The Mercy of the Lord

by Flora Annie Webster Steel

A SKETCH FROM LIFE

He was an old man; a very old man. A Syyed--that is, a Mahomedan who claims direct descent from the prophet--by trade a Yunani hakeem, or physician according to the Grecian system, introduced to India, doubtless, by Alexander the Great. He had a little sort of shop, close to the principal gate of the city, where he was in touch with all those who, with its ship the camel, went out, or came back from the desert beyond, and with all strangers and sojourners in the land. So all day and every day you might see wearied travellers resting on the hard wooden platform set in a dark archway, of which his shop consisted, drinking out of green glass tumblers some restorative sherbet of things hot or things cold, things dry or things wet, while he showed dimly in the background, a visionary outline of long grey beard and high white turban. In this way he heard a good deal of what was going on both inside and outside the city, and as he was of the old school of the absolutely loyal outspoken Mahomedan, who, while he holds our rule to be inferior to that of his own faith, emphatically believes it to be superior to all others, I used often to pause in riding into or out of the city for a chat with the old man; seldom without benefit to myself. One morning--I remember it so well!--the gram fields outside the city were literally drenched with dew, making the fine tufts look like diamond plumes, amongst which the wealth of tiny purple blue pea blossom showed like a sowing of sapphires--I found him sitting with a troubled look on his high, wrinkled forehead, peering through his horn spectacles at a blue printed paper.

A patient was snoring contentedly on the boards, with, tucked into the hollow of his neck, a hard roly-poly bolster which made me ache to look at. Nothing brings home to one the impossibility of any Western judging what is, or is not pleasant or convenient to an Eastern more than the ordinary rolling pin, two feet by six inches, stuffed hard with cotton wool, which the latter habitually uses as a pillow. The sight of it makes a Western neck feel stiff.

I recognised the paper at once. We were then in the throes of "Local Self Government," and a violent effort was being made to induce this little far-away town, inhabited for the most part by Pathans (exiled these centuries back from northern wilds to the Indian plain) to elect a Municipal Committee.

I had spent the better part of the day before in explaining to various Rais'es or honourable gentlemen of the city, that no insult was intended by asking them to put themselves up to auction as it were by the votes of their fellow citizens, instead of being discreetly and as ever nominated to the office of Councillor by the "hated alien." A few had gravely and dutifully given in to this new and quite incomprehensible fad of the constituted authorities, others had hesitated, but one, a fiery old Khân Bahadur, who was a retired risseldar from one of our crack native cavalry regiments, had sworn with many oaths that never would he take office from, amongst others, the perjured vote of Gunpat-Lal, pleader, who belonged to his ward, and whose evil, eloquent tongue had deliberately diddled him out of ancestral rights in a poppy field in the Huzoor's own court. No! He had served the Sirkar with distinction, he had, with his own hands, nearly killed an agitator he had found in the lines; nay, more! he had absolutely sent his daughter to school to please the sahib logue; but this was too much. It had been all I could do to prevent the hot-tempered old soldier from giving up the sword of honour with which he had been presented on retirement, as a signal of final rupture with the Government.

So, as I say, I recognised the blue paper at once as one of many voting papers which had been sent out for marking and return; for in these out of the way places in those days, the secret ballot-box was not the best blessing of the world, as it is now. And my old friend the hakeem was, I knew, on the Aga Khân's ward.

"What have you got to do with it?" I echoed, in reply to an anxious question. "Why, put a mark against the Aga Khân's name and give it back whence it came."

He salaamed profoundly. "Huzoor! that was the settled determination of this slave, thus combining new duties with old--which is the philosophy of faithful life; but, being called in last night to an indigestion in his house, which I combatted with burnt almonds, he told me that if I so much as went near his honourable name with my stylus, I should cease to be physician-in-ordinary to his household. And, father and son, we have been physicians to the Aga Khân ever since our fathers followed his fathers from Ghazni in that capacity with the Great Mahomed--on whom be peace."

"Then mark one of the other names--which you choose, and send it in," I replied, taking no notice of the scandalous attempt at coercion on the old Aga Khân's part.

A still more profound salaam was the answer. "That also would have occurred to me," came the suave old voice, "but that the Aga Khân said, with oaths, that if I so much as made a chance blot on this cursed paper against any of the names thereon, I should be cast for life from his honourable company."

I felt quite nettled. Her Majesty's lieges must not be intimidated in this fashion. "Well! you must think of the person whom you consider most fitted to fulfil all the many duties which will devolve on him, and put down his name," I said, for in these days when we really wished to get at the wishes of the people, we were not so strict about nominations and proposings and secondings as we are now, "and I will speak again to the Khân Bahadur and see if I cannot induce him to stand." (I meant to do so by threats of exposure for using force to Her Majesty's lieges!)

As I rode off, my horse picking its way through the piles of melons, the bags of corn, the jars of milk, the nets of pottery and all the olla podrida of trivial daily merchandise which finds pause for a few minutes about an active gate at dawn time, the patient sat up straight from his backboard and yawned, then asked for another violet drink. But the hakeem was absorbed in the problem of voting.

I happened that day to have business in the city in the evening also, but I entered by another gate, so that the sun was nigh setting when, on my homeward way, I saw my old friend the Yunani hakeem sitting with his pile of little medicine bottles and tiny earthenware goglets of pills and ointments beside him.

He was pounding away at something in a minute jade mortar and looked no longer disturbed, but weary utterly.

"Have you settled that knotty point, hakeem sahib?" I asked.

He gave a sigh of relief, but pounded away faster than ever. "I give God thanks I have been led into the way of wisdom," he replied, "else would I be harried, indeed! Never, within the memory of man, have so many gentlemen of rank been sick as during this day. I am but now compounding the 'Thirty-six-ingredient-drug' for one honourable house, and have but just finished the 'Four-great-things' for another. 'Tis anxiety about the elections, methinks, for they talk of nothing else. Hardly had your Honour left this morning, than Gunpat-Lal sent to say he had a belly-ache which his idolatrous miracle-monger could not touch. I had it away in half an hour with cucumber and lemon juice. Cold things to cold. And Lala-ji full of compliments and regrets that the Aga Sahib would not be elected." A faintly worried air crept over the high old face.

"Did he ask you to give him your vote?" I enquired, with a sinking at my heart.

"Yea!" replied the Yunani hakeem cheerfully, "and offered me five rupees for it."

Ye Gods above! How soon political corruption seizes on the innocent, I thought.

"But others have offered more," continued the old man, with a certain self-satisfaction. Then his face clouded. "Yonder pasty-faced knock-kneed student, who calls himself 'Hedditerlile--jackdaw'" (Editor Loyal Objector) "told me it was his by right, since he and his like were Hindustan. But I told the lad God had ordained otherwise--for look you, Huzoor, we Mussalmans came from the north many long years before the sahib-logue came from the west. So I let him talk, having, by God's mercy, come to a decision."

"What is that, hakeem-ji?" I asked, curious to know what had influenced the old man.

He salaamed quite simply. "The Huzoor bade me think who could best do the work, so I decided to vote for him. He is noble, and he knows what has to be done. He knows santation and inspekshon-conservance. Also new-tense, and karl-ra-pre-kar-sons, and"--he added, with the most beautiful supplementary salaam of pure flattery--"all other noble arts and philosophies." It quite gave me a pang to tell him that this scheme of his would not work. That I was ex officio president of the Municipal Committee, and thus beyond the reach of voters.

His face was illumined by a vast relief even amidst his perplexities.

"That is as it should be," he said simply. "The Sirkar then, has not, as they say, quite lost its head; the Huzoor retains it still. But what am I to do?"

I left him looking the picture of woe, absolutely unheeding of two patient travellers who had been awaiting my departure with that calm stolid disregard of the passing hour which brings with it to the Western such a sense of personal grievance; whereas to the Eastern it only emphasises his trust in Providence by proving the omnipotence of Fate.

Next morning, however, the whole aspect of affairs had been changed. Hakeem-ji was alert, spry, surrounded by quite a congregation of would-be patients, to whom he was giving out his dicta with quite a lordly air.

There was no need to ask him if he had settled his vexed question. That was apparent. I simply asked him what he had done about the paper.

"Huzoor," he said again, with that lucid candour which--was so marked a feature of the man himself, "the Lord mercifully directed me. Therefore I ate it, and it hath done me much good."

"Ate it?" I echoed. "You don't mean to say----"

"Huzoor!" he interrupted cheerfully, "this is how it was. After your Honour left, it was the time of evening prayer. So I went, after my usual custom, to the House of God, to await the cry of the Muazzim and prepare myself for the presence of the Most High by the necessary ablutions. And as I sat squatted on the edge of the Pool of Purification, my hands in the cool water, I felt as if naught could cleanse me from that accursed paper that lay folded in my breast. So I cried in my heart to the prophet that he should show me a way, and then in one moment I saw where the error lay. I was arrogating to myself decisions that should be left to the Almighty. So I did what I do ever when life and death are at issue; when even the mighty skill of medicine has to stand on one side and do nothing.

"I took my stylus, and I wrote all over that paper the attributes of the Most High--His mercy, His truth, His wisdom, His great loving-kindness. And then, Huzoor, I crushed it into the form of a bolus, covered it with silver foil, and swallowed it as a pill.

"It hath done me much good. I am now free from anxiety. The decision of all things rests with the Most Mighty."

[THE SALT OF THE EARTH]

"The Huzoor is the salt of the earth," said Hoshyari Mull, submissively. He had been educated, he asserted, at a mission school: thus the words of Scripture came handy to him. So also did a variety of other things.

"And you are the biggest scoundrel unhung. I know that, though I can't find you out--yet," retorted the Boy, almost savagely. He was really a Boy, a round-faced, fresh-coloured English Boy, though his years numbered twenty-four, and he was a full-blown Salt Patrol on the Great Customs Hedge, which, in the 'fifties and 'sixties, still stretched between the river Indus, as it flows to the Arabian Sea, and the Mahanuddi river that finds its way to the Bay of Bengal; in other words, stretched for fifteen hundred miles across the vast continent of India. It was a strange, weird barrier, this vast hedge of cactus and thorny acacia, of prickly palms, and still more prickly agaves, that thrust out their spiked swords boldly from a buckler of spine-set thicket. It was fully fourteen feet high, and of its width one could only guess, in passing through the break, every ten miles or so, where some first-class road claimed a long passage-way through it. Here it was that the Patrols had their bungalows, and it was at one of these that the Boy lived. It was a very important post, because it was, so to speak, the gateway between the South-West and the North-East; that is to say, between Bombay and the Central Provinces, and Delhi, Oude, Bengal. Then, lying as it did, right in the Rajputana Desert, with no other roadway within twenty miles of it on either side, it needed a sharp look out all along the line to prevent isolated attempts at smuggling. But the Boy was quick at his work, and spent all his youthful energy in preserving the intactness of his Customs Hedge. The life, however, was as strange and weird as was the barrier. Absolute loneliness, absolute isolation. For long months together not one word of your mother-tongue. With luck, a weekly post. No books, no newspapers, no civilisation of any kind. On the other hand there was endless sport, unfailing interest for those who loved wild things. And the Boy had never been one for books. Harrow had left him, one may say, uncontaminated by them; examinations had passed him by; so, though both his grandfathers had been high Indian officials, he had drifted naturally into the Salt Department; the last refuge, not of the incompetent, but the unlearned. There, to be a man was all that was asked of you. Without manhood the salt had lost its savour; there was no possibility of salting it with all the 'ologies in existence.

Hoshyari Mull paused in his deft winding-on of the Huzoor's putties, to say submissively, "The Salt of the Earth speaks truth." Whereat the Boy laughed.

He and Hoshyari were at once friends and enemies. The latter was chief native supervisor, a man of about forty, above middle height, smooth faced and lissome. There was nothing, the Boy soon found out, which he could not do; which, in fact, he did not do. An excellent accountant, he was also an excellent shot. If he knew, or said he knew, every smuggler of salt between Attock and Cuttack, he also knew every bird and beast and butterfly by name, and could tell you the habits of all and sundry. He knew the history of Ancient India by heart, and could pour forth legend and tale by the yard. He was a magnificent swordsman, and could teach the Boy, who had learnt singlestick, many cuts and thrusts.

In short, he was all things to the Boy; without him, life in the Patrol bungalow would, indeed, have lost its savour. And yet the Boy mistrusted him, for no reason, except vaguely that he was too clever by half. Hoshyari, for his part, regarded the Boy as he had regarded no other master. He had been, as it were, impresario of amusement to several Huzoors of the ordinary type. This one was different. This one was as the Angels of God. That is how Hoshyari put it to himself, and, on the whole, it was a sufficiently comprehensive description, and led to thoroughly wholesome treatment. Here was no necessity for itr of rose, no distilled waters of any description, save the dew of heaven, as it gathered on the gram fields where the black buck lay, or hung like a diamond on a cactus flower over which some rare butterfly hovered.

But there was no dew this hot May dawn, when Hoshyari Mull, with the deftness of an expert, was putting the woollen bandages on the Huzoor's long legs. It was not his work; but then half the things he did were not that. "I thought you were a Brahman; but I don't believe you are even a Hindu," the Boy had said scornfully to him one day, when, foraging for breakfast in a village, Hoshyari had come back, triumphantly, with half a dozen eggs in his high caste hand. Hoshyari had smiled. "I am a Srimali Brahman, Huzoor," he had replied tolerantly. "The Maharajah of Jaipur salaams to me. There are none here in the wilderness able to say Hoshyari hath defiled himself."

So he made no ado about this putting on of putties. They were, as he had proved to the Boy, the best of all protection against snake bite. With them on you might almost venture on trying to find a gap in the Great Salt Hedge; without them it was madness; for is not the prickly pear called in the vernaculars, naga-pan, or serpent shelter? And on these hot May mornings, as well as at noontide, were there not along the Customs line many pairs of watching, unwinking eyes lying in wait for the unwary, beside those of the fourteen thousand humans who patrolled its long length day and night?

Truly there were. As they cantered along it, after passing through the gateway, many a faint rustle among the colocynth apples at its base told of death among the flowers. For the Hedge was at its blossom time. Thorny salmon-coloured capers began it, with here and there a yellow cactus bloom, or, perhaps, a rare red one, on whose stems the wild cochineal insect lay like tiny spots of blood. Above it, a wilderness of these same cactus flowers, big as a tea cup, primrose within, the white stamens ranged sedately round the whiter star-pistil; then yellow without, shading to purple. Above them the violet-scented puff-balls of the thorny mimosa, with every now and again a great lance of aloe blossom, brown and white, all set with flower bells.

And above all, butterflies, dragon flies, moths, flitting in myriads. "That is the gap, Huzoor, where the ill-begotten hound of a Poorbeah managed to smuggle in a back-load of salt last week. He was going to carry it all the way to Kashi (Benares) he said. As the Salt of the Earth will see, it is now thoroughly mended," remarked Hoshyari, with a debonair smile of superiority.

The Boy frowned. There was too much, to his liking, of these petty discoveries. That long line of Hedge had not been planted, was not kept up, to prevent the smuggling of a poor back-load of salt. He looked at Hoshyari with dissatisfaction in his face.

"When are we going to find something worth finding out?" he asked cavalierly.

"If it is God's will, before long, Huzoor," was the reply, and there was a curious undertone of certainty about it. "Look, my lord! yonder are the buck. They are on the move already; we must hasten."

They were off at a gallop, rifles crossed on the saddle bow, over the hard white putt ground that was interspersed by ribbed drifts of fine white sand. Hoshyari sate his horse like an Englishman. Indeed, the Boy, looking at him, used often to think that, barring his colour, he seemed of kindred race; as, in truth, he was, since the Srimali Brahman is Aryan of the Aryans. There was, in fact, only that vague distrust to keep them apart; and that always vanished before sport.

It was a hot day, they followed the buck far, then, the Boy having a sudden headache from the sun, paused by Hoshyari's advice at some wandering goatherd's thatch for a hearth-baked cake, a drink of milk, and a rest till noon should have passed.

A very hot day; and the Boy rested in the shade of jund tree on a string bed, and slept profoundly.

When he woke, the shadows were lengthening, and Hoshyari, squatted on the ground beside him, had a new look on his face; a look of anxiety mingled with satisfaction.

"Huzoor!" he said, "I have news for you! What I have always prophesied, what I have always told you would happen if the Sirkar were not more careful, has come to pass. The native troops in Meerut have mutinied; they have gone to Delhi and murdered the Sahib-logue. I rode back to the depôt while the Salt of the Earth slept, to see all was right, and--and I heard it at the gate."

"At the gate," echoed the Boy, still stupid with sleep. "Who brought the news--has the post come in?"

Hoshyari's face was a study. He must break this thing gently to the Boy, who was a full-blown Salt Patrol, or he would see red, try to kill and be killed. And that must not be; quite a pang at the very thought shot through heart and brain, making him realise that this Boy of an alien race had grown dear to him.

"The post had not come in, Salt of the Earth," he said evasively. "Men brought it from the South."

"The South," echoed the Boy again, with a relieved yawn; "then it's a lie. How could they know, if we didn't?"

How? Hoshyari could have answered that question easily; he knew the strange wordless rapidity with which news travels in India; in Delhi to-day, in Peshawur to-morrow. A mystery that has passed undiscovered with the coming of telegraphs and telephones that do it for pennies and twopences.

Yes! he knew, but his task was to prevent this Angel of God from putting his life into the hands of men who, at best, were devils; as he was, himself, at bottom. He knew that also. Most men with brains did.

"It is not a lie, Huzoor," he said, simply. "These men are mutineers themselves. They are going to join those at Delhi, murdering all the Sahibs they can on the way."

He had laid his plan while the Salt of the Earth slept, and watched the effect of his words upon the Boy narrowly; hoping that even the defence of a post might take second place before the duty of giving a warning-- and that would mean being out of danger--for the time.

The Boy's face blanched. He had been away to the nearest station, fifty miles off, for a three days' holiday at Christmas, and the remembrance of a laughing girl with blue eyes came back to him now with a rush. Hoshyari saw his chance, and went on----

"The plans were laid for later on, Huzoor, so they are taken by surprise themselves; yet it gives them advantage also, since everywhere the Sahibs are taken by surprise also; if only they had been prepared it might be different."

The cunning told; the Boy's face hardened into thought. Fifty miles on, along the road. He might do it.

"When did they come in? I suppose they forced the guard," he added, his voice almost breaking in its resentment.

"About noon, Huzoor," came the wily tones. "They were wearied out."

So much the better; they would not start, likely, till just before dawn next day. If he could give warning. He rose and looked round for his horse.

Hoshyari rose also. "The Salt of the Earth cannot ride through the gate," he said--the time for dissuasion had come now. "He will only be killed in the attempt."

The Boy rounded on him instantly. "Didn't I always tell you you were the greatest scoundrel unhung? Now I've found you out, you skunk!"

"Has this slave not always said the Huzoor was as the Salt of the Earth," came the instant rapid reply. "My lord, listen! This is the Hand of Fate. Wise men bow to it. You are here, safe, alone, none know of you. Come with this slave and he will save you ..."

"D--n you, you scoundrel," shouted the Boy blindly, and fumbled for the stirrups.

"Huzoor! that is useless!" came Hoshyari's voice, quiet now; all entreaty gone. In its place almost command. "You cannot force the barrier. Where we had one man, they have ten."

"I will try," muttered the Boy, doggedly. "I can but try."

"The Huzoor can do better," said Hoshyari. "He can come with me. I know a way."

Even in his excitement the full meaning of this came home to the Boy.

"You know?" he echoed under his breath, "didn't I always say you were the greatest scoundrel unhung?"

"And the Huzoor is the Salt of the Earth," came the unfailing reply.

The rapid Indian dusk was falling as they made their way on foot to a village which, though almost exactly opposite the barrier, still lay the orthodox half mile from the Hedge, within which, by rule of the Salt Department, no building might be erected. The Boy was now in native dress, for Hoshyari had utilised the interval of time in arranging for the former's midnight ride of warning.

In reporting on these arrangements, he had given scope to his imagination as to their difficulty. In reality, he had only had to ride up to the barrier, give the password, and enter, to be welcomed as one of the party within. Whether he was at heart one of them, or whether, all things considered, his cleverness had come to the conclusion that it was best for his purpose to fall in with their mood for the time being, is uncertain; but that purpose was clear, namely, to get the Boy out of the danger zone if he could. So he raised no objection to the looting of the Salt Patrol's bungalow--the little Salt Patrol who, doubtless, had run away into the jungle in the hope of escape, being but a mere boy--but the office must be let alone. There must be no tampering with books and registers, since he, Hoshyari Mull, Srimali Brahman, whose father--God rest him--had been Prime Minister to a Prince, was accountable for them to the powers that be--be they John Company or the Badshah. Therefore the doors must be locked and the keys given to him. And that Kathyawar mare in the stable was his; so that was an end of it. Whoever laid hands on the beast would rue the deed. But all this was past: now he had to get the Boy through the Hedge, incredible though it seemed. "The furthermost house in the village is mine, Huzoor," said Hoshyari, gravely. "It is thence that, in disguise, I penetrate the evil designs of the smugglers."

The Boy ground his teeth, and was silent. He knew what he would say; but this was not the time to say it; this was the time to warn his countrymen.

They found the tiny hamlet deserted; as all knew, half India fled before the mutineers.

"It is as well," remarked Hoshyari, hardily, "since they might talk, though none know of the secret save this slave and Suchet Singh, the waiting--house keeper."

But as they came upon what was called the waiting-house, since here salt that arrived without proper papers, or that failed to pay the toll, was held up, they found Suchet Singh the Sikh lying dead at his post. The Boy ground his teeth again. So would he be lying but for his desire not only to die, but to do.

"Look sharp, will you," he said, roughly, to his companion, "we lose time. The moon will be up ere long."

Hoshyari led the way across a yard; an ordinary village house yard with a row of three or four native corn granaries standing against one wall. These are huge basketwork erections, each taller than a man, in shape not unlike a big pickle bottle, fixed to the ground and carefully plastered over with mud and cow dung.

"They are all full," said Hoshyari, with a curious smile, as he passed one; and, sure enough, as he lifted the little sliding door at the bottom, a tiny moraine of wheat fell forward in the half light. But the next instant, with a dexterous twist of his hand, the whole kothe slid round as on a pivot, disclosing a round well-like hole.

"We shall need a light," said Hoshyari in a matter-of-fact tone, and produced a tinder box and a candle from a niche at his feet.

Once again the Boy ground his teeth. So this was the way, was it? and all the time this biggest scoundrel that ever went unhung was discovering miserable back-loads of smuggling! Words had failed him long since; now thought failed him also; he plodded on, his head bent, down the narrow subterranean passage that scarcely showed in the flickering candle light.

But here, surely, there was less gloom and more room. He stood upright and glanced above him. A star showed through a tangle of branches.

"We are under the Great Hedge, Huzoor," said Hoshyari, deferentially, in answer to his look. "The passage needed air, and we also required to have a store closer at hand." He held up the light, and it fell faintly on rows on rows of sacks of salt ranged round a central space. "It is quite light here in the daytime, Huzoor," he went on cheerfully. "Sometimes the sun actually shines in; and the snakes do not fall down now that we have put a net across the opening."

So this was one of the things concealed in the great width of the Hedge. Who would have dreamt of it? Who could have dreamt it? Something of the comicality of the whole affair was beginning to filter into the Boy's brain; he caught himself wondering where the passage ended--under his bed, maybe!

It was almost as bad. "We are there, Huzoor," said Hoshyari, mounting some steep steps, and then swung a panel blocking the passage backwards. It had shelves on it, and books. He heard the turning of a key, he followed his leader, and the next minute stood in the growing light which presages a rising moon, inside the office room, looking stupidly at what lay behind him; only a cupboard in the mud wall where the ledgers were kept.

Dazed as he was, he yet realised partly how it was done. The wall must be thicker than it seemed--twice, three times, perhaps four times as thick--but who would have dreamed! And for the rest? He looked at Hoshyari defiantly--the latter answered in words.

"It was quite easy, Huzoor," he replied, lightly. "We could always replace salt that was taken from the Government storehouse next door with salt from our storehouse yonder. And that paid nothing."

The Boy gave a little gasp. But there was no time for that sort of thing now. The Kathyawar mare was waiting, the moon would be up in ten minutes or so, and he must be beyond sight of the chattering devils he could hear outside before them; but perhaps--yes! perhaps he might be able to come back--to come back and give these fellows their deserts.

"I'll pay you out yet--you're the greatest scoundrel unhung," he said, thickly, as Hoshyari held the stirrup for him.

"And the Huzoor is the Salt of the Earth," came the urbane reply.

After that there was silence on the far side of the office for five minutes--for ten minutes. Then, faint and far, only to be heard of an anxious listener, came the sound of a horse's hoofs as it was let into its stride.

The Huzoor had got through the picket, and if he only remembered instructions, might be considered safe for those fifty miles across country. Hoshyari drew a breath of relief, shut the door, and lay down placidly to sleep, feeling he had done his best. It is true he had sent the Angel of God on a wild goose chase; for, briefly, the mutineers had gone on straight that morning, only leaving a strong guard at the gate to keep it until the second body of rebels should come in next day.

So by this time, doubtless, the fate of Englishmen--aye, and every Englishwoman, too, on the route to Delhi must have been settled. But the ride would keep the Salt of the Earth out of danger, since it prevented him from doing rash things; which otherwise he was sure to have done; for what was the use of losing one's life in fighting two to a hundred; still less if it were only one. And these things were on the knees of the Gods. No! there was no use, especially when the store ammunition was in the hands of the enemy and you had expended your pouch full on black buck. The Huzoor was best away. With luck he would only find the cold ashes of outbreak. The hurricane of revolt would have spent itself, for, after all, it was only the soldiers who would mutiny. The rabble in the towns might follow suit; but there was safety yet in the country.

So he fell asleep.

When he woke it was broad daylight. Daylight? Why, it must be nigh on noon. He stepped to the door and looked through the panes. Aye! the sentry in the verandah was eating his bread. And the other detachment had come in. The courtyard was crowded with men. So much the better, for they would only rest during the heat of the day, and go on at sundown. Thus there would be peace before the Salt of the Earth could possibly return--if he did return; but once away from his post he would, most likely, and wisely, make for security to the north.

Meanwhile, it was time for him to think of himself. There was gold in the safe yonder, and it would be folly to leave it to new masters who had no more right to it than he. He went over to it, set the iron door open and began to gather together what he found.

The room was very still, but on the one side came the clamour of the newly-arrived rebels. He gave one last glance at them through the closed door, then slipped into the verandah on the other side. Then he paused before a dusty swaying figure that, throwing up its arms as it saw him, came at him like a wild beast. It was a time for calm--with those men in the courtyard, a time of calm for both!

He stood back a step and said, quietly, "So you have returned--Salt of the Earth."

The Boy seemed for an instant dazed, then a loud, reckless laugh rang out, "Come back! Yes! I've come back to kill you, you d--d scoundrel. I've come back as I said I'd come."

"I saved the Huzoor's life," interrupted Hoshyari, quietly, "and I'll save it again, if he will not speak so loud; the sentry will hear, and then----"

"Let him hear--I'll have time to kill you first," went on the Boy, blindly; for all that he lowered his voice; the instinct of belief in Hoshyari's wisdom was strong.

"The Huzoor would not have time," whispered the latter, blandly. "I am no fool at wrestling, as he knows; and he knows also that I tried to save him."

There was a sudden unexpected appeal in the tone which surprised even the man himself. He could have cried over this Angel of God who refused to be saved.

The Boy looked at him with dry hot eyes; there were no tears there--he had seen too many horrors for that. And he had ridden all night, all day, till the Kathyawar mare had dropped with him; then he had stumbled on as best he might, intent on revenge. And now the sight of Hoshyari was as the sight of a friend's face: it brought back the memory of so many jolly times they had had together. And what he said was true: the man had tried to save him.

He had to bolster up his anger. "It--it's the other thing you've got to answer for, you--you thief."

Hoshyari's eyes gleamed. "Don't call me that again, Huzoor. I am no thief. I was only--cleverer than other folk."

"I'll call you it ten times over if I choose. Thief! mean, miserable, petty thief."

There was something more savage in the whispered quarrel than if the two had been shouting at each other, and Hoshyari's gasp of rage fell on absolute silence, as, breathing hard, they looked at each other.

Then the Boy passed his hand wearily over his forehead. "No!" he said. "I can't--you're right--I can't kill you like a dog--we must fight it out--there are foils or swords somewhere--foils with the buttons off--where are they?"

His dependence on the elder man showed in his helplessness; he asked as a child might have asked.

There was almost a sob in his throat, but the voice which answered was firm.

"They are on the wall, Huzoor; but we cannot fight here; the sentry would hear, and----"

"D--n the sentry," said the Boy again, helplessly. "What can we do?"

Hoshyari thought for a moment. "There is light enough in the storehouse under the Great Hedge----" he began.

The Boy leapt up, fire in his eyes. "By God in heaven, it shall be there--and, mind you, it's to the death, you cursed smuggler."

"To the death, Salt of the Earth." A minute later the false back to the record cupboard swung to its lock with a click, and the office was empty.

* * * * *

The cactus flowers bloomed and faded; the violet-scented mimosa puff-balls fell in gold showers on the green lobes, the aloe bells withered in silence, the waiting, watching eyes waited and watched in vain. If the snakes, as they slid over the netting-covered round hole in the thickness of the great Salt Hedge, had looked down into the widening sunlit circle below them, what would they have seen?

Who knows, since Suchet Singh the Sikh lay dead at his post.

[AN APPRECIATED RUPEE]

She was a poor Mahomedan widow, and lived in an unconceivable sort of burrow under the tall winding stair of a big tenement house, which in its turn was hidden away in a long, winding, sunless alley. The stair centred round a sort of shaft, barred at each storey by iron gratings, narrow enough to admit of refuse being thrown down--the shaft being, briefly, the rubbish shoot of the building, so that old Maimuna--who seldom left her seclusion till the evening--had, in passing to and fro, to step over quite a pile of radish parings, cauliflower stalks, fluff, rags--a whole day's sweepings and leavings of the folk higher up in the world than she.

And even when she reached the odd-shaped cell of a place, whose only furniture consisted of a rickety bed with string--halt in two of its emaciated legs, a low stool and a spinning wheel, she was not free from her neighbours' off-scourings; for down the wall beside the low latticed window, where, perforce, she had to set her spinning wheel, crept a slimy black streak of sewage from above, which smelt horribly, on its way to join the open drain in the middle of the alley. Yet here Maimuna Begam, Patha-ni from Kasur, had lived for fifteen years of childless widowhood; lived far away from her home and people, too poor to rejoin them, too ignorant to hold her own among strangers. For she had been that most intolerable of interlopers--the wife of a man's old age. Not a suitable wife bringing a dower into the family; but one who, as a widow, might--unless the other heirs took active measures to prevent it--claim her portion of one-sixth for life. A wife, too, without a pretence of any position save that of the strictest seclusion; a seclusion so untouched by modern latitude as to be in itself second-rate. Without good looks also, and married simply and solely because old Jehan Latif had fancied some quail curry which he had eaten when business called him to Kasur, and, as the best way of securing repetition of the delicacy, had married the compounder and carried her back to Lucknow; where, to tell truth, he found more attractions in the cook than he had anticipated when he paid a good round sum for his middle-aged bride. For Maimuna was a good woman--kindly, gentle, pious--who had lived discreetly in her father's house, and helped to cook quail curry for that somewhat dissolute old swashbuckler ever since, as a girl of twelve, her husband had died before she had even seen him.

So, while she pounded the spices and boned the quails (since that was one of the refinements of the bonne-bouche) for old Jehan Latif, Maimuna used sometimes to think, with a kind of wondering regret, what life would have been like if the husband of her youth had not died of the measles; but, being conscientious, she never allowed the tears to drop into the quail curry!

It was no carelessness of hers, therefore, which led to fat Jehan Latif falling into a fit shortly after partaking of his favourite dish, which for ten years she had dutifully prepared for him. None-the-less, his heirs (who had had all these years in which to cook their accounts of the matter) treated her as if it were. There is no need to enter into details. Those who know India know how unscrupulous heirs can oppress a strange lone woman--ignorant, secluded; a woman whose position as wife has from the first been cavilled at, resented, impugned. It is sufficient to say that Maimuna, after a few feeble protests, found herself in the little cell under the stairs, earning a few farthings by her spinning wheel, and thankful that her great skill at it kept her from that last resort of deserted womanhood in India--the quern. Even so, it was hard at times to wait till there was sufficient thread in the percentage she got back for her spinning, to make it worth while for the merchant to buy it from her, or for her to break in, by a cash transaction, on the curious succession of cotton bought, and thread returned, without a coin changing hands. And this winter it was harder than ever, for the unusual cold made her fingers stiff, and sent shoots of rheumatism up her arm as she sat spinning in the ray of light which came in with the smell.

It was very cold indeed that New Year's afternoon, and Maimuna felt more than usually down-hearted; for there had been a death upstairs, and she knew that the stamping and shufflings she could hear coming rhythmically downwards over her head were the feet of those carrying a corpse. Now, weary and worn as she was, Maimuna--between the fifties and sixties--did not yet feel inclined to fold her hands and give in. Even now it needed a very little thing to bring a smile to her face; and once, when a child had fallen downstairs, she had surprised the neighbours by her alert decision. So that when she heard girls' shrill voices in half-giggling alarm through her door--which was ajar--she guessed at the cause, and called to the owners to come in until the stairs should be clear.

One (a slip of a thing ten years old) she knew as the daughter of a gold-thread worker higher up the stairs; the other (not more than five or six) was a stranger; a fat broad-faced morsel, with a stolid look, and something held very tight in one small chubby hand. She was dressed in the cleanest of new clothes, scanty of stuff, but gay, with a yard or two of tinsel on her scrap of a veil. Maimuna paused in the whirr and hum of her wheel to look at the children wistfully; her own childlessness had always seemed a crime to her.

"It is Fatma, the pen-maker's girl, Mai," said the gold-worker's daughter, patronisingly. "She is just back from the Missen School, where they have been having a big festival because it is the sahib log's big day."

"Tchuk," dissented the solemn-faced baby, clucking her tongue in emphatic denial. "It is not the Big Day. It is because Malika Victoria is--is----" The solemnity merged in confusion, finally into a sort of appealing defiance: "Is--is--that----"

She unclasped her fist, and held out a brand new shining silver two-anna bit. It was one of those struck when her Majesty the Queen assumed the Imperial title.

The gold-worker's daughter giggled. "She means Wictoria Kaiser-i-hind, you know. What the guns were about this morning. They are to go off every year, they say. That will be fun!"

"But why?" asked Maimuna, puzzled. Her life for close on five-and-twenty years had been spent in the cooking of quail curry and spinning of cotton--the very Mutiny had passed by unknown to her. She had heard vaguely of the Queen, and knew that it was her head on the rupee which, despite the hard times, she always wore on a black silk skein round her neck, because she had worn it since her babyhood, when the parents of the boy who had died of the measles had sent it her; but what the Queen had to do with John Company Bahadar, or he to her, was a mystery.

"Why," giggled the elder girl, "because she is going to be the King, and turn all the men out. That is what father says. He says she is sure to favour the women, and I think that will be fun. But Fatma knows it all. Come! dear one! Sing Maimuna that song the miss sahibs made the schools sing to-day. Sing it soft, close, close up to her ear, so that no one may hear it--for they don't like her singing, you know, at home, Mai: it isn't respectable."

So, standing on tip-toe, steadying herself against Maimuna's arm by the hand which held the two-anna bit, Fatma began in a most unmelodious whisper to chant a Hindee version of "God Save our Gracious Queen." The words as well as the tune were a difficulty to the fat, solemn-faced child, but the old woman sat listening and looking at the two-anna bit with a new interest, a new wonder in her weary eyes.

"Bismillah!" she said, half way through, when the gold-worker's daughter, becoming impatient, declared the corpse must have passed, and dragged Fatma off incontinently. "And she is a woman--only a woman!"

The girls paused at the door; the elder to nod and giggle, the younger to stand sedate and solemn, wagging one small forefinger backwards and forwards in negation.

"Tchuk! you shouldn't say that, Mai! Little girls are made of sugar and spice. It is little boys that are made nasty--the miss says so."

"She should not say so," faltered Maimuna, aghast. The very idea was preposterous, upsetting her whole cosmogony; but when they had closed the door, she sat idle, too astonished to work. Then, suddenly, she took off the black silk hank with its precious rupee, and looked at the woman's head at the back.

It was a young woman there; young and unveiled--strange, incomprehensible! But that other on the two-anna bit had been an old woman, more decently dressed, and with a crown on her head.

"Frustrate their knavish tricks."

Fatma's song returned to memory. So the Queen, too, had enemies; and yet she was Kaiser-i-hind, and, what is more, she made men like the gold-thread worker upstairs tremble!

"On thee our hopes we fix!"

* * * * *

Maimuna sat, and sat, and sat, looking at that rupee.

* * * * *

It was a day or two after this that an English official was sitting smoking in his verandah, when he became aware of a whispered colloquy behind him. It was someone, no doubt, trying, through the red-coated chaprasi, to gain an audience of him; and he was newly back from office, tired, impatient, perhaps, of the hopelessness of doing justice always. So he took no notice till something roused him to a swift turn, a swifter question. "What's that, chaprasi?" That was the unmistakable chink of fallen silver, the unmistakable whirr of a running rupee, the unmistakable buzzing ring of its settling to rest. And there, midway between a giving and a taking hand, lay the rupee itself--the Queen's head uppermost.

"Hazoor!" explained the chaprasi, glibly, "your slave was virtuously refusing; he was sending this ill-bred one away. Hat! budhi![^[2]] Hat!"

But the sight of that head on the precious rupee, which, after many heartsearchings, poor Maimuna had determined to risk in this effort to gain justice from a budhi like herself, whose enemies also had knavish tricks, brought courage to the old heart, and the old woman stood her ground.

"Gharibparwar!" she said quietly, with her best salaam--and in the old Pathan house they had taught manners, if nothing else--"Little Fatma, the pen-maker's daughter, says that Wictoria Kaiser-i-hind is an old woman like me, and so I have fixed my hopes on her. There is my rupee. It is all I have, and I want my widow's portion."

* * * * *

And she got it. It happened years ago, but the story is worth telling to-day, when women can no longer sing "God Save the Queen."

[THE LAKE OF HIGH HOPE]

A man stood watching a primrose dawn. There was a cloud upon his face; none on the wide expanse of light-suffused sky beyond the dim distance of the world. At his feet lay, stretching far, irregularly, into the grey mistiness of morning, a great sheet of water. The dawn showed on it as in a mirror, save where tall sedges and reeds sent still-shining shadows over its level light. Unutterable peace lay upon all things. They seemed still asleep, though the new day had come, bringing with it good and evil, rest and strife.

And then, suddenly, there was a change. The man turned swiftly at a light footstep behind him, to see a woman, and in an instant passion leapt up, bringing with it joy and despair. For the woman was another man's wife.

But something in her face made him open his arms and take her close to his clasp. It seemed to him as if he had been waiting for this moment ever since he was born.

She was a little bit of a woman, frail and fair, who looked over-weighted by her dark riding habit, but both seemed lost in the man's hold, as vibrating with tense emotion, he stood silent, their mingled figures forming a swaying shadow against that further light.

"At last," he said, in tender exultation, "at long last!"

She threw back her head then, and looked him in the eyes, hope and fear, and joy and sorrow showing in her face.

"I couldn't stand it--at the last," she almost sobbed, "when it came to going away, and leaving you here--alone--with that awful risk--for no one can say what mayn't come--with cholera---- He"--her voice trembled over the small syllable--"started earlier--I am to meet him by-and-by--so I came round--just to see you--and now----" She buried her face again, and the sobs shook her gently. He tightened his hold.

"I'm glad!" he replied, in a hard voice. "It was bound to come sooner or later--you couldn't go on for ever--an angel from heaven couldn't go on standing--it all. But now----" his voice changed--"now you and I----" he broke off and raised his head to listen.

It was a wild weird cry, that echoed and re-echoed over the wide stretches of water, that rose in one long continuous melodious wail from every reed bed, every thicket of sedge, every tuft of low lamarisk and bent-rush; for it was the dawn-cry of the myriad wild fowl which haunted this low-lying jheel of Northern India, and swift as thought, with a thunderous whirr of wide wings, the birds, teal and mallard and widgeon, white eye, pochard, and green shank, purple heron and white, rose in ones, in twos, in threes, in flocks, in companies, in serried battalions.

The primrose dawn was half effaced, the coming day was darkened by wheeling, veering, eddying flight, and the peace vanished in the strife of wings.

"By George! what a shot," cried the man excitedly, even passion forgotten as a trail of whistling teal swooped past, unconscious of them, to settle on the still water, then, recognising unlooked for humanity, veered at sharp angle to rise again into the troubled air.

But the woman clung closer. To her the interruption was terrible. The soaring birds brought home to her what she had done, and before that knowledge compelling emotion stopped abruptly.

"It is very foolish of me," she murmured brokenly, "and very wrong--though I don't know!--I don't know! It was your danger--and I was so tired--besides it--it need make no difference."

"No difference?" he echoed, in joyous, incredulous exultation. "Why, of course, it makes all the difference in the world, little woman! You and I can never go back again, now! We can never pretend again that we don't care! No! when this cholera camp is over, and I have time, we must think over what is to be done--but it's final. Yes! it's final, my darling, my darling!"

His kisses rained on her face, his heart encompassed her. So they stood for a while, oblivious of the wheeling, veering, eddying wings above them, oblivious of all things save that they were lovers, and that they knew it.

Then she left him. "He" would be wondering why she was so late; but Suleiman, the Arab pony, would soon carry her over the sandy plain.

The man remained watching the slight figure on the bounding grey till it was lost in the "azure silk of morning." Then he returned slowly to the jheel again, lost in thought. There was a good deal whereof to think, for she was a mother; by ill luck the mother of girls. Why had she worn those tiny presentments of their sweet baby faces in the double heart brooch which fastened her folded tie! She had not thought, of course; but it had somehow come between him and his kisses after he had noticed it.

Well! it was unfortunate; but that sort of thing had to be faced, and he would face it after he had seen his cholera camp through; for he was a doctor, and the thought of what might lie before him was with him as a background to all others. He had chosen a good place for the camp, yonder among the low sandhills, which were the highest point in all the desert plain, and, if that did not kill the germ, they could move on.

Meanwhile---- He drew a long breath and looked out over the water. The primrose dawn had passed to amber, the amber was beginning to flame, the whirring wings had carried the birds to distant feeding grounds, only a flock of egrets remained fishing solemnly in a distant shallow.

"The Huzoor is looking for God's birds," said a courteous voice beside him. "They have gone, likely, to the Lake of High Hope, for it nears the time of transit to a Higher Land."

The speaker was an old man seated so close to the water that his feet and legs were hidden by it. He had a simple, pleasant face, which over-thinness had refined almost to austerity.

The doctor took stock of him quietly. His speech proclaimed him a down country man, his lack of any garment save a strip of saffron cloth around his loins suggested asceticism, but his smile was at once familiar and kindly.

"Mānasa Sarovara?" replied the Englishman, carelessly, "is that what you mean? I am told the birds really do go there during the hot weather. I wonder if it is true. I should like to see it." He spoke half to himself, for he was somewhat of an ornothologist and the tale of the great West Tibetan Lake of Refuge for God's dear birds--that lake far from the haunts of men amid the eternal snow and ice, into which so many streams flow, out of which come none--had caught his fancy.

"The Huzoor can go when he chooses," remarked the old man placidly; "but he must leave many things behind him first; the mem sahiba, for instance."

The doctor felt himself flush up to the very roots of his hair, and his first instinct was to fall upon the evident eavesdropper. Consideration natheless condemning this course, he tried cool indifference.

"You have been here some time, I perceive," he said calmly.

"I have been all the time behind the shivala," acquiesced the other, with beautiful frankness, as he pointed to a large black upright stone set on end by the water. "The Huzoor was--was too much occupied to observe this slave."

"So that is a shivala, is it?" interpolated the Englishman hurriedly; "it doesn't look much like a temple."

"We pilgrims call it so, Huzoor, and we worship it."

"Then you are a pilgrim--whither?"

"To the Lake of High Hope, Huzoor," came the answer, and there was a tinge of sadness in the tone. "I have been going thither these twenty years past, but my feet are against me. God made them crooked."

He drew them out of the water as he spoke, and the doctor's professional eye recognised a rare deformity; recognised also that they were unconceivably blistered and worn.

"You will not get to Mānasa Sarovara on those," he said kindly; "they need rest, not travel."

The old man shook his head, and a trace of hurry crept into his voice. "I give them such rest as I can, Huzoor. That is why I sat with them in heaven's healing water; but I must get to Mānasa Sarovara, or my pilgrimage will be lost--and it is not for my own soul, see you." Then he smiled brilliantly. "And this slave will reach it, Huzoor. Shiv's angels tell me so."

"Shiv's angels?" queried the doctor.

"The birds yonder, Huzoor," replied the old man gravely, pointing to the flock of fishing egrets. "Some call them rice birds, and others egrets, but they come from Shiv's Paradise--one can tell that by their plumes--perhaps that is why the mems are so fond of wearing them."

A sudden memory of her face as he had first seen it beneath a snowy aigrette of such plumes assailed the doctor's mind; but it brought a vague dissatisfaction. "Herodias alba," he muttered to himself, giving the Latin name of the bird, "more likely to have something to do with dancing away a man's head!" Then a vague remorse at the harshness of his thought made him say curiously: "And why must I leave the mem behind if I want to reach the Lake of High Hope?"

"Because she is a mother, Huzoor," came the unexpected reply, followed by deprecating explanation. "This slave has good eyes--he saw the childs' faces on her breast."

Once again the doctor felt that unaccustomed thrill along the roots of his hair. What right had this old man to see--everything?--and to preach at him? A sudden antagonism leapt up in him against all rules, all limitations.

"Well! I don't mean to leave her behind, I can tell you," he said almost petulantly. "When a man has found Paradise----"

"Shiv's Paradise is close to the Lake of High Hope," interrupted the suave old voice.

"D--n Shiv's Paradise!" cried the doctor; then he laughed. "It's no use, brāhman-jee, for I suppose you are a brāhman. I'm not going to be stopped by snow or ice. Look here,"--his mood changed abruptly to quick masterful protest--"that would be to give up happiness. Now! what makes you happy? Holiness, I expect, being a pilgrim! high caste! one of the elect! Give that all up, brāhman-jee--and--and I'll think about it. And if you'll come over there," he pointed to the low sandhills as he spoke, "this evening. I'll give you an ointment for those blistered feet of yours--you'll never get to Mānasa Sarovara otherwise, you know."

"I shall get there some time, Huzoor," came the confident reply.

Perhaps the old man came; perhaps he did not. The doctor was far too busy to care, since before daylight failed he found himself face to face with the tightest corner of his life. The promise of the primrose dawn passed before noon. Heavy rain clouds massed themselves into a purple pall, dull, lowering, silent, until, with the close of day, the courage of the coming storm rose in low mutterings.

And then, at last, the rain fell--fell in torrents. It found the regiment--seeking safety from the scourge of cholera,--on the march, and disorganised it utterly. With baggage waggons bogged, soldiers already discouraged by dread, all drenched and disordered, there was nothing to be done but keep cool and trust that chance might avert disaster, since no man could hurry up tents that were miles behind.

"There's another man in G company down, sir," said the hospital sergeant, "and the apothecary reports no more room in his ward."

"There's room here," replied the doctor, setting his teeth. "Orderly! put a blanket in that corner and lift Smith to it--he's getting better--he'll do all right."

So yet one more man found a cot and such comfort as skill and strength of purpose could give him, while the thunder crashed overhead and the pitiless rain hammered at the taut tent roof like a drum. One had to shout to make oneself heard.

"Lights! I say, lights! I've been calling for them these ten minutes. Why the devil doesn't someone bring them? I can't see to do anything."

The doctor's voice rang resonantly; but the lights did not come. The waggon with the petroleum tins was hopelessly bogged miles away, and in the confusion no one had thought of lights.

"Thank God for the lightning," muttered the doctor with unwonted piety, as with awful blinding suddenness the whole hospital tent blazed into blue brilliance, putting out the miserable glimmer of the oil lantern that had been raised from somewhere. In that brief luminous second he could at least see his patients--thirty of them or more. It was not an encouraging sight. The livid look on many faces might be discounted by the lightning, but there was an ominous stillness in some that told its tale.

"Gone! Bring in another man from outside," came the swift verdict and order after a moment's inspection with the oil lantern.

"Beg pardin', sir," almost whined a hospital orderly "but Apothecary Jones has sent to say he's took himself, an' can't go on no more; an' beggin' your pardin, sir, I'm feeling awful bad myself."

The doctor held up the lantern, and its bull's eye showed a face as livid as any in the tent; a face distorted by justifiable horror and fear.

"Go into the quarantine tent, it's up by now, and tell them to give you a stiff-un of rum with chlorodyne in it. You'll be better by-and-by. I've no use for you here."

And he had no use for him--that was true. Shaking hands and trembling nerves were only in the way in a tight corner like this. So, one by one, men fell away, leaving the one strong soul and body to wrestle with a perfect hell.

For the rain never ceased, the thunder went on crashing, the lightning was almost incessant. Thank God for that! Thank God for the inches of running water on the floor of the tent that swept away its unspeakable uncleanlinesses, for the thunder's voice that drowned all other sounds, for the blessed light which made it possible to work.

The very sweepers disappeared at last. No one was left save that one strong soul and body, and even he stood for a second, dazed, irresolute.

"How can this slave help the Protector of the Poor," came a courteous voice beside him, and he turned to see a smile at once familiar and kindly.

"How?" echoed the doctor, stupidly; then he recovered himself. "You can't. You're a brāhman--high caste--all that----"

"This slave has come to help the Huzoor, so that he may be able to reach Mānasa Sarovara," was the quiet insistent reply. "Where shall he begin?"

A sudden spasm almost of anger shot through the strong soul and body as it realised and recollected, vaguely, dimly, as rudely, roughly, it gave no choice save the most menial work. But instant obedience followed, and the doctor, dismissing all other thoughts, plunged once more into the immediate present. The rain pelted, the thunder roared, but every time that blue brilliance filled the tent, it showed two men at work, both doing their duty nobly.

A born nurse! thought the doctor almost remorsefully, as he saw the old man moving about swiftly and remembered those blistered and bleeding feet. "They must hurt you--awfully," he said at last.

"God's healing water cools them, Huzoor," replied the old man, with a radiant smile, "I shall not be delayed in reaching the Lake of High Hope."

So the long night drew down to dawn once more, and dawn brought peace again, even to the cholera camp. An hour and a half passed without a fresh case, and the doctor, realising that the crisis was over, found time to notice the grey glimmer of light stealing through each crack and cranny of the tent. He set the flap aside and looked out. The primrose east was all barred with purple clouds, the distant jheel lay in still shiny shadow, but there was no concerted dawn cry of the wild birds, and the flights of whirring wings were isolated, errant.

"The call has come to them, Huzoor," said the suave old voice beside him. "They have gone to Mānasa Sarovara, leaving all things behind them."

The Englishman turned abruptly, almost with an oath, and began to count the costs of the night. Thirty-six dead bodies awaiting burial; but no more--no more!

With the mysterious inconsequence of cholera, the scourge had come, and gone. Seen in the first level rays of the sun, the camp looked almost cheerful, almost bright. A couple of doctors had ridden out from headquarters--there was no more to be done.

"I'll go out for a bit, and shake off the hell I've been in all night," said the doctor to the chief apothecary, who was recounting his past symptoms with suspicious accuracy. So he went out and wandered round the jheel, watching a flock of egrets--Herodias alba--that still lingered in its level waters. Were they really Shiv's angels?--or did they dance away men's brains----?

The sun was already high when he returned to camp, looking worn and tired. The hospital orderly whom he had sent to bed with rum and chlorodyne was standing, spruce and alert, at the canteen.

"Feeling better, eh, Green?" he said kindly, as he passed, then added: "All right, I suppose. No more cases or deaths?"

"No, sir," replied the orderly, saluting somewhat shamefacedly. "Leastways, not to count. There's a h'ole man as they found dead outside the camp about quarter of an hour agone, but not being on the strength of the regiment, 'e don't count."

Five minutes afterwards the doctor, his face still more tired and worn, was looking down on the body of his helper. It must have been one of those sudden cases in which collapse comes on from the very first, for no one had seen the old man ill. They had simply found him lying peacefully dead with his blistered deformed feet in a pool of water.

* * * * *

The doctor wrote a letter; it was rather a wild letter about plumes and egrets and the difficulty of distinguishing Herodias alba from the stork which brought babies. For the strain of that night in hell, and the subsequent fever brought on by wandering about the jheel land when he was outwearied had told even upon his body and soul.

So they sent him to the hills when he began to recover, and being a keen sportsman he did not stop in the Capuas of smart society, but made straight for the solitudes, seeking for something to slay; for he felt a bit savage sometimes. And ever, though he did not acknowledge the fact, his route brought him nearer and nearer to that high Tibetan land where ice and snow reign eternal. Through Garhwāl and up by Kidarnāth where the new born Ganges issues from a frost-bound cave, until one day he pitched his little six-foot hunter's tent on the other side of the Holy Himalaya and looked down into the wide upland valleys of Naki-khorsum and up beyond them to the great white cone of Kailāsa, the Paradise of Shiva.

A mere iceberg cutting the clear blue sky. How cold, how distant, how utterly unsatisfactory! He stood looking at it in the chill moonlight after his two servants were snoring round the juniper fire on their beds of juniper boughs--looking, and smoking, and thinking.

He had thought much during his three months of solitary wandering, and now the time was coming when thoughts must be translated into action, for his leave was nearly up. Should he go backwards or forwards? Go on to Mānasa Sarovara, or set his face towards lower levels? Should Hope of the mind take the place of Hope of the body? Bah! he was a fool! He would be a sensible man and return. That was his last thought as he rolled himself in his hunter's blanket and lay down to sleep.

But the dawn found him plodding on in front of his two coolies towards that compelling cone of snow. He left the tent at the foot of the next ridge, and that night the last thing he saw was Orion's Sword resting upon the summit of Mount Kailāsa.

Yes! he would go on. He would see if it were true that Herodias alba disported its plumes on the waters of the Lake of High Hope.

During the latter part of his wanderings he had, partly owing to the unsettled and hesitating state of his mind, diverged from the pilgrim track; but here, on this last day, he rejoined it, and in more than one place the bones of someone who had fallen by the way, showed amongst the flowers which carpeted every rent in the world's white shroud of snow; showed like streaks of snow itself, so bleached were they by long months of frost.

But the flowers! what countless thousands of them--low, almost leafless, hurrying in hot haste to blossom while they yet had time. And yet how pure, how cold, how colourless had not this mountain-side looked from afar. Almost as cold as Kailāsa, which, viewed from the height of the pass, seemed barely more significant.

But every foot of descent made a difference, and soon over the rocky ravine it rose stupendous, its great glacier shiny cold, inaccessible. Before long it would overtop the sky and reach High Heaven. No wonder men thought of Paradise!

Down and down, through a mere cleft in the rocks that closed in, shutting out all view....

Then, suddenly, he gave a little gasp and stood still.

So that was the Lake of the Soul's Hope--Mānasa Sarovara! The pure beauty of it sank into him, its rest and peace filled him with content.

A wilderness--a perfect wilderness of bright-hued flowers between the snow slopes and the lake whose blue waters gleamed like sapphires between the diamond icebergs that drifted hither and thither on its breeze-kissed waves.

But not one sign of life; no movement, no noise, save every now and again a far-distant thunderous roar, and a puff of distant white smoke upon some mountain-side telling of a falling avalanche.

Cradled in snow, yet wreathed in flowers; solemn, secure, unchangeable!

It was a marvellous sight. He was glad he had come, for it was a place where one could think--really think.

So he stood and thought--really--for a while; and then he took out his watch. Time was waning, for he had to re-climb the pass and rejoin his tent ere sundown. Still there was enough left for him to reach that jutting flower-set promontory, whence, surely the best view of the whole would be obtained.

Yes! decidedly the best! Shiv's Paradise, rising from the water's edge, showed from hence, equal-sided, serene, unassailable, a pure pyramid of ice.

Truly a sight never to be forgotten; a sight well worth a pilgrimage.

And then some swift remembrance made him glance downwards, and he saw before him the bleached skeleton of a man. Something in the attitude of it, the feet hidden in the lake made him stoop curiously to see what its sapphire surface covered.

What was it?

He stood looking down into the rippling water that whispered and whispered to the flowers ceaselessly, for some time; then he turned and climbed the hill again.

But, even if he had taken anything with him to Mānasa Sarovara, he left it behind him there beside the skeleton of a man with curiously deformed feet. But the blisters had gone.

[RETAINING FEES]

It is not always on rocks and rapids that the cockle shell of human happiness meets with the direst shipwreck. Often in the quietest backwaters, where no current is, where not a ripple disturbs the still surface, disaster so absolute, so overwhelming comes, that the very tragedy of it sinks out of sight also, unrecognised, unrecorded.

Such a backwater was a little square of roof four pair back, in a tall tenement house in Lucknow, where one blazing hot day in June a buxom woman, with a yellow-skinned baby hitched to her hip outside the voluminous veil of dirty crushed calico, which for the present was mostly in folds about her feet, was haranguing three other women who sat working as for dear life in the hard unyielding shadow of the high walls, which were deemed necessary even here to shut out the possibility of prying eyes.

"What you need, honourable ladies," finished Mussumet Jewuni decisively, "is a 'bannister.'"

"A 'bannister!'" echoed the eldest of the three listeners. "And what new-fangled thing is that?"

She did not slacken a second in her deft twirling of her distaff, neither did the others, despite their questioning eyes, relax their swift business. Indeed, as they sat in the shadows, the three might have served as a model for the Fates, since Khulâsa Khânum span ceaselessly. Aftâba Khânum wound yarn on a circling bamboo frame, and Lateefa Khânum snipped with a very large pair of scissors at the shirt she was making; for, being many years younger than the others, her eyes were still fit for fine back-stitching. Beautiful hazel eyes they were, too: large, soft, full of sunshine and shadow.

Jewuni dismissed one mouthful of betel nut and began on another ere she replied.

"A 'bannister' is a pleader, who, having been across the black water to London, knows new tricks wherewith to confound the old ones. 'Tis the only chance for justice, ladies. I know of such an one, and could bring him here to receive instruction, and mayhap there would be no need for the honourable ladies to answer in Court."

Khulâsa Khânum's hands froze in horror; she glanced anxiously towards Lateefa. "Talk not like that before the child, woman!" she interrupted, almost fiercely. "No strange man, as thou knowest, comes to this virtuous house, and no woman goes out of it."

Both statements were absolutely true; these women, distant relations, yet bound to each other by the tie of a common poverty, a common wrong, had not set foot beyond that square of roof for years and no men--save those whose interest it was to keep them poor--had ever climbed the steep stair hole which showed like a cavernous shadow in the high back wall.

Yet Jewuni Begum laughed. She was a very different stamp of woman. Her oil-beplastered hair narrowing her forehead beyond even Nature's intention, and the soap curls at her silver and gold tasselled ears were of a fashion which left little doubt as to her moral character; but, being a bottomless receptacle for the gossip of the whole town, owing to her husband's position as a paid tout at the Law Courts, the neighbourhood in general, and even that virtuous roof in particular, had left inquiry and condemnation alone for the present.

"Lo! Khânum!" she giggled, "that is true enough, God knows; yet what avails it for reputation? None. 'Tis a rare joke, and I meant not to tell it thee; still, 'tis too good to be lost. In the Mirza's reply to the last petition sent from this house for direct payment of the pension due to honourable ladies, it is written--my man saw it, and there was laughter among the writers, I will go bail--that the petitioners, being giddy young things, given to wanton ways, it is necessary for the honour of a princely family that they be held under restraint; such money as is due being expended lavishly, aye! and more, in securing the luxury due to gentlewomen of your estate."

Here she herself went off into such chuckles that the yellow baby had to be shifted higher on her shaking side.

The three women ceased working, and looked at each other helplessly, while underneath their curiously fair skins a flush showed distinctly.

"Did they say that--of us?" asked Aftâba Khânum at last, in a faltering voice. Perhaps it was her occupation of winding hanks without tangle which made her always so keen to have all things clear.

"And of me?" echoed Khulâsa faintly. Her old face had grown very grey, her hands, though they had ceased working, were no longer frozen; they trembled visibly.

Only Lateefa sat silent, a swift yet sullen anger on her still young face.

Jewuni giggled again. "There was no distinction of decency, Khânum. But 'tis too bad, and that is why I spoke of a 'bannister' to confound such old tricks with new ones. However, 'tis no business of mine, only," she paused in her conversation, and, going beside Lateefa, she lowered her voice, "there is no need for stitching shirts till shroud-time comes. There be other ways, as I have told thee before, of earning money, aye! enough even to pay a 'bannister's' fee, and get the truth made known. So, if thou preferest to be as a hooded falcon, seeing nothing of the sport in life, sit and stitch. If not, come to me and claim freedom--in all things."

When she and the yellow baby had gone, silence fell on the desecrated little square of virtuous roof.

Truly it was hard! After a life-time of patient propriety, long years of self-denial involving silence and seclusion even from scant justice, to have all these virtues reft from them in order that wantonness and giddiness and youth might serve as an excuse for withholding their rights! That these rights should be traversed was to their experience no new thing, though to Western ears it may seem inconceivable that even under British rule it is the easiest thing in the world to treat secluded women as these three had been treated. Briefly, for the male head of the family, as guardian, to leave them to starve, while he made merry over their poor pittances of pensions granted to them by Government in consideration of their race, or its good services. No wonder, then, that Khulâsa sat helpless, resorting for comfort to the little rosary she always carried, that Aftâba's tears ran silently down her withered cheeks, or that Lateefa's sullen anger gave a dangerous look to her still handsome face. So dangerous that fear pierced Aftâba's soft self-pity at last, making her ask anxiously:

"What was it she said to thee privately, Lateefa? Naught worse, surely?"

The darkening of the handsome face was not all anger now. Lateefa rose with a bitter laugh.

"Nay! she but spoke of 'fees' for justice, as if we had aught to pay. Yet something must be done."

"We have done too much already," came Khulâsa's shaking voice. "If we had trusted in the Lord instead of sending petitions there would have been no need for them to tell the lie. If we had waited----"

"Lo! we had waited," put in Aftâba, "and petitions are no new thing. Our fathers made them. They are not like 'bannisters' and strange men. These----"

There was no need for her to explain what these were to that virtuous roof, for at the moment a tentative cough from the stair-hole accompanied by the rhythmic squelching of water in a skin-bag announced the daily visitation of old Shamira, the bhisti, who had filled their earthen pots for them for years and years; and in an instant veils were hastily drawn close, faces turned to the wall.

"Bismillah!" came the orthodox greeting, for old Shamira knew all about the honourable ladies, and in a way loved them, though he had never once seen them in all the long years.

"Bismillah! irruhman, niruheem!" returned the virtuous ones decorously. Only Lateefa, standing in the corner, felt that there was but half a truth in the words. God might be clement in the next world, but he was far from merciful in this. Yet it was not the fault of the world itself; that was fair enough. There was a displaced brick in the corner where she stood, and, profiting by the temporary blindness of her veiled companions, she did what she had done several times on the sly, during the past few weeks--she took advantage of the brick-hole and tip-toe to gain a glimpse of that outside world. It was the veriest glimpse indeed, of purpling shadowy roofs huddled against a flare of sunset sky, but the dust haze through which she saw it seemed a golden halo of transfiguration, and in a second she had made her choice. She would pay a retaining fee for bare justice to her own womanhood. Jewuni was right! Times had changed. Why should she waste her life clinging to old ways when new freedom was within reach.

Yet there was a startled, half-frightened look both in the sunshine and shadow of her hazel eyes, as she waited, face towards the wall, till the cool sound of pouring water have ceased, she was free to resume her limited life. Limited, indeed! How strange those limitations seemed in the light of her new decision!

But those brief minutes of arrest, due to old Shamira's entry into the feminine cosmogony, had, curiously enough, brought decision to the other two women, for, in truth, Jewuni's story, Jewuni's giggle at the joke, had been the last straw to their patience, the final goad rousing them to action of which, each in her own way, they had been dreaming for long.

They, too, felt that the time was past for temporising, for trimming their sails to suit each other's opinions.

So Khulâsa Khânum's pallid, high-featured face was more like that of one new-dead than ever, when Shamira gone, she returned to work. And, in truth, she had in those few seconds died for ever to this world and its works.

Delicate from her babyhood, saintly from pure suffering, joy had had small part even in her desire, and her resistance to pain had been always half-hearted. For what was even the justice of man worth in comparison with the justice of God? Naturally enough, then, Jewuni's tale of the sorry jest had been more a horror to her than to either of the others, making her turn to the hidden meaning of her thwarted life for comfort. Her retaining fee for justice should be paid where there was no fear of a miscarriage. And in the meantime, while the tyranny of life lasted, she must work--work to the end.

For on her work, practically, those others lived. In all the town no hands could spin a finer thread than old Khulâsa Khânum's. The very spinning jennies of Bombay could not compete with her ceaseless industry; and there still remained noble folk who clung to the spider's-web muslin of the old times. So her hands twirled faster, more deftly. The rest was with God.

Aftâba Khânum, on the contrary, had decided for the world; not, as Lateefa had done, for the world as it was in these latter days, but for the world as it ought to be, as it used to be. She had a very different strain in her from those other two; from Khulâsa in her spirituality Lateefa in her emotionality. Aftâba, even when things were at their worst, smiled, consoling herself and the roof generally with some unexpected and perhaps extravagant scrap of amusement. A mouthful of pillau concocted out of nothing to season a dry bread dinner, a ridiculous toy made out of rubbish, whereat all laughed. Courtier-born, she loved even the old etiquettes by instinct, while her keen wit could find a clue of an intrigue as deftly as her fingers could disentangle Khulâsa's cobwebs. And, of all three, she kept in closer touch with a world with which she had not quarrelled, despite its injustice towards her. There was, indeed, a certain Uncle Chirâgh who still came to see her, and her only, once or twice a year. A blue-beard dodderer, with a twinkling eye, and a still mellow voice, who sometimes brought quails with him, and spices, so that Aftâba might regale him with one of her best curries; for she was a great cook.

So the spur of Jewuni's retailed insult came as a challenge to Aftâba's sense of propriety. The world might be diseased by novelty, but the foundations were sure. She had been a fool all these years to acquiesce in impersonal petitions with purposeless stamps to them, instead of some graceful tribute, after the older, approved method. True, she had once broached the subject to Jewuni. She had even gone so far as to bring out a certain faded brocaded bag, which was her greatest treasure, and produce therefrom a medal or two, a dozen or more worn letters. Quaint, old-world informations to the reader, that the bearer, Futteh, or Iman, or Hassan, was such and such a worthy person--a gold-spangled record of thanks for service in the Mutiny--the intimation of one Rissildar Tez Khan's death in action; which latter had indeed been the cause of Aftâba's loneliness. Even (curious survival of friendly days gone, never to return) a few English words, in sprawling, irresponsible, boyish handwriting, to say that the self-same Tez Khan knew the whereabouts of every living creature fit to shoot in the whole countryside!

But Jewuni had scorned the suggestion of sending these to the bigwig with, say, a basket of Aftâba's famous pumpkin preserve, since, alas, oranges stuffed with rupees were out of the question. Indeed, she had said succinctly:

"Keep them till the Day of Judgment. The Lord may look at them, the law will not. For, see, they are not even stamped, and without stamps is no justice possible."

Even then old Aftâba had felt, with dim obstinacy, that it was not law or justice she sought: it was favour! Favour such as the great had to give in a well-ordered world!

And so she, in her turn, came back to the limitations of her life with a decision. Uncle Chirâgh had told her but a week or two before--as luck would have it!--that the whole town was to be in an uproar the very next day over the unveiling of a statue of Malika Victoria. The anniversary of a great day in the heroic annals of the Defence of the Residency--for which, by the way, that gold-spangled gratitude had been given--had been chosen as fitting for the ceremonial. The grounds were to be lit up, fireworks let off, and special messages sent to and from the Queen herself, while the statue would be covered with offerings. Could anything be more opportune for the decorous presentation of a retaining fee?

So next day, while Lateefa Khânum stitched, repenting not at all yet, still with a flutter of her heart, and Khulâsa Khânum, with an odd flutter at her heart also, which kept the colour even from her lips, worked and prayed, Aftâba used the privacy of a tiny kitchen for the preparation of other things than a scanty dinner of herbs. It meant the loss of her only silver bangle, sold on the sly through the market woman who came every morning. It was quite the most valuable thing in the house; yet there was but a farthing or two left by the time the pumpkin preserve, covered with silver leaf, lay in a tinselled rush basket with the precious brocaded bag on the top, and the market woman, bribed to return for it in the afternoon, had received a generous douceur which would surely ensure its due delivery.

All this took time, and was tiring, to boot; so it was nigh sunset when, after a sleep which had taken her almost unawares in the little cook room, Aftâba came out again to the limited life on the roof. As she did so, the familiar tentative cough of Shamira the bhisti on his rounds, accompanied by the squelching of his water-skin, made her step back into the screening wall.

"Bismillah!" she said, wondering not to hear the familiar greeting. But old Shamira was staring helplessly at something he had never seen before. It was old Khulâsa Khânum.

"She must be dead," he said, simply, to Aftâba's horrified disbelief. "See! She sits with face unveiled."

And she was dead. Her retaining fee had brought justice swiftly. And Lateefa?

Aftâba, when she realised the emptiness of the roof save for herself and the dead woman, wondered if it was the sight of one who belonged to it slipping downstairs from its virtue that, by its terrible confirmation of wantonness, had sent Khulâsa to seek to a higher tribunal.

As for herself!

That night, when the waiters had gone, promising to return at dawn, and she was left really alone for the first time, she sat wondering what fate her preserved pumpkins would bring. And then she did something she had never done in all her life before. She, too, used the hole left by the displaced brick to gain a glimpse of the world which was doing honour to dead heroes, and to the Queen for whom they died. As she did so the first rockets rose from the unseen Residency to commemorate its brave defenders, and set their stars of glory in high heaven.

Up and up, valiantly, higher and higher, full of the best intentions, they went, typical, so far, of the hands that sent them on their mission. And then?

Then old Aftâba stepped down from her vain vantage, and creeping back to where Khulâsa lay waiting the dawn, put her head down beside hers and wept.

For the stars had fallen, but the dead woman's retaining fee had reached the Mercy Seat.

[HIS CHANCE]

He sate biting his nails viciously. It was not a habit of his, but, at the moment, the tangle of his nineteen years of life had been too much for him, and he sate before it, helpless yet resentful.

He was trying to write a letter to his mother, his widowed mother far away over the black water in England, to tell her that he had been placed under arrest for cowardice--since that was what it came to in the end!--and yet not to hurt her, not to blame her, whom every bit of his being blamed. Why had she brought him up a nincompoop? Why had she been so afraid of him?--poor little mother whose nerves had been shattered once and for all by her hero husband's death ere her child was born. Yet that father had been brave to recklessness....

The boy's head went down on his arm. Something like a sob quivered through the hot air. For it was hot, though the sun was but an hour old, in the little grass-thatched bungalow which boasted of but one room, two verandahs, and two corresponding slips of dark enclosed space; one a bathroom, the other full of saddles, corn, empty boxes--briefly, the factotum's go-down. The whole house being nothing but a square mushroom set down causelessly in a dusty plain and guarded by two whitewashed gate-pillars, one of which bore the legend, on a black board, "Ensign Hector Clive, 1st Pioneers."

A good name, Hector Clive, and yet the boy's head was down on his arm. Why had he been such a cursed fool?

A brain-fever bird was hard at work in a far-off sirus tree. He could see it in his mind's eye--green, with its red head held high among the powder-puff flowers, as it gave its incessant cry with the regularity of a coppersmith's hammer--for, though he had been but one year in the country, he knew all its birds, and beasts, and flowers; aye! and had a good smattering of its lingo also--it was that, partly, which had made him--what was it--afraid--or--or cautious?

His brain was in such a whirl he could not tell which. And he had no one to whom he could talk; not a friend in the whole regiment, for he was shy. That was why he was living alone in this cursed shanty where the centipedes and snakes, too, sometimes (but he was not afraid of them, or of any animal, thank heaven), fell from the cloth ceiling, and the sparrows (poor devils, after all they were only making their nests) dropped straws over one's letters. That one had made a blot--like a tear-mark--or was it, indeed...?

He cursed again under his breath, and a rigid obstinacy came to his face.

Like his name, it was a good enough face, though curiously young even for his young age. The great height of his forehead, it is true, took away from its breadth, and the short-sighted blink of the eyes set so close upon the high narrow nose prevented their piercing clearness from being seen. On the lower part of his face, hair had scarcely begun to show itself. All was callow, immature; yet the square chin showed stiff and strong enough.

There should, at least, be no suspicion of tear marks, so he took a fresh sheet: and then the thought struck him. He would write two letters. One to the dear little Mother who had devoted herself to him--him only--ever since he was born; the other to the woman who had spoiled him and his life, whose timidity had accentuated his birth-legacy of fear. It would do him good to have it out with himself and with Fate--not with Her--no! never with Her!

So this was what he wrote, and left lying on the table when an orderly came to summon him to the Colonel:

"Dear Mother,--It has come at last! I always knew it must come if you would make a soldier of me, just because my father was one! Why didn't you think? Why didn't you know? Poor Mother! I'm sorry to write all this. How could you dream I have felt more or less of a coward all my life, when he was so brave!

"And then you made me worse--you know you did. I wasn't allowed to risk things like the other boys did; because I was your only one. Ah! I don't blame you, but it was rough on me. I should have made an excellent parson, I expect. And yet I'll be damned--this isn't really for your eyes, mother darling--if I can see what good I should have done if I had ordered that Sepoy under arrest? The men wouldn't have obeyed orders. I saw murder in their eyes. I've seen it for a long time, and I haven't dared to say so--haven't dared to warn those who should be warned for fear of being thought a coward--Isn't that cowardice in itself? Oh, Mother, Mother! Well, it was very simple. A Sepoy was cheeky over these greased cartridges; actually threatened to shoot me if I ordered him under arrest, and--I--you see I know a lot of their lingo, and I understand--I was afraid to do what I ought to have done--chanced it. Of course it doesn't read as bare as that in the Adjutant's report--but I am under arrest. Not that it matters. It must have come sooner or later--for I'm a coward--that is what I am--a coward...."

The words, still wet, stared up into the baggy cloth ceiling, and the sparrows dropped straws over them while Ensign Hector Clive was being interviewed by his Colonel. He sate stolid, acquiescing in every word of blame; and yet he was obstinate.

"I don't see, sir, what good it would have done," he began drearily, when the Colonel stopped him with a high hand.

"Now, I won't have a word of that sort, Mr. Clive," he said severely. "There is enough of that silly talk amongst civilians, and I won't have it amongst the officers of my regiment. It is as good a regiment as any in India, and I'll stake----"

Here, feeling some lack of dignity in what he was about to say, he stood up, and the lad standing up also, overtopped his senior by many inches. Something suggestive in his still lanky length seemed to strike the Colonel. "I'll tell you what it is, Clive, you live too much alone. You're altogether too--too--why! I don't believe you even had a cup of tea before you started. There! I was sure of it. Absolute suicide! How can you expect, in this climate--and with a Colonel's wigging before you--Really too foolish--my wife shall give you one now--she's in the verandah with the boy--and--and, of course, I can't promise--but you--you shall have your chance--if--if possible."

The--lad--for he was but that--murmured something unintelligible. Perhaps to his dejected mind, another chance seemed to be but another opportunity of disgracing himself.

"How very shy he is," thought the tall slim woman who gave a cup of tea into his reluctant hand and sent Sonnie round to him with the toast and butter. "I must get you to give my small son a lesson, Mr. Clive," she said, smiling, trying to make conversation. "He was telling me all sorts of dreadful things he has heard--so he says--from Budlu, his bearer, and that he was frightened. And I told him a soldier's son never could be frightened at anything. Isn't that true?"

Ensign Hector Clive turned deadly pale. The child standing, with the plate of toast and butter, looked up at him confidently, as children look always where they feel there is sympathy.

"But you are flightened, aren't you?" he asked.

There was an instant's silence; then the answer came, desperately true: "Yes! I am--but then I'm a coward--that's what I am--a coward!"

You might have heard a pin drop in the pause. Then something in the wise, gentle face of the Colonel's wife broke down the barriers.

"Ah! you don't know----" he began; and so with a rush it all came out.

The Colonel's wife sate quite still; she was accustomed to confidences, and even when they did not come voluntarily she had the art of beguiling them. The art also of comforting the confider; and so when the lad's face had gone into his hands with his last words, as he sate--his elbows on his knees--the picture of dejection, she just rose gently, and came over with soft step to where he was. And she laid a soft hand on either of his lank long-fingered ones and pulled them apart. So, standing, smiled down upon him brilliantly--confidently.

"I don't believe it!" she said, "I don't believe a word of it! You'll be brave--oh! so brave, when your chance comes. Now, my dear, dear boy----" she looked at him as if he had been her son--"go away and forget all this nonsense. And see! Come back at dinner time and tell me before dinner that you've obeyed orders and haven't even thought about it."

She stood and waved her hand at him as he rode away in the blare of sunlight. Her voice echoing through the hot dry air reached him faintly as he turned out of her garden into the dust of the world beyond. "Till dinner-time--remember!"

* * * * *

Remember! The memory of those words came back to her idly as she sate clasping her baby to her breast, while Sonnie, wearied out with fear, slept in her lap, and her one disengaged hand busied itself in fanning a half-delirious man who lay on a string bed set in the close darkness. Dinner time! Yes, it must be about dinner time, for through a chink in the door you could see the sun flaring to his death in the west.

What had happened? She shuddered as she thought of it. What had come first, of all the horrors of that long hot May day? She could not piece it together. All that she knew was that someone had taken pity on the women and the children. And that they were all huddled together in that one room waiting till darkness should give a chance of escape; for the hut was built against an old ruin through which some underground passage gave upon ground not quite so sentry-warded as the barrack square in front. She could hear the familiar words of command, the clank of arms as they changed guard, and she shuddered again. Aye! the women and children might be safe, even if the almost hopeless stratagem failed; but what of the man--her husband--the only one, so far as she knew, of all the officers of the regiment who had escaped the massacre on the parade ground? How had he been saved? She scarcely knew. She remembered his running back like a hare--yes! he, the bravest of men--all bleeding and fainting, to gasp some words of almost hopeless directions for her safety. And then old Imân Khân--yes! it had been he--faithful old servant! Why had she not remembered before? For there he was, his bald head bereft of its concealing turban, keeping watch and ward at the door.

What a ruffian he looked, so--poor, faithful Imân Khân!

Hush! a voice from outside, a reply from the bald-headed watcher within. More questions, more replies, both growing in urgency in appeal. Then a pause and retreating footsteps.

"What is it, Imân Khân?" she questioned dully, as the old man stole over to her and laid his forehead in the dust.

"What this slave has feared, has waited for all the hours," he whispered, whimperingly. "They know--Huzoor----" he pointed to the bed. "Or, at least, they have suspicion that a man is here. And they must search--they will search--or kill. I have sent them to await the Huzoor's decision."

She stood up, still clasping her babe, the boy slipping, half-asleep, to the ground, and looked round at those other women--those other children who had lost their all. And hers lay here....

"They must come," she said in a muffled voice. Then she bent over her husband. "Will!" she whispered, bringing him back from confused, half-restful dreams, "the Sepoys say they must search--or--or kill--them all. We will hide you--if we can."

If we can! Was it possible, she wondered, feeling dead, dead at heart, as the door opened wide, letting in the sunlight and showing a group of tense womanhood, a bed whereon, huddled up asleep or awake, lay the children deftly disposed to hide all betraying contours.

"Huzoor! salaam!" said the tall subahdâr, drawing himself up to attention, and the search party of four followed suit.

How long that minute seemed. How interminable the sunlight. Ah! would no one shut out the light, and why did Sonnie move his hand?...

"Huzoor! Salaam!"

Oh! God in heaven! were they going? Was the door closing? Was the blessed darkness coming?...

It was utter darkness, as, her strength giving way, she fell on her knees beside the bed, burying her face upon her children, her husband.

"Will! Will!" she whispered.

A faint sigh came from the watching women. So Fate had been kind to her--her only....

One who had seen her husband shot down before her very eyes rose slowly, and taking her baby from the bed, moved away, rocking it in her arms almost fiercely. So, in the grim intensity of those first seconds, the sound of further parley at the door escaped them.

Then, in the ensuing pause, old Imân Khân's bald head was in the dust once more, his voice, scarce audible, seemed to fill the room.

"Huzoor! They have seen. He must go forth or they will kill--all."

The words, half-heard, seemed to rouse the wounded man to his manhood. He raised himself in bed, he staggered to his feet; so stood, swaying unsteady, yet still a man. "All right--I'll go--Let me out, quick--quick----"

But someone stood between him and the door. It was Ensign Hector Clive. His face was pale as death, his hands twitched nervously, but in the semi-darkness his eyes blazed, his chin looked square and set.

"No, sir," he said quietly, "this is my chance. Look here! I ran and hid in the passage-way when the others--died like men--I couldn't help it--perhaps if they had had the chance I had--but that's nothing!--nothing! I heard--I understand their lingo. They don't know you're here, sir--only a man--let me be a man--for once. It is my chance----"

His eyes sought the Colonel's wife in bitter appeal.

Swift as thought she answered it. Her hand was on her husband's shoulder to hold him back, for she saw in a flash what others might not see--a martyrdom of life, soul warring with frail flesh, for this boy.

"Let him go, Will," she whispered hoarsely. "As he says, it is his chance."

There was a faint stir amongst the listeners. The Colonel shook himself free from his wife's detaining hand. The code of conventional honour was his, in all its maddening lack of comprehension.

"Stand back, please--and you, Mr. Clive, obey orders--I--I----" He reeled and would have fallen, but for the bed against which he sank. His wife was on her knees beside him.

"Let him go, Will. It is his chance, give it him, for God's sake!"

There was no answer. Unconsciousness had come to bring the silence which gives consent, and she stood up again, stepped to the lad and laid her lips on his forehead.

"Thank you, dear--in the name of all these--thanks for a brave deed."

The blood surged up to his face. A boyish look of sheer triumph transfigured it as he paused for an instant to throw off his coat and tighten his waistband.

"I shall have my chance, too," he cried exultantly, "for I was always a good runner at school!"

Aye! a good runner, indeed! With the wild whoop of a schoolboy at play, he was across the barrack square, untouched. Once over that low wall in front and he would be in cover. He rose to the leap lightly, and for an instant he showed in all the pathetic beauty of immature strength, all the promise of what might lie hidden in the future, against the red flare of the sunlit sky, against the glorious farewell which is true herald of the rising of another day. Then he threw his arms skywards and fell, shot through the heart.

He had had his chance!

[THE FLATTERER FOR GAIN]

Prem Lal, census enumerator, raised to that fleeting dignity by reason of his being a "middle fail" student (as those who have at least gone up for the Middle School examination style themselves in India), paused in his ineffectual attempt to write with a fine steel nib on the fluttering blue paper held--without any backing--in his left hand, and, all unconsciously, gave the offending pen that sidelong, blot-scattering flick which the native reed requires when it will not drive properly.

Then he coughed a deprecating cough, and covered the previous act--natural enough in one whose ancestors, being of the clerkly caste, had spent long centuries in acquiring and transmitting it--by displaying his Western culture in another way.

"Now for the next 'adult' or 'adulteress' in this house," he said pompously in polyglot.

The grammatical correctness of his genders passed unchallenged by his half-curious, half-awe-stricken audience. The blue paper, ruled, scheduled, classified, contained an unknown world to that patriarchal party assembled in the sleepy sunshine which streamed down on the roof set--far above the city, far above Western civilisation--under the sleepy sunshiny sky; so it might well hold stranger things to its environment than untrustworthy feminines.

"There is the grandfather's father, Chiragh Shah, Huzoor," replied a man of about thirty who, standing midway between the real householder and his grandsons, had assumed the responsibility of spokesmanship in virtue of his possibly combining old wisdom and new culture. He used the honorific title "Huzoor" not to Prem Lal--whom he gauged scornfully to be a mere schoolboy, and a Hindoo idolator to boot--but to the blue paper which represented the alien rulers, who were numbering the people for reasons best known to themselves.

A stir came from the door chink behind which the females of the family were decorously hiding their indignant anxiety.

"Yea! let the old man go forth," shrilled a voice to which none in that household ever said nay. "He is past his time--let them take his brains if they will, and leave virtuous women alone. Who are we, to be registered as common evil walkers?"

Even Prem Lal grew humble instantly.

"Nay! mother," he said apologetically, in unconscious oblivion of his own previous classification. "The Sirkar suggests no impropriety. We seek but to know such trivials as age--sex--if idiot, cripple, spinster, adult or adult----"

"Let Chiragh Shah go forth to him," interrupted the hidden oracle with opportune decision. "Lo! his midday opium is still in his brain. Let it bring peace to him and the eater thereof."

The chink widened obediently, disclosing a fluttering and scattering of dim draperies. So, roused evidently from a doze in the inner darkness, a very old man shuffled out into the sunshine, then stopped, blinking at it as if, verily, he found himself in some new and unfamiliar world.

"The Sirkar hath sent for thee, grandad," bawled the appointed spokesman in his ear. "They need----"

But the words were enough. The blank, dazed look passed into a sudden alacrity which took years from the old body as it sat it a-trembling with eagerness.

"The Sirkar," he echoed. "It is long since I, Chiragh Shah--long since----" He relapsed as suddenly into dreams. His voice failed as if following the suit of memory, but he supplied the lack of both by a smile which spoke volumes.

For it was the smile of a sycophant as unblushingly false as the teeth which it displayed--teeth which were square, dicelike blocks of ivory, unvarying in size, strung together en a bold gold wire, and hung--Heaven knows how--to his toothless gums.

"Sit down, meeân-jee," said the census enumerator, politely, for the heart-whole artificiality of the smile admitted of no breach of manners. "We seek but honourable names and ages."

So they brought the old man a quaint red lacquered stool, which had once carried a certain dignity in its spindled back rail by reason of its having come into the family with some far dead and gone bride--Chiragh Shah's own, mayhap!--and there he sate, still with that look of urbane smiling alacrity rejuvenating his wrinkled face.

There was a hint, beneath the semi-transparency of his frayed white muslin robe, cut in a bygone fashion, of very worn, very old brocade fitting closely to the very thin, very old body, and the embroidered cap set back from his high, narrow forehead showed a glint here and there of frayed old worn gold thread.

"His name is Chiragh Shah," yawned the spokesman, adding in a bawl, "How old art thou, dâdâ--the Sirkar is asking?"

There was a little pause, and wintry though the sun was, its shine seemed to filter straight through all things, denying a visible shadow even to the blue paper.

"How old?" came the urbane voice, speaking with a long-lapsed precision of polish. "That is as God wills and my lord chooses."

Prem Lal glanced doubtfully at the schedules. They did not provide for such politeness, so he appealed mutely to the spokesman, who replied by roundabout assertion:

"He was of knowledgeable years when the city fell--wast thou not, dâdâ?" The explanatory shout brought keen intelligence to the hearer.

"Aye! it was from the palace bastion I watched the English. Half the city watched them that 14th of September...." Here once more voice and memory lapsed awhile. But Prem Lal's history was at least equal to the more recent event of that memorable date, so his pen grew glib in ciphering. "Taking knowledgeable age as ten," he commenced rapidly, "with deduction of years 1857 from present epoch 1881----"

His face darkened. "He has the appearance of more age than thirty-five," he began dubiously, when the suave old voice picked up the lost thread of recollection.

"Lake sahib came to our court two days after, and the King, being blind, saw not that the English face was no more merciful than the French face which had been driven away, so there were rejoicings."

"He means the day which began the hundred years of tyranny," suggested the spokesman; and Prem Lal's pen had already substituted 1805 for 1857, when the voice of her who had to be obeyed came sternly from the chink. "Put him down as a hundred, boy!" it said scornfully. "Meat is tough when the sacrifice is past its prime, anyhow, so what does it matter?"

The next question presented no difficulty. No one in that house could be aught but a descendant of the Prophet, so the answer "Syyed" sprang to every lip with chill, almost scornful, pride.

"Profession or trade," continued Prem Lal, mechanically; "gold-thread embroiderer, I suppose, like the rest of you."

It was a natural supposition, seeing that the high-bred, in-bred household had for years past--since, in fact, courts were abolished in Delhi--taken to this, the trade of so many ousted officials.

"Huzoor! no!" replied the spokesman with a yawn, for the proceedings were becoming uninteresting to him. "He is before that. He does nothing--he never did anything."

"Gentleman at large," hesitated on Prem Lal's pen; there an ephemeral conscientiousness born of his ephemeral dignity made him appeal to the old man himself.

Chiragh Shah smiled courteously. His hands trembled themselves tip to tip.

"My profession," he echoed. "Surely I am Chaplaoo--of inheritance and choice," he added alertly.

"Chaplaoo!" That was clear enough to Prem Lal in the vernacular, but how was it to be translated for the blue paper which must be written in English as an exposition of learning that might lead to further employment?

Being prepared for such emergencies by a pocket dictionary, he looked the word up--a proceeding which revived interest in the audience, notably behind the chink, whence the magisterial voice was heard remarking that it was no wonder the Sirkar wanted brains if it was so crassly ignorant as not to know what chaplaoo meant!

This flurried Prem Lal into premature decision. "Chaplaoo," he quoted under his breath, "a fawner--ha! I see! One who keepers the fawn--forester--huntsman--Am I not right?" he translated with a preparative flick of the steel pen.

The even ivory smile was clouded by an expression too blank for resentment.

"The Sirkar mistakes. This slave kept no animals."

Prem Lal dived hurriedly into further equivalents. "Parasite--backbiter--one who bites backs! Ah! I see--bug--etc."

"This slave, as he has said, kept no kind of animals whatever," repeated Chiragh Shah, with a suave, unconscious dignity which appeased even the rising storm of virtuous indignation behind the chink. "He was--if the Sirkar prefers the title--Chapar-qunatya, by inheritance and choice."

The rolling Arabic word had a soothing sound, and a hush fell with the sunshine even on Prem Lal's search after a common factor between East and West.

"Toad eater! eater of toads----" he began with doubt in the suggestion; "lick spittle--one who licks the spittle?"

"Eater of toads, licker of spittle," shrilled the voice of the chink. "Dost come here defiling an honourable house--and I who purvey its food--with such vile calumny--I----"

"Peace, mother," soothed a softer voice; "such things do no harm save to the speaker. What you spit at the sky falls on your own face!"

"Aye!" assented a ruder voice, "and is he not a Kyasth (clerk)--lie he must or his belly will burst."

The word "lie" gave the agitated enumerator a fresh clue, and the pages of the dictionary fluttered as if in a full gale.

"Lie--liar--slanderer----"

There was no connection in his tone; but the suggestion being at least plausible to his audience, the question was referred loudly to old Chiragh Shah, who was beginning to nod with combined sunshine and opium drams.

"Lie?" he asked, with a return of that swift alacrity. "Surely, I lied always. Yea! from the beginning to the end."

He used the high-sounding Arabic word for liar, and so sent Prem Lal a--fluttering once more. Ere he had lit on the correct gutteral, old Chiragh Shah's set smile had changed into a real one. The slack muscles of his neck stiffened; he flung out his right hand airily.

"Hush!" said the two smallest boys on the roof in sudden interest; "dâdâ is going to talk."

He was.

"Lies!" he began, and there was tone in the old voice, "and wherefore not if it is a real lie and not a bungle? But I never was a bungler. I know my profession too well--even at the last--yea, at the very end they had to come to me for artifice--for subterfuge. It was the last lie--to count as a real lie."

He paused, one of the boys had crept round to him and now laid a compelling hand of entreaty on the old man.

"Tell us of it, dâdâ."

The spokesman looked at the enumerator as if for orders.

"It may elucidate the meanings," muttered the Middle-fail to himself.

So in the stillness of that sunshiny roof, set so far above the workaday world, they sate listening.

"Yea! it was the last lie that was worth the telling. Yet I was past my prime like the court itself. For none, save those who saw, knew the heart-burnings, the bitterness of those last years. King but in name, the very court officials drifting away to other allegiance. And Lake sahib had been so full of promise on that first September day, when the Frenchman was driven away because, forsooth! he had made the blind Shah Alum a prisoner in his own palace----" There was a pause in the thin old cadences, and a flitting shadow fell on the sun-saturate listeners from a wheeling kite overhead.

"And what was Bahadur Shah but a prisoner, too? What matter--the Huzoors gave him bread after their fashion and he was unfaithful to the salt of it. That was not well--one must be loyal even to a lie! So after the mad midsummer dream of recovered kingship in the palace--such a mad dream--we who dreamed it knew at the time that we were dreaming--came that second September day when the English returned to Delhi. We did not watch them, then; we were hiding in the tombs--Humayon's tomb without the wall.

"It was the night after Hudson sahib bahadur had wiled away the King by fair promises--aya! the Huzoor knew the trick of those well--but the Princes were still hiding--and many a better man, too.

"My son for one. He was wounded to the death. Ah! I knew it--though the brave lad--he was the son of mine old age--steadied his breath and smiled when I spoke to him. But there was little leisure for words with treachery to right and treachery to left, and none to trust fairly. For the world had changed even then, and there were but one or two of my kind left, and I was out of favour. Too old for the new court--too old for new pleasures. And the young Prince--lo! how he used to laugh at my worn flatteries--had many pleasures--so many of them that he took some of them from other folks' lives; thus he had foes. Aye! but friends, too, for he came nearer to kingliness than his brothers. And my son loved him.

"So when the danger came, and I knew by chance of the plot to kill the Prince as he slept, and gain the reward set on him by the English, I had no choice. Yet I dare trust no one in the skulking crowd which crept about the shadows of the old tomb. In those days it was every one for himself, and the Prince had scant following at best. And he lay drunk with wine and women, out of bravado partly to the skulkers--in one of the half-secret upper rooms. But I knew which, and I remember it so well. The grey spear point of the distant Kut showed through its open arch.

"And below, in a far nook of the crypt, where there was a secret swinging panel in the red sandstone wall, known only to the old, my son lay dying.

"He steadied his breath as I stooped over him, and whispered that he would soon be fighting for his Prince again.

"'Soon, my son,' I answered, waiting as he smiled. For I knew the silence was at hand--silence from all things save the breathing that would only steady into death.

"We, my servant and I, lifted him easily. He was but a lad, though he would have grown to greater stature than the Prince. His head lay so contentedly on my shoulder as I went backward up the stair, telling those who stood aside to let us pass, that he was better and craved the fresher air of the roof. 'Better? Aye! he is better, or soon will be, old fool,' said one with a laugh. Then clattered noisily after his companions, so noisily that the echo of the winding staircase sent their scornful mirth back to me. 'He will be dead--like someone he followed--by morning.'

"Before morning, if I did not fail, thought I, silently, as, searching the shadows, we sought the Prince's hidden room. There was a youth ever with the Prince--a baby-faced, frightened, womanly thing--yet faithful as far as in him lay. Him, I caught by the throat, 'They would kill thee, too,' I said; 'better take the chance of life. If fate be kind, ere dawn discovers the deceit, he will be fit to fly.'

"So after my servant and I, wailing at our lack of wisdom, had carried the Prince down, face covered as one to whom worse sickness had come suddenly, I crept to the upper room again. It was growing late, but the grey spear-head of the Kut still showed beyond the open arch as I covered the lad's face, lest, for all his gay dress, the murderers might see too much.

"'Dream thou art fighting for the Prince, sonling!' I said, knowing he was past even the steadying of his breath for an answer; but the smile had lingered on his face.

"Then I covered my face also, and, bidding the baby-faced one escape to the crypt as soon as it was possible, sate as a servant might have sate, at the turning of the ways from the stair head.

"Would those who were to come be familiar or strange? I wondered. The latter, most likely, since Chiragh Shah, the Chaplaoo, had long since passed from court life, almost from remembrance.

"They were strange; as they challenged me, I drew the cloth from my face without fear.

"'The Prince's room!' they cried, dagger-point at my breast. But that could not be. There must be no suspicion, only certainty, only soothed certainty. 'I have been waiting to show it to my lords,' I answered. 'Lo! he sleeps sound--yea! he sleeps sound, his face toward the Kut.'

"So, with smooth words, I led them in the dark----"

The memory of the darkness seemed to fall as darkness itself on the old brain, and Chiragh Shah sate silent in the sunshine for a few seconds. When he spoke again, it was as if years had passed. "It was the last lie that was worth the telling," he said, almost triumphantly.

"And a good lie, too," came the shrill voice from behind the door chink. "See you, boy!--call the old man by his right name in your paper, or may God's curse light on you for ever!"

Thus adjured, Prem Lal, who, throughout the whole tale, had been fluttering his dictionary from one synonym to another, suggested sycophant; that was, he explained, one who flatters and lies for personal profit.

"Profit!" echoed the voice. "Small profit dâdâ gained. Was not the Prince killed with his brothers next day by Hudson Sahib; so there was no one left even to reward the old man?"

"Save God," suggested Prem Lal, piously trying to escape somehow from the dilemma.

"And there is gain, and gain," admitted the spokesman, combining new and old, east and west.

"Hush!" said one of the two small boys again; "dâdâ is going to talk--he may know----"

So once more the old voice rose in unconscious apology for the difficulty of condensing what etomologists call his life history into a census paper.

"Yea, it was good, and hard--yet not so hard as the first. That never left me, despite the long years."

It seemed, indeed, as if it had not, for something of childlike complaint came into the old voice. "It was my first day at court. Mother had cut my father's khim-khab robe--crimson with gold flowering--to fit me, despite her tears. Her eyes were heavy with them when she kissed me; but I had no fear for all I was so young. I knew the women's bread depended on my tongue--though it was my heritage also to be Chaplaoo.

"And the King was pleased. Mother had tied my turban so tall and he laughed at that. It was out in the garden, he under the gilt canopy, the nobles round and beyond the flowers, and birds fluttering among the roses.

"And I was standing beside the king, and he was laughing--for I knew my part.

"Then the fluttering came closer, closer, and lo! a bird settled on my wrist. It was Gul-afrog--I had left it with my sister, but it had followed me--for we loved each other. So, on my wrist it sate joyful, and salaamed, as I had taught it, drooping its pretty wings.

"Then the King cried, 'How, now, whose pretty bird is this?' and someone laid a warning hand upon my shoulder. But I knew before what I must say if I was to stand in father's place. I knew! I knew!

"'It is yours, my king.'

"So I said, kneeling at his feet! 'It is yours, it is yours,' and Gul-afrog had been with me since it fell out of the bulbul nest in the rose tree. Then they brought a golden cage ..." The old man sate staring out into the sunshine in silence, and only the littlest of the two boys wept softly.

"We will call him 'Flatterer for Gain.'" said Prem Lal, in desperate decision, and perhaps the description came as near to old Chiragh Shah's profession as was possible in a census schedule.

[A MAIDEN'S PRAYER]

"That is over! Thanks to Kâli Ma!" sighed Ramabhai, fanning herself vigorously as the last man shambled, a trifle sheepishly, from the inner apartment. She--was a stoutish Bengâli lady, with red betel--stained lips and smooth bandeaux of shiny black hair. Good-looking, good-natured, at the moment distinctly excited as she went on garrulously. "Muniya! down with the curtain, there is no further use for it now that crew has gone! And to think that the master will have to give each one of them five rupees! And for what? Forsooth! for the first seeing of such a bride as not one of them ever saw before. Lo! Shibi, marriage-monger!" Here she turned accusingly on one of the women who were busy unveiling themselves, chattering the while with shrill voices. "Hast no mind at all? Thou mightst have found newer words for thy description of my daughter!--'beautiful as a full moon, symmetrical as a cart-wheel, graceful as a young goose.' What are these for perfection? And thou didst use the same last week for Luchi Devi's girl, who is pock-marked and blind of an eye! But there! 'What's a fowl to one who has swallowed a sheep.' Parbutti,"--here she transferred her attentions to a young girl who was seated on a cushion resting her face in her henna-dyed hands, as if she felt dazed or tired--"an thou hast a grain of sense have a care of that nose-ring thy paternal auntie lent for the occasion or there will be flies in the pease porridge--there always is in that family. Yea! it is well over; and thank the gods, the priest found good omen in the morning watches, so I have not to dine the creatures. Fish curry and kid pillau is too much to pile on the getting of a trousseau; yet one must have meats at a wedding feast, if one in Sakta; and the bridegroom's folk are strict. As for clothes, I tell you, sisters, that 'boycotts' is well enough to play with every day, but when it comes to weddings and tinsel, 'tis a different matter. Kâli Ma! what a price for kulabatoon! Parbutti! an thou canst not remember that thou hast on thee four hundred rupees worth of Benares khim-kob, go put on the old Manchester. Thank Heaven!' Boycotts' is not so old yet, but one has stores left to come and go upon! Yea! Yea! A wedding is a great strain on a mother; and then there is the parting with my daughter, too--my sweeting, my little lump of delight----"

Here Ramabhai discreetly dissolved into regulation tears, mingled with sharp sobs and little outcries. It came easily, for she was really devoted to Parbutti, the little bride, who, in truth, looked distractingly pretty, all swathed in scarlet gold-flowered silk gauze, and hung with jewels galore.

Her grave open-eyed face looked, perhaps, a trifle stupid and obstinate, but there could be no question of its beauty.

"Mother!" she said seriously, "there is a smell of smoke--the tall one in the black coat smelt of it, and it is defilement. Had we not better pacify the gods?"

"Hark to her!" exclaimed Ramabhai, drying her facile tears triumphantly. "Saw you ever such a saint? He who gets my Parbutti is certain of salvation."

Parbutti sate silent. She did not even blush, though that is allowed to a Bengâli bride. But for all her outward calm she was inwardly quivering all over; and small wonder if she was! After long years spent, not like an English girl, in ignorance and innocence of matrimony, but in matter-of-fact expectation of it, that one great event in woman's life was close at hand. It had been delayed almost beyond propriety by the difficulty of finding a high-caste husband. For her father, though a Kulin Brahman, was sufficiently westernised not to hold with the caste habit of marrying a daughter to what may be called a professional husband: that is, to a Kulin who already possesses a score or two of wives. A suitable student had, however, been found at last, and the feminine portion of the household had plunged hysterically into all the suggestive ceremonials of a high-class Bengâli marriage. Even the widows let their blighted fancies dwell on kisses and blisses; so, feeling vicariously the sensuous pleasures of bridedom, vied with happier women in drugging the girl with sweets and scents, and secret whisperings of secret delights. The whole atmosphere was enervating, depraving; but Parbutti took all the gigglings and titterings gravely as her right. For this was the consummation of her hopes ever since, as a child of five, she had been taught to worship the gods, to pray for an amorous husband, and curse any woman who might try to win love from her.

"Look! how the little marionette scowls over it," the women had tittered as they watched her, a bit of a naked baby, going through the formula of the Brata, as it is called. "Truly no co-wife will dare to enter her house." And certainly her energy was prodigious.

"Mata! Mata! Ma! Keep my co-wife far--
Shiv! Shiv! Shiv! Grant she may not live--
Pot! Pot! Pot! Boil her hard and hot--
Broom! Broom! Broom! Sweep her from the room--
Mud! Mud! Mud! Moist thee with her blood--
Bell! Bell! Bell! Ring her soul to hell--"

and so on through every common and uncommon object on God's earth--and beneath it!

The childish body had swayed to the rhythm of the chant; the childish voice had risen clear in denunciation; the childish soul had given its consent to every wish; for Parbutti was nothing if not serious.

The very cantrips of the Sakta cult to which her parents--and some fifty millions of other Bengâlis--belonged, were to her so many indispensable realities.

She, as an unmarried girl, ate her plateful of sacrificial meat contentedly, though her mother refused it. She sate wide-eyed, solemn, acquiescent, when after long fasting the whole family waited in the dead of the night till the auspicious moment for sacrifice arrived, and in the silence the only sound was an occasional piteous, half-wondering bleat of the miserable victim--a pet goat, mayhap! She did not wink an eye when the consecrated scimitar curved downwards, a jet of red, red bubbling blood spurted into the dim light, and a sort of sob from the dying and the living alike told that atonement was made.

That sort of thing did not make her or any of the other women quiver; yet they were affectionate, emotional, kind-hearted. "Without shedding of blood is no remission of sin," is a Pauline text; but it was theirs also. Graven by age-long iteration in their limited minds and lives was the dogma that the Blood is the Life thereof. There was but one Sacrament; the Sacrament of Blood. Marriage was secondary, but cognate to it, of course; that was because it was the Gate to Birth and Death, through which none pass without the Great Sacrifice. So they clothed the bride in scarlet, and smeared her forehead with vermilion. It was this stability of inner thought which enabled the women to be so untiring in their variants of its outward application. All the bathings and anointings and soothsayings had this unchangeable dogma as foundation. So the round of ritual went on, the drums throbbed in unending rhythm, the conches blared in deafening yells, the whole house was full of the rustlings and bustlings of womenfolk. It must surely have been a wedding which made Babu Kishub Chander Sen write the ponderous dictum: "Man is a noun in the objective case, governed by the active verb woman."

Parbutti's father, being a sensible man, removed himself as much as possible from the ebullient atmosphere; perhaps it was as well, since he was a light in the Nationalist party, and the ceremonials of a Sakta wedding do not go well with talk of political rights and wrongs, of education, and equality, and exotic tyranny.

Even Parbutti's solemnity was not quite proof against the silly suggestiveness, the almost indecent jokes and tricks, the hysterical enhancing of emotions with which she was surrounded.

She felt it a relief when, the guests having retired for some sleep, she was free to perform her daily devotion at the shrine downstairs.

It was a quaint place, this shrine dedicated to Mai Kâli in her terrific form--in other words, to Our Lady of Pain--the Woman ever in travail of mind and body--the Ewig Weiblichkeit which is never satisfied. It formed on the river side of the house, a sort of low basement, private in so far that a flight of steep stone steps led down to it from the lowest storey of the house, public in that it opened on to some bathing steps. But few people came thither except on certain festivals; so Parbutti, still in her wedding finery, stole down to it confidently. She liked the small, dim, arched chamber where you could only see Mai Kâli as a blotch of crimson in her dark niche. And as you crept down the stairs behind that niche, and looked through the crisscross iron bars that filled up the arch, "She" showed nothing but a black shadow against the brilliance beyond. Parbutti used often to stand for an instant or two on the cornerwise landing of the stairs to look before passing up. Everything showed black but the low square of the outside doorway; and even the pigeons when they flew across it seemed flitting shadows on the light. To-day she was in a hurry, so she squatted down promptly at a respectful distance from the image, and began to smear the floor from a goglet of red paint she had brought with her. And as she did so she chanted:

"Om! Om! Kâli Ma!--
Ruler, Thou, of blackest night--
Dark, Dark, not a Star--
In Thy Heaven Kâli Ma!--
Thou who lovest the flesh of man--
By this blood I pray thee ban--
Aliens in Hindustan--
Kill them, Kâli Ma!--
Drink their blood and eat their flesh--
Thou shalt have it fresh and fresh--
Lo! devour it! lick thy lips--
Flesh in lumps and blood in sips--
Stain thyself with sacred red--
Make them lifeless, dead! dead! dead!
Blessed Kâli Ma!
Ho-o-m! 'Phut!"

The last two words were spoken with relish, not only because they were supposed to be the most potent part of the charm, but because they lent themselves to dramatic effect. Ho-om being given soft and low; phut explosively. The result being suggestive of an angry tom-cat. But the rest of the doggerel came slackly, for Parbutti was not much interested in it. It was not her curse at all, but one she had promised her schoolboy brother, Govinda, to say every evening. For many reasons; chiefly, it is to be feared, because someone else, at present nameless, was a class-fellow of the said Govinda's. But everyone knew, that if there was one compelling prayer on earth it was that of a maiden bride; even Mai Kâli could not resist it. And the petition was a fair one. Who wanted aliens in Hindustani? Not she! Why! their presence made your menkind do unspeakable things, so that life became wearisome with pacifying the gods. Imagine not being able to kiss ...

Voices close at hand, made her leap to her feet, and gain the staircase like a frightened hare. Then, of course, being a girl, she paused to peep through the grating.

Surely it was Govinda! Then, she need not have run away! No! he had a tall lad with him! Parbutti's heart beat to suffocation. Was it possible? Could it be? Was it--well! what she had been taught to consider her prayer, her pilgrimage, her paradise; that is, her duty and her pleasure combined? Stay! there was another lad--short! And yet another--middle-sized!

This was disconcerting; but perhaps if she listened a little she might find out. So she stood still as a mouse, all ears, praying in her inmost heart it might be the tall one.

Though they spoke in Bengâli, they used such a plentitude of English words that it was difficult for her to understand fully what they said. It was not all their fault, as it arose largely from the fact that the ideas they wished to express, being purely Western, had no Eastern equivalents. Parbutti, however, had been accustomed to this sort of talk, as she had been a great favourite of her father's, and till the last year or so, had often sate on his knee as he entertained his friends.

So she listened patiently to pæans about Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, mingled with darkling threats--threats which must destroy all three by depriving some brother of the Liberty of Life or at best of an arm or a leg!

For they were only silly schoolboys, who, but for an alien ideal of education, would have been learning, as their father had learnt, unquestioning, unqualified obedience at a Guru's feet. Learning it probably with tears, tied up in a sack with a revengeful tom-cat, or with a heavy brick poised on the back of the neck for livelong hours; such being the approved punishments for the faintest disobedience. Small wonder then, if the organism accustomed to this immemorial control, runs a bit wild when it finds itself absolutely free to do and think as it likes.

These particular boys were very angry, apparently, because some one of their number had been forced to obey something or someone. It was tyranny. The Mother-land and their religion was outraged. They were all Bengâli Brahmans; so Kâli worshippers by birth, and of the Sakta cult; possibly of the Left-handed or Secret form of that cult. Anyhow they talked big of Force being the one ruling principle by which men could rule, of the true Saktas' or Tantriks' contempt for public opinion, of their determination to show the world that the Tantras had been given by the gods in order to destroy the oppressors of men. So, "Jai Anarchism! Jai Kâli! Jai Bhairavi! Jai Banda Materam!"

It was a sad farrago of nonsense; Western individualism dished up skilfully by professional agitators in a garb of Eastern mysticism; but they talked it complacently, while Parbutti, still as a mouse, told herself it must be the tall one; he had such a nice voice.

Her hopes gained confidence when he lingered behind with Govinda after the others departed, and began speaking in a lower voice. Could he be talking about her? Ever and always that came as the uppermost thought. Then consideration told her this was not possible; no respectable bridegroom could talk of his bride to another--not even if he also were a Kulin and a brother. What was it then, about which they were so mysterious when there was nobody nigh?--here a twinge of compunction shot through her--at least nobody they could know about.

At last, her ears becoming accustomed to the strain, she caught one sentence: "My father was Mai Kâli's priest here"; so by degrees gathered that there was some secret receptacle somewhere, and that the tall youth wished to hide something.

The something appeared to be in what Parbutti had supposed to be a hooded cage such as students often carry about with their pet avitovats or fighting quails inside. But this one contained a square box, which the boy removed with great care, and then, before Parbutti had grasped what he was doing, he was round at the back of the carven image, kneeling with his back towards her, and fumbling at the gilt wooden drapery about Mai Kâli's waist; Govinda meanwhile keeping a look-out at the door.

How close he was! If she put out a hand she could touch him--she thrilled all over at the thought! Too close at any rate for her to move; besides, she must see what happened.

Ye gods! The drapery slid up! Mai Kâli was hollow!

"If aught happens to me," said the nice voice solemnly, "I leave this in thy charge, oh! Govinda Ram, Kulin. Thou art the only other living soul who knows of it. And see thou use it as it should be used. A cocoanut full for a bomb. It requires no fuse. The concussion is sufficient if the hand is bold."

The box deposited, the panel slid back again, and the tall lad rising from his knees stepped to the front again. As he did so, Parbutti caught a glimpse of his face. It was beautiful as the young Bala-Krishna, and the whole soul and body of her went out to him--her hand stole through the bars to touch the air in which he had stood--the happy air which had touched him.

So absorbed was she in her joy that she did not realise what was going on until the sound of their voices brought her back to reality. Then she recognised that they were repeating the vow of secrecy which is imposed on all initiates to the Tantrik cult. "I swear by the Eternal Relentless and Living Power I worship never to divulge the Secret, but to bury it deeply in silence and ever preserve it inviolate and inviolable. I will conceal it as the water in a cocoanut is concealed. I will be a Kaula internally, a Saiva externally, and a Vaishnava when talking at public meetings." Then they branched off into that of the new secret political society which underlies the old religious mysteries. And Parbutti listened with growing fear, for this was sheer straightforward cursing of informers and lukewarm supporters and spies--and--and----

If they should go on to her? If he should curse her?

The long stillness had told on her nerves--she felt as if she must scream, must do something to prevent the dreadful sequence going on and on....

"And cursed be they who listen and----"

The voices were checked by a passionate cry--

"Curse me not! Curse me not! I swear! I, Parbutti, swear to keep faith!"

Then, terrified at everything, even her own temerity, she turned and fled.

There was little leisure allowed her for thought in the women's apartment that night, for each one vied with the other in devising cantrips, most of them undescribable, to secure for her a truly uxorious husband; but one thing beat through her brain. Would he, could he--if it were he--be angry with her? Surely not! She had sworn, and she would keep her oath. Yes! she would keep it faithfully.

So the day dawned and another tumult of rejoicing rose around her.

In view of the delay in her betrothals it had been arranged to crowd in the ceremonials as closely as possible, so as to expedite the actual marriage, and everybody was running about, conches were blowing, women were giggling and laughing as the professional guests of the male sex cracked doubtful jests while they awaited the arrival of the bridegroom.

And then came a sudden hush. Something must have happened. What was it?

Parbutti, sitting apart swathed in her wedding scarlet, was too dazed to notice the pause at first, until low, and whimpering, an unmistakable woman's wail rose amid the garlands and tinsels, the paper flowers, the swinging lanterns.

She started to her feet--was someone dead?

In a way, the news that had come was worse than death. That was an act of God to be accepted with what resignation could be mustered. But this? What! They had arrested a bridegroom on his wedding day!--and Govinda, too, the son of the house! What! Those boys--they could not be guilty! It was only the tyranny of the hated police. They could not be mixed up with Anarchists. So said some of the men; but others held their peace and looked sinister, while all the women wept and wailed, and called on Mai Kâli to avenge the sacrilege. Only Parbutti sate very still, very silent. She knew something that the others did not know, but the knowledge only increased her blind resentment, only aggravated her blind despair.

He had been filched from her--if it was he. She was too dulled by disappointment at first to do more than realise her loss, and the thought of her oath of fealty did not come to her at all until after three months' needless delay in trying the conspiracy case against some forty students in the college--a delay due entirely to the hair-splitting efforts of the counsel for the defence--Govinda settled it for himself by dying in prison of autumnal fever. His had never been a good life; he had almost died of it the year before; he might have died of it at home. But the loss of a son, even when he is not the only one, is a grievous loss to a Hindu household, and it brought enhanced and almost insensate anger to every member of it; except to Parbutti, who went about her household duties calmly, almost stupidly.

Then came the final blow. The bridegroom--was it he?--she wondered dully--shot himself with a revolver smuggled in to him by a woman, a young and pretty woman full of patriotism and poetry, a woman brought up on Western lines, who was almost worshipped by the Nationalist party of unrest.

Parbutti heard the tale, still calm to outward appearance. She heard women's voices, full of curiosity, tell of the deed of patriotism, as it was called: she heard them wonder what the woman agitator was really like, and say that Kâli Ma would surely, ere long, rise up in Her Power and smite the M'llechas hip and thigh.

And then they looked at her and shook their heads. Neither maid, wife, nor widow, it would be more difficult than ever to find fresh betrothals for her. Whereupon Ramabhai wept as she had wept before with sharp sobs and little outcries. And once more Parbutti said nothing, though she was quivering all over. It would be impossible to define her feelings, they were such an admixture of hatred, and love, of fear, and jealousy, and despair. And through it all came the question: "Was it he?"--while, as a background, sheer physical disappointment stretched every fibre of her mind and body almost to breaking joint.

So it went on until one day someone spoke to her almost as if she had been a widow, and bade her do something almost menial.

She did it without a word. It was noon time and the house was deserted; those who were in it being asleep. She sate for a while in the sunshine of the courtyard, her hands on her knees, doing nothing. Then suddenly she rose, and slipped into the room which Ramabhai used as a wardrobe.

When she emerged from it she was swathed in the scarlet and gold Benares khim-kob that had cost four hundred rupees, and her arms, her neck, her feet, were hung with golden ornaments.

They tinkled as she made her way down the steep stone stairs to Kâli's shrine. Dark, and still, and small, it lay, with a faint scent of incense about it; for the previous day had been a festival, and many folk had been to worship there.

But Kâli--Mai Kâli--would never have better worshipping than Parbutti meant to give her. How the idea had come to the girl's mind who can say; but dimly, out of her confused thoughts had grown the conviction that something must be done. She was the only one, now, who knew the secret; but it was useless in her hands. She could not go out and throw bombs, as he doubtless would have thrown them had he lived; so giving the Great Goddess the Blood for which she craved. Yes! he had meant to do it, for were not the aliens accursed? Had they not killed him?

She mixed everything up hopelessly; Mai Kâli and the Sacrament of Blood, her own loss and the public good; she felt angry, and weary, and disappointed; she felt that she ought to do something, that she must get Someone stronger than she was on her side, to do what she was helpless to do.

So, confused, obstinate, she stepped behind the image, slid back the panel, and took out the box. Then, producing a cocoanut shell from the folds of her sare, she filled it carefully, methodically, and put back the box carefully, methodically.

This done, she went to the front of the image, smeared the floor once more with blood-red, and began her maiden's prayer--the prayer that is infallible!

"Om! Om! Kâli Ma!--
Dark! Dark! Not a star--
In my Heaven, Kâli Ma!--"

This time her voice was high and hard, for had not Mai Kâli to be compelled--yea! even by the greatest of sacrifices?

"Thou shalt have it fresh and fresh--
Blood to drink, and lumps of flesh--"

Higher and higher grew the voice; it did not falter at all: not even when at the final

"Hoom phut"

the girl, raising her hand on high, dashed the cocoanut she held upon the ground boldly.

There was a faint flash, an instant explosion, a grinding noise as the house rocked to its foundation, then steadied into quiescence.

But Parbutti had kept her promise to Mai Kâli, and to--him; for the Goddess might have satisfied Her craving for Blood, Her desire for Flesh amid the welter of broken stones and twisted grids, of shattered wood-carving and torn Benares khim-kob, of jewels rent apart and splintered bones, that was all remaining of Her shrine, Her image, and Her worshipper.

Whether She will keep her part of the bargain is another matter.

But the Maiden's Prayer has been said, the Greatest of Sacrifices has been made.

[SILVER SPEECH AND GOLDEN
SILENCE]