There was only one drawback to her satisfaction, and that was Shab-ud-din’s inability to comprehend that he need not follow her backwards and forwards across the canal. He was very loyal and very dense, and evidently felt that wherever the Beebee went it was his duty to go too. His youth had not been spent in the hunting-field, and his horse was much heavier than Bajazet, so that when Eveleen increased the length of the jumps by moving farther down the canal, the results became rather alarming. Two or three falls in the soft sandy mud happily inflicted no serious injury, but the banks suffered a good deal, and so did the channel.
Engrossed in her sport, Eveleen did not realise how time was passing until the increasing heat of the sun began to make itself unpleasantly evident. It really would soon be too hot to go out in the daytime, she said to herself regretfully, finding the prospect of the long ride back to the Residency the reverse of attractive. She must be getting near a village, too—at least, there were people running across the fields; so droll for them to be coming out to work at this time of day! Well, just one more jump, to take her to the right side of the canal for home, and this would be really a good wide one. Turning to Shab-ud-din, she did her best, by word and gesture, to explain to him that he had better ride a little higher up, and not attempt to cross here, but as she rode towards the bank she heard him pounding after her. It was his own fault, the foolish fellow! she could not pull up now, but she hoped he would fall soft—the fragmentary thoughts passed through her mind as Bajazet rose to the leap. But this time he was not to sail lightly over the obstacle—“like a bird,” as she delighted to say,—for a man who must have been crouching unseen in the water-channel started up, waving his arms and shouting. Had Eveleen not been taken by surprise the good little horse might have cleared the interrupter, but involuntarily she deflected him ever so slightly from his course. He faltered, jumped short, and as he staggered among the stiff clods of the opposite bank Shab-ud-din and his big horse came thundering down upon the two. Shab-ud-din would probably have come off in any case, but in his horror at the scene in front of him he must have tried to pull up, and forthwith executed a complicated somersault sideways which left him groaning in the mud.
With an instinct born of long experience, Eveleen had freed her foot from the stirrup when she saw disaster imminent, but it was not necessary for her to roll from the saddle, nor was she thrown from it. What happened—to her exceeding wrath—was that the man whose interference had caused all the trouble seized the skirt of her long habit and deliberately dragged her to the ground while Bajazet was struggling for a foothold. The shock pulled the reins from her hands, and she saw her steed, freed from her weight, reach the top of the bank safely and dash off in one direction, while Shab-ud-din’s, struggling up with an energy which sent the clods flying every way at once, laboured heavily up the side and disappeared in the other. The syce was nowhere to be seen, and Eveleen found herself sitting in the damp mud of the channel, helplessly entangled in her habit, with Shab-ud-din lying motionless close at hand in an attitude that spoke to her experienced eye of broken bones, and an angry crowd, who seemed to have arrived on the scene by magic, yelling and dancing with rage all about her. She was absolutely defenceless, for she had even lost her whip in the fall, and every word of Persian she had ever known was gone completely out of her head—even if these Khemi cultivators could have understood it. The only thing she could do was to adjust her hat—which was half-way down her back—for the sun was blazing down upon her, and then to look as much as possible as if she was not in the least frightened, which was wholly untrue. If she could even have risen to her feet, she felt that she might have overawed the mob, but what could she do when it was impossible to free herself and stand up without assistance? The men were all armed—some with rusty but murderous-looking swords, all with heavy iron-shod sticks—and to judge by their attitude, they had every intention of using them on her. She found herself speculating which of them would strike the first blow—the signal for all the rest to fall on her—and decided in favour of a truculent person who was prancing about and swinging a huge tulwar in most unpleasant proximity to her head. Would Richard be sorry? the question presented itself irresistibly, and brought its own answer—— Undoubtedly, but it would be because his wife hadn’t had the sense to die decently in her bed!
It would not have been Eveleen not to laugh at the picture thus called up, and the sight of her amusement gave pause to her assailants. They did not shout quite so loud, and the tulwar came down a little farther off instead of actually upon her. In this moment of comparative relief she saw the stranger. He was riding along the bank towards them—as fast as the insecure footing would allow, dashing the clods this way and that—and he was leading Bajazet. He was richly dressed, with a gorgeous pagri striped with gold, but his complexion was not dark—rather the brick-red of a European burnt by tropical suns. He shouted angrily as he came near, and the mob gave one glance of terror and dissolved helter-skelter. He turned and shouted to some one out of sight, and the rush of horses’ feet and clank of accoutrements seemed to show that he was attended by a military escort, which he was directing to pursue the fugitives. He dismounted as he came near—Eveleen’s syce appeared out of space to take the horses’ bridles—and stumbled down the rough bank towards her.
“I trust you ain’t hurt, ma’am? Bless my soul, if it ain’t Miss Evie—Miss Delany, I should say!”
The voice, with its Cockney accent, brought back vague memories of misty mornings, of purpling copses and vivid turf, of battered stone walls and untrimmed hedges masking sunken lanes—all the accompaniments of a day’s hunting in the old life. But why not an Irish voice? With a sudden effort Eveleen found the clue—recalled a young man, not a gentleman, who had come into the neighbourhood on some legal business, and having been bitten by the prevailing mania, had afforded a rich feast of amusement to the members of the hunt.
“It’s not you, Mr Carthew?” she said incredulously.
“’Sh, miss! They call me Tamas Sahib here, and it’s safer. To think of comin’ across you!”
“And they call me Mrs Ambrose,” she laughed, as he helped her up. “But why would you be going about dressed up like this?”
“I ain’t one of your lot,” he avoided her eye. “Master-General of Ordnance to their Highnesses—that’s what I am. The Resident he don’t know nothin’ about me, and I’ll thank you, ma’am, not to tell him nothin’.”