“Well?” said Azim.
“He was a diamond merchant, perhaps—or a dealer in rubies. Do Englishmen deal in such things?”
“Would I had seen him!” said Azim.
“He took gold away,” said Golam.
Both were silent for a space, and the purring noise of the wheel of the upper well, and the chatter of voices about it rising and falling, made a pleasant sound in the air. “Since the Englishman went,” said Golam, “he has been different. He hides something from me—something in his robe. Rubies! What else can it be?”
“He has not buried it?” said Azim.
“He will. Then he will want to dig it up again and look at it,” said Golam, for he was a man of experience. “I go softly. Sometimes almost I come upon him. Then he starts—”
“He grows old and nervous,” said Azim, and there was a pause.
“Before the English came,” said Golam, looking at the rings upon his fingers, as he recurred to his constant preoccupation; “there were no Rajahs nervous and old.”
That, I say, was even before the coming of the safe. It came in a packing case. Such a case it was as had never been seen before on all the slopes of the Himalayan mountains, it was an elephant’s burden even on the plain. It was days drawing nearer and nearer. At Allapore crowds went to see it pass upon the railway. Afterwards elephants and then a great multitude of men dragged it up the hills. And this great case being opened in the Hall of Audience revealed within itself a monstrous iron box, like no other box that had ever come to the city. It had been made, so the story went, by necromancers in England, expressly to the order of the Rajah, that he might keep his treasure therein and sleep in peace. It was so hard that the hardest files powdered upon its corners, and so strong that cannon fired point-blank at it would have produced no effect upon it. And it locked with a magic lock. There was a word, and none knew the word but the Rajah. With that word, and a little key that hung about his neck, one could open the lock; but without it none could do so.