The flame-gatherers

by Margaret Horton Potter

“Not so fast, comrade. What hast thou to carry to the King? Young Bhavani wanders by accident into Ragunáth’s rooms. My lord himself goes for a walk. By accident he meets the Ranee Ahalya in the poppy field. They scarcely speak. She returns home with her woman and me;—my lord remains there on whatever business is his. Bah, Kasya! The fool is punished now. Doubt it not. The Ranee can lash a man with her eyes, an she will; and Ragunáth was not favored to-day. I swear that by Lakshmi. A turmoil is never the result of wisdom. Let it rest, Kasya.”

Churi was committed in good earnest, now. For his own sake the affair must not go up to the Rajah.

“I thought—” Kasya bent his brows, “I feared the Ranee did not disdain him wholly. If you speak truth, however—”

Churi shrugged.

“Then let it pass. In time we shall show him that the Rajah’s will is done in Mandu.” And, with a sigh, Kasya turned and departed.

Churi’s desire for company had gone, apparently; for he made no move to return to the common room. For a few moments he stood in his own doorway, brows drawn, head bent, meditating. Then he turned inside, and dropped the hanging across the open space, to prevent interruption. Stretching himself out on an improvised but remarkably comfortable divan, he gave himself up to a more critical consideration of the drama that had been revealed to him that afternoon. It was a thing that he had never dreamed of. A day before, he would not have believed that he could be so calmly reviewing the situation that evidently existed between the one thing he cared for in Mandu—Ahalya—and the Mohammedan captive. If it piqued him that he had had no knowledge of its beginnings,—he, to whom every intrigue enacted in the palace during the last ten years had been an open book,—he could console himself with the reflection that he was still the only one that knew of it at all. But he wished especially to understand himself with regard to Fidá, toward whom, as yet, he felt no animosity. Fidá, however, continued to baffle him. He could come to no satisfactory opinion. His concealment of what he knew from Kasya, though it had come about accidentally, gave him little anxiety; for it was perfectly consistent with his usual methods: those plots and plans and hopes in which he, even he, the eunuch, constantly indulged.

Doctor Churi was, in fact, a person out of the ordinary. He had been the child of a Rajput woman and an Arab. For his birth, his mother had been put to death, and he himself, in his babyhood, sold into slavery. Before he was even aware of the existence of right and wrong, he had been made a creature apart from ordinary men. And when he was old enough to understand this, his soul rose up in revolt. From that time, his whole nature was warped; and he became an iconoclast in his every thought. His brain was unquestionably fine. His talent for medicine was manifested at an early age, when he tried to poison himself with opium, and was only saved by the quick skill of the doctor in whose charge he was still living. Under this man’s tuition, he gained his knowledge of anatomy and the power of herbs. At the age of eighteen he was sold to Rai-Khizar-Pál, his education having trebled his value. At the time of the transaction, Churi was made aware of the sum paid for him; and it was then that his great idea came: which was, by some means to obtain the equivalent of the amount, and with it buy himself into liberty.

Since that day, twelve years had passed away. Churi was thirty years old; and the little hoard of copper pieces which he had been able to store up, was still pitiably small. Meantime his heart had grown bitter, and his mind had taken to winding through tortuous ways of perception and imagination. He was known to many evil thoughts, but to few evil practices. And there was in him a volcanic passion of humanness kept relentlessly in check, that occasionally betrayed itself above the surface in some eccentric outburst.

The man led a solitary and loveless existence; yet as all human things must know some softening of the heart toward some one, so Churi had, by degrees, come to feel a strong interest, a more than interest, in the Ranee Ahalya, the universally beloved. She was very different from the other women in the zenana; and Churi had been first attracted to her by the quality rarest in women: that quality which she had in marked degree, and he not at all—disinterestedness. Because she had never had ends to gain, because she curried favor with none, he gave her the only genuine devotion that he had ever felt for any one; and, where her interests were concerned, was accustomed to waive his own. Perhaps it was this instinct in him that had suggested the lie to Kasya; and thereby, probably, he saved the life of Fidá. But it was quite for his own amusement that Churi now lay on his divan considering the incidents of the afternoon. All the result of these thoughts was, that he decided to see something of the Asra in the near future, and that the Lady Ahalya would perhaps bear a little watching also.

Fortune favored Churi’s first decision in a very simple way. Two or three nights later Fidá, who had not been in the house of slaves for forty-eight hours, went there to find his young comrade, Ahmed, lying in one corner of the porch, uncovered to the evil air of night, and burning with fever. Another slave, also Arabian, stood near by, regarding the sick boy helplessly. When Fidá appeared, Ahmed, who had lain with closed eyes, heeding nothing, sat up, stretching out his hands to his master. Fidá took them tenderly into his own, and was frightened to feel how hot they were. Wrapping the boy in his cloak, he bent over him, keeping off the swarm of little flies and insects that hovered around, and listening with alarm to the boy’s half-delirious murmurings. Something must be done. He was not to be left in this state. Surely even slaves were given help. And as he cast about, anxiously, for means of assistance, he was addressed by one Chakra, a soldier, who stood looking into the veranda: