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Miss Stuart's Legacy

By

Flora Annie Steel

AUTHOR OF
'ON THE FACE OF THE WATERS,' ETC.

London
William Heinemann
1900

MISS STUART'S LEGACY

An Indian railway station in the first freshness of an autumn dawn, with a clear decision of light and shade, unknown to northern latitudes, lending a fictitious picturesqueness to the low-arched buildings festooned with purple creepers. There was a crispness in the air which seemed to belie the possibility of a noon of brass; yet the level beams of the sun had already in them a warning of warmth.

The up-country mail had just steamed out of the station after depositing a scanty store of passengers on the narrow platform, while the down-country train, duly placarded with the information that it carried the homeward-bound mail, had shunted in from the siding where it had been patiently awaiting the signal of a clear line. The engine meanwhile drank breathlessly at the tank, where, in a masonry tower overhead, a couple of bullocks circled round and round, engaged in raising the water from the well beneath to the reservoir beside them. Round and round sleepily, while the primeval wooden wheel creaked and clacked, and the clumsy rope-ladder with its ring of earthen pots let half their contents fall back into the bowels of the earth; round and round dreamily, with the fresh gurgle of the water in their ears, and the blindness of leathern blinkers in their eyes; round and round, as their forebears had gone for centuries in the cool shade of sylvan wells. What was it to the patient creatures whether they watered a snorting western demon labelled "homeward mail," or the chequered mud-fields where the tender wheat spikelets took advantage of every crack in the dry soil? It was little to them who sowed the seed, or who gave the increase, so long as the goad lay in some one's hands. So much the cattle knew, and in this simple knowledge were not far behind the comprehension of their driver, who, wrapped in his cotton sheet, lay dozing while he drove.

The sweetmeat-seller dawdled by, pursued even at dawn by his pest of flies. The water-carriers lounged along uttering their monotonous chant, "Any Hindu drinkers? Any Mussulman drinkers?" while in their van, dusky hands stretched out holding metal cups and bowls, from the very shape of which the religion of the owners might be inferred, owners sitting cheek by jowl in third-class compartments with a gulf unfathomable, impassable, between them in this world and the next. The lank yellow dogs crept among the wheels, licking a precarious meal from the grease-boxes. The grey-headed carrion-crows sat in lines on the wire fencing with beaks wide open in unending yawns. Nothing else appeared to mark the passage of time; indeed the absence of hurry on all sides gave the scene a curious unreality to Western eyes, a feeling which was plainly shown in the expression of a young girl who stood alone beside a small pile of luggage.

"A new arrival," remarked a tall man in undress uniform, who was leaning against the door of a first-class compartment, and talking to its occupants.

"Yes, to judge by complexion and baggage," was the reply. "You'd hardly believe it, but Kate was as trim once; now!--just look at the carriage!"

A gay laugh came from behind a perfect barrier of baths, bundles, and bassinettes. "We hadn't four babies to drag about in those days, George, and I can assure Major Marsden that I'm not a bit ashamed of them, or my complexion. George, dear! do for goodness' sake get baby's bottle filled with hot water at the engine; if he doesn't have something to eat he will cry in ten minutes, and then you will have to take him."

While George, with the proverbial docility of the Anglo-Indian husband and father, strolled off on his errand, the feminine voice came into view in the shape of a cheerful round little woman with a child in her arms and another clinging to her dress. She looked with interest at the girl on the platform. "She seems lonely, doesn't she?"

Major Marsden frowned. He had been thinking the same thing, though he was fond of posing as a man devoid of sentiment; a not unusual affectation with those who are conscious of an over-soft heart. "I wonder what she is doing here," he said, kicking his heels viciously against the iron step of the carriage.

A twinkle of mischief lurked in his companion's blue eyes as she replied:

"'What are you doing here, my pretty maid?'
'Going a-marrying, sir,' she said.

Can't you see the square wooden box which betrays the wedding cake?"

"Then if you want to do a Christian act,--and you ladies love aggressive charity--just step out of your car as dea ex machine, and take her home again. India is no place for Englishwomen to be married in."

"Now don't go on! I know quite well what you are going to say, and I agree,--theoretically. India is an ogre, eating us up body and soul; ruining our health, our tempers, our morals, our manners, our babies."

The laugh died from her lips at the last word, for the spectre of certain separation haunts Indian motherhood too closely to be treated as a jest. Instinctively she held the child tighter to her breast with a little restless sigh; a short holiday at home, and then an empty nest,--that was the future for her! So she went on recklessly: "Oh, yes! Of course we are all bad lots,--neither good mothers, nor good wives."

"My dear Mrs. Gordon! I never said one or the other. I only remarked that Englishwomen had no business in India."

"What's that?" asked George, returning with the bottle.

"Only Major Marsden in a hurry to get rid of me," replied his wife.

"Don't believe her, Gordon! For all-embracing generalities, convertible into rigid personalities at a moment's notice, commend me to you, Mrs. Gordon. But there, I regret to say, goes the last bell."

The train moved off in a series of dislocations, which, painful to witness, were still more painful to endure, and Philip Marsden was left watching the last nod of George Gordon's friendly head, with that curious catching at the heart which comes to all Anglo-Indians as they say good-bye to the homeward-bound. He was contented enough, happy in his work and his play; yet the feeling of exile ran through it all,--as it does always, till pension comes to bid one leave the interests and friends of a lifetime. Then, all too late, the glamour of the East claims the heart, in exchange for the body.

The girl was still standing sentinel by her luggage, and as he passed their eyes met. In sudden impulse he went up and offered help if she required it. His voice, singularly sweet for a man, seemed to make the girl realise her own loneliness, for her lips quivered distinctly. "It is father! I expected him to meet me, and he has not come."

"Should you know him if you saw him?" She stared, evidently surprised, so he went on quickly, "I beg your pardon! I meant that you might not have seen him for some time, and--"

"I haven't seen him since I was a baby," she interrupted, with a sort of hurt dignity; "but of course I should know him from his photograph."

"Of course!" He scanned her face curiously, thinking her little more than a baby now; but he only suggested the possibility of a telegram, and went off in search of one, returning a minute afterwards with several. Behind him came the stationmaster explaining, with the plentiful plurals and Addisonian periods dear to babudom, that without due givings of names it was unpermissible, not to say non-regulation, to deliver telegrams.

"I forgot you couldn't know my name," said the girl frankly, when a rapid scrutiny had shown that none were addressed to her. "I'm Belle Stuart; my father lives at Faizapore."

"Not Colonel Stuart of the Commissariat?"

"Yes! Do you know him?"

A radiant smile lit up her face with such a curve of red lips, and flash of white teeth, that the spectator might well have been infected by its wholesome sweetness into an answering look. Major Marsden's eyes, however, only narrowed with perplexed enquiry as he said bluntly, "Yes, slightly."

"Then perhaps father sent you to fetch me?"

This time he relaxed; confidence is catching. "I'm afraid not; but possibly if he had known I was to be here he might. At all events I can make myself useful."

"How?"

"I can get you a gharri--that is a carriage--and start you for Faizapore. It is sixty miles from here as you know."

She bent down to pick up her rugs. "I did not know. You see I expected father."

Philip Marsden felt impelled to consolation. "He has been delayed. Most likely there has been"--in his haste to put forward a solid excuse he was just about to say "an accident," but floundered instead into a bald "something to detain him."

"There generally is something to detain one in every delay, isn't there?" she asked dryly; adding hastily, "but it is very kind of you to help. You see I have only just arrived in India, so I am quite a stranger."

"People generally are strangers when they first arrive in a new country aren't they?" retorted her companion grimly. Then as his eyes met her smiling ones, he smiled too and asked with a kinder ring in his voice, if there were anything else he could do for her.

"I'm so hungry," she said simply. "Couldn't you take me to get breakfast somewhere? I don't see a refreshment-room, and I hate going by myself."

"There is the dâk bungalow, but," he hesitated for an instant and stood looking at her, as if making up his mind about something; then calling some coolies he bade them take up the luggage. "This way please, Miss Stuart; you will have to walk about half a mile, but you won't mind that either, I expect."

In reply she launched out, as they went along the dusty road, into girlish chatter about the distances she could go without fatigue, the country life at home which seemed so very far off now, and the new existence on which she was just entering.

"You are not in the least like your sisters," he said suddenly.

She laughed. "They aren't my real sisters, you see. Father married again, and they are my stepmother's children. There are five of them--three girls and two boys, besides Charlie who is only six years old--but then he is my brother--my half-brother I mean. It's very funny, isn't it? to have so many brothers and a mother one has never seen. But of course I have their photographs."

He said he was glad of that; yet when he had seen her safely started at breakfast, he retired to the verandah under excuse of a cigar, and found fault with Providence. Briefly, he knew too much of the reality, not to make poor Belle's anticipations somewhat of a ghastly mockery. "Poor child," he thought, "how much easier life would be to some of us, if like Topsy, we growed. What business has that girl's father to be a disreputable scamp? For the matter of that what business has a disreputable scamp to be any girl's father? It's the old problem."

Belle meanwhile eating her breakfast with youthful appetite felt no qualms. Life to her was at its brightest moment. This coming out to India in order to rejoin her father had been the Hegira of her existence, with reference to which all smaller events had to be classified. His approval or disapproval had been her standard of right and wrong, his mind and body her model of human perfection; and so far distance had enabled Colonel Stuart to do justice to this pedestal; for it is easy to touch perfection in a letter, especially when it only extends to one sheet of creamlaid note-paper. Most of us have sufficient principal for such a small dividend.

"I knew father had not forgotten," she said calmly, when an abject badge-wearer was discovered asleep under a castor-oil bush, and proved to be the bearer of a note addressed in the familiar bold flourish to Miss Belle Stuart. "You see he had made all the arrangements, and I am not to start till the heat of the day is over."

"Then I will resign my charge, and say good-bye."

When they had shaken hands he went round to the other verandah where her baggage lay, and looked at the wooden box. Was it a wedding-cake? Even that might be better than life in the home to which she was going, though, for all he knew, the latter might suit her admirably. Then he went and kicked his heels at the station in order to be out of the way, for the bungalow only boasted one room.

[CHAPTER II.]

The dawn of another day was just breaking, when the rattle and clatter which had formed an accompaniment to Belle's wakeful dreams all night long, ceased at the last stage out from Faizapore. Belle stepped out of the palki-gharri to stretch her cramped limbs, and looked round her with eyes in which sleep still lingered.

A mud village lay close to the road, and from an outlying hut the ponies, destined to convey her the remaining five miles, struggled forth reluctantly. The coachman was furtively pulling at some one else's pipe; a naked anatomy, halt and blind of an eye, dribbled water from an earthen pot over the hot axles; two early travellers were bathing in a pool of dirty water. Belle standing in the middle of the glaring white highway, instinctively turned to where, in the distance, a slender church-spire rose above the bank of trees on the horizon. That was familiar!--that she understood. Born in India, and therefore a daughter of the soil, she could not have been further removed in taste and feeling from the toiling self-centred cosmogony of the Indian village in which she stood, had she dropped into it from another planet. So, alien in heart, she passed through the tide of life which sets every morning towards a great cantonment, looking on it as on some strange, new picture. Beyond all this, among people who ate with forks and spoons and went to church on Sundays, lay the life of which she had dreamed for years. The rest was a picturesque background; that was all.

A final flourish of an excruciating horn, gateposts guiltless of gates, a ragged privet hedge curving intermittently to a bright blue house set haphazard, cornerwise, in a square dusty expanse,--and the journey was over.

It was not only her cramped limbs that made Belle feel weak and unsteady as she stood before the seemingly deserted house. Suddenly, from behind a projecting corner, came a wrinkled beldame clad in dingy white bordered with red. With one hand she grasped a skinny child dressed in flannel night garments of Macgregor tartan, with the other she held up her draggling petticoats and salaamed profusely, thus displaying a pair of bandy, blue-trousered legs.

Belle looked at her with distinct aversion. "I think I have made a mistake," she said; "this can't be Colonel Stuart's house."

The woman grinned from ear to ear. "Ar'l right, missy ba. Mem sahib comin'. This b'y sonny baba." She broke in on the whining wail of her voice (which made Belle think of a professional beggar) to apostrophise her charge with loud-tongued abuse for not saying good morning to his "sissy."

Belle gasped. Could this dirty dark boy be her brother Charlie? Then a sudden rush of pity for the little fellow whose big black eyes met hers with such distrust, made her stoop to kiss him. But the child, reluctant and alarmed, struck at her face with his lean brown fingers and then fled into the house howling, followed full tilt by his aged attendant.

Belle would have felt inclined to cry, if the very unexpectedness of the attack, joined to the sight of the ayah's little bandy legs in hot pursuit, had not roused her ever-ready sense of humour. She laughed instead, and in so doing showed that she could hold her own with life; for no one throws up the sponge until the faculty of coming up smiling, even at one's own discomfiture, has been lost. And while she laughed, a new voice asserted itself above the howls within; a voice with, to Belle's ears, a strangely novel intonation, soft yet distinctly staccato, sharpening the vowels, clipping the consonants, and rising in pitch at the end of each sentence. It heralded the advent of a tall, stout lady in a limp cotton wrapper, who straightway took Belle to a languidly-effusive embrace, while she poured out an even flow of wonderings, delights, and endearments. The girl, with the reserve taught by long years of homelessness, felt embarrassed at the warm kisses and tepid tears showered upon her; then, ashamed of her own unresponsiveness, tried hard to realise that this was really the great event,--the homecoming to which she had looked forward ever since she could remember. She felt vexed with herself, annoyed at her own failure to reach high pressure point. Yet she was not conscious of disappointment, and gave herself up willingly to the voluble welcomes of three slender, dark-eyed girls, who presently came running in, clad like their mother in limp cotton wrappers. They sat beside her on the bare string bed in the bare room which looked so cheerless to Belle's English eyes, and chattered, fluttered, and pecked at her with little kisses, like a group of birds on a branch.

Mrs. Stuart was meanwhile drying her ready tears on a coarse, highly-scented pocket handkerchief, giving orders for boundless refreshments, and expressing her joy in alternate English and Hindustani. Belle, beset on all sides by novelty, found it difficult to recognise which language was being spoken, so little change was there in voice or inflection. At last, amid the babel of words and embraces, she managed to enquire for her father. The question produced a sudden gravity, as if some sacred subject had been introduced. In after years she recognised this extreme deference to the housemaster as typical of the mixed race, but at the time, it made her heart beat with a sudden fear of evil.

"Colonel Stuart is very well, thank you," replied her stepmother, showing a distinct tendency to reproduce the coarse handkerchief. "He will, I am sure, be very pleased to see you;--indeed that is one reason why I am glad myself. Though, of course, I welcome you for your own sake too, my darling girl. I am only a stepmother, I know, but I will allow no difference between you and my own three. So I told the mess-president yesterday--'My daughters cannot go to your ball, Captain Jenkins,' I said, 'unless Belle goes also.' So, of course, he sent you an invitation." Mrs. Stuart had a habit of saying "of course" as if she agreed plaintively with the decrees of Providence.

"But when"--began Belle, her mind far from balls.

"To-night," chorused the three girls; a chorus followed by voluble solos adjuring her to put on her smartest frock, because all the men were frantic to see the original of the photograph which, it appeared, had been duly handed round for inspection and admiration. Belle neither blushed nor felt indignant; her face fell however when she found that her father would not be up for another two hours, but the bated breath with which they spoke of his morning sleep prevented her from rebellion. Those two hours seemed an eternity, and as she sat waiting for him in the dim drawing-room, her heart beat with almost sickening force at each sound.

Unconscious as yet of disappointment, of anything save not unpleasant surprise, she still was conscious of an almost pathetic insistence that father must be the father of her dreams.

A mellow voice from the window calling her by name startled her from her watch by the door. She turned, to see a tall figure in scarlet and gold standing against the light which glittered on a trailing sword.

There was no doubt this time. With a cry of "Father? oh yes, you are father!" she was in his arms. To him also came the re-incarnation of a half-forgotten dream. The fair, slim, white-robed girl standing in the dim shadows, made the years vanish and youth return. "Good God, child, how like you are to your poor mother!" he faltered, and the ring in his voice made his daughter feel as if life held no more content.

Despite years of dissipation Colonel Stuart was still a singularly fine-looking man; well set up, and if a trifle fat in his dressing-gown, no more than portly in a tightly-buttoned tunic. He had always had a magnificent way with women, a sort of masterful politeness, a beautiful overbearing condescension, which the majority of the sex described as the sweetest of manners. And now, inspired by his little girl's undisguised admiration, he excelled himself, discoursing on his delight in having her with him, and on the impossibility of thanking Heaven sufficiently for the care it had taken of her. On this last point he spoke in the same terms that he was accustomed to use towards his hostess at the conclusion of a visit; that is to say, with the underlying conviction that she had only done her duty. He drew a touching picture of his own forlornness, when, as a matter of fact, the very thought of her had passed so completely out of his life, that her death would only have caused an unreal regret. His eloquence however brought conviction to himself. So, to all intents and purposes, he became a fond father, because he felt as if he had been one. After all, Belle, even had she known the truth, would have no real cause for distress. We have no lien on the past of another, or on the future either; the present is all we can claim, and that only to a certain limited extent.

In truth it would have required little self-deception to convince any one that Belle had always been an abiding factor in life. She was a daughter any man might well have been proud to possess. Tall and straight, clear-eyed and bright, with wholesome thoughts and tastes expressed in every feature. As she brought a cup of tea to her father, her face alight with pleasure, her eyes brilliant with happiness, she looked the picture of all an English girl ought to be.

"Thank you, my dear," said the Colonel viewing the offering dubiously. "I think,--I mean,--I should prefer a peg,--a B. and S.,--a brandy and soda. The fact is I had a confounded bad night, and it might do me good, you know."

He was faintly surprised at finding himself making excuses for what was a daily habit; but it was delightful to bask in the tender solicitude of Belle's grey eyes, as he poured out, and drank the dose with an air of accurate virtue. Once more he imposed on himself; on every one in fact but the servant, who, with the forethought of laziness, sat outside with the brandy-bottle lest he should be summoned again. And when, finally, the Colonel rode off to his committee on his big Australian charger, Belle thought the world could never have contained a more magnificently martial figure. That this gorgeous apparition should condescend to wave its hand to her at the gate, was at once so bewildering and so natural, that all lesser details faded into insignificance before this astounding realisation of her dreams.

This was fortunate, for many were the readjustments necessary ere the day was over. Breakfast, where Belle sat blissfully at her father's side, revealed two handsome, overdressed young men redolent of scent and sleek as to hair. These the Miss Van Milders, still in rumpled wrappers, introduced as their brothers Walter and Stanley, adding by no means covert chaff about "store clothes," whereat the young fellows giggled like girls, and Belle became almost aggressively sisterly in her manner. Walter was in tea, or rather had been so; as the plantation appeared to be undergoing transmutation into a limited Company, in order, Belle was told, to produce a dividend. Stanley was reading for some examination, after which somebody was to do something for him. It was all very voluble and vague. Meanwhile they stayed at home quite contentedly; satisfied to lounge about, play tennis, and keep a tame mongoose.

Towards the end of the meal, however, a red-haired youth slouched into the room, thrust an unwilling hand into Belle's when introduced as "your cousin Dick," and then sat down in silence with all the open awkwardness of an English schoolboy. Afterwards, whenever Belle's cool grey eyes wandered to that corner, they met a pair of fiery brown ones also on the reconnoitre.

Besides these present relations there were others constantly cropping up in conversation; and of them Belle had enough ere the day was done. The young men chattered over their cigarettes on the verandah; the girls chattered over Belle's boxes, which they insisted on unpacking at once; Mrs. Stuart chattered of, and to her servants. It was a relief when, after luncheon, the whole house settled into the silence of siesta, though Belle herself was far too excited to rest.

Dinner brought a bitter disappointment in Colonel Stuart's absence; for she had excused herself from the ball on plea of fatigue, in the hopes of an evening with her father. It was Cousin Dick who, as they sat down to table, answered the expectation in Belle's face. "The Colonel never dines on ball nights, he goes to mess. You see, the girls bobbing up and down annoy him, and it is beastly to see people bolting their food in curl-papers."

"I'd speak grammar if I were you," retorted Mildred Van Milder, flushing up. Her fringe was a perpetual weariness to her, sometimes demanding the sacrifice of a dance in order to allow hair-curlers to do their perfect work.

"And I wouldn't wear a fringe like a poodle," growled Dick; whereat Mrs. Stuart plaintively wondered whence he got his manners, and wished he was more like her own boys.

Poodles or no poodles, when the dancing-party appeared ready for the fray, Belle could hardly believe her eyes. The sallow-faced girls of the morning in their limp cotton wrappers were replaced by admirable copies of the latest French fashion-prints. Their elaborately-dressed hair, large dark eyes, and cream-coloured skins (to which art had lent a soft bloom denied by nature under Indian skies), joined to the perfect fit of their gowns, compelled attention. Indeed, when Maud, to try the stability of a shoe, waltzed round the room with her brother, Belle was startled at her own admiration for their lithe, graceful, sensuous beauty.

"I'll tell you what it is," cried Mabel, the eldest of the three; "you'll have a ripping good time tonight, Maudie. I never saw you look so cheek." She meant chic, but the spelling was against her. As for Mrs. Stuart, she appeared correctly attired in black satin and bugles. The girls saw to that, suppressing with inexorable firmness the good lady's hankering after gayer colours and more flimsy stuffs.

Left alone with Cousin Dick, Belle pretended to read, while in reality she was all ears for the sound of returning wheels. It was nearly ten o'clock, and, to her simple imagination, time for her father to come home. The clock struck, and Dick, who had been immersed in a book at the further corner of the room, laid it aside, and bringing out a chessboard began to set the men. He paused, frowned, passed both hands through his rough red hair, and finally asked abruptly if she played. A brief negative made him shift the pieces rapidly to a problem, and no more was said. Again the clock struck, and this time Dick came and stood before her. He was a middle-sized, broad-shouldered youth about her own age, with a promise of strength in face and figure. "You had better go to bed," he said still more abruptly. "The Colonel won't be home till morning. It isn't a bit of good your waiting for him."

This was the second time that he had stepped in to her thoughts, as it were, and Belle resented the intrusion. "Don't let me keep you up," she replied. "I'd just as soon be alone."

"Then you'll have your wish, I expect," he answered coolly, as he swept the chessmen together and left the room.

Some two hours after Belle woke from sleep to the sound of an impatient voice. "Bearer! Bearer! peg lao, quick! Hang it all, Raby! you must, you shall stop and give me my revenge. You've the most cursed good luck--"

"Father!" She rose from her chair with cheeks flushed like those of a newly-awakened child. The tall, fair young man who stood beside Colonel Stuart turned at the sound of her voice, then touched his companion on the arm. "Some one is speaking to you."

"God bless my soul, child! I thought you were at the ball. Why didn't you go?" His tone was kind, if a little husky, and he stretched a trembling hand towards her.

"I waited to see you, father," she replied, laying hers on his arm with a touch which was a caress.

The tall young man smiled to himself. "Will you not introduce me to your daughter, Colonel?" he said with a half-familiar bow towards Belle.

Colonel Stuart looked from one to the other as if he had never seen either of them before. "Introduce you,--why not? Belle, this is John Raby: a fellow who has the most infernal good luck in creation."

"I have no inclination to deny the fact at this moment," interposed the other, bowing again.

The implied compliment was quite lost on Belle, whose eyes and ears were for her father only. "I waited for you," she said with a little joyous laugh, "and fell asleep in my chair!"

Once more the Colonel looked from one to the other. The mere fact of his daughter's presence was in his present state confusing, but that she should have been waiting for him was bewildering in the extreme. How many years ago was it that another slim girl in white had gazed on him with similar adoration?

"You had better go to bed now," he said with almost supernatural profundity. "Good night. God bless you."

"Let me stay, please, father. I'm not a bit tired," she pleaded.

He stood uncertain, and John Raby drew out his watch with a contemptuous smile. "Half-past one, Colonel; I must be off."

"Hang it all!" expostulated the other feebly. "You can't go without my revenge. It ain't fair!"

"You shall have it sometime, never fear. Good night, Miss Stuart; we can't afford to peril such roses by late hours."

Again his words fell flat, their only result being that he looked at her with a flash of real interest. When he had gone Belle knelt beside her father's chair, timidly asking if he was angry with her for sitting up.

"Angry!" cried the Colonel, already in a half doze. "No, child! certainly not. Dear! dear! how like you are to your poor mother." The thought roused him, for he stood up shaking his head mournfully. "Go to bed, my dear. We all need rest. It has been a trying day, a very trying day."

Belle, as she laid her head on the pillow, felt that it had been so indeed; yet she was not disappointed with it. She was too young to criticise kindness, and they had all been kind, very kind; even Charlie had forgotten his first fright; and so she fell asleep, smiling at the remembrance of the old ayah's bandy legs.

[CHAPTER III.]

Early morning in the big bazaar at Faizapore. So much can be said; but who with pen alone could paint the scene, or who with brush give the aroma, physical and moral, which, to those familiar with the life of Indian streets, remains for ever the one indelible memory? The mysterious smell indescribable to those who know not the East; the air of sordid money-getting and giving which pervades even the children; the gaily-dressed, chattering stream of people drifting by; but from the grey-bearded cultivator come on a lawsuit from his village, to the sweeper, besom in hand, propelling the black flood along the gutter, the only subject sufficiently interesting to raise one voice above the universal hum, is money. Even the stalwart herdswomen with their kilted skirts swaying at each free bold step, their patchwork bodices obeying laws of decency antipodal to ours, even they, born and bred in the desert, talk noisily of the ghee they are bringing to market in the russet and black jars poised on their heads; and if ghee be not actually money, it is inextricably mixed up with it in the native mind.

All else may fade from the memory; the glare of sunlight, the transparent shadows, the clustering flies and children round the cavernous sweetmeat-shops, the glitter of brazen pots, and the rainbow-hued overflow from the dyers' vats staining the streets like a reflection of the many-tinted cloths festooned to dry overhead. Even the sharper contrasts of the scene may be forgotten; the marriage procession swerving to give way to the quiet dead, swathed in muslins and bound with tinsel, carried high on the string bed, or awaiting sunset and burial in some narrow by-way among green-gold melons and piles of red wheat. But to those who have known an Indian bazaar well, the chink of money, and the smell of a chemist's shop, will ever remain a more potent spell to awaken memory than any elaborate pictures made by pen or pencil.

On this particular morning quite a little crowd was collected round the doorway leading to the house of one Shunker Dâs, usurer, contractor, and honorary magistrate; a man who combined those three occupations into one unceasing manufacture of money. In his hands pice turned to annas, annas to rupees, and rupees in their turn to fat. For there is no little truth in the assertion that the real test of a buniah's (money-lender's) wealth is his weight, and the safest guard for income-tax his girth in inches.

Nevertheless a skeleton lay hidden under Shunker Dâs's mountain of prosperous flesh; a gruesome skeleton whose bones rattled ominously. Between him and the perdition of a sonless death stood but one life; a life so frail that it had only been saved hitherto by the expedient of dressing the priceless boy in petticoats, and so palming him off on the dread Shiva as a girl. At least so said the zenana women, and so in his inmost heart thought Shunker Dâs, though he was a prime specimen of enlightened native society. But on that day the fateful first decade during which the Destroyer had reft away so many baby-heirs from the usurer's home was over; and amid countless ceremonies, and much dispensation of alms, the little Nuttu, with his ears and nose pierced like a girl's, had been attired in the pugree and pyjamas of his sex. Hence the crowd closing in round the Lâlâ's Calcutta-built barouche which waited for its owner to come out. Hence the number of professional beggars, looking on the whole more fat and well-liking than the workers around them, certainly more so than a small group of women who were peeping charily from the door of the next house,--a very different house from Shunker Dâs's pretentious stucco erection with its blue elephants and mottled tigers frescoed round the top storey, and a railway train, flanked by two caricatures of the British soldier, over the courtyard doorway. This was a tall, square, colourless tower, gaining its only relief from the numerous places where the outer skin of bricks had fallen away, disclosing the hard red mortar beneath; mortar that was stronger than stone; mortar that had been ground and spread long years before the word "contractor" was a power in India. Here in poverty, abject in all save honour, dwelt Mahomed Lateef, a Syyed of the Syyeds;[^[1]] and it was his hewers of wood and drawers of water who formed the group at the door, turning their lean faces away disdainfully when the baskets of dough cakes, and trays of sweet rice were brought out for distribution from the idolater's house.

The crowd thickened, but fell away instinctively to give place to a couple of English soldiers who came tramping along shoulder to shoulder, utterly unconcerned and unsympathetic; their Glengarry caps set at the same angle, the very pipes in their mouths having a drilled appearance. Such a quiet, orderly crowd it was; not even becoming audible when Shunker Dâs appeared with little Nuttu, the hero of the day, who in a coat of the same brocade as his father's, and a pugree tied in the same fashion, looked a wizened, changeling double of his unwieldy companion. The barouche was brilliant as to varnish, vivid as to red linings, and the bay Australians were the best money could buy; yet the people, as it passed, took small notice of the Lâlâ, lolling in gorgeous attire against the Berlin-wool-worked cushion which he had bought from the Commissioner's wife at a bazaar in aid of a cathedral. They gave far more attention to a hawk-eyed old man with a cruel, high-bred face, who rode by on a miserable pony, and after returning the Lâlâ's contemptuous salutation with grave dignity, spat solemnly into the gutter.

This was Mahomed Lateef, who but the day before had put the talisman-signet on his right hand to a deed mortgaging the last acre of his ancestral estate to the usurer. Yet the people stood up with respectful salaams to him, while they had only obsequious grins for the other. Indeed, one old patriarch waiting for death in the sun, curled up comfortably, his chin upon his knees, on a bed stuck well into the street, nodded his head cheerfully and muttered "Shunker's father was nobody," over and over again till he fell asleep; to dream perchance of the old order of things.

Meanwhile the Lâlâ waited his turn for audience at the District Officer's bungalow. There were many other aspirants to that honour, seated on a row of cane-bottomed chairs in the verandah, silent, bored, uncomfortable. It is an irony of fate which elevates the chair in India into a patent of position, for nowhere does the native look more thoroughly out of place than in the coveted honour. As it is he clings to it, notably with his legs; those thin legs round whose painful want of contour the tight cotton pantaloons wrinkle all too closely, and which would be so much better tucked away under dignified skirts in true Eastern fashion. But the exotic has a strange fascination for humanity. Waiting there for his turn, the Lâlâ inwardly cursed the Western morality which prevented an immediate and bribe-won entry; but the red-coated badge-wearers knew better than to allow even a munificent shoe-money to interfere with the roster. The harassed-looking, preoccupied official within had an almost uncanny quickness of perception, so the rupees chinked into their pockets, but produced no effect beyond whining voices and fulsome flattery.

"Well, Lâlâ-ji! and what do you want?" asked the representative of British majesty when, at last, Shunker Dâs's most obsequious smile curled out over his fat face. There was no doubt a certain brutality of directness in the salutation, but it came from a deadly conviction that a request lay at the bottom of every interview, and that duty bade its discovery without delay. The abruptness of the magistrate was therefore compressed politeness. As he laid down the pen with which he had been writing a judgment, and leant wearily back in his chair, his bald head was framed, as it were, in a square nimbus formed by a poster on the wall behind. It was four feet square, and held, in treble columns, a list of all the schedules and reports due from his office during the year to come. That was his patent of position; and it was one which grows visibly, as day by day, and month by month, law and order become of more consequence than truth and equity in the government of India.

The Lâlâ's tact bade him follow the lead given. "I want, sahib," he said, "to be made a Rai Bâhâdur."

Now Rai Bâhâdur is an honorific title bestowed by Government for distinguished service to the State. So without more ado Shunker Dâs detailed his own virtues, totalled up the money expended in public utility, and wound up with an offer of five thousand rupees towards a new Female Hospital. The representative of British majesty drew diagrams on his blotting-paper, and remarked, casually, that he would certainly convey the Lâlâ's liberal suggestion about the hospital to the proper authorities; adding his belief that one Puras Râm, who was about to receive the coveted honour, had offered fifteen thousand for the same purpose.

"I will give ten thousand, Huzoor" bid the usurer, with a scowl struggling with his smile; "that will make seventy-five thousand in all; and Tôta Mull got it for building the big tank that won't hold water. If it cost him fifty thousand, may I eat dirt; and I ought to know for I had the contract. It won't last, Huzoor; I know the stuff that went into it."

"Tôta Mull had other services."

"Other services!" echoed Shunker fumbling in his garments, and producing a printed book tied up in a cotton handkerchief. "See my certificates; one from your honour's own hand."

Perhaps the District Officer judged the worth of the others by the measure of his own testimonial, wherein, being then a "griff" of six months' standing, he had recorded Shunker's name opposite a list of the cardinal virtues, for he set the book aside with a sad smile. Most likely he was thinking that in those days his ambition had been a reality, and his liver an idea, and that now they had changed places. "I am glad to see your son looking so well," he remarked with pointed irrelevance. "I hear you are to marry him next month, and that everything is to be on a magnificent scale. Tôta Mull will be quite eclipsed; though his boy's wedding cost him sixty-five thousand,--he told me so himself. Accept my best wishes on the occasion."

"Huzoor! I will give fifteen thou--" British majesty rose gravely with the usual intimation of dismissal, and a remark that it was always gratified at liberality. Shunker Dâs left the presence with his smile thoroughly replaced by a scowl, though his going there had simply been an attempt to save his pocket; for he knew right well that he had not yet filled up the measure of qualification for a Rai Bâhâdur-ship.

While this interview had been going on, another of a very different nature was taking place outside a bungalow on the other side of the road, where Philip Marsden stood holding the rein of his charger and talking to Mahomed Lateef, whose pink-nosed pony was tied to a neighbouring tree.

The old man, in faded green turban and shawl, showed straight and tall even beside the younger man's height and soldierly carriage. "Sahib," he said, "I am no beggar to whine at the feet of a stranger for alms. I don't know the sahib over yonder whose verandah, as you see, is crowded with such folk. They come and go too fast these sahibs, nowadays; and I am too old to tell the story of my birth. If it is forgotten, it is forgotten. But you know me, Allah be praised! You feel my son's blood there on your heart where he fell fighting beside you! Which of the three was it? What matter? They all died fighting. And this one is Benjamin; I cannot let him go. He is a bright boy, and will give brains, not blood, to the Sirkar, if I can only get employment for him. So I come to you, who know me and mine."

Philip Marsden laid his hand on the old man's shoulder. "That is true. Khân sahib. What is it I can do for you?"

"There is a post vacant in the office, Huzoor! It is not much, but a small thing is a great gain in our poor house. The boy could stay at home, and not see the women starve. It is only writing-work, and thanks to the old mullah, Murghub Admed is a real khush nawis (penman). Persian and Arabic, too, and Euclidus, and Algebra; all a true man should know. If you would ask the sahib."

"I'll go over now. No, no, Khân sahib! I am too young, and you are too old."

But Mahomed Lateef held the stirrup stoutly with lean brown fingers. "The old help the young into the saddle always, sahib. It is for you boys to fight now, and for us to watch and cry 'Allah be with the brave!'"

So it happened that as Shunker Dâs drove out of the District Officer's compound, Major Marsden rode in. Despite his scowl, the usurer stood up and salaamed profusely with both hands, receiving a curt salute in return.

British majesty was now in the verandah disposing of the smaller fry in batches. "Come inside," it said, hastily dismissing the final lot. "I've only ten minutes left for bath and breakfast, but you'll find a cigar there, and we can talk while I tub."

Amid vigorous splashings from within Major Marsden unfolded his mission, receiving in reply a somewhat disjointed enquiry as to whether the applicant had passed the Middle School examination, for otherwise his case was hopeless.

"And why, in Heaven's name?" asked his hearer impatiently.

The magistrate having finished his ablutions appeared at the door in scanty attire rubbing his bald head with a towel. "Immutable decree of government."

"And loyalty, family, influence--what of them?"

A shrug of the shoulders,--"Ask some one else. I am only a barrel-organ grinding out the executive and judicial tunes sent down from headquarters."

"And a lively discord you'll make of it in time! But you are wrong. A man in your position is, as it were, trustee to a minor's estate and bound to speak up for his wards."

"And be over-ridden! No good! I've tried it. Oh lord! twelve o'clock and I had a case with five pleaders in it at half-past eleven. Well, I'll bet the four-anna bit the exchange left me from last month's pay, that my judgment will be upset on appeal."

"I pity you profoundly."

"Don't mention it; there's balm in Gilead. This is mail-day, and I shall hear from my wife and the kids. Good-bye!--I'm sorry about the boy, but it can't be helped."

"It strikes me it will have to be helped some day," replied Major Marsden as he rode off.

Meanwhile a third interview, fraught with grave consequences to this story, had just taken place in the Commissariat office whither Shunker Dâs had driven immediately after his rebuff, with the intention of robbing Peter to pay Paul; in other words, of getting hold of some Government contract, out of which he could squeeze the extra rupees required for the purchase of the Rai Bâhâdur-ship; a proceeding which commended itself to his revengeful and spiteful brain. As it so happened, he appeared in the very nick of time; for he found Colonel Stuart looking helplessly at a telegram from headquarters, ordering him to forward five hundred camels to the front at once.

Now the Faizapore office sent in the daily schedules, original, duplicate, and triplicate, with commendable regularity, and drew the exact amount of grain sanctioned for transport animals without fail; nevertheless a sudden demand on its resources was disagreeable. So, as he had done once or twice before in this time of war and rumours of wars, the chief turned to the big contractor for help; not without a certain uneasiness, for though a long course of shady transactions had blunted Colonel Stuart's sense of honour towards his equals, it had survived to an altogether illogical extent towards his inferiors. Now his private indebtedness to the usurer was so great that he could not afford to quarrel with him; and this knowledge nurtured a suspicion that Shunker Dâs made a tool of him, an idea most distasteful both to pride and honour. No mental position is more difficult to analyse than that of a man, who having lost the desire to do the right from a higher motive, clings to it from a lower one. Belle's father, for instance, did not hesitate to borrow cash from monies intrusted to his care; but he would rather not have borrowed it from a man with whom he had official dealings.

Shunker Dâs, however, knew nothing, and had he known would have credited little, of this survival of honour. It seemed impossible in his eyes that the innumerable dishonesties of the Faizapore office could exist without the knowledge of its chief. Bribery was to him no crime; nor is it one to a very large proportion of the people of India. To the ignorant, indeed, it seems such a mere detail of daily life that it is hard for them to believe in judicial honesty. Hence the ease with which minor officials extort large sums on pretence of carrying the bribe to the right quarter; and hence again comes, no doubt, many a whispered tale of corruption in high places.

"I shall lose by this contract, sahib," said the Lâlâ, when the terms had been arranged; "but I rely on your honour's generous aid in the future. There are big things coming in, when the Protector of the Poor will doubtless remember his old servant, whose life and goods are always at your honour's disposal."

"I have the highest opinion of,--of your integrity, Lâlâ sahib," replied the Colonel evasively, "and of course shall take it,--I mean your previous services--into consideration, whenever it--it is possible to do so." The word integrity had made him collapse a little, but ere the end of the sentence he had recovered his self-esteem, and with it his pomposity.

The Lâlâ's crafty face expanded into a smile. "We understand each other, sahib, and if--!" here he dropped his voice to a confidential pitch.

Five minutes after Colonel Stuart's debts had increased by a thousand rupees, and the Lâlâ was carefully putting away a duly stamped and signed I.O.U. in his pocket-book; not that he assigned any value to it, but because it was part of the game. Without any distinct idea of treachery, he always felt that Lukshmi, the goddess of Fortune, had given him one more security against discomfiture when he managed to have the same date on a contract and a note of hand. Not that he anticipated discomfiture either. In fact, had any one told him that he and the Colonel were playing at cross-purposes, he would have laughed the assertion to scorn. He had too high an opinion of the perspicacity of the sahib-logue, and especially of the sahib who shut his eyes to so many irregularities, to credit such a possibility.

So he drove homewards elate, and on the way was stopped in a narrow alley by an invertebrate crowd, which, without any backbone of resistance, blocked all passage, despite the abuse he showered around. "Run over the pigs! Drive on, I say," he shouted to the driver, when other means failed.

"Best not, Shunker," sneered a little gold-earringed Rajpoot amongst the crowd, "there's a sepoy in yonder shooting free."

The Lâlâ sank back among his cushions, green with fear. At the same moment an officer in undress uniform rode up as if the street were empty, the crowd making way before him. "What is it, havildar (sergeant)?" he asked sharply, reining up before an open door where a sentry stood with rifle ready.

"Private Afzul Khân run amuck, Huzoor!"

Major Marsden threw himself from his horse and looked through the door into the little court within. It was empty, but an archway at right angles led to an inner yard. "When?"

"Half an hour gone--the guard will be here directly, Huzoor! They were teasing him for being an Afghan, and saying he would have to fight his own people."

"Any one hurt?"

"Jeswunt Rai and Gurdit Singh, not badly; he has--seven rounds left, sahib, and swears he won't be taken alive."

The last remark came hastily, as Major Marsden stepped inside the doorway. He paused, not to consider, but because the tramp of soldiers at the double came down the street. "Draw up your men at three paces on either side of the door," he said to the native officer. "If you hear a shot, go on the house-top and fire on him as he sits. If he comes out alone, shoot him down."

"Allah be with the brave!" muttered one or two of the men, as Philip Marsden turned once more to enter the courtyard. It lay blazing in the sunshine, open and empty; but what of the dim archway tunnelling a row of buildings into that smaller yard beyond, where Afzul Khân waited with murder in his heart, and his finger on the trigger of his rifle? There the Englishman would need all his nerve. It was a rash attempt he was making; he knew that right well, but he had resolved to attempt it if ever he got the opportunity. Anything, he had told himself, was better than the wild-beast-like scuffle he had witnessed not long before; a hopeless, insane struggle ending in death to three brave men, one of them the best soldier in the regiment. The remembrance of the horrible scene was strong on him as his spurs clicked an even measure across the court.

It was cooler in the shadow, quite a relief after the glare. Ah!... just as he had imagined! In the far corner a crouching figure and a glint of light on the barrel of a rifle. No pause; straight on into the sunlight again; then suddenly the word of command rang through the court boldly. "Lay down your arms!"

The familiar sound died away into silence. It was courage against power, and a life hung on the balance. Then the long gleam of light on the rifle wavered, disappeared, as Private Afzul Khân stood up and saluted. "You are a braver man than I, sahib," he said. That was all.

A sort of awed whisper of relief and amazement ran through the crowd as Philip Marsden came out with his prisoner, and gave orders for the men to fall in. Two Englishmen in mufti had ridden up in time for the final tableau; and one of them, nodding his head to the retreating soldiers, said approvingly, "That is what gave, and keeps us India."

"And that," returned John Raby pointing to Shunker Dâs who with renewed arrogance was driving off, "will make us lose it."

"My dear Raby! I thought the moneyed classes--"

"My dear Smith! if you think that when the struggle comes, as come it must, our new nobility, whose patent is plunder, will fight our battles against the old, I don't."

They argued the point all the way home without convincing each other, while Time with the truth hidden in his wallet passed on towards the Future.

[CHAPTER IV.]

Had any one, a week before his daughter arrived, told Colonel Stuart that her presence would be a pleasant restraint upon him, he would have been very angry. Yet such was the fact. Her likeness to her mother carried him back to days when his peccadilloes could still be regarded as youthful follies, and people spared a harsh verdict on what age might be expected to remedy. Then her vast admiration gave a reality to his own assumptions of rectitude; for the Colonel clung theoretically to virtue with great tenacity, in a loud-voiced, conservative "d---- you if you don't believe what I say" sort of manner. He also maintained a high ideal in regard to the honour of every one else, based on a weak-kneed conviction that his own was above suspicion.

He was proud of Belle too, fully recognising that with her by his side his grey hairs became reverend. So he pulled himself up to some small degree, and began to sprinkle good advice among the younger men with edifying gravity. As for Belle she was supremely happy. No doubt had she been "earnest" or "soulful" or "intense" she might have found spots on her sun with the greatest ease; but she was none of these things. At this period of her existence nothing was further from her disposition than inward questionings on any subject. She took life as she found it, seeing only her own healthy, happy desires in its dreary old problems, and remaining as utterly unconscious that she was assimilating herself to her surroundings as the caterpillar which takes its colour from the leaf on which it feeds. For a healthy mind acts towards small worries as the skin does towards friction; it protects itself from pain by an excess of vitality. It is only when pressure breaks through the blister that its extent is realised.

In good truth Belle's life was a merry one. The three girls were good-nature itself, especially when they found the new arrival possessed none of their own single-hearted desire for matrimony. Her stepmother, if anything, was over-considerate, being a trifle inclined to make a bugbear of the girl's superior claims to her father's affection. The housekeeping was lavishly good, and men of a certain stamp were not slow to avail themselves of the best mutton and prawn curry in Faizapore. Where the money came from which enabled the Stuarts to keep open house, they did not enquire. Neither did Belle, who knew no more about the value of things than a baby in arms. As for the Colonel, he had long years before acquired the habit of looking on his debts as his principal, and treating his pay as the interest. So matters went smoothly and swiftly for the first month or so, during which time Belle might have been seen everywhere in the company of the three Miss Van Milders, cheerfully following their lead with a serene innocence that kept even the fastest of a very fast set in check. Once or twice she saw Philip Marsden, and was rallied by the girls on her acquaintance with that solitary misogynist. Mrs. Stuart, indeed, went so far as to ask him to dinner, even though he had not called, on the ground that he was the richest man in the station, and Belle's interests must not be neglected though she was only a stepdaughter. But he sent a polite refusal, and so the matter dropped; nor to Mrs. Stuart's open surprise did Belle make any other declared conquest.

Yet, unnoticed by all, there was some one, who long before the first month was out, would willingly have cut himself into little pieces in order to save his idol from the least breath of disappointment. So it was from Cousin Dick's superior knowledge of Indian life that Belle learnt many comforting, if curious excuses for things liable to ruffle even her calm of content.

Poor Dick! Hitherto his efforts in all directions had resulted in conspicuous failure; chiefly, odd though it may seem, because he happened to be born under English instead of Indian skies. In other words, because he was not what bureaucracies term "a Statutory Native." His mother, Mrs. Stuart's younger sister, had run away with a young Englishman who, having ruined himself over a patent, was keeping soul and body together by driving engines. In some ways she might have done worse, for Smith senior was a gentleman; but he possessed, unfortunately, just that unstable spark of genius which, like a will-o'-the-wisp leads a man out of the beaten path without guiding him into another. The small sum of money she brought him was simply so much fuel to feed the flame; and, within a few months of their marriage, the soft, luxurious girl was weeping her eyes out in a miserable London lodging, while he went the rounds with his patent. There Dick was born, and thence after a year or two she brought them both back to the elastic house, the strong family affection, and lavish hospitality which characterise the Eurasian race. Not for long, however, since her husband died of heat-apoplexy while away seeking for employment, and she, after shedding many tears, succumbed to consumption brought on by the fogs and cold of the north. So, dependent on various uncles and aunts in turn, little Dick Smith had grown up with one rooted desire in the rough red head over which his sleek, soft guardians shook theirs ominously. Briefly, he was to be an engineer like his father. He broke open everything to see how it worked, and made so many crucial experiments that the whole family yearned for the time when he should join the Government Engineering College at Roorkee. And then, just when this desirable consummation was within reach, some one up among the deodars at Simla, or in an office at Whitehall, invented the "Statutory Native," and there was an end of poor Dick's career; for a Statutory Native is a person born in India of parents habitually resident and domiciled in the country. True, the college was open to the boy for his training; but with all the Government appointments awarded to successful students closed to him by the accident of his birth, his guardians naturally shook their heads again over an expensive education which would leave him, practically, without hope of employment. For, outside Government service, engineers are not, as yet, wanted in India. He might, of course, had he been the son of a rich man, have been sent home to pass out as an Englishman through the English college. As it was the boy, rebellious to the heart's core, was set to other employment. Poor Dick! If his European birth militated against him on the one side, his Eurasian parentage condemned him on the other. After infinite trouble his relations got him a small post on the railway, whence he was ousted on reduction; another with a private firm which became bankrupt. The lad's heart and brains were elsewhere, and as failure followed on failure, he gave way to fits of defiance, leading him by sheer excess of energy into low companionship and bad habits. At the time of Belle's arrival he was trying to work off steam as an unpaid clerk in his uncle's office when a boy's first love revolutionized his world; love at first sight, so enthralling, so compelling, that he did not even wonder at the change it wrought in him. Belle never knew, perhaps he himself did not recognise, how much of the calm content of those first few months was due to Dick's constant care. A silent, unreasoning devotion may seem a small thing viewed by the head, but it keeps the heart warm. Poor, homeless, rebellious Dick had never felt so happy, or so good, in all his life; and he would kneel down in his hitherto prayerless room and pray that she might be kept from sorrow, like any young saint. Yet he had an all-too-intimate acquaintance with the corruption of Indian towns, and an all-too-precocious knowledge of evil.

Belle in her turn liked him; there was something more congenial in his breezy, tempestuous, nature than in the sweetness of her stepbrothers, and unconsciously she soon learnt to come to him for comfort. "Charlie tells such dreadful stories," she complained one day, "and he really is fond of whisky-and-water. I almost wish father wouldn't give him any."

"The governor thinks it good for him, I bet," returned Dick stoutly. "I believe it is sometimes. Then as for lies! I used to tell 'em myself; it's the climate. He'll grow out of it, you'll see; I did."

Now Dick's truthfulness was, as a rule, so uncompromising that Belle cheered up; as for the boy, his one object then was to keep care from those clear eyes; abstract truth was nowhere.

The next time Sonny baba was offered a sip from his father's glass, he refused hastily. Pressure produced a howl of terror; nor was it without the greatest difficulty that he was subsequently brought to own that Cousin Dick had threatened to kill him if he ever touched a "peg" again. Luckily for the peace of the household this confession was made in the Colonel's absence, when only Mrs. Stuart's high, strident voice could be raised in feeble anger. The culprit remained unrepentant; the more so because Belle assoilzied him, declaring that Charlie ought not to be allowed to touch the horrid mixture. Whereupon her stepmother sat and cried softly with the boy on her lap, making both Belle and Dick feel horribly guilty, until, the incident having occurred at lunch, both the sufferers fell asleep placidly. When Belle returned from her afternoon ride she found Mrs. Stuart in high good humour, decanting a bottle of port wine. "You frightened me so, my dear," she said affectionately, "that I sent for the doctor, and he says port wine is better, so I'm glad you mentioned it." And Belle felt more guilty than ever.

These afternoon rides were Dick's only trouble. He hated the men who came about the house, and more especially the favoured many who were allowed to escort the "Van" as Belle's three stepsisters were nick-named. It made him feel hot and cold all over to think of her in the company which he found suitable enough for his cousins. But then it seemed to him as if no one was good enough for Belle,--he himself least of all. He dreamed wild, happy dreams of doing something brave, fine, and manly; not so much from any desire of thereby winning her, but because his own love demanded it imperiously. For the first time the needle of his compass pointed unhesitatingly to the pole of right. He confided these aspirations to the girl, and they would tell each other tales of heroism until their cheeks flushed, and their eyes flashed responsive to the deeds of which they talked. One day Dick came home full of the story of Major Marsden and the Afghan sepoy; and they agreed to admire it immensely. After that Dick made rather a hero of the Major, and Belle began to wonder why the tall quiet man who had been so friendly at their first meeting, kept so persistently aloof from her and hers. He was busy, of course, but so were others, for these were stirring times. The arsenal was working over hours, and all through the night, long files of laden carts crept down the dusty roads, bearing stores for the front.

To all outward appearance, however, society took no heed of these wars or rumours of wars, but went on its way rejoicing in the winter climate which made amusement possible. And no one in the station rejoiced more than Belle. Major Marsden, watching her from afar, told himself that a girl who adopted her surroundings--and such surroundings!--so readily, was not to be pitied. She was evidently well able to take care of herself; yet, many a time, as he sat playing whist while others were dancing, he caught himself looking up to see who the partner might be with whom she was hurrying past to seek the cooler air of the gardens, where seats for two were dimly visible among the coloured lanterns.

For the most part, however, Belle's partners were boys, too young to have lost the faculty of recognising innocent unconsciousness. But one night at a large ball given to a departing regiment, she fell into the hands of a stranger who had come in from an outstation in order to continue a pronounced flirtation which Maud Van Milder had permitted during a dull visit to a friend. That astute young lady having no intention of offending permanent partners for his sake, handed him over to Belle for a dance, and the latter, failing to fall in with his step during the first turn, pleaded fatigue as the easiest way of getting through the penance.

Philip at his whist, saw her pass down the corridor towards the garden; and, happening to know her companion, played a false card, lost the trick, and apologised.

"Time yet, if we look out," replied his partner; but this was exactly what the Major could not do, and the rubber coming swiftly to an end, he made an excuse for cutting out, and followed Belle into the garden, wondering who could have introduced her to such a man. To begin with he was not fit for decent society, and in addition he had evidently favoured the champagne. Philip had no definite purpose in his pursuit, until from a dark corner he heard Belle's clear young voice with a touch of hauteur in it. Then the impulse to get her away from her companion before he had a chance of making himself objectionable, came to the front, joined to an unexpected anger and annoyance.

"I have been looking for you everywhere, Miss Stuart. You are wanted," said Philip going up to them.

"Hallo, Marsden! what a beast you are to come just as we were gettin' confidential--weren't we?" exclaimed Belle's companion with what was meant to be a fascinating leer. She turned from one face to the other; but if the one aroused dislike and contempt, the air of authority in Major Marsden's touched her pride.

"Who wants me?" she asked calmly.

"Who!" echoed her partner. "Come, that's a good one! We both want you; don't we, Marsden?"

Luckily for the speaker Philip recognised his own imprudence in risking an altercation. The only thing to be done now, was to get the girl away as soon as possible.

"Exactly so;" he replied, crushing down his anger, "Miss Stuart can choose between us."

Belle rose superbly.

"You seem to forget I can go alone." And alone she went, while her partner shrieked with noisy laughter, avowing that he loved a spice of the devil in a girl.

Philip moodily chewing the end of his cheroot ere turning in felt that the rebuff served him right, though he could not restrain a smile as he thought of Belle's victorious retreat. By that time, however, subsequent facts had enlightened her as to Philip's possible meaning, and the sight of her former partner being inveigled away from waltzing to the billiard room by the senior subaltern, made her turn so pale that John Raby, on whose arm she was leaning, thought she was afraid.

"He won't be allowed to come back, Miss Stuart," he said consolingly. "And I apologise in the name of the committee for the strength of the champagne."

Belle's mouth hardened. "There is no excuse for that sort of thing. There never can be one."

He looked at her curiously.

"I wouldn't say that, Miss Stuart. It is a mistake to be so stern. For my part I can forgive anything. It is an easy habit to acquire--and most convenient."

Belle, however, could not even forgive herself. She lay tossing about enacting the scene over and over again, wondering what Major Marsden must think of her. How foolish she had been! Why had she not trusted him? Why had he not made her understand?

Being unable to sleep, she rose, and long ere her usual hour was walking about the winding paths which intersected the barren desert of garden where nothing grew but privet and a few bushes of oleander. This barrenness was not Dame Nature's fault, for just over the other side of the wide white road John Raby's garden was ablaze with blossom. Trails of Maréchale Niel roses, heavy with great creamy cups, hung over the low hedge, and a sweet English scent of clove-pinks and mignonette was wafted to her with every soft, fitful gust of wind. She felt desperately inclined to cross the intervening dust into this paradise, and stood quite a long time at the blue gate-posts wondering why a serpent seemed to have crept into her own Eden. The crow's long-drawn note came regularly from a kuchnâr tree that was sheeted with white geranium-like flowers; the Seven Brothers chattered noisily among the yellow tassels of the cassia, and over head, against the cloudless sky, a wedge-shaped flight of cranes was winging its way northward, all signs that the pleasant cold weather was about to give place to the fiery furnace of May; but Belle knew nothing of such things as yet, so the vague sense of coming evil, which lay heavily on her, seemed all the more depressing from its unreasonableness. A striped squirrel became inquisitive over her still figure and began inspection with bushy tail erect and short starts of advance, till it was scared by the clank of bangles and anklets as a group of Hindu women, bearing bunches of flowers and brazen lotahs of milk for Seetlâs' shrine, came down the road; beside them, in various stages of toddle, the little children for whom their mothers were about to beg immunity from small-pox. Of all this again Belle knew nothing; but suddenly, causelessly, it struck her for the first time that she ought to know something. Who were these people? What were they doing? Where were they going? One small child paused to look at her and she smiled at him. The mother smiled in return, and the other women looked back half surprised, half pleased, nodding, and laughing as they went on their way.

Why? Belle, turning to enquire after the late breakfast, felt oppressed by her own ignorance. In the verandah she met the bearer coming out of the Colonel's window with a medicine bottle in his hand. Did her ignorance go so far that her father should be ill and she not know of it? "Budlu!" she asked hastily, "the Colonel sahib isn't ill, is he?"

The man, who had known her mother, and grown grey with his master, raised a submissive face. "No, missy baba, not ill. Colonel sahib, he drunk."

"Drunk!" she echoed mechanically, too astonished for horror. "What do you mean?"

"Too much wine drunk,--very bad," explained Budlu cheerfully.

She caught swiftly at the words with a sense of relief from she knew not what. "Ah, I see! the wine last night was bad, and disagreed with him?"

"Damn bad!" Budlu's English was limited but not choice. She remarked on it at the breakfast-table, repeating his words and laughing. None of the girls were down, but Walter and Stanley giggled; and the latter was apparently about to say something facetious, when his words changed into an indignant request that Dick would look out, and keep his feet to himself.

"Was it you I kicked?" asked Dick innocently. "I thought it was the puppy." Then he went on fast as if in haste to change the subject: "I often wonder why you don't learn Hindustani, Belle. You'd be ashamed not to speak the lingo in other countries. Why not here? I'll teach you if you like."

"There's your chance, Belle!" sneered Stanley, still smarting from Dick's forcible method of ensuring silence. "He really is worth ten rupees a month as moonshee, and 'twill save the governor's pocket if it goes in the family."

An unkind speech, no doubt; yet it did good service to Dick by ensuring Belle's indignant defence, and her immediate acceptance of his offer; for she was ever ready of tongue, and swift of sympathy, against injustice or meanness.

So the little incident of the morning passed without her understanding it in the least. Nevertheless Dick found it harder and harder every day to manipulate facts, and to stand between his princess and the naked, indecent truth. Her curiosity in regard to many things had been aroused, and she asked more questions in the next four days than she had asked in the previous four months; almost scandalizing the Van Milder clan by the interest she took in things of which they knew nothing. It was all very well, the girls said, if she intended to be a zenana-mission lady, but without that aim it seemed to them barely correct that she should know how many wives the khansamah (butler) had. As for the boys, they rallied her tremendously about her Hindustani studies, for, like most of their race, they prided themselves on possessing but a limited acquaintance with their mother tongue; Walter, indeed, being almost boastful over the fact that he had twice failed for the Higher Standard. Then the whole family chaffed her openly because she had a few sensible talks with John Raby, the young civilian; and when she began to show a certain weariness of pursuing pleasure in rear of the "Van," insisted that she must be in love with him without knowing it.

"I don't like Raby," said Mildred, the youngest and least artificial of the sisters. "Jack Carruthers told me the governor had been dropping a lot of money to him at écarté."

"I don't see what you and Mr. Carruthers have to do with father's amusements," flashed out Belle in swift anger. "I suppose he can afford it, and at least he never stints you,--I mean the family," she added hastily, fearing to be mean.

"Quite true, my dear! He's a real good sort, is the governor, about money, and he can of course do as he likes; but Raby oughtn't to gamble; it isn't form in a civilian. You needn't laugh, Belle, it's true; it would be quite different if he was in the army."

"Soldiers rush in where civilians fear to tread," parodied Belle contemptuously. "I wish people wouldn't gossip so. Why can't they leave their neighbours alone?"

Nevertheless that afternoon she stole over to the office, which was only separated from the house by an expanse of dusty, stubbly grass, and seeing her father alone in his private room comfortably reading the paper, slipped to his side, and knelt down.

"Well, my pretty Belle," he said caressing her soft fluffy hair, "why aren't you out riding with the others?"

"I didn't care to go; then you were to be at home, and I like that best. I don't see much of you as a rule, father."

Colonel Stuart's virtue swelled visibly, as it always did under the vivifying influence of his daughter's devotion. "I am a busy man, my dear, you must not forget that," he replied a trifle pompously; "my time belongs to the Government I have the honour to serve." The girl was a perfect godsend to him, acting on his half-dead sensibilities like a galvanic battery on paralysed nerve-centres. He was dimly conscious of this, and also of relief that the influence was not always on him.

"I know you are very busy, dear," she returned, nestling her head on his arm, as she seated herself on the floor. "That's what bothers me. Couldn't I help you in your work sometimes? I write a very good hand, so people say."

Colonel Stuart let his paper fall in sheer astonishment. "Help me! why my dear child, I have any number of clerks."

"But I should like to help!" Her voice was almost pathetic; there was quite a break in it.

Her father looked at her in vague alarm. "You are not feeling ill, are you, Belle? Not feverish, I hope, my dear! It's a most infernal climate though, and one can't be too careful. You'd better go and get your mother to give you five grains of quinine. I can't have you falling sick, I can't indeed; just think of the anxiety it would be."

Belle, grateful for her father's interest, took the quinine; but no drug, not even poppy or mandragora, had power to charm away her restless dissatisfaction. Dick's office was no sinecure, and even his partial eyes could not fail to see that she was often captious, almost cross. It came as a revelation to him, for hitherto she had been a divinity in his eyes; and now, oh strange heresy! he found himself able to laugh at her with increased, but altered devotion. Hitherto he had wreathed her pedestal with flowers; now he kept the woman's feet from thorns, and the impulse to make their pathways one grew stronger day by day. She, unconscious of the position, added fuel to the flame by choosing his society, and making him her confidant. Naturally with one so emotional as Dick, the crisis was not long in coming, and music, of which he was passionately fond, brought it about in this wise; for Belle played prettily, and he used to sit and listen to her like the lover in Frank Dicksee's Harmony, letting himself drift away on a sea of pleasure or pain, he scarcely knew which. So, one afternoon when they were alone in the house together, she sat down to the piano and played Schubert's Frühlingslied. The sunshine lay like cloth of gold outside, the doves cooed ceaselessly, the scent of the roses in John Raby's garden drifted in through the window with the warm wind which stirred the little soft curls on Belle's neck. The perfume of life got into the lad's brain, and almost before he knew it, his arms were round the girl, his kisses were on her lips, and his tale of love in her ears.

It was very unconventional of course, but very natural,--for him. For her the sudden rising to her full height with amazement and dislike in her face was equally natural, and even more unforeseen. The sight of it filled poor Dick with such shame and regret, that his past action seemed almost incredible to his present bewilderment. "Forgive me, Belle," he cried, "I was mad; but indeed I love you,--I love you."

She stood before him like an insulted queen full of bitter anger. "I will never forgive you. How dare you kiss me? How dare you say you love me?"

The lad's combativeness rose at her tone. "I suppose any one may dare to love you. I'm sorry I kissed you, Belle, but my conduct doesn't alter my love."

His manner, meant to be dignified, tended to bombast, and the girl laughed scornfully. "Love indeed! You're only a boy! what do you know about love?"

"More than you do apparently."

"I'm glad you realise the fact if that is what you call love."

"At any rate I'm older than you."

The retort that he was old enough to know better rose to Belle's lips, but a suspicion that this childish squabbling was neither correct nor dignified, made her pause and say loftily, "How can you ask me to forgive such a mean ungentlemanly thing?"

The last epithet was too much for Dick; he looked at her as if she had struck him. "Don't say that, Belle," he said hoarsely. "It's bad enough that it's true, and that you don't understand; but don't say that." He leant over the piano and buried his face in his hands in utter despair. For the first time a pulse of pity shot through the storm of physical and mental repulsion in the girl's breast, but she put it from her fiercely. "Why shouldn't I say it if it is true?"

"Because you are kind; always so good and kind."

Again the pity had to be repulsed, this time still more harshly. "You will say next that I've been too kind, that I encouraged you, I suppose; that would put the finishing touch to your meanness."

This speech put it to Dick's patience; he caught her by both hands, and stood before her masterful in his wrath. "You shall not say such things to me, Belle! Look me in the face and say it again if you dare. You know quite well how I love and reverence you; you know that I would die rather than offend you. I forgot everything but you,--I lost myself,--you know it."

The thrill in his voice brought a new and distinctly pleasurable sense of power to the young girl, and, alas! that it should be so, made her more merciless. "I prefer actions to words. You have insulted me and I will never speak to you again." She regretted this assertion almost as it was uttered; it went too far and bound her down too much. She was not always going to be angry with poor Dick surely? No! not always, but for the present decidedly angry, very angry indeed.

"Insult!" echoed Dick drearily, letting her hands slip from his. "There you go again; but fellows do kiss their cousins sometimes."

Had there been any grown-up spectators to this scene they must have laughed at the full-blown tragedy of both faces, and the alternate bathos and pathos of the pleas. They were so young, so very young, this girl and boy, and neither of them really meant what they said, Belle especially, with her vicious retort: "I am not your cousin, and I'm glad of it. I'm glad that I have nothing to do with you."

As before her harshness overreached itself, and made a man of him. "You want to put me out of your life altogether, Belle," he said more steadily, "because I have made you angry. You have a right to be angry, and I will go. But not for always. You don't wish that yourself, I think, for you are kind. Oh Belle! be like yourself! say one kind word before I go."

Again the consciousness of power made her merciless, and she stood silent, yet tingling all over with a half-fearful curiosity as to what he would say next.

"One kind word," he pleaded; "only one."

He waited a minute, then, with a curse on his own folly in expecting pity, flung out of the room. So it was all over! A genuine regret came into the girl's heart and she crept away miserably to her own room, and cried.

"I wonder Dick isn't home to dinner," remarked Mrs. Stuart when that meal came round. "I do hope he isn't going back to his old habit of staying out. He heard to-day that his application for a post in the Salt Department was refused, and he has no patience like my own boys. I do hope he will come to no harm."

The empty chair renewed Belle's remorseful regret.

"Well! I can't have him kicking his heels in my office much longer," remarked the Colonel crossly. "The head-clerk complains of him. Confound his impudence! he actually interfered in the accounts the other day, and showed regular distrust. I must have good feeling in the office; that's a sine qua non."

"Oh, Dick's got a splendid opinion of himself," broke in Stanley. "He had the cheek to tell Raby yesterday that he played too much écarté with--" The speaker remembered his audience too late.

Colonel Stuart grew purple and breathless. "Do you mean to say that the boy,--that boy--presumed to speak to Raby,--to my friend Raby--about his private actions? Lucilla! What is the world coming to?"

This was a problem never propounded to his wife save under dire provocation, and the answer invariably warned him not to expect his own high standard from the world. This time she ventured upon a timid addition to the effect that rumour did accuse Mr. Raby of playing high.

"And if he does," retorted the Colonel, "he can afford to pay. Raby, my dear, is a fine young fellow, with good principles,--deuced good principles, let me tell you."

"I am very glad to hear it, Charles, I'm sure; for it would be a pity if a nice, clever, young man, who would make any girl a good husband, were to get into bad habits."

"Raby is a man any girl might be proud to marry. He is a good fellow." He looked at Belle, who smiled at him absently; she was wondering where Dick could be.

"Raby isn't a Christian," remarked Mabel. "He told us yesterday he was something else. What was it, Maud?"

"An erotic Buddhist."

"Esoteric," suggested Belle.

"It's all the same. He said we were the three Thibetan sisters and he worshipped us all. But we know who it is, don't we?"

"How you giggle, girls!" complained Colonel Stuart fretfully. "Belle never giggles. Dear child, I will teach you écarté this evening. It will amuse you."

It amused him, which was more to the purpose; in addition it prevented him from falling asleep after dinner, which he was particularly anxious not to do that evening. So they played until, just as the clock was striking ten, a step was heard outside, and Colonel Stuart rose with a relieved remark that it must be John Raby at last. The opening door, however, only admitted truant Dick with rather a flushed face. "From Raby," he said handing a note to his uncle. "I met the man outside."

The scowl, which the sight of the culprit had raised on Colonel Stuart's face, deepened as he read a palpable excuse for not coming over to play écarté. It seemed inconceivable that Dick's remonstrance could have wrought this disappointment; yet even the suggestion was unpleasant. He turned on his nephew only too anxious to find cause of quarrel. It was not hard to find, for Dick was manifestly excited. "At your old tricks again, sir?" said his uncle sternly. "You've been drinking in the bazaar."

Now Dick, ever since the day on which Belle had come to him in distress over Charlie's abandonment to "pegs," had forsworn liquor, as he had forsworn many another bad habit. Even when driven to despair, he had not flown to the old anodyne. But his very virtue had been his undoing, and a single stiff tumbler of whisky and water, forced on him by a friend who was startled by his looks as he returned fagged from a wander into the wilderness, had gone to his unaccustomed head in a most unlooked-for degree. The injustice of the accusation maddened him, and he retorted fiercely: "I haven't had so much to drink as you have, sir."

"Don't speak to your uncle like that, Dick," cried Mrs. Stuart alarmed. "You had better go to bed, dear; it is the best place for you."

"Leave the room, you dissipated young meddler," thundered the Colonel breaking in on his wife's attempt to avert a collision. It was the first time Belle had witnessed her father's passion, and the sight made her cling to him as if her touch might soothe his anger.

Dick, seeing her thus, felt himself an outcast indeed. "I've not been drinking," he burst out, beside himself with jealousy and rage. "The man who says I have is a liar."

"Go to bed, sir," bawled his uncle, "or I'll kick you out of the room. I'll have no drunkards here."

Luckless Dick's evil genius prompted an easy retort. "Then you'd better go first, sir; for I've seen you drunk oftener than you've seen me!"

The next instant he was at Belle's side pleading for disbelief. "No, no, Belle! it's a lie! I am mad--drunk--anything--only it is not true!" His denial struck home to the girl's heart when the angry assertion might have glanced by. A flash of intelligence lit up the past: she recollected a thousand incidents, she remembered a thousand doubts which had made no impression at the time; and before Colonel Stuart's inarticulate splutterings of wrath found words, her eyes met Dick's so truthfully, so steadily, that he turned away in despair, in blank, hopeless despair.

"Why to-morrow?" he cried bitterly in answer to his uncle's order to leave the room instantly and the house to-morrow. "There's no time like the present, and I deserve it. Good-bye, Aunt Lucilla; you've been very kind, always; but I can't stand it any longer. Good-bye, all of you!"

He never even looked at Belle again; the door closed and he was gone.

"Poor, dear Dick!" remarked Mrs. Stuart in her high complaining voice. "He always had a violent temper, even as a baby. Don't fret about it, my dear,"--for large tears were slowly rolling down Belle's cheeks--"He will be all right to-morrow, you'll see; and he has really been steadiness itself of late."

"He wasn't anything to speak of either," urged Mildred with her usual good-nature. "Only a little bit on, and I expect he had no dinner."

"Dinner or no dinner, I say he was drunk," growled Colonel Stuart sulkily. "No one lies like that unless he is,--that's my experience."

But Belle scarcely realised what they said. Her heart was full of fear, and though sleep came with almost unwelcome readiness to drive thought away, she dreamt all night long that some one was saying, "One kind word, Belle, only one kind word," and she could not speak.

[CHAPTER V.]

Outside the parallelograms of white roads centred by brown stretches of stubbly grass, and bordered by red and blue houses wherein the European residents of Faizapore dwelt after their kind, and our poor Belle lay dreaming, a very different world had been going on its way placidly indifferent, not to her only, but to the whole colony of strangers within its gates. The great plains, sweeping like a sea to the horizon, had been ploughed, sown, watered, harvested: children had been born, strong men had died, crimes been committed, noble acts done; and of all this not one word had reached the alien ears. Only the District Officer and his subaltern, John Raby, bridged the gulf by driving down every day to the court-house, which lay just beyond the boundaries of the cantonment and close to the native city; there, for eight weary hours, to come in contact with the most ignoble attributes of the Indian, and thence to drive at evening heartily glad of escape. In the lines of the native regiment Philip Marsden went in and out among his men, knowing them by name, and sympathising with their lives. But they too were a race apart from the tillers of soil, the hewers of wood and drawers of water, who pay the bills for the great Empire.

Even old Mahomed Lateef came but seldom to see the Major sahib since he had been forced to send his Benjamin to Delhi, there, in a hotbed of vice and corruption, to gain a livelihood by his penmanship. The lad was employed on the staff of a red-hot Mahometan newspaper entitled "The Light of Islâm," and spent his days in copying blatant leaders on to the lithographic stones. Nothing could exceed the lofty tone of "The Light of Islâm." No trace of the old Adam peeped through its exalted sentiments save when it spoke of the Government, or of its Hindu rival "The Patriot." Then the editor took down his dictionary of synonyms, and, looking out all the bad epithets from "abandoned" to "zymotic," used them with more copiousness than accuracy. Sometimes, however, it would join issue with one adversary against another, and blaze out into fiery paragraphs of the following order:

We are glad to see that yet once more "The Patriot," forgetting its nonsensical race-prejudice for the nonce, has, to use a colloquialism, followed our lead in pertinently calling on Government for some worthy explanation of the dastardly outrage perpetrated by its minions on a virtuous Mahometan widow, &c, &c.

And lovers of the dreadful, after wading through a column of abuse, would discover that the ancestral dirt of an old lady's cowhouse had been removed by order of the Deputy Commissioner! Yet the paper did good: it could hardly do otherwise, considering its exalted sentiments; but for all that the occupation was an unwholesome one for an excitable lad like Murghub Ahmed. While his fingers inked themselves hopelessly over the fine words, his mind also became clouded by them. The abuse of language intoxicated him, until moderation seemed to him indifference, and tolerance sympathy. He took to sitting up of nights composing still more turgid denunciations; and the first time "The Light of Islâm" went forth, bearing not only his hand-writing, but his heart's belief on its pages, he felt that he had found his mission. To think that but four months ago he had wept with disappointment because he was refused the post of statistical writer in a Government office! Between striking averages, and evolving Utopias, what a glorious difference! He thanked Providence for the change, though his heart ached cruelly at times when he could spare nothing from his modest wage for the dear ones at home. He had a wife waiting there for him; ere long there might be a child, and he knew her to be worse fed than many a street-beggar. It seemed to him part of the general injustice which set his brain on fire.

"Words! Nothing but words," muttered old Mahomed Lateef as he lay under the solitary nim tree in his courtyard and spelt out "The Light of Islâm" with the aid of a huge horn-rimmed pair of spectacles. "Pish! 'The pen is mightier than the sword!' What white-livered fool said that? The boy should not have such water in his veins unless his mother played me false. God knows! women are deceitful, and full of guile."

This was only his habit of thought; he had no intention of casting aspersions on his much respected wife Fâtma Bibi, who just then appeared with a hookah full of the rankest tobacco. "I shall send for the boy, oh Fâtma Bi!" said the stern old domestic tyrant. "He is learning to say more than he dare do, and that I will not have. He shall come home and do more than he says--ha! ha!" Fâtma Bi laughed too, and clapped her wrinkled hands, while the shy girl, dutifully doing the daughter-in-law's part of cooking, turned her head away to smile lest any one should accuse her of joy because he was coming back.

So Mahomed Lateef covered a sheet of flimsy German note-paper, bought in the bazaar, with crabbed Arabic lettering, and the women rejoiced because the light of their eyes was coming back. And after all the lad refused stoutly to return. He wrote his father a letter, full of the most trite and beautiful sentiments, informing his aged parent that times had changed, the old order given place to the new, and that he intended to raise the banner of jehâd (religious war) against the infidel. The women cried Bismillah, and Mahomed Lateef, despite his annoyance at the disobedience, could not help, as it were, cocking his ears like an old war-horse. Yet he wrote the lad a warning after his lights, which ran thus:

God and His prophet forbid, oh son of my heart, that I should keep thee back, if, as thou sayest, thou wouldst raise the banner of jehâd. If a sword be needed, I will send thee mine own friend; but remember always what the mullah taught thee, nor confound the three great things,--the Dur-ul-Islâm, the Dur-ul-Husub, and the Dur-ul-Ummun.[^[2]] Have at the Hindu pigs, especially any that bear kindred to Shunker's fat carcase; he hath cheated me rascally, and built a window overlooking my yard for which I shall have the law of him. But listen for the cry of the muezzin, and put thy sword in the scabbard when its sound falls on thine ear, remembering 'tis the House of Protection, and not the House of the Foe. If thou goest to China, as perhaps may befall, seeing the sahibs fight the infidel there, remember to cool thy brother's grave with tears. Meanwhile, play singlestick with Shâhbâz Khân the Mogul, and if thou canst get the old Meean sahib, his father, on his legs, put the foils into his hand, rap him over the knuckles once, and he will teach thee more in one minute than his son in five.

Then the old Syyed lay down on his bed under the nim tree, and Fâtma Bi fanned the mosquitoes from him with a tinsel fan, and talked in whispers to Nasibun, the childless wife, of the deeds their boy was to do, while Haiyât Bi, the young bride, busy as usual, found time to dry her tears unseen. A fire burning dim in one corner of the courtyard was almost eclipsed by the moon riding gloriously in the purple-black sky overhead. From the other side of the high partition wall came the dull throbbing of the dholki (little drum) and an occasional wild skirling of pipes. The marriage festivities in Shunker Dâs's house had begun, and every day some ceremony or other had to be gone through, bringing an excuse for having the marânsunis (female musicians) in to play and sing. High up near the roof of the sugar-cake house with its white filigree mouldings gleamed the objectionable window. Within sat the usurer himself conferring with his jackal, one Râm Lâl, a man of small estate but infinite cunning. It was from no desire of overlooking Mahomed Lateef's women that Shunker Dâs frequented the upper chamber. He had other and far more important business on hand, necessitating quiet and the impossibility of being overheard. Even up there the two talked in whispers, and chuckled under their breath; while in the courtyard below the delicate child who stood between Shunker and damnation ate sweetmeats and turned night into day with weary, yet sleepless, eyes.

The moon, shining in on the two courtyards, shone also on the church garden, as Major Marsden after going his rounds turned his horse into its winding paths. A curious garden it was, guiltless of flowers and planted for the most part with tombstones. Modern sanitation, stepping in like Aaron's rod to divide the dead from the living, had ceased to use it as a cemetery; but the records of long forgotten sorrows remained, looking ghostly in the moonlight. The branch of a rose-tree encroaching on the walk caught in the tassel of Major Marsden's bridle, and he stooped to disentangle it. Straightening himself again, he paused to look on the peaceful scene around him and perceived that some one, a belated soldier most likely, was lying not far off on a tombstone. The horse picked its way among many a nameless grave to draw up beside a figure lying still as if carved in stone.

Miss Stuart's Legacy

By

Flora Annie Steel

AUTHOR OF
'ON THE FACE OF THE WATERS,' ETC.

London
William Heinemann
1900

CONTENTS

[CHAPTER I]

[CHAPTER II]

[CHAPTER III]

[CHAPTER IV]

[CHAPTER V]

[CHAPTER VI]

[CHAPTER VII]

[CHAPTER VIII]

[CHAPTER IX]

[CHAPTER X]

[CHAPTER XI]

[CHAPTER XII]

[CHAPTER XIII]

[CHAPTER XIV]

[CHAPTER XV]

[CHAPTER XVI]

[CHAPTER XVII]

[CHAPTER XVIII]

[CHAPTER XIX]

[CHAPTER XX]

[CHAPTER XXI]

[CHAPTER XXII]

[CHAPTER XXIII]

[CHAPTER XXIV]

[CHAPTER XXV]

[CHAPTER XXVI]

[CHAPTER XXVII]

MISS STUART'S LEGACY

[CHAPTER I.]

[CHAPTER II.]

[CHAPTER III.]

[CHAPTER IV.]

[CHAPTER V.]

Miss Stuart's Legacy

By

Flora Annie Steel

AUTHOR OF'ON THE FACE OF THE WATERS,' ETC.

LondonWilliam Heinemann1900

CONTENTS

MISS STUART'S LEGACY

AUTHOR OF
'ON THE FACE OF THE WATERS,' ETC.

London
William Heinemann
1900