Part 7

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

She caught a glimpse of his drawn, miserable face.

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

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

*CHAPTER VIII*

*THE TWO LISTENERS*

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

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

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

Meredith accepted the fat brown hand extended towards him.

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

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

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

The Rajah chuckled, flattered and reassured.

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

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

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

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

Rasaldu shook his head.

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

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

Rasaldu's smile faded. He looked oddly crestfallen.

"A protege of yours, eh?"

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

"Convert, eh?"

"That may come," was the grave answer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I am not cold," he said.

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

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

"It is not my body----" he muttered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"There is no law----" she began.

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

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

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

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

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

He bent his head.

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

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

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

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

"Tristram Sahib? Is Tristram Sahib here?"

He pointed vaguely out into the darkness.

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

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

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

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

"Give it me!" she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mrs. Smithers shook her head sternly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*CHAPTER IX*

*LALLOO, THE MONEY-LENDER*

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

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

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

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

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

Barclay nodded absently.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The sharp brown eyes lifted for a moment.

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

"Murdered, too----?"

Lalloo smiled subtly.

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

"And Vahana?"

The smile, unchanged, gained in significance.

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

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

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

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