"Huzoor! this slave steeps his tobacco in the sleep-compeller. It gives great contentment."
I looked down at my pipe. It was but half smoked through. Was this really the explanation?
"But the echo?" I protested. "I heard it but now."
"Of a truth there is an echo. That is not a dream. For the rest it is well. The time has passed swiftly, the Huzoor is rested, his servant has returned, the boat has come--all in contentment. The Shelter of the World can proceed on his journey in peace, and return in peace."
"Unless the Footstep of Death overtakes me meanwhile," said I, but half satisfied.
"Huzoor! It never overtakes the just. Death and the righteous look at each other in the face as friends. When the Footstep comes I will go to meet it, and so will you. Hark! the demon screeches. Peace go with you, my lord."
About a year after this the daily police reports brought me the news that my friend the old fakeer had been found dead in the water-cut. An unusually heavy flood had undermined the banks and loosened the bridge; it must have fallen while the old man was on it, for his body was jammed against the plank which had stuck across the channel a little way down the stream. He had kept his word and gone to meet the Footstep. A certain unsatisfied curiosity, which had never quite left me since that night in the rains, made me accompany the doctor when, as in duty bound, he went to the dead-house to examine the body. The smiling mask was unchanged, but the eyes were open, and looked somehow less empty dead than in the almost terrible clearness of life. The right hand was fast clenched over something.
"Only a crushed magnolia blossom," said the doctor, gently unclasping the dead fingers. "Poor beggar! it must have been floating in the water--there's a tree up the cut; I've often smelt it from the road. Drowning men--you know the rest."
Did I? The coincidence was, to say the least of it, curious. It became more curious still when, three weeks afterwards, the unrecognisable body of a man was found half buried in the silt left in the alluvial basin by the subsiding floods--a man of more than middle age, whose right hand was clenched tight, over nothing.
So the question remains. Did I dream that night, or did the Footstep of Death bring revenge when it came over the bridge at last? I have never been able to decide; and the only thing which remains sure is the figure of the old fakeer with blind eyes, looking out on the uncertain mirage of the river and waiting in godliness and contentment,--for what?