A mad whirl of sound and colour. "Do you mind?" he said.
"Can you face it?"
Drawn by William J. Shettsline. (See page [266].)

The Hermit Doctor of Gaya

A Love Story of Modern India

By

I. A. R. Wylie

Author of "The Native Born," etc.

"This kiss to the whole world"
Beethoven's Ninth Symphony

G. P. Putnam's Sons
New York and London
The Knickerbocker Press
1916

COPYRIGHT, 1916
BY
I. A. R. WYLIE

The Knickerbocker Press, New York

CONTENTS

BOOK I

CHAPTER

I.—[The Story of Kurnavati]
II.—[Tristram the Hermit]
III.—[Tristram Becomes Father-Confessor]
IV.—[The Interlopers]
V.—[A Vision of the Backwater]
VI.—[Broken Sanctuary]
VII.—[Anne Boucicault Explains]
VIII.—[The Two Listeners]
IX.—[Lalloo, the Money-Lender]
X.—[An Encounter]
XI.—[Inferno]
XII.—[In which Fortune Pleases to Jest]
XIII.—[Crossed Swords]
XIV.—[Tristram Chooses his Road]
XV.—[The Weavers]
XVI.—[A Meredith to the Rescue]
XVII.—[Mrs. Smithers Does Accounts]
XVIII.—[The Feast of Siva]

BOOK II

I.—[Mrs. Compton Stands Firm]
II.—[A Home-Coming]
III.—[Mrs. Boucicault Calls the Tune]
IV.—[Anne Makes a Discovery]
V.—[Crisis]
VI.—["Of your Blood"]
VII.—[The Price Paid]
VIII.—[Return]
IX.—[For the Last Time]
X.—[Anne Chooses]
XI.—[Freedom]
XII.—[The Meeting of the Ways]
XIII.—[To Gaya!]
XIV.—[Resurrection]
XV.—[The Snake-God]
XVI.—[Towards Morning]

The Hermit Doctor of Gaya

BOOK I

CHAPTER I

THE STORY OF KURNAVATI

"Thus it came about that, for her child's sake, the Rani Kurnavati saved herself from the burning pyre and called together the flower of the Rajputs to defend Chitore and their king from the sword of Bahadur Shah."

The speaker's voice had not lifted from its brooding quiet. But now the quiet had become a living thing repressed, a passion disciplined, an echo dimmed with its passage from the by-gone years, but vibrant and splendid still with the clash of chivalrous steel.

The village story-teller gazed into the firelight and was silent. Swift, soft-footed shadows veiled the lower half of his face, but his eyes smouldered and burnt up as they followed their visions among the flames. He was young. His lithe, scantily-clad body was bent forward and his slender arms were clasped loosely about his knees. Compared with him, the broken circle of listeners seemed half living. They sat quite still, their skins shining darkly like polished bronze, their eyes blinking at the firelight. Only the headman of the village moved, stroking his fierce grey beard with a shrivelled hand.

"Those were the great days!" he muttered. "The great days!"

The silence lingered. The Englishman, whose long, white-clad body linked the circle, shifted his position. He lay stretched out with a lazy, unconscious grace, his head supported on his arm, his eyes lifted to the overhanging branches of the peepul tree, whose long, pointed leaves fretted the outskirts of the light and sheltered the solemn, battered effigy of the village god like the dome of a temple. A suddenly awakened night-breeze stirred them to a mysterious murmur. They rustled tremulously and secretly together, and the clear cold fire of a star burnt amidst their shifting shadows. Beyond and beneath their whispering there were other sounds. A night-owl hooted, a herd of excited, lithe-limbed monkeys scrambled noisily in the darkness overhead, chattered a moment, and were mischievously still. From the distance came the long, hungry wail of a pariah dog, hunting amidst the village garbage. These discords dropped into the night's silence, breaking its placid surface into widening circles and died away. The peepul leaves shivered and sank for an instant into grave meditation on their late communings, and through the deepened quiet there poured the distant, monotonous song of running water. It was a song based on one deep organ note, the primæval note of creation, and never changed. It rose up out of the earth and filled the darkness and mingled with the silence, so that they became one. The listeners heard it and did not know they heard it. It was the background on which the night sounds of living things painted themselves in vivid colours.

The Englishman turned his face to the firelight.

"Go on, Ayeshi," he said, with drowsy content. "You can't leave the beautiful Rani in mid-air like that, you know. Go on."

"Yes, Sahib." The young man pushed back the short black curls from his neck and resumed his old attitude of watchfulness on the flames. But his voice sounded louder, clearer:

"Thereafter, Sahib, the need of Chitore grew desperate. In vain, the bravest of her nobles sallied forth—the armies of Bahadur Shah swept over them as the tempest sweeps over the ripe corn, and hour by hour the ring about the city tightened till the very gates shivered beneath the enemy's blows. It was then the Rani bethought her of a custom of her people. With her own hands she made a bracelet of silver thread bound with tinsel and gay with seven coloured tassels, and, choosing a trusty servant, sent him forth out of Chitore to seek Humayun, the Great Moghul, whose conquering sword even then swept Bengal like a flail. By a miracle, the messenger escaped and came before Humayun and laid the bracelet in his hands, saying:

"'This is the gift of Kurnavati, Rani of Chitore.'

"And Humayun looked at the messenger and asked:

"'And if Humayun accept the gift of the Rani Kurnavati, what then?'

"'Then shall Humayim be her bracelet-bound brother, and she shall be his dear and virtuous sister.'

"And Humayun looked at the gift and asked:

"'And if I become bracelet-bound brother to the Rani Kurnavati, what then?'

"'Then will the Rani of Chitore call upon her dear and reverend brother, according to the bond, to succour her from the cruel vengeance of Bahadur Shah.'

"And because the heart of Humayun loved all chivalrous and noble deeds better than conquest and rich spoils, he took the bracelet and bound it about his wrist, saying: 'Behold, according to the custom, Humayun accepts the bond, and from henceforth the Rani Kurnavati is his dear and virtuous sister, and his sword shall not rest in its scabbard till she is free from the threat of her oppressors.' And he set forth with all his horsemen and rode night and day till the walls of Chitore were in sight."

"Well——?" The story-teller had ceased speaking and the Englishman rolled over, clipping his square chin in his big hands. "Go on, Ayeshi."

"He came too late." The metal had gone from the boy's voice, and the firelight awoke no answering gleam in his watching eyes.

"The Rani Kurnavati and three thousand of her women had sought honour on the funeral pyre. The grey smoke from their ashes greeted Humayun as he passed through the battered gates. The walls of Chitore lay in ruins and without them slept their defenders, clad in saffron bridal robes, their faces lifted to the sun, their broken swords red with the death of their enemies. And Humayun, seeing them, wept."

Ayeshi's voice trailed off into silence. The headman nodded to himself, showing his white teeth.

"Those were the great days," he muttered, "when men died fighting and the women followed their husbands to the——" He coughed and glanced at the Englishman.

"But ours are the days of the Sahib," he added, with great piety, "full of wisdom and peace."

"Just so." The Sahib rose to his feet, stretching himself. "And, talking of wives, Buddhoos, if thou dost not give that luckless female of thine the medicine I ordered, instead of offering it up to the village devil, I will mix thee such a compound as will make thy particular hereafter seem Paradise by comparison. Moreover, I will complain to the Burra Sahib and thou wilt be most certainly degraded and become the mock of Lalloo, thy dear and loving brother-in-law. Moreover, if I again find thirty of thy needy brethren herded together in thy cow-stall, I will assuredly dose thy whole family. Hast thou understood?"

The headman salaamed solemnly.

"The Dakktar Sahib's wishes are law," he declared fervently.

"I should like to think so. And now, Ayeshi, it is time. We have ten miles to go before morning. Give me my medicine-chest. I see that Buddhoos has a longing eye on it. Come, Wickie!"

The last order was in English, and a small, curious shape uncurled itself from the shadows at the base of the tree and trotted into the firelight. The most that could be said of it with any truth was, that it had been intended for a dog. Many generations back there had been an Aberdeen in the family, and since then the peculiarities of that particular strain had been modified to an amazing degree by a series of mésalliances. In fact, all that remained of the Aberdeen were a pair of bandy legs and a wistful, pseudo-innocent eye. Nevertheless, it was evidently an object of veneration. The village elders made way for it, regarding it with gloomy apprehension as it leisurely stretched itself, yawned, and then, with the dignity which goes with conscious yet modest superiority, proceeded to follow the massive white figure of its master into the darkness.

The headman salaamed again deeply and possibly thankfully.

"A safe journey and return, Sahib!" he called.

The Sahib's answer came back cheerily through the stillness. He looked back for an instant at the patch of firelight and the sharply cut silhouettes of moving figures, and then strode on, keeping well to the middle of the dusty roadway, his footsteps ringing out above the soft accompaniment of Ayeshi's patter and the fussy tap-tap of Wickie's unwieldy paws. He whistled cheerfully. So long as the sleeping, odoriferous mud-huts of the village bound them in on either hand, he clung tenaciously to his disjointed scrap of melody, but, as they came out at last into the open country, he broke off, sighing, and stood still, his arms outstretched, breathing in the freedom and untainted air with a thirsty, passionate gratitude.

There was no moon. The luminous haze which poured out over the limitless space before them was a mysterious thing, born of itself without source, without body. Its pallid, greenish clarity stretched in a ghostly sea between the earth and the black, beacon-studded sky, distorting and magnifying, as still water distorts and magnifies the rocks and tangled seaweed at its bed. It lapped soundlessly against the cliff of rising jungle land to the right, and beneath its quiet surface the shadow of the village temple floated like a sunken island, its slender sikhara alone rising up into the darkness, a finger of warning and admonition. It was very still. The voice of the invisible, swift-flowing river had indeed grown louder, but it was a sound outside this world of shadows and phantoms. It beat against the protecting wall of dreams, unheeded yet ominous and threatening in its implacable reality.

The two men crossed the path which encircled the village and made their way over the uneven ground towards the temple. As they drew nearer, the light seemed to recede, leaving the great roofless manderpam a shapeless ruin, whilst the sikhara faded into the black background of the jungle. The Dakktar Sahib whistled softly; a horse whinnied in answer, and the amazing Wickie bounded forward as though recognizing an old acquaintance. The Sahib laughed under his breath.

"We know each other, Wickie, Arabella and I," he said. "A wonderful animal that, Ayeshi."

"Truly, a noble creature, Sahib," Ayeshi answered very gravely.

A minute later they reached the carved gateway of the temple where two horses had been casually tethered. They stood deep in shadow, but the strange, unreal light which covered the plain filled the manderpam with its broken avenue of pillars, and threw into sharp relief the carved gateway and the figure seated cross-legged and motionless beneath the arch. Both men seemed to have expected the apparition. Ayeshi knelt down before it and placed a bowl of milk, which he had been carefully carrying, within reach of the long, lifeless-looking arms.

"For the God thou servest, O Holy One," he said, and for a moment knelt there with his forehead pressed to the ground.

The old mendicant seemed neither to have heard nor seen. He was almost naked. The bones started out of the shrivelled flesh, and the long, matted grey hair hung about his shoulders and mingled with the dishevelled beard, so that he seemed scarcely human, scarcely living. Only for an instant his eyes, half hidden beneath the wild disorder, flashed over the kneeling figure, and then closed, shutting the last vestige of life behind blank lids.

The Dakktar Sahib bent down and placed a coin in the upturned palms.

"That also is for thy God, Vahana," he said, with grave respect. Receiving no answer, he turned away and untethered his horse, a quadruped which even the solemn shadow could not dignify. It must have stood over seventeen hands high and its shape was comically suggestive of a child's drawing—six none too steady lines representing legs, back, and neck. The Dakktar Sahib whispered to it tenderly and reassuringly: "Only ten miles, Arabella, on my word of honour, only ten miles. And you shall have all tomorrow. I know it's rotten bad luck, but then I have got to stick it, too—it's our confounded, glorious duty to stick it, Arabella, and you wouldn't leave me in the lurch, would you, old girl?" Then came the crunch of sugar and the sound of Arabella's affectionate nozzling in the region of coat pockets. The Dakktar swung himself on to her lengthy back. "Now, then, Ayeshi; now then, Wickie!"

The three strange companions trotted out of the shadow, threading their way through the long, coarse grass in the direction of the river; but once the Englishman turned in his saddle and looked back. By some atmospheric freak, the temple seemed to have drawn all the green phosphorescent haze into its ruined self and hung like a great, dimly lit lamp against the wall of jungle. The Dakktar Sahib lingered a moment.

"They must have dreamed wonderfully in those old days," he said, wistfully. "To have built that—think of it, Ayeshi! To have given one's soul an abiding expression to wake the souls of other men thousands of years hence—to bring a lump into the throat of some human being long after one's bones have crumbled to dust. Well—well——"

He broke off with a sigh. "And you believe that tonight the Snake God will drink your milk, Ayeshi?"

"He or his many brethren, Sahib. He lies coiled about the branches of the highest tree in the jungle and on every branch of the forest another such as he keeps guard over his rest."

"No man has ever seen him, Ayeshi?"

"No man dares set foot within the jungle, Sahib, save Vahana, and he is a Sadhu, a holy man. He has sat before the temple for a hundred years, and none have seen him eat or heard him speak."

"You believe that, Ayeshi?"

The boy hesitated a moment, then answered gravely:

"Yes, Sahib. My people have believed it."

"Your people? Well—that's a good reason—one of our pet reasons for our pet beliefs, if you did but know it, Ayeshi. There's not such a gulf between East and West, after all." He rode on in silence, and then turned his head a little as though trying to distinguish his companion's features through the darkness. "Who are your people, Ayeshi—your father, your mother, your brothers? You have never spoken of them. Are they dead?"

"I do not know, Sahib. I have never known father or mother or brethren."

The Dakktar Sahib nodded to himself.

"You are not like the other villagers," he said. "One feels it—one doesn't talk in the same way to you. Tell me, Ayeshi, have you no ambitions?"

"None but to serve you, Sahib."

The Englishman threw back his head and laughed.

"Well, that's a poor sort of ambition. Why, I might get knocked on the head any time—typhoid, cholera, enteric—I'm cheek by jowl with the lot of them half the days of my life. And then where would you be, Ayeshi?"

"I should follow you, Sahib."

"That sounds almost biblical. And what for, eh?"

"Because of this, Sahib——" Suddenly and passionately, he discarded the English language which he used with ease and plunged into his own vernacular. "Behold, Sahib, there is the snake-bite on my arm, the wound which the Sahib cleansed with his own lips. Is that a thing to be forgotten? A life belongs to him who saves it."

"Pooh, nonsense!" The Englishman leant over his saddle. "For the Lord's sake, Wickie, keep away from Arabella's hoofs! Are you a dog or an idiot? Ayeshi, you don't understand. That sort of thing's my job—there, now, you've nearly run us into the river with your silly chatter——"

They drew rein abruptly. It was now close on the dawn, and the darkness had become intensified. The stars seemed colder and dimmer. Where they stood, their horses snuffing nervously at the unknown, they could hear the steady hurrying of the water at their feet, but they could see nothing. The Englishman patted the neck of his steed with a comforting hand. "In a year or two, there will be a bridge across," he said. "Then Mother Ganges won't have such terrors for us."

"Mother Ganges demands toll of those who curb her," Ayeshi answered solemnly.

"You mean, that no bridge could be built here?"

"I mean, Sahib, that the price will be a heavy one."

The Dakktar Sahib made no answer. Suddenly he laughed, not as though amused, but with a vague embarrassment.

"That was a fine story you told us tonight, Ayeshi. I don't know what there was about it—something that made one tingle from head to foot. I've been thinking of it on and off all the time. Those were days when men did mad, splendid things—bad too—worse than anything we do, but also finer. Sometimes one wishes—but it's no good wishing. The Rani Kurnavati and her bracelet are gone forever."

"Humayun also is dead," Ayeshi said, in his grave way.

"You mean——? Yes, that's true, too, I suppose. But oh Lord"—he lifted himself in his saddle with a movement of joyous, fiery vitality—"though I'm no Great Moghul, worse luck, still, if a woman sent me her bracelet and she were being murdered on the top of Mount Ararat, I'd——"

"The Sahib would come in time," Ayeshi interposed gently and significantly.

The Englishman dropped back in his saddle.

"Well, anyhow, Arabella, Wickie, and I would have a good shot at it," he said, gaily. He turned his horse's head eastwards and touched her gently to a trot. "But it's no good bragging. No one's going to make either of us bracelet brother. That's not for the like of us. And meanwhile, we've got eight miles to go and the dawn will be on us in an hour. I wish we'd got the seven-league boots handy. But you don't know the story of the seven-league boots, do you, Ayeshi? I'll tell it you as we go along. A story for a story, eh?"

"Yes, Sahib."

They trotted off along the bank of the river, Arabella slightly in advance, Wickie skirmishing skilfully on either hand, the Dakktar Sahib's voice mingling with the song of the waters as he told the story of the seven-league boots.

Behind them the temple had sunk into profound shadow.

Vahana, the mendicant, still sat beneath the archway. He took the bowl of milk and drained it thirstily. The coin he spat on with a venomous hatred and sent spinning into the darkness.

CHAPTER II

TRISTRAM THE HERMIT

"Of course, all that one can do is to hope," Mrs. Compton said, ruffling up her dark, curly hair with a distracted hand. "I don't know who it was talked about hope springing eternal in the something-something, but he must have lived in Gaya. If we hadn't hope and pegs in this withered desert——"

"My dear," her husband interposed, "in the first place, Gaya isn't a desert. It's the Garden of India. In the second place, no lady talks about pegs—certainly not in the tone of devout thankfulness which you have used. Pegs is—are masculine. They uphold us in our strenuous hours, of which you women appear to know nothing; they soothe our overwrought nerves and prepare the way for a liverish old age in Cheltenham. Praise be to Allah!"

Mrs. Compton sighed and surveyed the curtain which she had been artistically draping. Her manner, like her whole wiry, restless personality, expressed a good-tempered irascibility.

"Anyhow, they keep you human and grant us luckless females a lucid interval in which we can call our souls our own. What you men would be like if you didn't have your drinks and your tubs and all your other multitudinous creature comforts—well, it doesn't stand thinking about. Archie, do you like the curtain tied up with a bow or—oh, of course, it's no use asking you, you materialistic lump." She turned from the long, lean figure sprawling on the wicker chair by the verandah window and appealed to the second member of her audience.

"Mr. Meredith, you're a clergyman, you ought to have a soul. Do you like bows or don't you?"

Meredith looked up with a faint smile on his grave face.

"I like bows, Mrs. Compton. I hope it's a good sign of my artistic and spiritual development?"

"Yes, it is. I like bows myself. Oh, dear——" She stopped suddenly. "But supposing she's a horror! Supposing she paints and smothers herself in diamonds, and gets hilarious at dinner, and has a shrill voice! Goodness knows, I don't boast about our morals, but we're immoral in our own conventional way, so that it becomes almost respectable, and anything else would shock us frightfully. You know, I think we're running an awful risk."

Captain Compton guffawed cheerfully, and the smile still lingered in Owen Meredith's pleasant eyes.

"I shouldn't worry, my dear lady," he recommended. "After all, some of them are the last thing in respectability. It belongs to their profession. They're bound to be physically perfect, and physical perfection goes with morality. Besides, I understand that there can be genius in that sort of thing, and that she's a genius."

"Well, genius doesn't go with respectability, anyhow," Mary Compton retorted. "A professional dancer and a guest of the Rajah's! What can one hope for?"

Meredith compressed his lips and passed his hand over his black hair with a movement that somehow or other revealed the Anglican. A look of what might have been habitual anxiety settled on his square, blunt features, and he found no answer.

Captain Compton got up, stretching himself.

"The Rajah's the best guarantee we could have," he said lazily. "He's a harmless type of the little degenerate princeling who apes the European and lives in a holy terror of doing the wrong thing. He wouldn't set Gaya by the ears for untold gold. I know just what's happened. He saw Mlle. Fersen dance and he sent her a bouquet—very respectfully—and gave a supper-party in her honour—also very respectable—and assured her of a warm, respectable welcome in Gaya should she ever visit India. Well, she's come—as why shouldn't she?—and he's trying to do the handsome and the respectable at the same time. You don't suppose old Armstrong would have written about her if everything wasn't quite all right." He pulled out his cigarette case and looked round helplessly for the matches. "My dear, you will find that she is not only a perfect lady, but that our ways will shock her into fits, and that we shall have to live up to her."

Mrs. Compton gave him the matches with the air of a nurse tending a peculiarly incapable child.

"You disappoint me horribly," she said, and went out on the verandah. A minute later she called the two men after her and pointed an indignant finger in the direction of the highway. "Look at that, Archie! How do you suppose anybody's going to respect us with that sort of thing running about! It's positively unpatriotic. It's a blow at the very foundations of the Empire——!"

"Why, it's the old Hermit," Compton interrupted, soothingly. "Don't worry about him. If there were a few more hermits—Bless the man! what's he doing? Ahoy, Tristram, ahoy there!"

In answer to the shouted welcome, the little procession which had aroused Mrs. Compton's ire turned in at the compound gates. The Dakktar Sahib came first. He wore a duck suit with leggings, and carried his pith helmet in both hands as though it were a bowl full of priceless liquid. In its place, a loud bandanna handkerchief offered a slight protection to his head and neck. Behind him, at her untrammelled leisure; came Arabella, her reins trailing, her nose almost on the ground, her legs obviously wavering under the burden of her protruding ribs. Behind her again, in a cloud of sulky dust, waddled Wickie, forlorn and spiritless. The three halted at the steps of the verandah, and the Dakktar Sahib sat down on the first step without ceremony.

"I'm done," he said.

Mrs. Compton almost snorted at him.

"I should think so! What on earth were you walking for, you impossible person? What is the use of having a horse—if you call that object a horse—if you don't ride?"

"Arabella's dead beat," he explained simply. He put his pith helmet between his knees and stared down into its depths as though something hidden there interested him. "I know she's no beauty," he went on earnestly. "But she's an awful brick. Never done me or any one a bad turn in her lire. Can't say that of myself. And just because I paid fourteen quid for her, I don't see why I should put upon her. I suppose we three couldn't have a drink, could we?"

Compton shook his head. He came and sat down on the step beside the big, travel-stained figure and looked cooler and more immaculate by contrast.

"Afraid not. If you weren't so delightfully absent-minded, Hermit, you would know perfectly well that we're not at home. Don't you recognize the old dâk-bungalow when you see it?"

Tristram turned and looked about him rather blankly. At that moment Mrs. Compton, who was feeling unjustifiably irritable, thought he was quite the ugliest man she had ever set eyes on.

"No—to tell you the truth, I was too dead to notice. I just tottered in. What's happened? The old place looks as though it had had its face washed. Who are you expecting?"

"Ever heard of Sigrid Fersen?"

Tristram returned rather suddenly to the contemplation of the mysterious contents of his helmet.

"Yes—on my last leave home. I saw her dance the night before I sailed."

"Well, she's coming here—world tour or something. The Rajah invited her to Gaya, and Armstrong gave us a hint to do the hospitable. Mary is all on the qui vive, hoping she'll do the high kick at a Vice-Regal function or something."

Tristram made no answer, and his silence was at once irritating and final. He seemed scarcely to have heard. Mrs. Compton, watching his profile with dark, exasperated eyes, suddenly softened.

"You do look fagged!" she exclaimed impulsively. "Has it been a bad time, Hermit?"

He looked up at her.

"Pretty bad. I haven't seen a white face for two months or slept in the same quarters for two nights running. There's any amount of trouble brewing out there in the villages. It's the drought—and the poor beggars can't get the hang of our notions. Anything might develop. I'm going back to Heerut tonight. I came along only to get fresh medical supplies. I left Ayeshi at the last village. He's a gem."

Meredith, who had been standing by the verandah railings, drew himself up, his swarthy face was brightened by his eyes, which were alight with a grave, sincere fervour.

"Yes, Ayeshi's unusual," he said. "He's different from the rest. I've often noticed him. I wish we could get hold of him, Tristram."

"Get hold of him?"

"Give him a chance. You know what I mean. It's that type of man we want. He ought to be encouraged to go ahead."

"Ayeshi's all right," Tristram remarked slowly. "He's happy. And he's a sort of poet, you know. I'd leave him alone, if I were you."

Meredith laughed good-temperedly.

"It's not my business to leave people alone," he said.

There was a silence which unaccountably threatened to become strained. Mrs. Compton, wearied by her struggles with refractory curtains, drew a chair up to the steps of the verandah and sat down, ruffling her husband's sleek hair with an absent-minded affection. He bore the affliction patiently, his lazy blue eyes intent on the approach of a neat, slow-going dog-cart which had turned the bend of the high-road.

"It's the Boucicaults' turn-out," he said. "And little Anne driving herself, too, by Jove! I wonder what she wants round here?"

"Whatever it is, she must want it pretty badly," his wife remarked. "She hates driving—if the truth were told, I believe that pony terrifies her out of her life. Poor little soul!"

"No nerve," Compton agreed. "Broken long ago."

Meanwhile, with a lightness and agility that was unexpected in a man of his short, heavy build, Owen Meredith had swung himself over the verandah rails and walked down to meet the new-comer. The trio on the steps watched him in silence. Then Compton chuckled rather mirthlessly. "She'd make a first-rate parson's wife," he said. "If only——" then he broke off and became suddenly business-like and astonishingly keen. "Tristram—stop fidgeting with that damned helmet of yours. I know you're dog-tired, old chap, but I want you to go round to the Boucicaults before you return to the wilds."

Tristram looked up. The tiredness had gone out of his face.

"Anything wrong—I mean, worse than usual?"

Compton threw his half-finished cigarette at Wickie.

"You don't know what it's been like these last two months. The man's mad, Tristram, or he's possessed of the devil. The whole regiment is suffering from c.b. and extra drill and stopped leave—for nothing—nothing. I oughtn't to talk about it, I suppose, but something's got to be done. The men are getting nervy and out of hand, and no wonder. There are moments when I feel ready to lash out myself."

"Can't something be done? Can't you get rid of him?"

Compton laughed shortly.

"You know what happens to men who complain of their superior officers. Besides, he's so devilishly efficient, and everything he does is done in cold blood. It's drink, of course, but it doesn't make him lose his head. It makes him deadly, hideously quiet. And it's not only the regiment, Tristram—there's his wife. We hardly ever see her—and when we do—well, they say——"

Mrs. Compton clenched her small brown fist and thumped her husband's shoulder in a burst of indignation.

"They say he beats her," she said between clenched teeth.

Tristram got up as though he had been stung.

"That's—that's damnable!" he stuttered.

"That's just the word," Mrs. Compton acknowledged gratefully. She looked up at him and admitted to herself that, after all, he pleased her profoundly. At that moment he was not ugly in her eyes. In one way, she recognized him to be magnificent. She knew no other man with such shoulders or who carried his height and strength with so natural a grace. But now even his face pleased her, red-bearded and unlovely though it was. In her quick, Celtic way, she imagined a sculptor who, in an inspired mood, had modelled a masterpiece, incomplete, rough-hewn, yet vigorous with life and significance. She liked his blue eyes, which usually looked out on the world with a whimsical simplicity and now flared up, dangerously bright. "Positively," said Mrs. Compton, "there are moments when I love you, Hermit."

Archibald Compton grimaced and pulled himself to his feet.

"Anyhow, after that brazen-faced declaration you might help us," he said. "You're a doctor. It's your business to interfere. Couldn't you drop a hint at headquarters—suggest long leave or something? Do—there's a good fellow——"

Tristram had no opportunity to reply, for Anne Boucicault her companion were now within earshot. Meredith walked at the wheel of her cart and was talking gaily, his face lifted to hers, and, freed for the moment from its habitual expression of fervid purpose, was almost boyish. She smiled down at him, and then, glancing up at the group at the verandah, the smile faded and she jerked the reins of her pony so that the animal came to an abrupt stand-still.

"Major Tristram!" she exclaimed. "Why, I didn't know you were back—I thought——" She broke off, flushing to the brows. Her incoherency and that quick change of colour added to her rather touching sweetness. She was not pretty. Neither the dainty white frock nor the shady hat could help her to more than youth. But her youth was vivid and gracious. There was something, too, in her expression, in the look of the brown eyes, that had all the appeal, the wistfulness of an anxious, frightened child. There was nothing mature about her save her mouth, which was firm, even obstinate.

Major Tristram came to her and gave her his big hand.

"I'm back for only a few hours," he explained, "and then my victims have me again. But it's good to catch a glimpse of anything so fresh as yourself. Isn't the sun ever going to wither you like other mortals?"

The smile dawned shyly about the corners of her lips.

"I don't know. I keep out of it as much as possible. I don't like it. I only came out this afternoon because——" She hesitated and then added rather breathlessly: "I knew Mrs. Compton was here—and I'm anxious about mother."

Mary Compton laid an impulsive brown hand on the white one which held the reins in its frail, ineffectual fingers.

"Well, here we all are, anyhow," she said, "and just dying to be useful. What's the trouble, dear?"

"Mother is ill," Anne Boucicault answered, with the same curious hesitancy. "I was frightened. Major Tristram, if only you could come——"

He did not wait for her to finish her appeal. He scrambled up on to the seat beside her, and took the reins from her hands.

"You look after Arabella and Wickie, Compton," he said, "and hand me up my helmet. No—not like that—for goodness' sake, be careful, man! Thanks, that's better."

"And I hope you're going to wear it," Mrs. Compton remarked, with asperity. "I suppose you don't want to arrive with a sunstroke or give Mrs. Boucicault a fit with that awful handkerchief?"

Tristram shook his head.

"Sorry, can't be done. It's occupied already. A patient of mine." He put his battered headgear between his knees and poked gingerly about the depths, producing, finally, amidst a confusion of straw and grass, a tiny bulbul. The little creature fluttered desperately, and then, as though there were something miraculous in the man's hand, lay still, a soft, bright-eyed ball of colour, and stared around it with an audacious contentment.

"Its wing's hurt," Tristram explained. "Wickie bit it. In point of fact, Wickie and I aren't on speaking terms as a result. It's a subject we shall never agree upon." He soothed the little creature's ruffled plumage with a tender forefinger, and held it out for Anne Boucicault's inspection. She peered at it curiously and rather coldly.

"It's very sweet," she said, "but wouldn't it be kinder to put it out of its misery?"

"Rather not. Besides"—his eyes twinkled in Meredith's direction—"it's not my business to put people out of their misery. And I'd rather keep this little chap alive than some men I know of. He's one of creation's top-notes. He's a poem all to himself. He wants to live and he's a right to live, and he's going to. His wing'll mend. I've mended dozens. It's an instinct—mending. I've got a baby cheetah with a broken paw at my diggins——"

Compton laughed hilariously at his wife's grim disapproval.

"I don't believe you could drown a kitten," she said.

"Why on earth should I want to drown a kitten?" He put his protégé tenderly back in its impromptu nest. "I brought two tabbies from England, and there are a lot more now. The whole village looks after them. They believe they're a specially imported sort of devil, and take every opportunity to propitiate them with edible offerings. It's great!"

Mrs. Compton looked helpless.

"You beware of that man, Anne," she said. "He's probably got a dyspeptic rattlesnake in one of his pockets. As to you, Tristram Tristram, I warn you that sooner or later you will get into serious trouble. You're a sentimentalist. There—go along. And, meanwhile, I'll let Arabella eat the grass tidy, and that so-called dog shall have a bone. Good luck to you!"

"I'm awfully obliged," he said solemnly. "Not a chicken bone, please. They stick in his throat."

"If I followed my conscience, I should give him poison," Mrs. Compton retorted, with her brows knitted over laughing eyes.

She had, however, no opportunity to carry out her threat. As the dog-cart turned out of the compound gates the disgruntled Wickie, who had been lying afar off, panting and disgraced, picked himself up, and, uttering a hoarse wail of indignation and despair, took to his bandy legs and rolled after the disappearing vehicle in a miniature storm of dust.

CHAPTER III

TRISTRAM BECOMES FATHER-CONFESSOR

So long as the gleaming, unsheltered roadway lasted, Tristram remained silent. His eyes were swollen with fatigue, and the sun blinded him. Through a silver shimmer of heat, he could see the undulating plain, yellow with the harvest, and his knowledge saw beyond that to the river and the rising jungle land, and the scattered hapless villages where his enemy awaited him. Cool and beautiful, Gaya lay above them, circling the hillside, the white walls of the bungalows sparkling amidst the dark green of the trees like the gems of a diadem. Tristram and his companion watched it thirstily. As they trotted at last into an avenue of flowering Mohwa trees, he drew rein and glanced down at the girl beside him. She was sitting very straight as though in defiance of the heat, her hands folded in front of her, her lips sternly composed. The youthful tears were not far off, yet, through a transient break in the future, he saw her as she would be years hence. And somehow the vision amused and touched him. It was as though the phenomenon reversed itself, and a stern-featured, middle-aged woman had grown young before his eyes.

"You mustn't worry," he said gently. "I don't suppose it's anything serious. Tell me about it. I don't want to worry her with questions."

"It won't worry her." He saw how her hands trembled as she clasped them and unclasped them. "She wants to talk—it's terrible—that's why I was so anxious—I had to find some one who would listen—and—and soothe her. I really came for Mr. Meredith. She doesn't like him, I'm afraid, poor mother, but that's because she doesn't understand. He's so awfully good."

"He's a fine fellow," Tristram agreed.

"And I thought he might help her," she went on, earnestly,—"might give her strength. Trouble overwhelms her. She resents it. And she has nothing to fall back on—nothing to console her."

Tristram did not answer immediately. They were going uphill, and he gave the pony his head, letting him manage the ascent after his own fashion.

"It takes a lot to console a man when his machinery's out of order," he said at last. "And one somehow does resent it. And then, I must say, if I had the toothache, I shouldn't want Mr. Meredith."

She gave a little nervous, unamused laugh.

"You know quite well what I mean, Major Tristram."

"Yes, I do. And I'm wondering if, after all, Meredith isn't the man you want. He and I both concentrate on humanity, but we do it from different points of view. I'm the man who looks after the house and sees that it's hygienic and watertight and all that. Meredith puts in the furniture and the electric fittings and keeps them polished."

He glanced whimsically at her puzzled face. "I mean just that the soul isn't my business," he added.

She raised eager, trusting eyes to his.

"I think it is, Major Tristram, I'm sure it is."

"Well, to tell you the truth, I think so too. I believe that the soul is the body and the body is the soul, and that one can't be healthy or unhealthy without affecting the other. But that's heresy, isn't it?"

A waxen, beautiful blossom from an overhanging mango-tree fell into her lap. Mechanically she picked it up and tore it with her restless fingers.

"It's not what we are taught to believe," she answered.

"No. You see, I'm a Pagan, Miss Boucicault. It's hereditary. My old mother—she's nearly eighty—she still totters up on to the mountain tops to say her prayers. As for me—" he gave a contented chuckle—"you hear that little chap chirping inside my helmet? Well, he's my consolation for every ache and sorrow I ever had—he and his like, and the trees and the stars and the flowers—even that mango blossom you're tearing up. To me they're just so many parts of God."

"Oh!——" She looked at the tattered flower in her lap and brushed it aside as though it suddenly frightened her. "I don't think that can be right. I'm sure you're not a Pagan, anyhow, Major. You couldn't be—and do the things you do."

They came out of the belt of shadow into the broad sunlight, and the blinding change covered his silence. A company of native infantry came up from a cross-road and swung past them amidst a cloud of slow-rising dust. The officers saluted Tristram. For an instant they seemed to throw off their weary dejection and to become almost gay. But the men did not lift their eyes. Their beards were white with dust and their faces set and sullen. They passed on, the beat of their feet sounding muffled and heavy on the palpitating quiet.

"They look pretty bad," Tristram commented.

"I'm frightened of them," she returned quickly. "Some of them mutinied last week, and father was nearly shot. I wake up every night and fancy I hear them firing on us."

"They belong to a regiment that stuck to us through thick and thin in 1857," he answered. "It's not like them to turn against us."

Her lips tightened.

"You can't trust any of them," she said.

By this time they had reached the first large bungalow of the European quarter. It was at once a sombre, pretentious building, evidently newly done up, and as they passed, a man on horseback turned out of the compound. Seeing Anne Boucicault, he saluted at once with a faintly exaggerated courtesy. The exaggeration matched the ultra-smartness of his English riding-clothes and the un-English flashiness of his good looks. Anne Boucicault returned the salutation stiffly, not meeting his direct glance, which passed on with an unveiled curiosity to Tristram. The latter urged the pony to a smarter trot as though something had irritated him.

"That's a stranger, anyhow," he said. "Two months brings changes even to Gaya. I thought that place was deserted and haunted for all time."

"Mr. Barclay has it now," she answered. "He came six weeks ago. I believe he trades with the native weavers or something. He's very rich."

"He doesn't look like an Englishman."

"He's not—not really. An Eurasian. His mother was a native, and his father——" She broke off. "He makes it a sort of half mystery. He just hints at things—I don't believe he knows himself. Anyhow, we hate him and try to avoid him. It's awfully awkward."

"I seemed to know his face," Tristram said, half to himself. He heard her sigh, and the sigh roused him from his tired search after an elusive memory. "He doesn't bother you, does he?" he asked.

She shook her head, but he saw her lips tremble with a new agitation.

"Not exactly—only it's all going to be so different. We were like a big family, weren't we, Major Tristram—all friends, all of the same set, and now this man has come, and then—you've heard, haven't you—about this woman, this dancer——"

"Mlle. Fersen, you mean?"

"That's what she calls herself." There was a chilly displeasure in her tone, which made her seem suddenly much older. "What does she want here? Why does she come? She can't have anything in common with us. She may even be a foreigner—vulgar and horrid——"

"I don't think she's like that," he interposed.

She flashed round on him.

"You know her, then?"

"I've seen her—just once," he answered, slowly.

"Is she——" She seemed to struggle with the question. "Is she very beautiful, Major Tristram?"

"No—I think not—not at all."

"That's worse then." And then quickly, passionately: "Oh, I wish she wasn't coming! I don't know why the very thought of her frightens me. It's as though I knew she was going to bring trouble—a sort of presentiment——"

"You're tired and anxious," he interrupted, and smiled down at her. "Nothing will happen—or perhaps I'm sanguine because I shan't be there to witness the upheaval."

"You're going into camp again?"

"Tonight."

"For long?"

"Until I've got things straight."

He happened to see her hands, and how they were tightly interlocked as though she were holding herself back. But her voice was quiet enough.

"Will you go on like that always, Major Tristram?"

"Until they push me on to the rubbish heap," he answered lightly.

"It must be very, very lonely."

He plunged his hand into his side-pocket and drew out a big bundle of letters. His blue eyes twinkled.

"You'd better not waste sympathy on me, Miss Boucicault. Look at these. I picked them up at the station—two by every mail. What do you think of that? And all from one woman!"

"A woman?" she echoed, stupidly.

"My old mother." He laughed with a boyish satisfaction. "We're the greatest pals on earth, she and I. A man couldn't be lonely with her in the background. We've got each other to live for."

"But she's in England. How she must miss you!"

He put the letters slowly back in his pocket.

"Yes. It's like a chronic pain. It hurts, but it weaves itself into the pattern of one's life. My mother's like that. My father was out here too, and they were often separated. She accepts it as inevitable."

"But you—your loneliness must be worse, out there in the wilderness."

"It's not a wilderness, it's peopled with all kinds of things—all kinds of"—— He caught himself up. "And I have friends in all the villages, and my animals and my work."

"I know your work is wonderful—the noblest work in the world." She spoke with a grave, youthful wisdom. "But the loneliness must remain all the same, Major Tristram."

He was silent for a moment, and then shook himself as though freeing himself from a burden.

"It can't be helped," he said. "No one can share it with me."

"Many people would be proud and glad to share it," she answered. She held her head high, and there was a fervent simplicity in her low voice which raised the impulsive words above suspicion. He turned to her with warm eyes.

"Thank you," he said. "I don't think it's true, and I shan't ever put it to the test—but it's good hearing."

He turned the pony neatly into the gates of the Boucicaults' bungalow and drove up the shady avenue to the porch. A syce ran out to meet them and caught the reins, and a minute later Anne Boucicault had been lifted gently to the ground. "And we've chattered so much," Tristram remarked shamefacedly, "that I don't even know your mother's symptoms."

She made no answer, indeed did not seem to have heard him. She had lost all her vigour, all her faintly self-opinionated eagerness. As they stood together in the entrance hall she seemed just cowed and broken, a white, frightened little ghost.

"My mother's in here," she said, scarcely above a whisper. She held the door open for him, and he went past her into a room so carefully darkened that for a moment he hesitated blindly on the threshold. Then a sound guided him. It was the sound of some one crying. Not passionately, not desperately, but with a terrible monotony. Then one salient feature detached itself from the shadows—a wicker chair drawn up by the curtained window, and beside it, huddled together, with her face buried in her arms, the figure of a woman. She wore some loose, dark-coloured garment, and was so small and still that she would have seemed scarcely living, but for the jerking sobs. Tristram checked the girl's anxious movement and went forward alone. He knelt down by the piteous heap and put his hand on her arm, and remained thus for a full minute. He did not speak to her, and she seemed unconscious of his presence. The sobbing went on unbrokenly. Then he picked her up quietly and effortlessly, and placed her in the chair, dexterously slipping a silk cushion behind her head.

"Mrs. Boucicault!" She did not answer. Her eyes were closed. Her small, white face under the mop of fair hair, fast turning grey, was puckered like a child's. Her little hands gripped the arms of her chair. From her place near the door, Anne watched with a frightened wonder. "Mrs. Boucicault!" Tristram repeated quietly. Her eyes opened then. They were tearless and very bright. She stared straight ahead, her under-lip between her white teeth, and began to rock herself backwards and forwards. She was still sobbing. Tristram knelt again and took one of her hands and held it between his own. She looked down then—first at her hand, as though it puzzled her, and then at him. Suddenly, violently, she freed herself and tore open the heavily embroidered kimono. Her shoulders were bare. On the right shoulder was a black swollen stain bigger than a man's hand.

"Look!" she said.

Anne Boucicault caught her breath with a vague, vicarious shame. She saw that Tristram had moved very slightly. His square jaws looked ugly against the dim light of the window.

"Get hot water and bandages," he commanded. "Linen will do—and ointment—anything greasy." As she slipped from the room he drew the kimono gently over the poor lacerated shoulder. "You've had a nasty accident, Mrs. Boucicault," he said, levelly.

"It was no accident." Her sobs had stopped. Her voice sounded like the rasp of steel against steel. "He did it—my husband. It's not the first time, Major Tristram. It won't be the last. He'll kill me—and he'll kill her." She nodded towards the door. The words poured from her as though released from a long restraint, but she was coldly, violently coherent. "Yes—he'll kill her—slowly, by inches. He'll break her. She'll go under fast. She's not like me—I'm wiry—she's hard, but she'll snap. For all her prayers and her church and her God, she'll go under." Something contemptuous and angry crept into her face. "Anne's cowed already. And it's not only us. His men—they tried to shoot him. Did you hear?"

He nodded.

"Yes."

Her eyes blazed.

"Oh, I wish to God they'd done it!" she burst out, from between clenched teeth. "Oh, why didn't they? He's goaded them enough. One of these days they'll murder us all for his sake. He's a devil. He's made life a hell. He likes to make suffering. He likes to see us wince. Oh, if he were only dead!" Suddenly the tense mask of hatred broke up into piteous lines of helpless misery. Two great tears rolled unheeded down her white cheeks. "Anne talked about bearing our cross, and prayer, and God's will," she went on chokingly. "But I want to be happy, Major Tristram, I want to be happy."

"You have an absolute right to happiness," he answered. "You've got to be happy, Mrs. Boucicault. I'm going to see to it."

She dropped back wearily among her cushions. Her grey eyes, now pale and faded-looking, rested on his face with a childish questioning.

"You talk as though—as though you could."

"Well, I can do something—I promise you. Close your eyes."

She closed them at once, and he took his handkerchief and brushed the tears from her cheeks. Then he resumed his kneeling position, her hand in his, soothing it much as he had soothed the frightened, broken-winged bird. Once she sighed deeply, as if released from some stifling weight, and thereafter her breathing sounded quiet and regular. By the time Anne Boucicault returned, her mother had dropped into a heavy sleep.

Major Tristram got up noiselessly, and motioned the girl to follow him. His movements were curiously light and noiseless, and brought no shadow of change on the sleeper's face.

"It's better that she should sleep," he said quietly. "I shall come in again tonight before I leave. I doubt if she wakes before then."

They went out together. On the mat the ubiquitous Wickie lay extended in a state of dusty misery. He rolled over as Tristram appeared, displaying much humility and a blood-stained paw. Tristram picked him up and hugged him. "You're not a dog—you're an ass, Wickie," he declared. "And I'll wager you consider yourself a martyr into the bargain, you assassin of innocent bulbuls. What do you suppose I'm going to do with you—carry you, I suppose?" He turned a wry, laughing face to his companion.

"Well, I'll be off now, anyhow," he said. "You'll see me tonight. Good-bye till then—and don't worry her or yourself."

She took his extended hand.

"Thank you. I thought it would be so terrible—for any one to know how things are with us. I haven't minded you a bit."

"I'm awfully glad."

He took up his impromptu bird's-nest from its place of safety in an empty fern-pot. The contents chirped defiance and terror, and Tristram looked up smiling. He saw then that Anne Boucicault's eyes were fixed on something beyond him, and that they were wide and stupid-looking with dread. He turned. A man stood in the sunlit verandah. Against the golden background he bulked huge and threatening, his features and whatever expression they bore blotted out by shadow. The switch which he carried beat an irritable tattoo against his riding-boots.

Tristram nodded a greeting.

"Good evening, Colonel."

"Good evening, Major." He bowed satirically and crossed the threshold. "This is a pleasant surprise. I understood you were out camping."

"I have been for the last two months. I am off again tonight."

"Then my daughter and I are indeed fortunate to catch this glimpse of you." He came farther into the shade, half turning to fling his helmet and whip on to a table. The light fell on his profile, revealing the livid skin, the brutal line of the jaw. "To what are we indebted, Major?"

"I came professionally," Tristram answered.

"On Anne's behalf, I suppose?"

"No, for Mrs. Boucicault." He scrutinized the elder man deliberately. "Perhaps I could do something for you, Colonel. You're not looking well. You ought to take a year's leave."

Colonel Boucicault allowed a moment to elapse before he answered. He had the tensely vicious look of a hard drinker who is never drunk, and whose jangling nerves are always writhing under restraint. Finally, he seemed to take a stronger hold over himself. He laughed out, shortly.

"Thanks, I'm very well. I'll last the regiment another year or two—to its infinite satisfaction, no doubt. As to Mrs. Boucicault, your visit was kind but unnecessary. There's nothing wrong in that quarter but feminine hysteria."

"I don't think so," Tristram returned. He had coloured slowly to the roots of his ruddy hair, but his voice was even quieter. "I take a serious view of the case. I have ordered Mrs. Boucicault an immediate return to England."

There was another break. The two men eyed each other squarely.

"That is an absurd proposition which I cannot sanction," Boucicault said in the same tone of violent self-restraint.

"I'm afraid you'll have to, Colonel."

The antagonism, whose note had sounded even in their greeting of each other, now rang out clearly. Boucicault's big hands twitched at his sides.

"Surely, Major, that is scarcely fitting language——" he began.

"I don't care a damn for what's fitting," Tristram broke in. "Mrs. Boucicault's going to England with Anne. If she doesn't, I'll have you hounded out of the army even if I get hounded out myself in the doing of it. That's my bargain."

"By God, Major——" Boucicault took a step nearer.

By reason of his heavy build, he seemed to tower over the younger man. His eyes were bloodshot in their inflamed rims; his whole body quivered. "You'd better get out of here," he stammered thickly. "And take my advice—keep clear of this place—keep out of my way."

"Thanks." Tristram tucked Wickie more securely under one arm. "I'll be round this evening," he added.

He ignored the threatening gesture, and went leisurely down the steps and along the drive. At the gates he stopped, drawing his breath with a quick, deep relief.

Across the roadway, the stems of the trees stood out black and straight as the pillars of a great temple, whose red-gold lamp had been lowered from the dome and now sank swiftly into an extinguishing pool of shadow. A breeze rustled coolly overhead, brushing away the sweet, heavy incense of many flowers and bringing the first warning of nightfall. A belated finch fluttered amidst the dense foliage, and then all was still again.

Tristram remained motionless, apparently plunged in his own thoughts, for he started when a hand touched his arm and turned almost angrily. Anne Boucicault stood beside him. She was breathless, her lips were parted, and the wind had blown the dark, curly hair from her white forehead, adding impulse and eagerness to her staid girlishness.

"I had to come," she panted, "to—to thank you. And then—you mustn't keep your promise. You mustn't come—it isn't safe——"

He shook his head. His eyes, after the first glance, had gone back to the fading light.

"I shouldn't hurt your father," he said, gravely.

"But you——!" she exclaimed. "No one knows what he might do to you."

"I don't think that matters," he returned, still in the same rather absent tone. "Anyway, if he's mad, he's not a fool. You mustn't worry."

She lingered. Her hand rested tremblingly on his arm.

"And I want to thank you, Major Tristram. You've helped poor mother—and I was so proud. No one's ever faced him like that. I wish——" She faltered. "If we could only do something for you——"

He was silent for a moment, then, as though her words only reached him gradually, he turned with a quick smile.

"You can. Take Wickie in as a boarder, will you? He's lame, and my hands are full already. I couldn't take him with me. Ayeshi could fetch him in a week or two. Would you mind?"

"I'd love to have him." She took the unwieldy, protesting mongrel, and held him rather clumsily in her arms. "And your little bird?" she asked.

"No, he'll want special medical treatment. Thanks awfully, all the same." He bent and patted Wickie's black snout with an apologetic gentleness. "Don't fret your heart out, old chap. It's your own fault—and Ayeshi shall come for you, upon my honour he shall."

"I'll take care of him," Anne said.

"I know you will."

"Good-bye, Major Tristram." The sunlight was in her eyes, and they were very bright. The colour in her cheeks deepened. "And God bless you," she added, timidly but very seriously.

He smiled down at her.

"And you and Wickie and everybody," he said. "I'm sure He does."

He strode off, and at the bend of the road turned and waved.

But long after he had disappeared, she stood there gazing into the dusk, the unhappy Wickie pressed tightly against her breast.

CHAPTER IV

THE INTERLOPERS

Rajah Rasaldû was wonderfully, if not impressively, European. He wore a frock-coat and grey trousers, English in intention, French in execution. They were almost too perfect. The native, brightly hued turban, an unwilling concession, as he admitted, to local prejudice, came as a rather startling finale, though it suited him better than his Europeanism. He was a short, unmuscular little man, built in circles rather than in straight lines, and a determined course of Parisian good-living had added seriously to a natural tendency to embonpoint. His manner, even in sitting still, was restless and fussy. He had, in fact, neither the inscrutable dignity of the native nor the self-assured ease of the race he aped.

"When I look at you, Mademoiselle," he was saying, earnestly, "I forget that I am in this dreadful country, and I imagine myself back to London. I see myself in the darkened box, and you in all the brightness. I hear the music and the roar of applause. I feel at home—almost happy." He stared down at his round, soft hands as though he were rather pleased with their severe lack of adornment, and sighed. The woman he addressed did not look at him. She was watching the little groups of white-clad figures dotted about the garden, with her head turned slightly away from him. Next her, Mary Compton and the Judge's wife were talking with the lazy earnestness engendered by tea and the cool shade of a flowering mango.

"But this is your country," Sigrid Fersen said. "You are surely happiest here."

He shrugged his shoulders.

"I was born here. The Government has put me in a position of trust, and it is my duty to be at my post from time to time. But my heart is with you—with the West and Western civilization. And of all that, Mademoiselle, you are the personification."

She laughed a little, as though secretly amused.

"Tell me your impressions of Paris, Rajah," she said.

He told her. From time to time his brown, dissipated eyes shot irritable glances at the figure seated immediately behind his hostess. It was perhaps a somewhat startling figure, and though Gaya approved of companions and chaperons, and had indeed heaved a sigh of relief over Mrs. Smithers's existence, it had none the less been considerably startled by her personality. She was well past middle age, and, in spite of the considerable heat, was dressed severely in black grenadine, and wore a mob-cap on a remarkably fine head of white hair, which she occasionally patted with a nervous hand. If it is true all human beings bear a resemblance to some animal, then Mrs. Smithers might easily have been associated with a bull-dog of exceedingly determined character. Her face was settled in wrinkles of challenging tenacity, but she never moved and never changed her expression. She sat there, bolt upright, and only her roving eyes betrayed the fact that she was alive. They expressed also the bitterest and most annihilating disapproval of everything existent.

Mrs. Compton accepted her third cup of tea from an engagingly youthful subaltern and went on talking.

"Of course he's mad," she was saying. "He hates Tristram worse than any one living, which is saying a lot. They had an awful row over Mrs. Boucicault just before Tristram went away, and now Boucicault is taking his turn. He refuses to forward Tristram's appeal for help—says the whole thing's a scare, and that Tristram is simply fussing for his own glorification. But it isn't true. Ayeshi came to my husband last night and told him. It's cholera—oh, my dear Susan, don't jump like that! Heerut's fifteen miles away, and we've the river between us, and Gaya's healthy when everything else is riddled. Besides, Tristram has got the thing in hand. He hasn't slept for four days. Ayeshi said he didn't look human. Some of the natives went crazy with fright and got out of hand. But Tristram managed them—single-handed, my dear, and with not so much as a revolver. Ayeshi talked about him as though he were the tenth Avatar, or whatever they call it. Of course, he'll do that sort of thing once too often. C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre. But I love that man. I tell Archie once a day at least, and he's getting quite tired about it——"

"Of whom are you talking, Mrs. Compton?"

Mrs. Compton started, and the Rajah, who had been expatiating on French genius as revealed in the Bal du Moulin Rouge, went on for a minute, carried forward by his own momentum. Then he stopped and dropped into a silence, which would have been sulky in any one less anxious to appear civilized. As for Mrs. Compton, the question had come with such self-assured, if quiet authority, that she felt certain that, as a woman on her own ground, she ought to take offence. In fact, all Gaya, as represented in the old dâk-bungalow's garden, was in much the same position. Without performing the high kick at the club dinner or otherwise living up to the conventional reputation of her class, the newcomer had sailed serenely across all their unwritten laws, and not only had Gaya not been outraged, but it had been secretly delighted. And it was ashamed of itself for being delighted. Mrs. Compton was ashamed of herself—ashamed that she, the untamable spirit of the station who had insulted Colonel Boucicault to his face should sit there and meet this woman with a smile of propitiating amiability.

"Major Tristram," she said. "He belongs to the Medical Service. You haven't met him yet, and I don't suppose any of us will see him for some time. He's fighting the cholera in one of the native villages."

Sigrid Fersen nodded thoughtfully. Then she got up.

"I heard you say just now that you were interested in old china," she said, abruptly. "I have a piece in the drawing-room which I should like you to see. Will you come?"

"I should be delighted——"

"Your guests, Mademoiselle," Rasaldû murmured. But his protest passed unheeded, and Mrs. Compton got up and left the Judge's wife without a word of apology. Mrs. Smithers had risen with equal promptitude and brought up the rear.

They crossed the garden to the bungalow, and the little parties grouped lazily in the vicinity of the tea-tables became silent, and remained silent until Sigrid Fersen had disappeared. Then they went on talking. Very few of them realized that they had ever stopped, much less that they had been staring with the naïve directness of children. They certainly made no comment. Only Jim Radcliffe, the newly joined subaltern, who had the inexhaustible restlessness of a fox-terrier puppy, became quiet to the point of thoughtfulness.

"By Jove, did you see her walk?" he said to Mrs. Brabazone. But the latter made no reply, being in a state of dudgeon and not inclined to appreciation.

Meantime, Mary Compton had become aware of a profound and very mysterious change in her own psychology. As she crossed the threshold of the darkened drawing-room she perceived that every earnest, painstaking effort of hers to make the place habitable and presentable had suffered a ruthless upheaval. The hours of patient questioning which she had spent on the to-be or not-to-be of the curtain bows had been so many hours wasted. Yet her fiery Celtic susceptibilities remained unruffled. She admitted at once that the changes were improvements,—small but effective strokes of genius. Moreover, various new items had been introduced—a piano procured from heaven alone knew where, a few rich embroideries, a vase or two, and a pale-tinted Persian rug. She was busy cataloguing these items, when her quick eyes encountered Mrs. Smithers. Mrs. Smithers had seated herself promptly on the chair nearest the door, and assumed her former attitude of unbending severity and disapproval. Her appearance somehow made a further reduction in Mrs. Compton's forces of self-assurance, and when her hostess, who had been busy with the contents of a carved chest, came back to her, she was overpowered by an unusual sense of almost fatuous helplessness. Whatever this small woman meant to do, she would do. And therewith the fate of Gaya seemed sealed.

"There—you recognize it, of course."

Mrs. Compton forgot Gaya and her own lost prestige. In the ten years of her married life, there was one passion for which she and the easy-going, hard-working Archie had scraped and saved. It was a passion which was one day to find a fitting background in some English home, a place created almost daily afresh in their minds but always with the abiding features of spacious lawns and an orchard and stables, and within doors oak cupboards guarding the treasures of the hard years. But with all their savings and searchings, they had never possessed anything like this.

"It's Sèvres—of course—how beautiful! I'm almost afraid to touch it."

"Don't be. It's yours."

"Mine!" Mary Compton gasped—whether audibly or not, she did not know. She felt that there was fresh cause for offence coming and that she had no adequate forces with which to meet it. "But, of course not——"

"I bought it for you."

Mrs. Compton nearly regained her usual briskness.

"That's nonsense. We haven't known each other a week. And you must have bought that in Europe."

"Yes—I did, years ago. But I bought it for you, all the same. I bought it for some one who would look at it and touch it as you did. And besides, I want you to have something of mine—I am selfish enough to wish to be remembered by those who have been kind to me—as you have been. It was the Rajah's invitation which brought me to Gaya, but only a woman could have welcomed me. Any one in my position makes enemies automatically, and without you I should have had to face a whole army of prejudices. But you paved the way—you made it possible to invite all these people without offending them—and this in spite of the fact that you thought you were probably introducing a firebrand." She laughed in her curious, reflective way. "And then it was your hands prepared this beautiful home for me," she added.

Mrs. Compton crimsoned and swallowed the delicate morsel of brazen flattery with a ridiculous pleasure. She made a last effort, however, to retire to her first position of friendly reserve.

"Of course, we did what we could," she said. "Gaya is rather proud of its hospitality. We wanted you to take back a good impression, Mademoiselle——"

A quick gesture interrupted her.

"I'm not 'mademoiselle.' I'm English. My mother was a Swede, and I took her maiden name because—there never has been a great English dancer, and in England what hasn't been can't be. It's just one of the Rajah's foibles to give everything a Gallic touch. But I'm just Miss Fersen—or Sigrid if you like."

The Celtic temperament works both ways. The only certain feature is its uncertainty. Mrs. Compton abandoned her offensive-defensive and with great dexterity managed to cling to the Sèvres vase and kiss the giver on both cheeks without disaster.

"I'd like it to be Sigrid," she said warmly. "And my name's Mary—and I'm going to take the Sèvres because I want it badly, and because I like you and I shan't mind feeling horribly grateful. And I hope you'll make me your master of ceremonies, and our bungalow your headquarters. You will, won't you?"

She thrilled under the touch of the cool, small hand on hers.

"Yes, I promise you. It's what I wanted. I shall need a friend. A great many people will hate me—men and women. I have seen it in the eyes of one woman already. And, besides that I want to get to know real human beings. All my life I have lived for and in the one thing. People have been shadows to me. Now I need them. But they must be real—good, honest flesh and blood. Not puppets." She sat down on the big divan drawn up against the wall and patted the seat beside her. "Tell me about this Major Tristram," she said.

And Mrs. Compton, whose rules of etiquette were Gaya's social law, sat down and for half an hour talked about Major Tristram, whilst Sigrid Fersen's guests wandered unshepherded about her garden.

At the end of the half-hour Mrs. Compton found her husband near the gates, disconsolate and alone, guarding the rather shabby little turn-out which they called a dog-cart. He was in uniform, and had evidently been at some pains to escape notice.

"You said six o'clock and it's half-past," he commented, gloomily. "I shall be confoundedly late. What on earth have you been doing? And what's that you've got under your arm?"

She chuckled to herself.

"Can't you recognize Sèvres when you see it?"

"By George—what a piece!" His eyes opened with a hungry appreciation. Then he shook his head at her. "My dear girl, put it back! I knew we should come to this sooner or later—all collectors do. Put it back before it's missed. Think of the scandal. And a newcomer, too!"

She broke into a half-pleased, half-ashamed laugh and wrapped the precious trophy in the protecting folds of a rug.

"She gave it me—yes, she did. And she calls me Mary, and I call her Sigrid, and we've kissed each other, and I've given her the run of our bungalow." She climbed up into the driver's seat and took the reins. "You know how I hate those sort of sudden familiarities, Archie. But I've no explanation. Have you?"

"Not one."

"She isn't beautiful. I'm better-looking myself."

"A dozen times, old girl."

She smiled down upon him with a rather absent-minded graciousness.

"I believe she's got electric wires instead of nerves and sinews," she said reflectively. "I felt them in her hand. It was like putting one's fingers into a steel glove covered with velvet. What bosh I'm talking. I believe I'm hypnotized. I shall go round and look up poor Anne and restore my self-respect. Mr. Meredith told me she looked as though she was breaking her heart over something. Of course, it's that brute! Why aren't you men plucky enough to shoot him——?"

"My dear girl——"

His wife cut short his protest by turning her pony out of the gates and up the broad avenue which led from the outlying dâk-bungalow to Gaya proper. The steep hill, her new possession, and various rather confused speculations accounted for the fact that her pony promptly dropped to a walk and was allowed to proceed in a leisurely fashion, which culminated in an abrupt halt. Mrs. Compton awoke then. She felt vaguely annoyed with herself, and her annoyance changed to something like consternation when she perceived that the stoppage was not attributable either to the pony's disinclination or her own day-dreaming. A man stood at the animal's head and now came up to the step, his long, brown hand lifted to his topee in greeting.

"I called to you, Mrs. Compton," he said, "but you didn't hear me, and I took the liberty of stopping you. I hope I'm forgiven."

She stared down at him. Her confusion of warm disjointed musings chilled instantly to her usual trenchant matter-of-factness.

"If you wanted to speak to me, Mr. Barclay——" she began.

"I know—I might have called formally. But I ran the risk either of being refused or landing into a crowd of people. I wanted to see you alone." He waited a moment. His hand rested firmly on the side of the cart, and she could not have driven on without going over him. She saw also the dogged set of his dark face and waited with an angry resignation. "You've just come from Mademoiselle Fersen's At Home, haven't you?" he asked.

"Yes."

"I used to know her," he said, "that is to say, I was introduced at some big reception in England. She wouldn't remember me. That was in my undergrad days. I was at Balliol, you know."

Mrs. Compton's fine lips twitched satirically. She was not feeling charitable, and this man was offering her his credentials in a way that incited derision. He must have seen her expression, for his brown eyes, with their blue-tinted whites, never left her face. "I want you to do me a favour," he burst out. "I want you to introduce me again, Mrs. Compton."

Her smile faded. She was thoroughly angry, but some other less definable emotion confused her indignation to the point of ineffectuality.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Barclay, but I really haven't the right or the power to introduce any one to Miss Fersen without her permission."

"I know that—at least, your friends and acquaintances would be introduced naturally——" He broke off. The nostrils of his fine, aquiline nose distended, his whole face, handsome in line and profoundly brooding in its fundamental expression, was tense and strained-looking. He seemed like a man doggedly setting himself to a hated task. "May I be straightforward with you, Mrs. Compton?"

"Of course. Why not?"

"I know you are anxious to drive on—over me even," he said, with a flash from a smothered bitterness. "But you are the only person I feel I can speak to, and I mayn't get you alone again. Look here, Mrs. Compton, I'm an Englishman. My father was English—I was educated at an English University—I hold an English degree. I've got any amount of money. It seems to me I've got the right to demand—well, decent civility. So far—I've been here two months—I've been out of things. Of course, I don't belong to the military lot, and I haven't a government appointment—but it seems to me-out here in an alien country—we English ought to hold together——" He was choking and breaking over his words like a man breathless with running, the fatal mincing accent betraying itself in his gathering excitement, and instinctively Mrs. Compton looked away from him. He was trembling, and somehow the sight filled her with an odd pity almost stronger than her repugnance.

"What do you want me to do, Mr. Barclay?" she asked.

"After all—it's not much. If your husband would put me up for the Polo Club—I'm a good player, and I've got some of the finest ponies in India. Gaya could beat any team you like with my ponies. Your husband's popular—he could easily do it—if he wanted to——"

"I couldn't ask him," she interrupted hurriedly. "It's not my business. I hate backstair influence with husbands." She took refuge in a cowardly compromise. "You ought to speak to Captain Compton yourself."

He laughed shortly.

"That means you won't," he broke out suddenly and violently. "It's the touch of the tar brush that's worrying you, isn't it? Yet you don't mind kowtowing to a full-blooded native. You'll have that dissipated degenerate Rasaldû at all your feasts, though he's not even accepted by his own people. His grandfather was a village cow-herd, and the Government set his people up in the place of the hereditary heirs because they were likely to be more tractable. You know all that, and yet you'd lick his boots, whilst I, with your own blood in my veins——" He caught himself up, smoothing his working features with a desperate effort. "Look here, Mrs. Compton, I want to do the right thing. I want to serve my country loyally. But I've got to have a country—I've got to belong somewhere. Otherwise——"

She tightened the reins, moving her pony's head round so that she could go forward without driving over him.

"I'm sorry," she said, coldly. "I have no prejudices myself, but I also have no right to interfere with the prejudices of other people. You must make your own way. Please let me pass——"

The pony started under the cut of her whip, and Barclay instantly jumped out of danger. He stood then in the middle of the dusty road, his hands clenched at his side, his cheeks wet. He was crying with the helpless passion of a child. Meanwhile, the swift Indian nightfall had risen up out of the plain to Gaya's hilltops pouring its shadow army into the dâk-bungalow's neglected garden, veiling its rambling decay with an unfathomable, shapeless beauty.

The Rajah had been the last to leave, lingering clumsily and obsequiously to the limits of the law, but now even he had gone, and in the place of the voices and subdued laughter there was nothing but a flutter of a night-bird among the trees, the hushed, mysterious rustlings and whisperings of darkness.

Sigrid Fersen had drawn her chair near to the verandah. A lamp burnt behind her, and she was reading intently in some old vellum-bound book. Mrs. Smithers sat opposite her, knitting a sock, which even now that the day's heat was over had a curiously smothering and woolly appearance. From time to time her faded, truculent blue eyes glanced across to the figure beneath the light, and their habitual expression of grim disapproval yielded to a wistful anxiety.

For half an hour there had been no sound but the turning over of the thick leaves and the click of the knitting-needles. Now Sigrid Fersen touched the soft-voiced silver bell beside her. The curtains at the far end of the room parted almost immediately in answer.

"Tell the syce to have the best horse in the stable saddled by daybreak," she said. "I am riding to Heerut. I shall need a guide."

There was a moment's perceptible hesitation. The ayah's roe-eyes were large with trouble.

"Mem-Sahib, there is much sickness in Heerut."

"I know."

"It may be, Mem-Sahib, that no guide will dare——"

"He need not accompany me farther than the river. See to it."

"It shall be done, Mem-Sahib."

The curtains fell noiselessly in their place. Mrs. Smithers dropped her knitting-needles.

"Oh, lawks a-mercy!" she said. "Lawks a-mercy!"

It was as though some solemn old Egyptian sphinx had broken into broad Cockney, and, having given vent to its feelings, relapsed into the historic pose of unfathomable and supercilious meditation. Sigrid Fersen closed her book. She rested her head on its smooth yellow surface with a curious tenderness.

"You mustn't be unhappy, Smithy, and you mustn't try to prevent me. One way or the other, my days are numbered, and each one of them has to be an episode, something definite and new, something to take with me or to look back on. Afterwards——" Her voice lifted from its veiled softness and rang clearer. "We have travelled a long, long way, Smithy, and now we are almost at the end. You have seen it all with your wise old eyes, perhaps better than I have, and you know what life is. What shall it be, Smithy?"

The old woman clasped her knotted hands together and rocked herself slowly backwards and forwards.

"I don't know—I don't know. It's just a nightmare. I wake up sometimes o' nights and ask myself if I've gone clean mad, or what we're doing here in this awful heathen country—you, the greatest of 'em all, hobnobbing with ninnies wot don't know Taglioni from Queen Elizabeth, and me trying to be a lady by dint of keeping my mouth shut like a mouse-trap—me, that stood and waited for you night after night and 'dressed' you quicker than the smartest of them—lawks a-mercy, wot am I doing here?"

Sigrid Fersen got up slowly, putting her book on the table, and came and stood at her companion's side. She caressed the grenadine-clad shoulder lightly, affectionately. "You're here because I am, and because you've stuck to me through everything. You can't help sticking to me any more than I can help wanting you somewhere in the background. And I'm here because of this"—she laid her hand on her left side—"and this——" She opened a drawer in the table, and, taking out a little shiny-backed note-book, dropped it into the old woman's lap. "Open it. Now take the bottom figure on the right-hand column from the bottom figure on the left. What does it leave?"

Mrs. Smithers coughed apologetically.

"I never was a hand at figures, Sigrid."

"Never mind. Take your time."

"I don't know rightly—it looks to me like a thousand."

"That must be about right. Well, that's what we've got. No more. What would you have me do—teach dancing to loutish girls in some stuffy English suburb? No, Smithy. You wouldn't. In my art there is no one greater than I—there never has been—and though I want to live I mustn't burn out like some poor candle. I must be a splendid rocket, lighting up all the country, and most splendid of all at the last. Then darkness."

The old woman put up her hand blindly.

"Oh, my dear, my dear——"

Sigrid Fersen seemed to have forgotten her.

"'To die in beauty.' That's Ibsen. It's the most wonderful thought in the world. It's the only prayer I know. Not squalidly, not in misery and decay and ugliness, but in beauty. That is the goal of life."

"I don't understand, Sigrid. And I can't believe it all. I can't. Never to wait for you in the wings—never to hear men shout for you—and see the women crying for love of you. Never to hear you silence them all so that they don't even seem to breathe. Lawks a-mercy, when I think of that there waltz—Chopin, wasn't it—the tune runs in my head now—I can see the faces in the front row, white as death, Sigrid, as though they had seen——"

Her voice cracked. Sigrid Fersen turned away from her.

"No—never again—or perhaps once more—just once——"

She went out on to the verandah and stood there motionless, her face lifted to the darkness.

CHAPTER V

A VISION OF THE BACKWATER

The Dakktar Sahib stepped carefully over the body of Ayeshi, who lay asleep inside the doorway, and went down the centre of the street. The village was silent and seemingly deserted. Even the grain-dealer, Lalloo by name, not unknown as a money-lender with Eastern ideas on interest—had deserted his wooden booth, and the lean dogs which were wont to nose hungrily in the gutters had gone elsewhere for their hunting-ground. The gutters themselves were clean; there was no cattle to wander haplessly in and out of the open doorways; the half-naked babies were hidden and silent. And in all this silence and garnished peace there was something ominous and dreadful. A mighty scavenger had passed through the village and swept it clear of refuse and misery and sickness and life itself. Heerut lay under the burning midday sun like a body awaiting burial, wrapped in the orderliness of death, silent, colourless, for all its piteous poverty, majestic.

Tristram's footsteps rang out loudly in the stillness. He alone was alive and bore the agony and stress of life stamped on his body. He was ugly with the ugliness of a soldier returning from the battle-field. His clothes were dirty. He reeled drunkenly, his eyes were bloodshot and swollen in their deep sockets, and a month's growth of reddish beard covered his long chin. He might have passed for a spectre of Death itself, stalking through the place of its visitation.

He reached the village cross-roads. The pointed leaves of the council-tree hung limply, their soft mysterious voices hushed. Underneath, the earth was scarred and burnt by the bonfires around which the village elders clustered at nightfall, listening to the tales from the great past. There had been no bonfire for many nights, and the elders had gone their ways.

Tristram went on, out of the village, across the ancient half-obliterated path of Auspiciousness, through the coarse jungle grass to the river. It flowed broad and swift, swirling against its muddy, artificial barrier with sullen impatience, its farther bank lost in the blaze and shimmer of heat. Tristram went on, past the temple whose battered walls glowed warm and golden in the sunlight, to the clump of trees beyond. He entered their shade at a stumbling run like a man seeking refuge from pursuers, and burst through the tangled undergrowth with the whole weight of his body.

Here, beneath the branches of the stately Mohwa trees, the Ganges had built herself a backwater. Her waters, grey still with the snows of her mountain mother, had turned from their stern course and become clear as crystal and still as the surface of a mirror. They reflected softly the flaming green of the overhanging foliage and the red and gold of the strange flowers growing on their banks. A lotus-flower floated like a fairy palace in a patch of subdued sunshine, its pale petals half open and delicately tipped with pink as though the light had awakened them from their white sleep to life. Beneath, in the shining, deceptive depths was a world of mystery, forests of twining, sinuous growths, the monster blossoms swaying in the under-current.

Tristram dropped down on his knees at the water's edge and then rolled over with his face hidden on his arm. He lay so still that a golden lizard flashed out from the long grass and lingered almost at his elbow and a water-hen gliding down on to the breast of the water preened herself in complacent security.

The patch of sunlight moved on. It left the lotus-flower in an emerald shadow, and rested like a bright, watchful eye on a patch of flaming poppies on the farther bank. The silence deepened. Even the gentle parting of the undergrowth behind the spot where Tristram slept brought no sound. With a noiseless strength the lean hands of Vahana, the Sadhu, pressed back the opposing branches. He came forward so slowly, so stealthily, that the foliage seemed rather to thin imperceptibly before him like a green mist, leaving him at last unveiled on the fringe of the clearing. Even then it was as though he had been there always, not a man, not even living, but the dead twisted stump of some tempest-riven tree.

But the water-hen heard and saw him and rose with a whirr of wings. The lizard flashed back into his hiding-place.

Tristram did not stir. The emaciated, half-naked body glided towards him and bent over him. For a long minute Vahana remained thus, scrutinizing the half-hidden face of the sleeper, then he stood upright, tossing the hair from his wild eyes, his long, fleshless arms raised high above his head, with a gesture that was as a salute to some oncoming, resistless destiny. Then, in an instant, he seemed to shrivel, his arm sank, and with one swift glance about him he turned and vanished among the trees.

Tristram awoke suddenly, but not completely. He rested on his elbow, gazing at the blur of colour before him with heavy eyes, then drew himself up and, with the clumsiness of a drunken man, began to undress. Presently he slipped into the quiet water; the circles widened about him, and the lotus-flower rocked on the breast of the strange upheaval, but after that the intruder scarcely moved. He became as one of the giant weeds growing amidst the stones, upborne by the water, himself inert and quiescent. His head was thrown slightly back and his eyes had closed again.

Half an hour later, when he scrambled back on to the bank, the agony of exhaustion had been washed from him. He held himself upright to the air and sun, his body shining white and splendid against the background of foliage, the joy of life in every muscle, in every firm and graceful line. Then, with a sigh of unutterable content, he began to dress leisurely, retrieved a battered cigarette case and a box of matches and crouched down, tailor fashion, amidst the grasses. For a time he smoked peacefully, watching the light changing on the water and the swift moving life that hid in the shallows and darted out between the stones and swaying weeds. The lizard, tempted by his quiet and perhaps some luscious prospect of supper, wriggled out and took grave stock of him, and he stared back as motionless and absorbed, until the forgotten cigarette burnt him, when he swore and the lizard vanished like a tiny golden streak into its fastness. The man laughed to himself and dropped back upon his elbow. A smile still lingered about his mouth, but his eyes under the big square brows had forgotten their amusement. They were fixed dreamily ahead, and what they saw smoothed out the last lines of tension from his features, and lent them a look of youth and tenderness. And presently he dropped back, and, with his hands clasped behind his head, stared up into the shadowing green, as though whatever dream he conjured up had taken refuge there.

He slept again, not heavily as before but on the border-land of consciousness where thoughts break from their moorings, and sail out into a magic, restless sea of change whose bed lies littered with forgotten treasures. When the thud of hoofs broke on the stillness a dream rose up and shielded him, covering the sound with a fantastic picture, so that he slept on.

The patch of sunshine travelled upwards. It had forsaken the poppies as it had left the lotus-flower, and rested on the fair head of a woman.

Though Tristram saw her he did not move.

She stood scarcely five paces from him near an opening in the trees. One hand rested on the bridle of a tired horse, the other was lifted to her face, the forefinger to her lips, half in reflection, half as though hushing her own breathing. A pith helmet and the white coat of her simple riding-habit were fastened carelessly to the pommel of her saddle.

She stood quite motionless—as still and living as a bird resting among the flowers. It was that wonderful, restrained lightness in her that made her seem smaller and more fragile than she was. Her hair, of a gold paler than the sunlight and parted primly in the middle, waved down smoothly on a forehead that was high and too domed for beauty. Her face was small, more round than oval, with small features, exquisitely imperfect, demure, and resolute. There was something Victorian about her, and something vitally modern. It was as though a Botticellian Madonna had thrown off her serene and lovely foolishness and stepped down into life with the mocking happy humour of a faun at the corners of her fine lips and the wisdom of the world in her eyes. And added to all this there was in her expression an odd touch of an impersonal, aloof pity and tenderness.

She stood there looking down at the man in the grass with her subdued smile, and he stared back at her. Then presently she spoke:

"How do you do, Major Tristram? My name is Fersen—Sigrid Fersen."

"I know," he answered. His own voice seemed to break a spell, for he shot up as though she had struck him, his hand flying to the neck of his graceless, unbuttoned collarless shirt. "I beg your pardon—I'm awfully sorry—I'd been asleep—and day-dreaming—I thought you were just—not real——"

"A sort of concrete vision?" she suggested.

"It sounds absurd, of course, but it wasn't an ordinary sleep. In fact, barring today, I don't know when I slept last. That makes a man queer——"

"Obviously." Her enigmatic kindly smile was like sunshine on her demure gravity. "For instance, you said 'I know' when I introduced myself." The blood welled up under the man's brown skin, and she went on lightly. "I saw you half an hour ago. The shade tempted me—I was hot and tired. Fortunately I came quietly. You had just come out of the water and stood there like a young Beethoven—'this kiss to the whole world——'"

"I felt like that," he stammered. "It just expresses it—only——"

"Of course I went away at once," she said. "I felt you would be disconcerted if you knew—possibly very shocked. You may be now for all I know."

He looked down at his right hand, and then, as though it annoyed him, thrust it into his pocket.

"No," he said, "I'm not."

"I didn't think you would be." She led her horse down to the water, and, with accustomed fingers, unfastened the bit. "Please sit down again, Major Tristram."

He obeyed her instantly, and with his big hands clasped about his knees watched her as she came towards him. The blood was still dark in his face.

"I'm wondering how you knew me," he said abruptly.

"Gaya described you."

He burst out into a big laugh.

"My word! Did Gaya tell you I usually went about with nothing on or in these evil-smelling rags?"

"It is enough that I recognized you," she said primly. She added, as an after-thought: "They didn't tell me you were so beautiful."

"Me—beautiful?"

"As far as your figure goes."

"And my face?"

She looked at him whimsically.

"No, not exactly." She slipped down into the long grass beside him with an effortless, unconscious grace. "We're rather like each other," she went on, "both of us—how shall I say?—plain, and both of us quite lovely in our way. A perfect body is worth more than a perfect nose."

"Yes," he agreed. His voice sounded suddenly thick and tired and he looked away from her. "You're not alone, are you?" he asked.

"I have been. I've a faithful syce waiting at the bridge-head five miles up. He wouldn't come any farther. Perhaps——" She studied his hard-set profile with amused eyes. "Perhaps you're wishing I hadn't burst in upon you, or perhaps you share Gaya's dismay."

"Was Gaya dismayed?"

"Very. One or two are still. They thought I was an adventuress, partly on account of the Rajah and partly on account of my profession. And they were quite right." The laughter died out of her. Her voice sounded grave and eager. "I am an adventuress. I can't conceive myself being anything else. To live is to explore an unknown country, with every day a step forward. Some people shrink from it and cringe at home, and when they're taken by the scruff of the neck and flung out they're frightened and helpless. I'm not like that—you're not. Even my art was an adventure—the greatest. Every bar of music, every step, every inspiration that came to me, was like a mountain peak scaled and a new vista into a new country. Do you understand?"

He turned to her, his sunken, red-rimmed eyes warm with a generous, almost passionate sympathy.

"I can understand your feeling like that—I do too, in my way, especially out here. Out here nothing lasts. Every day brings change—the very trees and flowers and fields and forests—I don't know how it is—one says good-night to them and in the morning it's as though new friends had taken their place—people whom one had to study and wonder at—and then——" He turned away from her again and stared down at his strong hands—"anything can happen—the most wonderful, impossible things——"

She did not answer him. When she spoke again it was after a long silence and more lightly.

"I don't believe you're an official at all," she said. "You don't talk like one. You haven't asked me what business I have here or tell me that I am a danger to myself and a nuisance to everyone else. Why haven't you?"

"I forgot," he answered quietly. "For one thing, I knew you were not afraid, and people who are not afraid have nothing to fear. And besides that, the infection is over in Heerut. The poor beggars are either underground or isolated miles away. I did that 'on my own,' and I expect there'll be lots of trouble about it."

"You've had a bad time."

"Yes," he said simply.

"Mrs. Compton told me. I was immensely interested, and made up my mind to call on you. The 'lone fight' has always thrilled me. I don't care whether the fighter is a murderer or a hero so long as he fights against odds."

He laughed.

"Well, I'm not a criminal or a hero," he said.

"You can't tell. We're all potentially one or the other—or both."

He seemed on the verge of protest, but, looking at her, dropped to silence. She leant forward, her chin in the palm of her hand, and he saw that she smiled to herself, her eyes intent on the shadowy water.

"Doesn't Brahma sleep in the heart of that lotus-flower, Major Tristram?"

"He did once—so they say. And it is the lotus-flower which encloses our world. When the pink-tipped petals open then it is dawn with us." He hesitated, and then added with a shy laugh, "Shall I fetch it for you?"

"No, why spoil it? It is loveliest where it is."

"Yes, I know—but if you had wished it——" He broke off. "Somehow I'm glad you didn't," he said almost inaudibly.

The quiet rose up between them. It was like a mist, veiling them from each other with a drowsy peace. When she spoke again her voice sounded gay but subdued.

"Major Tristram, I'm disappointed—I meant to drop on like a bombshell—and here you sit next me as though it was the sort of thing you had done all your life. You don't even bother to talk to me. Do you think we were married in our last pilgrimage?"

The man turned his head away from her.

"Anything seems possible, here," he answered.

"Even hunger," she suggested gravely.

"Hunger?"

The dreamy unreality which had sunk upon them dissolved, letting through the light of every-day facts. She laughed at him.

"I'm hungry. I haven't eaten anything since dawn, and I didn't bring food because Mrs. Compton said you practically lived here. I was sure—after the first skirmish—that you'd ask me to tea."

He was on his feet now—less with eagerness than with a half-angry consternation.

"Mrs. Compton misled you——" he began hotly.

"She didn't—she didn't know I was coming. Are you going to let me starve?"

"I do live here," he went on stammeringly, "but in a native hovel like the rest of them. I can't take you there."

"Why not?" Her eyes were mocking, her lips pursed into a demure, ironic challenge. "Don't you want to?"

"It's not that——" His opposition collapsed and he faltered like a boy. "Only—well, I daresay you know what they call me—Tristram the Hermit. It's because I've had to live alone so much. No one comes out here. I've got accustomed to it. I'm like a miser with my loneliness."

"Then I had better go," she said gravely.

"No—not now. I want you to come. You'll understand better——"

He bridled her horse and brought it to her. For a moment they looked at each other with a steadiness in which there was a vague antagonism. Then the man stooped, hiding his face, and placed his hands for her to mount. She scarcely seemed to touch them. He looked up into her small face, flushed now with an eager colour. "You are lighter than the leaf on the wind," he said.

She laughed, but her laugh was more meditative than gay.

"And you, Major Tristram, are a poet in the wilderness," she answered.

CHAPTER VI

BROKEN SANCTUARY

He walked beside her, his hand light on her bridle, and silently they made their way through the long grass, along the banks of the grey, wide flowing river, past the temple, and into the empty village streets. Only once did she speak to him, bending slightly towards him in her saddle.

"I have been wondering what your name is," she said, "your other name. I've been trying to fit you with one."

"Tristram," he said.

"Tristram Tristram?"

He nodded, and she repeated the name thoughtfully under her breath.

"That's a curious repetition——"

"Yes, my mother liked it. It's the only thing we've ever quarrelled about. I tell her she suffered from lack of imagination, and that she took a mean advantage over my helplessness. What could anybody expect of a Tristram Tristram?"

"And yet it suits you somehow."

"I'm not flattered," he answered laughing.

The magic sunlight had gone and the low thatched huts were grey and sordid in the rising tide of shadow. Here and there a golden patch lingered palely, and the council-tree at the cross-roads blazed in the full flood from the west.

"This is my home," Tristram said.

The hut from the outside was not different from its fellows, save for the big windows that had been cut in the mud wall. The rough wooden doors stood open. Sigrid Fersen slipped out of her saddle and for a moment he barred her path. "You won't let me go forward to prepare the way?" he asked.

"No—I want to see what you are like, Major Tristram."

"It's as though I made you a confession," he said unevenly.

"I am woman enough to want to hear it."

He stood aside and she passed through the low doorway. At other times the contrast to the foetid street outside must have been overwhelming, but even now the dwelling's cool monastic purity arrested her on the threshold. A curtained doorway appeared to lead into a second apartment. There was scarcely any furniture—a chair, a table, a couple of Persian rugs on the uneven floor, a pile of cushions heaped into a divan against the wall. Nothing on the walls. Yet the old, exquisitely shaded rugs were probably priceless, and all the art and mysterious symbolism of India had gone into the carving of the great chair whose high back was Brahma the Creator and whose wide arms were pictured with strange fantasies of the Avatars. As her eyes grew accustomed to the twilight the woman saw beyond this dignity to details that brought a sudden laugh to her lips. A yellow ball that looked like a spotted St. Bernard pup rolled yelping off the cushions, displaying its teeth and a bandaged paw, and thereby rousing its bedfellow—a common English tabby, who stretched itself, threw an offhand curse at its disturber, then advanced arching its back and purring stormily. Sigrid bent down to stroke him, but he passed on with the crushing disdain of his race and rubbed himself against Tristram's leg.

"That's Tim," Tristram explained. "He has a wife, but she's probably out hunting. To tell the truth, she does most of the work. There were half a dozen kittens, but they died, worse luck. Couldn't stand the heat."

"Anything else?"

"Wickie isn't here. And Arabella. Laid up, both of them."

"And pray what is Wickie and what is Arabella?" she persisted.

"I call Wickie a dog and Arabella a horse," he answered solemnly, "but I'm told the matter is open to dispute. Wickie's boarding out with Miss Boucicault."

"Ah, Anne Boucicault!" She echoed the name with an amused inflection of her quiet voice. "An odd little person who detests me. And she is so touchingly conscientious about it. Not in the least spiteful, only very religious and full of doubts and scruples——" She made a little gesture which seemed to brush Anne Boucicault into nothingness. "Go on with your menagerie, Major Tristram. Introduce that terrifying little growl-box."

He picked up the yellow ball by the scruff of its neck and offered up his fist to the ineffectual first teeth as a sacrifice.

"A cheetah cub. I found him on the edge of the forest with his paw broken. He's nearly all right now, and will be able to go home."

"And start his criminal career," she suggested.

He laughed.

"Oh well, that's the risk the world runs every time a new infant is brought into it," he retorted. But he had become suddenly embarrassed, almost guilty-looking, and, after one glance at him from quizzical brows, she changed the subject.

"Am I at liberty to inspect, Major Tristram?"

"You must do whatever you wish." He stood at the entrance to the hut and watched her as she crossed straightway to the writing-table. His face, now in shadow, was set in grim resolution. There were two large photographs on the table, and one of these she picked up and held to the light.

"A fine old face—your mother, Major Tristram?"

"Yes," he assented briefly.

"She must be very beautiful."

"I think she is," he answered, with a sudden relaxing of his strained features.

"Not a bit like you."

He feigned a rueful discontent.

"Not a bit. I always tell her that she was jealous, and wouldn't spare me so much as one good feature."

"Whereat, I hope, she boxes your ears for your ingratitude, you mortal with the perfect body!" She replaced the picture regretfully. "And this——"

She broke off. It became very still in the low-roofed room. Even the cheetah had ceased its infant growlings as though it felt the tension in the quiet about him. Tristram threw back his head, his chin thrust out, and did not speak. Suddenly she turned to him. Her lips were parted, in a wide, eager smile that was like a child's. Impulsively, ingenuously, she held out her ungloved hand to him, palm downwards.

"Is that your confession, Tristram Tristram!"

For one instant he wavered, the next he was at her side, had taken her hand and bowed over it and kissed it. Then he stood back, defiant, trembling, like a man who has committed a world-staggering enormity. But to her, it seemed, nothing had happened, nothing that she had not willed and desired. Still smiling, she turned away from him and, seating herself in the high-backed chair, placed the photograph where she could see it best. Then she became intent, absorbed. The brief incident and the man who watched her waveringly seemed to have been swallowed up in something greater, some passionate feeling. Without a word he left her and she did not hear him go. It was only when he returned presently and placed a cup and saucer before her that she looked up, colouring faintly.

"A poet in the wilderness and now Worcester! Major Tristram, I begin to think you are a rather strange and wonderful doctor!"

He smiled with frank pleasure in her pleasure.

"I love beautiful things," he said. "I fancy they are to me what wine is to some men. I'm like my mother in that. She understands. She saved and saved to buy me that cup. There's a teapot—not to match—I hate sets—but equally lovely. You shall see it when the water boils."

"And the chair—and these rugs! I know a Park Lane plutocrat who would sell his greasy soul for them. Was that your mother too?"

"No, the rugs are a gift from Lalloo the money-lender. His baby son had a bout of something or other, but got over it, and Lalloo wanted to shower blessings on somebody. He knows the markets for rare things and I have a shrewd, painful suspicion that he used unholy forces of financial coercion to get hold of these. Ayeshi carved the chair for me."

"Is Ayeshi a wood-pecker, or what?" she asked gaily.

He laughed with her.

"No—my aide-de-camp, orderly, servant, friend, all in one. Rather a wonderful sort of person. Heaven alone knows where he came from. He was brought to me by the man who 'owned' him, he was suffering from snakebite, and after the cure he stuck to me. Nobody minded. The people he lived with were afraid of him."

"Why?" she asked.

"Oh, I don't know—he wasn't of their caste—any one could see that. He is a Brahmin of the Brahmins, and believes in his gods. There isn't anything so disconcerting to conventional religionists as genuine belief." Tristram was on his way to the door of the inner room. He stopped a moment and looked back at her. "And he can tell the most wonderful stories," he went on slowly, as though overtaken by some memory. "One day you must listen to him as I do—by the firelight, with night overhead."

"I shall come," she answered deliberately. "And I shall see the snake-bite on his arm and think of the story of the man who saved him."

Tristram had gone. She laughed a little and then fell to her old brooding contemplation of the picture at her elbow. But when he returned with the promised teapot and a plate of sandwiches she pushed it impatiently from her.

"Tell me, Major Tristram, are you glad I've broken into your sanctuary?" she asked abruptly.

He poured her tea out for her with a hand that shook a little.

"I don't know——"

"That's ungracious, Major Tristram. But you're altogether unexpected. Even this room-it's not a man's room. Where are your guns, your skins, your trophies?"

He looked about him, flushing to the roots of his fair, untidy hair.

"I haven't got any—I never had a gun of my own. I've got an Army pistol somewhere in the kitchen, but it's got rusty and I don't know what would happen if I fired it." He put the sandwiches near to her and then stalked across to the doorway and sat down cross-legged on the rug, his irregular profile cut sharply against the light. "I can't kill things," he said doggedly.

"Go on, Major Tristram. I am getting almost excited. A man who can't kill things!"

He heard the irony in her voice and winced, but did not look at her.

"Oh—I know it's ridiculous—laughable. Compton says I'm a sentimentalist—a freak. I can't help it."

"Is it a theory—Tolstoyism, Jainism——?"

He shook his head.

"I haven't any theories—it's just instinct—perhaps a kind of revulsion. My father was the finest shot in the Indian Army. Once when I was in Scotland I killed a stag. I felt—beastly—like a sort of cowardly criminal who couldn't be punished and knew it."

"Still go on. Tell me more. I came here to get to know you, Major Tristram, and I am a spoilt woman. Yes, you are a freak. I want to know how freaks originate. Tell me—no, not about your father—I have a fancy he was not freakish—but your mother——"

He stiffened, averting his head, his brows stern.

"My mother is different——" he began proudly.

"You have known me so long," she interrupted, "did you think I meant to joke at her? Haven't you understood better than that?"

He turned. Twilight had begun to invest them both. In the great carved chair among the shadows she looked almost luminous, a white spirit neither of heaven nor earth, aloof and radiant in fairy immortality and serene with a wisdom high above the man's painful plodding. Seeing her, he caught his breath; the anger passed from his face, leaving it with a curious look of bewilderment and pain.

"I'm sorry——" he said unevenly. "Of course I ought to have known. But I am a heavy, unpresentable fellow—rather ridiculous too—and I didn't want you to think I was like her." He turned away again, his eyes intent on the dark strong hands clasped about his knees. "As to my antecedents, there isn't much to tell. My father was a Captain in the Indian Army. He was killed out here in Gaya when I was a baby. No one ever found out how it happened. My mother was in England at the time. She had nothing but her pension. She starved herself to keep me fit and give me my chance." He broke off sharply. "I'd rather not talk about that. It means a responsibility that would be intolerable if I wasn't so proud of it—it would be awful to fail a woman who had starved for you."

"I can understand that, Major Tristram."

He seemed to listen a moment as though to an echo of her low voice.

"All my people had been in the Indian Army," he went on. "I knew I should make a dismal failure of soldiering. It seemed to me—it's my nearest approach to a theory—that it's a man's business to make life more tolerable—not to destroy it. So I compromised with the I.M.S. And here I am."

"A hermit!" She leant forward, with her chin resting in the palm of her hand. "Is that also part of your law of life, Major Tristram?"

"I have my work," he answered. "It's a huge district, and I've got to be at it all the time. It is my life. But I'm a queer cuss—I have other thoughts too—absurd daydreams. I'm alone so much that it's natural enough—and if I came much among men and women I should be afraid——"

"—that the vision might become concrete." She waited a moment—"or fail you."

He shook his head.

"No—not that. But since I have got to be alone always I mustn't want anything too badly."

She got up suddenly.

"It is getting late," she said. "I promised to be at the bridge-head by nine. Mr. Radcliffe, who is in the adventure, meets me there and escorts me back to safety. We should be home by midnight, and tomorrow Gaya will have a new scandal. Mr. Radcliffe is very young. He will be so pleased."

"I will come with you as far as the bridge-head," Tristram returned gravely.

"I had expected nothing less."

For all her change of tone the suspense which had crept in upon them with the twilight remained unbroken. It lay upon the man like a quivering hand. As he led her horse through the black streets it vibrated on the hot obscurity. They came out on to the plain and it was there also, at his throat, suffocating him.

The full moon hung low on the horizon like a silver lamp. There was nothing hid from it. It revealed and transfigured fantastically; the very blades of the high-standing grass were drawn in separate delicate lines of shadow, but they did not look like grass. The great river flooded through the darkness—an endless winding army of ghosts whose murmur was never still.

Sigrid Fersen looked down at the man beside her. As distance brings out the significance of a rough sketch, so now the grey half-light threw into relief lines and hollows of his face which she had not seen before. They were as vigorous and ugly as they had ever been, yet their silhouette under the helmet rim conveyed to her a new impression—the thought of something chivalresque and simple, mystic and single-hearted—a Pure Fool on the Threshold of his Quest. She bent towards him, stroking her horse's neck with a gentle hand.

"And I too have a theory, Tristram Tristram," she said, as though there had been no silence between them. "It is this—that there can be no going back for any of us. We climb from experience to experience, and grow or shrivel as our experience is a high or low one. There was a man sleeping by the backwater. He is gone, and in his place you walk beside me."

"Why should I not be the man by the backwater?" he asked. "He knew you also."

"Since when?"

"Since two years ago."

"Tell me how he met me—I have forgotten."

"You never knew," he answered. "It was his last night in England. He had said good-bye to all he cared for, and he felt pretty bad. He knew what lay ahead of him—lonely, hard years and perhaps no return. So he did what he had never done before, because money and pleasure had not come his way—he took himself and his pain into a theatre. And there he saw you."

"Well—and then?"

"That's all. There was wonderful music, and you explained it to him. You showed him a new beauty that he had never dreamed of, you unlocked a door, and he entered a new world. When it was over he got up and left the theatre. He behaved like a boy—he went and stood by the river until day broke."

"And the photograph."

"He bought it to take with him."

She smiled to herself, tenderly, ironically.

"It did not occur to him to ask for my autograph—to seek me out."

"No, then you would have been a reality to him—an unattainable reality. He wanted you as a dream he could live with and conjure up at will."

"As he did by the backwater."

"Yes." He pointed out towards the grey bulk of the temple lying against the forest. His voice lost its habitual unevenness, and grew full and clear. "One thing you danced—do you remember?—the ballet in Robert le Diable? The scene was a churchyard—an ugly thing of cardboard and clumsy carpentering until you came. But out there is a real temple. At night the moon plays through the great sun-window of the sikhara and fills the space between the pillars. And I have gone there at night-time and seen you dance."

"Shall you go again, Tristram Tristram?"

"I don't know—I don't know."

They went on in silence. There was no sound but the song of the water and the swish of the grass at their feet. Presently she drew rein.

"We are near the bridge; I can hear voices, and I want to say good-bye to you now. I want to thank you. I have made my experience, and climbed higher."

He looked up at her with a wistful smile.

"I don't know about that—I don't know what I have done. I do know that I have grown frightened for you. I've been thinking of infection and cheetahs on the home road and all the horrors I don't believe in. I wish I could go with you to Gaya."

"There is nothing to fear, Tristram Tristram. And you will come to Gaya tomorrow or the next day or next week and I shall play to you Beethoven, Chopin, Brahms—all the most wonderful music in the world. I shall open new doors for you and new worlds——"

He shook his head.

"There's cholera out in Bjura."

"Still you will come——" she answered.

Her hand touched his. Then she was gone—a speck of moving light—into the darkness.

CHAPTER VII

ANNE BOUCICAULT EXPLAINS

It was Anne Boucicault's birthday—her twenty-second—and Owen Meredith had proposed her health in lemonade—a beverage which he was assured had no unlucky superstition attached to it. The rest responded in champagne. It was not Colonel Boucicault's champagne, though it was on his verandah that Gaya had gathered to celebrate. Jim Radcliffe, who, since his midnight ride with Sigrid and the consequent hubbub, had developed into a very debonair and self-confident young man, had produced a case-full with the satisfaction and mystery of a popular conjurer, and Mrs. Boucicault showed neither offence nor appreciation at this addition to her hospitality. She sat in the shade near the doorway and scarcely spoke. From time to time her hand rose involuntarily to the high collar which had been added to her elaborate gown, and rested there as though it hid something painful. When a remark reached her a fitful smile quivered about her lips steadied to artificial gaiety. But her pale eyes were wide and unsmiling, their sight turned inwards on to some ugly vision, and never lifted from their unseeing watch on the avenue leading to the high-road. Anne sat on the arm of her chair and held her hand. She looked very young, and, whilst Meredith spoke, almost radiant. He had seen the colour creep back into her pale cheeks, and had become gay and eloquent and a little reckless. For all the lemonade, and the little chilly mannerisms of his calling, he was a passionate young man, and the sight of her fragile pleasure roused in him a fierce pity and tenderness. He betrayed himself, and did not know it. Afterwards, when he came and touched her long-stemmed glass with his tumbler, he lingered, looking down at her, his hazel eyes bright with a new purpose and an old hope suddenly and daringly set free.

"Anne—dear—before I go tonight I have something I want to say to you. Give me a chance, will you?"

She met his eager gaze for an instant, and then her own eyes faltered and dropped. She looked startled, a little frightened, like a child that has been taken unawares, but her colour remained unchanged.

"Of course—we shall be going into the garden. Come with me. I will show you our new rose-trees."

"Thank you," he answered. He stood back, others crowded to take his place, and she received their good wishes much as she had received him, with a shy graciousness that made her appealingly attractive. Only when Sigrid Fersen held out her glass she stiffened, and grew suddenly much older. It was as though for an instant they had changed places, and the girl had become the woman defending herself coldly and bitterly against the threat of youth.

"And I can wish you nothing better than that you should always have some one like Mr. Meredith to wish you so much good, with so much fervour," Sigrid said lightly. She turned her head towards the man standing behind Anne Boucicault's chair, and her eyes in the shade of the big garden hat sparkled with subdued merriment and kindly mockery. "Tell me, is Mr. Meredith so eloquent in the pulpit?" she asked.

"You should hear him for yourself," Anne replied staidly.

"But then, I never go to church."

"That is a pity." She flushed a little, her mouth small and tight-looking. "It is especially a pity out here—because of the natives. But then, of course, you haven't our responsibility."

Meredith frowned slightly, not at Anne's words, but at the expression which he saw pass over the small face opposite him. It was still kindly, but the merriment had become ironic. Up to that moment he had felt nothing very definite towards her, recognizing, with an unclerical modesty, that he did not understand her. Now he thrilled with an odd dislike.

"I'm afraid my eloquence won't cure Miss Fersen's backsliding," he said, hurriedly good-humoured. "And, in the meantime, behold a new arrival, breathless with congratulations."

The new arrival proved to be Wickie, escaped from the compound, who bounced up the verandah steps and advanced among the scattered tables practising the ingratiating squirm with which the Aberdeen masks his real impertinence. He was received with acclamation, partly for his master's sake, partly as a tribute to his own irresistible ugliness. Anne whistled timidly to him, but he ignored her and sniffed at Sigrid's outstretched hand.

"It's almost as though he knew you," Anne said sharply.

"Well, we know of each other at any rate, don't we, Wickie?"

"How?" The question was rude in its abruptness and Anne's manners were always very gentle. Sigrid Fersen did not look at her. She bent down and balanced a generous portion of cake on Wickie's hopeful snout.

"Major Tristram told me about him," she said.

"But Major Tristram has not been in Gaya since you arrived."

"Nevertheless, we have met." She glanced across at Radcliffe who chuckled with boyish self-consciousness. "I paid Major Tristram a visit," she added.

"At Heerut?"

"Well, we had tea there—but we met by the river. Major Tristram had been bathing."

Anne Boucicault sat very straight and still and hard-eyed. Meredith saw that her hands were clenched so that they were white at the knuckles, and again he felt the passing of a sudden emotion which was this time a mingling of inexplicable pain and dread.

"That must have been an unusual—dangerous adventure," Anne uttered from between stiff lips.

"I had hoped that it might be—it proved to be nothing but a very agreeable afternoon," was the answer.

The dialogue passed unnoticed. Mrs. Brabazone was telling one of her only three stories, and trying to sort out the point. Gaya listened and waited reverently, and Mrs. Brabazone, being possessed of a fine sense of her own total lack of humour, finished with a round fat laugh which added a perfecting touch to her rotund figure and creaseless, elderly face.

"Anyhow, I do amuse you," she said triumphantly. "Nobody amuses you like I do. I don't believe you could get on without me. One of these days I shall have that story right, and then you'll see that it was worth waiting for it. You know, I always mix it up with the one about the Lancashire woman who——" She stopped, her mouth agape. "What on earth was that?" she demanded sharply.

"Firing," Mary Compton answered. She raised herself from her comfortable lounging attitude on the long chair, and leant forward with a curious expression on her alert face. "What was it, Mr. Radcliffe?"

The boy got up hurriedly, ostensibly to refill his neighbour's empty glass. His fresh-coloured face, not yet burnt with the Indian sun, had turned a dull red.

"Oh, I don't know," he said. "Some silly ass over in the barracks. A rifle gone off by mistake. Or a sentry. The sentries have taken to firing at their own shadows."

"It may have been at the barracks," Mrs. Compton pursued, "but that wasn't a rifle, Jim Radcliffe. It was a squad firing, and you know it."

"And how do you know?" Mrs. Brabazone broke in. "Sometimes, Mary, I feel that you can't be really nice. You do know such dreadfully unwomanly things."

"I was shut up in Chitral with Archie when the regiment mutinied," Mrs. Compton retorted coolly. "I learnt to know the meaning of every sound—even to the snapping of a twig under a naked foot."

Mrs. Brabazone shook herself like a dog throwing off a douche of cold water.

"My dear, don't! You're trying to insinuate that we are on the verge of being murdered in our beds, and I know it perfectly well. I tell the Judge so every night, and he says he's sure I shall die of a broken heart if I have to go off peacefully. But then——"

Her voice trailed off. For once her headlong garrulity failed to evoke a response, and the little group of men and women sat silent, avoiding each other's eyes. It was very still again. A drowsy late afternoon peace hung over the shady garden at their feet. Yet the sound which had fallen lingered among them like a long-drawn-out echo.

They lived lightly and gaily, these people of Gaya, most blessed of Indian stations. Polo and tennis, a drag-hunt here and there, a constant happy-go-lucky exchange of hospitality, a close fraternity which allowed for scandal and malice and all uncharitableness, and never failed at a pinch. And then for an instant a rift—a glimpse down into the thinly crusted abyss on which they danced—a tightening of the lips, a laugh, a call for a new tune, a fine carrying-on of their life with the secret knowledge that their pleasure and their brotherhood was other and greater than they had thought.

Mary Compton broke the silence. Her voice sounded light and careless.

"I don't think we're going to die just yet, anyhow," she said; "there's Colonel Boucicault. Perhaps he will condescend to tell us what Mr. Radcliffe won't." She gave the latter one of those penetrating glances which made her a rather dreaded little personality, and immediately afterwards, catching sight of Mrs. Boucicault's face she flushed crimson. It was, as she afterwards expressed it, as though she had been caught eavesdropping or prying into a confession not meant for her reading. For Mrs. Boucicault had sunk together like a faded flower whose stem had been snapped. The elaborate lace dress and the jewelled hands in her lap added painfully to her look of broken helplessness. But it was in her eyes that Mary Compton had seen her self-betrayal. They were half-closed, and from under the heavy lids they kept watch as a dog watches who has been beaten past protest, even past subjection into a terrible patient waiting. She pushed her daughter's hand aside, and Anne smiled down at her with an attempt at careless ease which had its own piteousness.

Colonel Boucicault came up the verandah steps, his hand to his helmet with that exaggerated formality which made the greeting a veiled gibe.

"I trust I don't interrupt," he said. "Anne is celebrating, isn't she? I heard whispers of something of the sort, but I was not invited. In fact, I suspect that the entertainment was fixed for the afternoon in the hopes that my duties might keep me elsewhere."

He accepted the chair which his subaltern had vacated for him. "Thanks, Radcliffe, always the soul of correctness, and ever to be found where there is nothing more arduous going than champagne. Well, what are you all silent for? Mrs. Brabazone, you are positively pale. Has anything happened?"

Mrs. Brabazone waved one of her podgy hands with a gesture that was probably an expression of an otherwise inarticulate rage. Boucicault laughed at her. Whether he had been drinking or not could not be said for certain. He never betrayed himself. His hands and his voice were equally steady. His complexion, sallow and unhealthy, added to the unnatural brightness of his pale eyes, which, like the mouth under the heavy moustache, expressed a deliberate, insane cruelty.

Anne Boucicault met his roving stare and tried to smile.

"We heard firing," she stammered. "We didn't know what it was. We were rather frightened."

"Frightened? Of course you were. You're given that way, aren't you, Anne?" He held out an irritable hand for the glass which Meredith had filled for him. "Well, you weren't the only one. Five more terrified wretches I never saw—why, I can't think. A transmigration at this time of the year must be rather agreeable."

Mary Compton turned her head sharply.

"The five men who mutinied," she exclaimed, "they were shot—-just now?"

Though the sunlight was still strong the garden seemed to have suddenly passed into a chilling shadow.

Colonel Boucicault nodded.

"Yes, before the whole regiment with the exception of this gentleman who had—what was it—the toothache?" He lifted his glass towards Radcliffe, whose boyish face had whitened under the taunt. "Allow me to congratulate you on your taste in champagne, sir. You should be invaluable on the mess committee at any rate."

Radcliffe's lips twitched but he made no answer, and it was Sigrid Fersen who spoke. She bent down, stroking Wickie's pointed ears with a deliberate hand.

"Wasn't the execution a trifle ostentatious, Colonel Boucicault?" she asked.

He stared back at her, an ugly smile at the corner of his lips.

"It was meant to be ostentatious. I'm afraid I cannot always consider the delicate female nerves."

"My nerves weren't upset," she returned levelly. "I'm not afraid of anything."

"Indeed?" He seemed to meditate a moment, as though something either in her voice or appearance struck him, then jerked his head in Anne's direction. "My orderly told me there was a messenger for me. Bring him here."

"Here, father?"

"That was what I said."

Anne slipped from her place, and, motioning Meredith aside, hurried into the house like some frightened little animal. As she disappeared Mary Compton started a conversation which was taken up eagerly but without more than a faltering success. It failed altogether as Anne returned.

"That's Ayeshi," Radcliffe whispered in Sigrid's ear.

She looked up. The young Hindu had salaamed gravely, partly to Boucicault, partly to the assembled company and now stood upright and silent. He was barefooted, and the white loose clothes were grey with dust. Yet there was that in the carriage of his slender body and in the dark, delicate featured face which was arresting in its dignity. To Boucicault, possibly, the boy's untroubled ease appeared as insolence. He frowned at him moodily.

"You are Major Tristram's servant," he asked in English.

"Yes, Sahib."

"Well, he has not taught you manners. But that was hardly to be expected. You have brought a message?"

"Yes, Sahib."

"Deliver it."

"It is by word of mouth, Sahib."

"Well, then, deliver it, in Heaven's name."

Ayeshi put his hand to his neck, pushing back the short black curls which escaped from under his turban. He seemed to become suddenly conscious of the attention centred on him, and his eyes, moving over the watching faces, encountered Sigrid Fersen. He looked at her intently and then at the dog at her feet, and she saw that his lips quivered though not with fear.

"It is that there is cholera at Bjura," he said. "The Dakktar Sahib is hard pressed, and begs for help."

"He is always doing that. Tell him I have no one to send. Captain Treves is on furlough, and I should not dream of recalling him. The Dakktar Sahib must manage as best he can."

Ayeshi held his ground. His mouth had hardened.

"The Dakktar Sahib is ill," he said.

"Well, let the physician heal himself," Boucicault laughed.

"Colonel Sahib—it is urgent——"

Boucicault rose to his feet.

"You can go," he said. Then, as Ayeshi lingered, with a suddenness that was awful in its expression of released passions, Boucicault lifted his hand and struck the native full on the mouth. "Now will you go?" he said softly.

Mrs. Brabazone screamed, but her voice was drowned wholly by a more full-throated sound. Wickie, barking furiously and bristling with all the fighting fury of his Scottish forbears, broke from a long restraint and flung himself at the aggressor. Even his teeth, however, could not prevail against the leather riding-boots, and Boucicault kicked himself free. His passion had died down or had become something worse, a cold still fury.

"What brute is this?" he asked. He looked at Anne, and she tried to meet his eyes and flinched.

"It's Major Tristram's dog—he gave it to me to take care of—it had a broken paw—it was shut up in the compound—I hoped you wouldn't mind, father."

Boucicault made no answer. He took the riding-crop which he had carried. There was a tight line about his jaw which betrayed the grinding teeth. He was very deliberate, almost ostentatious in his purpose. Anne watched him. She held out a hand of protest—then let it drop. Her pallor had become pitiful. Sigrid Fersen got up. She was so swift and light in her movement that no one realised what she was doing till it was done. She crossed the verandah and picked up Wickie in her arms, narrowly escaping the murderous descent of the riding-crop. Then she rose and faced him.

"I like Wickie," she said. "From henceforward, Colonel Boucicault, he is under my protection."

Boucicault drew back. His face was grey looking.

"You have some courage, Mademoiselle," he said almost inaudibly.

She smiled composedly.

"I am not 'Mademoiselle,' and you know it, Colonel Boucicault. Also, as I said before, I am not afraid. I killed a mad dog once, and since than I have been afraid of nothing." She turned carelessly. Ayeshi stood behind her. There was blood on his mouth and on the hand which he had raised in self-defence. His eyes were full of a sick suffering which was terrible because it was not of the body. She laid her free hand on his arm. "You are hurt," she said; "please go to my bungalow. Mrs. Smithers will look after you—tell her I sent you. You mustn't mind what has happened——" She looked back mockingly over her shoulder. "Colonel Boucicault is a little out of temper. He would hit me if he dared."

There was a silence of sheer stupefaction. Mrs. Compton's temperament, usually leashed by her passionate care for her husband's career, bolted with her, and she laughed outright, and Mrs. Brabazone settled herself back in her chair with a subdued complacency of one who has seen herself fitly avenged. But Anne Boucicault had risen to her feet. There was a look on her face more painful than her fear, and almost reckless in its self-betrayal. For an instant she stood looking at the woman who faced her father, and then without a word she turned and slipped into the room behind her. Meredith followed. He did not speak to her. He knew where she was going, and the knowledge gave him an odd comfort, as though in her need she had remembered him and turned to him. Like a shadow she glided along the dim passages. The verandah overlooking the rose-garden was deserted and the garden itself already full of a cool twilight which added to its sad air of neglect and death. Roses grew well in Gaya, but they did not grow well in Anne's garden. She loved them but not successfully. Meredith stood beside her as she lay huddled together on the old bench and waited. Though she was so still he felt that she was crying and the knowledge stirred him to a compassion that was not one of understanding. In truth he understood as yet very little—the mere surface of her grief. Presently he sat down beside her and drew her hand gently and resolutely from her face. It was wet with tears.

"Anne!" he said unsteadily. "Little Anne!" Loyally unselfish and modest though he was, yet at that moment he accused himself of a tender insincerity as though his grief and pity were masks covering his own happiness. The thing for which he had longed and prayed had come to pass, so swiftly and splendidly that in his warm faith he seemed to recognize the hand of the God he prayed to. "You mustn't grieve so," he whispered. "People understand—and we are all your friends. We know too what this country can do with a man's character—we can make allowances. And then, dear, no harm was done. Miss Fersen saved the situation for us all."

She withdrew her hand slowly and looked at him then, in spite of her girl's tears and the veiling twilight, he wondered at the unyouthfulness of her expression.

"Yes, I suppose she did. She saved Wickie. She was very brave."

"I thought so too."

"And yet I hate her." She made a quick gesture, silencing his involuntary protest. "I hate her—not wickedly. There is a hatred which isn't wicked—the kind of thing we feel for what is harmful and evil. I've tested myself over and over again. I know—I feel that she isn't a good woman—she has no faith, no ideals. She has done harm in Gaya already—she sticks at nothing—and because of that she wins, and people yield to her and let her poison them. That is why I hate her."

The man beside her was silent for a moment. He had no answer ready. He had felt nothing for Sigrid Fersen save a masculine admiration for her cool courage. Anne's passionate dislike, compared to what he hoped was coming to them both, seemed a little thing and yet it chilled him. The cold shadows of the neglected garden laid hands upon him, checking and paralysing the headlong impulse and joyous confidence with which men win victories. With an effort he tried to free himself.

"You may be right," he said quietly, "I don't know. I'm no judge of character. But the truth is, I haven't thought about her. I haven't thought of any but the one woman—of any one but you, Anne." He paused a moment. He no longer dared to look at her, but leant forward, his hands tightly interlocked, his eyes fixed on the on-coming tide of darkness. He did not know that his voice shook. "Anne, I haven't dared boast to myself—and yet we have been so happy together—we love the same things and have the same faith; we look at life with the same eyes. All that is surely something. As to myself—God knows how little I have to give you—but I won't apologize for the rest—not for my work. That is the grandest, best thing I have to offer. I know you think so too."

"Yes, Owen." She put her small, unsteady hand on his arm. And for a second hope blazed up in him, dying down again to grey premonition. "And you weren't boastful to think I cared—I do—but not like that, Owen."

Something impersonal within himself marvelled at the banality of tragedy. People made fun of scenes like this—caricatured them. And he was sick with pain and weakness.

"Little Anne—you're so young—how should you know?"

"I do know," she answered.

Then he looked at her, driven out of himself by the simplicity and strength of her confession. She held herself upright and even though her face was full of shadow he could see the line of her mouth and it frightened him. He knew now what he had always refused to know. Ruthlessly, from the secret depths where we bury our hated truths, he drew out a memory and a fear and recognized them for what they were. The recognition was the end of the one hope of personal happiness he had granted himself, and it staggered him. Then the man and the Christian in him rose triumphant.

"I won't pretend I don't guess," he said quietly and naturally. "I do. And, Anne, though I was selfish enough to want you myself—still, there was one thing I did want more. It isn't a phrase—it's honestly true. I wanted you to be happy. I think you will be—I think you are—so I haven't the right to grumble, have I?"

He tried to smile at her. Commonplace as his form of renunciation had been, he was not conscious now of any banality either in himself or her. He stood on that rarely ascended pinnacle whence men look down on their daily life and see in its tortuous monotony the weaving of a divine pattern. He felt for the instant glorified as some men are who stand before a miracle of nature, or a great picture, or listen to grand music. It was his vision of the Beautiful—willing sacrifice, happy renunciation.

But Anne Boucicault got up and stood beside him, very straight, her hands clenched at her sides.

"I am not happy," she said. "I do not think I ever shall be."

And she left him standing there in the twilight, a very human and tragic figure, with the grey ash of his vision between his hands.

* * * * *

Such was Anne Boucicault's birthday. Mrs. Compton, driving home from the scene of celebration, met her husband at the barrack gates and forced the reins upon him in order that she might give herself over entirely to invective and lurid description, two pastimes for which she had an unlimited talent. Archie Compton chuckled at her picture of Sigrid's dramatic and triumphant intervention, but his chuckle was not all that she had expected, and she caught herself up.

"What a brute I am!" she exclaimed repentantly. "I had forgotten. You poor old boy! You must be feeling sick——"

"I am," he returned grimly. "It was damnable." His voice was lowered for the benefit of the syce balanced on the back seat, but it was no less vibrant with bitterness. "But that's how it is out here. We—you and I—men like Tristram—everybody—sweat out our lives, sacrifice every personal wish we've got, play the game from the Viceroy down to the new-fledged Tommy as, heaven knows, the game isn't often played on this earth—for what? Well, we don't talk about that. We just go ahead with our best. And then some blundering ass—some blackguard, is let loose among us and the whole thing is in the fire—we might as well never have been—or played the deuce to our hearts' content——"

She caught a glimpse of his drawn, miserable face.

"You think—things are pretty bad?" she asked, gropingly. "Something will happen?"

"Sure." His grip tightened on the reins. "Something—God knows what—but something——"

CHAPTER VIII

THE TWO LISTENERS

It was typical of Owen Meredith that, as he left the Boucicaults' compound behind him, he put aside his own grief and turned sternly to the duty that lay nearest him. That duty concerned Ayeshi. Possibly, had Ayeshi been moulded in the common clay of his race, Meredith might have taken his duty with less seriousness, though his blood would still have burnt at Boucicault's wanton brutality—as it was, a long-considered purpose now took a definite form.

It chanced that, as Meredith trudged on his way to the Mission, the Rajah's English dog-cart swerved round a bend of the dusty road, and came down upon him with the best speed of a rather showy high-stepper. Rasaldû drove himself, the knowledge of animals being the one talent that he appeared to have inherited from his cowherd ancestry, and, recognizing Meredith, he drew up so smartly as almost to jerk his attendant from off his precarious perch in the rear.

"I have just come down from the dâk-bungalow," he explained. "I was to have taken Mademoiselle Fersen out with my new cob—beauty, eh?—but she was out. Happened to have seen her?"

Meredith accepted the fat brown hand extended towards him.

"I left her at the Boucicaults'," he said. "But that was some time back. It was Miss Boucicault's birthday, you know."

"No, I didn't." Rasaldû's face fell like that of an offended child, and Meredith hastened to add lightly:

"It was a very small affair—only a handful of Miss Boucicault's women friends and an odd male or two like myself. Miss Fersen was there as a matter of course. I don't think any affair in Gaya could get along without her."

The Rajah chuckled, flattered and reassured.

"No, I suppose not. A wonderful woman. Well, I daresay she had to go. Anything I can do for you, Meredith? Want a new schoolhouse or anything like that?"

"I want money, Rajah," Meredith returned promptly.

"Thought so. You shall have it. Let me have the list and I'll head it with as much as you like——"

"Hadn't you better hear what it's for?" Meredith suggested.

Rasaldû shook his head.

"Oh, I don't know; that's hardly my business."

"In this case, I think. It concerns one of your own people, Rajah."

Rasaldû's smile faded. He looked oddly crestfallen.

"A protégé of yours, eh?"

"Yes, a very brilliant young man—much above his class. Though I've not been able to trace his parentage, I imagine he has good blood in his veins. Anyhow, I want to give him his chance, perhaps eventually send him to Calcutta University."

"Convert, eh?"

"That may come," was the grave answer.

Rasaldû was silent a moment, busy with the restless animal in the shafts. A rather supercilious smile flickered at the corners of his thick lips.

"Well, you shall have all you want," he said finally. "But send him to London—Paris. Paris is the place. It opens a man's mind—gives him ideas. We want that sort of stuff out here. Don't fuddle him with universities. Show him life. And there's nothing like Paris for that. It was there I met Mademoiselle Fersen, you know. A fine woman, eh? Fairly taken Gaya by storm, I fancy."

"She certainly does pretty well what she likes," Meredith admitted with a wry smile.

"I thought so. She was bound to win. At home she fairly walked over everyone—don't know why exactly. It wasn't only her dancing—I couldn't quite understand it myself—not enough of it or too much—and it wasn't her beauty. She isn't in the least beautiful.... There were women in Paris I knew——" He caught sight of Meredith's face and burst out into a good-natured laugh. "Well, all that won't interest you. But you shall have your money. Keep clear of the wheels, my dear fellow—the brute's got the devil in her—good-bye."

He raised his whip in salutation, and a minute later was a speck in a rolling cloud of dust.

Owen Meredith trudged on patiently and interwove his thoughts of Ayeshi's future, and of the slow piling of stone upon stone which was to make a new temple in India, with the red thread of his own pain.

Meantime the subject of his anxious consideration sat on the top step of the dâk-bungalow and was ministered to by Mrs. Smithers. Mrs. Smithers had accepted him much as she would have accepted a herd of wild elephants if they had presented themselves in Sigrid's name. She brought hot water and bathed the blood from his face, and set food in lavish quantities at his side, all this—except for a single exclamation, "lawks a-mercy!"—without surprise or question or the slightest change in the expression of her grim features. Ayeshi seemed scarcely aware of her. Nor did he touch the food. He sat with his back against the wooden pillar of the verandah, his knees drawn up to his chin and shivered as though in the grip of a violent ague. Mrs. Smithers tried to cover him with a rug, but he thrust her offering aside.

"I am not cold," he said.

"You're very ill, young man," Mrs. Smithers retorted.

He turned his half-closed, suffering eyes for a moment to her face.

"It is not my body——" he muttered.

Mrs. Smithers gave it up. Nevertheless, she drew up a chair on the other side of the steps and sat down with her hands folded in her lap and kept watch over him as though he had been a criminal given over into her keeping.

It was thus Sigrid found them half an hour later. The brief Indian twilight still lingered on the open roadway, but in the happy wilderness which was the garden of the dâk-bungalow it was night, and the figures of the two watchers were only shadows.

Sigrid stepped out of the white military cloak which covered her light dress and revealed the presence, under one arm, of a black-snouted, alert-eared something which in other days, when Aberdeens and their mongrel offspring were unknown, would have been taken for a baby dragon. Mrs. Smithers's unexpectant lap received Wickie, helplessly entangled in the cloak, and Sigrid knelt at Ayeshi's side. He had tried to rise and salaam, but she forced him back with a resolute hand.

"We've had enough of that sort of thing," she said almost angrily. "How you must hate us all!"

He gave a long shuddering sigh like that of a child which has exhausted itself with crying, and then was still.

"Mem-Sahib is very good," he said softly. "But he had the right——"

"He had not," she flashed back fiercely. "What gives him the right?"

"If Mem-Sahib were not a stranger she would know," he answered in his broken voice.

She struck her knee with her clenched hand in a storm of anger.

"There is no law——" she began.

"There is a custom, Mem-Sahib," he interrupted. "I think many of them were sorry, but had I turned on him and struck him they would have flung themselves on me. That is the difference."

"You are as good as he," she protested recklessly. "If you had a chance you would be more than he is. Major Tristram has told me——"

"There are barriers that Mem-Sahib would be the first to remember," he persisted.

But the fire of her outraged chivalry burnt fiercer in the wind of his opposition.

"You're wrong, Ayeshi. I shouldn't. There are no barriers—at least, none like that. Goodness knows, we're not born equal, but the inequality that matters isn't of birth or race, but of mind and soul. And you have a mind and soul above most. There are no barriers for you."

He bent his head.

"That is what Meredith Sahib has said to me. We are all brothers—that is the message of his God to us. Somehow, I do not think that Meredith Sahib is wise to bring the message—nor you, Mem-Sahib—and yet we who are athirst in the desert——"

He seemed to meditate and to have forgotten her. He rose stiffly and painfully to his feet.

"I go to seek Tristram Sahib," he muttered.

She also had risen with an effortless slowness which made even of the simple movement a kind of wonder.

"Tristram Sahib? Is Tristram Sahib here?"

He pointed vaguely out into the darkness.

"There—in an hour I am to meet him with the Colonel Sahib's answer. He would not come himself, for he is hard pressed, and if he met the Colonel Sahib——"

"There would be an end to his theories," she interposed with a little laugh.

"And to you also he sent a message, Mem-Sahib."

She turned to him. Mrs. Smithers, to whom the darkness was in the nature of an impropriety, had lit the high lamp in the room behind them, and the dim gold which flooded Sigrid Fersen's face seemed more the dawn of an expression than a reflected light.

"Give it me!" she said.

His back was to the light. He looked at her for a moment, his face a blank, featureless shadow.

"It is here, Mem-Sahib." From his tunic he drew out a little bundle wrapped in a thick silk cummerbund, and gave it tenderly into her hands.

"It was that which made me most afraid," he added.

"That!" she said, scarcely above her breath. She held the fragile china cup in both hands, her head bent. "I can't accept it," she said hurriedly. "You must tell him so, Ayeshi. It was his mother's gift—he valued it—he loves beautiful things—I couldn't take it——"

"Mem-Sahib"—the young Hindu's voice sounded rough and uneven—"the Dakktar Sahib goes to Bjura tonight. There is much terrible sickness in Bjura, and the Dakktar Sahib goes weary and single-handed. The cup was precious to him—most precious—and that was why he sent it to the Mem-Sahib who loves the beautiful as he does. He believed that his mother would have wished it." He waited and then asked: "What message shall I take to the Dakktar Sahib?"

"Wait—you must give me time to think, Ayeshi—or, no, why should I think?" Her laugh sounded low and unsteady. "Come, you must sit there in the shadow again. It is not yet time for Tristram Sahib. Wait—I will give him my message—sit there——"

She was gone noiselessly. Mrs. Smithers, who hovered gloomily about the drawing-room in search of the absconded Wickie, saw her go to the piano and throw it open. For many minutes she sat before it motionless, seeming to listen, then her left hand touched the keys, and almost inaudibly, like the stir of a newly awakened wind, there sounded the first notes of the Andante Appassionata.

Mrs. Smithers no longer fidgeted. She stood in the shadow of the curtained window, her old, hard-set face to the darkness. Only her mouth had lost something of its grim severity, and had become tender. She did not see Ayeshi, though barely the breadth of the verandah separated them. She looked past him as sightlessly as he looked past her. Evidently he had turned to go. One foot rested on the lower step and his body was thrown back against the balustrade as though he had been arrested in the very act of flight. The dim light on his face revealed its look of wonder—almost panic-stricken wonder.

Mrs. Smithers continued to disregard him. But presently she turned and went across to the piano. Whatever momentary weakness had overcome her had gone and she was again her ruthless, uncompromising self.

"Sigrid—there's some one out there in the compound—under the trees—a man. Who is he?"

"Major Tristram—the Dakktar Sahib—a very poor and gallant gentleman—who is perhaps going out to die and now trembles on the brink of Paradise." She broke off and passed joyously into the next phrase and through its glowing crescendo her voice sounded with a light distinctness. "I can play too, Smithy! And dance. I could dance to this and Beethoven would say I knew more of his soul than half the fools who gape in stuffy concert-halls. Think, Smithy, that man out there has never heard such music—only Meyerbeer's pompous little ballet—and after that he went and stood by the river until the daybreak—because of me——"

Mrs. Smithers shook her head sternly.

"You mustn't, Sigrid—you mustn't. It's not fair—you've always been fair. You know nothing can't come of it. You know yourself. You can't change your course——"

"I do know. But sometimes the wind shall blow me whither it listeth. Haven't I the right to that much?"

"Not at some one else's cost, Sigrid."

There was no answer. Sigrid Fersen lifted her right hand and touched her lips with her forefinger. It was as though she called the very garden without to a deeper stillness. Her left hand passed swiftly from chord to chord, from major to a wistful minor, resting at last on one deep lingering note of suspense.

"Hush, Smithy! Don't talk! What does anything matter? Now listen! Do you remember—the D minor valse—do you remember that last night—the grand-dukes and the princesses, what were they all?—was there anything but God and Chopin and I——"

Her fair small head was thrown back, her eyes were bright, but not now with gaiety. Her mouth was slightly open, and she was breathing deeply and quickly with the glory of divine movement.

Mrs. Smithers turned away again and went back to the window. She was crying, her mouth stiff as though it could not yield, even to grief.

The man under the trees had taken a step forward and now stood still again. Between them Ayeshi lay huddled together on the top step of the verandah, his face hidden in his arms.

CHAPTER IX

LALLOO, THE MONEY-LENDER

It had come to be an accepted fact in Gaya that the old bungalow lying on the outskirts was haunted and therefore undesirable. Not that Gaya feared ghosts or anything else in heaven or earth. The average Anglo-Indian's nerve, strained by the subtle but immediate juxtaposition of frivolity and danger which shade so imperceptibly into each other, that the border-line can be crossed unconsciously and in an instant, cannot indulge in emotionalism or fancies. He has to close his mind both to the fascination and the veiled menace of Indian life, or be lost. It is for that reason that he is always the last to admit the fascination, except in regard to the social conditions, or the danger, beyond the obvious ones of ill health and consequent retirement on a beggarly half-pay.

So Gaya's inhabitants locked up fear, and hid the key where it could not be found even by the most unbaked, fluttered newcomer, and the old bungalow with its ugly secret left them unmoved. But they never denied the existence of the blight which rested on the gloomy, tumbled-down building, and they avoided the place as unpleasant and depressing, and took care that innocent newly appointed officers and their wives, for whom so large and spacious a dwelling seemed eminently suited, should house elsewhere. It was owing to this circumstance that James Barclay had been able to obtain possession and a consequent but dubious foothold on the outskirts of Gaya's sternly fortified social life. The bungalow had been built in the dim ages before the Mutiny, and had been patched and patched till little was left of the original. James Barclay promptly renovated it from end to end, and added various bizarre additions of his own which, however, did not alter the place's fundamental characteristic of mouldering gloom and depression.

In the room in which he sat talking to Lalloo, the money-lender, everything of native origin had been rigorously excluded. The chairs were covered with English chintzes, the curtains were futurist in design and colour; there were copies of European masterpieces in heavy gilded frames on the walls, and a new art bronze lamp suspended from the hand of a marble Venus cast a bright, garish reflection on the upturned, contemplative face of its owner.

It was curious, therefore, that, as little as he had been able to eradicate the gloom, as little had he been able to oust the indigenous element. The objects might be Western, but the atmosphere remained obstinately Oriental. Perhaps it was the irrepressible outbursts of colour-love betrayed by the chintzes, or perhaps Lalloo supplied the cause of this phenomena. He sat cross-legged on the carpet and stroked his grizzled beard with a dark hand, that seemed all the darker for the scrupulous whiteness of his puggri and loose tunic. Compared with him, Barclay looked almost blond, almost English. Yet Lalloo also accentuated what was un-English in him. There were lines about the old usurer's mouth and nostrils which were already dimly suggested in Barclay's face. There was a gulf between them, but there was also a bridge across.

"There is Seetul, who says he cannot pay," Lalloo detailed monotonously, and as though he were reading from an account-book. "He has owed us ten rupees these last six months, and still he says he cannot pay. But he has had many fine stuffs in his loom—and his daughter's hands have been busy with rich embroideries on which the Sahibs' wives have cast longing eyes. It would be well to claim your due, Meester Barclay, before it is too late."

Barclay nodded absently.

"Good. I can leave that to you, Lalloo," he said.

"It is well. Then Heera Singh—we lent him five rupees a year ago when the harvest failed. Twenty-five rupees is what I claimed from him two days ago, and he has nothing—that is to say, he has some fine cattle and this year the rabi has done well. Your claim would be a just one, Meester Barclay."

"You'd better make it quick, then, before the beggar sells out. Afterwards he'll come whining with some infernal lie. He's had rope enough."

"It is well." The old man continued to stroke his beard for a moment in silence, watching the face under the light with a blank intentness which revealed nothing. "Nehal Pal has paid in full," he resumed at length. "His daughter was given in marriage to Meer Ali a week since. Meer Ali is a very old man, and there was some difficulty, for in these degenerate days the tongues of the women wag to some purpose—but the marriage contract was very favourable to Nehal Pal. And he has paid in full." Lalloo patted his waistband and drew out a small jangling bag, which he set with an almost religious gravity at his patron's feet. "These and the other moneys of which I have already rendered account are now before you, Meester Barclay."

Barclay picked up the bag and weighed it negligently in his lean, brown hand.

"You've got an amazing head for figures, Lalloo," he commended. "And you're some business man, as our American friends would say. We shall want both qualities badly in the future. I want money—as much as I can get. I mean to rope in all the industries of every village within three hundred miles and make them paying concerns. At present, they're just in a state of straggling, unprofitable hugger-mugger, out of which nobody gets anything."

"I have done my best," Lalloo insinuated deprecatingly.

Barclay tossed the bag on to the polished oak table beside him.

"One man's best isn't enough. Nothing's of any good without organization, and to organize one must have the power to make others do what they're told. So far we've got most of the grain-dealers into the net, and by the next harvest they'll have to sell me their grain at my own price. But that's a drop in the ocean. The weaving—that's the thing. That's what's going to count. There are three hundred thousand weavers round and about Gaya, swamped by rotten fakes from Manchester. I'm going to change all that. It's Manchester that's going to be swamped. One of these days, I shall be a power in Gaya, Lalloo."

He said it with a mixture of arrogance, complacency, and appeal which elicited no more than an enigmatic "It may well be, Meester Barclay," from the expressionless Hindu Kara cross-legged on the carpet.

Barclay got up and stood with his hands thrust into the pockets of his riding-breeches, his eyes roving from one to another of the expensive atrocities with which the room was crowded.

"I've begun here," he went on, in the same tone. "I daresay they would have fought me tooth and nail for possession of the place if they'd had the power. But they hadn't. Even in Gaya money spells the last word, and I had money. There isn't another bungalow like this in Gaya."

"That also is true," Lalloo assented. He turned his head for a moment, fixing an intent look on the curtained doorway as though it reminded him of something. "I know the place well. It was here in this room many years ago that I found the body of the great Tristram Sahib. He had been murdered. There was blood on the floor—almost where Meester Barclay stands now. The carpet hides the stain. We tried to wash it out, but the blood had soaked into the wood." He made a little regretful gesture. "It had flowed freely, and we came many hours too late," he finished. He gave his account as casually, tonelessly as he had recited his accounts, not noting the uneasy start of the man in front of him, but seeming to fall into a mood of profound retrospection. Barclay came nearer to the light again.

"Murdered?" he echoed. "In this room—by whom?"

The sharp brown eyes lifted for a moment.

"That is not known. One could tell, perhaps, but he has been long silent. The young and foolish swear he has not spoken for a hundred years, but that is vulgar superstition. I remember Vahana the Holy Man when he was young and handsome and loved a beautiful wife." He jerked his head significantly. "It was her body I found out in the garden well yonder," he added.

"Murdered, too——?"

Lalloo smiled subtly.

"Tristram Sahib was handsome and brave and lonely. It was said that he had a way with women—and he was Sahib. No doubt she came willingly. In those days, Gaya was not as now. She lived with him for a year before the—accident. There was a child, but that was never found."

"And Vahana?"

The smile, unchanged, gained in significance.

"He was on a great pilgrimage to Holy Benares, Meester Barclay." The old usurer put his hand to the neck of his tunic and pulled up something which hung there by a cord. The thing glittered yellow in the light. "See, this is what I found on her body-0an old bracelet—strange and wonderful in design, Meester Barclay. I wear it, for there is a saying that a murdered woman's jewels shield a man from the evil eye, and I, Lalloo, who believe in nothing, am cautious. There was a fellow to it, but that I gave to Vahana in remembrance of the wife he had loved. He thanked me and went his way—some say to Kailasa, but there is no knowing, for since that day no man has heard him speak."

Barclay, who had bent down for a moment, let the bracelet slip from his fingers. He turned away and went and stood near the spot which Lalloo had indicated, frowning down at it as though the stain were still visible or bore for him some deeper significance.

"And so, because of a sordid tragedy, many years old, the place is boycotted by all save outsiders—such as I am. Is that the delicate point of your story, Lalloo?" he asked.

"They say a spirit dwells in this room," Lalloo answered indirectly, "—an evil spirit," he added.

"Or a living one. Ghosts, if there are any, are men's deeds which live after them. But there are no ghosts." He shrugged his shoulders and laughed. "Look about you, Lalloo. A ghost couldn't haunt this room now. He'd lose his bearings. It's changed since those days, eh?"

Lalloo looked at the marble Venus with her lamp.

"It is indeed wonderful," he assented.

Barclay swung on his heel and came back. He was suddenly neither arrogant nor pleading, but utterly and rather terribly sincere.

"You don't think it wonderful," he said, softly and bitterly. "What you think, God knows, but at least it's not admiration for me that you're hiding behind your damned impassivity. I'm your partner—a very rich partner. I'm Meester Barclay, that's all. But the youngest whipper-snapper with a pink and white face and a pair of epaulettes is Sahib." He stopped, trying to master himself physically. The lean brown hands were clenched at his side in the effort. "Why am I not Sahib?" he asked.

Lalloo spread out his hands.

"I speak to you in English. Is not 'Meester Barclay' the English way?" he asked with deference.

Barclay laughed. The muscles of his handsome features still quivered with the gust of nervous passion which had swept over him, but there was a certain satisfaction in his laughter.

"Well, you have always a soft answer—and I understood. I am simply not Sahib. They—your masters—have not recognized me, so you do not recognize me. But all that is going to change, and when you see me cheek by jowl with the best of them you will salaam and ask the bidding of Barclay Sahib." He paced restlessly backwards and forwards in his excitement, the mincing quality of his accent asserting itself. "You know the law, Lalloo. A man is what his father was. My father was English—I have got good English blood in my veins. I've always known it—it would be damned awkward for some of them if I proved it. But, at any rate, they've got to have me. I'm forging a gold key to their strongest locks, and if that won't do, then——" He broke off again, changing his tone to one of trenchant decision.

"I've got to have money—money enough to swamp them. I've got to have those weavers. Once get a hold on the throat of the industries and the rest's easy. Start at Heerut, Lalloo. They've had an epidemic, and will be ready to sell their souls. You can give them easy terms—"

Lalloo got up leisurely.

"At Heerut—no, Meester Barclay," he said. "Not there."

"And why not?"

"The Dakktar Sahib lives in Heerut. He is a strange man. He has no love for my calling."

"Well, are you afraid of him?"

"No; he drove a devil out of my son," Lalloo explained, without particular emotion.

Barclay laughed irritably.

"That means fear, right enough. You think if he can drive out devils, he can also inflict them. I know your ways of argument. Well, in the name of the devil he exorcised, who is the fellow?"

"Tristram Sahib."

"Tristram——?"

"The son," Lalloo explained, his eyes on the spot near the curtain.

James Barclay turned on his heel and went over to the window. For a full minute he stood there motionless and silent, seemingly intent on the sound of English voices which drifted towards him over the darkness of the compound. When he spoke again it was with a drawling heaviness.

"Tristram——the son? That's a curious coincidence. Still, I see your point, Lalloo. You could not very well oppose him. Leave Heerut to me. I shall manage. You can go now."

The old usurer lingered. He was watching the tall, stooping figure by the window, his head a little on one side, as though he, too, listened, but apparently to other sounds. Presently he slid noiselessly to the door and drew back the curtain.

A woman entered.

Lalloo greeted her with silent deference. He lifted his hand half-way to his forehead, looking in Barclay's direction, and the gesture was nicely expressive of a courteous equality. Then he was gone.

Barclay continued to stand by the window. He had noticed neither Lalloo's departure nor the woman's entry. Evidently the English party outside on the road had just returned from some entertainment. He could hear a fragment of a laughing reference to champagne, then an indistinguishable murmur pitched in a graver key, and a woman's exclamation of contemptuous disgust. Some one called good-night, a whip cracked, and a light-wheeled vehicle rolled on its way down-hill towards the dâk-bungalow.

Barclay drew in his breath between his teeth like some one who has received a hurt, but he did not move. The woman came nearer to him. Her movements were quiet and graceful, and curiously typical of the whole of her. Everything about her was harmonious in a supple, boneless way. The big straw hat, made garishly ornate with artificial poppies, flopped over the dark little face and its untidy, beautiful frame of straight, jet-black hair. The light sprig dress revealed the yielding lines of her body, and was in itself pretty and badly made and carelessly put on. She had all the charm, all the lithesome fascination of a young animal, but there were also lines in her face, in her figure, which gave warning of a less lovely maturity.

As she came softly forward she clasped her hands, half in excitement, half in a childish appeal, and they were long-fingered, olive-tinted, and gaudy with bright rings.

"Jim!" she whispered. "Jim!"

He started. The moody dejection passed. He swung round, his features blank with the very violence of contending emotions. For a moment he stared at her, whilst the breathless joy in her eyes faded into hesitant questioning, then into fear. "Oh, Jim," she repeated helplessly.

"Jim!"

He strode up to her, catching her roughly by the wrist, shaking her less with anger than in a kind of panic.

"Why have you come?" he stammered. "How did you get here?"

She cowered like a dog before threatening punishment, and her eyes, lifted to his face, were dog-like in their steadfast, wistful appeal.

"By train to Bhara and then I drove—for two days, Jim. But no one knew me. I didn't ask any questions—I didn't tell any one. Not a soul. I just found my way here. I had your letters and they described things so wonderfully, I felt I was coming home. Jim, how beautiful it all is! Much more beautiful than I ever dreamed!"

Partly she was trying to propitiate him, but partly the exclamation was sincere. Her brown eyes were wide and bright as they passed over the room's treasures, resting at last on the culminating vulgarity of the Venus. Barclay followed her gaze, then, without a word, he released her, and going over to the lamp, turned down the wick. It sputtered feebly, throwing up decreasing flashes of light on to the white, stupid loveliness of the goddess, and then died out. Through the darkness, Barclay's voice sounded thick with anger.

"Anybody might have seen us from the road," he said. "You must be mad, Marie, or bent on doing for my chances. Don't you know what I told you—or did you just choose to forget? Good God, don't whimper! You're like a child. You smash something and then you cry as though you were the injured party——"

"I was so awfully lonely——" she broke in, piteously.

He was silent. She could not read his expression, but the quiet following on his first violence suggested a furious effort to regain self-control. She waited, not moving or speaking, and presently he took up her plea, scrutinizing it with the level coldness of suppressed anger.

"Lonely, you say? Hadn't you friends enough? You used to make me sick with your boasts about them. There were the Mazzinis and the Aostas—in our Calcutta days they lived with us, fed on us, borrowed from us. What's become of them? You had money enough to buy the lot. Lonely!" He exploded on the word, falling on it with a raging bitterness, then choked himself back to his pose of judicial deliberation. "It did not at all occur to you that I might be lonely, I suppose. It did not occur to you that whilst you were lolling comfortably in your rut, I was cutting new roads for us both through a granite opposition with not a soul to help me. You imagined me in a whirl of conviviality, no doubt—fêted, courted, the catch of Gaya——" He laughed out. "You fool!" he flung at her, in a paroxysm of exasperation.

She gasped, as though he had struck her across the face, but she was no longer crying. Her voice sounded flat and tired like a child's.

"I was lonely," she reiterated patiently. "I had the Mazzinis and the Aostas. I saw them every day, and they were very kind. But they were not you, Jim. I wanted you all the time, night and day, worse and worse. I thought I should have died, wanting you. And I did imagine things. I couldn't help it. I thought how brilliant and handsome you were, and I knew you'd win through and climb—ever so high—and I should be left behind. I couldn't bear it, Jim, dear. I had to come."

Barclay did not answer, but now his silence was no longer the tense, savage thing it had been. She could see his tall, slight figure dimly outlined against the paler darkness of the garden. Presently he turned and drew up, the Chesterfield to the shadow's edge.

"Come here!" he said authoritatively.

She came, groping blindly towards him and knelt down at his knees. She put her hands up, touching his face his shoulders, his whole body.

"Oh, Jim!" she whispered huskily. "Just to feel you again—just to know you're there—near me. It's like slaking an awful thirst—you don't know what it's been——"

"Hush!" he whispered back. She had flung aside her hat, and he bent and kissed her hair. A curious fragrance rose to meet him—Eastern, sensuous, intoxicating. He flung his arms round, dragging her close to him, kissing her eyes, her lips with a ruthless desire.

"And haven't I thirsted—haven't I wanted you? Do you think I haven't been lonely—among these strangers who turn their backs on me, shrink from me as though I were a leper? Hush, don't cry! I'm not angry now. I'm glad. We shall have these few hours together. Tomorrow——"

"Tomorrow?" she interrupted fearfully.

"Tomorrow you must go back." He laid his hand on her lips, stifling her involuntary cry of pain. His own voice grew clearer and less passionate. "You must. We can't let ourselves be carried away by our feelings like this. It would be ridiculous to sell the whole future for the present."

"We were happy before," she whispered. "What more can one be than happy?"

He made a little impatient movement.

"You were happy. But I—couldn't you see for yourself—I didn't belong there—not among your set or the set I'd been brought up in—poor, mean, petty folk, squabbling and wrangling over the degrees of their insignificance. Who was your father?—a rotten little clerk, sweating in a Government office, too poor to get an English wife. But my father——" He broke off, and then went on rapidly. "I'm different, Marie. I've got good blood in my veins—good English blood. It's restless in me. It won't let me rot like the others. I've got to get on. I've got to win through—back to my own people. Don't you understand?"

"Yes," she said dully, "and I am afraid."

He went on, with gathering determination:

"So you must go back and wait. I shall pull through, but you couldn't, and I couldn't help you. You'd drag me back. You must have patience and faith. When I've made my position safe here——"

"You will not want me," she interrupted gently. "You'll have climbed too high for me, Jim. That's why I am afraid."

He laughed a little. His hand brushed the tears from her hot cheeks, and passed on caressingly down her arm to her wrist and lingered there.

"You're tired and fanciful, Marie. Some one's been putting ideas into your head. You've got to trust me and help me——"

"Jim—what are you doing?" she whispered.

"The bracelet—the one I gave you—you're still wearing it——?"

"Always. Night and day. It's been like a bit of you——"

"I want it back——"

She tried to wrench herself free from him. "Jim—don't—don't, dear."

"I want it. Hush, don't make a fuss. You shall have it back, I promise you. Heavens—what a child——!"

She was crying now convulsively. He put his arms round her and pressed her closer with an impatient tenderness.

"It was all I had of you," she sobbed. "It was our luck—a sort of link—now it's gone——"

"—into my pocket," he retorted, good-humouredly, "and in a week or two it'll be back on your wrist. I'll put it there if I have to come all the way to Calcutta. Hush, for God's sake; don't cry like that——"

She became suddenly very quiet. Instinctively she knew that he was trying to listen to something beyond her sobbing, and she too listened, intently, with the alertness of a frightened animal.

"Jim—what is it——?"

He freed himself deliberately from her arms.

"It's down at the dâk-bungalow. Some one playing. It's a long way off. The wind must be in the east——"

"The dâk-bungalow? Who lives there?"

"Sigrid Fersen——"

"A woman. Jim, do you know her?"

He got up. It was as though she no longer existed for him. The D minor valse came down to them on the breath of the night-breeze—maddening and exhilarating—a song of life at its full tide.

"Yes—I—I know her," he said.

"Jim, where are you going?"

He turned on her, thrusting aside her clinging hands with a cold violence.

"Stay there!" he said. "Don't let any one see you. Stay there——!"

He pushed past her and went down the verandah steps. It was as though he had thrust a dog out of his path. She called to him, but he did not hear her—a minute later, he had vanished into the shadow of the trees.

CHAPTER X

AN ENCOUNTER

Ayeshi, with his face buried in his arms, had neither seen nor heard, and it was Mrs. Smithers who stepped challengingly into the man's path. Her old heart beat terrifyingly, but she held herself with a very dour and acrimonious determination.

"Of all the impertinence!" she hissed at him. "Go away with you, you nasty, maraudering heathen——"

But it was then that Sigrid saw him, and the D minor valse broke off sharply, leaving a flat and drear silence, as though some splendid, glowing spirit had fallen lifeless. She herself had risen and stood with one hand on the keys, the other at her side. Her mouth was still a little open, but no longer with her wide smile of joyous living. She looked tired, and rather wan.

"Who are you?" she asked, breathlessly. "What are you doing here?"

"I beg your pardon." Barclay bowed to her. "I assure you, I did not mean to interrupt your playing, but this—this lady caught sight of me and I had to present myself at once or be taken for a burglar. I hope I am forgiven?"

She shrugged her shoulder, studying him with an impassivity before which his suave manner faltered and became uncertain.

"I neither know you nor your business," she said. "When I have heard your explanation, it will be time to consider whether I can accept your apology."

"Meantime, I accept the reproof," he retorted. "But we are old acquaintances—at least, we have met before. That is the first paragraph of my excuse. We met at the dinner Lord Kirkdale gave in honour of your return, and I was introduced to you. My name is Barclay—James Barclay."

"There are many thousands of people who have been introduced to me and whose names and faces I have forgotten," she said, simply. "That does not warrant their walking into my drawing-room at odd hours of the night."

His smile, uneasily ingratiating, persisted.

"Haven't I apologized, and won't you make some allowances? I had missed you this afternoon at Colonel Boucicault's—business detained me—and was bitterly disappointed. Passing your bungalow, I heard you playing—I was mortally tempted—and, relying on the fact that we are in India and not in stiff-necked England, I ventured to present myself at once."

"You relied on the facts that I am a dancer, that you once paid half a guinea for a stall to see me dance, that you cadged for an introduction where introductions were valueless, and that, once a woman ventures out into publicity, men of a certain type consider her fair game." She spoke quietly enough, but there was a whiteness about her distended nostrils which betrayed a rising anger. "Well, as you rightly say, we are not in England. The half-guinea stall is of no value here. My privacy is my right, and I beg of you to respect it."

He held his ground. His impulse had carried him into an impasse from which he could not possibly retreat with dignity.

"You are like royalty, Miss Fersen," he said fluently. "People whom you don't know, know you. It's the penalty of greatness. You can't be hard on us poor mortals who take the sunshine when they can get it. Besides, I have only forestalled events. Sooner or later, I should have met you——"

"I have lived in Gaya for two months," she interrupted, "and I have neither met you nor heard of you, Mr. Barclay."

She closed the piano, sighing impatiently. Had she looked at him at that moment she might have repented her only half-intended cruelty, for his insolent ease had become a desperate and rather pitiable humiliation. He had committed a blunder which he had neither the art nor the social adroitness to cover over, and he looked to her to make his escape possible—decent. And she ignored him. Whereat what little self-possession he owned deserted him, leaving him to the mad guidance of a raw and quivering pride.

"You know very well who and what I am, Miss Fersen," he stammered, "or you wouldn't behave like this. If I'd been one of the others, you'd have welcomed me. You wouldn't have dared treat the merest subaltern as you've treated me. If Rajah Rasaldû, a full-blown native, from whom you accept——"

She turned like a flash.

"Will you go, Mr. Barclay?" she said, scarcely above her breath.

He remained stubbornly unmoved. A minute before, he had been merely a tragi-comic figure, a victim of a midsummer night's ambition, and his own intoxicated senses. He might, to himself at least, have pleaded many things in extenuation—certainly a fundamental harmlessness and even a rather painful humility. Now he had become dangerous.

"I'll go at my own time," he said unevenly. Mrs. Smithers had once more intervened and he pushed her back.

"I can afford a scandal—you can't——"

It was at that moment that Tristram stalked in through the open verandah. Sigrid saw him first, and laughed.

"So it's your turn to play deus ex machinâ," she said gaily. It was as though his advent had swept away every vestige of her annoyance. She looked at Barclay with bright, malicious eyes. "You've just come in time to show Mr. Barclay the way out," she said. "He was unable to find it for himself."

The two men stared at each other. At that moment either of them could have passed easily for the villain of the little drama, Barclay's quivering, passion-distorted features being balanced by the Englishman's general appearance, which was ragamuffinly, not to say ruffianly. His white clothes had been washed since Sigrid had seen him last, but had not been ironed, an unfortunate omission, since the result was one of soiled inelegance. The stubble on his unusual chin had become a reddish beard, in itself an unlovely object, and lent his countenance a look of aggression and truculence.

Barclay laughed. He was beside himself, less with anger than with panic before the inevitable débâcle, and he groped round for any weapon which might deliver him with a semblance of dignity.

"I appreciate my blunder, Miss Fersen," he jerked out. "I had no idea that I interrupted an—an appointment. I can quite understand your annoyance—and I apologize. I wish you both good-night."

Tristram blocked his way.

"Your name's Barclay?" he asked quietly.

"It is."

"I've heard of you."

"I daresay." The Eurasian's eyes narrowed. He looked into his opponent's face with a sudden curiosity. "I daresay we have met before, Major Tristram."

"I don't think so."

"Perhaps in a third person."

"I don't understand," Tristram returned simply. "But I have heard of you. Some time I'd like to have a little talk—about various things, which concern us both—notably about some friends of mine who have been hard pressed.——"

"I shall be delighted to meet you any time, Major Tristram," Barclay retorted. "I, too, may have matters of interest to discuss with you."

Tristram stood on one side.

"Shall we go together now?" he suggested. "Since we are both intruding——"

"Not you, Major Tristram," Sigrid interposed quietly.

There was a moment's silence. The way was now open to Barclay, and the three implacable watchers gave him no choice. He tried to insinuate into his bearing, into his exaggerated bow, a mocking ease, a cynical suggestiveness which might give him even a semblance of advantage. But he failed, and knew it. He stumbled out, blind and sick with the consciousness of defeat, of a hideous, self-inflicted humiliation.

Mrs. Smithers saw him to the verandah steps as a policeman sees a doubtful intruder off premises specially recommended to his care. She adjusted her neat wig with dignity and a touch of wrathful defiance.

"In a brace of shakes, I'd have boxed his ears," she muttered ferociously. "Not but what my heart was beating about inside me like a fly in a bottle. The impudent blackguard! Called himself an acquaintance! What next! We shall have the sweep dropping in for tea and the butcher leaving his card——" She caught herself up. "There, in another minute, I'd have forgotten I was a lady and said things. Shall I see about coffee for you, Sigrid?"

"Please, Smithy."

Sigrid Fersen stood near the middle of the room, looking out on to the dark garden, her hand raised to her small face in the familiar attitude of half-whimsical, half-sad reflection. Tristram glanced at her and then hurriedly away.

"I was dancing," she said suddenly, with a catch in her breath. "I don't think I'd ever danced like that before. And then he came. It was as though something vital in me had been snapped—a bird brought down in full flight——"

"Ayeshi came out and told me you were in difficulties," he said. "I was eavesdropping. I suppose I behaved like a cad, too."

She shook her head.

"I was playing to you—and dancing. I knew you would see me dancing."

"Then you knew——?"

"Ayeshi told me you were coming. I knew if I played you would come into the garden and listen. I wanted you to come. And you came."

He tried to laugh, and the laugh failed him.

"I am almost afraid of you," he said.

She considered him quaintly.

"Smithy would say you were quite right to be afraid. And Smithy would be right, too. I am dangerous."

"And I am a believer in the theory which bids us 'live dangerously,'" he retorted more lightly.

"But with you the theory would work out as self-sacrifice—with me it would mean the sacrifice of others." She drew a lounge chair out on to the verandah and sat down with a little sigh of relief. "How tired I am! The D minor valse always tired me—not my body—that doesn't matter—but the invisible spirit which makes a single step a divine thing. Mr. Meredith would call it the soul, if he could connect his speciality with anything so vulgar and mundane." She laughed and snuggled herself back among the cushions. "Anyhow, my soul has danced and my soul is tired," she announced contentedly.

Tristram remained standing. He was looking down at her profile with a puzzled intentness.

"Yes," he admitted, "very tired."

"That means—I'm looking ugly?" she suggested.

"No," he answered, abruptly.

At that moment, seated there with her back to the light, she looked elfish, something aerial and inhuman. Her fair hair, smoothed down with a delicious primness on either side of her small head, made an aureole in which her face gleamed white and transparent. Beauty and ugliness were terms inapplicable to her. As well have measured air and fire by the standards of a Venus de Milo. "Still, you're not well tonight," Tristram persisted obstinately.

"Feel that, then, Dakktar Sahib!"

He took her outstretched hand. For a second it lay in his, small, cool, amazingly soft and supple, then clasped itself round his fingers like a steel band made living by electric forces, and he looked up wincing and laughing, and their eyes met. She was smiling at him with a childlike satisfaction.

"You see, I am stronger than you, Dakktar Sahib!" she said gaily.

"That wouldn't be saying much tonight," he answered.

She still held his hand, but her hold had changed its character.

"I had forgotten—Ayeshi told us—you are ill——"

"It is nothing," he muttered.

She became thoughtful in her silence. Wickie made a scrambling rush up the verandah steps and flung himself, with an hysterical yell of triumph, against Tristram's legs. By what cunning he had eluded Mrs. Smithers's methodical but unpractised search cannot be told—but he was there, a wriggling, writhing, panting mass of delirious happiness. Tristram caught him up and hugged him.

"And how in the name of the Creator of Mongrel Puppies did you get here?" he asked.

"I commandeered him," Sigrid Fersen answered.

"I left him with Miss Boucicault."

"And Colonel Boucicault threatened to knock his brains out, so I commandeered him."

Tristram glanced down at her wonderingly.

"You bearded the Colonel? That was plucky of you. Anne must have been frightened, poor little soul."

A faint, malicious smile quivered at the corner of Sigrid's lips.

"A little, I think. But she had no time to interfere. I was nearest to the scene of action."

"I am awfully grateful. Wickie and I are old pals."

"I know. If I deserve reward, let him stay with me. What will you do with small dogs out there?"

"I don't know—would he stay with you?"