"Dead——?"
Lalloo glanced up through the darkness into the Englishman's face. For a minute his own manner changed, losing something of its impassive reticence.
"Sahib, there are things which no man may forget and prosper. For the sake of one memory—leave here, leave Gaya—there is an illness coming which even the cunning hand of the Dakktar Sahib cannot stay——"
"Is that a threat, Lalloo? Do you know me so little that you think I should turn tail——"
The old money-lender lifted his hand almost with authority.
"No man can change the course of his fate, Sahib. But I have paid my debt."
He salaamed and slipped away into the irregular silhouette which the tumble-down huts threw into the palely-lit street.
Tristram lingered a moment. His pipe had gone out, and he lit it again with an affectionate care, which covered tension. An instinct, more delicate than a seismograph, inherited from men who had learnt at bitter cost the significance of a glance, had warned him. It fed itself on the unbroken silence, on the fevered, palpitating heat. The bo-tree, whose leaves quivered to the faintest breath, was still as though it, too, was aware of an approaching change and listened for its footfall. The very light which filtered down from the stars and poured in a pale stream between the black banks of the street carried with it a suggestion of a near and brooding menace.
Tristram walked slowly up towards the northern entrance of the village. In the past he would not have walked alone. There would have been Ayeshi on one side of him and some woe-begone villager on the other, with Wickie scampering in and out among the shadows, pursuing, with the uncrushable optimism of his kind, the elusive mouse. And Tristram, listening in memory to those past sounds and voices, was overwhelmed, not with a sense of an invisible danger, but with a bitter loneliness. He had now only one desire, and that to get away from these silent, watching walls, out into the open.
He walked fast, but by the time he had reached the narrow road along the river the first bar of moonlight had struck across the valley. He stood still again, for beneath the sullen muttering of the water he had heard other sounds.