"Well, doctor, if you had stood at the door of the Mosque as I've done on duty, and heard the Hindu population out with their goddess Mariyamina and listened to the howling and tom-toming fit to break the drum of your ear, and that when the place was filled with Mussulmans at their prayers during the sacred feast of Ramazan, you would have felt that they had good reason to complain. Why, though their lips were moving in prayer, they were itching to be at the throats of the Hindus! If it had not been for the Collector's courage that day in standing at the Mosque door all the time the procession was passing, there must have been bloodshed, and he did that in the interest of the Hindus even more than for the other side. I can tell you, Campbell, there's many a Hindu in Puranapore remembers that day and knows what the Collector saved them from. It would have made a picture to see him as he stood there," ended the jailer, with a look of admiring recollection in his eyes; and Mark Cheveril felt as if he, too, had seen that picture.
"Well, they're warming up for riots again down there, sure enough," said the doctor, shaking his head. "No saying what you may come in for, Mr. Cheveril. See you keep an open mind, anyhow."
"And don't, like the doctor, be wholly given over to a belief in the mild Hindus versus the Mussulmans," said Samptor with a laugh, as he laid his big palm on the doctor's shoulder.
Mark had found the foregoing conversation a little enigmatical. His hero—born of two hours ago—was not evidently quite without flaw, but as evidently he was able to inspire many of those nearest him with a liking and a loyalty which is not always the portion of the ruler of an Indian territory.
As he walked by his side between the cactus hedges on the darkening road and listened to his talk, Mark felt that whatever his faults might be, Felix Worsley, Collector of Puranapore, had become to him already a fascinating personality.
CHAPTER XII.
The houses of the English official residents in Puranapore were all in fairly close neighbourhood, though each was surrounded by its own ample compound. They were mostly thatched bungalows with deep verandahs. The Judge's house was the only "up-stair" house, as the natives call a house of two storeys. It was also the largest in the station, being usually appropriated by the Collector; but Mr. Worsley, being solitary, had given it to the Goldrings, and elected to live in a small flat-roofed bungalow, grey and colourless, with a pillared verandah unrelieved by creepers like those which adorned Mrs. Samptor's entrance. The Government office stood a little further down the road, a group of grey stone buildings of the Georgian period, surrounded by a grove of cocoanut palms. At one end a great banyan tree, with its branches growing downwards on the brown grass and its dense foliage of glossy green, made a chosen retreat for the various native witnesses and the police peons in attendance at the Court House. There they squatted, ate betel-nut, and chattered in their native Tamil; while a group of crows perched near listened to all with their heads to one side, always ready to pounce on any food within their reach.
The ancient town itself was quite a mile distant from the European quarter, not even a mud village intervened, so the English residents were more divided than usual from the native population. To none was this topographical isolation more welcome than to the Collector.
"It is, in fact, my reason for preferring to camp in this sleepy hollow," he explained to his new Assistant as they walked homewards after Mrs. Samptor's tea-party. "You don't know what a relief it is to be out of reach of all the tom-toms and shrill street cries and the constant hum of the bazaars, not to speak of the vile odours."