“A cold eye. Look at it next time. It’s the eye of a fish—a shark for choice.”
“Well, you couldn’t expect her to have a warm one, could you?” drowsed Tarleton, who was half asleep. Whereat they all roared.
Now in all of this there was more than a little, for, apart from her natural inclination to have as good a time as possible, here amid entirely new conditions of life, and forming as they did a marked contrast to those of a country vicarage, Cynthia had kept her ears open as well as her eyes. Even station gup had not as yet linked Raynier’s name with that of Hilda Clive. But it had speculated as to the view that would be taken at headquarters of the Political Agent allowing himself to be lulled into a state of absolute blindness on the subject of the ill-affectedness of the Gularzai; the most important and powerful tribe within his jurisdiction. All of which Cynthia had not been slow to take in; and Captain Beecher, who was always on hand with his dogcart, or a very sleek and serviceable Waler—of which she was secretly afraid—if she preferred riding, was very devoted, and substantially sound, and Cynthia was verging on thirty. And a live and frisky dog was very much better than a dead and reduced lion, and Haslam was an abominable cynic who knew his India, and the dominant population thereof, thoroughly.
Hilda Clive, watching this state of things, said nothing, only thought. So completely did she say nothing in fact, that the station decided that in view of the circumstances of the case, she was singularly lacking in appreciation, not to say gratitude. She and Raynier had been together through the winnowing of a common danger. She had come out of it safe and sound, he had not. Yet she seemed to give him no further thought.
Did she not?
“All are forgetting him,” she said to herself, in the bitterness of her intense self-concentration. “All are forgetting him—even decrying him, and there are those hungrily ready to step into his shoes. All the more reason to show him that here is one who is not.”
She thanked Heaven she was well off; indeed, for a single woman, almost rich. Nothing can be done in this world without filthy lucre. She had been endowed with this if not with the art of drawing men round her like flies around a jar of stale marmalade. Money can buy anything within certain limits, even life. Yet how many there would have expended say one thousand rupees to purchase that of Herbert Raynier’s?
But she? She shut herself up in her own room a good deal just then, shut herself up with business papers—which, by the way, she thoroughly understood. And running through all her calculations and correspondence were certainly recollections of a time spent in a free al fresco life; and subsequently, in an al fresco life which was anything but free, and hedged round with hardship at every turn, and somehow it seemed that that time was not the least enjoyable period of her existence. Then she would push away all the business matter in front of her, and pass her hands over her brows, and if anyone had broken in upon her at that time it would have been to see upon Hilda Clive’s face a look that rendered it wondrously soft and lovable and attractive.
But through it all there mingled a puzzled and half-distressed state of mind. Her strange powers of foresight seemed to hover around, and yet refuse to be called into definite action. There was something to be done, they told her, and she was the one to do it; yet what, and how? Ah, now it was clear. Money would purchase anything—even life.
The first thing she had done on her return to Mazaran was to present Mehrab Khan with such a substantial sum in rupees as to cause that faithful Mussulman to stare. Then she had set to work to obtain for him a sort of indefinite furlough, so that he could attach himself wholly and entirely to her service, which he was by no means loth to do. It had not been difficult, because, as it happened, his term of enlistment had all but expired, and Mehrab Khan was far too valuable a jemadar of Levy Sowars to part with at that juncture; wherefore, through Haslam, who, as we have seen, stood her friend, and others, she contrived that the authorities should allow her the use of him pro tem. To what she would turn that use we shall see anon.