He spoke with absolute indifference, but Captain Dering, as they left the bazaar, which led from the bridge, for a short flight of steps and a narrow alley cleaving it's way through crowded, shouldering houses, remarked aside:--
"I believe that means he is about the nearest relation left. The Colonel, I know, wasn't sure about the wisdom of his coming here; but then the Colonel is that sort. So I insisted. One wants somebody who can tell you things in a new place. What's that, in there, Roshan?"
They had come to a long, high wall, with trees showing above it, which stretched away on their right hand for two or three hundred yards, until it ended in an arched tunnel through a massive block of buildings at right angles to it.
"The palace garden, sir; and that is the palace. There is no entrance this side."
"The women's apartments, I suppose?"
"Huzoor," assented Roshan Khân once more. "The Miss Sahib lives there now, and the Padré has his chapel there too. The river runs along the side, and it is pleasant."
"Pleasant and cool," echoed Lance, as the shadow of the tunnel closed in on them. "I'd no idea it was so hot outside. By Jove! what a quaint place."
They were emerging on a wide, square courtyard of which the palace formed one side, the fort another, a flight of steps leading down to the river a third, while the fourth was apparently, a wing of the palace. All three walls were absolutely blank save for a low door at each of the four corners; and these were, so to speak, connected with each other by pathways raised two steps above the rest of the courtyard. A similar footpath crossed it in the middle and so completed the resemblance to a union-jack; for the pathways were of white marble and red Agra stone, the courtyard of purple-blue brick. These paths met in a round platform in the centre, where, on a stone carriage, stood an old cannon.
"That's a big gun," said Vincent Dering, when, with a quickened clink of his spurred steps he had reached it; so, laying his hand lightly on the cylinder, he vaulted to it, as on to a horse, and stooped to read an inscription on the riveted band about the breech.
"Sanskrit," he said--"that stumps me! it's so confounded straight. Ah! here it is in Persian too--that's better."