"Badshah Junction, Mr. Amber … Badshah Junction … We'll be there in 'alf an hour …"
Inexorably the voice droned on, repeating the admonition over and over.
Mutinous, Amber stirred and grumbled in his sleep; stirred and, grumbling, wakened to another day. Doggott stood over him, doggedly insistent.
"Not much time to dress, sir; we're due in less than 'alf an hour."
"Oh,allright." Drowsy, stiff and sore in bone and muscle, Amber sat up on the edge of the leather-padded bunk and stared out of the window, wondering. With thundering flanges the train fled from east to west across a landscape that still slept wrapped in purple shadows. Far in the north the higher peaks of a long, low range of treeless hills were burning with a pale, cold light. A few stars glimmered in the cloudless vault—glimmered wan, doomed to sudden, swift extinction. Beside the railroad a procession of telegraph poles marched with dipping loops of wire between. There was nothing else to see. None the less the young man, now fully alive to the business of the day, said "Thank God!" in all sincerity.
"Even a tonga will be a relief after three days of this, Doggott," he observed, surrendering himself to the ministrations of the servant.
It was the third morning succeeding that on which he had risen from his bed in the Great Eastern Hotel in Calcutta, possessed by a wild anxiety to find his way with the least possible delay to Darjeeling and Sophia Farrell—a journey which he was destined never to make. For while he breakfasted a telegram had been brought to him.
"Your train for Benares," he read, "leaves Howrah at nine-thirty. Imperative." It was signed: "Pink Satin."
He acted upon it without thought of disobedience; he was in the hands of Labertouche, and Labertouche knew best. Between the lines he read that the Englishman considered it unwise to attempt further communication in Calcutta. Something had happened to eliminate the trip to Darjeeling. Labertouche would undoubtedly contrive to meet and enlighten him, either on the way or in Benares itself.
In the long, tiresome, eventless journey that followed his faith was sorely tried; nor was it justified until the train paused some time after midnight at Mogul Serai. There, before Amber and Doggott could alight to change for Benares, their compartment was invaded by an unmistakable loafer, very drunk. Tall and burly; with red-rimmed eyes in a pasty pockmarked face, dirty and rusty with a week-old growth of beard; clothed with sublime contempt for the mode and exalted beyond reason with liquor—a typical loafer of the Indian railways—he flung the door open and himself into Amber's arms, almost knocking the latter down; and resented the accident at the top of his lungs.
"You miserable, misbegotten blighter of a wall-eyed American——" At this point he became unprintably profane, and Doggott fell upon him with the laudable intention of throwing him out. In the struggle Amber caught his eye, and it was bright with meaning. "Pink Satin!" he hissed. "He's gone ahead…. You're to keep on to Agra…. Change for Badshah Junction, Rajputana Route…. Then tonga to Kuttarpur…. Farrell's there and his daughter…. That's right, my man, throw me out!…"
His downfall was spectacular. In his enthusiasm for the part he played, he had erred to the extent of delivering a blow in Doggott's face more forcible, probably, than he had intended it to be. Promptly he landed sprawling on the station platform and, in the sight of a multitude of natives, but the moment gone by his shrieks roused from their sleep in orderly ranks upon the floor, was gathered into the arms of the stationmaster and had the seriousness of his mistake pointed out to him forthwith and without regard to the sensitiveness of human anatomy.
And the train continued on its appointed way, bearing both Amber and the injured Doggott.
Thus they had come to the heart of Rajputana.
In the chill of dawn they were deposited at Badshah Junction. A scanty length of rude platform received them and their two small travelling bags.
On their left the Haiderabad express roared away, following the night, its course upon the parallel ribbons of shining steel marked by a towering pillar of dust. On their right, beyond the sharp-cut edge of the world, the sun had kindled a mighty conflagration in the skies. On every hand, behind and before them, the desert lay in ebbing shadows, a rolling waste seared by arid nullahs—the bone-dry beds of long-forgotten streams. Off in the north the hills cropped up and stole purposelessly away over the horizon.
They stood, then, forlorn in a howling desolation. For signs of life they had the station, a flimsy shelter roofed with corrugated iron, a beaten track that wandered off northwards and disappeared over a grassless swell, a handful of mud huts at a distance, and the ticket-agent. The latter a sleepy, surly Eurasian in pyjamas, surveyed them listlessly from the threshold of the station, and without a sign either of interest or contempt turned and locked himself in.
Amber sat down on his upturned suit-case and laughed and lit a cigarette. Doggott growled. The noise of the train died to silence in the distance, and a hyena came out of nowhere, exhibited himself upon the ridge of a dry desert swell, and mocked them sardonically. Then he, like the ticket-agent, went away, leaving an oppressive silence.
Presently the sun rose in glory and sent its burning level rays to cast a shadow several rods long of an enraged American beating frantically with clenched fists upon the door of an unresponsive railway station.
He hammered until he was a-weary, then deputised his task to Doggott, who resourcefully found him a stone of size and proceeded to make dents in the door. This method elicited the Eurasian. He came out, listened attentively to abuse and languidly to their demands for a tonga to bear them to Kuttarpur, and observed that the mail tonga left once a day—at three in the afternoon. Doggott caught him as he was on the point of returning to his interrupted repose and called his attention to the unwisdom of his ways.
Apparently convinced, this ticket-agent announced his intention of endeavouring to find a tonga for the sahib. Besides, he was not unwilling to acquire rupees. He scowled thoughtfully at Amber, ferociously at Doggott, went back into the station, gossipped casually with the telegraph sounder for a quarter of an hour, and finally reappearing, without a word or a nod left the platform for the road and walked and walked and walked and walked. Within thirty yards his figure was blurred by the dance of new-born heat devils. Within a hundred he disappeared; the desert swallowed him up.
An hour passed as three. The heat became terrific; not a breath of wind stirred. The face of the world lost its contours in wavering mirage. The travellers found lukewarm water in the station and breakfasted sparingly from their own stores of biscuit and tinned things. Then, in the shadow of the station, they settled down to wait, bored to extinction. Lulled by the hushed chatter of the telegraph sounder, Doggott nodded and slept audibly; Amber nodded, felt himself going, roused with a struggle, and lapsed into a dreary mid-world of semi-stupor.
In the simple fulness of Asiatic time a tonga came from Heaven knew where and roused him by rattling up beside the platform. He got up and looked it over with a just eye and a temper none the sweeter for his experience. It was a brute of a tonga, a patched and ramshackle wreck of what had once been a real tonga, with no top to protect the travellers from the sun, and accommodation only for three, including the driver.
The Eurasian ticket-agent alighted and solicited rupees. He got them and with them Amber's unvarnished opinion of the tonga; something which was not received with civility by the driver.
He remained in his seat—a short, swart native with an evil countenance and, across his knees, a sheathed tulwar—arguing with Amber in broken English and, abusing him scandalously in impurest Hindi, flinging at him in silken tones untranslatable scraps of bazaar Billingsgate. For, as he explained in an audible aside to the ticket-agent, this sahib was an outlander and, being as ignorant as most sahibs, could not understand Hindi. At this the Eurasian turned away to hide a grin of delight and the driver winked deliberately at Amber the while he broadly sketched for him his ancestry and the manner of his life at home and abroad.
Thunderstruck, Amber caught himself just as he was on the point of attempting to drag the driver from his seat and beat him into a more endurable frame of mind. He swallowed the hint and gave up the contest.
"Oh, very well," he conceded. "I presume you're trying to say there isn't another tonga to be had and it can't be helped; but I don't like your tone. However, there doesn't seem to be anything to do but take you. How much for the two of us?"
"Your servant, sahib? He cannot ride in this tonga," asserted the driver impassively.
"He can't! Why not?"
"You can see there is room for but two, and I have yet another passenger."
"Where?"
"At the first dak-bungalow, Sahib, where the mail-tonga broke down last night. This tonga, which I say is an excellent tonga, anaramtonga, a tonga for ease, is sent to take its place. More than this, I am bidden to go in haste; therefore there is little time for you to decide whether or not you will go with me alone. As for your servant, he can follow by this afternoon's mail tonga."
Upon this ultimatum he stood, immovable; neither threats nor bribery availed. It was an order, he said: he had no choice other than to obey. Shabash! Would the sahib be pleased to make up his mind quickly?
Perforce, the sahib yielded. "It'll be Labertouche; he's arranged this," he told himself. "That loafer said he'd gone on ahead of us." And comforted he issued his orders to Doggott, who received and acceded to them with all the ill-grace imaginable. He was to remain and follow to Kuttarpur by the afternoon's tonga. He forthwith sulked—and Amber, looking round upon the little Tephet that was Badshah Junction, had not the heart to reprove the man.
"It's all very well, sir," said Doggott. "I carn't s'y anything, I know. But, mark my words, sir—beggin' your pardon—there'll be trouble come of this. That driver's as ill-favoured a scoundrel as ever I see. And as for this 'ere ape, if 'e smiles at me just once more, I'll give 'im what-for." And he scowled so blackly upon the Eurasian that that individual hastily sought the seclusion which the station granted.
Amber left him, then, with a travelling-bag and a revolver for company, and the ticket-agent and his bad temper to occupy his mind.
Climbing aboard, the Virginian settled himself against the endless discomforts of the ride which he foresaw; the tonga was anything but "anaramtonga—a tonga for ease," there was no shade and no breeze, and the face of the land crawled with heat-bred haze.
To a crisp crackling of the whip-lash over the backs of the two sturdy, shaggy, flea-bitten ponies, the tonga swept away from the station, swift as a hunted fox with a dusty plume. The station dropped out of sight and the desert took them to its sterile heart.
On every hand the long swales rolled away, sunbaked, rocky, innocent of any sign of life other than the trooping telegraph poles in the south, destitute of any sort of vegetation other than the inevitable ak and gos. Wherever the eye wandered the prospect was the same—limitless expanses of raw blistering ochres, salmon-pinks, and dry faded reds, under a sky of brass and fire.
Amber leaned forward, watching the driver's face. "Your name, tonga-wallah?" he enquired.
"Ram Nath, sahib." The man spoke without moving his head, attending diligently to the management of his ponies.
"And this other passenger, who awaits us at the dak-bungalow, RamNath—is he, perchance, one known both to you and to me?"
Ram Nath flicked the flagging ponies. "How should I know?" he returned brusquely.
"One," persisted Amber, "who might be known by such a name as, say,Pink Satin?"
"What manner of talk is this?" demanded Ram Nath. "I am no child to be amused by a riddle. I know naught of your 'Pink Satin.'" He bent forward, shortening his grasp upon the reins, as if to signify that the interview was at an end.
Amber sat back, annoyed by the fellow's impudence yet sensitive to a suspicion that Ram Nath was playing his part better than his passenger, that the rebuke was merited by one who had ventured to speak of secret things in a land whose very stones have ears. For all that he could say their every move was watched by invisible spies, of whom the rock-strewn waste through which they sped might well harbour a hidden legion…. But perhaps, after all, Ram Nath had nothing whatever to do with Labertouche. Undeniable as had been his wink, it might well have been nothing more than an impertinence. At the thought Amber's eyes darkened and hardened and he swore bitterly beneath his breath. If that were so, he vowed, the tonga-wallah would pay dearly for the indiscretion. He set his wits to contrive a way to satisfy his doubts.
Meanwhile the tonga rocked and bounded fiendishly over an infamous parody of a road, turning and twisting between huge boulders and in and out of pebbly nullahs, Ram Nath tooling it along with the hand of a master. But all his attention was of necessity centred upon the ponies, and presently his tulwar slipped from his knees and clattered upon the floor of the tonga. Amber saw his chance and put his foot upon it.
"Ram Nath," he asked gently, "have you no other arms?"
"I were a fool had I not." The man did not deign to glance round. "He hath need of weapons who doth traffick with the Chosen of the Voice, sahib."
"Ah, that Voice!" cried Amber in exasperation. "I grow weary of the word, am Nath."
"That may well be," returned the man, imperturbable. "None the less it were well for you to have a care how you fondle the revolver in your pocket, sahib. Should it by any chance go off and the bullet find lodgment in your tonga-wallah, you are like to hear more of that Voice, and from less friendly lips."
"I think you have eyes in the back of your head, Ram Nath." Amber withdrew his hand from his coat pocket and laughed shortly as he spoke.
"There is a saying in this country, sahib, that even the stones in the desert have ears to hear and eyes to see and tongues withal to tell what they have seen and heard."
"Ah-h!… That is a wise saying, Ram Nath."
"There be those I could name who would do well to lay that saying to heart, sahib."
"You are right, indeed…. Now if there be aught of truth in that saying, and if one were unwisely to speak a certain name, even here——"
"The echo of that name might be heard beyond the threshold of a certainGateway, sahib."
Amber grunted and said no more, contented now with the assurance that he was in truth in touch with Labertouche, that this Ram Nath was an employee of the I.S.S. The wink was now explained away with all the rest of the tonga-wallah's churlishness. Since there was a purpose behind it all, the Virginian was satisfied to contain his curiosity. Nevertheless he could not help thinking that there must be some fantastic exaggeration in the excessive degree of caution that was thus tacitly imposed upon him.
He looked round him, narrowing his eyes against the sun-glare; and the desert showed itself to his eyes a desert waste and nothing more. The day lay stark upon its lifeless face and it seemed as if, within the wide rim of the horizon, no thing moved save the tonga. They were then passing rapidly over higher ground and seemed to have drawn a shade nearer to the raw red northern hills. Amber would have said that they could never have found a solitude more absolute.
The thought was still in his mind when the tonga dipped unexpectedly over another ridge, began to descend another long grade of dead, parched earth, and discovered some distance ahead of them on the wagontrack a cloud of dust like a tinted veil, so dense, opaque, and wide and high that its cause was altogether concealed in its reddish, glittering convolutions. But the Virginian knew the land well enough to recognise the phenomenon and surmise its cause, even before his ears began to be assailed by the hideous rasping screech of wheels of solid wood revolving reluctantly on rough-hewn axles guiltless of grease. And as the tonga swiftly lessened the distance, his gaze, penetrating the thinning folds, discerned the contours of a cotton-wain drawn by twin stunted bullocks, patient noses to the ground, tails a-switch. Beside his cattle the driver plodded, goad in hand, a naked sword upon his hip. Within his reach, between the rude bales of the loaded cart, the butt of a brass-bound musket protruded significantly…. All men went armed in that wild land: to do as much is one of the boons attendant upon citizenship in an unprogressive, independent native State.
Deliberately enough the carter swerved his beasts aside to make way for the tonga, lest by undue haste he should make himself seem other than what he was—a free man and a Rajput. But when his fierce, hawk-like eyes encountered those of the dak traveller, his attitude changed curiously and completely. Recognition and reverence fought with surprise in his expression, and as Ram Nath swung the tonga past the man salaamed profoundly. His voice, as he rose, came after them, resonant and clear:
"Hail, thou Chosen of the Gateway! Hail!"
Amber neither turned to look nor replied. But his frown deepened. The incident passed into his history, marked only by the terse comment it educed from Ram Nath—words which were flung curtly over the tonga-wallah's shoulder: "Eyes to see and ears to hear and a tongue withal … sahib!"
The Virginian said nothing. But it was in his mind that he had indeed thrust his head into the lion's mouth by thus adventuring into the territory which every instinct of caution and common-sense proclaimed taboo to him—the erstwhile kingdom of the Maharana Har Dyal Rutton. It was, in a word, foolhardy—nothing less. But for his pledged word it had been so easy to order Ram Nath to convey him back to Badshah Junction to order and to enforce obedience at the pistol's point, if needs be! Honour held him helpless, bound upon the Wheel of his Destiny: he must and would go on….
He sat in silent gloom while sixty minutes were drummed out by the flying hoofs. The hills folded in about the way, diverting it hither and yon with raw, seamed spurs, whose flanks flung back harsh and heavy echoes of the tonga's flight through riven gulch and scrub-grown valley. And then it was that Ram Nath proved his mettle. Hardened himself, he showed no mercy to his passenger, and never once drew rein, though the tonga danced from rock to ridge and ridge to rut and back again, like a tin can on the tail of an astonished dog. As for Amber, he wedged his feet and held on with both hands, grimly, groaning in spirit when he did not in the flesh, foreseeing as he did nine hours more of this heroic torture punctuated only by brief respites at the end of each stage.
One travels dak by relays casually disposed along the route at the whim of the native contractor. Between Badshah Junction and Kuttarpur there were ten stages, of which the conclusion of the first was at hand—Amber having all but abandoned belief in its existence.
Slamming recklessly down the bed of an ancient watercourse, the tonga spun suddenly upon one wheel round a shoulder of the banks and dashed out upon a rolling plain, across which the trail snaked to other farther hills that lay dim and low, a wavy line of blue, upon the horizon—the hills in whose heart Kuttarpur itself lay occult. And, by the roadside, in a compound fenced with camel-thorn, sat an aged and indigent dak-bungalow, marking the end of the first stage, the beginning of the second.
It wore a look of Heaven to the traveller. In the shade of its veranda he read an urgent invitation to rest and surcease of sunlight. He approved it thoroughly; the ramshackle rest-house itself, the sheds in the rear for the accommodation of relays, the syce squatting asleep in the sunshine, the few scrawny chickens squabbling and scratching over their precarious sustenance in the deep hot dust of the compound, even the broken tonga reposing with its shafts uplifted at a piteous angle of decrepitude—all these Amber surveyed with a kindly eye.
Ram Nath reined in with a flourish and lifted a raucous voice, hailing the syce, while Amber, painfully disengaging his cramped limbs, climbed down and stumbled toward the veranda. The abrupt transition from violent and erratic motion to a solid and substantial footing affected him unpleasantly, with an undeniable qualm; the earth seemed to rock and flow beneath him as if under the influence of an antic earthquake. He was for some seconds occupied with the problem of regaining his poise, and it was not until he heard an Englishwoman's voice uplifted in accents of anger, that he remembered the other wayfarer with whom he was to share his tonga, or associated the white-clad figure in the dark doorway of the bungalow with anything but the khansamah, coming to greet and cheat the chance-brought guest.
"Where is that tonga-wallah who deserted me here last night?" the woman was demanding of Ram Nath, too preoccupied with her resentment to have eyes for the other traveller, who at sight of her had stopped and removed his pith helmet and now stood staring as if he had come from a land in which there were no women. "Where," she continued, with an imperative stamp of a daintily-shod foot, "is that wretched tonga-wallah?"
"Sahiba," protested Ram Nath, with a great show of deference, "how should I know? Belike he is in Badshah Junction, whither he returned very late last night, being travel-worn and weary, and where I left him, being sent with this excellent tonga to take his place."
"You were? And why have I been detained here, alone and unprotected, this long night? Simply because that other tonga-wallah was a fool, am I to be imposed upon in this fashion?"
"What am I," whimpered Ram Nath, "to endure the wrath of the sahiba for a fault that is none of mine?"
"I beg your pardon, sir," said the girl, turning to Amber, "but it is very annoying." She looked him over, first with abstraction, then with a puzzled gathering of her brows, for he was far from her thoughts—the last person she would have expected to meet in that place, and very effectually disguised in dust and dirt besides, "The tire came off the wheel just as we got here, late yesterday evening, and in trying, or pretending to try, to fit it on again, that block-head of a tonga-wallah hammered the rim with a rock as big as his head and naturally smashed it to kindling-wood. Then, before I could stop him, he flung himself on the back of a pony and went away, saying that it was the will of God that he should return to Badshah for a better tonga. Since when I have had for company one stable-syce, one deaf-and-dumb patriarch of a khansamah and … the usual dak-bungalow discomforts—insects, bad food, and a terrible fear of dacoits."
"I am so sorry, Miss Farrell," Amber put in. "If I had only been here…."
The girl gave a little gasp and sat down abruptly in one of the veranda chairs, thereby threatening it with instant demolition and herself with a bad spill; for the chair was feeble with the burden of its many years, and she was a quite substantial young person. Indeed, so loudly did it croak a protest and a warning that she immediately arose in alarm.
"Mr. Amber!" she said; and, "Well …!"
"You'll forgive me the surprise?" he begged, going up on the veranda to her. "I myself had no hope of finding you here."
"But," she protested, with a pretty flush of colour—"but I left you in the States such a little while ago!"
"Yes?" he said gravely. "It seems so long to me…. And when you had gone, Long Island was a very lonely place indeed," he added, with calculated impudence.
Her colour deepened and she sought another chair, seating herself with gingerly decision. "I'm sure you don't mean me to assume that you've followed me half round the world?"
"Why not?" He brought another chair to face her. "Besides, I haven't seen anything of … India for a good many years."
"Mr. Amber!"
"Ma'am?" he countered with affected humility.
"You're spoiling it all. I was so glad to see you—I'd have been glad to see any white man, of course——"
"Much obliged, I'm sure."
"And now you're actually flirting with me—or pretending to."
"I'm not," he declared soberly. "As a matter of solemn fact, I had to come to India."
"Youhadto?"
"On a matter of serious business. Please don't ask me what, just yet; but it's very serious, to my way of thinking. This happy accident—I count myself a very happy man to have been so fortunate—only makes my errand the more pleasant."
She regarded him intently, chin in hand, her brown eyes sedate with speculation, for some time. "I believe you've been speaking in parables," she asserted, at length. "If I'm unjust, bear with me; appearances are against you. There isn't any reason I know of why you should tell me what brought you here——"
"There's every reason, in point of fact, Miss Farrell; only … I can't explain just now."
"Very well," she agreed briskly; "let's be content with that. I am glad to see you again, truly; and—we're to travel on to Kuttarpur in the same tonga?"
"If you'll permit——"
"After what I've endured, this awful night, I wouldn't willingly let you out of my sight."
"Or any other white man?"
She laughed, pleased. "I presume you're wondering what I'm doing here?"
"You were to join your father in Darjeeling, I believe?" he countered, cautious.
"But I found he'd been transferred unexpectedly to Kuttarpur. So, of course, I had to follow. I telegraphed him day before yesterday when I was to arrive at Badshah Junction, and naturally expected he'd come in person or have some one meet me, but I presume the message must have gone astray. At all events there was no one there for me and I had to come on alone. It's hardly been a pleasant experience; that incompetent tonga-wallah behaved precisely as though he had deliberately made up his mind to delay me…. And the tonga's nearly ready; I must lock my kit-bag."
She went into the bungalow, leaving him thoughtful, for perhaps…. But the back of Ram Nath, as that worthy busied himself superintending the harnessing in of fresh ponies, conveyed to him no support for his half-credited hypothesis that this "accident" had been carefully planned by Labertouche for Amber's especial benefit.
He vexed himself with vain speculations, for it was perfectly certain that he would get nothing in the way of either denial or confirmation out of Ram Nath; and, presently, acknowledging this, he called the khansamah and ordered a peg for the sake of the dust in his throat.
The girl joined him on the veranda in due course, very demure and sweet to look upon in her travelling-dress of light pongee and her pith helmet, whose green under-brim and puggaree served very handsomely to set off her fair colouring. If she overlooked the adoration of his eyes, she was rather less than woman; for it was in them, plain to be seen for the looking. The khansamah followed her from the bungalow, staggering under the weight of her box and kit-bag, and with Ram Nath's surly assistance made them fast to the front seat. While Amber gave the girl his hand to help her to her place, and lifted himself to her side in a mute glow of ecstasy. Fate, he thought with reason, was most kind to him.
They rattled headlong from the compound, making for the distant hills of blue. The girl drew down her puggaree, with its soft, thin folds sheltering the pure contours of her face from the dust and burning sun-glare. He watched her hungrily, holding his breath as the thought came to him that he was seated elbow to elbow with the woman who was to be his wife, his hand still a-tingle with the reminiscence of her gloved fingers that had touched it so transiently. She caught his intent look and smiled, her eyes lustrous through the veiling.
She was very tired after her night-long vigil, and after a few words of commonplace as they drew away from the station, he forebore to weary her with talk, and a silence as sweet as communion lengthened between them as the stage lengthened. He was very intent upon her presence; the consciousness of her there beside him seemed, at times, almost suffocating. He could by no means forget that she had in a curious way been assigned to him—set aside to be his wife, the partner of all his days; and she tolerated him kindly, all unsuspicious of the significance of his advent into her life…. If she were made to suspect, to understand, what effect would it have upon their relations, slight and but lately established as they were? Would she shrink from or encourage him?
His wife! He wagged his head in solemn stupefaction, trying to appreciate the intangible, the chimerical dream of yesterday resolved into the actuality of to-day; realising that, even when most intrigued by the adventure of which she was at once the cause and the prize, even though he had met and been charmed by her before becoming enmeshed in its web of incident, he had thought of her with a faint trace of incredulity, as though she had been a thing of fable, trapped with all the fanciful charms of beleaguered fairy princesses, rather than a living woman of flesh and fire and blood—such as she proved to be who rode with him, her thoughts drowsily astray in the vastnesses of her inscrutable, virginal moods.
To think that she was foreordained to be his wife was not more unbelievable than the consciousness that he, her undeclared lover, her predestined mate and protector, was listlessly permitting her to delve further into the black heart of a land out of which he had promised to convey her with all possible speed, for the salvation of her body and soul…. Yet what could he do, save be passive for the time, and wait upon the turn of events? He could not, dared not seize her in his arms and insist that she love him, marry him, fly with him—all within the compass of an hour or even of a day. For words of love came haltingly to his unskilled tongue, though they came from a surcharged heart, and to him the strategy of love was as a sealed book, at whose contents he could but guess, and that with a diffidence and distrust sadly handicapping to one who had urgent need of expedition in his courting.
With a rueful smile and a perturbed heart he pondered his problem. The second stage wore away without a dozen words passing between them; so also the third. The pauses were brief enough, the ponies being exchanged with gratifying despatch. The tonga would pull up, Ram Nath would jump down … and in a brace of minutes or little more the vehicle would been routeagain, Amber engaged with the infinite ramifications of this labyrinthal riddle of his, and the girl insensibly yielding to the need of sleep. She passed, at length, into sound unconsciousness.
Thus the morning stages flowed beneath the tonga, personified in a winding ribbon of roadway, narrow, deep-rutted, inexpressibly dusty, lined uncertainly over a scrubby, sun-scorched waste. Sophia napped uneasily by fits and starts, waking now and again with a sleepy smile and a fragmentary, murmured apology. She roused finally very much refreshed for the midday halt for rest and tiffin, which they passed at one of the conventional bungalows, in nothing particularly unlike its fellows unless it were that they enjoyed, before tiffin, the gorgeous luxury of plenty of clean water, cooled in porous earthen jars. Amber, overwhelmed by the discovery of this abundance, promptly went to the extreme of calling in the khansamah to sluice him down with jar after jar, and felt like himself for the first time in five days when, shaved and dressed, he returned to the common living-room of the resthouse.
The girl kept him waiting but a little while. Lacking the attentions of an ayah she had probably been unable to bathe so extensively as he, but eventually she appeared in an immeasurably more happy state of body and mind, calling up to him the simile, stronger than any other, of a tall, fair lily after a morning shower. And she was in a bewitching humour, one that ingenuously enough succeeded in entangling him more thoroughly than ever before in the web of her fascinations. Over an execrable curry of stringy fowl and questionable rice, eked out with tea and tinned delicacies of their own, their chatter, at the beginning sufficiently gay and inconsequent, drifted by imperceptible and unsuspected gradations perilously close to the shoals of intimacy. And subsequently, when they had packed themselves back into the narrow tonga-seat and again were being bounced and juggled breathlessly over shocking roads, the exchange of confidences continued with unabated interest. Amber on his part was led to talk of his life and work, of his adventures in the name of Science, of his ambitions and achievements. In return he received a vivid impression of the lives of those women who share with their men the burden of official life in British India: of serene days in the brisk, invigorating, clear atmosphere of hill stations; of sunsmitten days and steaming nights in the Deccan; of the uncertain, anchorless existences of those who know not from one day to another when they may be whisked half across an Empire at the whim of that awful force simply nominated Government….
For all the taint upon her pedigree, she proved herself to Amber at heart a simple, lonely Englishwoman—a stranger in a sullen and suspicious land, desiring nothing better than to return to the England she had seen and learned to love, the England of ample lawns, of box-hedges, and lanes, of travelled highways, pavements and gaslights, of shops and theatres, of home and family ties….
But India she knew. "I sometimes fancy," she told him with the conscious laugh that deprecates a confessed superstition, "that I must have lived here in some past incarnation." She paused, but he did not speak. "Do you believe in reincarnation?" Again he had no answer for her, though temporarily he saw the daylight as darkness. "It's hard to live here for long and resist belief in it…. But as a matter of fact I seem to understand these people better than they're understood by most ofmypeople. Don't you think it curious? Perhaps it's merely intuition——"
"That's the birthright of your sex," he said, rousing. "On the other hand, you have to remember that your father is one of a family that for generations has served the Empire. And your mother?"
"She, too, came of an Anglo-Indian family. Indeed, they met and courted here, though they were married in England…. So you think my insight into native character a sort of birthright—a sense inherited?"
"Perhaps—something of the sort."
"You may be right. We'll never know. At all events, I seem to have a more—more painful comprehension of the native than most of the English in this country have; I seem to feel, to sense their motives, their desires, aspirations, even sometimes their untranslatable thoughts. I believe I understand perfectly their feeling toward us, the governing race."
"Then," said Amber, "you know something his Highness the Viceroy himself would give his ears to be sure of."
"I know that; but I do."
"And that feeling is——?"
"Not love, Mr. Amber."
"Much to the contrary——?"
"Very much," she affirmed with deep conviction.
"This 'Indian unrest' one reads of in the papers is not mere gossip, then?"
"Anything but that; it's the hidden fire stirring within the volcano we told ourselves was dead. The quiet of the last fifty years has been not content but slumber; deep down there has always been the fire, slow, deadly, smouldering beneath the ashes. The Mutiny still lives in spirit; some day it will break out afresh. You must believe me—Iknow. The more we English give our lives to educate the natives, the further we spread the propaganda of discontent; day by day we're teaching them to understand that we are no better than they, no more fit to rule; they are beginning to look up and to see over the rim of the world—and we have opened their eyes. They have learned that Japanese can defeat Caucasians, that China turns in its sleep, that England is no more omnipotent than omniscient. They've heard of anarchy and socialism and have learned to throw bombs. Only the other day a justice in Bengal was killed by a bomb…. I fancy I talk," the girl broke off with her clear laugh, "precisely like my father, who talks precisely as a political pamphleteer writes. You'll see when you meet him."
"Do you take much interest in politics?"
"No more than the every-day Englishwoman; it's one of our staples of conversation, when we've exhausted the weather, you know. But I'm not in the least advanced, if that's what you mean; I hunger after fashion-papers and spend more time than I ought, devouring home-made trash imported in paper-covers. I only feel what I feel by instinct—as I said awhile ago."
Perhaps if he had known less about the girl, he would have attached less importance to her statements. As it was, she impressed him profoundly. He pondered her words deeply, storing them in his memory, remembering that another had spoken in the same manner—one for whose insight into the ways of the native he had intense respect.
As the slow afternoon dragged out its blazing hours, their spirits languished, and they fell silent, full weary and listless. Towards the last quarter of the journey their road forsook the spacious, haggard plain and again entered a hilly country, but this time one wherein there was no lack either of water or of life: a green and fertile land parcelled into farms and dotted with villages.
Night overtook the tonga when it was close upon Kuttarpur, swooping down upon the world like a blanket of darkness, at the moment that the final relay of ponies was being hitched in. The sun dipped behind the encircling hills; the west blazed with the lambent flame of fire-opal; the wonderful translucent blue of the sky shaded suddenly to deep purple lanced by great shafts of mauve and amethyst light, and in the east stars popped out; the hills shone like huge, crude gems—sapphire, jade, jasper, malachite, chalcedony—their valleys swimming with mists of mother-of-pearl…. And it was night, the hills dark and still, the sky a deeper purple and opaque, the ruddy fires of wayfarers on the roadside leaping clear and bright.
With fresh ponies the tonga took the road with a wild initial rush soon to be moderated, when it began to climb the last steep grade to the pass that gives access to Kuttarpur from the south. For an hour the road toiled up and ever upward; steep cliffs of rock crowded it, threatening to push it over into black abysses, or to choke it off between towering, formidable walls. It swerved suddenly into a broad, clear space. The tonga paused. Voluntarily Ram Nath spoke for almost the first time since morning.
"Kuttarpur," he said, with a wave of his whip.
Aloof, austere and haughty, the City of Swords sits in the mouth of a ravine so narrow that a wall no more than a hundred yards in length is sufficient to seal its southerly approach. Beneath this wall, to one side of the city gate, a river flows from the lake that is Kuttarpur's chiefest beauty. Within, a multitude of dwellings huddles, all interpenetrated by streets and backways so straitened and sinuous as scarcely to permit the passage of an elephant from the Maharana's herd; congested in the bottom of the valley, the houses climb tier upon tier the flanking hillsides, until their topmost roofs threaten even the supremacy of that miracle in white marble, the Raj Mahal.
Northwards the palace of Khandawar's kings stands, exquisite, rare, and marvellous, unlike any other building in the world. White, all white, from the lake that washes its lowest walls to the crenellated rim of its highest roof, it sweeps upward in breath-taking steps and wide terraces to the crest of the western hill, into which it burrows, from which it springs; a vast enigma propounded in white marble without a note of colour save where the foliage of a hidden garden peeps over the edge of a jealous screen—a hundred imposing mansions merged into one monstrous and imperial maze.
Impregnable in the old days, before cannon were brought to India, Kuttarpur lives to-day remote, unfriendly, inhospitable. Within its walls there is no room for many visitors; they who come in numbers, therefore, must perforce camp down before the gates.
Now figure the city to yourself, seeing it as Sophia was later to see it in the light of day; then drench it with blue Indian night and stud it with a myriad eyes of fire—lamps, torches, candles, blue-white electric arcs, lights running up and down both hillsides and fringing the very star-sheeted skies, clustering and diverging in vast, bewildering, inconsequent designs, picking out the walls and main thoroughfares, shining through coloured globes upon the palace terraces, glimmering mysteriously from isolate windows and balconies; and add to these the softly illuminated walls of a hundred silken state marquees and a thousand meaner canvas tents arrayed south of the city…. And that is Kuttarpur as it first revealed itself to Amber and Sophia Farrell.
But for a moment were they permitted to gaze in wonderment; Ram Nath had little patience. When he chose to, he applied his whip, and the ponies stretched out, the tonga plunging on their heels down the steep hillside, like an ungoverned, ungovernable thing, maddened. Within a quarter of an hour they were careering through the city of tents on the parked plain before the southern wall. In five minutes more they drew up at the main city gate to parley with the Quarter Guard.
Here they suffered an exasperating delay. It appeared that the gates were shut at sundown, in deference to custom immemorial. Between that hour and sunrise none were permitted to pass either in or out without the express sanction of the State. The commander of the guard instituted an impudent catechism, in response to which Ram Nath discovered the several identities and estates of his charges. The commander received the information with impartial equanimity and retired within the city to confer with his superiors. After some time a trooper was sent to advise the travellers that the tonga would be permitted to enter with the understanding that the unaccredited Englishman (meaning Amber) would consent to lodge for the night in no other spot than the State rest-house beyond the northern limits of the city.
Amber agreed. The trooper saluted with much deference and withdrew. And for a long time nothing happened; the gates remained shut, the postern of the Quarter Guard irresponsive to Ram Nath's repeated summons. His passengers endured with what patience they could command; they were aware that it was necessary to obtain from some quarter official sanction for the opening of the gates, but they had understood that it had already been obtained.
Abruptly the peace of the night was shattered, and the hum of the encampment behind them with the roar of the city before them was dwarfed, by a dull and thunderous detonation of cannon from a terrace of the palace. The tonga ponies, reared and plunged, Ram Nath mastering them with much difficulty. Sophia was startled, and Amber himself stirred uneasily on his perch.
"What now?" he grumbled. "You'd think we were visitors of state and had to be durbarred!"
Far up on the heights a second red flame stabbed the night, and again the thunder pealed. Thereafter gun after gun bellowed at imperative, stately intervals.
"Fifteen," Amber announced after a time. "Isn't this something extraordinary, Miss Farrell?"
"Perhaps," she suggested, "there's a native potentate arriving at the northern gate. They're very punctilious about their salutes, you know."
Another crash silenced her. Amber continued to count. "Twenty-one," he said when it seemed that there was to be no more cannonading. "Isn't that a royal salute?"
"Yes," said the girl; "four more guns than the Maharana of Khandawar himself is entitled to."
"How do you explain it?"
"I don't," she replied simply. "Can you?"
He was dumb. Could it be possible that this imperial greeting was intended for the man supposed to be the Maharana of Khandawar—Har Dyal Rutton? He glanced sharply at the girl, but her face was shadowed; and he believed she suspected nothing.
A great hush had fallen, replacing the rolling thunder of the State ordnance. Even the voice of the city seemed moderate, subdued. In silence the massive gates studded with sharp-toothed elephant-spikes swung open.
With a grunt, Ram Nath cracked his whiplash and the tonga sped into the city. Amber bent forward.
"What's the name of that gate, Ram Nath—if you happen to know?"
"That," said the tonga-wallah in a level voice, "is known as the Gateway of Swords, sahib." He added in his own good time: "But nottheGateway of Swords."
Amber failed to educe from him any satisfactory explanation of this orphic utterance.
That same night Amber dined at the Residency, on the invitation of Raikes, the local representative of Government, seconded by the insistence of Colonel Farrell. It developed that Sophia's telegram had somehow been lost in transit, and Farrell's surprise and pleasure at sight of her were tempered only by his keen appreciation of Amber's adventitious services, slight though they had been. He was urged to stay the evening out, before proceeding to his designated quarters, and the reluctance with which he acceded to this arrangement which worked so happily with his desires, may be imagined.
Their arrival coincided with the dinner-hour; the meal was held half an hour to permit them to dress. Raikes put a room at Amber's disposal, and the Virginian contrived to bathe and get into his evening clothes within less time than had been allowed him. Sophia, contrary to the habit of her sex, was little tardier. At thirty minutes past eight they sat down to dine, at a table in the garden of the Residency.
Ease of anxiety was more than food and drink to Amber; his feeling of relief, to have convoyed Sophia to the company and protection of Anglo-Saxons like himself, was intense. Yet he swallowed his preliminary brandy-peg in a distinctly uncomfortable frame of mind, strangely troubled by the reflection that round that lone white table was gathered together the known white population of the State; a census of which accounted for just five souls.
In the encompassing, exotic gloom of that blue Indian night—the kind of night that never seems friendly to the Occidental but forever teems with hints of tragic mystery—the cloth, lighted by shaded candles, shone as immaculate and lustrous as an island of snow in a sea of ink—as a good deed in a naughty world. Its punctilious array of crystal and silver was no more foreign to the setting than were the men who sat round it, stiff in that black-and-white armour of civilisation, impregnable against the insidious ease of the East, in which your expatriate Englishman nightly encases himself wherever he may be, as loath to forego the ceremony of "dressing for dinner" as he would be to dispense with letters from Home.
Raikes presided, a heavy man with the flaming red face of one who constitutionally is unable to tan; of middle-age, good-natured, mellow, adroit of manner. On his one hand sat Amber, over across from Sophia. Next to Amber sat Farrell, tall and lean, sad of eye and slow of speech, his sun-faded hair and moustache streaked with grey setting off a dark complexion and thin, fine features. He wore the habit of authority equally with the irascibility of one who temporizes with his liver. Opposite him was a young, mild-eyed missionary, too new in the land to have lost his illusions or have blunted the keen edge of his enthusiasms; a colourless person with a finical way of handling his knife and fork, who darted continually shy, sidelong glances at Sophia, or interpolated eager, undigested comments, nervously into the conversation.
The table-talk was inconsequent; Amber took a courteous and easy part in it without feeling that any strain was being put upon his intelligence. His attention was centred upon the woman who faced him, flushed with gaiety and pleasure, not alone because she was once more with her father, but also because she unexpectedly was looking her best. If she had been well suited in her tidy pongee travelling costume, she found her evening gown no less becoming. It was a black affair, very simple and individual; her shoulders rose from it with intensified purity of tone, like fair white ivory gleaming with a suggestion of the sleek sheen of satin; their strong, clean lines rounded bewitchingly into the fair, slender neck upholding the young head with its deftly coiffed crown of bronze and gold….
Tall, well-trained, silent servants moved like white-robed wraiths behind the guests; the dishes of the many courses disappeared and were replaced in a twinkling, as if by slight of hand. They were over plentiful; Amber was relieved when at length the meal was over, and Miss Farrell having withdrawn in conformance with inviolable custom, the cloth was deftly whisked away and cigars, cigarettes, liqueurs, whiskey and soda were served.
Amber took unto himself a cigar and utilised an observation of the Political's as a lever to swing the conversation to a plane more likely to inform him. Farrell had grumbled about the exactions of his position as particularly instanced by the necessity of his attending tedious and tiresome native ceremonies in connection with thetamasha.
"What's, precisely, the nature of thistamasha, Colonel Farrell?"
"Why, my dear young man, I thought you knew. Isn't it what you came to see?"
"No," Amber admitted cautiously; "I merely heard a rumour that there was something uncommon afoot. Is it really anything worth while?"
"Rather," Raikes interjected drily; "the present ruler's abdicating in favour of his son, a child of twelve. That puts the business in a class by itself."
"There's been one precedent, hasn't there?" said the missionary, pretending to be at ease with a cigarette. "The Holkar of Indore?"
"Yes," agreed Farrell; "a similar case, to be sure."
"But why should a prince hand over the reins of government to a child of twelve? There must be some reason for it. Isn't it known?" asked Amber.
"Who can fathom a Hindu's mind?" grunted Farrell. "I daresay there's some scandalous native intrigue at the bottom of it. Eh, Raikes?"
The Resident shook his head. "Don't come to this shop for information about what goes on in Khandawar. I doubt if there's another Resident in India who knows as little of the underhand devilment in his State as I do. His Majesty the Rana loves me as a cheetah loves his trainer. He's an intractable rascal."
"They grease the wheels of the independent native States with intrigue," Farrell explained. "I know from sore experience. And your Rajput is the deepest of the lot. I don't envy Raikes, here."
"The man who can guess what a Rajput intends to do next is entitled to give himself a deal of credit," commented the Resident, with a short laugh.
"I've travelled a bit," continued Farrell, "and have seen something of the courts of Europe, but I've yet to meet a diplomat who's peer to the Rajput. You hear a great deal about the astuteness of the Russians and the yellow races, and a Greek or Turk can lie with a fairly straight face when he sees a profit in deception, but none of them is to be classed with these people. If we English ever decide to let India rule herself, her diplomatic corps will be recruited exclusively from the flower of Rajputana's chivalry."
"I'll back Salig Singh against the field," said Raikes grimly; "he'll be dean of the corps, when that time comes. He'd rather conspire than fight, and the Rajputs—of course you know—are a warrior caste. I've a notion"—the Resident leaned back and searched the shadows for an eavesdropper—"I've a notion," he continued, lowering his voice, "that the Rana has got himself in rather deep in some rascality or other, and wants to get out before he's put out. There's bazaar gossip…. Hmm! Do you speak French, Mr. Amber?"
"A little," said Amber in that tongue. "And I," nodded the missionary.The talk continued in the language of diplomacy.
"Bazaar gossip——?" Farrell repeated enquiringly.
"There have been a number of deaths from cholera in the Palace lately, the grand vizier's amongst them."
"White arsenic cholera?"
"That, and the hemp poison kind."
"Refractory vizier?" questioned Farrell. "The kind that wants to retrench and institute reforms—railways and metalled roads and so forth?"
"No; he was quite suited to his master. But the bazaar says Naraini took a dislike to him for one reason or another."
"Naraini?" queried Amber.
"The genius of the place." Raikes nodded toward the Raj Mahal, shining like a pearl through the darkness on the hill-side over against the Residency. "She's Salig's head queen. At least that's about as near to her status as one can get. She's not actually his queen, but some sort of a heritage from the Rutton dynasty—I hardly know what or why. Salig never married her, but she lives in the Palace, and for several years—ever since she first began to be talked about—she's ruled from behind the screen with a high hand and an out-stretched arm. So the bazaar says."
"I've heard she was beautiful," Farrell observed.
"As beautiful as a peri, according to rumour. You never can tell; very likely she's a withered old hag; nine out of ten native women are, by the time they're thirty." Raikes jerked the glowing end of his cigar into the shrubbery and reverted to English. "Shall we join Miss Farrell?"
They arose and left the table to the servants, the Resident with Amber following Farrell and young Clarkson.
"Old women we are, forever talking scandal," said Raikes, with a chuckle. "Oh, well! it's shop with us, you know."
"Of course…. Then I understand that thetamashais the reason for the encampment beyond the walls?"
"Yes; they've been coming in for a week. By to-morrow night, I daresay, every rajah, prince, thakur, baron, fief, and lord in Rajputana, each with his 'tail,' horse and foot, will be camped down before the walls of Kuttarpur. You've chosen an interesting time for your visit. It'll be a sight worth seeing, when they begin to make a show. My troubles begin with a State banquet to-morrow that I'd give much to miss; however, I'll have Farrell for company."
"I'm glad to be here," said Amber thoughtfully. Could it be possible that the proposed abdication of Salig Singh in favour of his son were merely a cloak to a conspiracy to restore to power the house of Rutton? Or had thetamashabeen arranged in order to gather together all the rulers in Rajputana without exciting suspicion, that they might agree upon a concerted plan of mutiny against the Sirkar? This state affair of surpassing importance had been arranged for the last day of grace allotted the Prince of the house of Rutton. What had it to do with the Gateway of Swords, the Voice, the Mind, the Eye, the Body, the Bell?
"By the way, Mr. Raikes," said the Virginian suddenly, "what do they call the gate by which we entered the city—the southern gate?"
"The Gateway of Swords, I believe."
Farrell, on the point of entering the house, overheard and turned. "Is that so? Why, I thoughtthatgateway was in Kathiapur."
"I've heard of a Gateway of Swords in Kathiapur," Raikes admitted."Never been there, myself."
"Kathiapur?"
"A dead city, Mr. Amber, not far away—originally the capital of Khandawar. It's over there in the hills to the north, somewhere. Old Rao Rutton, founder of the old dynasty, got tired of the place and caused it to be depopulated, building Kuttarpur in its stead—I believe, to commemorate some victory or other. That sort of thing used to be quite the fashion in India, before we came." Raikes fell back, giving Amber precedence as they entered the Residency. "By the way, remind me, if you think of it, Colonel Farrell, to get after the telegraph-clerk to-morrow. There's a new man in charge—a Bengali babu—and I presume he's about as worthless as the run of his kind."
Amber made a careful note of this information; he was curious about that babu.
In the drawing-room Raikes and Farrell impressed Clarkson for three-handed Bridge. Sophia did not care to play and Amber was ignorant of the game—a defect in his social education which he found no cause to regret, since it left him in undisputed attendance upon the girl.
She had seated herself at a warped and discouraged piano, for which Raikes had already apologised; it was, he said, a legacy from a former Resident. For years its yellow keys had not known a woman's touch such as that to which they now responded with thin, cracked voices; the girl's fine, slender fingers wrung from them a plaintive, pathetic parody of melody. Amber stood over her with his arms folded on the top of the instrument, comfortably unconscious that his pose was copied from any number of sentimental photogravures and "art photographs." His temper was sentimental enough, for that matter; the woman was very sweet and beautiful in his eyes as she sat with her white, round arms flashing over the keyboard, her head bowed and her face a little averted, the long lashes low upon her cheeks and tremulous with a fathomless emotion. It was his thought that his time was momentarily becoming shorter, and that just now, more than ever, she was very distant from his arms, something inaccessible, too rare and delicate and fine for the rude possession of him who sighed for his own unworthiness.
Abruptly she brought both hands down upon the keys, educing a jangled, startled crash from the tortured wires, and swinging round, glanced up at Amber with quaint mirth trembling behind the veil of moisture in her misty eyes.
"India!" she cried, with a broken laugh: "India epitomised: a homesick, exiled woman trying to drag a song of Home from the broken heart of a crippled piano! That is an Englishwoman's India: it's our life, ever to strive and struggle and contrive to piece together out of makeshift odds and ends the atmosphere of Home!… It's suffocating in here. Come." She rose with a quick shrug of impatience, and led the way back to the gardens.
The table had been removed together with the chairs and candles; nothing remained to remind them of the hour just gone. The walks were clear of servants. Their only light came from the high arch of stars smitten to its zenith with pale, quivering waves of light from the moon invisible behind the hills. Below them the city hummed like a disturbed beehive. Somewhere afar a gentle hand was sweeping the strings of azitar, sounding weird, sad chords. The perfumed languor of the night weighed heavily upon the senses, like the woven witchery of some age-old enchantment….
Pensive, the girl trained her long skirts heedlessly over the dew-drenched grasses, Amber at her side, himself speechless with an intangible, ineluctable, unreasoning sense of expectancy. Never, he told himself, had a lover's hour been more auspiciously timed or staged; and this was his hour, altogether his!… If only he might find the words of wooing to which his lips were strange! He dared not delay; to-morrow it might be too late; in the womb of the morrow a world of chances stirred—contingencies that might in a breath set them a world apart.
They found seats in the shadow of a pepul.
"You must be tired, Mr. Amber," she said. "Why don't you smoke?"
"I hadn't thought of it, and hadn't asked permission."
"Please do. I like it."
He found his cigarette-case and struck a match, Sophia watching intently his face in the rosy glow of the little, flickering flame.
"Are you in the habit of indulging in protracted silences?" she rallied him gently. "Between friends of old standing they're permissible, I believe, but——"
"A day's journey by tonga matures acquaintanceships wonderfully," he observed abstrusely.
"Indeed?" She laughed.
"At least, I hope so."
He felt that he must be making progress; thus far he had been no less inane than any average lover of the stage or fiction. And he wondered: was she laughing at him, softly, there in the shadows?
"You see," she said, amused at his relapse into reverie, "you're incurable and ungrateful. I'm trying my best to be attractive and interesting, and you won't pay me any attention whatever. There must be something on your mind. Is it this mysterious errand that brings you so unexpectedly to India—to Kuttarpur, Mr. Amber?"
"Yes," he answered truthfully.
"And you won't tell me?"
"I think I must," he said, bending forward.
There sounded a stealthy rustling in the shrubbery. The girl drew away and rose with a startled exclamation. With a bound, a man in native dress sped from the shadows and paused before them, panting.
Amber jumped up, overturning his chair, and instinctively feeling for the pistol that was with his travelling things, upstairs in the Residency.
The native reassured him with a swift, obsequious gesture. "Pardon, sahib, and yours, sahiba, if I have alarmed you, but I am come on an errand of haste, seeking him who is known as the Sahib David Amber."
"I am he. What do you want with me?"
"It is only this, that I have been commissioned to bear to you, sahib."
The man fumbled hurriedly in the folds of his surtout, darting quick glances of apprehension round the garden. Amber looked him over as closely as he could in the dim light, but found him wholly a stranger—merely a low-caste Hindu, counterpart of a million others to be encountered daily in the highways and bazaars of India. The Virginian's rising hope that he might prove to be Labertouche failed for want of encouragement; the intruder was of a stature the Englishman could by no means have counterfeited.
"From whom come you?" he demanded in the vernacular.
"Nay, a name that is unspoken harms none, sahib." The native produced a small, thin, flat package and thrust it into Amber's hands. "With permission, I go, sahib; it were unwise to linger——"
"There is no answer?"
"None, sahib." The man salaamed and strode away, seeming to melt soundlessly into the foliage.
For a minute Amber remained astare. The girl's voice alone roused him.
"I think you are a very interesting person, Mr. Amber," she said, resuming her chair.
"Well!…Ibegin to think this a most uncommonly interesting country." He laughed uncertainly, turning the package over and over. "Upon my word——! I haven't the least notion what this can be!"
"Why not bring it to the light, and find out?"
He assented meekly, having been perfectly candid in his assertion that he had no suspicion of what the packet might contain, and a moment later they stood beneath the window of the Residency, from which a broad shaft of light streamed out like vaporised gold.
Amber held the packet to the light; it was oblong, thin, stiff, covered with common paper, guiltless of superscription, and sealed with mucilage. He tore the covering, withdrew the enclosure, and heard the girl gasp with surprise. For himself, he was transfixed with consternation. His look wavered in dismay between the girl and the photograph in his hand—herphotograph, which had been stolen from him aboard thePoonah.
She extended her hand imperiously. "Give that to me, please, Mr. Amber," she insisted. He surrendered it without a word. "Mr. Amber!" she cried in a voice that quivered with wonder and resentment.
He faced her with a hang-dog air, feeling that now indeed had his case been made hopeless by this contretemps. "Confound Labertouche!" he cried in his ungrateful heart. "Confound his meddling mystery-mongering and hokus-pokus!"
"Well?" enquired the girl sharply.
"Yes, Miss Farrell." He could invent nothing else to say.
"You—you are going to explain, I presume."
He shook his head in despair. "No-o…."
"What!"
"I've no explanation whatever to make—that'd be adequate, I mean."
He saw that she was shaken by impatience. "I think," said she evenly—"I think you will find it best to let me judge of that. This is my photograph. How do you come to have it? What right have you to it?"
"I … ah…." He stammered and paused, acutely conscious of the voices of the Englishmen, Farrell, Raikes, and young Clarkson, drifting out through the open window of the drawing-room. "If you'll be kind enough to return to our chairs," he said, "I'll try to make a satisfactory explanation. I'd rather not be overheard."
The girl doubted, was strongly inclined to refuse him; then, perhaps moved to compassion by his abject attitude, she relented and agreed. "Very well," she said, and retaining the picture moved swiftly before him into the shadowed garden. He lagged after her, inventing a hundred impracticable yarns. She found her chair and sat down with a manner of hauteur moderated by expectancy. He took his place beside her.
"Who sent you this photograph of me?" she began to cross-examine him.
"A friend."
"His name?"
"I'm sorry I can't tell you just now."
"Oh!… Why did he send it?"
"Because…." In his desperation it occurred to him to tell the truth—as much of it, at least, as his word to Rutton would permit. "Because it's mine. My friend knew I had lost it."
"How could it have been yours? It was taken in London a year ago. I sent copies only to personal friends who, I know, would not give them away." She thought it over and added: "The Quains had no copy; it's quite impossible that one should have got to America."
"None the less," he maintained stubbornly, "it's mine, and I got it inAmerica."
"I can hardly be expected to believe that."
"I'm sorry."
"You persist in saying that you got it in America?"
"I must."
"When?"
"After you left the Quains."
"How?" she propounded triumphantly.