'And when she went thereThe cupboard was bare.'
'And when she went thereThe cupboard was bare.'
The childish doggerel fitted the occasion and left him smiling at some ship's biscuit--the last resource by sea or land--left at the bottom of a tin. Dan certainlywasa bad housekeeper. The comedy of his disappointment struck him; the tragedy, needing the sequel to develop it, remained invisible like a photograph in film-embryo.
It was dry work, eating ship's biscuit in a fiery furnace, with a ten-pound thirst upon you and whisky and soda within reach. When he stood up again the weariness seemed to have crept upwards, leaving nothing alert save his brain. Had he ever been so tired in all his life? As tired asshemust have been when she fell asleep in the chair he was just passing. His hand lingered on the back of it for an instant, almost caressingly.
By Jove! what a furnace it was outside! Lighter than it had been, however, because of the suggestion of a moon low down in the heat-haze. And there was the potter's lamp twinkling like a star above the domed shadow of the Hodinuggur mound. Queer old chap--queer start the whole thing--if one came to think of it. A crazy, irresponsible creator! as Dan had called him. Why not he as well as another? Who knew? who cared?
He stood so for a space, looking out with sensitive, seeing eyes to the broad shadows, formless save for the pinpoint flicker of the potter's light. Face to face at last, he and Hodinuggur; between them the sliding water, mother of all things. Then came a memory.
'Hath not the Potter power over the Clay?'
Ah! if that was all the light amid the shadows of life, better far were darkness! If that he turned quickly, beset by uncontrolled, passionate contempt, uncontrolled, passionate desire for action, and beneath his shaking hand the lamp on the table flared out, smokily. A poor protest; yet the dark was better. Darkness and rest--if rest could come to one so tired as he was, as it had come to her. Not that it mattered if he were tired or not----
Five minutes after, the twinkling light, could it have reached so far, would have found him asleep, peaceful as a child, among the red cushions whereshehad slept. But even Azîzan's eyes, set keen as they were by devotion, could not pierce the darkness. For the light George had seen was in her hand, as she stood looking out from the yard towards the other bank of the canal.
'It hath gone out again,' she murmured; 'a servant likely, on no good errand; and the old man tells me the truth, I think. Another week ere he returns. I would it had been sooner, so that I might warn him. But there! 'tis the same! The task is mine in the end.'
As she crossed back to the hut, she paused an instant to look, by the light of the cresset she shaded with her thin fingers, on the figure of old Fuzl Elâhi asleep in the open beside his wheel.
'Poor fool,' she said softly, as if to the sleeper. And after that even the potter's light disappeared, leaving both sides of the sliding water to darkness.
The dawn came and went; the sun climbing into the sky turned it to brass--a brazen dome in which the sun itself seemed merged and lost. Yet still George slept on, undisturbed even by the water-carrier's cautious peepings through the chick.
'Lo! the Huzoor is young, and he was broken into pieces by thy bad animal,' he said to the camel man who was impatiently awaiting payment. 'Sleep is even as food and drink to him, and besides, ere he wakes, my wife's cousin, whom I have sent for, will be present to cook my lord's breakfast. There is great virtue in beingmajood(created), and the man who cooks one meal hath himself to blame if he cook not many. If thou art hurried, go. Who wants thee and thy evil-smelling brute?'
So George slept on, and when he woke at last it was to the confused, unreasoning consciousness of those who have been drugged. He stared round him incredulously, until out of the mist, as it were, the empty whisky bottle on the table grew clear, accusingly clear, and he sprang to his feet, becoming aware, as he did so, of a racking headache.
Undoubtedly he had taken more whisky than usual; not perhaps without excuse, he added, as memory began to return. The next instant he was at the door. Yellow haze and yellow heat, and through it a silver streak steering for the south!----
That was all he saw, but that little changed the whole world for him in the twinkling of an eye. The sluice-gate was open. The devils had won--they had won!--they had won!
What use is there in saying that he felt this, that he felt that? What use in pointing out whether anger or regret came uppermost in the conglomerate of passion? As a matter of fact, George felt nothing consciously; not even when, after an hour or more, he came back wearily to the red-hot bungalow, out of the red-hot air.
He sat down then on the table, now cleared of last night's crumbs, and relaid by the wife's cousin with that superfluity which marks new zeal in India, and tried to think of what he had thought, or said, or done since he first caught sight of that silver streak steering southward where no streak should be. But, after a time, he found himself deeply interested in reconstructing the pyramid of five forks intertwined, with which the new hand had adorned the centre of the table. What a fool! what an arrant fool he was, to be sure. Even if there had been any one upon whom to use the revolver, he would most likely have lost his opportunity or missed the beggar! But there had been nobody, and he might as well have left it at home, lying on the table ready, as it was now. The sluice-gate, not ten minutes before he woke, had been opened by a key--a key which had broken in the lock, making it impossible to close it again till it was repaired. Of course there were the other keys and the new lock; but what need was there for hurry now? No power in earth or heaven could hide the fact that the sluice-gate had been open. For months to come, miles on miles of crop ripening to harvest would proclaim the failure, the treachery. 'As ye have sown so shall ye reap.' Concealment was impossible; that much was certain--and the certainty brought with it an odd sort of content. Since it was all his fault from beginning to end, it was as well he should suffer. Yes! it had been opened quietly while the guard was eating his dinner; opened quietly while he, George, was asleep; why not say drunk at once--that was nearer the truth.
And the Diwân! George's listless hands tightened as he thought of that brief interview with the old man on the roof. His own torrent of reckless abuse, the courteous regrets and replies ignoring his very accusations. But those palace devils could afford to eat abuse! Zubr-ul-Zamân had played, and the game was done indeed. But how? Half mechanically George drew out the key attached to his watch-chain and looked at it; carelessly at first, then carefully. And what he saw there clinging to the inner surface of a ward, changed heaven for him in the twinkling of an eye, even as the silver streak of water had changed the world.
It was a very simple thing; only a piece of wax. How long he sat there staring at it he did not realise. The yellow haze outside grew ruddier with the sinking of the sun, the water-carrier, shadowed by a white-robed aspirant to the dead factotum's duties, hovered about the verandah expectantly.
'What do you want, you fool?' bawled George, looking up, surprised at his own anger, surprised that anything should touch him save the thought thatshehad known--must have known--thatshehad done it, must have done it.
The man edged in through the screen, signing to the white-robed one to follow his example.
'Only to bring the Huzoor this,' he began noisily. 'Only to bring this proof of honesty to the feet of justice. Lo! it was found even now by this man with a foresight and quickness to be commended. In the sahib's own room, Huzoor, beneath the matting, thus causing the face of the big sahib's ill-begotten servant to be blackened by reason of his base insinuation of theft! Theft! How can there be theft in a house where the water-carrier is as I am, and the kit will be as this one--mine own wife's brother, Huzoor----'
George broke out suddenly into dull laughter, 'Oh! go to blazes with your wife's brother--put the thing down there on the table, I tell you, and go--go--do you hear?'
Anger, and something more than anger was back in his tone ere he ended, and the water-carrier, knowing his master's voice, fled. The white-robed one with the courage of ignorance risked all by a salaam.
'At what hour will the Huzoor please to dine?'
The young man looked at him curiously, feeling that the world was past his comprehension.
'The usual time, I suppose.'
As well this fool as another--as well to-morrow as to-day. Everything was trivial of course, and yet the trivial commonplace interruption had somehow brought home the reality of what had happened to the lad, and his head sank on his crossed arms once more in utter dejection.Shemight have told him, warned him. Surely when he had promised she might have done so much for his sake, and Dan's--by the way, what was it that Dan had lost and that chattering idiot had brought in with him? George's right hand trembled a little as it reached over the table to take a plain gold locket on a slender gold chain. It was familiar enough to him. Dan wore it day and night, and many a time had George chaffed him about the young woman, so it was no wonder the dear old man had been vexed at the thought of losing it. Losing it? or losing her? In the keen thrust of this thought, the locket slipped through George's fingers, and falling, opened. So it lay, face upwards, while the boy sat staring out into the room blindly, intent on the remembrance that after all it was not a case of whether a man or a woman should suffer; it was one woman or another. The womanheloved or the womanDanloved. A hundred thoughts beset him, but, analysed, they all resolved themselves to this: his love or Dan's. To saveherfrom even a breath of scandal he was willing to bear the blame; but how could this be without also imperilling Dan's future? No! if the worst came; if he could find no way--yet surely, surely, there must be some way, some simple way--of taking all the responsibility on his shoulders; thenshemust be brave;shemust tell the truth and save this woman whom Dan loved--whose face lay there in the locket. His eyes sought it mechanically----
'Gwen.'
The sound, barely a whisper, scarcely stirred the sodden air. After a while he pushed back his chair slowly and crossed to stand once more looking out over Hodinuggur.
It seemed to have a fascination for him; yet his mind held but one thought--a desire to get away--to find some place where there was neither truth nor lies, where he need say nothing--need think nothing. That surely would settle it.
'No, you wouldn't, old chap, not unless you wanted them to believe you guilty.' Lewis Gordon's idle words as they had stood laughing and jesting on the balcony yonder but a few months ago came back to him; the only real, living memory in the chaos of his present pain. The scene reproduced itself before his haggard young eyes. Yes! that would settle it; and after all he was guilty. Why had he not told the Colonel? why had he slept? why----
The sound was louder this time; yet not loud enough to disturb the servants, chattering across in the cook-room over the chances of perquisites under the new régime. Loud enough, for all that, to deafen the lad's ears for ever to questionings of truth or untruth.
He lay on his back, face upwards, and a faint stream of blood oozing from the blue bruise just over his heart traced a fine girdle round his breast; perhaps to show that the potter's thumb had slipped, and the pot had cracked in the firing.
Maybe a fiery furnace and a »ed-hot bungalow are overtrying even to the best of clay when it is fresh from the moulder's hand; but that is neither here nor there.
The fact remains that George had run away; from truth and untruth, from himself and his fellow-men, but most of all from Hodinuggur and the crazy irresponsible creator; yet could he have realised the fact, no one in the wide, wide world would have been more incredulous of his own action. And as he lay dead, with a bullet through his heart, the barometer upon the mantelpiece was falling faster and faster, while Dan, with a telegram in his pocket, was riding all he knew across the desert to open the sluice-gate against the biggest flood within the memory of man. To open it so far and no farther, and so to prevent any weakening of the channel for a while. Too late! For already the peasants were knee-deep in their fields breaking through every obstacle which might stem the rising water. And still the barometer fell faster and faster; but the only one who could have understood the silent warning had deserted his post.
Azîzan was waiting for darkness, like many another woman in India; waiting for the veil of night to destroy the veil of man's contriving. Not so much because she dreaded to show her face in the daylight, but because it suited her to keep up the mystery of her appearance. Waiting, however, for the last time; since once her work of warning was done there need be no more concealment, no more playing like a cat over a mouse with the palace folk. Once that was done, she meant to forget caution and kill some of them; for she felt that her own death was nigh, and revenge would sweeten the end of life. As she sat, her back against the wall, her knees drawn up to her chin, Azîzan had no very distinct plans for that revenge, save that the Ayôdhya pot which she had taken from its hiding-place in the stair of the old tower and kept in her bosom must be her chief aid. With its secret bribe of jewels, it would prove to the sahib that there was truth in the tale she had gathered during her nightly wanderings as a ghost about Hodinuggur. When that was done, she would be free in some of those nightly wanderings to kill the Diwân or his son, the man who killed her mother. Perhaps she might be able to kill both, and yet have some strength left for Chândni--Chândni who had told her so many lies. For there was a fire now in Azîzan's light eyes, which quite accounted for the consideration which the courtesan had shown the girl when, more than once, Chândni had awakened to find them looking at her. Of course, by and by a stop must be put to this masquerading through the village, but at present it would be unsafe, when so much depended on good luck, and thus Azîzan had hitherto been unmolested. Indeed, Chândni herself had taken malicious pleasure in countenancing current tales of the return of the potter's dead daughter; and once when Khush-hâl Beg, during his son's absence, had deemed it well to single her out for favour, she had sent the hoary old sinner back to his swinging cradle like a quaking jelly from abject fear of what he might meet by the way. Still it was only when she was on the roof with the old Diwân that she ventured to speak in whispers of a time when this mad girl should be taught her own impotence for good or evil.
So in the meantime, the freedom from interruption, and the dread which the mere thought of her existence roused in the simple village folk, conspired to increase Azîzan's faith in her own supernatural power, and as she sat in the growing dusk no doubt of her own success assailed her; for the little sahib had returned--during the night. At least so said the old man, who, with all his craziness, was to be trusted. Therefore, in less than an hour, he would know all, since the day was dying down quickly; smothered in a hot haze-like smoke. There was not a shadow anywhere; only a dull darkness growing momentarily as the dull darkness had grown upon her mind day by day. For all that she had the power; the potter might mould the clay, the palace folk might plot and plan, but she, the woman with the evil eye, was stronger than they!
'Azîz! Oh! thou art there still, Heaven be praised!' The cry roused her from a sort of dream to find the old man beside her, breathless as from running, his mild face, seen dimly in the darkness, full of piteous entreaty. 'Go not from me this night, oh Heart's-joy! Leave me not again in the storm!'
'The storm! What storm, poor fool!' she asked indifferently.
He laid his trembling hand on her arm. 'Listen! Thou canst hear the noise of many waters. They came before, so the fathers sang, and made a new world. Down yonder at the palace, where thou goest, 'twill run like the race of a river, and the stones of the old wall where thou liest will be crumbling into it. Go not there to-night, oh, Light of mine Eyes! It is safe here on the heights.'
'There is no water,' she answered, with a short laugh, 'there will be none; save in the canal. The sahib will see to that now he hath returned.'
'How can he see when he is dead----'
'Dead,' she echoed. 'Bah! thou liest! He is not dead. There is no water, and there is no death----'
She broke off suddenly, silenced by his look as he stood with one hand raised as if listening. In the breathless air a strange whispering reached her ear, and like an arrow from a bow, she flew to the gap in the palisade, whence she could see the dip between the ruins and the canal bank, and beyond that silver streak again to the bungalow dotted down upon the level plain.
'Dohai! Dohai!'
The Great Cry--the blind human cry of her race for justice burst from her instinctively. The next moment found her bare-faced in the open on her way to prove if the old man spoke truth in death also.
'Azîzan! go not! Leave not the House of Safety! It is the Flood of the Most High! Go not, oh! go not!'
His unavailing plea came back to him unanswered from the night which had fallen suddenly, as the dust from below sprang electrically up to meet the dust above and hide everything from sight. But through the thick veil that rush of water rose louder and louder as the girl sped on her way. It was true what the old man had said, and she had seen it. There was a river by the old palace. Was the other thing true also? Was the sahib dead? Had they killed him? The darkness lightened a little as she ran over the bridge so that she could see a great swirl of yellow water shooting past the piers not three inches below the keystone of the arch. Lower down it had found the open sluice-gates, hurled them from their foundations and carried them with it as it burst through the embankment weakened by the new-made cuttings of the villagers, and had raced in a mad river to fling itself against the mound of Hodinuggur, tearing down yard after yard of crumbling sand as it turned abruptly from the collision, to try conclusions by a flank movement. Azîzan saw none of this; nothing but the dim white arches where she had waited once before.
'Sahib! Sahib!'
No answer, and in her eagerness she crouched down at the closed door, tapping softly.
'Sahib! Sahib!'
There was only a quarter-inch planking between them, that was all, for they had left him as he fell till some other white-face should come to accept the responsibility of interference. Yet it did the work as effectually as all the barriers of custom and culture which had divided them in life.
'Sahib! Sahib!'
Could it be true? It must be true that he was dead; otherwise he would surely hear her cry!
'Sahib! Sahib!'
As she crouched she might have put out her hand and taken his, but for that trivial quarter-inch of wood between them; but he did not hear. Because he was dead? Perhaps, yet even in life he had not heard, he had not known. The light in the potter's yard, lit by her passionate love and care, had only served to arouse his contempt. Better darkness, he had thought, than such a light as that.
'Sahib! Sahib!'
At last she rose and stumbled across to the servants' quarters, seeking the certainty which she must gain somehow. A light glimmered behind the grass palisades, sacred to her namesake's modesty, and from within came the eager yet subdued tones of gossiping women. Azîzan crept close, and crouching in on herself held her breath to listen.
'Lo! I content myself with goodwill towards all men,' came the widow's voice self-complacently. 'Yet, O Motiya! wife of Ganesha the groom, I make bold to aver that this is no more or less than a judgment on----'
'What! Dost think it to be really the Flood of Destruction?' broke in Motiya, whimpering.
'Ai fool!Who cares for the water? It flows south, not north; so we are safe. No! 'tis the sahib's death. Mayhap 'twill teach other folks' relations not to be in such a hurry to thrust themselves into other folks' service against the custom----'
'But----'
'Ai teri!wouldest deny my right--the widow's right?Ai! mere adme, thy sahib is dead, and there is none to see justice done and employ thy relations!Ai! mere dil murgya! murgya!'
As the renewed sense of her wrongs rose in the familiar wail, the women from within joined in it dutifully. Without, the girl, with her hands clenched and her wild eyes straining into the shadows, seemed to be caught and carried away by it also, and her shrill voice echoed theirs instinctively.
'Ai! mere sahib murgya. Ai! mere dil murgya! murgya!'
The women, scared to death at the unexpected aid, stopped suddenly, and the young voice rose alone.
'Ai! mere dil murgya! murgya!'
The sound of her own wailing brought home to her the truth, rousing her passion, her grief, her anger, to madness; and in one swift desire for revenge she turned and ran.
'Mere sahib murgya!'
The wail echoed over the wild swirl of the flood-water as she crossed the bridge once more. It was trembling now before its doom as the water rose inch by inch. And could that be rain? that large warm drop upon her hand, so large that it ran down between her fingers? Another on her upturned face, blinding her. If those were raindrops, and many of them came, it might, indeed, be the deluge of the Most High. And if it were? Had not the end of all things come to her already? Yet as she ran she looked curiously into the sky. Not a cloud was visible; only an even haze of grey vapour, through which now and again a great drop splashed down upon her, warm and soft.
'Ai! mere sahib! mere sahib!'
No more than a sob now; yet even that she hushed as the Mori gate showed black before her. Should it be Chândni? No, not yet; but for Dalel and the hopes of him, the woman would have cared nothing for water or no water. So she passed on through the causeway. One or two villagers, hurrying, like her, through the darkness, talking in scared whispers of the strange flood, fell back from her path terrified. A knot of men in the bazaar huddled aside as she slipped by like a shadow; even in the courtyard of the palace the watchmen, gathered round one pipe for the comfort of companionship in such uncanny times, gave no more than an uneasy glance at the half-seen figure which they did not care to challenge.
Should it be Khush-hâl Beg in his swinging cradle? He had betrayed her mother, and the knife she carried was long enough to reach through the fat to his heart, long enough to do the mischief, when held in reckless hands, even if aid came to the unwieldy body. No! it should not be Khush-hâl either. Let him wait a while since he had done little to harm the sahib. The true quarry lay higher in the old man up yonder in his nest like a bird of prey; seeing all things with his keen old eyes, plotting and planning with his wise old brain. But for him, the others had not been; but for him the sahib would have been alive, and now he was dead. Each step of the stairs as she laboured up them seemed to need that cry of 'dead! dead!' to help her on her way; and they left her breathless on the first platform of the roof, where those huge drops of rain were falling in audible thuds upon the hard plaster. Faster and faster. This was not rain. Something must have given way in the sky, and, as the old man had said, it was 'Tofhân Ehlâi.' So much the better for her purpose. In the arcades on either side faint figures glimmering white in the shadows showed where some of the servants were sheltering. So much the better, also, since she might find the old man alone; not that she cared for that either, save in its greater assurance of success. He would not be in the pavilions at this time, but in the room to the north end of the tower, of which she had heard the women speak. The room with the big jutting balcony whence you could see north, east, and west, everything except Hodinuggur itself.
By this time the raindrops, falling faster and faster, had become a sheet of water streaming down straight with such curious force that she staggered under it. A little sun-baked fireplace against which she stumbled dissolved to sheer mud ere she had recovered her balance, and a loosened brick on the last step upwards rolled down, beaten from its place ere her foot touched it. It was the Great Flood indeed, though every moment the sky grew lighter and she could now see her way clearly.
'Mere sahib murgya! murgya!'
She kept the wild fire glowing in heart and eyes by the murmur, until through an open door she saw what she sought--an old man seated at a chess-table, still as a statue. With a cry she darted forward, snatching at the knife in her girdle, then paused abruptly. Where was the hurry? he could not move. So with a half laugh of exultation she turned back deliberately to bolt the door--a strong door, as befitted one giving on the favourite sleeping-place of despotism. It would need time to force an entry there; more time than she would need to do her work. Meanwhile she must look at this arbiter of her fate ever since she was born--this tyrant whom she had never seen. What! was that all? that wreck of a man, with his head upon his breast? but as she came nearer, the light, such as it was, from the wide-arched balcony, aided by a cresset smoking in a niche, showed her something of the youth in his eyes. Perhaps it showed him something of the age in hers, for the Diwân paused in his first haughty challenge, then began again.
'Hast come to frighten me, as thou frightenest the villagers, oh! Azîzan, daughter of the potter's daughter?' he asked coldly. He was defenceless, and he knew it, save for craft of the brain.
'Nay! I have come to kill thee, Zubr-ul-Zamân, Diwân of Hodinuggur,' she replied; 'to kill thee as thou hast killed the sahib.'
A sound which might have been a laugh reached her as she took a step nearer, brandishing the knife; perhaps it was that which made her pause again in her turn; for laughter was hardly what she expected.
'I did not kill the sahib, fool. He killed himself for love of the mem sahib: the fair mem who took the Ayôdhya pot.'
The girl fell back the step she had taken, and the hand bearing the knife went up to her forehead in a gesture matching her sharp cry of pain. The truth struck home; yet she caught at denial desperately.
'Thou liest! She did not take it. I took it once--twice. I have the pearls--the Hodinuggur pearls. I--I--not she.'
One of those curious spasms of life came to the wreck of a man, as it turned to look at the girl more closely.
'So! Thou also hast brains. 'Tis the woman'syôg[6]nowadays. My son, and my son's son, have none. Thou shouldst have been my granddaughter, Azîzan, had I but known. Thou mayest be now.'
His granddaughter! Of course! she had suspected so all her life, had known it to be so for months, yet she had never realised the fact till now; and an odd, inexplicable sense of kindred rose up in her against her will.
'I shall kill thee, no matter who thou art,' she cried quickly.
'Wherefore? What harm have I done to thee, Azîzan? 'Twould have suited me better had the sahib fancied thy face. Thou hadst thy chance.'
Something in her shrank back abashed before the naked truth of the old man's words. She had had her chance, according to her world, and she had failed. She had failed utterly; and yet---- Something else in her, strange, incomprehensible, clamoured against the verdict, and the deadly weariness, the passionate apathy she had so often felt before came over her. The knife dropped to her side, and half mechanically she looked out through the arches of the balcony to where the red-brick bungalow should stand. There was nothing to be seen but sheets of water streaming from above, while from below came a rush and a roar. Suddenly as she listened came another sound; apit-pat pat-piton the floor in half a dozen places. The rain had conquered the thick-domed roof.
'It is "Tofhân Elâhi," she said, and even as she spoke a babel of voices rose at the closed door.
'Open! open! The river saps the foundation.Ari bhai!is he dead, that he hath no fear? Beat it down!--Oh, Diwân sahib!--Oh! servant, who hath closed the door?--Open! open!--Nay! without a smith 'tis hopeless--And I tarry not!--Listen! there goes more of the wall--Open, fools! open!'
Amid the roar and rush, the vain blows and shouting, the old man's eyes were on Azîzan's, not so much in appeal as in command. He could not move and his faded voice would never reach through the clamour, so his only safety lay in her obedience. But she shook her head, then crouched down--as if to wait till they should once more be alone--in her favourite attitude, her back against the wall, her knees drawn up to her chin, the knife still clasped in her hand ready for use. A louder roar came from without, a rattle as of bricks, mingled with cries of caution and alarm. Then gradually the blows and voices dwindled away from the ceaseless clamour of the rain and the intermittent rumblings of falling masonry, as the smallest crack widened beneath the pressure to a breach until, bit by bit, the solid walls seemed to melt away.
'Why didst thou not open the door, fool?' The words in the greater silence were just audible to the girl.
'Because I did not choose.'
Again the odd sound like a laugh came from that bent figure.
'The woman's reason. Why didst thou not choose, Azîzan?'
There was no anger, scarcely a trace of anxiety even, in his tone. He was no novice to the ways of women, and the girl's face told him that his chance of life was almost gone. What must be must, and death came to all; to the mad fool in her turn. The sombre fire of her eyes met his sullenly; but she made no answer, save to lay the knife down quietly on the sill of the arch against which she leant. The steel rang clear upon the hard red sandstone.
The old Diwân's wrinkled hand hovered for a moment over the pieces on the board, then fell back upon his knees. So they sat staring at each other silently in the bow of the balcony. There was nothing more to be said. She had chosen; why, she knew not. And as the clamour of the rain and the rush of the river rose higher and higher, Zubr-ul-Zamân's head sank upon his breast with the old formula--
'Queen's mate; the game is done.'
The woman's reason, or unreason, had conquered the Strength of the World. But that was no new thing to the Diwân's wisdom.
But to the people outside in the open, huddling together under the pitiless downpour for safety's sake, it was more or less of an amusement to wonder how long the old tower would hold out against the mad stream sapping at its foundations. Not long; for already the ruined wall had gone, disclosing a portion of the secret stair, where Zainub, the old duenna, lay parched up almost to a mummy. A hideous sight, no doubt, had there been light enough to see it; but there was not, and the refugees upon the higher ground could discern nothing but the block of the old tower and the swirling water below. A faint light came from the balcony of the room where the Diwân was known to be; and, as they watched it, people speculated how the door came to be fastened. Perhaps it had swung-to, perhaps---- Well, he must be dead, or would soon be dead, since rescue was impossible; and, after all, he had lived his time. Khush-hâl had been saved from his swinging cradle, and then there was Dalel away up at Simla. Rulers enough for a poor country-side, if God spared it from the Great Flood; and if not, why then the old man was at least better off than they, exposed as they were to the elements. Far better; both he and the outcasts in their straw huts, which would hurt no one even if they fell. So the first in the land was as the last, and the last first. 'Sobhan ullah!'
As the rain slackened the night grew darker, until even the block of the tower ceased to show against the sky, and the little company of watchers could only hear the thunder of its fall.
'God rest him,' muttered a peasant, muffled into a formless bundle in his blanket. 'He was a hard master, and the new one may be harder still. There will be a good crop anyway.'
And down on the very edge of the boiling stream, when the rain ceased, a light went twinkling up and down, up and down. It was the potter looking for his dead daughter as thedébrisof the old wall, beneath which she had been buried sixteen years before, crumbled away bit by bit before the furious stream.
The dawn broke upon a new world as far as Hodinuggur was concerned. Where the desert had stretched thirsty and dry, lay a shoreless sea. Where the streak of silver had split the round horizon into halves, the double line of the canal banks looked like twin paths leading to some world beyond the waste of waters. They steered straight out of sight on either side, almost unbroken save for the great gap where the sluice-gate had stood. There the stream still swept sideways to circle round the island of Hodinuggur, which bore, like an ark, its company of refugees from the surrounding levels; a little company which straightway, taking advantage of the coming sun, began to wring out its wet garments and spread them to dry, until a general air of washing-day reduced the tragedy of the past night to the commonplace. And after all, what had happened? An old woman or two had been drowned, the Diwân and his tower swept away. But the world held too many old women and more than enough of nobles. For the rest, it had not been the Flood of the Most High; and though Death came to all in the end, and the loneliness of it must be dreary, still it was somehow more terrifying to die in batches, wholesale.
So, clothed in their white, new-washed robes like the elect, they went down after a time in companies to see the extent of damage done to their belongings, and test how far it was possible to wade through the water towards the village homestead or two which rose above the flood. Canal-wards, of course, passage was barred, would be barred for days until the stream ceased flowing or a boat was brought. So the horseman whom they could see picking his way flounderingly along the northern bank might be the only survivor of the big world beyond, and they be none the wiser--for the time. It was Dan Fitzgerald who, after an enforced shelter at the half-way village, was wondering who could have taken the responsibility of anticipating the telegram he carried in his pocket by opening the sluice-gates, and so, in all probability saving the big Sunowlie embankment farther down. For the sluice had been opened; that was evident to his experience at once, since without the lead of the current to cut, the flood would have swept on to do its worst elsewhere. Well! whoever had done it, be he watchman or Diwân, deserved something at the hands of the Department, and be the past record a bad one or not, this act should have its reward--its just reward--if he could compass it.
Ten minutes after, he had driven the chattering servant from the room, and grief-stricken, yet convinced into a sort of calm acceptance of the inevitable, had lifted the poor lad's body tenderly to the bed. He scarcely even thought of a reason for the tragedy; perhaps there was none, for Dan in his rough and ready life had seen such a thing before; had known the useless search for some adequate cause. And was there not cause enough here for a sudden loss of balance? That race down from Paradise to Purgatory!--the intolerable journey--the horrible homecoming; and then the cursed bottle he had left. The remembrance sent his whole mind into useless regrets. If he had only ridden faster, if somehow he could have been there in time to prevent the loneliness, the awful desolation of it all! for he had been through such loneliness himself, and knew what it had meant to him. Perhaps, taking his own excitability as a standard, he over-estimated the effect on George's nature. At any rate, as he stooped mechanically to pick up the revolver round which the boy's dead hand had still been closed, he felt that, given the necessity for sudden return, the rest might be inferred. And then, beside the revolver he saw the open locket, with Gwen's smiling face staring up at him.Gwen!Great God! what did it mean? His own locket, of course, and yet----he sat down at the table white as death, looking first at the pretty face, then at the still figure on the bed, now decently shrouded from the glaring light of day. And by degrees the colour returned to his cheek. No! it could not be so. She was not cruel, only careless; and ah! what a grief this would be to her! Besides, George was not one to put a life-long regret of that sort into a friend's life. So pondering, he realised that among other incidents of the home-coming had been that of learning who his sweetheart really was. That, then, did not happen at Simla, so that could not have been the cause of the lad's sudden return.
Why, then, had he come? The new lock and keys lying on the table, gave him a clew, and his quick wits suggested danger to the gates. Then it came to him in a flash confusedly, almost irrationally, that it had been done for his sake and hers, and he was on his knees by the bed in a minute.
'Oh! George! George! why did you do it?'
So with the answering silence came a decision, impulsive, yet immutable. Such blame as could be taken he would take. No one should know or dream of failure. No one should ever say--'Ah, poor fellow, he shot himself; must have been something wrong, you know.' Rapidly he counted the costs, the possibility of silence. Hodinuggur, separated from him by an impassable stream, could not be taken into account, so he must accept the risk there. It would not be much, if the servants' tale was true, that they had only discovered their master's death when the storm began, and had done no more than send word to the palace. No one, then, could have seen the body save those four or five servants, who loved their master, and worshipped rupees, and, above all, desired peace and quiet, and not the dangerous rakings up of the past which always followed on the advent of the police. Then for the Department itself. What he had said in his ignorance was true. Whether George had opened the sluice when, as the servants said, he went out in the middle of the day, or whether the palace folk had done it, the Department, in either case, owed the opener a debt of gratitude. If the latter, the Moghuls would be glad to keep silence; if the former, even if they set up a claim for compensation for damage, they would have been due so much had he, Dan, arrived in time to carry out his orders; thus no injustice would be done.
So half an hour afterwards, one of the servants started along the path to the outer world with a telegram to headquarters, and that evening, when the flood had subsided a little, Dan chose out the driest spot he could find in the sandy compound, and read the Church service over his friend's body. No one, he told himself, should know the truth; except some day perhaps, Gwen, when she came there as his wife. Then he would tell her, the pity, the needlessness of it all; and yet the needlessness had this virtue in it, that it made concealment possible; for the flood had swept away the error, if error there had been.
The telegram reached Colonel Tweedie next morning, among many more telling of disaster and death along the line of the great canal. Yet none was more pitiful than this one which ran thus--
'Opening of sluice-gate, as ordered, saved Sunowlie embankment, but palace injured. George Keene died yesterday of cholera. Very prevalent here. Details by post.'
'Dear! dear!' fussed the Colonel. 'How very sad! What a blow to poor Mrs. Boynton. She is so tenderhearted, and really, she was almost unnecessarily interested in that boy.'
They all thought of her; even Lewis Gordon, as yielding to that odd desire to see for oneself which besets us all when bad news comes by telegram, he sat looking at the flimsy message of evil; yet his first words were of Rose.
'Your daughter will feel it also, sir; feel it very much, I'm afraid.' Then he paused, to resume in more ordinary tones. 'I had, I think, better start at once, sir. I can report all along the line, and wire if your presence seems necessary. I hardly think it will be, and it is useless inconveniencing yourself for nothing.'
Colonel Tweedie bridled. 'I am not accustomed to consider my own convenience as against the public service'--he was beginning pompously, when Lewis cut him short.
'I'm afraid I wasn't thinking so much of you, sir, as of Miss Tweedie. This will be a great blow to her.' He thought so honestly, and as he jolted down the hill in a tonga half an hour afterwards he told himself he was glad to have escaped the necessity for seeing her grief, even while he was conscious of a curiosity to know how she would take the news. There was no such difficulty in imagining Gwen's behaviour. He could almost see the pretty pathetic face keeping back its tears, and hear the soft voice saying with a little thrill in it that George was the nicest, dearest boy she had ever met, and that she would never forget his kindness and goodness to her--never! never!
As he thought of this his expression was not pleasant, for Gwen had, in his opinion, done her level best to turn the lad's head, and so must surely know that she was talking bunkum. A man would know it; though perhaps it was not fair to judge a woman by a man's standard of truth, and Gwen, doubtless, was as genuine as she knew how to be; as genuine, anyhow, as Rose Tweedie, with her pretensions of utter indifference to all sentiment. Well, poor girl! she was face to face with realities now, for she had certainly cared a good deal for George, even to the extent of trying to keep him from Gwen's wiles. Poor George! a fine young fellow, who, for one thing, had been saved a bad heartache.
He had intended passing on as quickly as possible to Hodinuggur, but being delayed by the necessity for settling endless requisitions for repairs, had barely reached Rajpore ere Dan Fitzgerald returned, reporting that there was no reason for him to go out. Permanent repair was impossible till the rains should be over, as every lesser flood must run down the channel cut out for it by this deluge, and everything to ensure the further safety of the palace had been done. Barring the Diwân's tower, there had not after all been much damage, as the jewels and treasure in the vaults below had been saved: besides, the bumper crops which would follow on the inundations would more than compensate for any loss. There was, however, a certain anxiety in Dan's face as he said this.
'Well, even if they were to claim,' replied Lewis complacently, 'the saving of the Sunowlie bank would be dirt cheap at a few thousands. It cost us over two lakhs, and I was in an awful funk about it, thinking we must be too late. I tried to intercept poor George with a wire, knowing he would take the order quicker as he was already on the way.
Dan's whole soul leaped towards the possibility. 'Then he got it after all. I was wondering----' he paused, angry at his own imprudence.
'Wondering what?' asked Lewis impatiently. 'I was going to say I missed him, and then I didn't see how you could possibly get there in time. By the way, when did you get my wire?'
'About an hour after you sent it off,' said Dan uneasily. He did not care for Lewis Gordon's sharp, practical eyes on these details.
'That is, say, ten o'clock on the morning of the 6th, I suppose. Good riding, indeed! And that reminds me. The report from the Rajah's people, which came through your office, says that the water first ran through the cut about middle day on the 6th. Manifestly impossible. You had hardly left Hodinuggur. It's a trifle, of course but you had better stamp on the inaccuracy, and show you are on the watch, or they will go on to cooking generally.'
'Yes----,' replied Dan slowly. This simple difficulty in concealing the discrepancy of time had escaped him before; but he was fully alive to it now. Most men in his place would have set the question aside, at all costs, for further consideration, and risked the possible consequences of the evasion. But Dan's mind was of finer temper; he could trust it to thrust home at any moment. This is the true test of power, and it is only the second thoughts of the commonplace which are better than their first. So he took advantage of the occasion calmly, knowing his man.
'But they are right. I did not open the gates. I believe George did, but even of that I am not sure. However, you shall judge for yourself. I don't ask for confidence, of course. I haven't the right; but I expect you will give it all the same.' Then boldly, plainly, yet with one reservation, he told the tale of what he knew and what he surmised. George had shot himself--of that there was no doubt. The sluice had been opened, in his opinion, by treachery, of which George, at Simla, had received some hint, and which he had arrived too late to prevent; though this also was mysterious, since the gates had not been opened till long after George's arrival. The guard at the sluice had been drowned or had disappeared, and the new Diwân, Khush-hâl, professed pious ignorance. In fact, only this much was certain, that the Sunowlie embankment had been saved, that George had taken the responsibility on himself even to death, and that the flood had made it possible to keep his memory from stain. For the sake of his friends alone, was not this desirable? This hint, no more, he gave of the inner tragedy connected with the locket. Yet as those two men sat looking at each other across the office-table littered with papers, their thoughts, all unknown to each other, flew to the one woman; but the memory brought tears to Dan's dark eyes, and left Lewis's hard as the nether millstone in the conviction that Gwen was at least morally responsible for George Keene's death. It came to him as a certainty, and yet a contemptuous tolerance came with it. She had not meant, of course--women never did--to play fast and loose with the boy's head. Yet she had done so. He had spent too much money, he had been careless; honest, perhaps, though even that might not be so, no one could tell. Why then should they try to find out now, when it was all irrevocable, when no harm could come out of silence? And George had been a good sort; too good for such an end; besides, even for Gwen's sake silence was best. He felt very bitter against her, very sore; yet such things must not be said about his future wife as might be said if the truth were really known.
'I suppose it had better remain as it is,' he said at last, moodily. 'Cholera has served its turn in such a case before--one of the advantages of living in a land of sudden death. Poor George! I daresay there was treachery.
Dan, shading his eyes with his clasped hands, was silent a moment. 'If there was, he had no part in it. I wonder if you remember a conversation in the balcony at Hodinuggur about what a man would do in such a case. "No, you wouldn't, not unless you wanted to be thought guilty." Do you remember saying that, Gordon?'
Lewis nodded; it was not a pleasant memory.
'I can't tell you the whole. But I am convinced George shot himself to save me. He knew'--what, perhaps, you don't--that I was engaged to a woman----'
Gordon pulled some papers towards him impatiently, and took up a pen, as if to end the subject.
'I suppose it is always "cherchez la femme"; yet it does not seem to me an agreeable factor in existence.'
'Cherchez la femme!' echoed Dan. 'Why not? They are our mothers and sisters, our sweethearts and wives, after all. And have you ever thought, Gordon, what it must be like to look back over a lifetime, and see next to nothing that you would rather have left undone? Or, if you're pious, to take a sort of pride in pillorying yourself for a cross word or a tarradiddle? There isn't a man in a million with that record, but half the women one meets--ay! half the women one patronises--have it. Perhaps it is small blame to anything but fate; still they have it.'
'Or think they have--which has the same effect! You remind me of a countryman of yours, a doctor, I knew once. "The sex," he said, "can't do wrong, and when it does it's hysteria." However, let us leave that poor lad to rest in peace; in a way that is more worth than the happiness of any woman who ever was born. And, look here, make the tale of reports complete, send them to me, and I'll consign them, dates and all, to a pigeon-hole. That is the beauty of official mistakes; youcanpigeon-hole them and no one is the wiser, unless, indeed, some personal motive crops up. But that is not likely. So far as I can see, it is to no one's interest to make a row--not even if there is a woman at the bottom of it all.'
There was a concentrated bitterness in his tone, due to no cynicism, but rather to an intensity of pain; for if Rose Tweedie belonged by birth to that strange latter-day feminine development which unconsciously sets passion aside both from mind and emotion, and will none of it spiritually or physically, Lewis belonged to that still larger class of men who have driven it from the mind: who say openly that it is despicable; but that the world cannot get on without it; who insist in a breath in its unworthiness and its necessity. Gwen, he said to himself after Dan had gone, was very woman, capable of ruining any man in a week if she chose, and then being sorrowfully surprised at the result. Still it would be unkind to wound her needlessly by telling her that result; the more so because she would certainly tell other people, and Rose Tweedie might break her heart over it. Even if the pigeon-holed mistake were found out, they might get up a fiction about the telegram having reached George after all. The compensation might have to be given; but even in that case he could see no need for raking up the mud, since the claim would be a just one.
Nevertheless a week after, when he and Dan were once more seated opposite each other at the office-table, he felt vaguely uncomfortable. For a schedule of the dead lad's debts lay between them ready for the Administrator-General, and that showed an item of six thousand rupees borrowed on George's note of hand, backed by some youngsters on the very day on which he had left Simla.
'It was a first holiday, you know,' said Dan regretfully. 'And Hodinuggur is such a hole. There were the races, you know, and--and----'
'Cherchez la femme,' quoted Lewis; 'I don't blame him, not a bit. But if there had been an inquiry, Fitzgerald?-----'
Dan shook his head and sighed fiercely. 'Yes! I know. For all that, he was straight--straight as a die! My only regret in keeping the thing dark is that some one has to go scot-free.'