Chapter Nineteen.
In Strange Quarters.
Murad Afzul was in high glee, for which he had good reason. The Tarletons and Haslam he had released, conditionally on the promise of payment of a good round sum of rupees. True, the promise was so far on paper only, but curiously enough Murad Afzul, robber and general freebooter as he was himself, entertained a high opinion of the promises of the Sahibs—Feringhi infidels as they were; besides, there was just this amount of additional security, that did they repudiate their promise in this instance, why then, they had better go away and dwell right at the further end of India, and that at a day’s notice, even if they did not put the sea between them and him, for any closer proximity would certainly prove fatal to their health. As it was, the terms were satisfactory all round, for all observation had gone to convince that shrewd marauder that though it might be safe sport flaying and burning such of his Asiatic fellow-subjects who should fall into his hands, it did not pay to extend such operations to the Sahibs. They would stand robbery, but at the murder of themselves they drew the line. So a bundobust was entered into, and for what was, under the circumstances, a moderate ransom, the British captives were allowed to return to Mazaran, and they, reckoning that the Government would pay, deemed themselves mighty lucky in getting off so cheap. But Murad Afzul could afford to be moderate just then, for he was standing in for a stroke of business beside which the gains already secured were as a fleabite, and this was the capture of Herbert Raynier, and the reward offered by the Nawab for that feat.
Incidentally Murad Afzul had other kine to milk—which in their way would give a good, rich, profitable yield. The wily freebooter had issued orders that two men should be exempted from the slaughter which had taken place of the camp servants, and these two were Raynier’s chuprassis. He knew his way about, did Murad Afzul, whereupon he argued that if any man was likely to be the possessor of a considerable hoard of ill-gotten gains, that man would be a Government chuprassi. Accordingly he named a good round sum apiece, which Sunt Singh and Kaur Singh were invited to disgorge, and on their protesting their utter inability to do so, were immediately treated to an instalment of the consequences of such refusal duly persisted in.
It is curious how, even outside the covers of a book, or off the stage, poetic justice will sometimes overtake delinquents, and that as a sheer matter of cause and effect, and now for instance, as they yelled and writhed, each with a red-hot coal bound up within his left armpit—not the right, lest they should be unable to indite the requisite document authorising payment of their ransom—it did not, of course, occur to Sunt Singh and Kaur Singh that this was indirect result of their supercilious repulse of Chand Lall from their master’s audience, because they were unaware of the nature of his errand. But it is none the less certain that had that luckless trader been able to communicate that Murad Afzul and his gang of “budmashes” were out in the district, and dacoity in full blast, Raynier would never have ventured forth thus on a practically defenceless camping expedition, nor suffered others to do so either, in which contingency the events just recorded would, so far, never have taken place.
Raynier, awaking to consciousness, stared at the opposite wall, then at the furniture, then at the window, then closed his eyes again. A confused medley was flitting through his clouded brain. He seemed to see, but as if in a far-off time, the hiding-place among the mountain tops, the rain and mist and wild storms, to feel in a dull and uneasy form of sense the oppression of some peril hanging over him, but sequence of thought refused to come. Events chased each other in wild phantasmagoria through his mind, a sense of being hurled through space, a shock of some sort, a ring of shaggy fierce countenances and the flash of uplifted tulwars. Then, of a sudden, his mind cleared. He remembered the runaway horse and how his last sense had been that of being whirled into space, wrapped in a chill mist. But Hilda? What of her? Where was she? Had she been found too. Was she here, and—where on earth was he?
He opened his eyes wide now, and stared around the room. Yes, it was a room, but a strange one. The walls were of a dull brown colour, and unpapered. The window was a tall, narrow embrasure, glazed and partly open. In the doorway was a chik of fine split bamboo, draped by faded curtains, and a lamp of strange, but very artistic, design hung from the ceiling. Where was he? And he made a movement to spring out of bed.
A figure glided to his side, a figure clad in white and wearing a turban, and a hand was laid upon his wrist.
“Do not move, Sahib. The Sahib must lie quiet. The Sahib has been ill.”
The words were spoken in Hindustani, and now Raynier answered in the same tongue,—
“I suppose I have been. But where am I, and—who are you?”
“I am a Hakim (native physician.). The Sahib must not talk,” was the answer, ignoring the first part of the question. This the patient did not fail to notice.
“That is all right, Hakim Sahib”—Raynier was always polite in his address with natives, and if they had any title or rank never failed to give them the benefit of it. “But what I want to know is, where am I?”
The question was asked with some impatience. The doctor, seeing that he was likely to become excited, which would be highly prejudicial to the patient, and therefore equally so to his own interest, replied,—
“You are in the house of his Greatness the Nawab.”
“What?” almost shouted Raynier.
“In the house of the Nawab Mahomed Mushîm Khan,” repeated the Hakim.
“Oh, then, I am in good hands. The Nawab and I are friends. Is the Miss Sahib here too?”
Even if the doctor had not turned away to conceal it, Raynier would not have noticed the strange look which had come over his face, as indeed how should he?
“Yes, yes,” was the hurried answer. “Now the Sahib must not talk any more.”
“But I must see her if only for a minute. She will come, I know. Bring her to me, Hakim Sahib, then I will be as quiet as you wish.”
“That cannot be,” was the answer. “She is getting on well, but not well enough to talk to the Sahib. In a few days, perhaps. Now the Sahib must rest quiet or he will not get well enough to see her at all.”
Raynier sighed. There was sense in what the other said, he supposed, yet it was hard. Hilda would naturally have suffered from reaction, and could conceivably be anything but well. Why, he himself was as weak as a cat, as the sapient simile for some inscrutable reason puts it, the harmless, necessary domestic feline being, proportionately, of the strongest and most wiry of the animal creation.
“Can I see the Nawab, then?” he said.
“The Nawab is absent.”
“Then his brother, the Sirdar Kuhandil Khan? Will he not come and see me?”
“He too is absent, Sahib. In a few days, perhaps, when the Sahib is well.”
With this answer Raynier must fain be content. A drowsiness stole over him, begotten of the exertion of talking, and a great sense of security and comfort Mushîm Khan was his friend, and although he might have been drawn into the present bobbery—all these mountain tribes dearly loved the fun of fighting—why, he and Hilda would be perfectly safe under his roof. Hilda, of course, had been found at the same time as himself, and brought here. They would meet in a day or two, as the doctor had said, and when the fighting was over, why, then, they would return to Mazaran, and—good Heavens! why would the thought of Cynthia Daintree obtrude itself? And as, in consequence, he began to turn restlessly, the Hakim glided to his side.
“Drink this,” he said, pouring something from a phial. Raynier did so, and in another moment was slumbering hard and peacefully.
For two or three days longer was Raynier thus tended, but day and night the Hakim was with him, or in the room which lay behind the chik, or, if absent for a while, his place was supplied by an attendant. But not by any chance, not for one single instant was he ever left alone. Had he been a criminal awaiting the gallows he could not have been more closely and continuously watched. He tried to obtain information as to what was going on outside, but without avail. On general subjects the doctor or the attendant would converse, but let him once touch that of the present disturbance and they were closeness itself. Then he thought it was time to insist on seeing Hilda.
With deprecatory words, and far from easy in his mind, the Hakim told him that the Miss Sahib was not there. He had told him the contrary, it was true, but he was very weak and ill, and good news is better for a sick man than bad news, wherefore he had told him what he had.
What, then, had become of Miss Sahib? Raynier asked. Had she not been found at the same time as himself? He was repressing a murderous desire to leap upon and throttle this liar of a Hakim, and only the knowledge that violence would serve no good purpose whatever availed to restrain him. He controlled his voice, too, striving to speak calmly.
No, she had not been found, the doctor answered. It was not even known that there was a Miss Sahib with him at all. He had been found by a party of Gularzai in the early morning lying unconscious on the mountain side, and brought here. But there was nobody with him. And then the Hakim, looking at him with something like pity, it might have been thought, suggested that the time had come when the Sahib might take a little fresh air.
A few moments ago, and how welcome the idea would have been. He was longing to see something beyond the four walls of his room—of his prison; and from his window nothing was visible but another wall. But now the shock was too great, too stunning. He had pictured Hilda here with him, here in security, and, after their hardships, in some degree of comfort. And all the time this infernal Hakim had been feeding him on lies. What had become of her? He remembered how she had gone after the horse, but of the descent of the mist he remembered nothing. Had she wandered too far and been unable to find him again? Great Heaven! how awful. A defenceless woman, alone, lost, in that savage mountain solitude, with night coming on, and that woman Hilda Clive. And then by a strange inspiration came a modicum of comfort in the thought that it was Hilda Clive; for it brought back to him certain recollections. He remembered her bizarre midnight walk in a semi-trance, the perilous episode in the tangi and the consummate nerve and utter unconcern she had displayed. She had qualities, properties, gifts, what you will, which placed her utterly outside any other woman he had ever known—and these might now carry her through where another would succumb.
Following the Hakim and the attendant mechanically, Raynier found himself in a kind of courtyard, rather was it a roof, flat and walled in. He could see two or three other similar roof courtyards, with people on them. But where was he? He had been in Mushîm Khan’s dwelling, an ordinary mud-walled village similar in every way to a hundred others inhabited by the Gularzai and kindred border tribes, but this place was akin to a castle or rock fortress. He could not see much of it, but it seemed to him that the place he was in crowned the summit of a rock eminence, into which it was partly built. Had Mushîm Khan another dwelling, then—a mountain stronghold which he used in times of disturbance? It looked so.
How blue the sky was, how bracing the air. Raynier drew in deep draughts of the latter. He felt recovered already, and earnestly he longed for the return of the Nawab, that he might be set at liberty, and at once start in search of Hilda. Little he cared now about his official prospects or anything of the kind. This girl who had been his companion in danger and hardship filled all his thoughts.
And then immediately beneath him arose an outburst of the most awful cries and shrieks, such as could have been wrung only from a human being undergoing the extremity of anguish and bodily torture. With blanched face and chilled blood he rushed to the parapet and looked over.