Ho! I am king! All lesser fry
Must cringe, and crawl, and cry to me,
And none have any rights but I,--
Except the right to lie to me.
JAIMIHR was not the only man who would have dearly liked to know of the
whereabouts of Mahommed Gunga. It had been reported to Maharajah Howrah,
by his spies, that the redoubtable ex-Risaldar of horse had visited his
relatives in Howrah City, and, though he had not been able to ascertain
a word of what had passed, he was none the less anxious.
He knew, of course--for every soul in Howrah knew--that Jaimihr was
plotting for the throne. He knew, too, that the priests of Siva,
who with himself were joint keepers of the wickedly won, tax-swollen
treasure, had sounded Jaimihr; they had tentatively hinted that they
might espouse his cause, provided that an equitable division of the
treasure were arranged beforehand. The question uppermost in Maharajah
Howrah's mind was whether the Rangars--the Moslem descendants of once
Hindoo Rajputs, who formed such a small but valuable proportion of the
local population--could or could not be induced to throw in their lot
with him.
No man on the whole tax-ridden countryside believed or considered it as
a distant possibility that the Rangars would strike for any hand except
their own; they were known, on the other hand, to be more or less
cohesive, and it was considered certain that, whichever way they swung,
when the priest-pulled string let loose the flood of revolution, they
would swing all together. The question, then, was how to win the favor
of the Rangars. It was not at all an easy question, for the love lost
between Hindoos and Mohammedans is less than that between dark-skinned
men and white--a lot less.
Within two hours of its happening he had been told of the capture of
Ali Partab; and he knew--for that was another thing his spies had told
him--that Ali Partab was Mahommed Gunga's man. Apparently, then, Ali
Partab--a prisoner in Jaimihr's palace-yard--was the only connecting
link between him and the Rangars whom he wished to win over to his side.
He was as anxious as any to help overwhelm the British, but he naturally
wished to come out of the turmoil high and dry himself, and he was,
therefore, ready to consider the protection of individual British
subjects if that would please the men whom he wanted for his friends.
Mahommed Gunga was known to have carried letters for the missionaries.
He was known to have engaged a new servant when he rode away from Howrah
and to have left his trusted man behind. Miss McClean was known to have
conversed with the retainer, immediately after which the man had been
seized and carried off by Jaimihr's men. Jaimihr was known to have
placed watchers round the mission house and--once--to have killed a man
in Miss McClean's defense. The deduction was not too far-fetched
that the retainer had been left as a protection against Jaimihr, and
consequently that the Rangars, at the behest of Mahommed Gunga, had
decided--on at least the white girl's safety.
Therefore, he argued, if he now proceeded to protect the McCleans, he
would, at all events, not incur the Rangars' enmity.
It was a serious decision that he had to make, for, for one thing, he
dared not yet make any move likely to incite his strongly supported
brother to open rebellion; he dared not, therefore, interfere at
present with the watchers near the mission house. To openly befriend the
Christian priests would be to set the whole Hindoo population against
himself, for it had been mainly against suttee and its kindred horrors
that the missionaries had bent all their energy.
The great palace of Howrah was ahum. Elephants with painted tusks,
and loaded to the groaning-point under howdahs decked with jewels and
gold-leaf, came and went through the carved entrance-gates. Occasionally
camels, loaded too until their legs all but buckled underneath them,
strutted with their weird, mixed air of foolishness and dignity, to be
disburdened of great cases that eight men could scarcely lift; on the
outside the cases were marked “Hardware,” but a horde of armed and
waiting malcontents scattered about the countryside could have given a
more detailed and accurate guess at what was in them.
Men came and went--men almost of all castes and many nationalities.
Priests--not all of them fat, but every single one fat-smiling--sunned
themselves, or waited in the shade until they could have audience; no
priest of any Hindoo temple had to wait long to be admitted to that
Rajah's presence, and there was an everlasting chain of them, each with
his axe to grind, coming and going by day and night.
Color rioted in the blazing sun and deep, dark shadows lurked in all
the thousand places where the sun could never penetrate. It was India
in essence--noise and blaze and flouted splendor, with a back-ground and
underground of mystery. Any but the purblind British could have told at
half a glance, merely by the attitude of Howrah's armed sepoys, that a
concerted movement of some kind was afoot--that there was a tight-held
thread of plan running through the whole confusion; but no man--not
even a native--could have guessed what secret plotting might be going on
within the acres of the straggling palace.
From the courtyard there was no least hint obtainable even of the
building's size; its shape could only have been marked down from a
bird's-eye view aloft. Even the roof was so uneven, and so subdivided by
traced and deep-carved walls and ramparts, that a sentry posted at one
end could not have seen the next man to him, perhaps some twenty feet
away. Building had been piled on building--other buildings had been
added end to end and crisscrosswise--and each extension had been walled
in as new centuries saw new additions, until the many acres were a maze
of bricks and stone and fountain-decorated gardens that no lifelong
palace denizen could have learned to know in their entirety.
Within--one story up above the courtyard din--in a spacious, richly
decorated room that gave on to a gorgeous roof-garden, the Maharajah sat
and let himself be fanned by women, who were purchasable for perhaps a
tenth of what any of the fans had cost. Another woman, younger than the
rest, played wild minor music to him on an instrument not much unlike
a flute; they were melancholy notes--beautiful--but sad enough to sow
pessimism's seed in any one who listened.
His divan--carved, inlaid, and gilded--faced the wide, awning-hung
opening to the garden. Round him on all three sides was a carved stone
screen through whose interstices came rustlings and whisperings that
told of the hidden life which sees and is not seen. The women with the
fans and flute were mere court accessories; the real nerves of Asia--the
veiled intriguers whom none may know but whose secret power any man may
feel--could be heard like caged birds crowding on their perches.
Now and then glass bracelets tinkled from behind the screen; ever and
again the music stopped, until another girl appeared to play another
melancholy air. But the even purring of the fans went on incessantly,
and the poor, priest-ridden fool who owned it all scowled straight in
front of him, his brows lined deep in thought.
It is a strange malady, that which seizes men whom fate has elevated to
a throne. It acts as certain Indian drugs are known to do--deprives its
victim of the power to act, but intensifies his ability to think, and
theorize, and feel. Howrah, with untold treasure in his vaults, with an
army of five thousand men, with the authority and backing that a hundred
generations give, could long for more--could fear the loss of what he
did have--but could not act.
The priests held him fear-bound. His brother held him hate-bound. His
women--and not even he knew, probably, how many of them languished in
the secret warren inside those palace walls--kept him restless in a net
of this-and-that-way-tugged intrigue. Flattery--and that is by far the
subtlest poison of the East--blinded him utterly to his own best course,
and kept him blind. Luxury unmanned him; he who had once held the
straightest spear in western India, and for the love of feeling red
blood racing in his veins had ridden down panthers on the maidan,
was flabby now; deep, dark rings underlined his eyes and the once
steel-sinewed wrist trembled.
His brother Jaimihr in his place, unsapped yet by decadent delights,
would have loosed his five thousand on the countryside--butchered any
who opposed him--pressed into service those who merely lagged--and would
have plunged India in a welter of blood before the priests had time
to mature their plans and arrange to keep all the power and plunder to
themselves. But Jaimihr had to stalk lesser game and content himself
with pricking at the ever-growing hate that gradually rendered the
Maharajah decisionless and sorry only for himself.
A first glimpse at Howrah, particularly in the shaded room, showed a
handsome man, black-bearded, lean, and lithe; a second look, undazzled
by his jewelry or by the studied magnificence of each apparently
unstudied movement, betrayed a man whose lightest word was law, but who
feared to give the word. Where muscles had been were unfilled folds of
skin that shook; where a firm if selfish mouth had once smiled merrily
beneath a pointed black mustache, a mouth still smiled, but meanly; the
selfishness was there, but the firmness had faded.
His eyes, though, were his most marked feature. They were hungry eyes,
pathetic as a caged beast's and as savage. No one could see them without
pitying him, and no man in his senses would have accepted their owner's
word on any point at all. A man looks as he did when the fire of a
burning velt has circled him and there is no way out. There was fear
behind them, and the look of restless search for safety that is nowhere.
In one of the many-columned courtyards of the palace was a chained,
mad elephant whose duty was to kneel on the Rajah's captive enemies. In
another courtyard was a big, square tank with a weedy, slippery stone
ramp at one end; in the tank were alligators; down the ramp other of the
Rajah's enemies, tight-bound, would scream and struggle and slide from
time to time. But they were only little enemies who died in that way;
the greater ones, who had power or influence, lived on and plotted,
because the owner of the execution beasts was afraid to put them to
their use.
Below, in damp, unlit dungeons, there were silken cords suspended from
stone ceilings; their ends were noosed, and the nooses hung ten feet
above the floor; those told only, though, of the fate of women who had
schemed unwisely--favorites of a week, perhaps, who had dared to sulk,
listeners through screens who had forgotten to forget. No men died ever
by the silken cord, and no tales ever reached the outside world of who
did die down in the echoing brick cellars; there was a path that led
underground to the alligator tank and a trap-door that opened just
above the water edge. Night, and the fungus-fouled long jaws, and slimy,
weed-filled water--the creak of rusty hinges--a splash--the bang of
a falling trap--a swirl in the moonlit water, and ring after heavy,
widening ring that lapped at last against the stone would write
conclusion to a tragedy. There would be no record kept.
Howrah was childless. That, of all the hell-sent troubles that beset
him, was the worst. That alone was worse than the hoarded treasure whose
secret he and his brother and the priests of Siva shared. Only in India
could it happen that a line of Rajahs, drag-net-armed--oblivious to the
duties of a king and greedy only of the royal right to tax--could pile
up, century by century, a hoard of gold an jewels--to be looked at. The
secret of that treasure made the throne worth plotting for--gave the
priests, who shared the secret, more than nine tenths of their power for
blackmail, pressure, and intrigue--and grew, like a cancer, into each
succeeding Rajah's mind until, from a man with a soul inside him he
became in turn a heartless, fear ridden miser.
Any childless king is liable to feel the insolent expectancy betrayed by
the heir apparent. But Jaimihr--who had no sons either--was an heir who
understood all of the Indian arts whereby a man of brain may hasten the
succession. Worry, artfully stirred up, is the greatest weapon of them
all, and never a day passed but some cleverly concocted tale would reach
the Rajah, calculated to set his guessing faculties at work.
Either of the brothers, when he happened to be thirsty, would call his
least-trusted counsellor to drink first from the jewelled cup, and would
watch the man afterward for at least ten minutes before daring to slake
his thirst; but Jaimihr had the moral advantage of an aspirant; Howrah,
on the defensive, wilted under the nibbling necessity for wakefulness,
while Jaimihr grinned.
What were five thousand drilled, armed men to a king who feared to use
them? Of what use was a waiting countryside, armed if not drilled, if he
was not sure that his brother had not won every man's allegiance? Being
Hindoo, priest-reared, priest-fooled, and priest-flattered, he knew, or
thought he knew, to an anna the value he might set on Hindoo loyalty
or on the loyalty of any man who did not stand to gain in pocket by
remaining true; and, as many another fear-sick tyrant has begun to do,
he turned, in his mind at least, to men of another creed--which in India
means of another race, practically-wondering whether he could not make
use of them against his own.
Like every other Rajah of his line, he longed to have sole control
of that wonderful treasure that had eaten out his very manhood. Miser
though he was, he was prepared at least to bargain with outsiders with
the promise of a portion of it, if that would give him possession of it
all. He had learned from the priests who took such full advantage of him
an absolute contempt for Mohammedans; and their teaching, as well as his
own trend of character, made him quite indifferent to promises he might
make, for the sake of diplomacy, to men of another creed. It began to be
obvious to him that he would lose nothing by courting the favor of the
Rangars, and of Alwa in particular, and that he might win security by
coaxing them to take his part. Of one thing he was certain: the Rangars
would do anything at all, if by doing it they could harm the Hindoo
priests.
But, being of the East Eastern, and at that Hindoo, he could not have
brought himself to make overtures direct and go straight to the real
issue. He had to feel his way gingerly. The thousand horses in his
stables, he reflected, would mount a thousand of the Rangars and place
at his disposal a regiment of cavalry which would be difficult to beat;
but a thousand mounted Mohammedans might be a worse thorn in his side
than even his brother or the priests. He decided to write to Alwa, but
to open negotiations with a very thin and delicately inserted wedge.
He could write. The priests had overlooked that opportunity, and had
taught him in his boyhood; in that one thing he was their equal. But the
other things that they had taught him, too, offset his penmanship.
He was too proud to write--too lazy, too enamoured of his dignity.
He called a court official, and the man sat very humbly at his
feet--listened meekly to the stern command to secrecy--and took the
letter from dictation.
Alwa was informed, quite briefly, that in view of certain happenings in
Howrah City His Highness the Maharajah had considered it expedient
to set a guard over the Christian missionaries in the city, for their
safety. The accompanying horse was a gift to the Alwa-sahib. The
Alwa-sahib himself would be a welcome guest whenever he might care to
come.
The document was placed in a silver tube and scaled. Within the space of
half an hour a horseman was kicking up the desert dust, riding as though
he carried news of life-and-death importance, and with another man and a
led horse galloping behind him. Five minutes after the man had started,
in a cell below the temple, of Siva, the court official who had taken
down the letter was repeating it word for word to a congeries of
priests. And one hour later still, in a room up near the roof of
Jaimihr's palace, one of the priests--panting from having come so
fast--was asking the Rajah's brother what he thought about it.
“Did he say nothing--,” asked Jaimihr.
“Nothing, sahib.”
The priest watched him eagerly; he would have to bear back to the other
priests an exact account of the Prince's every word, and movement, and
expression.
“Then I, too, say nothing!” answered Jaimihr.
“But to the priests of Siva, who are waiting, sahib?”
“Tell them I said nothing.”