“Coolies,” was the laconic rejoinder. “Get them ready to start at once”—to his head servant, with an imperious wave of his hand.
“There is no way of transport for your majesty,” said his obsequious bearer with a deep salaam. “No ponies, not even an ekka—unless the ‘Protector of the Poor’ would stoop to a country cart?” (Which same is a long rude open basket, between two round wooden wheels, and drawn by a pair of bullocks.)
“I really think it is hardly worth while to move,” urged Goring, as he cast a greedy eye in the direction of a promising snipe jheel. “It will be an awful fag, and you know you hate walking!”
“You can please yourself, and stay here,” said Mr. Gregson, with immense dignity, who, if he hated walking, liked his own way.
As the whole suite (not to mention the commissariat) were bound to accompany him, Goring was compelled to submit; he dared not run counter to his arbitrary companion, who, rejecting with scorn the lowly vehicle that had been suggested, set out for Kori on foot, whither a long string of coolies had already preceded him. The sandy country road wound over a barren, melancholy-looking tract, diversified with scanty pasture and marshy patches (or jheels), pools of water, tall reeds, and brown grasses. It was dotted with droves of lean cattle, paddy-birds, milk-white herons, and cranes—especially the tall sirius family, who danced to one another in a stately, not to say solemn, fashion.
Truly a bleak, desolate-looking region, and, save one or two miserable huts and some thorn bushes, there was no sign of tree or human habitation. At last they came in sight of a wretched village—the once prosperous hanger-on of the now deserted hunting palace—that showed its delicate stone pinnacles behind a high wall; apparently it stood in an enclosure of vast extent, an enclosure that must have cost lakhs of rupees. Two sahibs were naturally an extraordinary sight in this out-of-the-way district; the fame and name of Mr. Gregson, a Burra-Burra sahib, had been spread before him by the coolies, therefore beggars and petitioners swarmed eagerly round this great and all-powerful personage.
Mr. Gregson liked to feel his own importance at a durbar, or an official dinner, but it was quite another matter to have it thrust upon him by a gang of clamouring paupers—the maimed, the halt, the blind—crying out against taxation, imploring alms, and mercy. He was a hard man, with a quick, impatient temper. An aged blind beldame got in his way, and he struck her savagely with his stick. She shrank back with a sharp cry, and Goring, who was ever known as “a sahib with a soft heart,” spoke to her and gave her a rupee—a real rupee; it was years since she had felt one!
“Although she is blind, sahib, beware of her,” said an officious youth, with his hair in a top-not. “She has the evil eye!”
“Peace, dog!” she screamed; then to Goring, “I am a lone old woman; my kindred are dead—I have lived too long. I remember the former days—rich days; but bad days. Sahib, if you would be wise, go not to the palace Khana.”
Goring was moving on when the hag hastily clutched him by the sleeve, and added in a rasping whisper—