'Jes' so, sir; not as there's so much isolation, not to speak of, in them third-class cattle-pens,' assented the mellow voice; and as the footstep passed on, it kept time to the refrain of
'Wait for the wagon, and we'll all take a ride.'
'I expect we shall,' remarked Jack Raymond grimly, and his mind reverted to Grace Arbuthnot and her husband. There might be need for that safe-conduct ere long. Well, they must manage things as best they could; he wouldn't.
'Oh! I do hope there'll be a wow, a weal wow!' came Jerry's prayerful voice.
[CHAPTER V]
SHARK LANE
There was no quainter spot in all Nushapore than Shark Lane (as the road near the public offices where the lawyers congregated was generally called), though at first sight it seemed to differ little from its neighbours. Broad, white, its tree-set margins were studded with the usual inconsequent-looking stucco gate-posts of an Indian station, which, guiltless of any fence, serve to mark the short carriage-drives leading back to the houses.
And these again--colour-washed pink, yellow, or blue--were even as other houses of the second-class. Yet it did not need the placards on those same gate-posts, announcing that 'Mr. Lala Râm Nâth' or 'Mr. Syyed Abdul Rahmân,' 'barristers-at-law,' lived within, to tell the passer-by that the inhabitants were not European.
To begin with, somewhere or another, there was almost sure to be a grass hurdle visible--the grass hurdle which in India does the duty of a hoarding and ensures privacy. Indeed, a knowledgable eye could infer the exact degree to which the social life within was at variance with the Western architecture in which it dwelt by the number and position of such hurdles. Two or three, merely blocking in an arch of verandah, being indicative of a lingering dislike to publicity in some 'new woman'; a dozen or more, screening in a patch of garden ground, showing the rigorous seclusion of the old.
True, in not a few cases, this sign was absent, but then a nameless air of utter desolation, a blank stare out on the world, told its tale of a keener quarrel still--of family ties, family life, lost absolutely in the chase after Western ways, Western ideas. In such houses the only sign of life from dawn to dusk, barring a furtive wielder of a grass broom raising clouds of dust at stated intervals, would be the rickety hired carriage, like a green box on wheels, which, every morning and every evening, would turn out and in between those inconsequent gate-posts, conveying a solitary young man and a pile of law-books to and from the courts.