"The women----" he began.
"Oh, I know!" interrupted the young Englishman. "'Stri acchar,' and all that. But, I say, Gunpat! How the deuce are you going to govern India if you can't even settle your womenkind? No, my dear fellow! I haven't the faintest sympathy with you. You sail pretty near sedition in this copy." Here he laid his hand on the blurred, blotched broadsheet which called itself The Star of Hope. "But, by George! if you jib it the least bit more, I shall have to run you in. So don't be a fool. You're a good sort, Gunpat, and I shall never forget that innings of yours--never! If you would only have stuck to it instead of 'seeking a post in white clothing' you might have been----"
He paused, unable to say what; and Gunpat-Rai, feeling a like inability, the conversation ended uncomfortably.
And so it came to pass that not many more days afterwards, Tom Gordon sat once more in that curious atmosphere of cocoanut-oil and curry powder which is inseparable from Indian crowds, listening to Gunpat-Rai's voice. But he sat disguised in one of the front benches of the crowded hall, so that he had to look far back more than once to see that his constables were all in evidence. For a notable agitator on tour had stopped at the little town; and this was a meeting which must be reported upon, since here was no audience composed of peacefully seditious Bengâli clerks and irresponsible students, but of stalwart Jats, discontented over some new, but as yet untried, scheme of irrigation. Now, irrigation stands closer to the heart of a Jat that does wife and children. What! was the Sirkar to deny the land its drink?
The other speakers had been innocuous. Their very vehemence had passed by the slumbering passions of the long-bearded Jats who listened to them with ill-concealed yawns. But with Gunpat-Rai it was different. At the first word Tom Gordon felt that he was in the presence of a born orator. And yet--and yet--surely the words were vaguely familiar in their import, if not in their sound?
"The crimes we charge against this alien Government of India," came the liquid Indian voice, "are not lapses, defects, errors of common frailty which we, brethren, as we know them in ourselves, can allow for. They are no crimes that have not arisen from evil passions--passions which it is criminal to harbour"--an iron mailed stick held by a burly farmer fell with a clang as its owner shifted it to his right hand--"no offences that have not their root in avarice, rapacity, pride, insolence, ferocity, treachery, cruelty, malignity of temper----" Each epithet seemed punctuated by a growing stir amongst the audience. "In short, in nothing that does not argue a total extinction of all moral principle, that does not manifest an inveterate blackness of heart."
Tom Gordon had it now! The Billingsgate he had confounded years ago, of course--Burke's Billingsgate!
He had flung off his disguise and leapt to the dais in a second.
"Oh, hold your jaw! Do, there's a decent chap! Don't go spouting other folks' abuse!" he cried.
But Gunpat-Rai was helpless before the sudden need for decision. "Dyed ingrain with malice, vitiated----" he went on mechanically.