'Curse you!' shouted Mr. Lucanaster, 'what the devil----? Then, as the simplest way of getting at the truth, he ran into the verandah. Every servant had disappeared; but there was no mistaking the sound that came clearer now--it was the sound of a crowd, an angry crowd! He stood irresolute for a moment, and then, along the road that lay between his house and Chris Davenant s, he saw two men running with torches.
'There is thatch to both,' called one. 'We will take his first--he who spoilt our plan. The others will settle the depraver of Kings' Houses!'
That was enough! He was back in the house in a second, but not in the drawing-room. In his office, at the safe which he had left open!
Meanwhile Viva, alone with the furtive haste and furtive importance which had seen it all before, stood paralysed with terror; stood in that dress of the year of grace 1857, feeling as if that past had claimed her.
But it had claimed the old anatomy who had returned, in his old age, to the first rung of the ladder whence he had climbed to that dignity of 'khânsâman to Ricketts-sahib bahadur who was killed.'
They had come back to him, those days of livery and gold lace when he had served a lady, dressed perhaps in pink tarlatan! They had come back, and the furtiveness left the remnant that remained of that dignity; the importance returned. 'But the mem was not killed, Huzoor! How should it be so when Mohubbut Khân was there? Quick! follow me, Huzoor! This slave knows where safety lies! Has he not seen it all before? Quick, Huzoor, quick! The mem-sahiba is safe--quite safe if she follows Mohubbut Khân.'
Safe, quite safe! Those words were enough for this woman in her pink tarlatan, whose nerves, such as they were, had been juggled with by that same pink tarlatan! She forgot everything else, even the pink dewdrops!
The next instant she was out--as many a mem-sahiba had been out in that fateful May-time more than forty years before--with no guide to safety but a native servant. And this was no servant of hers, bound to her by the slender tie--slender in the West, at any rate!--of personal service. Mohubbut Khân was only servant of that past--the past which had brought him nothing for his old age save a return to the greasy swab and miserable pittance of his apprenticeship to service!
Yet as, with a breathlessness that had not been in that midnight flight of forty years ago, he headed straight as a die for the Garden Mound, he prattled cheerfully of the future as he might have done then.
Let the mem-sahiba stay herself on the Merciful and Clement, including, of course, His servant Mohubbut! As for the master, the âkâ-sahib, who, perforce, had to think of more than mere safety, the Merciful and Clement had him in his keeping also. And though Mohubbut could not, unfortunately, be in two places at once, some other slave would doubtless be raised up!