"For her house inclineth unto death!"--_The Bible_.
We lie beneath the mosquito net, we undress behind the purdah, we sit
on the verandah, or stroll in the compound; we dance, we ride, we eat,
we sleep, ever heedless of the eyes watching, and of the hidden form;
but above all of that relentless will which causes some of us
uncontrollably to do odd things at odd moments under the Indian stars,
to our subsequent disgust and wonderment.
Leonie, with Jan Cuxson behind her, stopped outside the temple door,
which, hanging upon one hinge, moved slowly to and fro in the night
breeze.
And at the side of the altar, in the black shadows of the doorway which
led to the secret places of the temple, a pock-marked native woman,
draped in an orange coloured _sari_ embroidered in silver, laid one
hand upon the priest's arm and pointed with the other.
"Behold the Sahib," she whispered with a snarl of hate at the corners
of her mouth, stained crimson with betel juice. "He who seeks her in
wife," she continued, pushing the _sari_ back from about her head so
that the thirteen silver rings she wore in her crumpled left ear
tinkled faintly, and her nose-ring of gold set with small but real
turquoise gleamed dully, "and once wedded she will return across the
Black Water. O father of the people, O wise one, I love her and thou
didst promise."
She suddenly beat her breast, and the heavy silver bracelets jingled
faintly, then shrank back against the painted wall as a young man, even
the jungle guide, and beautiful to the verge of unseemliness, stealing
from the shadows, smote her fiercely across the mouth, and pulled the
_sari_ roughly over her head.
"Hold thy peace and watch," he whispered, with a swift movement of the
arm, most suggestive of a cobra uncoiling itself with intent to strike,
as Leonie turned away from the doorway with a shudder.
She took two steps and stopped irresolute, with the rays of the full
moon shining upon her upturned perplexed face.
Then she stared down at the myriad things which crawled and hopped in
and out of the gleaming bones which lay about in little heaps, or
scattered in ones and twos, even up to the door and into the dim
interior.
Too absorbed, neither Jan nor Leonie noticed the murmur of voices from
the far end of the court, nor the reek of the tiger's blood which came
from her stained dress and the carcase of the dead beast which was in
the process of being skinned, and around which hovered the native staff
awaiting the distribution of the coveted tiger's fat.
Which more by faith, than any medicinal property it contains, is
supposed to work miracles in stressful times of rheumatism, and cattle
sickness.
Jan Cuxson, trying to grasp and knot together the tag ends of a dawning
knowledge, stood behind his beloved, patiently awaiting her next
desire, instead of picking her up in his arms as he should have done,
and carrying her off to safety, a good wash and a better dinner at the
other end of the court.
He was surprised when she spoke quickly and below her breath.
"Take me away," she whispered hoarsely as he caught her outstretched
hands and pulled her fiercely into his arms. "Take me away, the place
is evil--evil I tell you--and"--she raised her hand and passed it
across his face, laughing softly, "I think I am bewitched--something
is--is--pulling--is------"
She looked back over her shoulder, stared hard for a moment, and then,
tearing herself free, ran like a hunted deer through the crumbling
doorway into the blackness of the temple.
"Who fears, O Woman?" whispered the man, whose beauty touched the
unseemly as he sank to the ground. "Who fears?"
Half-way up the temple Leonie stopped, standing in a silver pool of
moonshine which blazed like the blade of a knife through a hole in the
roof; lighting up the ruined altar, the grass-grown stones, and the
image of a female deity carved in bas-relief upon a huge block of
granite.
Nude was the woman carved out of stone, and of so dark a blue as to be
almost black; with tongue protruding and hair in waving masses, through
which were thrust four arms; garlanded with skulls she danced wantonly
upon the body of a man, with two hands raised in blessing, in the third
a knife, in the fourth a bleeding head.
Kali! Kali! Kali!
If only Jan Cuxson had been able to do something, anything, what a mint
of trouble he would have saved himself and others, but instead, he
stood rooted to a spot just inside the door, incapable of moving hand
or foot, held by a force he did not even guess at, and therefore could
not fight, watching Leonie as she moved slowly forward, as though she
were walking in her sleep towards the blood-stained altar.
"So will she always come," murmured the old priest as he laid his hand
caressingly upon his well-beloved pupil. "So will she always come.
Love? Pah! who fears the love of man in the Black One's temple? Who?"
And there was no answer from the shrouded future.
Leonie stood still, quite still, unconscious of the eyes about her, and
everything save the terrible problem she was trying to solve.
Then suddenly she cried aloud, and the words, like wings, beat against
the roof and walls.
"I know!" she cried, "I know! I know!"
And whirling round towards the spell-bound man, she turned her hands,
palm downwards, with a wonderful eastern gesture of renunciation, and
crumpled into a heap before the altar, and the three watching figures
stole noiselessly back into the secret places of the temple as Cuxson,
freed, strode hastily up to his beloved.
He gathered up the unconscious girl as tenderly as a woman, oh! a good
deal more so, and turning her face to his shoulder, carried her out of
the temple; stopping for a second to hold her more securely in his left
arm as he bent to pick up something which glittered in the moonlight: a
piece of orange silk heavily embroidered in silver, for which Leonie
had ransacked the Old, the New, and the Lal Bazaars; a bit of her
ayah's _sari_ torn and caught in a sundri breather. "And she stayed
behind on the boat," said Jan to himself, with a flash of inspiration
as he turned the thing over in his hand, and slipped it into his pocket.
And though his heart ached over his beloved's mental and physical
distress, he inwardly rejoiced at the untoward occurrences of the day
which had supplied his solid, trustworthy brain with the outline of a
key to the problem.
Dear, stolid old Jan, who, given the time, could beat anyone at
unravelling the hardest, hard-tied, knotted problem.
With a tale of sudden faintness he gave her into the care of Edna
Talbot, who cooed and fluttered over her like the woman she was, in
spite of her workmanlike appearance and her outrageous craving for a
big meal. And she herded the sahibs to the far end of the court, where
lay the sick man, after the big meal in which Leonie had joined right
heartily; a little white about the face, truly, and shadowed about the
eyes, but normal and content, with not the vaguest recollection of what
had happened after the killing of the tiger.
"Oh! don't be dense," Edna Talbot said quite brusquely when Guy Dean,
having brutally ignored the suffering native, suggested returning to
the others. "You surely don't want to make a triangle."
"Triangle--what!"
"Well, you know the old saying about two being company, don't you?"
"Of course I do--that's where it comes in," replied the lad not over
lucidly, "_I_ want to make the two!"
The major laughed at the rueful countenance, as he clapped the boy on
the shoulder.
"You'll get over it all right, old fellow; it's just like inoculation,
a feeble taste of something which might have been ever so much worse.
Trust me, you'll get over it!"
"_Never_!" stoutly maintained young Dean as he heaved a stone at
something which fled across the court, his mental vision failing to
register a picture of the future in which Jill Wetherbourne, daughter
of Molly and Jack, occupied the principal position.
Later, Leonie, sitting with Jan Cuxson on a block of fallen masonry,
smiled sweetly upon the head _shikari_, who, salaaming, prayed her to
honour him by accepting a little memento of the _shikar_ which had
terminated so successfully upon the slaying of the tiger.
In his open palm he held two small bones about two and a half inches in
length, two little superstitious tokens which ensure sons to the woman
who treasures them, and which, he told her in his broken English, were
only found in the tiger, one on each side of the chest, unconnected
with any other bone at all.
"It is a charm, O! Mem Sahib, defender of the poor, which will
assuredly bring you happiness.
"And may the sons of the sahib grow straight as the pine tree," he
added slowly in his own tongue, as he felt the sahib's eyes fixed
steadily upon him.
"What did he say to you, Jan?"
As the shikari turned away Cuxson caught the girl's hands and crushed
them up against his heart.
"I will tell you some day!"
"Tell me _now_!"
"No! not now! It is of love that I should have to speak, and in all
these past weeks you have not let me touch your hand or speak to you of
love. You have put a barrier between us, a barrier of a misplaced
fear, which has grown higher and stronger since I have had to confess
to failure in finding any trace of your old servant. India is wide,
dear, and its villages uncountable, and _I_ am not distressed over the
empty return of these last months; all that worries me is, that while
prowling about the Himalayas out of reach of the post, I never knew
what had happened to you, or that you were in India."
Leonie sighed as she opened her hand and looked at the small bones.
"Tell me now, Jan!" she insisted.
"No! Leonie, I cannot. There will be no one near us when I do tell
you, and except as a souvenir of that very fine old man, you need not
keep them, because my love is a still greater and surer charm to bring
you the great happiness they promise."