After that again came a time when even Afzul stood aside and let the mem take the lead while he sat watching her curiously--a time when it positively seemed more to her that Philip should take so many spoonfuls of nourishment every hour than that he should get better; when the content of immediate success blotted out the thought of future failure, and the fear of death was forgotten in the desire of staving it off. Most people who have nursed a case in which even the doctors stay their hands and wait on Nature, know that strange dream-like life wherein the peaks and passes on the temperature chart seem by contraries to raise or depress the whole world. Belle fought the fight bravely; and not until she stood one day looking at a thermometer which registered normal did she feel a sinking at her heart. They had come down into the low levels of life; they were back in the work-day world. Yet it was not the one they had left six weeks before. Even outwardly it had changed. The last green blade of grass had withered to a brown shadow on the sunbaked soil, and the dust-storms of May swept over the half-finished house.
"It looks dreary enough now, but just you wait till next year," said John Raby, in his cheerful confident way. "The new dam will be finished, I hope, the water will come in at high level to the garden, the place will be a paradise of flowers, and we shall be dividing thirty per cent, profit! There's a prospect! Oh, by the way, did I ever tell you that beast Shunker Dâs came down just after you did, Marsden, expecting to find me on my back like a turned turtle? His face, when he saw I was jolly as a sand-boy, was a caution! By George! that man does hate me and no mistake."
Belle moved a step nearer her husband and laid her hand on the back of his easy-chair. Perhaps it was only his good-nature in leaving her free to nurse Philip, but somehow she felt they had drifted far apart during the past six weeks. "I seem to have heard nothing," she began, wistfully.
"Better employed on the head of the firm, my dear," he replied with a laugh. "You do her credit, Marsden. And now I must be off again, for there is some idiotic fuss at a village a few miles off. Shunker's work, I expect; but we are too strong for him. Even the native recognises the almighty dollar, and if they will only have patience, I'll engage to treble the revenue of this district. Well, good-bye, Belle. I'll be back to-morrow or next day. Soon as I can 'get,' as the Americans say. Take care of yourselves."
When he had gone the punkah went on swinging, Belle's hands knitted busily, Philip's lay idle in the languor of convalescence; all was as before, and yet there was a difference--a difference of which each was conscious, and which brought a certain restraint.
"Why does Shunker hate him?" asked Major Marsden.
There was no lack of confidence now between these two, and if he asked many questions, she was quite ready to answer them faithfully, according to her lights. In this one, however, she failed to give a just impression, for the simple reason that she herself had no conception of the extent of the usurer's malice. In fact, his impotent rage on discovering that Philip's return had apparently made no difference to the Rabys would have been incredible to an educated Englishwoman, had she been aware of it, which she was not. The man, coming down to Saudaghur expectant of consternation, had found nothing but a stir of fresh enterprise which his keen business eye told him meant money. He wandered about from village to village, noting the golden seed being sown by his adversary, until the thought of the harvest in which he would have no share positively worried him into spleen and ague. And as he lay among the simple village folk a fresh idea for revenge came to console him. It is never hard to change the stolid opposition of the Indian peasant into stolid obstruction. No overt injustice is required; nothing but a disregard of custom. And so Shunker, taking advantage of the short period during which he had been associated in partnership with John Raby, began cautiously to call in debts in the name of the firm. Now in an Indian village a debt to the ancestral usurer is a debt; that is to say no nighty ephemeral liability which may crop up at any time claiming payment, but a good, solid inheritance going back sometimes a generation or two; a patent almost of solvency, a claim certainly for consideration at the hands of your banker; since a bumper crop might any day give you the upper-hand, or a bad one make it still more unwise for the creditor to present his bill. Thus, when Shunker disregarded time-worn prejudices to the extent of asking one Peru, an old-established customer, to make a settlement, the latter looked as if the foundations of the round world had been moved.
"Pay," he said slowly, his broad nostrils inflated like those of a horse shying at novelty, "I am always paying, buniak-ji, year by year, one harvest or another. God knows how much, but 'tis the old way, and old ways are good."
"They are good," sighed the usurer, piously. "I like them myself, Peru; but new masters have new ways."
"New masters do not make new land," retorted the peasant shrewdly enough. "That remains the same. It must be sown; yet when I ask the seed-grain, as my fathers have done, the answer is 'Pay!' Pay! of course I will pay when the crops ripen. Does not harvest mean payment to the peasant?"