strange wild fowl. Sat silently, as men will do over a pipe,
till a clinking of anklets and a chatter of feminine voices came round
the corner, and the foremost woman of the troop on their way to the
tank drew her veil close swiftly at sight of a stranger. Yet her voice
came as swiftly. "What news, brother? What news?"
"None for thee, Mother Kirpo," answered the resident watchman tartly.
"'Tis for the elders."
The titterings and tossings of veiled heads at this snub to the worst
gossip in the village, ended in an expectant pause as a very old
woman, with a fine-cut face which had long since forsworn concealment,
stepped up to the watchmen, and squatting down beside them, raised the
cake in her wrinkled hands.
"From the North to the South or the South to the North. From the East
to the West or the West to the East. Which?" she asked, nodding her
old head.
"Sure it was so, mother," replied the stranger, surprised. "Dost know
aught?"
"Know?" she echoed; "I know 'tis an old tale--an old tale."
"What is an old tale, mother?" asked the women eagerly, as, emboldened
by the presence of the village spey-wife, they crowded round, eying
the cake curiously.
She gave a scornful laugh, let the _chupatti_ drop, and, rising to her
feet, passed on to the tank. It suited her profession to be
mysterious, and she knew no more than this, that once, or at most
twice in her long life, such a token had come peacefully into the
village, and passed out of it as peacefully with its message.
"Mai Dhunnoo knows something, for sure," commented a deep-bosomed
mother of sons as the troop followed their "chaperone's" lead, closer
serried than before, full of whispering surmise. "The gods send it
mean not smallpox. I will give curds and sugar to thee, Mâta jee, each
Friday for a year! I swear it for safety to the boys."
"He slipped in a puddle and cried 'Hail to the Ganges,'" retorted her
neighbor, an ill-looking woman blind of one eye. She had been the
richest heiress in the village, and was in consequence the wife of the
handsomest young man in it; a childless wife into the bargain. "Boys
do not fill the world, Veru; not even thine! Their welfare will not
set tokens a-going. It needs some real misfortune for that."
"Then thy life is safe for sure," began the other hotly, when a
peacemaker intervened.
"Wrangle not, sisters! All are naked when their clothes are gone;
and the warning may be for us all. Mayhap the Toorks are coming once
more--Mai Dhunnoo said 'twas an old tale. God send we be not all reft
from our husbands."
"That would I never be," protested the heiress, provoking uproarious
titterings among some girls.
"No such luck for poor Ramo," whispered one. "And she sonless too!"
"He shaved for the heat, and then the hail fell on his bald pate,"
quoted the prettiest callously. "Serve him right, say I. He, at least,
had two eyes."
The burst of laughter following this sally made the peacemaker, who,
as the wife of the headman, had authority, turn in rebuke. 'Twas no
laughing matter to Jâtnis, as they were, who did so much of the field
work, that a token, maybe of ill, should come to the village when the
harvest promised so well. The revenue had to be paid, smallpox or no
smallpox, Toork or no Toork. And was not one of the Huzoors in camp
already giving an eye to the look of the crops, and the other to the
shooting of wild things? Could they not hear the sound of his gun for
themselves if they listened instead of chattering? And truly enough,
in the pause which came to mirth, there echoed from the pale northern
horizon, beyond which lay the big jheels, a shot or two, faint and
far; for all that dealing death to some of God's creatures. And these
listeners dealt death to none; their faith forbade it.
"Think you they will come our way and kill our deer as they did once?"
asked a slender slip of a girl anxiously. Her tame fawn had lately
taken to joining the wild ones when they came at dawn to feed upon the
wheat.
"God knows," replied one beside her. "They will come if they like, and
kill if they like. Are they not the masters?"
So the final reference was in the women's minds also, as, while the
muddy water strained slowly into their pots through a filtering corner
of their veils, they raised their eyes curiously, doubtfully, to the
horizon which held the master. It had held him always. To the north or
to the south, the east or the west. Mohammedan, Mahratta, Christian.
But always coming over the far horizon and slaying something. In old
days husbands, brothers, fathers. Nowadays the herds of deer which the
sacredness of life allowed to have their full of the wheat unchecked,
or the peacocks who spread their tails, securely vainglorious, on the
heaps of corn upon the threshing floors.
So the unleavened cake stayed in the village all day long, and when
the slant shadows brought leisure, the headman's wife baked two cakes,
one for the north the other for the west, and Dittu the old watchman,
and the embryo watchman his son, set off with them to the next village
west and north, since that was the old custom. So much must be done
because their fathers had done it; for the rest, who could tell?
Nevertheless, as the messengers passed through the village street
where the women sat spinning, many paused to look after them, with a
vague relief that the unknown, unsought, had gone out of their life.
Then the moon rose peacefully, and one by one the sights and sounds of
that life ceased. The latest of all was the hum of a mill in one of
the poorest houses, and a snatch of a harvest-song in murmuring
accompaniment:
"When the sickle meets the corn,
From their meeting joy is born;
When the sickle smites the wheat,
Care is conquered, sorrow beat."
"Have a care, sister, have a care!" came that rebuking voice from the
headman's house close by. "Wouldst bring ill-luck on us all, that
grinding but millet thou singest the song of wheat?"
And thereinafter there was no song at all, and sleep settled on all
things peacefully. The token had come and gone, leaving the mud shell
and the laboring life within it as it had been before. Curiously
impassive, impassively curious. There was one more portent in the sky,
one more mist on the dim horizon. That was all.
So through the dew-hung fields the mysterious message sped west and
south.
Sent by whom? And wherefore?
The question was being asked by the masters in desultory fashion as
they sat round a bonfire, which blazed in the center of the Resident's
camp, on the banks of the great jheel. It was a shooting camp, a
standing camp, lavish in comfort. The white tents were ranged
symmetrically on three sides of a square, and, in the moonlight, shone
almost as brightly as the long levels of water stretching away on the
fourth side to the sedgy brakes and isolated palms of the snipe
marshes. Behind rose a heavy mass of burnished foliage, and in front
of the big mess-tent the English flag drooped from its mast in the
still night air. Nearer the jheel again the bonfire flashed and
crackled, sending a column of smoke and sparks into the star-set sky.
The ground about it was spread with carpets and Persian rugs, and
here, in luxurious armchairs, the comfortably-tired sportsmen were
lounging after dinner, some of them in mess uniform, some in civilian
black, but all in decorous dress; for not only was the Brigadier
present, but also a small sprinkling of ladies wrapped in fur cloaks
above their evening fineries. Briefly, a company more suitable to the
foyer of a theater than this barbaric bonfire. But the whole camp,
with its endless luxury, stood out in keen contrast with the sordid
savagery of a wretched hamlet which lay half-hidden behind the trees.
The contrast struck Jim Douglas, who for that evening only, happened
to be the Resident's guest; for, having been on the jheel in a very
different sort of camp when the Resident had invaded his solitude, the
usual invitation to dine had followed as a matter of course; as it
would have followed to any white face with pretensions to be
considered a gentleman's. He had accepted it, because, every now and
again, a desire "to chuck" as he expressed it, and go back to the
ordinary life of his class came over him. This mood had been on him
persistently ever since the Yama and Indra incident, so that, for the
time being, he had dismissed his scoundrels and given up spying in
disgust. He had, he told himself, wasted his time, and the military
magnate was justified in politely dispensing with his further
services. There was, in truth, no need for them so far as he could
see. There was plenty of talk, plenty of discontent, but nothing more.
And even that anyone could observe and gauge; for there was no
mystery, no concealment. The whole affair was invertebrate utterly,
except every now and again when you came upon the track of the
Moulvie of Fyzabad. It was conceivable that the aspect might change,
but for the present he was sick of the whole thing, ambition and all.
Horse-dealing was better. So he had established himself in a small
house in Duryagunj, started a stable, and then taken a holiday in a
shooting _pâl_ among the jheels and jungles, where in his younger days
he had spent so much of his time.
Thus, after eating a first-class dinner, he was smoking a first-class
cigar, and, being a stranger to everyone there, thinking his own
thoughts, when the Resident's voice came from the other side of the
fire which, with its dancing flame-light distorting every feature in
myriad variation, disguised rather than revealed the faces seen by it.
"You have bagged one or two in your district, haven't you, Ford?"
"What, sir? Bustard?" inquired the Collector of the next district, who
had come over his border for a day or two's shoot, and who had been
engrossed in sporting talk with his neighbor. There was a laugh from
the other side of the fire.
"No! these _chupatties_. The Brigadier was asking me if they were as
numerous as they are further south, and Fraser, here, said none had
come into the Delhi district as yet."
"One came to-day into the hamlet behind the tents," said Jim Douglas
quietly. "I met the man bringing it. A watchman from over the border
in Mr. Ford's district."
Half a dozen faces turned to the voice which spoke so confidently, and
then asked in whispers who the man was? But there was nothing in the
whispered replies to warrant that tone of imparting information to
others, and a man in black clothes seemed to resent it, for he
appealed to the Resident rather fulsomely.
"It will be in the reports to-morrow, no doubt, sir. For myself I
attach no importance to it. The custom is an old one. I remember
observing it in Muttra when smallpox was bad. But I should like to
have your opinion. You ought to know if anyone does."
The compliment was no idle flattery. None had a better right to it
than Sir Theophilus Metcalfe, whose illustrious name had been a power
in Delhi for two generations, and whose uncle had been one of India's
most distinguished statesmen. So there was a hush for his reply.
"I can't say," he answered deliberately. "Personally I doubt the
dissatisfaction ever coming to a head. There is a good deal, of
course, but of late, so it has seemed to me, it is quieting down.
People are getting tired of fermenting. As for the causes of the
disaffection it is patent. We can't, simply, do the work we are doing
without making enemies of those whose vested interests we have to
destroy. We may have gone ahead a little too fast; but that is another
question. As for the army, I've no right to speak of it, but it seems
to me it has been allowed to get out of hand, out of touch. It will
need care to bring it into discipline, but I don't anticipate trouble.
Its mixed character is our safeguard. It would be hard for even a good
leader to hit on a general grievance which would touch both the army
and the civil population, Hindoos and Mohammedans--and as a matter of
fact they have no leader at all."
"Have you ever come across the Moulvie of Fyzabad, sir?" remarked Jim
Douglas again. "If I had the power I would shoot him like a mad dog.
But for the rest I quite agree."
Here a stir behind them distracted both his attention and the
attention of those who were listening to this authoritative voice with
bated breath.
"Is that the post? Oh, how delightful!" chorused the ladies, and more
than one added plaintively, "I wonder if the English mail is in."
"Let's bet on it. Sir Theophilus to hold the stakes," cried a young
fellow who had been yawning through the discussion. But the subject
was too serious for such light handling, to judge by the eager faces
which crowded round, while the red-coated _chuprassies_ poured the
contents of the bags into a heap on the carpet at their master's feet.
There is always a suspense about that moment of search among the
bundles of official correspondence, the files, the cases which fill up
the camp mail, for the thin packet of private letters which is the
only tie between you and the world; but when hopes of home news is
superadded, the breath is apt to come faster. And so a scene, trivial
in itself, points an inexorable finger to the broad fact underlying
all our Indian administration, that we are strangers and exiles.
"Not in!" announced the Resident, studiously cheerful. "But there are
heaps of letters for everybody. Did the mem-sahib come in the
carriage, Gâmu?" he added as he sorted out the owners.
"Huzoor!" replied the head orderly, who was also his master's
factotum, thrusting the remainder back in the bags. "And the Major
sahib also. According to order, refreshments are being offered."
"Glad Erlton could come," remarked a voice to its neighbor. "We want
another good shot badly."
"And Mrs. Gissing is awfully good company too," assented the neighbor.
Jim Douglas, who was sitting on the other side, looked up quickly. The
juxtaposition of the names surprised him after what he had seen, or
thought he had seen at Christmas time.
"Is that Mrs. Gissing from Lucknow?" he asked.
"I believe so. She is a stranger here. Seems awfully jolly, but the
women don't like her. Do you know anything of her?"
Jim Douglas hesitated. He could have easily satisfied the ear
evidently agog for scandal; but what, after all, did he know of her?
What did he know of his own experience? It seemed to him as if she
stood there, defiantly dignified, asking him the question, her
china-blue eyes flashing, the childish face set and stern.
"Personally I know little," he replied, "but that little is very much
to her credit."
As he relapsed into silence and smoke he felt that she had once more
walked boldly into his consciousness and claimed recognition. She had
forced him to acknowledge something in her which corresponded with
something in him. Something unexpected. If Kate Erlton's eyes with
their cold glint in them had flashed like that, he would not have
wondered; but they had not. They had done just the reverse. They had
softened; they had only looked heroic. Underneath the glint which had
sent him on a wild-goose chase had lain that commonplace indefinable
womanhood, sweet enough, but a bit sickly, which could be in any
woman's eyes if you fancied yourself in love with her. It had lain in
the eyes belonging to the golden curl, in poor little Zora's eyes,
might conceivably lie in half a dozen others.
"By George!" came an eager voice from the group of men who were
reading their letters by the light of a lamp held for the purpose by a
silent bronze image of a man in uniform. "I have some news here which
will interest you, sir. There has been a row at Dum-Dum about the new
Enfield cartridges."
"Eh! what's that?" asked the Brigadier, looking up from his own
correspondence. "Nothing serious, I hope."
"Not yet, but it seems curious by the light of what we were discussing,
and what Mr.--er--Capt----"
"Douglas," suggested the owner of the name, who at the first words had
sat up to listen intently. His face had a certain anticipation in it;
almost an eagerness.
"Thanks. It's a letter from the musketry depot. Shall I read it, sir?"
The Brigadier nodded, one or two men looked up to listen, but most
went on with their letters or discussed the chances of slaughter for
the morrow.
"There is a most unpleasant feeling abroad respecting these new
cartridges, which came to light a day or two ago in consequence of a
high-caste sepoy refusing to let a lower caste workman drink out of
his cup. The man retorted that as the cartridges being made in the
Arsenal were smeared with pig's grease and cow's fat there would soon
be no caste left in the army. The sepoy complained, and it came out
that this idea is already widely spread. Wright denied the fact flatly
at first, but found out that large quantities of beef-tallow _had_
been indented for by the Ordnance. And that, of course, made the men
think he had lied about it. Bontein, the chief, has wisely suggested
altering the drill, since the men say they will not bite the
cartridges. If they do, their relations won't eat with them when they
go home on leave. You see, with this new rifle it is not really
necessary to bite the cartridge at all, so it would be a quite natural
alteration, and get us out of the difficulty without giving in. The
suggestion has been forwarded, and if it could be settled sharp would
smother the business; but what with duffers and----" The reader broke
off, and a faint smile showed even on the Brigadier's face as the
former skipped hurriedly to find something safer--"Old General
Hearsey, who knows the natives like a book, says there is trouble in
it. He declares that the Moulvie of Fyzabad--whoever that may be----"
The faces looked at Jim Douglas curiously, but he was too eager to
notice it.
"Is at the bottom of the _chupatties_ we hear are being sent round
up-country; but that he is in league also with the Brahmins in
Calcutta--especially the priests at Kali's shrine--over _suttee_ and
widow remarriage and all that. However, all I know is that both
Hindoos and Mohammedans in my classes are in a blue funk about the
cartridges, and swear even their wives won't live with them if they
touch them."
"The common grievance," said Jim Douglas, in the silence that ensued.
"It alters the whole aspect of affairs."
"Prepare to receive cavalry?" yawned the man who had suggested betting
on the chance of the home-mail. What was the use of a week's leave on
the best snipe jheel about, if it was to be spent in talking shop?
"No!" cried the man in black, not unwilling to change the subject of
which he had not yet official cognizance. "Prepare to receive ladies.
There is Mrs. Gissing, looking as fresh as paint!"
She looked fresh, indeed, as she came forward; her curly hair, rough
when fashionable heads were smooth, glistening in the firelight, the
fluffy swansdown on her long coat framing her childish face softly.
Behind her, heavy, handsome, came Major Erlton with the half-sheepish
air men assume when they are following a woman's lead.
"Here I am at last, Sir Theophilus," she began, in a gay artificial
voice as she passed Jim Douglas, who stood up, pushing his chair aside
to give more room. "I'm so glad Major Erlton managed to get leave. I'm
such a coward! I should have died of fright all by myself in that
long, lonely----"
"Keep still!" interrupted a peremptory voice behind her, as a pair of
swift unceremonious arms seized her round the waist, and by sheer
force dragged her back a step, then held her tight-clasped to
something that beat fast despite the calm tone. "Kill that snake,
someone! There, right at her feet! It isn't a branch. I saw it move.
Don't stir, Mrs. Gissing, it's all right."
It might be, but the heart she felt beat hard; and the one beneath his
hand gave a bound and then seemed to stand still, as the sticks and
staves, hastily caught up, smote furiously on her very dress, so close
did certain death lie to her. There was a faint scent of lavender
about that dress, about her curly hair, which Jim Douglas never
forgot; just as he never forgot the passionate admiration which made
his hands relax to an infinite tenderness, when she uttered no cry, no
sound; when there was no need to hold her, so still did she stand, so
absolutely in unison with the defiance of Fate which kept him steady
as a rock. Surely no one in all his life, he thought, had ever stood
so close to him, yet so far off!
"God bless my soul! My dear lady, what an escape!" The hurried
faltering exclamation from a bystander heralded the holding up of a
long limp rope of a thing hanging helplessly over a stick. It was the
signal for a perfect babel. Many had seen the brute, but had thought
it a branch, others had similar experiences of drowsy snakes scorched
out of winter quarters in some hollow log, and all crowded round Mrs.
Gissing, loud in praise of her coolness. Only she turned quickly to
see who had held her; and found Major Erlton.
"The brute hasn't touched you, has he?" he began huskily, then broke
into almost a sob of relief, "My God! what an escape!"
She glanced at him with the faint distaste which any expression of
strong emotion showed toward her by a man always provoked, and gave
one of her high irrelevant laughs.
"Is it? I may die a worse death. But I want _him_--where is he?"
"Slipped away from your gratitude, I expect," said the Collector. "But
I'll betray him. It was the man who knew about the _chupatties_, Sir
Theophilus; I don't know his name."
"Douglas," said the host. "He is in camp a mile or two down the jheel.
I expect he has gone back. He seemed a nice fellow."
Mrs. Gissing made a _moue_. "I would not have been so grateful as all
that! I would only have said 'Bravo' to him."
Her own phrase seemed to startle her, she broke off with a sudden
wistful look in her wide blue eyes.
"My dear Mrs. Gissing, have a glass of wine; you must indeed," fussed
the Brigadier. But the little lady set the suggestion aside.
"Douglas!" she repeated. "I wonder where he comes from? Does anyone
know a Douglas?"
"James Sholto Douglas," corrected the host. "It's a good name."
"And I knew a good fellow of that name once; but he went under," said
an older man.
"About what?" Alice Gissing's eyes challenged the speaker, who stood
close to her.
"About a woman, my dear lady."
"Poor dear! Erlton, you must fetch him over to see me to-morrow
morning." She said it with infinite verve, and her hearers laughed.
"Him!" retorted someone. "How do you know it's the same man?"
She nodded her head gayly. "I've a fancy it is. And I am bound to be
nice to him anyhow."
She had not the chance, however. Major Erlton, riding over before
breakfast to catch him, found nothing but the square-shaped furrow
surrounding a dry vacant spot which shows where a tent has been.
For Jim Douglas was already on his way back to Delhi, on his way back
to more than Delhi if he succeeded in carrying out a plan which had
suggested itself to him when he heard of General Hearsey's belief that
the priests conducting the agitation against widow remarriage and the
abolition of _suttee_ were leagued with the Mohammedan revival. Tara,
the would-be saint, was still in Delhi. He had not sought her out
before, being in truth angry with the woman's duplicity, and not
wanting to run the risk of her chattering about him. Now, as he had
said, the whole position was changed. He had no common hold upon her,
and might through her get some useful hints as to the leading men in
the movement. She must have seen them when the miracle took place at
Benares. The thought made him smile rather savagely. Decidedly she
would not care to defy his tongue; from saint to sinner would be too
great a fall.
So at dusk that very evening he was back in his mendicant's disguise,
begging at a doorway in one of the oldest parts of Delhi. An
insignificant doorway in an insignificant alley. But there was a faded
wreath of yellow marigolds over the architrave, a deeper hollow in the
stone threshold; sure signs, both, that something to attract
worshiping feet lay within. Yet at first sight the court into which
you entered, after a brief passage barred by blank wall, was much as
other courts. It was set round with high irregular houses, perfect
rabbit-warrens of tiny rooms, slips of roof, and stairs; all
conglomerate, yet distinct. Some reached from within, some from
without, some from neighboring roofs, and some, Heaven knows how!
possibly by wings, after the fashion of the purple pigeons cooing and
sidling on the purple brick cornices. In one corner, however, stood a
huge _peepul-tree_, and partly shaded by this, partly attached to an
arcaded building of two stories, was a small, squalid-looking, black
stone Hindoo temple. It was not more than ten feet square, triply
recessed at each corner, and with a pointed spire continuing the
recesses of the base. A sort of hollow monolith raised on a plinth of
three steps. In its dark windowless sanctuary, open to the outside
world by a tingle arch, stood a polished black stone, resting on a
polished black stone cup, like a large acorn. For this was the oldest
Shivâla in Delhi, and in the rabbit-warrens surrounding this survival
of Baal worship lived and lodged _yogis_, beggars, saints, half the
insanity and sacerdotalism of Delhi. It was not a place into which to
venture rashly. So Jim Douglas sat at the gate begging while the
clashings and brayings and drumings echoed out into the alley. For the
seven fold circling of the Lamps was going on, and if Tara did not
pass to this evening service from outside, she most likely lived
within; that she lodged near the temple he knew.
So as he sat waiting, watching, the light faded, the faint smell of
incense grew fainter, the stream of worshipers coming to take the
holy water in which the god had been washed slackened. Then by twos
and threes the Brahmins and _yogis_--the Dean and Chapter, as it
were--passed out clinking half-pennies, and carrying the offertory in
kind, tied up in handkerchiefs.
The service was over, and Tara must therefore live in a lodging
reached from within. And now, when the coast was clearing, he might
still have opportunity of tracing her. So he rose and walked in
boldly, disappointed to find the courtyard was almost empty already.
There were only a few stragglers, mostly women, and they in the white
shroud of widows; but even in the gloom and shadow he could see the
tall figure he sought was not among them, and he was about to slip
away when, following their looks, he caught sight of another figure
crouching on the topmost step of the plinth, right in front of the
sanctuary door, so that it stood faintly outlined against the glimmer
of the single cresset, which, raised on the heap of half-dead flowers
within, showed them and nothing more--nothing but the shadows.
He drew back hastily into the empty arcade, and waited for the widows'
lingering bare feet--scarcely heard even on those echoing stones--to
pass out and leave him and Tara alone. For it was Tara. That he knew
though her face was turned from him.
The feet lingered on, making him fear lest some of the mendicants who
must lodge in these arcades should return, after almsgiving time, and
find him there. And as they lingered he thought how he had best make
himself known to the devotee, the saint. It must be something
dramatic, something to tie her tongue at once, something to bring home
to her his hold upon her. The locket! He slipped it from his neck and
stood ready. Then, as the last flutter of white disappeared, he
stepped noiselessly across the court.
And so, suddenly, between the rapt face and the dim light on which its
eyes were fixed, hung a dangling gold oval, and the Englishman,
bending over the woman's shoulder from behind, could see the amaze
flash to the face. And his other hand was ready with the clutch of
command, his tongue with a swift threat; but she was too quick for
him. She was round at his feet in an instant, clasping them.
"Master! Master!"
Jim Douglas recoiled from that touch once more; but with a half-shamed
surprise, regret, almost remorse. He had meant to threaten this woman,
and now----
She was up again, eager, excited. "Quick! The Huzoor is not safe here.
They may return any moment. Quick! Quick! Huzoor, follow me."
And as, blindly, he obeyed, passing rapidly through a low doorway and
so up a dark staircase, he slipped the locket back to its place with a
sort of groan. Here was another woman to be reckoned with, and though
the discovery suited his purpose, and though he knew himself to be as
safe as her woman's wit could make him, he wondered irritably if there
was anything in the world into which this eternal question of sex did
not intrude. And then, suddenly, he seemed to feel Alice Gissing's
heart beat beneath his hand; there had been no womanhood in that
touch.
So he passed on. And next morning he was on his way southward. Tara
had told him what he wanted to know.