“True; she ain’t a young girl.” The tone was savage, but Richard knew his friend was right. A girl who knew India, brought up by a managing mother accustomed to Indian ways, might have faced the life which had been his for so many painful years; but Eveleen, knowing as little of the country as she did of method and contrivance—what would there be before her but a miserable struggle ending in ruined health and spirits for both? He was not free to cut loose from Khemistan.
“So you must swallow the bitter pill, you see,” Colonel Bayard was saying as they mounted the steps, “and do what you can for my poor Khans from a distance. By the bye, I didn’t tell you that—this place is to be closed for the present; you are to go up to Sahar. I shall have to break it all to them to-morrow. I couldn’t go down the river without bidding ’em farewell, but it will be one of the hardest things I have ever done.”
CHAPTER VIII.
TOO CLEVER BY HALF.
“For the last time!” said Colonel Bayard, with a comical glance of self-pity at Richard, as they rode out the next morning preceded by the chobdars with their silver sticks and followed by the barbaric escort.
“Not a bit of it! You’ll never be left mud-crawling with a black regiment. The G.-G. will find out his mistake in no time, and send for you back.”
“It would take a good deal to make him do that. I was promised the Agency for the down-river states when he sent Lennox here, but there’s no word of it now. Don’t look so shockingly cut up, Richard. I tell you it’s a release from bondage for me, after the lacquey way I have been treated this summer by his lordship—bandied about like a racquet-ball! Old Lennox would have kept me on as his personal assistant—doing the deed first and getting permission afterwards—if I would have stayed; but I asked for furlough instead, and he put the Asteroid at my disposal to take me down the river in the handsomest way. A singular character, that old chap, but a thorough good fellow.”
“I hear he spoke very properly of you at the dinner they gave you before starting.”
“Properly? Nay, I assure you I didn’t know where to look. I might have been Scipio Africanus and Sir Philip Sidney rolled into one, instead of a failed Political going back to his regiment a poorer man than when he left it twenty years ago. By the bye, I don’t know whether I am in order in taking the sowari [retinue] with me to-day. Merely a private individual now, I suppose.”
“Not till you have left Khemistan, surely! If Sir Henry’s attitude is as generous as you say, he couldn’t grudge you the ordinary marks of respect.”
“Ay, but to him they ain’t ordinary, and he means to put an end to ’em. He has no chobdars himself, and he’s going to abolish these. An escort he can tolerate—but only on state occasions, of course—because it can follow him at a gallop, but fellows walking in front of him and making him ride slow—never!”