"Leave him alone, you fools! The night air will sober him; and if it
doesn't, there's no hurry to carry on the breed."
Something of brutal truth behind the brutal coarseness of the remark
fell like a wet blanket over the half-fuddled guests; some of them
picked themselves up moodily from the gravel, others found stability
from friends, and so they drifted in unsteadily, dominated once more by
that hard, feminine, unwomanly voice asserting that if he didn't crawl
back to burrow in a quarter-of-an-hour, she'd send the butler to look
for him.
And thereinafter came quiet; while one by one the glittering windows of
the house sank to darkness.
And yet it was not dark, after all, surely? Or was there a curious halo
of light emanating from old Mahadeo's head; a halo which distorted him
somehow, which piled his low turban into a high tiara, and made his
nose show long, so long--almost as long as the Elephant-Faced
God-of-Wisdom ... in the Indian shrines....
Ah! There he was!...
Gwynne of Garthgwynne, standing on a bit of open beyond the
shadow--behind him a grey shimmer of mere set thick with water
lilies--his legs very wide apart, his watch in his hand--it had some
electric appliance about it, and the feeble light streaming upwards
showed his face full of hard, soul-revealing lines. What a face!--the
face of a devil let loose--set free from the fetters of conventional
life.
"Two o'clock," he muttered. "Well! whats'h a--matter. Sh'upposin' am
drunk she'll have to put up--Gwynne Garthgwynne, d--mn her--my
wife--mother of Gwynne's-Garth ..."
"Forward, Sri Ganêsh!" The order came soft but swift, and we were out
of the shadows. What was it out of the shadows, also--out of the Dim
Shadows which shroud Life in the Beginning and the End, which caught me
irresistibly, making me say sharply as one who has waited long, "Come
along, Gwynne! do--there's a good fellow."
For an instant surprise seemed to struggle with satisfaction in his
drink-sodden brain. The tall, heavy figure swayed, lurched. I could see
its every detail, the very buttons on the mess jacket--worn doubtless
out of bravado this last evening of bachelorhood--shone, as they had
done that night years ago amid the shadow and shine of the mango-tôpe;
for a radiance seemed to have sprung from earth and sky in which
nothing could be hidden.
Then suddenly came his old reckless, half-insane burst of laughter.
"Come," he echoed, drunkenly, "Why--why--shno't? Whatsh' larks--chursh,
fl'rs joll'--lit'--bride--no bridegroom!--joll'--good'--larks'h, eh!
Off to Phildelp'ia in the mornin'--see th'other one--joll'--lit' one.
_Bait_, you pig, Ganêsh! _Bait!_"
It all passed like a flash of lightning. The elephant was down and up
again, and the last thing I remember was hearing Gwynne of
Garthgwynne's drunken voice say, "Hello! old Mahadeo, eh! Well! go it,
ol' man. Givs'h some of--wish-dom--Shri Ganêsh--eh--what?"
When I roused again it was dawn; pale primrose dawn over a cloudless
sea.
It was the strange wind that roused me, the soft, warm wind that passed
over my face and sought something else--and found it. Soft as a snake
the elephant's trunk found the drunken man's neck as he lay asleep,
half hanging out of the cushioned howdah, and closed on it. The sight
drove the blur from my mind, and in an instant I saw all things
clearly.
We were on the very edge of a high cliff. Below us lay the scarce
dawn-lit waters of the calm sea. But between me and that tender distant
sky, what form was this with triple crown and wise stern human eyes
looking out of an animal's face?
Wisdom itself! Wisdom come to judgment.
There was a moment's pause. I clung to the howdah's side as if turned
to stone. I seemed to know what was coming--to realise the verdict
which that ultimate wisdom must give. Then in a clarion voice the words
came:
"By the order of the Lord Ganêsh, kill."
The softness, the tenderness of the snaky coil, so sensitive that the
finest thread in God's world can scarce escape it, changed suddenly to
iron. There was no cry, no struggle. Gwynne of Garthgwynne's body swung
high in air, then, flung from it with all leviathan's strength, fell,
and fell, and fell ...
* * * * *
When the roaring of the distant sea ceased in mine ears about a
fortnight afterwards, I found that the nine days' wonder of Gwynne of
Garthgwynne's disappearance on his wedding night had died down. He had
rushed out rollicking drunk--that all knew. He had not returned. The
butler sent out to seek for him had sought other seekers, but all in
vain. They were still dragging the mere for him, but the flood gates of
the river (of which it was a backwater) had been open that night, and
the body might have drifted out to sea. So there had been no wedding,
and a distant heir, barely related to the old stock, was ready to take
possession so soon as doubt was over. As for me, the early postman,
attracted by my moaning, had found me half-in and half-out of my blankets
in the _tente d'abri_ behind the bramble screen of the quarry.
Was it then all a dream? Even if it were not ...
Was it not the wisdom of our Lord Ganêsh?
I decided, at last, to say nothing about that dream of a marvellous
moonlight ride on an elephant over half Wales. Twinges of conscience
assailed me at times, but they were laid to rest for ever about
Christmas-tide, when, going through a small town in the Midlands, I was
met, in passing a new cottage hospital on its environs, by a glad cry--
"The very man I want! I've got a poor soul here who won't die. He ought
really to have been at peace two days ago--but he goes on and on. You
see, he's an Indian or something, and we can't speak the lingo--you
can, I expect?"
I followed the doctor, with whom I had a slight acquaintance, into the
ward, with a foreboding at my heart. I knew it was old Mahadeo, and
that, indeed, he wanted me. And it was. He lay tucked up between clean
sheets on an English bed with two English hospital nurses fadding about
him, speechless, gasping, at the very point and spit of death, yet
waiting--waiting ...
I knew what he wanted, and without a word, his dark eyes following me
in dim gladness, I threw back the clothes and got a firm grip of the
sheet at his head. He should at least die as a Hindu should die. "Now,
doctor!" I said, "if you'll take the feet we will let him find freedom
outside."
A nurse started forward. "But the case is pneumonia--double
pneumonia----"
The doctor hesitated; they always are in the hands of the nurses.
"Look here, Jones," I cried, sharply. "This man doesn't want clinical
thermometers, and draw-sheets, and caps. He wants freedom. He wants to
die as his religion tells him he must die, on Mother Earth--aye--even
if her bosom is white with snow."
And it was, for it was Christmas-tide.
So we lifted him out, the doctor and I, and laid him down on Heaven's
white quilt. He just rolled over, face down, into the cool pillow.
"_Râm-Râm--Sita-Râm_," I whispered, kneeling beside him to give the
last dying benediction of his race. Such a quaint one! Only the name of
what to it, is superman and superwoman. A last appeal to the higher
instincts of humanity.
There was one little sob. I thought I heard the beginning of the old
refrain:
"The wisdom of our Lord Ganêsh----" Then he had found freedom.
"You seem to know their ways, sir," said a horsey-looking man who had
come in with us and who had evidently something to do with the show.
"So, if you could give us a 'elp with this pore fellar's beast, I'd be
obliged. Hasn't touched food this ten days--never since the old man
took worse, and a elephant, sir, is a dead loss to a show. The master
lef' 'im here with me, but I'm blowed if I can do nothing with him."
I found Ganêsh happier than his master, for, no place being large
enough for him, he lay in the open; but they had stretched a tarpaulin
over him like a rick-cover, as a protection.
A glance told me he was far gone, though he lay crouched, not prone;
his trunk--marvellous agent for good or ill--stretched out before him
beyond shelter into the snow.
As I came up to him, I fancied I saw a flicker in his eyes, those eyes
so small, so full of wisdom. Then I laid in front of him the old man's
turban, ragged, worn, which I had begged of the prim nurses. In a
second the whole, huge, inert mass of flesh became instinct with life.
He rose to his feet with incredible swiftness, and softly encircling
the old ragged pugree, raised it gently and placed it in the master's
seat. For a moment I doubted what would come next; but the instinct
which is held in leviathan's small brain is great. He knew by some
mysterious art that the master was dead, that the human mind which had
been his guide was gone.
He took one step forward, threw up his trunk, and the echoes of the
surrounding houses cracked with the roaring bellow of his trumpet as he
swayed sideways and fell dead.
That was all the little smug provincial English town ever knew of the
"Wisdom of our Lord Ganêsh."
THE SON OF A KING
I
"Barring my pay," he said, ruefully, "I haven't a coin in the world."
And for the moment, newly accepted lover as he was, his eyes actually
left hers and wandered away to the reddening yellow of the sunset with
a certain resentment at the limitations of his world.
"Father has plenty!" she put in joyously. And for the moment her hand
actually touched his in a new-born sense of appropriation and right of
re-assurance which made her blush faintly. It also made his eyes return
to hers, whereat she blushed furiously, and then tried to cover her
confusion by a jest. "Well! he has. Hasn't he the best collection of
coins in India?"
"He wouldn't part with one of them, though, for love or money. And I
doubt his parting with you--though I could pay a lot--in love."
He had both her hands now, and the very newness of the position made
her fence with the emotion it aroused.
"He parted with duplicates."
"But you aren't one--there isn't anyone like you in the wide, wide
world. And I'm glad you're not. I don't want anyone else to be as lucky
as I am."
She retreated still further from realities into jesting. "Then
he exchanges quite often, so, if you only set yourself to find
something----" She broke off, and her face lit up. "Oh, Jim! I have
such a delightful idea! You shall find the gold coin--you know the one
I mean--with the date that is to settle, or unsettle, half the history
of the world! Do you know, I really believe, if you helped him to
confound all those German wiseacres, that father would be quite willing
to exchange----"
"His daughter for the ducat! Perhaps. But, unfortunately--and quite
between ourselves--I have my doubts about the existence of that coin.
Or if it does exist it is hopelessly hidden away for ever and ever and
aye, like that blessed old buried city of his that we have all been
hunting after this month past in the wilderness. I don't wish to be
disrespectful to your father, Queenie, but I believe he dreamt of
it--that is to say, if it didn't dream of him--one never knows which
comes first----"
He paused, arrested in the egoism, the absolute individualism of love
by the mystery of the collective life which was part even of that love,
and once more his eyes wandered to the sun setting.
The sky had darkened on the horizon as the dust haze shadowed into
purple, so that the distant edge of the low sand-hills, losing definite
outline, seemed almost level. Yet far and near, from the feet of the
lovers as they sat close together to that uncertain ending of their
visible world, not a straight line was to be seen. Everything showed in
curves--curves that told their unflinching tale of unseen circlings.
The wrinkled ripples left by the last wind upon the sea of sand around
them waved over the endless undulations of the desert, the sparse
tussocks of coarse grass fell in fountains from their own centres, the
stunted thorn-bushes were coiled and twisted on themselves like tangled
skeins without a clue, the faint tracks of the sand-rats and the
partridges wound snake-like in every direction, and even the footprints
which had brought the two lovers in their present resting-place held
the same hint of reference to unseen continuity, for, absorbed in
Love's new world, they had wandered on aimlessly unheeding of the old
one at their feet.
The result stared them in the face, now, in a firm yet undecided trail
that was by far the most salient feature in the indefinite landscape.
Jim Forrester laughed as he directed her attention to it.
"We seem to have gone round and round on our tracks; so the tents, and
your respected father and civilisation generally must be--well! exactly
where I would have sworn they were not. But that just bears out what I
was saying. For all we know the whole thing may be a peculiarly vicious
circle! The world may be going back when we think it is going forward,
and all the fine new things we think we find, may only he ourselves
again. You and I, and the buried city and the gold coin--everything
that we dream of, or that dreams of us, may only be part of the hidden
circle which belongs to the curve of a life which has no straight
lines--My God! take care--what the devil is that?"
That, if anything, _was_ a straight line--straight as an arrow. And an
arrow it was, still vibrating in the soft sand at their very feet. Jim
Forrester stood up angrily and looked round for the archer who had
drawn his bow at such an unpleasantly close venture. But no one was
visible, so he stooped down and drew the arrow out of the sand. He had
seen its like, or almost its like, before in those wild central tracts
of sandy desert where the wandering tribes of goatherds still cling to
the weapons of a past age. His companion, however, had not, and she
bent to examine it curiously. The attitude made the fair coils of her
hair, which were plaited round her head, look more than ever like a
heavy gold crown.
"It takes one back to another world altogether," she said, watching him
as he balanced it critically to appraise the perfection of its poise.
"To a world where it was made, perhaps--for it looks old, doesn't it! I
wonder who----"
She paused, becoming conscious that someone was standing behind her.
Jim Forrester became conscious of the fact also, and showed it in such
an aggressive way that she exclaimed hastily:
"Don't be angry with him, please. It must have been quite a chance--he
couldn't have known we were here."
Even without the plea it would have been difficult for the young
Englishman to refuse the chance of explanation to the figure which had
appeared so unexpectedly. For, though in all outward accessories it was
only that of a wandering goatherd, there was a calm dignity about it
which claimed consideration. The fillet which bound the hair,
sun-ripened to a rich brown on its waves and curls, was only a knotted
bit of goats'-hair string, but the head it encircled had a youthful
buoyancy such as the Greek sculptors gave to the young Apollo, a
resemblance enhanced by the statuesque folds of the rough goats'-hair
blanketing which was sparsely draped over the bare, sinewy yet
fine-drawn frame.
The face, however, was faintly aquiline, and the eyes, deep set between
prominent brow and cheek bone, had the mingled fire and softness which
in India so often redeems an otherwise commonplace countenance.
"I was stalking bustard, Huzoor," said the goatherd frankly, with a
flash of very white teeth, "and being face down on the sand yonder
behind the grasses saw nothing till the Presences stood up, but a glint
of the sun on something."
He spoke to the man, but his eyes were on the girl's golden crown of
hair.
Jim Forrester suddenly broke the arrow across his knee and threw the
fragments from him into the sand ripples.
"Hand me over the bow, too," he said, peremptorily, then paused.
"Hullo! Where the deuce did you get that--it is very old--the oldest
I've seen--with a looped string, too?" he added, handling it curiously.
The goatherd smiled. "The Presence is welcome to keep it if he likes. I
can get plenty more in the old city."
Once again, in speaking to the man, his eyes, askance, were on the
girl.
She started. "In the old city," she echoed, "Jim! do you hear
that--then you know where the old city is?"
The goatherd almost laughed. "Wherefore not, malika sahiba
(queen-lady). Have I not lived in it always?"
"Lived in it! Then where is it?"
He swept a bronze hand in a circle which clipped her and him and the
distant horizon.
"Here, queen-lady."
"Here," echoed Jim Forrester, incredulously; "but there are absolutely
no signs of a city here."
"Plenty, Huzoor!" replied the goatherd, "if the Protector of the Poor
will only use his eyes. Look yonder, how the ground rises to meet the
curve of the sky; yonder, sahib, where the sunset red dyes deepest."
The young Englishman looked and frowned, but the girl gave a quick
exclamation, and laid a hasty, surprised touch on her lover's arm. "He
is right, Jim," she said; "why didn't we notice it before? It stands
out quite clear--an even rise all round centring on the unseen sun. How
very curious! Ask him his name, Jim, and all that, so that father may
be able to get hold of him. Fancy if we find the buried city--it would
be as good almost as the gold coin, though somehow it makes me feel
creepy." She gave a faint shiver as she spoke.
"The queen-lady should not remain in the wilderness when the sun has
set," came in swift warning from the goatherd; "there is a fever fiend
lurks in it and brings strange dreams."
Something almost of familiarity and command in the liquid yet vibrant
voice made Jim Forrester frown again and say, shortly, "Yes; we must
get back; it grows quite cold."
The girl looked half bewildered first to one and then to the other of
the two tall figures that stood between her and the fast-fading light,
against which she still saw clearly that faint swelling domed blue
shadow, as of some other world forcing its way through the crust of the
visible one.
So she stood silent, vaguely disturbed while the few questions
necessary to identify the man who answered them were asked.
She did not speak, indeed, until with faces set on the right path for
their camp and civilisation generally, they paused on the top of the
first sand-rippled wave to look back. The shadowy dome was still there,
swelling towards the vanished sun, and from its side the figure of the
young goatherd rose into the darkening dust haze. He was calling to his
flock, and the words of his old-time chant were clearly audible:
"O, seekers for Life's meat,
Your course is run!
Come home with weary feet,
Rest is so sweet.
What though one day be done?--
Another has begun.
The flock, the fold are one,
Where long years meet!"
"I hope he told us his real name!" she said, suddenly.
II
"My dear child, all your geese are swans--and so were your poor
mother's before you," said her father. And then his eyes grew dreamy,
perhaps over the intricacies of some new coins he was classifying;
though, in truth, the memory of the young wife who had left him alone
with a week-old baby in the days of his youth had somehow come harder
to him during the last few happier, more home-like years since his
daughter had returned to take her mother's place as mistress of the
house; for the girl was very like the dead woman.
She had brought her father his afternoon cup of tea to the
office-tent, cleared for that brief recess of the cloud of clerks and
witnesses, who through the wide canvas-wings, set open to let in the
air, could be seen huddled in groups among the sparse shadows of the
stunted kikar trees amid which the camp was pitched. They could be
heard also, since in the limited leisure at their disposal they were
hubble-hubbling away at their hookahs conscientiously; the noise in its
rhythmic, intermittent insistency seemed like a distant snore from the
sleepy desert of sand that stretched away to the horizon on all sides.
"Of course," he went on, "you could hardly be expected to know--though
really, my dear, you have all your mother's quickness of perception
regarding people and places--but the mere fact of that goatherd fellow
giving his name as Khesroo, and admitting he was low-caste, should have
made you doubt his assertion. I confess I had little hope, for such
knowledge as he professed to have is generally in the keeping of the
priesthood only."
"But Jim was there--I mean Mr. Forrester," she began. Her father
coughed uneasily.
"Because I call my personal assistant, whom I have known as a child,
Jim, that is no reason, my dear Queenie, why you should contract the
habit. I don't think your poor mother would have liked it. Besides,
though he is an able young man--very much so, indeed, and when he
grows older will make an excellent officer--Mr. Forrester--ahem!"
(he made a violent effort over the name) "has no genius for
antiquities. He utterly fails, for instance, to realise the
far-reaching importance--for it would, of course, alter the whole
chronology of the Græco-Bactrian era--of my contention concerning
what Hausmann and the German school generally venture to designate a
post-Vicramaditya. Yet some day, I feel sure, the gold coin of which
Kapala gives so exact a description in B.C. 200, with the date under
the legend and a double profile on the obverse, will turn up, and then
the point will be settled, even if I do not live to see it."
He was fairly off on his hobby and had risen to pace the tent, his
hands behind his back. Many a time and oft she had listened to him
patiently, almost eagerly, for the story of India's golden age always
fired her imagination, but to-day she was thinking of other things--of
her engagement for one, which she must break to him sooner or later. So
she went up to him and tucked her arm into his coaxingly.
"You may, father. It might be found any day. Do you know, I believe you
would give almost anything--even your daughter--for that ducat.
Wouldn't you?"
Absolute jest as it was, her voice trembled over the trivial words, as
voices often do unconsciously when Fate means to turn them to her own
purposes.
He smiled and patted her hand. "Undoubtedly, I would, my dear. But,
nice as you are, no one is likely to offer me that exchange. To begin
with, the coin, as a simple unique, would be worth a fortune, and then
there is the fame. Think of it! Half the philologists, most of the
historians, and all those German fellows routed on their own ground!"
"Who knows?" she said, and then a frown dimmed the amusement in her
eyes. "Though I can't understand," she added, "why that man Khesroo
denied--as you say he did--having met Jim--I mean, us--yesterday. He
can't be the wrong man, can he?"
"Mr. Forrester thinks he is not. But you can see for yourself," replied
her father, returning to his tea and his treasures, "for he is still
over in the orderlies' tent. They had such trouble hunting him out of
the jungles and persuading him to come here that they said they must
keep him overnight, anyhow, in case he was wanted."
An hour or so afterwards, therefore, a yellow-legged constable escorted
the goatherd who had answered to the name of Khesroo into the verandah
of the Miss-Sahiba's drawing-room tent. It, also, was set wide to the
cool of the desert evening, and its easy-chairs and low, flower-decked
tables strewn with books and magazines struck a curiously dissonant
note from that sounded by the wilderness of sandy waste which on all
sides hemmed in the little square of white-winged camp with a certain
hungry emptiness.
"He is the man, Jim," said the girl, in an undertone (for her father
had come over from office and was seated within, reading the daily
papers which the camel-post had just brought). "And yet--he looks
different somehow--and so ill, too."
He did look ill, with the languid yet harassed air which follows on
malarial fever. The buoyancy of his carriage was replaced by an almost
dejected air. Yet it was unmistakably the goatherd they had met the
evening before, who, in obedience to a sign, squatted down midway, as
it were, between the culture inside the tent and the savagery without
it.
"You look as if you had been having fever--have you?" asked the girl
abruptly, for her years of authority had made her knowledgeable in such
things.
"The malika sahiba says right," replied Khesroo, indifferently. "I have
had it much--this long while back."
"And you had it yesterday or the day before?"