The flame-gatherers

by Margaret Horton Potter

“All is well. No one is stirring. Enter.”

Fidá’s bright eyes grew brighter still; and he ran boyishly through the doorway into the little passage where, this time, Neila awaited him. He followed her, in silence, down the short hall, through the memorable room at the end of it, which was empty to-night, and across the next one, that he had never seen, to a door at which Neila knocked. A moment’s suspense, and then a muffled voice said, “Open!” The maid pushed it, and motioned to Fidá, who passed swiftly within. The door closed behind him. He was gazing upon the figure of Ahalya, who stood a few feet away, looking at him, doubtfully, longingly, half sadly. His heart throbbed with many emotions. He took a hesitating step or two toward her, pleading with his eyes. Then, all at once, there was a quick, low cry, and Ahalya had flung herself into his arms.

What passed between them now were difficult to relate. Afterwards they themselves had but a confused idea. It was very certain that Ahalya loved him; for she delivered herself up entirely to his will. Yet, with each of them, passion was mingled with something better: a deep tenderness, a high companionship, the mutual compassion of the unhappy. She laid upon him a great responsibility, telling him over and over again that without him she should not try to live; explaining the torture of her self-hatred: the shame that, loving him, she must still submit to another; wetting his eyes with her tears while she demanded from him a solution of her miserable problem. Pitying while he loved, Fidá read what her warped life had been, and all the history of her loneliness. Nor did he fail her in a certain sort of comfort, of a philosophical nature, for which she cared little, save that it came from his lips. But she listened eagerly to all that he told her of himself, of his country and his life; though he withheld the story of the curse, of which, at their first meeting, he had given her a suggestion that she seemed to have forgotten. They talked long, but the talk was finally hushed. Fidá extinguished the single lamp that burned. And later, Neila, come to warn them of the time, found them there in the darkness, Ahalya weeping in his arms.

This time it was the woman that bade her lover leave her; for Fidá had not the strength to put her from him. When at last he reached the anteroom, only three or four minutes before the appearance of Churi’s relief, the latter’s heart was in his throat, and he was ready to declare that he would never again run the risk of disaster and discovery through the slave’s rashness. Later in the night he sought Fidá in his own room, and the two had a long talk together. The eunuch had come with the purpose of protesting against the present arrangement, with which he was in a high state of dissatisfaction. But he ended by allowing himself to be, to some extent, overpowered by the earnestness and the logic of love; though after he had departed, Fidá lay awake for a long time, anxiously considering the risks that he ran in placing all his dependence on this one person, whom he knew very well to be in some ways entirely unreliable.

Churi, indeed, was playing a part very different from the one he had imagined for himself. He had entered upon the affair rather blindly, and with the belief that a few weeks, perhaps days even, would convert his ruby into money; upon which his freedom would quickly follow. A little time had shown him his mistake. The ruby was not a gem easily to be sold; for the simple reason that no one in Mandu save the Rajah himself was wealthy enough to buy it; and Rai-Khizar-Pál knew the stone, and to whom it belonged. Questions were not to be risked. Churi soon realized that he must wait until the spring, when the travelling merchants from Rajputana would come down from the north with the rich wares that made their arduous journeys profitable. One of these, the eunuch knew very well, would take his stone, without questions. Meantime, what was his course to be? It was true that he was genuinely attached to Ahalya, and had some feeling for Fidá. Moreover, his natural talent for intrigue rejoiced at the risk of the present affair. Nevertheless, that risk, as matters stood at present, was too great. Soon, then, he found his mind at work reconstructing, building up new safeguards against that bombshell which, one day, no caution could keep from an explosion that must betray its existence to Mandu in ruin and destruction.

Churi, evil-thinking, evil-doing, was nevertheless faithful to his better instincts. It was not for his own gain that he set his mind to work at new plans of entrance to the zenana; and at finding therefrom new exits, to be used in case of need. These plans materialized well; and, by the bedside of the now almost recovered Ahmed, he expounded his ideas to Fidá. The Asra was already aware that the zenana was accessible by other ways than the central portion of the palace. The passage from the north wing to the little court was left unguarded for the simple reason that, by day, no one could enter there without risk of being seen by half a hundred eyes; and by night the face of the zenana itself was made, by means of chains and locks, a perfectly impenetrable wall, by which the high Lord Ragunáth himself had more than once been baffled. For Fidá, however, this difficulty did not exist. On the other side of that wall there were willing hands to work for him; for Churi himself had the task of fastening doors and wooden window-screens at nightfall. Who was there to discover that one of these, in the inner room of the Ranee Ahalya, was left unlocked? Who was there to note the tiny hinge which deft-handed Churi substituted for a bolt? Rai-Khizar-Pál never perceived these things; and, beside him, Neila was the only soul that entered the Ranee’s bedroom. Shortly, then, Fidá had ceased to be dependent on the antechamber for access to his lady; and he and Churi both wondered how so obvious a means had slipped their first consideration. But passion soon began to get the better of the Arabian. His gracelessness no longer stopped with the night. Hairbrained were the risks he ran, wild the chances that he took, though all the time it seemed that he was protected by a scandalous providence. Churi and Neila spent days and nights of dread; but Ahalya was as blind to caution as the Asra; and together they overran advice or pleadings; and recklessly they laughed with Fate.

Two months—a little more—went by: to the lovers, months of ecstasy and despair, of joy inexpressible, and keenest agony; for love like theirs carries constantly its own punishment. But the man and the woman were young, of Oriental blood, the desire for affection in each rendered abnormal by the restraint to which both had been subject. Fidá went without sleep and without food, and yet seemed to suffer no untoward effects from his nerve-destroying existence. Indeed, so remarkable was his vitality, so strong his power of recuperation after the longest service and watchfulness, that he, and Churi also, began in their minds to scoff at the Asra curse, and wonder whence the quaint legend had originated. Ahalya, who had little to do, save in so far as Rai-Khizar-Pál demanded her companionship, spent all the hours in which she and Fidá were apart, in dreaming of their next meeting. Never had she been so beautiful as now. Every line of weariness and discontent had disappeared from her face. Her eyes, under the light of their new knowledge, shone like stars. Her face took on a new glow of color, more clear, more pure, more rose-and-white than ever. Her voice had gained a new and tender richness; and, as she dreamed over the Persian harp that she loved to play, Neila used to listen in amazement to the beauty of her singing. Her increased charm had its penalty, however; for the Rajah was not slow in perception, and seemed more and more to delight in her, keeping her at his side oftener than of old. And the suffering entailed by this was nearly enough to drive the loveliness away.

Varied as were the duties of Fidá’s life, pleasant, or dull, or interesting as they might otherwise have been, he performed all save one apathetically, as so much dull labor to be got through willy-nilly. Everything in him, every thought, every wish, was under Ahalya’s sway. Body and heart and brain she ruled him, as, indeed, he ruled her. There was now scarcely a suggestion of remorse or regret in either of them. The lower natures of both were in the ascendant; and there were numberless hours when the flesh reigned supreme. In his saner moments Fidá sometimes paused to analyze himself, doubtfully, wondering if he could be the Fidá of Delhi and of Yemen. But during the last month he was not often sane; and when, with the glare of the day, other thoughts, truths, reproaches, came to him, he fought them off, refusing to consider, not daring to remember, his code.

El-Islam, life to the true Arabian, was, by degrees, deserting the captive. How should he maintain a religion that taught moderation in all things, duty to the master, forbearance from intoxication? Ahalya, whose mother, in her long captivity, had lost her own beautiful Magian religion, and who had herself been brought up a Hindoo, had, like many Indian women of station, taken the god Krishna, lord of beauty, romance, and love, for her special deity. And some of the pretty ceremony and graceful superstition of her half-doubtful beliefs had woven themselves like an evil web around Fidá’s brain. Often, during their quiet hours, Ahalya used to sing to her lover parts of the great Indian Song of Songs—the wooing of Krishna and Radha. And her voice, and the smooth-flowing poetry of the words, charmed him into new forgetfulness of the sterner western creed. The story was well fitted to their state. As Ahalya sang, he loved to call her Radha; and if she delighted in him as the incarnation of her too well worshipped god, her lover saw in it no sacrilege. But in this way his prayers grew strange to him; and he became in some sort a pagan, unworthy of any god.

There was but one pursuit left in which they found an honest pleasure. Both of them loved the boy, Bhavani, whom, in different ways, each was instructing in a primitive code of manhood and chivalry. The child had taken so strong a fancy to Fidá that his father, perfectly confident of the Asra’s fitness for the position, began more and more to surrender him as cup-bearer in order that he might attend his son. And Fidá, finding the child truthful, obedient, and affectionate, took a genuine pride in instructing him in all that he knew. There were times, indeed, when the man, brought into close contact with young innocence and instinctive honor, was drawn to a certain unavoidable sense of guilt; and this same thing Ahalya felt, when, in accordance with the young prince’s wishes, she rehearsed with him, in their old way, the dramatic epics of ancient Indian heroism and self-sacrifice. And so much alike had the minds of the lovers become, that the young Bhavani, imbibing from each the same often identically expressed principles, came by degrees to connect the two in his mind; perhaps even, with a child’s intuition, guessing something of their position, though unconscious of its sin.