Part 9

The Boy gave a little gasp. But there was no time for that sort of thing now. The Kathyawar mare was waiting, the moon would be up in ten minutes or so, and he must be beyond sight of the chattering devils he could hear outside before them; but perhaps--yes! perhaps he might be able to come back--to come back and give these fellows their deserts.

"I'll pay you out yet--you're the greatest scoundrel unhung," he said, thickly, as Hoshyari held the stirrup for him.

"And the Huzoor is the Salt of the Earth," came the urbane reply.

After that there was silence on the far side of the office for five minutes--for ten minutes. Then, faint and far, only to be heard of an anxious listener, came the sound of a horse's hoofs as it was let into its stride.

The Huzoor had got through the picket, and if he only remembered instructions, might be considered safe for those fifty miles across country. Hoshyari drew a breath of relief, shut the door, and lay down placidly to sleep, feeling he had done his best. It is true he had sent the Angel of God on a wild goose chase; for, briefly, the mutineers had gone on straight that morning, only leaving a strong guard at the gate to keep it until the second body of rebels should come in next day.

So by this time, doubtless, the fate of Englishmen--aye, and every Englishwoman, too, on the route to Delhi must have been settled. But the ride would keep the Salt of the Earth out of danger, since it prevented him from doing rash things; which otherwise he was sure to have done; for what was the use of losing one's life in fighting two to a hundred; still less if it were only one. And these things were on the knees of the Gods. No! there was no use, especially when the store ammunition was in the hands of the enemy and you had expended your pouch full on black buck. The Huzoor was best away. With luck he would only find the cold ashes of outbreak. The hurricane of revolt would have spent itself, for, after all, it was only the soldiers who would mutiny. The rabble in the towns might follow suit; but there was safety yet in the country.

So he fell asleep.

When he woke it was broad daylight. Daylight? Why, it must be nigh on noon. He stepped to the door and looked through the panes. Aye! the sentry in the verandah was eating his bread. And the other detachment had come in. The courtyard was crowded with men. So much the better, for they would only rest during the heat of the day, and go on at sundown. Thus there would be peace before the Salt of the Earth could possibly return--if he did return; but once away from his post he would, most likely, and wisely, make for security to the north.

Meanwhile, it was time for him to think of himself. There was gold in the safe yonder, and it would be folly to leave it to new masters who had no more right to it than he. He went over to it, set the iron door open and began to gather together what he found.

The room was very still, but on the one side came the clamour of the newly-arrived rebels. He gave one last glance at them through the closed door, then slipped into the verandah on the other side. Then he paused before a dusty swaying figure that, throwing up its arms as it saw him, came at him like a wild beast. It was a time for calm--with those men in the courtyard, a time of calm for both!

He stood back a step and said, quietly, "So you have returned--Salt of the Earth."

The Boy seemed for an instant dazed, then a loud, reckless laugh rang out, "Come back! Yes! I've come back to kill you, you d--d scoundrel. I've come back as I said I'd come."

"I saved the Huzoor's life," interrupted Hoshyari, quietly, "and I'll save it again, if he will not speak so loud; the sentry will hear, and then----"

"Let him hear--I'll have time to kill you first," went on the Boy, blindly; for all that he lowered his voice; the instinct of belief in Hoshyari's wisdom was strong.

"The Huzoor would not have time," whispered the latter, blandly. "I am no fool at wrestling, as he knows; and he knows also that I tried to save him."

There was a sudden unexpected appeal in the tone which surprised even the man himself. He could have cried over this Angel of God who refused to be saved.

The Boy looked at him with dry hot eyes; there were no tears there--he had seen too many horrors for that. And he had ridden all night, all day, till the Kathyawar mare had dropped with him; then he had stumbled on as best he might, intent on revenge. And now the sight of Hoshyari was as the sight of a friend's face: it brought back the memory of so many jolly times they had had together. And what he said was true: the man had tried to save him.

He had to bolster up his anger. "It--it's the other thing you've got to answer for, you--you thief."

Hoshyari's eyes gleamed. "Don't call me that again, Huzoor. I am no thief. I was only--cleverer than other folk."

"I'll call you it ten times over if I choose. Thief! mean, miserable, petty thief."

There was something more savage in the whispered quarrel than if the two had been shouting at each other, and Hoshyari's gasp of rage fell on absolute silence, as, breathing hard, they looked at each other.

Then the Boy passed his hand wearily over his forehead. "No!" he said. "I can't--you're right--I can't kill you like a dog--we must fight it out--there are foils or swords somewhere--foils with the buttons off--where are they?"

His dependence on the elder man showed in his helplessness; he asked as a child might have asked.

There was almost a sob in his throat, but the voice which answered was firm.

"They are on the wall, Huzoor; but we cannot fight here; the sentry would hear, and----"

"D--n the sentry," said the Boy again, helplessly. "What can we do?"

Hoshyari thought for a moment. "There is light enough in the storehouse under the Great Hedge----" he began.

The Boy leapt up, fire in his eyes. "By God in heaven, it shall be there--and, mind you, it's to the death, you cursed smuggler."

"To the death, Salt of the Earth." A minute later the false back to the record cupboard swung to its lock with a click, and the office was empty.

* * * * *

The cactus flowers bloomed and faded; the violet-scented mimosa puff-balls fell in gold showers on the green lobes, the aloe bells withered in silence, the waiting, watching eyes waited and watched in vain. If the snakes, as they slid over the netting-covered round hole in the thickness of the great Salt Hedge, had looked down into the widening sunlit circle below them, what would they have seen?

Who knows, since Suchet Singh the Sikh lay dead at his post.

AN APPRECIATED RUPEE

She was a poor Mahomedan widow, and lived in an unconceivable sort of burrow under the tall winding stair of a big tenement house, which in its turn was hidden away in a long, winding, sunless alley. The stair centred round a sort of shaft, barred at each storey by iron gratings, narrow enough to admit of refuse being thrown down--the shaft being, briefly, the rubbish shoot of the building, so that old Maimuna--who seldom left her seclusion till the evening--had, in passing to and fro, to step over quite a pile of radish parings, cauliflower stalks, fluff, rags--a whole day's sweepings and leavings of the folk higher up in the world than she.

And even when she reached the odd-shaped cell of a place, whose only furniture consisted of a rickety bed with string--halt in two of its emaciated legs, a low stool and a spinning wheel, she was not free from her neighbours' off-scourings; for down the wall beside the low latticed window, where, perforce, she had to set her spinning wheel, crept a slimy black streak of sewage from above, which smelt horribly, on its way to join the open drain in the middle of the alley. Yet here Maimuna Begam, Patha-ni from Kasur, had lived for fifteen years of childless widowhood; lived far away from her home and people, too poor to rejoin them, too ignorant to hold her own among strangers. For she had been that most intolerable of interlopers--the wife of a man's old age. Not a suitable wife bringing a dower into the family; but one who, as a widow, might--unless the other heirs took active measures to prevent it--claim her portion of one-sixth for life. A wife, too, without a pretence of any position save that of the strictest seclusion; a seclusion so untouched by modern latitude as to be in itself second-rate. Without good looks also, and married simply and solely because old Jehan Latif had fancied some quail curry which he had eaten when business called him to Kasur, and, as the best way of securing repetition of the delicacy, had married the compounder and carried her back to Lucknow; where, to tell truth, he found more attractions in the cook than he had anticipated when he paid a good round sum for his middle-aged bride. For Maimuna was a good woman--kindly, gentle, pious--who had lived discreetly in her father's house, and helped to cook quail curry for that somewhat dissolute old swashbuckler ever since, as a girl of twelve, her husband had died before she had even seen him.

So, while she pounded the spices and boned the quails (since that was one of the refinements of the _bonne-bouche_) for old Jehan Latif, Maimuna used sometimes to think, with a kind of wondering regret, what life would have been like if the husband of her youth had not died of the measles; but, being conscientious, she never allowed the tears to drop into the quail curry!

It was no carelessness of hers, therefore, which led to fat Jehan Latif falling into a fit shortly after partaking of his favourite dish, which for ten years she had dutifully prepared for him. None-the-less, his heirs (who had had all these years in which to cook their accounts of the matter) treated her as if it were. There is no need to enter into details. Those who know India know how unscrupulous heirs can oppress a strange lone woman--ignorant, secluded; a woman whose position as wife has from the first been cavilled at, resented, impugned. It is sufficient to say that Maimuna, after a few feeble protests, found herself in the little cell under the stairs, earning a few farthings by her spinning wheel, and thankful that her great skill at it kept her from that last resort of deserted womanhood in India--the quern. Even so, it was hard at times to wait till there was sufficient thread in the percentage she got back for her spinning, to make it worth while for the merchant to buy it from her, or for her to break in, by a cash transaction, on the curious succession of cotton bought, and thread returned, without a coin changing hands. And this winter it was harder than ever, for the unusual cold made her fingers stiff, and sent shoots of rheumatism up her arm as she sat spinning in the ray of light which came in with the smell.

It was very cold indeed that New Year's afternoon, and Maimuna felt more than usually down-hearted; for there had been a death upstairs, and she knew that the stamping and shufflings she could hear coming rhythmically downwards over her head were the feet of those carrying a corpse. Now, weary and worn as she was, Maimuna--between the fifties and sixties--did not yet feel inclined to fold her hands and give in. Even now it needed a very little thing to bring a smile to her face; and once, when a child had fallen downstairs, she had surprised the neighbours by her alert decision. So that when she heard girls' shrill voices in half-giggling alarm through her door--which was ajar--she guessed at the cause, and called to the owners to come in until the stairs should be clear.

One (a slip of a thing ten years old) she knew as the daughter of a gold-thread worker higher up the stairs; the other (not more than five or six) was a stranger; a fat broad-faced morsel, with a stolid look, and something held very tight in one small chubby hand. She was dressed in the cleanest of new clothes, scanty of stuff, but gay, with a yard or two of tinsel on her scrap of a veil. Maimuna paused in the whirr and hum of her wheel to look at the children wistfully; her own childlessness had always seemed a crime to her.

"It is Fatma, the pen-maker's girl, _Mai_," said the gold-worker's daughter, patronisingly. "She is just back from the Missen School, where they have been having a big festival because it is the _sahib log's_ big day."

"Tchuk," dissented the solemn-faced baby, clucking her tongue in emphatic denial. "It is not the Big Day. It is because _Malika_ Victoria is--is----" The solemnity merged in confusion, finally into a sort of appealing defiance: "Is--is--_that_----"

She unclasped her fist, and held out a brand new shining silver two-anna bit. It was one of those struck when her Majesty the Queen assumed the Imperial title.

The gold-worker's daughter giggled. "She means Wictoria _Kaiser-i-hind_, you know. What the guns were about this morning. They are to go off every year, they say. That will be fun!"

"But why?" asked Maimuna, puzzled. Her life for close on five-and-twenty years had been spent in the cooking of quail curry and spinning of cotton--the very Mutiny had passed by unknown to her. She had heard vaguely of the Queen, and knew that it was her head on the rupee which, despite the hard times, she always wore on a black silk skein round her neck, because she had worn it since her babyhood, when the parents of the boy who had died of the measles had sent it her; but what the Queen had to do with John Company Bahadar, or he to her, was a mystery.

"Why," giggled the elder girl, "because she is going to be the King, and turn all the men out. That is what father says. He says she is sure to favour the women, and I think that will be fun. But Fatma knows it all. Come! dear one! Sing Maimuna that song the _miss sahibs_ made the schools sing to-day. Sing it soft, close, close up to her ear, so that no one may hear it--for they don't like her singing, you know, at home, _Mai_: it isn't respectable."

So, standing on tip-toe, steadying herself against Maimuna's arm by the hand which held the two-anna bit, Fatma began in a most unmelodious whisper to chant a Hindee version of "God Save our Gracious Queen." The words as well as the tune were a difficulty to the fat, solemn-faced child, but the old woman sat listening and looking at the two-anna bit with a new interest, a new wonder in her weary eyes.

"Bismillah!" she said, half way through, when the gold-worker's daughter, becoming impatient, declared the corpse must have passed, and dragged Fatma off incontinently. "And she is a woman--only a woman!"

The girls paused at the door; the elder to nod and giggle, the younger to stand sedate and solemn, wagging one small forefinger backwards and forwards in negation.

"Tchuk! you shouldn't say that, Mai! Little girls are made of sugar and spice. It is little boys that are made nasty--the _miss_ says so."

"She should not say so," faltered Maimuna, aghast. The very idea was preposterous, upsetting her whole cosmogony; but when they had closed the door, she sat idle, too astonished to work. Then, suddenly, she took off the black silk hank with its precious rupee, and looked at the woman's head at the back.

It was a young woman there; young and unveiled--strange, incomprehensible! But that other on the two-anna bit had been an old woman, more decently dressed, and with a crown on her head.

"Frustrate their knavish tricks."

Fatma's song returned to memory. So the Queen, too, had enemies; and yet she was Kaiser-i-hind, and, what is more, she made men like the gold-thread worker upstairs tremble!

"On thee our hopes we fix!"

* * * * *

Maimuna sat, and sat, and sat, looking at that rupee.

* * * * *

It was a day or two after this that an English official was sitting smoking in his verandah, when he became aware of a whispered colloquy behind him. It was someone, no doubt, trying, through the red-coated _chaprasi_, to gain an audience of him; and he was newly back from office, tired, impatient, perhaps, of the hopelessness of doing justice always. So he took no notice till something roused him to a swift turn, a swifter question. "What's that, _chaprasi?_" _That_ was the unmistakable chink of fallen silver, the unmistakable whirr of a running rupee, the unmistakable buzzing ring of its settling to rest. And there, midway between a giving and a taking hand, lay the rupee itself--the Queen's head uppermost.

"_Hazoor!_" explained the _chaprasi_, glibly, "your slave was virtuously refusing; he was sending this ill-bred one away. Hat! _budhi!_[2] Hat!"

But the sight of that head on the precious rupee, which, after many heartsearchings, poor Maimuna had determined to risk in this effort to gain justice from a _budhi_ like herself, whose enemies also had knavish tricks, brought courage to the old heart, and the old woman stood her ground.

"_Gharibparwar!_" she said quietly, with her best salaam--and in the old Pathan house they had taught manners, if nothing else--"Little Fatma, the pen-maker's daughter, says that Wictoria Kaiser-i-hind is an old woman like me, and so I have fixed my hopes on her. There is my rupee. It is all I have, and I want my widow's portion."

* * * * *

And she got it. It happened years ago, but the story is worth telling to-day, when women can no longer sing "God Save the Queen."

THE LAKE OF HIGH HOPE

A man stood watching a primrose dawn. There was a cloud upon his face; none on the wide expanse of light-suffused sky beyond the dim distance of the world. At his feet lay, stretching far, irregularly, into the grey mistiness of morning, a great sheet of water. The dawn showed on it as in a mirror, save where tall sedges and reeds sent still-shining shadows over its level light. Unutterable peace lay upon all things. They seemed still asleep, though the new day had come, bringing with it good and evil, rest and strife.

And then, suddenly, there was a change. The man turned swiftly at a light footstep behind him, to see a woman, and in an instant passion leapt up, bringing with it joy and despair. For the woman was another man's wife.

But something in her face made him open his arms and take her close to his clasp. It seemed to him as if he had been waiting for this moment ever since he was born.

She was a little bit of a woman, frail and fair, who looked over-weighted by her dark riding habit, but both seemed lost in the man's hold, as vibrating with tense emotion, he stood silent, their mingled figures forming a swaying shadow against that further light.

"At last," he said, in tender exultation, "at long last!"

She threw back her head then, and looked him in the eyes, hope and fear, and joy and sorrow showing in her face.

"I couldn't stand it--at the last," she almost sobbed, "when it came to going away, and leaving you here--alone--with that awful risk--for no one can say what mayn't come--with cholera---- _He_"--her voice trembled over the small syllable--"started earlier--I am to meet him by-and-by--so I came round--just to see you--and now----" She buried her face again, and the sobs shook her gently. He tightened his hold.

"I'm glad!" he replied, in a hard voice. "It was bound to come sooner or later--you couldn't go on for ever--an angel from heaven couldn't go on standing--it all. But now----" his voice changed--"now you and I----" he broke off and raised his head to listen.

It was a wild weird cry, that echoed and re-echoed over the wide stretches of water, that rose in one long continuous melodious wail from every reed bed, every thicket of sedge, every tuft of low lamarisk and bent-rush; for it was the dawn-cry of the myriad wild fowl which haunted this low-lying _jheel_ of Northern India, and swift as thought, with a thunderous whirr of wide wings, the birds, teal and mallard and widgeon, white eye, pochard, and green shank, purple heron and white, rose in ones, in twos, in threes, in flocks, in companies, in serried battalions.

The primrose dawn was half effaced, the coming day was darkened by wheeling, veering, eddying flight, and the peace vanished in the strife of wings.

"By George! what a shot," cried the man excitedly, even passion forgotten as a trail of whistling teal swooped past, unconscious of them, to settle on the still water, then, recognising unlooked for humanity, veered at sharp angle to rise again into the troubled air.

But the woman clung closer. To her the interruption was terrible. The soaring birds brought home to her what she had done, and before that knowledge compelling emotion stopped abruptly.

"It is very foolish of me," she murmured brokenly, "and very wrong--though I don't know!--I don't know! It was your danger--and I was so tired--besides it--it need make no difference."

"No difference?" he echoed, in joyous, incredulous exultation. "Why, of course, it makes all the difference in the world, little woman! You and I can never go back again, _now!_ We can never pretend again that we don't care! No! when this cholera camp is over, and I have time, we must think over what is to be done--but it's final. Yes! it's final, my darling, my darling!"

His kisses rained on her face, his heart encompassed her. So they stood for a while, oblivious of the wheeling, veering, eddying wings above them, oblivious of all things save that they were lovers, and that they knew it.

Then she left him. "He" would be wondering why she was so late; but Suleiman, the Arab pony, would soon carry her over the sandy plain.

The man remained watching the slight figure on the bounding grey till it was lost in the "azure silk of morning." Then he returned slowly to the _jheel_ again, lost in thought. There was a good deal whereof to think, for she was a mother; by ill luck the mother of girls. Why had she worn those tiny presentments of their sweet baby faces in the double heart brooch which fastened her folded tie! She had not thought, of course; but it had somehow come between him and his kisses after he had noticed it.

Well! it was unfortunate; but that sort of thing had to be faced, and he _would_ face it after he had seen his cholera camp through; for he was a doctor, and the thought of what might lie before him was with him as a background to all others. He had chosen a good place for the camp, yonder among the low sandhills, which were the highest point in all the desert plain, and, if that did not kill the germ, they could move on.

Meanwhile---- He drew a long breath and looked out over the water. The primrose dawn had passed to amber, the amber was beginning to flame, the whirring wings had carried the birds to distant feeding grounds, only a flock of egrets remained fishing solemnly in a distant shallow.

"The Huzoor is looking for God's birds," said a courteous voice beside him. "They have gone, likely, to the Lake of High Hope, for it nears the time of transit to a Higher Land."

The speaker was an old man seated so close to the water that his feet and legs were hidden by it. He had a simple, pleasant face, which over-thinness had refined almost to austerity.

The doctor took stock of him quietly. His speech proclaimed him a down country man, his lack of any garment save a strip of saffron cloth around his loins suggested asceticism, but his smile was at once familiar and kindly.

"M[=a]nasa Sarovara?" replied the Englishman, carelessly, "is that what you mean? I am told the birds really do go there during the hot weather. I wonder if it is true. I should like to see it." He spoke half to himself, for he was somewhat of an ornothologist and the tale of the great West Tibetan Lake of Refuge for God's dear birds--that lake far from the haunts of men amid the eternal snow and ice, into which so many streams flow, out of which come none--had caught his fancy.

"The Huzoor can go when he chooses," remarked the old man placidly; "but he must leave many things behind him first; the _mem sahiba_, for instance."