Yes, I could remember distinctly the bramble-and-nut-hidden quarry hole, with its little inner sward of sweet sheep-bitten grass where I had pitched the tent. I knew that if I were to call, someone of the rumbling cart wheels, which came at intervals along the road, might stop and seek for the caller; but I lay still. I was hard-happed round and round with the curious content which comes as the chills and the aches are passing into the fire flood of fever that thrills the finger-tips and sets the brain fizzling like champagne.
"The wisdom of Sri Ganêsh--the wisdom of our Lord Ganêsh."
Why on earth should that haunt me here in Wales? on a piece, no doubt, of Nat Gwynne's property.
Nat Gwynne! Then I knew. It was because I had seen him in the distance that day, driving a pair of grey ponies, tandem, with a pretty young girl beside his coarse, heavy, good looks; heavier than they had been, though, heaven knows! refinement had never stood much in his way. And they were to be married to-morrow! Married to Gwynne of Garthgwynne! Couldn't anyone tell her what she was doing? Couldn't anyone save her, as the wisdom of Sri Ganêsh had saved that other one?...
And then in a second I was gone. I was under the brassy blue sky of India, and from the twisted tufts of marsh-grasses by the elephant's feet came a native beater's lament--"As God sees me it is invisible--what a tyranny is here."
"Bid Ganêsh seek," said Nat Gwynne's voice, imperatively from the howdah from which we were both shooting. He was in a Lancer regiment cantooned in the native State where for many years I had been consulting engineer.
The mahout, seated on the big brute's neck, turned calmly. "It is against the orders that Sri Ganêsh, King of Elephants and Lord of Wisdom, should touch carrion even of the Huzoor's."
I looked at my old friend Mahadeo with astonishment. He and I had been out on Ganêsh, the Rajah's finest elephant, scores of times, and again and again the cunning old rogue's inquisitive trunk had nosed out and up a partridge or snipe which the coolies had failed to find.
"He hath a scent like a bed of roses," old Mahadeo would say proudly, "and as for wisdom! Doth he not hold the Huzoor even as his own mahout?"
Which delicate piece of flattery was true, for old Ganêsh, pad elephant to the bankrupt young scoundrel of a Rajah, had taken a fancy to me, as elephants do take fancies.