In the Tideway

When I was a child I wept over a story--if I remember right, by Mrs. Sherwood--which bore this title.

Years after I came to man's estate, I felt inclined to weep over an incident in real life which this title seemed to fit.

Looking back on those first tears, I judge them uncalled for by what my maturer age condemns as false sentiment. Perhaps my later emotion is equally at fault. The reader had better judge for himself.

* * * * *

"Speak on, O Bisram, bearer! Wherefore dost not obey? Speak on about Mai Kali and the Noose--the Noose that is so soft, that never slips. Wherefore dost not speak, son of an owl?"

The voice was childish, fretful. So was the listless little figure in a flannel dressing-gown, which lay half upon the reed mat spread on the verandah floor, half against the red and yellow livery coat of Bisram, bearer. The latter remained silent, his dark eyes fixed deprecatingly on a taller figure within earshot. It was the child's mother, standing for a glance at her darling.

"Speak! Why dost not speak, base-born child of pigs? Lo! I will smite thee. Speak of Mai Kali and the Noose. Lo! Bisram, bearer, be not unkind. Remember I am sick. Show me the Noose. Ai! Bisra! show it to Sonny Baba."

The liquid Urdu fell from the child's lips with quaint precision, and ended in the coaxing wail of one who knows his power.

That was unmistakable. The man's high-bred, sensitive face, which had not quivered under the parentage assigned to him by the thin, domineering voice, melted at the appeal, and the red and yellow arms seemed to close round their charge at the very suggestion of sickness. Bisram gave another deprecating glance at the tall white figure at the door, and then, from the folds of his waistcloth, took out a silk handkerchief crumpled into a ball. But a dexterous flutter left it in uncreased folds across the child's knees.

"Lo! Protector of the Poor! such is the Noose of Kali," said Bisram, deferentially.

Seen thus, the handkerchief looked larger than one would have expected: or perhaps it is more correct to say longer, for, the texture being loose like canvas, even the slight drag across the child's knees stretched the stuff lengthwise. It was of that curious Indian colour called oodah, which is not purple or crimson, but which looks as if it had been the latter and might become the former--the colour, briefly, of recently spilt blood. It looked well, however, in the soft lustrous folds lying upon the child's white dressing-gown. He smiled down at it joyfully: yet not content, since there was more to come.

"Twist it for Mai Kali. Twist it, Bisram, bearer! Ai! base-born, twist it or I will smite--"

"It is time for the Shelter of the World to take his medicine," began Bisram, interrupting the imperious little voice. "Lo! does his Honour not see the mem waiting for him?"

Sonny gave a quick glance at his mother. He knew his power there also. "I'se not goin' to take it, mum," he called decisively, "till he's twisted a' Noose. I won't--I want a' stwangle somefin' first. Tell him, mum--please. Then I'll 'waller it like a good boy."

"Do what he wants, Bisram, and then bring him here," said Sonny's mother, her eyes soft. For the child had but lately chosen the path of Life instead of the Valley of the Shadow, so even wayward footsteps along it were welcome.

"Now is it Government orders," boasted Sonny, reverting to the precisions and peremptoriness of Hindustani with a wave of his small hand. "So twist and strangle, and if thou dost it not, my father will cause hanging to come to thee."

"Huzoor!" assented Bisram, cheerfully, as he shifted his burden slightly so as to free his left hand. The next instant a purple crimson rope of a thing, circled on itself, settled down upon the neck of a big painted mud tiger, bright yellow with black stripes and fiery red eyes, which one of the native visitors had brought that morning for the magistrate's little son.

"Now the Protector of the Poor can pull," said Bisram, bearer. "It will not slip."

But Sonny's wan little face had perplexity and doubt in it. "But, Bisra, Mai Kali rides a tiger. She wouldn't stwangle it. Would she, mum? I wouldn't stwangle my pony. I'd wather stwangle the gwoom; wouldn't you, mum? I would. I'd wather like to stwangle Gamoo."

"My dear Sonny!" exclaimed his mother, looking with amused horror at the still, helpless little figure which Bisram had brought to her. "You wouldn't murder poor Gamoo, surely!"

Sonny made faces over his quinine, as if that were a matter of much more importance.

"'Ess, I would," he said, with his mouth full of sweet biscuits. "I'd stwangle him, and then Mai Kali would be pleased for a fousand years; and then I'd stwangle Ditto an' Peroo too; so she'd be pleased for a fousand fousand years--wouldn't she, Bisra?"

"Huzoor!" assented Bisram, bearer.

"My dear," said Sonny's mother, going back with a somewhat disturbed look to the room where the magistrate, Sonny's father, was busy over crabbed Sanskrit texts and bright-coloured talc pictures; for in his leisure hours he was compiling a Hindu Pantheon for the use of students, "I almost wish Bisram would not tell Sonny so many stories about the gods and goddesses. They do such horrid things."

The scholar, who in his heart nourished a hope that his son might in due time follow in his footsteps, and, perhaps, gain reputation where his father only found amusement, looked up from his books mildly.

"Gods and goddesses always do, my dear. Their morality seldom conforms to that which obtains among their worshippers. I intend to draw general attention to this anomaly. Besides, Sonny will have to learn these things anyhow when he begins Greek and Latin; he will in fact find this previous knowledge of great use. Kali, for instance, is the terrific form of Durga who, of course, corresponds to the Juno of the Greeks and Romans and the Isis of Egypt. She is also the crescent-crowned Diana, and as Parbutt the Earth-mother Ceres. Under the name of Atma, again, she is 'goddess of souls governing the three worlds,' and so equivalent to Hecate Triformis--"

"Yes! my dear," interrupted his wife, meekly. "But for all that I don't want Sonny to talk of strangling the grooms; it really doesn't sound nice. However, as Bisram is eager, now Sonny is really recovering, to get away at once for his usual leave, I won't say anything to the child. He will forget while Bisram is away, and I will give orders that the latter is not to mention the subject on his return."

Bisram himself, receiving his pay and his orders ere starting on the yearly visit to his own country, which was the only portion of his life by day or night not absolutely--without any reservation whatever--at the disposal of his employers, fully acquiesced in the mem-sahiba's dictum. The Noose of Kali was scarcely a nice game for the little master; indeed his slave would never have introduced it under ordinary circumstances. But the mem must remember that dreadful day when the Heart's-eye lay so still, caring for nothing, and the doctor-sahib had said there was nothing to be done save to coax him into looking into the restless Face of Life instead of into the restful Face of Death. That was when he, Bisram, who knew, had spoken of the Noose; and, at least, it had done the little Shelter of the World no harm.

"Harm?" echoed Sonny's mother, gently. "You have never done him harm, Bisra. Why, the doctor-sahib himself said your hand was fortunate with the child. If you had not been with him, I think--I think, Bisram--he might have died. And now I am even wondering if I am wise to let you go--"

Bisram looked up eagerly. "I must go, Huzoor--I must go without fail to-night--the year is over--" He paused abruptly, then added quietly: "The Huzoor need have no fear. The little master will do well. The Mighty One who cares for children will protect this one."

He spoke with such faith in voice and face, that Sonny's mother going back once more to the study, and finding her husband busy as usual over his Pantheon, lingered to look doubtfully at the talc pictures, and finally remark that after all the people really had a good deal of religious feeling, and actually seemed to believe in a God. Bisram, for instance, had said that Sonny was in the guardianship of One who suffered the little children-- Here her eyes filled with tears, and her voice sank.

"He meant Mata Devi, I expect, my dear," replied the scholar without looking up. "She is another form of Kali or Durga, and corresponds to Cybele or the Mater Montana--"

"He was very eager to get away, however," went on Sonny's mother, almost aggrievedly. "I really think he might have stayed a few days longer till the boy was quite himself. But devoted as he is, he is just like the rest of them--selfishly set on what they are accustomed to--"

"He put off going nearly a month though, and you know, my dear, that when he took service as Sonny's bearer, he stipulated for a fortnight's leave every spring, about a certain time, in order to perform some religious ceremonial," protested the justice.

"Well, and he has had it. Every year for five years; so he might have given it up for once. But he wouldn't. I don't believe he would, not even to save Sonny's life. However, I think the child is all right, and even if I had kept Bisram, he wouldn't have been much good, for he has been frightfully restless and hurried the last few days."

He did not seem so, however, as he stood quietly in the growing dusk at the gateless gate of the compound to look back at the house where he had left the little Shelter of the World asleep. His scarlet and yellow coat was gone, replaced by the faint coral-coloured garments of the pilgrim; he carried a network-covered pot for holy water, slung on his left wrist, and the yellow trident of Siva showed like a frown on his forehead. The thickets of flowering shrubs, the tangles of white petunias bordering the path, sent their perfume into the air; but above it rose the heavy, dead-sweet scent from a wild dhatura plant which, taking advantage of an unweeded nook by the gate, thrust its long white flowers across the pilaster; one of them indeed reaching past it, and so, seen five-pointed against the dusk beyond, looking like a slim white hand pointing the way thither.

Bisram stooped deliberately to pick it, tore it into its five segments, and placed the pieces in his bosom, muttering softly, "With heart and brain and feet, and hands and eyes, Devi, I am thy servant." Then for a second he raised himself to his full height, and stretched both his thin, fine hands--such delicately supple, strong hands--towards the house. "Sleep sound, Life of my Life," he murmured again. "Sleep sound, and have no fear. The offering will be complete, though the time is short indeed."

So, turning on his heel, he passed into the dusk, beyond the gate, whither the flower had pointed.

A fortnight later he came out of it once more, passed into his hut in the gloaming, dressed as a pilgrim, and emerged therefrom ten minutes afterwards in the red and yellow coat, with a huge white turban with a bend, as the heralds call it, across it bearing his master's crest. So altered, he slipped back into his place as if he had never left it, and setting aside the reed screen at the door of Sonny's nursery, stood within. Sonny, in his white flannel dressing-gown, was convalescent enough to be saying his prayers, kneeling on his mother's knee.

"Go on, dear," she said gently. "You can speak to Bisram afterwards."

Sonny, whose feet were less wayward, now shut his eyes again, and assumed a prayerful expression.

"--an' all kine friends, an' make me a velly good boy--yamen--O Bisra! where's the Noose?" The mother might smile, unable so far to pretend ignorance. Not so Bisram, bearer, who had his orders.

"What Noose, Shelter of the World?" he asked gravely. "Thy servant remembers none; but he hath brought the Protector of the Poor a toy."

It was only one of the many which you can buy in any Indian town for the fraction of a farthing, made of mud, straw, cane; a bit of tinsel perhaps, or tuft of cotton-wool, their sole value over and above the ingenuity and time spent in making them. But Sonny had never seen this kind before, and laughed as the snakes, made out of curled shavings, leapt and twisted. Leapt so like life that his mother drew back hastily, telling herself that the bearer had certainly a fine taste in horrors. And no doubt there would be some tale to match these. Sonny, however, seemed to know it vaguely, for a puzzled look replaced the laugh. "Yea! Bisra," he said in imperious argument, "Mai Kali had snakes and skulls too; but I like the Noose best. Why didst not bring it back, son of an owl?"

The man never moved a muscle. "The little master mistakes," he replied calmly. "It was some others who tied the Noose. Not this dustlike one. He is but the Protector of the Poor's bearer, Bisram."

A year is an eternity to the memory of a child. Indeed before a twelfth of one was over Sonny had ceased from suddenly, irrelevantly asking, "O Bisra! where is the Noose? Why didst not bring it back, son of an owl?" The thought seemed to have passed from his life altogether. From Bisram also, as he tended the child night and day, day and night, unremittingly, contentedly.

So the spring of the year returned, and with it, by one of those mysterious coincidences beyond classification, came the old desire. It came suddenly--irrelevantly it seemed to Sonny's parents--during a brief attack of fever which the changing season brought to the boy. But Bisram, bearer, hearing the little fretful wail, "O Bisra, where is the Noose? I want the Noose," stood silent for a moment with a scared look in his eyes, then turned them in quick appeal to his mistress, as if to ask leave for something. But she was silent also, so the old formula came gently--

"What Noose, Shelter of the World?"

That evening, however, when Harry--as his mother vainly strove to call him, now that, as she used to tell the boy fondly, he was a man and had had his curls cut--had fallen into the heavy sleep which brings so little relief, the bearer came into the study and asked for his usual yearly leave. A week might do, but leave he must have at once. True, the year was not up, but the master would doubtless remember that his slave had deferred going at the proper season last time because of Harry-sahib's illness (Bisram, punctilious to the least order, never forgot the child's new dignity). He did not want to lose the right season again; and so, if he went now, at once, even for a week, he would be back in time even if Harry-sahib were to be ill as he was last year, which Heaven forbid!

He was quite calm, but there was an almost pathetic entreaty in his dark eyes, so soft, so dark, that looking into them, one seemed to see nothing save soft darkness.

"Go!" commented Sonny's mother, when, moved by a vague feeling that Bisram meant well, his master handed on his request to the real authority. "Certainly not. I wonder he has the face to ask for leave when Sonny--I mean Harry--is down with fever. Not that it is anything, the doctor says, but a passing attack. Still, I am not going to run any risks with a strange servant. Go, indeed! It shows what his pretended devotion is worth--"

"Surely, my dear, he is devoted--"

"Oh, very! in his way. But really you spoil Bisra, Edward. Just because he can tell you things about those horrid gods and goddesses. Do you know, I really think of getting an English nurse for the child until I have--until I have to take him home," interrupted his wife, her initial sharpness of tone softening over the inevitable certainty of separation which clouds Indian motherhood. "It cannot be right to let him live in such an atmosphere of superstition and ignorance."

The magistrate, who was leaving the room, had paused at her remark about the nurse as he might have paused before a painful scene. "By Jove!" he murmured as if to himself, "I believe it would break the man's heart. I often wonder what on earth he'll do when the child has--to go home."

The inevitable lent a tremor to the father's voice also. But Bisram, despite the former's belief, spoke of the same separation quite calmly when, the very next morning the doctor coming early, found his little patient in the verandah getting the advantage of the fresh, bright air in Bisra's arms.

"When," asked the latter, calmly, but with that slow pathetic anxiety in his eyes, "was Harry-sahib going across the black water?"

"You think he ought to go?" said the doctor. "Why?"

"This slave does not think; he knows! The little master must go--go at once," replied the man, still calmly, though he held the child to him with a visibly closer strain. "The Huzoor himself knows how bad Hindustan is for the little ones. He must go, Huzoor, before he gets worse."

"But he is not going to get worse," said the doctor, kindly. "He is better already, and if he has another bout of fever his mother has promised to take him to the hills, so don't distress yourself."

Bisram's dark eyes looked wistfully into the doctor's.

"The hills? That would be worse. That would be nearer the evil. He must go far from Hindustan at once, Huzoor; and if you tell the mem this she will go--she will not mind."

"And you, Bisra?" asked the doctor, curiously.

The man's eyes flinched, but he never stirred a muscle under the blow.

"I am only the little master's bearer, Huzoor. He will not need one much longer: he grows big."

"It is only because he is in a hurry to get away himself, I verily believe," said Sonny's mother, when the doctor, also vaguely impressed with something in the man's appeal, told her of it. "You can't fathom these people. Oh! I know he wouldn't abate one atom of his care, and it is simply wonderful. All the same, I believe that just now he would be glad to be rid of the necessity for it, since it clashes with some of his religious notions. That's it, depend upon it. And I mean to let him go as soon as Sonny--I mean Harry--is better; and he really is better to-day, isn't he?"

"Much better. And you may be right; only it's always impossible to lay down the law for men like Bisra. Those high-caste hill Brahmins are a law unto themselves. However, I expect to find the boy quite cool to-morrow." He was not, however, and more than once, as he lay in Bisra's arms, the little fretful wail rose between sleeping and waking. "Where's the Noose, Bisra? I want the Noose." And Bisra would pause as if waiting for a promise of wayward life in threat or abuse, and when neither came would turn a wistful appeal to authority, and when it was silent say--

"What Noose, Shelter of the World?"

But in the dead of night a day or two later, when even maternal authority slept for a brief spell, Bisra's answer to the request, which came almost incoherently from the child's dry lips, was different.

Then he stood bent over the boy's cot in the attitude of a suppliant, and his joined petitioning hands trembled.

"Why dost ask it, Kali ma?" he whispered rapidly. "Lo! have I not served thee? Would I not serve thee now if I could? But I have promised this, and they will not let me go for the other. Lo! Kali ma! be merciful and ask no more, and when the child has gone away, I will serve thee all the years--yea! every day of all the years."

There was no passion, no excitement in his face or voice; only that pathetic appeal which passed into a murmured lullaby as the restless little sleeper turned on his pillow with a sigh of greater content.

"Better again this morning," was the doctor's verdict, with the rider that Bisram himself stood in need of a little rest. The man smiled faintly when his mistress replied that it would be her turn that night; though, to say sooth, Harry certainly did seem to improve when she slept.

"Perhaps Bisram works charms," remarked the doctor, thoughtlessly; whereat she frowned.

Charms or no charms, the boy was certainly worse next morning, and that despite the fact that Bisram, who had steadily refused to go further than the verandah, had spent the night huddled up outside the threshold, within which his mistress refused to allow him to come. He needed rest, she said, and though she could not compel him to take it, he should at least not work.

"You had better let him have his own way to-night," said the doctor at his evening visit. "The child gets on better, and you are fresher for the day's nursing. Those thin, delicate-looking natives are very wiry, and if the man won't rest, he won't, and that's an end of it."

He spoke cheerfully; but as he was getting into his dogcart he saw Bisram at his elbow. "The doctor-sahib thinks the little master very ill to-night?" he asked quietly.

"So ill that you must do your very best for him to-night. If any one can pull him through, you can, remember that."

"Huzoor!" said Bisram, submissively.

It was a very dark night; so dark that the rushlight in Sonny's room seemed almost brilliant from the verandah. Looking thence you could see the child's cot, one of its side rails removed, and in its place, as it were, the protection of Bisram's crouching figure. He did not touch the cot; he crouched beside it with clasped hands hanging over his knees, and dark eyes staring hard into the darkness as if waiting and listening.

So he sate, his clasped hands loosening, his eyes growing softer as the hours passed, bringing nothing but half-conscious sleep, half-conscious wakening to the child. Until suddenly, irrelevantly, just on the border-land of night and day, the fretful wail rose upon the silence loudly, insistently--

"Where is the Noose, Bisra? I want it. O Bisram, bearer, bring the Noose, and strangle something."

The slackness, the dreaminess left the man's hands and eyes. He stood up blindly, desperately to face these last words; the words for which he had been listening. Yet there was still the same pathetic self-control as he stretched his hands out over the sleeping child.

"Lo! Kali ma," he muttered, "have I not served thee as ever, despite the child. Have I set him before thee? Nay! thou knowest I have risked life itself to have thy tale of offering complete when I was hindered. Thou didst not suffer. Wilt not wait for once? Wilt not wait one little while?"

His voice, sinking in its entreaty, ended in silence. But only for a second. Then the fretful wail began again.

"The Noose, Bisra! Be not unkind. Remember I am ill. O Bisra! I want you to strangle something for me--"

Bisra gave a faint sob; then joined his outstretched hands.

"Huzoor! so be it! the Noose shall find a victim. Yea, Shelter of the World, Bisra will strangle something. Sleep in peace!"

There was no sound in the room after that save the little contented sigh in which restlessness finds rest.

Outside, the shiver of the cicalas seemed to count the seconds, but inside the hours seemed to pass unnoticed as Bisra sate beside the cot, his hands listless, his eyes dreamy. There was nothing to wait for now, nothing to fear. That which had to come had come.

So with the first glint of light, a stealthy step glided in, and an anxious voice whispered--

"How is it with the child, Bisra?"

"It is well!" he whispered back, rising rather stiffly. "He hath slept since the darkest hour. He will sleep on."

The mother, peering carefully for a glimpse of the child's face, smiled at what she saw.

"He sleeps, indeed. Thou hast done well, Bisra!"

He made no answer. But ere he left the room, his night-watch being over, he paused to touch the foot-rail of the cot with both hands and so salaam, as those do who leave the presence.

Sonny was still sleeping when his father, entering his study with a lighter heart, found a stranger, as he thought, awaiting him there. It was a man, naked save for a waistcloth, lean, sinewy, lithe; the head was clean-shaven, save for the Brahminical tuft, and the face was disfigured by the weird caste marks of extreme fanaticism.

"Who--?" he began, shrinking involuntarily from one who might well be dangerous.

"It is Bisra, Huzoor" said a familiar voice, gently. "Bisra, the child-bearer. Bisra, the servant of Kali also. Lo! here is Her Noose." As he spoke he held out the crimson-scarlet handkerchief twisted to a rope, and coiled in his curved palms like a snake. "The master, being learned, will know the Noose and its meaning. It hath brought Her many a blood-offering, Huzoor. Many and many every year without fail. And it will not fail this year either. It will bring Her the blood of Her servant, the blood of Bisram the Strangler."

"Bisram the Strangler!" echoed the magistrate, stupidly, as the even, monotonous voice ceased. Then he sate down helplessly in his chair. In truth he knew too much of the mystery of India to be quite incredulous.

Yet two hours after, when with the help of the police-officer he had been cross-questioning Bisra upon his confession, he told himself as helplessly that it was incredible--the man must be mad. He had been born to strangle, he said, and had strangled to keep Kali ma content. That was necessary when you were born Her servant, especially when you had children. Perhaps he had let the little Shelter of the World creep too close to his heart, though he had striven to be just. At any rate Kali ma had become jealous. He had not known this, at first, or he would never have given the mistress that promise about the Noose, for if it had been in Harry-sahib's hands Devi would never have sought his life. She always protected those with the Noose--they never came to harm--unless-- He had paused there, and then asked quickly if he had not said enough? Did they want him to tell any more! He could not give them the names of the victims, of course, not knowing them; but they were many--very many.

"There is nothing against him but his own story," said the magistrate, fighting against his growing conviction that the man spoke truth. "I can't commit him to the sessions on that."

"There is something more, I think," replied the police-officer, reluctantly. "Don't you remember that man who was found dead in a railway carriage about this time last year? He had an up-country ticket on him, and as this was out of the beat of Stranglers, no inquiry was made here. It was just about this time, and--and Bisram says he was in a hurry because the year was nearly up. He had been nursing the boy."

The boy's father, leaning with his head on his hand, groaned.

But Bisra was quite cheerful. He looked a little anxious, however, when two days after he was brought up formally to be committed for trial. There was still nothing definite against him save his own confession and the coincidence of the strangled man in the railway carriage. But opinion was dead against him amongst his countrymen. Of course he was one of Kali's Stranglers. Did he not look one? Was he not born one? So how could he help being one? The argument brought no consolation to Sonny's father. But Bisram again was cheerful. He stood patiently between two yellow-legged policemen and told his tale at length, as if anxious to incriminate himself as much as possible, anxious that there should be no mistake. And when all the mysterious intricacies of charges and papers were over, and the two policemen nudged him to make place for other criminals, with a friendly "Come along, brother," he paused a moment with handcuffed, petitioning hands to ask how soon he was to be hanged.

The magistrate, leaning his head on his hand, made no answer. He knew what the question meant, and could not. The thought of his little son came between him and the truth; namely, that Bisra's sacrifice must wait the law's pleasure.

The doctor, too, in charge of the gaol where Bisra awaited trial, had not the heart to tell the truth. Every day when on his rounds he looked into the cell, like a wild beast's cage, where Bisra, being a Strangler, and therefore dangerous to life, was confined alone, he answered the question which the tall, naked figure stood up at his entrance to ask in the same words. Harry-sahib was better, and as for the hanging, that would come soon enough, never fear. Yet every day the pathetic, self-controlled eagerness on the man's face struck him with a sense of physical pain, and left him helpless before his own pity.

Until a day came--after not many days--when with a face sad from the sight of bitter grief that he could understand, the sense of his absolute helplessness before the mystery of this man's nature made the doctor feel inclined to throw pity to the winds and fall back on sheer common sense. After all the man was a murderer; and if he had been fond of the child--what then? Such criminals were often men of strong affections.

Yet once again, the sight of the submissive, salaaming figure, the sound of the wistful yet calm voice made him answer as usual. The child was better. The hanging would doubtless come ere long.

For once, however, Bisram did not accept the reply as final.

"The Huzoor means that it will not come today?" he asked quietly.

The doctor raised his eyebrows. "To-day? What made you think of to-day? Certainly not. There's no chance of it."

But he was wrong. Two hours afterwards the gaol overseer sent for him in a hurry, because Bisram had completed his sacrifice by strangling himself in his cell with his waistcloth. What else could he do, seeing that it was the last day of the year during which the propitiation of a sacrifice kept Kali ma from revenge?

"Poor devil!" said the doctor, as he stood up after his useless examination. "I'm glad now I didn't tell him the child was dead."

THE HALL OF AUDIENCE

"This, gentlemen and respected sirs," said the blatant specimen of new India whom my friend Robbins had insisted on having as a guide to a ruined Rajput town, "is Hall of Common Audience, in more colloquial phrase, Court of Justice, built two, ought, six before Christ B.C. by Great Asoka, mighty monarch of then united Hindustan, full of Manu wisdoms, and sacred Veda occultations--"

Then I gave in. "For God's sake, Robbins," I said, "take away that fool or I shall kill him. A man who be-plasters even the Deity with university degrees is intolerable here."

Robbins gave me that look of condoling forbearance which had nearly driven me mad for a week and beguiled the babee away promptly, as if I had been a fractious child. I was, however, only a jilted man. A badly jilted man, whose jilting was of the kind which becomes almost comic from sheer excess of tragedy. To be brief, I had gone down on ten days' leave to Bombay to meet and marry the girl to whom I had been engaged for two years. Robbins, who was coming out in the same ship with her, was to have been best man. We had certainly been in love with each other when we last met; at least, if I was not, I have never been in love at all. If she was not, then I have never seen a girl in love. I wish to be absolutely fair in the matter, so I will confess that, as I went to meet her, I knew myself to be less emotional than I had been two years before. I had even vague qualms as to whether this sort of thing was quite wise. I was, to put it curtly, in the mental condition in which every man about to marry a fiancée whom he has not seen for two years must be. Presumably her mental condition was similar. But whereas I had to spend the three weeks preceding the irrevocable step in a jungle station where any novelty must necessarily be attractive, she spent it in an environment which gave her endless opportunities of seeing other men, and comparing them with me, and her ideal. The result being that she found she was in love with some one else. Being frank and honourable she told me the truth, with a kind of blank dismay. She did not offer to fulfil her engagement. How could she? when from the beginning to the end, from her first confession that I was her ideal, to her last letter, then in my breast pocket, the whole fabric of our future lives had been built by us on our belief in the permanence of this selfsame love of ours. We could only look in each other's eyes and wonder what was the matter with the foundations of our round world.

Robbins said I behaved splendidly. In truth I was too much stunned at first to realise what it actually meant, and then a certain contempt for them both, especially for the man who came and offered me a shot at him, made me magnanimous. I merely offered in my turn to be best man at the wedding, and was only deterred from doing so by the feeling that it was theatrical, and by Robbins suggesting that I had better have some ice on the back of my head. He meant well, did Robbins, and insisted on accompanying me on what was to have been my wedding tour; for I had my ten days' leave, and I was in no hurry to go back to the gossiping little station where the bungalow I had furnished for her lay waiting a mistress.

Yes! Robbins meant well, and by sheer counter-irritation kept me going. There was a honeymoon off the same ship which came up country with us stage by stage, and the efforts Robbins made to prevent me from seeing its bliss were pathetically comic. The bride and bridegroom wore neat, new, brown-leather shoes, and she had a new brown-leather handbag, just like one which I had carried for my fiancée before she explained the situation. As I sate opposite them I wondered savagely if my face had worn the idiotic smirk of sheer content visible on the man's, and I tucked my own new brown shoes under the seat. They looked so forlorn beside Robbins' big boots. For all that, I combated all condemnation of the delinquents for the first three days. The only honourable theory of marriage being that based upon a mutual and romantic love, it would be unjust because of a single mistake, to blame any one for acting in accordance with a belief which had made Englishmen and Englishwomen what, thank God, they were. In fact I was badly, brutally moral, until, coming out into the hotel verandah during one of our rests by the way, I happened on the bride and bridegroom looking at the moon.

Then the primeval desire to murder rose up, seized me, and held me. Why hadn't I taken the scoundrel's offer and killed him? I was a good shot; and Robbins, as an army doctor, an excellent second. Then I could have married the bride-widow, or spurned her, as I preferred.

There was really, I told myself, no logical foothold between this and being best man. If marriage was an affair of love, these two were right, and the part designed for me by Providence obviously that of second fiddle. If not, they were wrong, and I had a right to claim redress. To shilly-shally, feeling at once hurt and magnanimous, was absurd. I had lain awake, afterwards, debating half in jest, half in earnest, whether I should send Robbins back to the wedding with my cartel, or go myself with a set of silver salt-cellars in a velvet case. But underneath my jest and earnest lay a keen yet vague desire to understand, to find some solid spot on which to rest. I had still been debating the question, when, to please Robbins, who liked me to have no time for thought, we had driven out next morning to these ruins. The country through which we drove had been the ordinary Rajputana country; flat--or nearly so--dry, rocky. Then we had come to a spiky, spiny, roach-back hillock, over which the dead town sprawled, half buried in its own dust, half lost in the sunshine.

I had been watching Robbins' big boots all the way, so I was in a bad temper. Apart from other causes, however, I had some excuse for threatening to kill the guide. For the Hall of Audience to which we had just climbed was, briefly, one of those places which make some of us nineteenth-century folk remember the warning given long ago to an eager reformer to take the shoes from off his feet, since the ground whereon he stood had already been made holy by other hands than his. Yet it was plain almost to bareness. Devoid utterly of any of that ornamentation telling of human hopes and fears, likings, dislikings, and ideals, which men all over the world strive wistfully, hopelessly, to make permanent by carving them in stone. But it was a miracle of light and shade, with its triple ranks of square stone columns--rose-coloured in the sunshine about their feet, blood red in the gloom of arches about their heads--standing like sentinels round a Holy of Holies which was roofed only by the open sky, and floored level to the marble pavement surrounding the still pool, with clear, cool water. And through the outer arches, on all sides, showed that indefinite glare, and dust, and haze, faintly yellow, faintly purple--that burden and heat of the Eastern day in which millions are born, and toil, and die--which seems to swallow up the real India and hide so much of it from Western eyes.

I had just got so far in my appreciation of the indefinable charm of the place, when Robbins returned to stand beside me and look down on the brimming water.

"Curious!" he said, "at the top of a hill like this. I wonder what's the reason of it?"

"Those of uncultivated mind, sirs," replied New India, promptly, "hold it by reason of Grace-of-God. We who through merciful master's aid have acquired hydraulics prefer system of secret syphons; though the latter belief is optional."

"If that man remains here," I remarked aside to Robbins, "I refuse to be held responsible for my actions. Take him away and see the rest of the ruins. I am going to stop here--this is enough for me."

They went off together, the guide babbling of modern equity. The last words I heard were a quotation: "Boots not to say, O Justice! what asperities have not been committed in Thy name!"

Perhaps. No doubt dreadful things had been done even in this Hall of Audience, though it lay very still now; very silent in the sunshine.

I sate down on the base of a sentinel column and looked at the sky, mirrored at my feet, wondering what other things the water had seen.

So by degrees the question seemed to clamour at me. What had been done there? What was it? What gave the place its charm for me? For it had a charm, an infinite charm.

I gave an impatient shrug of my shoulders at the sound of footsteps. Robbins need not surely watch me as if he feared I might commit suicide; though the water certainly looked inviting. But it was not Robbins. It was an old man with a shaven head, and a very clean saffron-coloured cloth, coming through the pillared ranks with a brass poojah basket like a big cruet-stand in his hand. My mind misgave me instantly. He was far too clean for a real ascetic, and there was a bogus air about him as of one expecting tourists and their alms. In addition he came straight towards me, and squatting down by the edge, within reach absolutely of my contaminating shadow, began to mutter prayers.

I rose disgusted; but my first movement showed me I was at any rate partly mistaken, for he turned his head, startled at the sound. Then I saw he could not have known I was there, for he was blind. I saw also that the basket which he had set down contained nothing but the star-like flowers of the wild jasmine.

"Whom are you going to worship?" I asked instantly, for I was a connoisseur in ceremonies, having spent years of study over the ancient cults of India.

He stood up instantly and salaamed, recognising the accent of the master. "No one, Huzoor," he replied. "I am only going to make Mother tma her crown."

"tma!" I echoed. "Who was she?"

A half-puzzled, half-cunning look came to his face. "It is a long story, Huzoor; but if the Cherisher of the Poor will give his slave a rupee--"

Returning to my first impression of him, I was about to move away, when he added plaintively: "I tell it better than the baboo, Huzoor, but now-a-days he comes with the sahibs. So my stomach is often empty. May God silence his tongue!"

The desire pleased me. It matched my own. And as I paused, I noticed that the old man, who had squatted down again, had begun to thread the jasmine flowers on some link which was invisible from where I stood.

"What are you using to thread the flowers?" I asked curiously.

"A woman's hair, Huzoor. It is always the hair of a woman who has died, but whose child has lived, that is used for Mai tma's crown. Shall I tell the story, Huzoor?"

"Was she beautiful?" I asked irrelevantly, why I know not.

"I do not know, Huzoor," he replied. "Am I not blind?"

The answer struck me as irrelevant also, but I went on idly, feeling, in truth, but small interest in what I was convinced must be some hackneyed tale I had heard a hundred times before, since I was given to the hearing of tales.

"Is it about this place?" I asked.

He shook his head again. "I do not know, Huzoor. It is about Mai tma. Shall I tell the story?"

"You seem to know very little about the story, I must say. How do you know it is about tma?"

He smiled broadly. "It is about Mai tma, sure enough. The Huzoor will see that if he lets me tell the tale."

I clinked a rupee down among the jasmine flowers and bid him fire away, and be quick about it.

He began instantly, plunging without any preface into a curiously rhythmed chant, the very first line of which gave pathetic answer to my irrelevant question, and at the same time showed the cause of the old man's ignorance. It ran thus:--

"O world which she has left, forget not she was fair."

Vain appeal when made in the oldest known form of Arya-Pali--the dialect in which the edicts of Asoka are carved--and of which not one man in ten million, even in India, knows the very existence. I happened to be one of the few, and though at the time I could naturally only gather the general outline of the chant, I subsequently took it down word for word from the old man's lips. Some passages still remain obscure; there are yawning gaps in the narrative, but taking it all in all, it is a singularly clear bit of tradition, preserved, as it were, by the complete ignorance of those who passed the words from lip to lip. Roughly translated, it runs thus:--

"O world she left, forget not she was fair; so very fair. Her small kind face so kind. Straight to the eyes it looked, then smiled or frowned. About her slender throat were gold-blue stones. Gold at her wrists; the gold hem of her gown slid like a snake along the marble floor, coiled like a snake upon the water's edge.

"By night she asked the stars, by day the sun, what they would have her do.

"I was her servant sitting at her door,

Watching her small feet kiss the marble floor;

Reading the water mirror's heaven-learnt lore.

"O world she left, remember she was Queen!

"For tma ruled a queen ere she was born, her widowed mother wasting nine long months to give her life ere following the King.

"O tma mata! strike thy servant blind,

He and his sons for ever, lest they find

Thy face within the crown their fingers bind.

"Hark! how her voice comes echoing through the Hall, 'Who hath a claim to-day 'gainst me or mine?' (There was a dainty jewel at her breast, kept time in sparkles to her lightest word.)

"'Who hath a claim'--her small, kind face so wise!

"O tma mata! strike thy servant blind,

He and his sons for ever!"

* * * * *

"See! how her soft feet kiss the marble floor! tma, the girl-queen, dancing to herself, close to the pool; the jasmine in her hair falling to fit the rhythm of her feet, and scent their warm life with the scent of death, or sail away upon the water's breast like mirrored stars. Oh, bind from them a crown; a crown for tma mata, who is kind--for tma, who hath struck her servant blind."

* * * * *

"Hark! how her voice comes whispering in my ear: 'I see naught but my own face in the deep. No other face but this--my face alone. And there are always stars about my head, or else the sun. Read me the riddle quick.' (There was a tremor in her perfumed hair which matched the tremor of her perfumed breath.) 'tma is queen,' I said; 'the stars, the sun, weave crowns as I do. Wear them. Oh! my queen.'

"O tma mata! rightly am I blind,

Blind was I then in heart and soul and mind.

"Hark! how her voice comes echoing through the Hall. (The cold blue stones about her slender waist clipped all her purple robe to long straight folds.) 'Go tell your masters, tma needs no King. She is the Queen, her son shall be the King, and not the son to Kings of other lands. So if they seek for beauty, seek not mine--it is not mine to give--it is my son's! My son the gods will send me ere I die.'

"O tma mata! strike thy servant blind,

He and his sons for ever, lest they find

Thy face within the crown their fingers bind.

"See! how her slim hand grasps the marble throne. See! how her firm feet grip the marble step! Hark how her voice rings clear with angry scorn. (There was a loose gold circlet on her wrist, slid to soft resting as she raised her arm.) 'Oh! shame to brawl like dogs about a bone! Cowards to kill because a woman's fair. Can they not take the promise of a Queen? Go! bid your masters bind fair sons in peace. tma will choose a father for her King--she needs no lover.'

"O tma mata! strike thy servant dead.

"'Hush!'--just a whisper on the water's edge, a faint glow from the sacred censer's fire. 'What dost thou see, my friend, down in the deep? There in the circle of the sacred flowers?' (The incense cloud rose white upon the dark, and hid us from each other, hid all things save water and our hands--her hands in mine clasped in the cold clear pool.) 'Naught, oh my Queen! Naught but thy face--thy face--beside mine own.' (Cold was the water, cold her little hand, cold was her voice.) 'Nay! more than that,' she said, 'thou dost forget the stars about my head.'

"O tma mata! strike thy servant blind,

For being blind in heart and soul and mind.

"Hark! how her voice goes echoing through the Hall. 'Go, bid your masters sheathe their swords at once, nor spill men's blood because a woman's fair. For I have chosen. I will wed with none, but since God sends the children to the world and asks no questions how they come or why, I will take him as father to my King. The law allows adoption; be it so. From out God's children I have bought a son to be your King and mine. Lo! here he stands.' (Her arm about the sturdy, dimpled limbs drew the child closer to the cold blue stones clipping her purple robe to long, straight folds.) 'Some woman bore him--fair and strong and bold--bore him by God's decree to be a son. That is enough for me who am your Queen. Go, tell the brawlers, tma hath her King.' (So stooping, whispered softly to the boy, who straightway lisped to order parrot-wise.) 'Who hath a claim to-day 'gainst me or mine? Who hath a claim?' And as of old came answer: 'None, O King.'

"None said they all, and so I held my tongue.

O tma mata! shall I ever find

Thy kind, wise face? Oh! wherefore am I blind?

* * * * *

"Hark! how her voice breaks in upon the child's. A claim at last.

"So they--these kings--have dared

To kill my people--nay! not mine--my son's!

Have they no shame--no pity for the poor?

"The gold hem round her robe's straight virgin folds coiled like a snake asleep upon the floor, the sparkling jewel fastened on her breast shone bright and steady as a distant star.

"There was no tremor in her perfumed hair, there was no quiver in her perfumed breath; the cold blue stones about her throat and waist, the loose gold circlet on her slender wrist, the jasmine-blossom chaplet in her hair, looked as though carved in stone, so still she stood before the dead man on the marble floor.

"His red blood crept in curves to find her feet and clasp them in a claim for vengeance due, while those around cried 'Justice from the King!'

"Until she smiled--her small, kind face so wise, and her clear voice came echoing through the Hall. 'Vengeance is mine,' she said, 'and not the King's. Send forth no army, spill no blood for me. Search not the water-mirror for a sign. I know the answer of the sun and stars. So send our heralds out, and bid these Kings come as Kings should, and not as murderers to plead their cause before the King, my son. Come with all state as to a wedding feast, come with all hope as bridegrooms to the bride. My son shall choose my lover, so prepare all things in order--music, feasting, flowers.' (Then turned to where I stood, and said aside: 'Forget not thou to make a jasmine crown.')

"O tma mata! wherefore was I blind?

Did I not know how wise thou wert, how kind,

How cold thy hand, how warm the heart behind?

"Fair, strong, and bold he stood, the little King; the noonday sun above the child's bare head scarce cast a shadow on his small, bare feet, standing so straight beside the water's edge, where, half afloat upon the clear, still depths, a small round raft of jasmine-blossoms lay ready to give the omen.

"Heaped so high, so piled with little scented stars, that I--her servant with the crown she had bespoke--stood wondering what need there was of all. And round about the mirror-pool in rank sat tma's lovers waiting the decree.

"Till suddenly the baby raised his hand. (There was a loose gold circlet on his wrist, which smote him on the breast as it fell back, making him wince, so all too large it was.) But the child bit his lip and took no heed, knowing his kingly part right royally; so, parrot-wise, he lisped the ordered words: 'My mother tma hath no need for love; since she hath mine. She hath no need, my lords, for you as lovers, but she sends by me, as sister sends her brothers, that which sure should heal the strife and make you brothers too.'

"So at the last he stooped, and with a push sent the flower-raft afloat upon the pool, dipping and dancing on the waves it made, so that the loose, white blossoms of the pile floated to drift like stars upon the depths, leaving what lay beneath them clear and cold.

"O tma mata! why was I not blind?

Thy face, thy face was there in flowers enshrined!

Thy cold dead face, with cold dead flowers entwined.

* * * * *

"O world she left! to bring it peace not war.

O world she left, forget not she was fair,

So very fair. The jasmine in her hair

And round her kind, wise face; about her throat

The cold blue stones, and for her queenly crown

The sunlight in the water--like the stars.

"O tma mata! strike thy servant blind,

He and his sons for ever, lest they find

Thy face within the wreath their fingers bind."

* * * * *

The old man's song ceased, but he went on without a pause. "The Huzoor will hear that it is all about tma. Her name is there always."

He had finished stringing the flowers also, and now with a deft hand set the fragile garland--strung like a daisy chain upon a dead woman's hair and then tied to a circle--afloat upon the water, where it drifted idly, each separate flower separate, and keeping its appointed place.

A crown of scented stars!

I roused myself to answer. "Undoubtedly it is all about tma; but you have not told me why you weave the crown?"

"It is always woven, Huzoor," he replied. "Our family belongs to the place, and as one son is always blind, he stays at home--since he cannot earn money at other trades, Huzoor--and makes Mai tma's crown as his fathers did."

"One son is always blind?" I echoed curiously.

"Always, Huzoor. It is ever so. One is blind in each generation, so he makes Mai tma's crown."

He and his sons for ever! a strange coincidence truly.

"Then no one has ever seen her face 'within the wreath their fingers twine'?" I asked, quoting the words involuntarily and forgetting that he could not understand them. He answered the first part of the sentence.

"How could that be, Huzoor, seeing we are always blind?"

True. But if one was not blind? My thought was interrupted by Robbins' voice from behind.

"Hope you haven't found it long, old chap; but the baboo really knows a lot about Asoka. Fine old beggar he must have been. And then he has got a chant about some female called tma who had a lot of lovers, don't you know." Robbins pulled himself up hastily, and, to cover his confusion, protested that it was just the sort of unintelligible gibberish which interested me, and thereupon bade the baboo give me a specimen.

Before I could stop him, the brute had got well into the first line; but even in my wrath I was relieved to find that it was indeed absolutely unintelligible. New India evidently did not understand the old. I came to this conclusion before I got my fingers, as gently as I could, inside his rainbow-hued comforter and choked him off.

"I cannot help it, Robbins," I said as I tendered the baboo five rupees as hush-money. "If you knew all you would excuse me."

Robbins gave me one of his most sympathetic looks and said he quite understood.

Did he? Did I? I asked myself that question over and over again, until in the dead of the night I could ask it no longer. The desire for an answer grew too strong.

It was still night when I stood once more beside the water's edge. The moon had paled the red ranks of the sentinel pillars, the dust and heat and burden of the day was gone. All things were clear and flooded with cool, quiet, passionless light. And on the water lay the crown of starry flowers. It had drifted close to the edge, at the extreme end of the pool, beside a square projection in the marble floor, whence you could look clear into the depths. No doubt the place of divination. I went over to it moved by an irresistible impulse, and, kneeling down, thrust my hand into the cool water.

Was it fancy, or did I feel a cold, soft hand in mine? Was it a passing dizziness, or did a white, scented vapour close round me like a cloud, hiding all things save the water framed in that crown of jasmine?

tma! Mai tma!!

* * * * *

There was no need so far as I am concerned for the appeal--

"Forget not she was fair."

I have never forgotten it, though it is years since I saw, or fancied I saw, her face in the water.

But I have forgotten other things. Indeed, I forgot them so speedily that I saw poor old Robbins was quite puzzled and hurt in his feelings. So, before my wedding tour came to an end, I thought it kinder to give him something definite as an excuse for my cheerfulness. I told him, therefore, that I had fallen in love with some one else.

He gave a low whistle, said, "By Jove!" then added heartily, "Upon my soul, old chap, I believe it's the wisest thing you can do."

Perhaps it was. But I am not yet married. I am waiting for a woman who does not want a lover.

IN A FOG

A great flock of fleecy white clouds were browsing up the steep hillside like sheep, and hiding part of the great map of India which lay spread out five thousand feet below one of the isolated peaks which rise, in sheer masses of granite, from the dusty deserts of Rajputana.

Even to their dustiness, however, had come a faint tinting of green, since the seasonal rains had begun. For the moment, nevertheless, the incessant deluge had ceased, giving place to one of those brilliantly fine monsoon days--fine with the fineness of gentian skies, and snowdrift clouds, which remind Indian exiles of the cold, crisp North.

But already these same clouds were losing their lightness and beginning to sink earthwards; sure sign that the break in the rains was at an end. Still here, in the little station beside the lake, which looks as if the least tilt would make it brim over and send it rolling like quicksilver to the sun-dry plains below, the sky was all the clearer because of the steady increase of those fleecy flocks among the glens and ravines which spread outwards, downwards, ray-like, star-shaped, from the summit.

The increase was so steady that, after a time, the flocks coalesced, and the likeness passed into that of a rolling sea, through whose waves the knolls and peaks rose like islands; until the whole scene, lake and all, showed as a clustered coral reef shows in the Pacific Ocean--still, dream-like, peaceful utterly.

There was no peace, however, on the face of the Englishman in undress uniform who was sitting at an office table in the verandah of a thatched bungalow, which, fenced in perfunctorily from a sheer precipice on three sides by a frail trellis of bamboo solidified by morning glories, was perched above the now unseen levels below.

"If I could get reliable information," he muttered irritably, "I could be prepared. But I can hear nothing of the relief columns, and it is quite impossible for me to predicate the movements of the mutineers; yet without this it is difficult to know how to receive them."

His voice rose as he went on, for a yawn and a stir from a lounge-chair set in the shade, told him he had a listener.

"Not the laste bit in loife, me dear bhoy," came with the yawn. "Sure we've got to kill them somehow."

The first speaker looked up angrily from the map he was studying.

"Perhaps if I were only directly responsible for fifteen convalescents, as you are, Tiernay, I should be content to--to be in a fog. But I am the Brigade Major, and in the absence on duty of the commanding officer, and, I regret to say, all but a mere handful of native troops, I am responsible for the safety of a hundred and thirty-five helpless women and children--their lives and deaths--"

He was interrupted by the mixed sound of a laugh and the finishing of some brandy and water over which Dr. Tiernay had evidently been snoozing.

"Divvle a bit. Loife and death's my business from wan year's end to the other. There's responsibility for yez. And I kill as many as I cure, as all we pill-boxes do. Sure we haven't a fair chance, for a man keeps well without a doctor. It's when he thinks of dyin' he comes to us--an' nine toimes out of ten we can't help him. For talk of bein' in a fog! Be jabers! it's nothing to the British Pharmacop?ia. When I write a prescription I always put D.V., weather permitting, at the tail of it."

The Brigade Major looked at the dishevelled, lazy figure, so different from his own, distastefully.

"Well, I prefer a clearer conception of my line of treatment. Now if this portion of the rebels, which, there seems little doubt, are making for us here"--his finger followed a red line he had marked, "elect to proceed--"

"Elect, is it?" interrupted the doctor. "Sure they won't elect to do anything. It will come to them widout their knowing how, like fayver or catarrh. An' it's no manner of use beginning to physic a patient till ye know what disease fancies him. So lave off wid worrying, me dear bhoy, and just get out the salts and senna--"

"Salts and senna!" echoed the Brigade Major, angrily. "Really, Tiernay, considering you are the only other man in the place--for I don't count your miserable convalescents, of course, and my handful of natives is more an anxiety than a help--I do think you might talk sense."

Dr. Tiernay rose, yawned, and walked over to the office table, a tall, lank figure with a reckless, whimsical face, alert now to the uttermost.

"An' isn't it sinse? Salts and senna is what's generally wanted to begin with. Well, I've collected every lethal weapon I can lay hands on, including the dintistry case and the horse-pistols with which me grand-uncle, Macturk of Turksville, shot his wife's brother; so me salts and senna's ready. And, by the Lord, I'll exhibit it too whin the patient comes along--trust Micky Tiernay for that. But till he does"--here his face took a sudden, almost serious gravity--"ah, just quit cultivating omniscience, and lave the fog alone. Sure only the divvle himself could say what the blackguards will do."

"But Hoshyari Mul, the banker, thinks--"

"Is it that fat, oily brute? Oh, don't belave him. Don't belave what anybody says. They don't know--not even what they'll be at themselves if the mutineers do come. There's only wan thing certain--there's but wan straight road from Nusseerabad up the hill to us. That's the tail end of it yonder through the break in the mist. Oh, I've been kaping an eye on it, I tell yez, even in my sleep. Well, if they come, they'll come that way."

"But Koomar the priest--"

Dr. Tiernay looked across the placid, still sunbright levels of the little lake, at the wonderful Jain temples which made this hilltop one of the holiest spots in all India, and shook his head.

"Don't trust him either, for all his white robes and his piety. He means well; but he's more in a fog than we are, for we know that we don't want the mutineers to come, and he isn't sure. How can he be? I'd just throuble ye to imagine his mental position--if ye can."

So saying, he took up his battered helmet, which looked as if some one had been playing football with it, and strolled over to the hospital. It was perched on another knoll close by, yet the mist now lay almost level between it and him; for the curved waves had given place, like the fleecy flocks, to a new formation of fog. This, far as the eye could see, was a flat plain of cotton-wool, white, luminous, on which the knolls, the temples, the glittering lake, showed like jewels.

He dipped into the cotton-wool as it lay soft in the hollow, and out of it again ere entering the hospital verandah, where a man in the loose uniform of a dresser rose from his task of polishing a pair of horse-pistols and saluted; a trifle unsteadily, for he, though the best of the bunch of convalescents, was somewhat of a cripple. Had he not been so, he would not have been left behind when every man who could hold a rifle tramped down the hill to do the work that had to be done in the plains, if not only Englishwomen, but England herself was to be saved.

"Parade will be a bit short to-day, sir," he said, with cheerful regret, "for Corporal Flanagan 'e 'ave 'ad to 'ave a hemetic, sir, and the fly-blister on Private MacTartan's chest is has big has a hostrich's hegg."

"Dear, dee-ar," commented the doctor in long-drawn sympathy, as he passed into where a dozen or more of men in grey flannel dressing-gowns were lounging about in their cots or out of them. They were an unshaven, haggard-looking lot, though one or two were beginning to show that air of alertness which tells that soul and body are coming back to the bustle of life.

One or two, again, lay cuddled into their pallets with that other hospital expression--impatient patience.

Most, however, were between these two extremes, and one of them asked eagerly: "Any news of the brutes to-day, sir? It would be just my luck when I'm down with another bad turn."

"Bad turn go to blazes," retorted Dr. Tiernay, with a reassuring smile. "News of the varmint would have more therapeutic power than every drug I possess, an' a galvanic batthery wouldn't be in it wid the first shot. Faix even if I'd killed ye, ye'd do old Lazarus to spite me. Oh, Flanagan, there ye are. A bit white about the gills, me bhoy, but it's a foine thing to be in light inarching order. An' as for you, MacTartan, sure you've the illigantest protective pad evver a man wore above his heart. Is there any more of you would like wan?"

Yet as he made merry, the doctor's eye had wandered to where the tail end of the upward road had shown more than once for a second, between a rift in the wet blanket; for that only connection between mutiny and helplessness climbed the hill perilously along a steep funnel-shaped ravine, up which the draught, caused by the cool air above the hot air below, swept like a chimney driving the fog before it.

There was nothing to be seen, however, not even a rift or break; so he went on to dress the leg of a cripple on crutches. He was in the middle of bandaging it when an excited voice called him by name from the verandah, and he rushed out, bandage and all, so that his patient remained attached to him by a fluttering ribbon of linen.

He found the Brigade Major on his pony. There was news at last. The mutineers were coming, but not by the road. They had been seen on the old footpath to the north--they evidently meant to steal a march in the rear.

"What made ye come and tell?" asked the doctor suddenly in Hindustani to the naked figure which had brought the news. It was that of a Jain ascetic with a muslin cloth bound about his mouth, so as to prevent the destruction even of the unseen life around him.

The set brown sanctity of his face wavered. "They come to kill--and I kill nothing."

Dr. Tiernay turned on his heel and faced the man on crutches (who, after vainly begging to be told what was happening, had come crawling on all-fours like a dog to the verandah), and began as it were to haul him in by rolling up the bandage. "Who the divvle tould ye to move, Tompkins?" he said; "come in at wanst and let me finish me job."

"But, doctor," protested the Brigade Major.

The doctor swung round again at the appeal.

"Don't believe his saintship. Don't, for God's sake. If it's killing he objects to, sure isn't he helping us to kill them? That sort of thing doesn't work. See you--he says there are five hundred of them. Sainted Cecilia! if that's so, an' they mean to come and kill us, why come up the back stairs?"

"But he says,--and Koomar also, and even Hoshiari Mul--"

"Well, I'd rather trust the fat little banker if it comes to trustin'," interrupted the doctor, "for, see you, I owe him money, and if I'm killed he won't get it. But if I were you I'd trust none of them. Even Hoshiar, compound interest at a hundred and fifty per cent. to boot, does not know what he'll be at, so take my advice and sit tight where ye are."

The Brigade Major did, very tight and square on his pony.

"I'm sorry you don't agree with me, Dr. Tiernay," he said stiffly, "and, of course, being in independent medical charge of this convalescent depot, you can remain behind if you choose. Indeed I think it would, in a way, be wiser, since your fellows would be of little use."

Dr. Tiernay looked round on the contingent of crippledom which had crowded and crawled to the verandah to listen. "Faix," he said, "their hearts are whole, anyhow, an' that's half the battle. But what's your plan?"

"I have thought out this eventuality before, and am certain that our defence must be at the defile--you know--about four miles from here. I shall take every soul I can--it's better to give every one something to do."

The doctor nodded. "That's sound, anyhow. Satan finds--then I'll stay here."

"If--I fail--you will do what you can for the women and children--I shan't give the alarm now; so--so you might tell my wife by-and-by--if necessary."

Mike Tiernay walked back and patted the pony's neck.

"I'll tell her. And ye may be right--ye can't tell--it's just a fog. Anyhow, the cripples will do what they can for the ladies and the babies--though wanst those murderin' villains set foot on the summit, it's all up--so--so--I'll keep an eye on the road for ye. Well, good-by, me dear bhoy, and good luck to ye."

The sun, that was still shining brightly above the mists, shone on the men's clasped hands for a moment.

After that, Dr. Tiernay finished Tompkins' leg.

It was rather a long job, as it had to be done all over again. Then there were minor hurts to arms and hands, so that an hour must have passed before the doctor, wiping his hands with the curiously minute care of the surgeon who knows what risks he runs, suddenly dropped the towel and said--

"Sainted Sister Anne! they're coming."

Yes. The rift for which he had been watching with the carelessness which comes with custom, had showed that tail end of the road for a moment, and showed something on it--a trail of men and horses, a flashing of bayonets and spear-points.

Ten minutes after the man on crutches was the only one left in the hospital, and he was sitting on the edge of his cot sobbing like a child disappointed of his holiday; but Mike Tiernay had left him the horse-pistols by way of consolation, with instructions to hold the fort as long as he could, and prevent the damned rascals from touching even the drugs.

"Ye'll have the best of it after all, I tell ye," had been the doctor's farewell, "for sure ye'll be sitting at your ease shootin' straight long after we've been silenced; and a last shot is always a last shot." He was wondering what his would be as he led his company of cripples through the hollow of mist which lay between the hospital and the head of that road whose tail had shown the upward gleam of bayonets.

As yet, however, everything was peaceful. The lake, the temples, the isolated houses set on their knolls, even the lower cluster of the bazaar were all bathed in sunshine, with the curious, translucent brilliance which only Indian sunshine can give. Only between them, clinging to every hollow, lay the thick, luminous white fog.

Mike Tiernay took off his helmet, wiped his forehead, and looked around.

"It's no good in life making the poor things anxious," he muttered to himself, "an' if we can keep the divvles at bay he will be back to tell his own story. But I'll just give a look round to hearten them up; there's plenty of time, for I can catch up the cripples in a jiffy." So, bidding his men march slowly down the road (saving themselves as much as possible, since their work would be cut out for them afterwards) until he rejoined them, he set off with swinging strides to the semi-fortified houses, in which, more for the name of safety than for the hope of it, the helpless women and children had been gathered during the last few days.

"Any news, doctor?" asked the Brigade Major's wife, coming out to meet him, her six months' baby in her arms. "Dick isn't back from office yet, and it's such weary work, waiting, waiting."

Dr. Tiernay bent rather abruptly to look at the fretful child, which was teething badly. One or two other women, pale-faced, anxious, their little ones clinging round them, had gathered to listen, and he spoke as it were to all.

"Well, it can't be long now, any more than it can't be long before Dick comes back, or before that troublesome eye-tooth comes through. If all goes well, me dear madam, all the worry will be over by tomorrow."

"And if it isn't you will come with your lancet, won't you?" asked the mother, pleadingly.

Dr. Tiernay frowned portentously. "It's against me principles, madam--but I'll use--well, some kind of lethal weapon, I promise you. An' tell your husband, when ye see him, that my cripples did as well as could be expected, considering the fog."

"Did as well?" she asked. "What have they done?"

"Gone for their first walk down the road," he replied, with a cheerful laugh, "an' I must be affther them to stop them from overtiring themselves. So good-by. Dick'll maybe bring good news."

"How cheerful he is always," said one pale-faced mother to another. "I always feel safer when I've seen him; and, you know, he can't really think there is any immediate danger or he wouldn't have talked of coming to lance the baby's gums, would he?"

Whatever Dr. Tiernay might have thought, he was by this time beginning to realise that in the fog it was impossible to know anything--even the positions of his own cripples. "Are ye all there, wid as many legs an' arms as ye have whole?" he called, after he had given the order for them to fall in; "for, by the Lord that made me, I must take ye on trust; ye might be anybody." He paused; his eyes lit up suddenly; he gave a wild hooroosh.

"I have it, men; let's play the fog on the divvies, an' be damned to them. They can't see us, so let's take them in flank at the zig-zag. Smith, out wid yur engineer's eye an' tell me what's the length of the zig-zag--wan zig of it, I mane."

Smith, in the fog, thought a moment or two. "Close on a mile, sir, more or less, and there's four of them."

"Say three-quarters, and we are fifteen; no, it's fourteen, for we had to leave poor Tompkins wid his crutches an' the horse-pistols. Tompkins absent."

"Beg pardin', sir," came a voice from the fog; "Tompkins present. Come a all-fours down the short cut quite easy."

"Fifteen," corrected the doctor, calmly, "fifteen into twelve hundred yards. Faix, it'll have to be open order."--He paused for an odd catch in his breath, something between a laugh and a sob. "See here, ye gomerauns--English, Irish, Scotch, whatever ye are--that's our game. We're not fifteen; we're fifteen hundred."

The cripples out of the fog broke into a faint cheer.

"You've got it, Mick Tiernay!" they assented wildly. "You've got it, doctor dear! The fog's our game."

"We're fifteen hundred strong, an' we're each of us a hundred men an' two officers," called the doctor back. "Now, d'ye understand, men? open order it is--wan hundred yards or thereabouts, at the top zig-zag, and chargin' down on the divvies in flank--an' the gift of tongues--an' Donnybrook Fair--Hooroosh, Pat! come on, lads."

The next moment, hirpling, hobbling, unseen even of each other until sometimes a jostle would bring a low-toned witticism--"Now, then, Cap'n, keep your regiment orf mine, will ye?" or, "I'll throuble you, sorr, to respect me formation!"--the men were making their way, fast as crippledom would let them, towards their forlorn hope. And despite the witticisms, their haggard lean faces, hidden, like all else, in the fog, were stern and strained. Men's faces are so, when each man has to find place in his body for a hundred souls.

"Quiet's the word. Let them come on almost to the turn," was the doctor's last injunction as he posted his men; the strongest at the narrowest end of the zig-zag because they would the soonest come upon the enemy, and so on in varying gradations of convalescence, till the line of the supposed battalion stopped at the widest end with Tompkins, who was given as much ammunition as they could spare, and told to fire freely, regardlessly.

The doctor himself, with MacTartan close beside him ("so as," he said, "to increase the illushion"), were at the extreme angle. The unseen road lay below them, not fifty yards off, and below that again, the doctor knew, was an almost precipitous grass slope down to the next zig.

"We must start them on that short cut, if we can," he said to his supporter, "an' if we do, they'll rowl and rowl and rowl to perdition, please the Lord!" So they waited, the jest forgotten in earnest.

Then suddenly through the fog came a jingle.

"Tenshion, B Company," whispered the man who had had a bad turn (his name was Brown) to himself, and steadied his shaking hands on his musket as he listened. Another jingle. A sound of voices first; then, as suddenly as the jingle had come, came a thud of many feet.

Thud, thud, thud.

Then all along the hillside, all along that three-quarters of a mile or more, a volley--not of rifles, but orders--orders familiar to those below, and suggestive of colonels and majors, regiments and wings, and companies. Finally, at the narrowest end, a call to fire and charge; a reckless volley into the fog, and then two reckless figures flinging themselves into the uttermost void, God knows how, God knows where, save that it was downwards on that climbing foe.

MacTartan first; remembering his Highland corries and half bursting his lungs in his effort to give the Highland yell of a whole regiment. Yet beneath the grim joke a grimmer earnest lay, as in the fog he and his bayonet found something.

"Hech, now! Is that you?" he said grimly, and the something was a man no more!

"Steady, men. Follow me!" shouted Dr. Tiernay. Once more the mist produced something, and two men in deadly earnest hacked at each other with swords.

"Go on, brothers! run! they are behind us! run! Go back, brothers! they are ahead!" came the cry. And above it rose those orders. From close at hand a dropping fire; and from the far end--Tompkins' end-- quite a respectable volley.

"Come on! come on! and let them have the bayonet!" shouted the doctor again; and with the shout one or two more men grew to sight from the mist upon one side of the climbing road. But the men who had been on the road first were disappearing into the fog on the other side; disappearing down the grass slope to the next zag. Only at the turn where the doctor and MacTartan fought side by side, the difficulty of escape made resistance fierce from a knot of troopers, till, with a curse, MacTartan caught one horse by the bridle, and deliberately backed it over the edge; but not before, in his desperate effort to be strong as he once had been, he had stumbled and fallen before the flash of a sabre that passed in mad flight downwards. "Gorsh me, I've spoilt myself," he murmured sadly, as he rose with difficulty.

"What is it, man? Are you wounded?" cried the doctor, rushing up.

"Bruk me blister, sir," replied MacTartan, stolidly, reaching for his bayonet and going on.

That upper zig-zag was clear now; but below in the fog lay another, and another, and another, where the fugitives might be caught. So the battalion charged again and again, while Tompkins coming down quite easily, "a all-fours," fired volleys steadily.

The jest and the earnest of it, what pen can tell?

Till through the fog rang a faint hurrah. The last of the zig-zags had blindly been reached, and neither far nor near upon the hillside down which the battalion had charged in open order, was foe--not to be seen, but felt! The uttermost void was void indeed.

"We've got no dooleys, men," said Dr. Tiernay, wiping his forehead once more, "so the wounded must crawl back to hospital as best they can."

So they crawled. All but Tompkins; the doctor insisted upon carrying him pick-a-back, on the ground that he, the doctor, was the only whole man in the battalion, and was bound to do double work.

And the next morning, when he went his rounds, he stood for a minute or two beside a fretful baby, and then took out his lancet.

"It's against me principles, me dear madam," he said, with a shrug of his shoulders; "for there's a toime for everything, and everything in its toime; and no one, not even a tooth, knows what it would be at till that toime comes. But as I said the throuble would be over, and the rest of it is;--why, I'll keep my word!"

And it was over; for a message saying he was close on the heels of his messenger came from the general in command of relief.

The fog had lifted by this time, lifted for steady rain; so the English troops coming up found the foes more easily than the battalion had done. But the foes were dead. Those random shots, those reckless charges from nothingness to nothingness had done some work.

And part of it was on the naked body of a Jain ascetic, with a bit of muslin swathed about his mouth, lest, inadvertently, he should bring death to the smallest of God's creatures.

GOLD, FRANKINCENSE, AND MYRRH

"Oh! Mummy," said the Boy, as his mother slipped a sort of nightgown over his trim little khaki uniform, "I think it'sh shkittles!"

Boy's invariable dissent--picked up about the barracks of an Indian cantonment--was applied in this instance both to the angelic robe represented by the nightgown, and the angelic part the child was to play in it.

For it was Christmas Eve, and the vague desire for peace and goodwill which, even in these latter days, comes with Christmas-tide, had made the English aliens in the station devise a Tree for those still greater aliens--the Boer prisoners--who lived among them in the strange spider's web of barbed wire, which to the casual eye seemed so inefficient a prison for enemies who had defied capture so long, so bravely.

It was Boy's mother who had started the idea. She was one of those women, lovable utterly, not always reasonable, who find solace in dramatising their own sorrows. So when, two years before, her husband, commanding a native cavalry regiment still quartered in the station, had been ordered to Africa on Staff duty, she had remained on in the big house, sharing it with a friend, and continuing religiously to care for all things for which her absent soldier had cared--even for the regiment which was still so proud of its Colonel at the front.

It was a heartrending solace, indeed, to see the native officers and men, when they inquired for the latest news, salute Boy as solemnly as they would have saluted his father; and it pleased her to perceive that the only regard these warriors had for her was as guardian of their Sahib's honour and of his only son; for the wellbeing of which things they were fiercely jealous.

To this woman, militant to the heart's core yet sentimentally pitiful, it had seemed appropriate that Boy--son of the only fighting father in the station--should play the part of the "Christ-kind," the Bringer of good gifts at the Christmas-tree. There was no geographical or ethnological reason why this German custom should obtain among the Boers, but Boy's mother had recollections of school-days abroad, and thought that her little son, with his aureole of red hair and grave baby face, so like the absent hero, would look sweet in the part.

"It isn't skittles at all, Boy," she said softly. "Remember what I told you about loving your enemies."

"I'd wather fight 'em, like Daddy," replied Boy, drawing from its scabbard the miniature sword of strict regimental pattern which--it being a new toy--he had refused to lay aside even for angelic robings.

"But it is Christmas," persisted his mother. "Remember what I told you about it--about the angels, and the peace, and goodwill."

"I shink Chrishmus shkittles, too."

"Quite right, youngster! It is skittles in India," put in a tall man, who, farther down the verandah, was watching a woman's fingers busy themselves over church decorations.

His rather reckless expression changed as, stooping to select a brilliant branch of scarlet-fingered poinsettia from the confused heap of flowers and greenery at their feet, he handed it to his companion, and she looked up to thank him with her eyes.

Boy's mother, who had glanced towards them at the interrupting voice, paused over the angelic robe, uneasily silent.

"I wish I had something white, beside the roses," remarked the cross-maker a trifle hurriedly. "They don't look a bit Christmassy."

"Lilies?" suggested the man.

She shook her head. "Lilies don't suit the climate; there aren't any--here."

He stooped and spoke lower. "Yes! it's a God-forsaken spot all round--for you. But, look here! I saw a dhatura actually in blossom to-day--close to my bungalow. It's not unlike a lily--as white, anyhow--and sweeter. They use it in their temples--so why not in church? It doesn't do to be too particular--when you want anything."

She shook her head again. "It's poisonous--besides, it doesn't do--to leave the beaten path."

"Try!"

There was a pause; for the undercurrent, which had seemed to sweep each trivial word to another meaning, seemed suddenly to sweep this man and woman within touch--dangerous touch--of each other.

"What are you two talking about?" asked Boy's mother, coming towards them. "What a lovely cross, Muriel! And why, please, should Christmas in India be skittles, Colonel Gould?"

He laughed. "How stern you look! I wish I could get that righteous indignation up for orderly room. I need it!"

"My husband never found the regiment difficult to manage," interrupted the wife of its absent commander jealously.

"Nor do I," retorted its present head, "but--" he paused, not caring to explain that he, an outsider sent but lately to drill a corps back to the discipline it had lost after her husband's departure, had naturally a very different task.

"Hullo, Boy!" he said, to change the subject, "that is a jolly little sword! Who gave it you?"

"Hirabul Khan gaved it me," replied the child. "When I'm Colonel, he'sh going to be my risshildar, 'cos you shee he was my Daddy's orderly first, an' then Daddy made him--oh, lotsh of fings."

"He'll have to look out if he doesn't want to lose some things," said Colonel Gould, sharply; then answering a vexed look of Boy's mother, continued: "He was a protégé of your husband's, I know--but he really has wind in his head. For his own sake it must be got out. I put him under arrest to-day, and told him squarely I'd have to block his promotion."

"What had he done?" She spoke quite fiercely.

"Cheek, as usual. It was over that escape from the camp. Haven't you heard? Viljeon, that cantankerous brute who gives so much trouble, managed to get out again last night. I wish it had been any one else--for he's half mad and dangerous. I'm glad the General has ordered the search-party to shoot at sight if he offers resistance."

Boy, in his white robe, his toy sword in his hand still, nodded his red aureole sagely.

"The Tommies down at the camp told me. He'sh just an awful brute, Vile John is. He is goin' to kill all the little English children he meets, 'cos--'cos they killed his: but that's a damned lie."

The calm deliberation of the last was so evidently imitative that Boy's mother smiled, despite a sudden pain at her heart.

"They died, dear, and so you must be very sorry for him. Think how sad I should be if--" The thought produced a sudden caress, a sudden glisten in her grey eyes. "Now, Boy of mine, let me take that thing off. Then you must go and lie down and sleep, for you'll have to keep wide awake half the night."

"Take care of my shword, Mummy, please!" said Boy, superbly, as, in unrobing, he shifted it from one hand to the other; "it's most dweadful sharp!"

"By George, it is," remarked Colonel Gould; "a trifle too sharp for safety."

"Is it?" said Boy's mother, anxiously. "Hirabul ought not--"

"It wasn't Hira," interrupted Boy. "It was Kunder sharped it, so as I could kill Vile John if I met him, like as my Daddy done over in Africa. Didn't you, Kunder?"

A figure squatting in a far corner rose and salaamed.

"The Huzoor speaks truth."

The speaker was an old man, slender, upright, unusually dark-skinned; this latter fact made his bare limbs look curiously youthful and lissom.

"Done it uncommonly well, too," assented Colonel Gould, feeling the edge. "Where did you learn the trick?"

"Your slave was once sword-sharpener by trade," was the submissive reply.

"Kunder'sh an awful clever chap," said Boy, loquaciously. "He can make--oh! all sorts of fings as deads people--bows and stwangles, you know--can't you, Kunder?"

The man salaamed, with a watchful look at his other hearers.

"And," continued Boy, in vicarious boasting, "he can do all sorts of dweadful fings, too! He can steal people's purses when they'se sleepin', an' make dicky-birds tumble off bwanches, an' little boys like me wake never no more--can't you, Kunder?"

Submissiveness grew crafty. "This slave has certainly told such tales to the children-people."

"Looks scoundrel enough," remarked Colonel Gould, carelessly. "Where did you pick him up?"

"Oh! he isn't my servant," replied Boy's mother. "He is Muriel's. I can't think why she keeps him."

The cross-maker rose and held her work at arm's length. "Does any one really know why they do anything?" she asked. "Perhaps, as you say, he will steal my jewels some day--or murder me. But, as Boy says, he's awful clever, and one must be amused! Now I must go and put this up. Will you drive me to the church, Colonel Gould?"

"Better come in the victoria with me," said Boy's mother, hastily; "it is going to rain." This other woman, this childless wife with an unspeakable husband, must be guarded from herself.

"I don't think so," put in the Colonel, firmly. "Kunder! call my dogcart, and we can go round by my bungalow and pick the dhatura."

Kunder, passing on his errand, looked up curiously at the last word.

Colonel Gould gave back the look. "Queer customer! Shouldn't wonder if he's a Thug--they use dhatura poison to stupefy their victims, you know."

He spoke carelessly as they stood looking out at the bare patch of parched ground called by courtesy a garden. The lowering sky, of an even purplish grey, was so dark that the level lines of dust-laden sirus trees along the road showed light against it.

"I wish some one would stupefy me," said Muriel, with a sudden passion in her voice; to cover which she went on recklessly: "How I hate Christmas in India!--the sham of it--sham decorations--sham church, for it isn't real! The reality is outside among the poor folk in the fields and the towns, to whom Christmas is a day when we guzzle and they pay the piper!"

"My dear Muriel!"

"It's true! Think of it! Peace and goodwill? Isn't the whole station at daggers-drawing because one lady said another wasn't the best-dressed woman in India? Isn't your regiment, Colonel, ready to murder you? Then that camp, right in the middle of us Christians, with how many prisoners eating their hearts out? And Vile John--as Boy has been taught to call him--half mad in thinking of his children who have died. Oh, I know it is all inevitable--but think, just think of him wandering about this Christmas Eve, liable to be shot at sight. There's a Santa Claus for you!"

Her voice had risen, her fingers had closed tremblingly on the sprig of poinsettia she had fastened in her breast. It showed against the white laces of her dress like a clutching scarlet hand.

Colonel Gould shrugged his shoulders uneasily. "Don't forget Kunder in the picture of peace and goodwill!--Kunder with his 'fings as kills'; for the matter of that don't forget you and me, and the rest of us! The Decalogue is in danger on Christmas Eve as always--perhaps more so."

"I don't believe it," exclaimed Boy's mother in sudden pitiful emotion. "Don't believe him, Muriel! Wait and see! Why, even that storm brewing"--as she spoke a shivering seam of lightning shot slanting across the purple pall behind the dusty trees--"only means the Christmas rains. How welcome they will be after this endless drought! They will perhaps save millions of lives--"

"A doubtful message of peace," put in the Colonel, drily. "But hadn't we better start? or we shan't have time for the dhatura."

"You haven't time," said Boy's mother, sharply. "You must be back by eight, Muriel, for we have to be at the camp by nine. Ayah will bring Boy down ready dressed when we want him--so please don't be late."

This thing which she saw looming as plainly as she saw that storm in the sky, should not be if she could help it. They were too good, both the man and the woman, for that sort of ruin.

She shivered as she watched the dogcart drive off. Truly there were storms ahead! And that thought of Viljeon--childless, half-distraught--wandering about, liable to be shot like a wild beast, made her fear for what might happen ere Christmas dawned.

The verandah darkened silently after she left it. Every now and again a puff of wind rattled the dry pods of the sirus trees, making them give out a faint crackle like that of a scaled viper coiled watchfully in a corner.

Kunder, in his corner, sate up keenly as a snake does. There was a louder crackle of a stealthy footstep.

"Is it well?" came a stealthy voice.

"If Fate wills," replied Kunder, sinking back again to sloth.

A stealthy hand reached out a tiny paper packet wound with unspun silk.

"The sleep-giver--from the Master--it is fresh and good."

"There is no need for sleep-giving," replied Kunder, passively. "The mem is drunk with the love-philtre women crave. I know their ways"--he gave a little soft laugh. "She will not return to-night. So, at dawn, I and the jewels will be--with the Master--if Fate so wills."

"Why should She not will?"

Kunder laughed again. "Who knows what Fate may will?"

He looked out, when the stealthy footstep had gone, at the dusty trees that were growing ghostly in the twilight, and told himself again that none knew. Had he known when, as a lad, he fought against the Sahibs, that one day the death of a Sahib's five-year-old son would be to him as the death of his own child? Had he known when that nursling's red-gold curls--so like Boy's curls--lay confidingly on his breast, that one day he would be thief--perhaps murderer?

No! it was as Fate willed. He was, as ever, in Her hands to-night.

Another footstep! not stealthy this time, but hurried even in its measured military rhythm.

It was Hirabul Khan, the disgraced native officer, seeking an appeal to Colonel Gould before the limitations of an open arrest made it necessary for him to return to his quarters.

"Yea, he was here!" replied Kunder, cynically. "He is ever here--after the mem! Where hides the doe thither comes the buck!"

Hirabul twirled his moustache fiercely. "Keep thy tongue off thy betters, scum of the bazaars, or I break thy every bone. I give thee womenkind in general--but this one is different. Whither hath he gone? for I must see him."

"No need," retorted Kunder, spitefully. "Thy pottage is cooked already. He told the mem so but now. 'No promotion,' said he--I know their speech. And she--"

"Base-born!--and she?"

"She laughed, as I do--scum of the bazaars! Ha, ha!" A devilish malignity had seized on him; he chuckled even while Hirabul shook him like a rat.

"Liar! Cur! Whither hath he gone?"

"To the church--with the mem! Thou wilt see! 'No promotion,' said he; and she--"

With a curse Hirabul flung the chuckler from him, and strode away into the growing darkness.

The church stood--after the manner of Indian churches--in a garden, and on the wide sweep of gravel round it carriages were awaiting the owners, who were busy within. The Colonel's dogcart was among them. So he was there, sure enough.

Hirabul Khan, hesitating at the open door he dared not enter, could see straight along the aisle to the altar; could see the cross of poinsettia and white roses upon the latter, the text above it--

"Unto us a Child is Born."

Unmeaning as it all was to him, he stood looking at it dreamily, until suddenly from the unseen transept the Christmas hymn began, and those of the decorators who were not remaining for choir practice came trooping down the aisle. Then he retreated hastily to where the Colonel's dogcart stood, that being his best chance of the interview which, if humble apology might avail, would mean much to his pride.

So he waited, watching with uncomprehending eyes, listening with uncomprehensive ears--

"Oh! come all ye faithful,

Joyful and triumphant,

Oh! come ye, oh! come ye to Bethlehem."

Suddenly, on those distant voices, the sound of nearer ones became audible. He stepped back a pace or two, and peered through the thicket of rose and pomegranate.

The scum of the bazaars had spoken truth, then! That man and woman standing so close to each other in the scented twilight were the new Colonel, the real Colonel's wife! What infamy! He set his teeth and listened--though this was to him as incomprehensible as the call to peace and goodwill had been.

"For God's sake, have pity on her!" Boy's mother's voice was full of tears. "I heard you settle it. But if you two pick that dhatura tonight--'the last thing after the Tree, so that it may not wither!' Oh, yes, I heard, Colonel Gould--"

"You did hear. I don't deny it. My dear, kind lady--think! If it is not to-night--it must be soon. This life is killing her--it is wiser, kinder, to end the struggle now--"

"No! no! give her time. It is in your power to do this, for she loves you. Remember it is Christmas; you might, at least--"

"The better the day! No; Christmas must take care of itself--if it can! I mean to take her away and care for her--if I can. But thanks, all the same. I shall never forget your kindness."

In the semi-darkness the listener could see the man stoop and kiss the hand laid on his arm.

The next instant Colonel Gould was turning savagely on the figure which had thrust itself on to the path.

"What the devil are you doing here, sir? You are under arrest, and should be in quarters."

"It was only open arrest, sir, and the time--" Hirabul's tone matched the mutiny in his heart, and the Colonel broke in on it roughly--

"Consider it close arrest now. Go back and report yourself at once--and, by Heaven! if you say another word, I'll have you court-martialled. Go!"

A wild surge of impotent rage kept Hirabul Khan speechless, and ere he recovered himself the Colonel was driving off--the Colonel and a woman!

"Sing, choirs of angels,

Sing in exultation."

He turned and shook his fist at the church; then plunging recklessly through the garden, sought silence and solitude. He needed calm before he could even begin his revenge.

There was no doubt about the coming of the rains now. More than one heavy, curiously round drop fell on the dust through which he strode; but all was still--very still as yet.

By-and-by twinkling carriage-lights, like fireflies, began to sparkle among the straight row of trees leading to the prison camp.

Yet the rain kept off, and it had not even begun to fall when the ayah's twinkling light roused Boy for his robing. But half awake, the child grew fractious, calling all things "shkittles," save the killing of Viljeon, who, he asserted, was hiding in the garden. To all of which Ayah, awaiting the carriage, agreed, until her charge, seated on his little bed, grew drowsy once more, and she stole off for a last pull at her forbidden pipe.

But Kunder's light went on twinkling in the farther room, where he was conscientiously finishing his old domestic duties, and preparing for new ones.

So after a time the carriage arrived, bringing with it a smell of damp dust.

"Hurry up, woman!" called the coachman. "It has begun down the road like the storm of God. Bring the child; it were best he was soon in safety."

Bring the child! How? When Boy, with his little pretence wings sewn on to his nightgown behind, his little sword that was not all pretence, was not to be found!

The twinkling lights--Kunder's among them--were all over the garden, accompanied by endearments, threats, promises.

"Shiv-jee save him!" muttered Kunder, as suddenly the rain began to fall in torrents, quenching his light, and washing him from head to foot. The child with the red-gold curls of his race might well drown on a night like this!

The Colonel felt the same fear, as, waiting at the camp-gate to pass the child in, he heard the news first; then, with a brief order that the boy's mother was only to be told that the carriage had been unable to return, owing to the violent storm, and that therefore the gift-giving must go on without the little giver, started to join the search.

Hirabul also, who, waiting his opportunity for revenge, had dogged the Colonel's footsteps all that evening, heard the tale as he skulked in the crowd, put up his revolver, and with a sob at the thought of his far-away sahib, unconscious of his wife's treachery or his son's danger, set himself another task.

So the rain fell, and the wayfarers, keeping by the flare of incessant lightning to the raised roads, said to each other: "This is the deluge of God! Repent, while there is time!"

* * * * *

"What a terrific noise it makes on this iron roof," said Boy's mother, when the gift-giving was nearly over. "I'm glad Boy didn't come--he might have been frightened."

* * * * *

Was he frightened out in the dark alone? He had been. Not at first, however, when, half asleep, it had been almost a game to slip into the garden to find and kill Viljeon, and so, cunningly, when he found no one, into the belt of jungle adjoining it. He was not even frightened when, stumbling over the rough ground and his long white robe, he began to tire of his quest and tried to go back. It was not until the lightning which heralded the bursting of the rain-cloud turned the wilderness round him into black and white shadows that his courage left him, and he started to run blindly, too terrified to think, still too brave to scream.

But he was not frightened now. He was fast asleep, cuddled warmly on a big, broad breast against a big brown beard.

For that quaint little figure, sword in hand and with its ridiculous fluttering wings, had, almost in its first flight, run full tilt against a man who was crouching to leeward of a big tuft of tiger-grass--a man whose head was buried in his crossed arms, but who sprang to his feet with a curse at the unmistakable touch of humanity; then, as a flash of lightning showed him the white robe, the wings, the golden aureole of hair, fell back faltering.

"God in heaven!" he muttered in a foreign tongue. "What dost Thou here?"

Boy needed no question as to his wants. "Oh, please!" he panted, "take me home. I wanted to kill Vile John with the sword as Kunder sharped; but now I'd wather, please, give the Chrishmus fings--the peace, you know, an' all that--please, sir. I weally would wather--"

A sudden smile, half bitter, came to the man's bewildered face. "You wanted to kill Vile John," he said in English. "Why?"

"Oh, I don't know--but I don't want to now. I'd wather bring the peace."

And then silently the rain had begun--not rain such as Christmas usually brings in India, but the downpour as from a bucket which comes at times after long drought; rain before which nothing can stand, which seems to wash the world and the men in it from all things save a desire for shelter.

"God in heaven!" exclaimed the man, reverting to his own tongue. "We shall be drowned if we stop here. Come, little rat! Let us find a spot where we can keep dry."

A difficult job even for this man--Viljeon, prince of veldt roamers--to whom this country with its rapidly filling watercourses, its wide stretches of flood-land, was almost familiar. Seen, indeed, by the rapid shimmer of the lightning as he steered his way, the instinct of a pioneer waking in him at every step, he could scarce believe he was not mastering an African drift.

And the child cuddled close to his breast, wrapped for shelter in his coat? Who was this child which he held as if it had been his own--the child with its travesty of wings, its travesty of a sword?

Half bewildered as he was, the humour, the pathos of the strange chance made his heart softer, and his eyes grew keener, not only for himself but for his charge, as the danger increased minute by minute.

At first, mixed with his desire for present shelter had been that of future escape for himself. But by degrees the thought of the child came uppermost. Safety for it lay on different lines from safety to a strong man untrammelled; and the instinct of the veldtsman told him that the former was on the higher ground near the cantonment--near the prison he had left!

So, through the incessant rain, he threaded his way wading waist-deep at times, till on a rising bit of land the lightning showed him a ruined mud hovel. It might serve for shelter and rest for the time: if the flood rose to it he could but go on.

It was a sort of cattle-shed he found; a rude trough of mud ran round it, and in one corner was a pile of straw. He drew the driest of this from beneath the leaking roof, and, placing it in the trough, laid the still sleeping child upon it. It was better so than in his damp coat. Then, creeping to the doorway, he sate down to think and watch--alone.

Not quite so much alone, however, as the darkness of the night which followed on the sudden cessation of rain led him to believe; for not two hundred yards away, in another cattle-shed on this Government grazing-ground, three other refugees were also awaiting the dawn.

For Kunder, who had abandoned jewels in the search for gold curls, had happened in the dark upon Hirabul Khan, who in his turn was desperately seeking aid for a disabled man whose shouts for help he had answered, unwitting who gave them.

And if it was the Colonel, explained Hirabul, half apologetically, as they made their way back together to give the help--well! a man might be disloyal over women--who were the devil--yea! even to a real hero like the absent sahib, and yet not deserve to drown like a rat in a drain; and as for the other question, that stood over for settlement.

Whereupon Kunder had asked what treacherous woman had an absent hero, and had thereupon fallen into jeers over Hirabul's mistake. Was he a fool not to know it was the other mem who lived in the house? As for Boy's mother, was she not palpably a pudmuni, with no thought save for husband and son?

In consequence of which explanation a new and remorseful respect had come to Hirabul's helping of the Colonel, so that when the latter was at last in comparative safety in the cattle-shed, he, too, found food for thought as he also sate waiting for daylight, hoping against hope for Boy and Boy's mother.

So the grey dawn found him dozing at the door. But he started to his feet at an exclamation from Kunder, who was standing outside; and then across a stretch of shallowing water he saw another ruined cattle-shed, and at the doorway a tall, broad man, with a big brown beard.

"Viljeon!" he exclaimed under his breath.

"To be shot at sight," mumbled Hirabul, but half awake, as he reached round aimlessly for a rifle.

"Fool!" cavilled Kunder, all unwitting of the revolver in Hirabul's belt, "thou art not safe with things that kill, so 'tis well thou hast none. See! he beckons to us. Let us go to him. The rain hath washed evil from us all!"

They helped the Colonel, who could scarce believe his senses, to hobble across, while Viljeon stood guarding the door with a still, stern look on his face.

"You will find the Child lying in the manger," he said; "bring your offerings--I have brought mine."

* * * * *

But only three wise men went down to cantonments that Christmas morning, bringing the child with them; for Kunder, wiser perhaps, or less wise, felt that his new virtue was better away from the proximity of the jewels he had left tied up ready in a bundle; so, seizing his opportunity, he slipped like a water-snake into the tangle of floods and was seen no more.

* * * * *

"And after all," said Boy's mother, softly, "Christmas did take care of itself!"

"Yes!" answered the Colonel, quietly. "We all brought our offerings--gold and frankincense and myrrh."

SURBHI

A FAMINE TALE

She was only a cow, but she was all things, wife and child, earth and heaven, to old Gopal, the Brahmin who owned her.

And, apart from his estimation, she had value. Connoisseurs in the village, as they looked over the low mud wall which separated the slip of open courtyard, ten feet by six, where there was just room for a crazy four-legged string bed between Surabhi's manger and the door, would nod and say she must have been a good cow when young; but when that was only God knew!

Whereupon Gopal would raise his shaven head with its faint frosting of silver hair from Surabhi's silver flank, as he squatted holding a brass lotah in one hand, milking with the other, and smile scornfully.

"Old or young, she is the best milker in the village, and the best looking one, and the best bred," he would say. "And wherefore not? Is she not Surabhi the Great Milk-Mother, whom even the gods worship? Since without her where would the little godlings be?" And then he would pop down the lotah and cease milking for a moment, so that both hands might be free for a reverential salaam to the old cow who, at the cessation, would turn her mild white face--the real Brahmini zebu face with its wide dewy black nostril, wide dewy black eyes, and long lopping ears--to see what had come to old Gopi; and as often as not, would give his round frosted black poll a lick round with her black frosted tongue, by way of encouragement to go on, as if he had been a calf!

But the connoisseurs over the wall would snigger, and touch their foreheads, and say that Gopal Das was getting quite childish and mixed up things. Though, no doubt, the great Surabhi must have been just such another cow, since the old man said right. There was not her like in the village. No! not even now that Govinda had brought home the brown cow with five teats, which had taken the prize at the Huzoor's big show. It was younger, of course, but Surabhi would outlast the old man, and what more could he want? Then who, before these latter days, had ever heard tell of a brown cow? And as for the five teats, they might portend more milk, but were they lawful?

So long-limbed, whole-hearted, dull-headed, the villagers went doubtfully about their business scarcely less confused than old Gopi between facts and fancies, realities and unrealities; tied and bound, as their like are in hamlet and village, by the allegories of a faith whose inner teaching has been forgotten.

But old Gopal stayed with Surabhi. His life was bounded by her. How he lived was one of the many mysteries of Indian village life. He did nothing but look after his cow, but he must have inherited some fractional share of the village land from his fathers, or been entitled, by reason of his race, to some ancestral dues, for twice a year at harvest time he would come back to the courtyard, like a squirrel to its nest, with so many handfuls of this grain and so many handfuls of that, so many bundles of wheat straw, millet stalks, or pea stems. And on these, and the milk she gave, he and Surabhi lived contentedly. He was very old; if he had had wife and children in the past he had quite forgotten them. Yet it was typical of village life that no one forgot old Gopi or his rights. Whatever was due to him from well or unwatered land, even if it were only so many leaves of tobacco or chili pods, came to the courtyard as regularly as the sunshine.

And, regularly as the sunshine, too, the old man, after he had milked Surabhi in the early dawn, would go with his solitary blanket and a little spud, and spend the whole day till sunset in gathering succulent weeds for the Great Milk-Mother's supper. It was his religion. And under the broad blue sky, edging a plantigrade path over the parched plain, leaving, like a locust, not a green leaf behind him, old Gopi's mind would be full of confused piety and mystical meanings.

This was the highest service of man, this was Faith, and Hope, and Charity all combined; since every one knew that Surabhi was the World-Mother, and without her--

Here the old Brahmin's memory of words would fail him, and he would fall back on deeds, by digging at the biggest weed within reach.

From year's end to year's end he seldom fingered a coin, and if he did, it was Surabhi who brought it to him. Her last calf had long since become an ox, and drifted away from the village to fill a gap in the great company of the ploughers and martyrs who give the coffer of the Empire all its gold and die in thousands--long before famine touches humanity--without a penny piece from that coffer being spent to save them from starvation. Yet she still, after the fashion of her race, gave milk and to spare. The latter went, as a rule, to folk poorer still than the old Brahmin, especially to children; but when he sold it, part of the money was always spent on a new charm for Surabhi's neck. And it might be noted that whenever, by looking over the old mud walls which separated the village courtyards one from the other, he found that Govinda's brown cow had a fresh bell or disposition of cowries round her neck, there was always enough milk over and above Gopi's wants next day to procure a similar adornment for the white one with its heavy dewlap.

The rivalry grew, by degrees, into a definite challenge between their owners, so that when, after a time, Govinda's beast fell off in her milk, Gopi's delight was palpable, and he scouted all reasonable explanations of the fact.

The cow, he said, was underbred. You could see by her hoofs that she had been accustomed to wander about and pick up her own living like low-caste folk; while Surabhi bore token of her lifelong seclusion in every polished ring of her long-pointed black toes.

But before the question at issue could be decided, that came about which dried up every cow in the village, and made even old Gopi's brass lotah cease to brim.

There was no rain. Even in December and January, though the skies were dappled as the partridge's breast, the clouds carried their moisture elsewhere. Where, did not affect the villagers. It was not here, and that was all they knew. The autumn crop, which means fodder, had been a scant one, the cattle were thrown entirely on the still scantier growth of grass in the waste land; and when that failed, custom did not fail. The herds were driven forth from the thorn enclosures every morning to the wilderness and taken back from it at eve, just as if that wilderness were still a grazing-ground. What else could be done, seeing that when cattle starve it is not a famine? That is a time when help is given by the new master. God knows why, since the old masters never gave any.

Such time of help must come, of course, ere long, if the clouds remained dry; but meanwhile the flocks and herds went out to graze on mud, and if some failed to return in the evening, what else was to be expected?

So the long dry days dragged on. That spring-harvest old Gopal's share of garnered grain was scarcely worth the bringing home. The squirrel's hoard in the little courtyard was scanty indeed, and very soon he had to stint his own share, and rise an hour earlier to go weed-grubbing, and return an hour later, so that Surabhi should not low her discontent at short commons. For that would be shame unutterable, even though the brown cow had long since been driven from high-class seclusion to fend for herself with the common herd from dawn to eve.

Thus old Gopal's lank anatomy was appreciably more lank, more skeleton-like, when one day the headman of the village, as he smoked his pipe in front of the house of faith where strangers were lodged, announced that the famine had really come at last. Over in Chotia Aluwala there were piles of baskets and spades. Some Huzoors were there in white tents, so doubtless ere long, God knows why, they would begin digging earth from one place and putting it in another, so that a distribution of grain could be made in the evening.

That was the headman's idea of relief-works, and his hearers had no other.

Now, Chotia Aluwala was ten miles at least from Surabhi's stall, but of late Gopi had scarce found a weed within twice that distance.

So the very next day, when, backed by a pile of forlorn-looking earth on one side and a not much smaller pile of baskets with which the earth had, during the day's toil been conveyed to its present resting-place, one hungry face after another came up in file to the distribution of food, old Gopi's frosted head was among the number. But he was bitterly disappointed at his dole of cooked dough-cake. He had expected grain. Though more than enough for his old appetite, what would Surabhi, with her seven stomachs, say to such concentrated food?

After his long trudge home he passed a miserable night seeking, by every means in his power, to supply the bulk necessary for the satisfying of those clamorous stomachs. He even chopped up the grass twine of his string bed and tempted the old cow to chew it by soaking the fibre in some of her own milk.

Thus, once more, he came off second best, for the milk should have been his share. So he could scarcely manage to stagger along with his basket next day. Not that this mattered, for already the Englishmen, who, in their khaki clothes and huge pith helmets were supervising the work, were saying tentatively, with a glance at the totterers, that it might have been better to start relief a little sooner. And down in one hollow Gopi saw a woman being carried away, while the babe which had been at her breast yelled feebly in an orderly's arms.

The sight did not affect Gopi in the least. He had thought out a plan which filled his confused old soul with a heavenly joy. So when his two dough-cakes were given him that evening he hurried off with them to the contractor in the background, through whom the Huzoors had arranged for this supply, and exchanged them--at a loss, inevitably--for the coarse husks, the bran, the sweepings, the absolute waste which could not be used even in famine bread.

The arrangement suited both parties, the contractor and old Gopi, who day after day trudged home, hungry, with a bulky bundle of fodder for Surabhi. It was a fair exchange all round; even with the old cow, who turned the fodder into milk. Not much, it is true, since the bundle was not over-large, but enough to keep Gopi's soul and body together.

And the soul grew if the body wasted. How could it be otherwise, when one was permitted to be the babe and suckling, as it were, of the Great Milk-Mother? The Great World-Mother, whose sacred work it was to nourish all things, even the little godlings?

The old Brahmin's eyes grew softer, more trustful, more like the eyes of a child, as the days went by; and as he milked her, Surabhi's black frothed tongue often licked more than his shaven poll, as if she were concerned at the bones which showed through the skin of her calf.

Gopal himself, however, took this licking as a mark of Divine favour; and, as for the thinness, were not all the babes and sucklings growing thin?

That was true. The Englishman in head charge of the Chotia Aluwala relief-work canal had that thinness on his conscience. But what could man do in a wilderness, without mothers, without milk?

He had it on his heart too, because he was a father; and because, despite a mother and milk, doctors and dosing galore, it was not two months since he had seen his first-born waste away mysteriously to death, as children will waste.

So his mind was full of it, when, for the sake of seeing a lonely wife and mother, he rode forty miles after nightfall to the little bungalow so empty of a child's voice.

"I've got quite a nursery of 'em now," he said grimly, "but they beat me. I can't get the men in charge to mix that tin-milk stuff right, you know, and the little beggars won't look at a teaspoon."

Perhaps it was his ride that had tired him. Anyhow, he crossed his hands on the table, and laid his head on them wearily.

He roused, however, at her touch on his shoulder.

"Let me come," she said; "I've--I've nothing to do here."

He looked at her for a moment, then turned his eyes away. "Will you?" he said in an odd voice; "that--that will be awfully jolly."

So in a day or two, armed with the dead baby's bottles, feeding-cups, God knows what, and such mother's lore as the dead child had taught her, she was at work in a white tent set in the shade of the only tree at Chotia Aluwala.

"I must have more milk," she said decidedly, and there was a new light in her eyes, a new tone in her voice, when they brought her yet another whimpering black baby. "That is the end of it; by hook or by crook I must have more milk. There must be some, somewhere. Send out and see!"

So, because when a woman is standing between death and children, her orders are the orders of "She-who-must-be-obeyed," they sent. And, of course, one of the first discoveries made by the native underling to whom the inquiry was entrusted, was Surabhi. In other words, that an old Brahmin, in receipt actually of relief, was the possessor of a remarkably fine cow, if not in full milk, yet capable of supporting an infant or two. It needs the vicious flair of an underpaid chuprassi to find such chances for tyranny and extortion at the first throw off. But this one was found, and when Gopi returned that evening to the little courtyard, an official with a brass lotah was waiting for milk. It would be paid for, of course, by-and-by. Gopi could keep an account, and the Sirkar no doubt would pay, provided the proper official certified it by a countersign.

The old man was too confused, too tired to be ready with protest at a moment's notice. So that night he went supperless to bed. But in the white tent over at Chotia Aluwala, an Englishwoman's pale face had quite a colour in it.

"Fancy!" she said, "two whole quarts of the most beautiful, rich milk! I would reward that man if I were you, hubby. I am to have the same every day. It--it means four lives at least!"

Possibly, for a baby takes less to keep it alive than an old man.

Small tragedies of this sort are common enough in India, but it is difficult to give all their fineness of detail to English eyes.

Old Gopal was at once cunning as a fox, guileless as a child; and through both the guile and the innocence ran that bewildered belief in Surabhi as something beyond ordinary cows. He tried to escape the impasse by not milking her dry, so as to leave some for himself; but though Surabhi resented any other hand finishing the task, it was impossible for an experienced onlooker to be deceived. The result of that, therefore, was abuse and blows. Then he tried keeping back one dough-cake from his daily dole for himself, and only exchanging the other for fodder. That reduced the milk in reality, but it also reduced Surabhi to lowing; and his sense of sin, in consequence, became so acute that he was forced into going back to the old plan. But these tactics had, by this time, roused the petty official's ire. The mem sahiba had spoken sharply to him because the milk had fallen off in quantity and quality; for he had not scrupled, despite old Gopi's tears and distracted prayers, to take away the Milk-Mother's character by filling up the measure with water.

And so he lost patience. Thus one day he avenged himself and attained his object by first reporting that Gopi, Brahmin, was wrongfully and fraudulently obtaining relief, seeing that he was, amongst other things, possessor of a remarkably fine cow, whose milk he was selling to the Huzoors, and then seizing Surabhi, on the ground that Gopi, having no means of supporting her, was not fit to take care of so valuable an animal!

These two blows, followed by the sight of Surabhi being walked off on her dainty toes into the rough outside world, quite upset the frail balance of the old man's mind.

He crouched shivering all night in the empty stall, feeling himself accursed. He was not worthy. Surabhi had gone.

How long he remained there speechless, famine-stricken, yet not hungry, he did not know. It was early afternoon when the white garment and brass badge of authority showed again at the door in the low wall, and a voice said sullenly--

"Thou must come. Thy cursed cow is a devil for kicking, and the mem is a fiend for temper. My badge is gone if thou come not. My pony will carry two."

The sun was showing red behind the great piles of earth which in that wide level plain rose like a range of hills, when the oddly assorted pair rode into the shade of the Chotia Aluwala tree. There was no need to announce the arrivals. Surabhi declared who one was, almost ere he stumbled to the ground, stiff, dazed, bewildered. All the more bewildered for that vision of something undreamt of, unseen hitherto in Gopal Das' ignorant village life--a woman fair as milk herself, smiling at him gladly, calling with quaint, strange accent: "Quick--quick! we wait, we are hungry--are we not, babies?"

There were dark toddlers round the white dress, a dark head on the white bosom, and old Gopi muttered something about the Milk-Mother, the World-Mother, as, with a brass vessel some one thrust into his hand, he squatted down beside Surabhi.

He scarcely needed to milk her; perhaps that was as well, for he was very tired. But the lotah brimmed, and another had to be called for, while Surabhi's black frosted tongue licked the black frosted head between her "moos" of satisfaction.

And beyond, in the shadiest part of the shade, there was more satisfaction and to spare.

After a while old Gopi crept stiffly to watch it, squatting in the dust with dry, bright, wistful eyes fixed on the bottles, the babies; above all on the milk-white face full of smiles.

Until suddenly he gave a little cry.

"Me too, Mother of mercy! Great Milk-Mother of the world, me too!" he said, like any child, and so fell forward insensible with outstretched, petitioning hands.

But that was the end of his troubles.

When he came to himself, the Great Milk-Mother was feeding him with a teaspoon. Nor when he recovered his strength would she let him out of the nursery, for by that time the whole story had been told, with the curious calm acquiescence of villagers in such pitiful tales of mistake and wrong. Every one had known the truth, of course, but what then? The Huzoors wanted the milk for the babies, and Gopi was old--

"He is only a baby himself," interrupted a woman's voice indignantly when this explanation was being given; "why, this morning I made him as happy as a king by letting him suck one of the bottles! He said that there was nothing left now to be desired, nothing wanting, except--"

"Except what?" asked the man's voice.

"That he could see no little godlings like--like me."

Then there was silence.

ON THE OLD SALT ROAD

After the discussion on a certain story told by the grey man had reached dissolution point from sheer want of coherence, I observed that the Major--though still standing in his usual place by the fire--was looking into the embers instead of warming his coat-tails at them. This fact, and the expression of his face, convinced me that he had forgotten the present in some past experience.

"The Major remembers a story," I remarked aloud. He looked up with a smile.

"I must have a very transparent face," he said, "but it is quite true. I have been wondering if I ought not to tell you something that happened to some one--to me, in fact--a great many years ago. It seems to me that I ought. You see most of you are inclined to scoff at the story we have just heard; unwilling to allow anything but a rational explanation of the mysterious summons. I am not, simply because I happen to have had certain experiences which most of you have not had. The question therefore arises as to whether I am not bound to give my evidence, and so, perhaps, prevent you from forming a hasty judgment?"

He looked inquiringly round the room, but no one spoke. We were so much accustomed to accept the Major's decisions as, above all things, equitable, that we were content to let him arrive at one unbiassed by our views. During the pause which followed, I found myself thinking that weight for weight, inches for inches, brains for brains, I knew no man who had made a better use of life than our Major. Not over clever, certainly not handsome, handicapped heavily by having to start at scratch in worldly matters, he had a distinct personality of his own which influenced every society he entered. You felt somehow that your estimate of that society rose from his presence, and that he brought an element of sound, healthy strength of heart and mind into the mêlée which you would not willingly spare from the struggle for existence. It came to this. Had he not been there the world would have been the worse for his absence; high praise, indeed, for any man.

"Yes!" continued the Major, after a pause, "I'll have to tell my tale like the Ancient Mariner; and if in so doing I bore you with a few uninteresting confidences about myself, I can't help it. You shall have as little of them as possible."

He was so long settling himself in a chair, pulling up his trousers in his careful, economical way, and poking the fire, that our attention had begun to waver, when his opening words startled us into renewed curiosity.

"I don't suppose," he began, "that any of you know I am a widower; but I am. My wife died a year after our marriage; and the child too--a girl. If you search the whole wide world through you won't find a more desolate creature than a boy of two-and-twenty coming back alone in a strange country from the grave of his wife and child. Perhaps, as Rudyard Kipling says, he has no business to have a wife and child. Anyhow he feels a mistake somewhere in the universe when he tries to behave like a man in the little drawing-room she made so pretty. The twopenny-halfpenny fans put up to hide the bare walls--the little dodges to make the sticks of furniture look nice which seemed to you so clever, and over which you have both laughed so often--the unused basket thing done up with lace and frills over which she was so happy that last evening, while you sate by wondering if it could be true, and that your child would lie amongst the dainty furbelows. Well! I suppose it has to be sometimes, but it drove me mad. I was like the boy in another of Kipling's tales, and could think of nothing but death to end it all; just to creep away and die by myself somewhere. I did not want so much to be dead, but to be quite alone--by myself. You see I had lost everything--for ever--and the rest of the stupid world drove me wild with impatience.

"So I went out on leave to the old Salt Road, which ran right across the loneliest part of the district. Perhaps some of you don't know what a Salt Road is? Simply the Customs line which in old days used to be patrolled day and night in order to prevent smuggling. The cactus hedge had been cut down when the protection system was given up, but the road behind it was still passable, and the patrol houses, more or less dilapidated, stood at intervals of ten or twelve miles. I had seen some of them when out on shooting expeditions, and the remembrance of their desolation came back on me now with a new sort of fascination.

"After I settled to go I used to lie awake wondering which of them would be the place. Not the first. That was within hail of other people and help; besides, I could not so soon get rid of the servant whom I had to take with me in order to avoid suspicion. My plan was to send the man on early with orders to do two stages, and have everything ready for me at night in bungalow Number Three; then I should have all the day to myself. Would it be bungalow Number Two, at noon, I wondered? As there were five patrol houses in all, it would most likely be Two or Four; but if I liked any of the others better I could easily find some excuse for getting rid of the servant.

"This may seem unnatural, but I was really quite mad with a sort of rage and spite against everything and everybody; so utterly absorbed in myself that I felt as if I were taking a revenge on life by quitting it. My own pain being the axis of the universe, the world must surely be the loser by its removal. In fact, my mental position at this time might be fairly represented by that of a man quitting a pleasant society because some one has been rude to him. I had no hopes of bettering my condition; I simply wanted to show my resentment.

"I don't believe I ever slept sounder in my life than on the first night after leaving cantonments. Perhaps it was the change; but I remember being disappointed and disgusted with myself when I woke to find broad daylight streaming in through the broken windows of Number One. My servant, according to his orders, had started at dawn, for the weather was still hot enough to make early marching necessary. He had, however, left me a bottle of cold tea and some provisions, which I ate with appetite. And now comes a curious thing. Though I had quite made up my mind to face death, and all the dangers it might bring, I positively hesitated about starting for a ten-mile walk in the sun from fear of heat apoplexy. It was very unreasonable, but it shows the force of habit. After I had decided on remaining where I was till the evening, I walked round the tumble-down mud building, wondering if it would do for the final tableau. It did not please me, so I lay down and slept, feeling that I ought really to have remained awake and brooded over my grief. But an unconquerable drowsiness was upon me, making me sleep like a child. How well I remember the ten-mile walk to the next bungalow! The afternoon shadows lengthened across the half-effaced road as I tramped along in solitary silence. I had nothing with me save my revolver and a small writing-case with which to inscribe my last words of defiance. My thoughts were full of what these should be, for I had now quite made up my mind that bungalow Number Two was to be the place, and that a very short time would rid me of all my foes. I felt distinctly easier than I had done before, and being, as it were, wound up to tragedy pitch, the cheerful appearance of Number Two as I came up to it in the sunset disappointed me. In cutting down the thorn and cactus hedge they had, as usual, left the kikar bushes, and these had grown into trees, forming an avenue, while a few more shaded the house itself. This was also far less dilapidated than Number One; not only were the doors and windows intact, but at a few of them still hung the usual reed blinds or chicks. As I wandered round the house before entering it, I noticed what one might call the graves of a garden. Broken mounds of earth giving a reminiscence of walks and beds, with here and there a globe amaranth doing chief mourner. Evidently bungalow Number Two had been the permanent residence of a patrol. It annoyed me to find myself wondering if he had had a wife and child, so I hastily entered the centre room, determined to put an end to all useless sympathies without delay. To my surprise it contained a few half-broken sticks of furniture; but telling myself that it would make my last task easier I laid my revolver on the table and, taking out my case, sat down to write. Again I felt curiously drowsy; more than once I rested my head on my hands and rubbed my eyes in the endeavour to collect my thoughts.

"A sudden increase of light in the room, visible even through my shading fingers, made me look up. The chick was turned aside, and holding it back with one chubby hand stood a little child about three years old. I think, without exception, the loveliest little girl I ever saw. Great mischievous brown eyes, and fluffy curls of that pale gold which turns black in after years. She raised her hand from the door-jamb, and placed her finger to her lips, brimming over with laughter.

"'Hush!! Ma-ma's a-teep. Dot's 'un away.'

"Such a ripple of a voice, musical with happiness. I was always fond of children, and this one was of the sort any man would notice--perhaps covet. I laid down my pen, forgetful of interruption.

"'Dot has run away, has she? That's very naughty of Dot, isn't it? But as she has run away she had better come in here. You are not afraid of me, are you?'

"She was already in the room; then I noticed for the first time that she was in her nightgown--a straight white thing like they put the angels into, and her small bare feet made no noise on the floor.

"'Dot's not af'aid. Dot's never af'aid. Dot's a b'aave girl. Dada says so.'

"She spoke more to herself than to me, and the words were evidently a formula well known and often repeated.

"'Who is Dada?' I asked, feeling the first curiosity that had had power to touch me for many days.

"Dot had raised herself to the level of the table with her tiny hands, and now stood on tiptoe opposite me. Her fair curls framed her face, as her laughing brown eyes fixed themselves on my revolver.

"'Dada's?' she said coaxingly. 'Dot wants to make a puff-puff-boom!'

"The childish words evoked a quick horror, why, I cannot tell; but a sudden vision of myself as I should be in that lonely room after the dull report rose up and blinded me. Somehow the coaxing babyish phrase filled me with an awful revulsion of feeling. My head sank into my hands; when I raised it the child had gone.

"I went into the verandah uncertain what to do. The room next mine had a chick also, so that I could not see in from the outside, but from within came a low crooning song like a lullaby. Every now and again little bursts of a child's voice. Dot, no doubt, recaptured and soothed to sleep. It was evident that the bungalow was occupied by others beside myself, for in the gathering dusk I thought I saw some white forms flitting about the servants' quarters. I wondered faintly at the latter, for I had a half recollection of noticing that the huts were entirely in ruins. My mind, however, had now reverted to its original purpose with increased strength, and I returned to the room considering what had best be done. The child's words, 'Dot's not af'aid! Dot wants to make a puff-puff-boom,' would not keep out of my head. After all, was it not only another way of phrasing my own desire? I was not afraid. Not afraid of what? Amid these questionings one thing was certain. It could not be bungalow Number Two-- I would not frighten the child Ah, no! I could not frighten Dot for ever with the awful puff-puff-boom I had set myself to make.

"It must therefore be Number Four, so I packed up my writing things and set off to rejoin my servant at Number Three. How childish we are! As I trudged along I caught myself smiling more than once over the recollection of Dot's mischievous face at the door. My servant was patiently awaiting my arrival beside the dinner he had cooked for me. Supposing I had not turned up--according to my original plan--he would have waited calmly all night long, keeping his 'clear soup, chikhun cutlet, custel pudden' hot for a dead man. I must have been less mad, for the humour of the idea struck me at the time, and I laughed. He gravely asked why I had not brought on my pillow and sheets, and I laughed again as I told him I meant to do without them in the future. Everything was clear now. Fate had settled on Number Four, so there was nothing to worry or hustle about. I bade him call me early, determined this time to have all the day to myself. Then I fell asleep to dream the night long of Dot and the revolver. Indeed my thoughts were so full of her, that even when I woke I fancied, more than once, that I heard her voice in the verandah, though I knew it could only be a trick of fancy, for the bungalow was a perfect wreck, and even the room I occupied had but half a roof.

"It must have been about eleven o'clock ere I reached Number Four, which stood off the road a little and was much smaller than any of the other bungalows. Indeed it consisted of but two rooms opening the one into the other. It looked the very picture of desolation, planted square in the open with a single kikar tree struggling for life in one corner of the enclosure. Yet it was the best preserved of all the patrol-houses; perhaps because of its smaller size and greater compactness. Anyhow it needed little to fit it for habitation, and as I found out afterwards it was constantly used by the civil officers when on their tours of inspection. At the time, however, I was surprised to find signs of recent occupation about it in the shape of earthen pots and half-burnt sticks in a mud fireplace. Going into the outer room I found it contained, like Number Two, a few bits of furniture, and feeling weary I sat down by the table without looking into the other room, only a portion of which was visible through the half-closed door.

"Once more I laid my revolver beside me, and took out my writing materials. I had just begun my task when a deadly disgust at the whole business came over me, and I resolved to end everything without further delay. My hand sought the revolver, and fingered it mechanically to see if it were loaded. A sense of strangeness made me look at it, when, to my intense surprise, I found it was not my own weapon. This was an old-fashioned heavy revolver, and one of the chambers had evidently been recently fired. As I laid it down, astonished beyond measure, I saw my own on the table beside it!

"Whose then was the other? Did it belong to some one else in the bungalow? Was I once more to be disturbed? I rose instinctively and pushed open the door leading into the inner room. To my still greater surprise I found it littered with half-open boxes and various things lying about in great confusion. A few common toys were on the floor; on the bare string bed a bundle of bedding; on the table a heap of towels, and a basin of water ominously tinged with red. The fireplace was on the other side of the room beyond the table, and crouched beside it on the floor was a woman closely huddled up in a common grey shawl. She held something under its folds on her knee; something that drew breath in long gasping sighs, with a fatal pause between them.

"'I beg your pardon,' I stammered, intending to retire. Just then the woman looking up, showed me a young face, so wild with grief and terror that I paused irresolute.

"' Will no one come!' she wailed, seeming to look past me with eyes blind with grief. 'O God--dear God! will no one ever come?' Then, as her face fell again over the burden on her lap, she moaned like an animal in mortal agony. But above the moan I could still hear that curious gasping sigh. 'Can I not help?' I asked. She gave no reply, so I went up and stood beside her. Still she seemed unconscious of my presence, for once more came the wail. 'Will nobody come? O my God! will nobody come to help?' 'I have come,' I answered, touching her on the arm. She looked at me then, and a curious thrill made me feel quite dizzy for a moment. Perhaps that was the reason why both face and voice seemed to me changed and altered. Her eyes met mine doubtfully.

"'You did not come before,' she said. 'No one ever came--no one, no one.'

"As I removed my hand she bent once more over her burden with the same piteous moan.

"Evidently she was stupefied by horror and suspense, so I gently raised her shawl to see what was the matter.

"Great heavens! What a sight! After all these years I seem to see it now. Fair silky curls dabbled in blood that welled up from under the handkerchief which the woman held convulsively to the little white breast. One chubby hand thrown out stiff and clenched; great brown eyes glazed and dim; grey lips where each gasping sigh sent a tinge of red.

"'Dot!' I exclaimed, dropping on my knees the better to assure myself of the awful truth.

"The familiar name seemed to rouse the wavering life.

"'Dots not af'aid. Dot--only--wanted to make--a puff-puff-boom.'

"The words seemed to float in the air. I heard them as in a dream; and as in a dream also came an insight into what had happened. Dada's revolver within reach of those tiny hands. O Dot! poor little brave Dot! I felt helpless before the awful tragedy. Once I tried to take the child, but the woman resisted silently, nor could I get her to listen to my entreaties that she should at least move to an easier position. At last, seeing I could do nothing, and acknowledging sorrowfully that nothing I could do was likely to be of any avail, I contented myself with waiting beside her in silence, until the end. And as I waited a coherent story grew out of what I knew, and what I guessed. They had come on early that morning, the father on his way further afield, the mother and child to remain in the little bungalow till his return. Then all in a minute the accident; and then the only servant had been sent forth wildly for help whilst the wretched woman waited alone. Yes! that must have been it. So clear, so simple, so awful in its very simplicity.

"There was not a sound in the house save at intervals the woman's moan. 'Will no one ever come! O God; will no one ever come!' and always distinct above it the child's gasping sigh with a soft rattle in it.

"How long this lasted I cannot say. It was like some hideous nightmare, until suddenly the sighing ceased, and I became conscious of an immeasurable relief. Yet I knew the silence meant death.

"The woman did not move or notice me in any way, so once more I touched her on the arm.

"'There is no need to watch longer,' I said; 'Dot is asleep at last. It is your turn to rest. Give me the child, and believe me there is nothing to be done now.'

"As before, she raised her face to mine, and the same thrill came over me as I recognised an unmistakable change in features and voice; a deadening of expression, a hardening of the tone into a certain fretfulness.

"'But there is a great deal to be done,' she replied rapidly. 'Oh! so much. How can you know? We must dig the grave under the kikar tree and bury her in the sand--for it is sand below, and it creeps and creeps into the grave and will not leave room for Dot. And the night must fall--oh, so dark!--before her father gets home. There will hardly be time to dig the little grave before sunrise; and it must be dug--you know it must--'

"Her words seemed to me wild and distraught. To soothe her I repeated that there was plenty of time.

"She frowned, closed her eyes with one hand, and again replied in a curiously rapid, even tone.

"'No! no! there never has been time. It is always a hurry. Out in the dark digging the grave, and the sand slipping, slipping, slipping till there is no room. I have done it,--oh! so many times.'

"I was puzzled what to do or say. The wisest course seemed to leave her to herself until help arrived. So after one or two ineffectual attempts at consolation I went outside in despair to see if the assistance so sorely needed was not in sight. Surely it could not be delayed much longer. I was surprised to find how late it was: noon had long passed, and cool shadows were stretching themselves athwart the parched ground. One, darker and cooler than the rest, lay eastward of the solitary kikar tree. Here it was that the little grave was to be dug if the mother's wish were fulfilled. Quite mechanically I strolled to the spot, impelled by sad curiosity.

"As I approached, the fragments of a low railing, half standing, half lying, in a small oblong, made me wonder if the enclosure had already been a resting-place. That might account for the mother's wish. Yes! there was a grave; a tiny grave no bigger than little Dot's would be, with a roughly-hewn cross as a headstone.

"I bent to read the inscription:--

HERE LIES

Our Little Darling Dot.

1840.

"Dot! I stood up with heart and brain in a whirl. Dot! 1840. Five-and-twenty years ago, and Dot had died but half-an-hour before. What did it mean? What did it mean?

"A sudden fear of the solitude and silence of the place fell upon me. But for shame I would have turned tail on it then and there. As it was, scorn of my own suspicions made me return to the house. How still it was! how desolate. I remember standing at the outer door listening in vain for some sound within; I remember seeing my revolver and writing-case on the table in the outer room; I remember nerving myself to push open the inner door, but I remember no more.

* * * * *

"They told me in hospital that I must have tripped over the broken flooring between the two rooms, and in falling have cut my head against the lintel.

"Perhaps I did. Perhaps I didn't. I only know that something--God knows what--stood between me and my madness, so that when I came to myself it was gone for ever. In its place had grown up a craving to live--to hear, to see, to know, to understand.

"As I got better I used to lie and cry like a woman. Then the other fellows would say it was all weakness, and that I must be a man and bear up. And sometimes I would lie and smile. Then they said I was a trump with more pluck than they had. And as often as not I wasn't thinking of myself or my own troubles at all, but of brave little Dot and her desire for a puff-puff-boom.

"They sent me down the Indus to Bombay, so as to avoid the rattle of the train, for my head was still weak. We stuck on a sandbank at Sukkhur, being made unmanageable by two flats we were towing. They were laden mostly with cargo, but carried a good many third-class passengers. I don't know why I had risen from my sick-bed full of a great curiosity, but I had. Somehow I never seemed to have looked at life before, whereas now everything interested me. So I went down to the flats and talked to the people. There was a cabin on one, carrying a few second-class passengers, and as I was walking along a gangway between some bales I saw an Englishwoman, holding a child on her lap. The crouching attitude struck me as familiar; I stopped and spoke about the weather or something. She looked up, and then I knew where I had seen that attitude, for it was Dot's mother. I don't think I should have recognised her--for she was an old woman with grey hair--but for the remembrance of the changed look which, as you may recollect, she had when I roused her in the bungalow by touching her arm.

"'Is that your child?' I asked courteously, for, poorly dressed as she was, her face was unmistakably refined.

"'No!' she replied; and I recognised the somewhat querulous voice. 'It's my granddaughter, but I am as fond of her as if she were my own--almost.'

"As she spoke she shifted the child's head higher up on her arm, and I saw a mass of fluffy light gold curls.

"'Perhaps she reminds you of your own,' I continued at a venture, anxious only to make her talk.

"A faint curiosity came to her worn face.

"'It's funny you should say so--just as if you had seen our Dot. So like--so wonderfully like. Sometimes it seems as if she had come back again, yet it is five-and-twenty years since I lost her.'

"'That is a long time.'

"'A long, long time to remember, isn't it? And I've had so many and lost so many. But I never forgot Dot--she was so pretty! Ah, well! I daresay it would have been against her, poor lamb. "Favour is deceitful and beauty is vain."'

"She lulled the child on her lap to deeper slumber with a gentle rocking. It seemed to me as if she were soothing regret to sleep also.

"'She had curls like this one?' I remarked, cruelly anxious to keep her to the subject.

"Once more she looked at me with that oddly familiar bewilderment.

"'I can't think where I've seen you before,' she said after a pause. 'I never met you in those old days, did I? Ah, well! I've lived so long and travelled so far that I can't remember it all. Sometimes I seem to forget everything except what I see--and Dot. I never forget her. Only last month I was coming down the river not far from the place where the little dear shot herself--she was playing with her father's revolver, you know--and I seemed to go through it all again. Her father--he left the Salt soon after--was downright vexed with me because I fretted so. He said no good could come of remembering grief so long. But I don't know. I've heard it said that there is only so much sorrow and happiness in the world; then if one person gets a lot there must be less trouble left for others. I've held on to my share anyhow, though maybe, as father says, it isn't any good.'

"Her tired eyes sought the distant sandhills wistfully and her mouth trembled a little.

"Just then the whistle sounded, bidding all stragglers go on board the steamer.

"'Good-by,' said I, holding out my hand. 'To-morrow, if I may, I will come again and tell you what your unforgotten grief did for me.'

"But next morning I found that the flat had been left at its destination during the night. That is all."

There was a long pause.

"And your explanation?" asked a somewhat tremulous voice from a dark corner.

"Gentlemen," said the Major, "I have none to offer. What I know is this. Somehow--God knows how--I saw that mother's unforgotten grief, and it saved me from shirking my share."

THE DOLL-MAKER

"Christmas Eve!" echoed Mrs. Langford. "Yes! I suppose it is; but I had forgotten--there isn't much to remind one of it in India--is there?"

As she paused half-way up the verandah steps she glanced back at the creeper-hung porch where the high spider-cart, in which she had come home from the club, waited for its owner to return to the box-seat. He seemed in no hurry to do so, and his glance followed hers as he stood on the step below her. He was a tall man, so his face was on a level with hers, and the two showed young, handsome--hers a trifle pale, his a trifle red.

There was a stretch of garden visible beyond the creepers. It was not flowerful, since Christmas, even in India, comes when the tide of sap, the flow of life, is at its lowest; yet, in the growing dusk, the great scarlet hands of the poinsettias could be seen thrusting themselves out wickedly from the leafy shadows as if to clutch the faint white stars of the oleanders blossoming above them; and there was a bunch of Maréchal Niel roses in the silver belt of the woman's white tennis dress, which told of sweeter, more home-like blossom.

"And it is just as well," she continued, with a bitter little laugh, "that there isn't, for it's a deadly, dreary time--"

"All times are dreary," assented the tall man in a low voice, rapidly, passionately, "when there is no one who cares--"

"There is my husband," she interrupted, this time with a nervous laugh. The answer fitted doubly, for she turned to a figure which at that moment came out of the soft rose-tinted light of the room within, and said in a faintly fretful tone, "You don't mean to say, George, surely, that you've been working till now?"

"Working!" echoed George Langford, absently. "Yes! why not? Ah! is that you, Campbell? Brought the missus home, like a good chap. Sorry I couldn't come, my dear; but there was a beastly report overdue, so now I've only time for a spin on the bicycle before dinner, for I must have some exercise. By the way, Laura, you'd better send off your home letter without mine. I really haven't had time to write to the boys this mail."

He was busy now, in the same absent, preoccupied, yet energetic way, in seeing to the machine, which a red-coated servant held for him; but he looked up quickly at his wife's reply--

"I haven't written either."

"Haven't you? That's a pity," he began, then paused, with a vaguely unquiet look at her and her tall companion, which merged, however, into a good-natured smile. "Well, they won't know it was Christmas mail anyhow. 'Pon my soul I'd forgotten it myself, Campbell, or I'd have made a point.... But there's the devil of a crush of work just now, though I shall clear some of the arrears off to-morrow. That's about the only good of a holiday to me!" He was off as he spoke--a shadow gliding into the shadows, where the red hands of the poinsettias and the white stars of the oleanders showed fainter as the dusk deepened.

But he left a pair of covetous, entreating hands and a white face behind him in the verandah, between the rosy light of comfort from within and the grey gloom of the world without.

"It cannot go on--this sort of thing--for ever," said the man, still in that low, passionate voice. "It will kill--"

"Kill him? Do you think so?" she interrupted, still with that little half-nervous, half-bitter laugh. "I don't; he's awfully strong and awfully clever, you know."

The owner of the dogcart turned to it impatiently.

"You will come to-morrow at eleven, anyhow," he said, bringing the patience back to his voice with an effort, for it seemed to him--as it so often seems to a man--that the woman did not know what she would be at. "It will be a jolly drive; and, as they are sending out a mess-tent, we need not come back till late. Your husband said he was to be busy all day."

He waited, reins in hand, for an answer. It came after a pause; came decidedly.

"Yes; at eleven, please. It will be better anyhow than stopping here. There isn't even tennis on Christmas Day, you know; and the house is--is so deadly quiet." She turned to it slowly as she spoke, passed into the rose light, and stood listening to the sound of the dogcart wheels growing fainter and fainter. When it had gone an intense stillness seemed to settle over the wide, empty house--that stillness and emptiness which must perforce settle round many an Englishwoman in India; the stillness and emptiness of a house where children have been, and are not.

It made her shiver slightly as she stood alone, thinking of the dogcart wheels.

Yet just at the back of the screen of poinsettias and oleanders which hid the servants' quarters from the creeper-hung porch there were children and to spare. Dozens of them, all ages, all sizes, belonging to the posse of followers which hangs to the skirts of bureaucracy in India.

Here, as the lights of the dogcart flashed by, they lit up for an instant a quaint little group gathered round a rushlight set on the ground. It consisted of a very old man, almost naked, with a grey frost of beard on his withered cheeks, and of a semicircle of wide-eyed, solemn-faced, brown babies--toddlers of two and three, with a sprinkling of demure little maidens of four and five.

The centre of the group lay beside the rushlight. It was a rudimentary attempt at a rag doll; so rudimentary indeed that as the passing flash of the lamps disclosed its proportions, or rather the lack of them, a titter rose from the darkness behind, where some older folk were lounging.

The old doll-maker, who was attempting to thread a big packing-needle by the faint flicker, turned towards the sound in mild reproof: "Lo! brothers and sisters," he said, "have patience awhile. Even the Creator takes time to make His puppets, and this of mine will be as dolls are always when it is done. And a doll is a doll ever, nothing more, nothing less."

"Yet thou art sadly behind the world in them, babajee," put in a pale young man, with a pen-box under his arm, who had paused on his way to the cook-room, whither he was going to write up the daily account for the butler; since a man must live even if he has a University degree, and, if Government service be not forthcoming, must earn a penny or two as best he can. "That sort of image did for the dark ages of ignorance, but now the mind must have more reality; glass eyes and such like. The world changes."

The old man's face took an almost cunning expression by reason of its self-complacent wisdom. "But not the puppets which play in it, my son. The Final One makes them in the same mould ever; as I do my dolls, as my fathers made theirs. Ay! and thine too, babajee! As for eyes, they come with the sight that sees them, since all things are illusion. For the rest"--here he shot a glance of fiery disdain at the titterers--"I make not dolls for these scoffers, but for their betters. This is for the little masters on their Big Day. To-morrow I will present it to the sahib and the mem, since the little sahibs themselves are away over the Black Water. For old Premoo knows what is due. This dust-like one, lame of a leg and blind of an eye, has not always been a garden coolie--a mere picker of weeds, a gatherer of dried leaves, saved from starvation by such trivial tasks. In his youth Premoo hath carried young masters in his bosom, and guarded them night and day after the manner of bearers. And hath found amusement for them also; even to the making of dolls as this one. Ay! it is true," he went on, led to garrulous indignation by renewed sounds of mirth from behind; "dolls which gave them delight, for they were not as some folk, black of face, but sahib logue who, by God's grace, grew to be ginerals and jedges, and commissioners, and--and even Lat-sahibs."

The old voice, though it rose in pitch with each rise in rank, was not strong enough to overbear the titter, and the doll-maker paused in startled doubt to look at his own creation.

"I can see naught amiss," he muttered to himself; "it is as I used to make them, for sure." His anxious critical eye lingered almost wistfully over the bald head, the pincushion body, the sausage limbs of his creature, yet found no flaw in it; since fingers and toes were a mere detail, and as for hair, a tuft of wool would settle that point. What more could folk want, sensible folk, who knew that a doll must be always a doll--nothing more, nothing less?

Suddenly a thought came to make him put doubt to the test, and he turned to the nearest of the solemn-faced, wide-eyed semicircle of babies.

"Thou canst dandle it whilst I thread the needle, Gungi," he said pompously, "but have a care not to injure the child, and let not the others touch it."

The solemnity left one chubby brown face, and one pair of chubby brown hands closed in glad possession round the despised rag doll. Old Premoo heaved a sigh of relief.

"Said I not so, brothers and sisters?" he cried exultingly. "My hand has not lost its art with the years. A doll is a doll ever to a child, as a child is a child ever to the man and the woman. As for glass eyes, they are illusion--they perish!"

"Nevertheless, thou wilt put clothes to it, for sure, brother," remonstrated the fat butler, who had joined the group, "ere giving it to the Presences. 'Tis like a skinned fowl now, and bare decent."

Premoo shook his head mournfully. "Lo! khangee, my rags, as thou seest, scarce run to a big enough body and legs! And the Huzoor's tailor would give no scraps to Premoo the garden coolie; though in the old days, when the little masters lay in these arms, and there was favour to be carried by the dressing of dolls, such as he were ready to make them, male and female, kings and queens, fairies and heroes, mem-sahibs and Lat-sahibs after their kind. But it matters not in the end, khanjee, it matters not! The doll is a doll ever to a child, as a child is a child ever to the man and the woman, though they know not whether it will wear a crown or a shroud."

So as Christmas Eve passed into Christmas night, Premoo stitched away contentedly as he sat under the stars. There was no Christmas message in them for the old man. The master's Big Day meant nothing to him save an occasion for the giving of gifts, notably rag dolls! There was no vision for him in the velvet darkness of the spangled sky of angels proclaiming the glad tidings of birth; and yet in a way his old heart, wise with the dim wisdom which long life brings, held the answer to the great Problem, as in vague self-consolation for the titterings he murmured to himself now and again: "It is so always; naught matters but the children, and the children's children."

And when his task was over, he laid the result for safety on the basket of withered leaves which he had swept up from the path that evening, and wrapping himself in his thin cotton shawl, lay down to sleep in the shelter of the poinsettia and oleander hedge.

So, the Christmas sun peering through the morning mists shone upon a quaint crèche indeed--on the veriest simulacrum of a child lying on a heap of faded red hand-like leaves and white star-like blossoms. Perhaps it smiled at the sight. Humanity did, anyhow, as it passed and repassed from the servants' quarters to its work in the house. For in truth old Premoo's creation looked even more comical in the daylight than it had by the faint flicker of the lamp. There was something about it productive of sheer mirth, yet of mirth that was tender. Even the fat butler, on his way to set breakfast, stopped to giggle foolishly in its face.

"God knows what it is like," he said finally. "I deemed it was a skinned fowl last night, but 'tis not that. It might be anything."

"Ay!" assented the bearer, who had come out, duster in hand. "That is just where it comes. A body cannot say what it might or might not be. Bala Krishna himself, for aught I know." Whereupon he salaamed; and others passing followed suit, in jest at first, afterwards with a suspicion of gravity in their mirth, since, when all was said and done, who knew what anything was really in this illusory world?

So the rag doll held its levée that Christmas morning, and when the time came for its presentation to the Huzoors there were curious eyes watching the old man as he sate with his offering on the lowest step of the silent, empty house, waiting for the master and mistress to come out into the verandah. Premoo had covered the doll's bed of withered flowers with some fresh ones, so it lay in pomp in its basket, amid royal scarlet and white and gold; nevertheless he waited till the very last, until the smallest platter of sugar and oranges and almonds had been ranged at the master's feet, ere he crept up the steps, salaaming humbly, yet with a vague confidence on his old face.

"It is for the child-people," he said, in his cracked old voice. "This dust-like one has nothing else, but a doll is always a doll to them, as a child is a child to the man and the woman."

Then for an instant the rag doll lay, as it were, in state, surrounded by offerings. But not for long. Some one laughed, then another, till even old Premoo joined doubtfully in the general mirth.

"The devil is in it," chuckled the fat butler, apologetically; "but the twelve Imams themselves would not keep grave over it during the requiem!"

"By Jove, Laura," cried George Langford, "we must really send that home to the kids. It's too absurd!"

"Yes," she assented, a trifle absently, "we must indeed." She stopped to take the quaint travesty from its basket, and as she did so one of the red hands of the poinsettias clung to its sausage legs. She brushed the flower aside with a smile which broadened to a laugh; for in truth the thing was more ludicrously comical than ever seen thus, held in mid-air. George Langford found it so, anyhow, and exploded into a fresh guffaw.

She flushed suddenly, and gathered the unshapen thing in her arms as if to hide it from his laughter.

"Don't, George," she said, "it--it seems unkind. Thank you, Premoo, very much. We will certainly send it home to the little masters; and they, I am sure--" Here her eyes fell upon the doll again, and mirth got the better of her gravity once more.

Half-an-hour afterwards, however, as she stood alone in the drawing-room, ready dressed for her drive, the gravity had returned as she looked down on the quaint monstrosity spread out on the table, where on the evening before the rose-shaded lamp had been. It was ridiculous, certainly, but beneath that there was something else. What was it? What had the old man said: "A doll is always a doll...." He had said that and something more: "As the child is always a child to the man and the woman." It ought to be--but was it? Was not that tie forgotten, lost sight of in others ... sometimes?

Half mechanically she took the rag doll, and sitting down on a rocking-chair laid the caricature on her lap among the dainty frills and laces of her pretty gown. And this was Christmas Day--the children's day--she thought vaguely, dreamily, as she rocked herself backwards and forwards slowly. But the house was empty save for this--this idea, like nothing really in heaven or earth; yet for all that giving the Christmas message, the message of peace and goodwill which the birth of a child into the world should give to the man and the woman:--

"Unto us a child is born."

She smiled faintly--the thing on her lap seemed so far from such a memory--and then, with that sudden half-remorseful pity, she once more gathered the rag doll closer in her arms, as if to shield it from her own laughter.

And as she sate so, her face soft and kind, her husband coming into the room behind her, paused at what he saw. And something that was not laughter surged up in him; for he understood in a flash, understood once and for all, how empty his house had been to her, how empty her arms, how empty her life.

He crossed to her quickly, but she was on her feet almost defiantly at the first sight of him. "Ridiculous monster!" she exclaimed, gaily tossing the doll back on the table. "But it has an uncanny look about it which fascinates one. Gracious! Where are my gloves? I must have left them in my room, and I promised to be ready at eleven!"

When she had gone to look for them, George Langford took up the rag doll in his turn--took it up gingerly, as men take their babies--and stared at it almost fiercely. And he stood there, stern, square, silent, staring at it until his wife came back. Then he walked up to her deliberately and laid his hands on hers.

"I'm going to pack this thing up at once, my dear," he said, "and take it over this morning to little Mrs. Greville. She starts this afternoon, you know, to catch the Messageries steamer. She'll take it home for us; and so the boys could have it by the Christmas mail, which I forgot."

The words were commonplace, but there was a world of meaning in the tone.

"I--I thought you were busy," she said indistinctly, after a pause in which the one thing in the world seemed to her that tightening hold upon her hand. "If you are--I--I could go...."

There was another pause--a longer one.

"I thought you were going out," he said at last, and his voice, though distinct, was not quite steady; "but if you aren't, we might go together. My work can easily stand over, and--and Campbell can drive you out some other day when I can't."

She gave an odd little sound between a laugh and a sob.

"That would be best, perhaps," she said. "I'd like the boys to have this"--she laid her other hand tenderly on the rag doll--"by the Christmas mail I had forgotten."

Old Premoo was sweeping up the withered leaves and flowers from the poinsettia and oleander hedge, when first one and then another high dogcart drove past him. And when the second one had disappeared, he turned to the general audience on the other side of the hedge, and said with great pride and pomp--

"Look you! The scoffers mocked at my doll, but the Huzoors understand. The sahib himself has taken it to send to the little sahibs, and the mem packed it up herself and went with him, instead of going in the Captain sahib's dogcart. That is because a doll is always a doll; as for glass eyes and such like, they perish."

And with that he crushed a handful of withered red poinsettias into the rubbish basket triumphantly.

THE SKELETON TREE

The engine was conscientiously climbing to the level plateau which stretches between Bhopal and Bandakui, when I heard this story.

Ten minutes before, apparently for no other purpose save to supply the first-class passengers with their early cup of tea, the mail train had stopped at a desolate little station which consisted of a concrete-arched, oven-like shed, made still more obtrusively unfitted for the wilderness in which it stood by a dejected bottle-gourd striving to climb up it.

Here a wistful-faced old man in spotless white raiment had appeared in the dawn with a tray of tea and toast. There were four cups of tea and only two passengers; myself and a man who had already been asleep on one side of the carriage when I took possession of the other at Bhopal. So we saw each other for the first time as we sate up in our sleeping suits among our blankets and pillows. As the train moved on, in a series of dislocations which sent half my tea into my saucer, we left the wistful old face looking at the two unsold cups of tea regretfully, and I wished I had bought the lot. It seemed such a pathetic group to leave there in the wilderness, backed by a European oven and a climbing gourd.

And it was a wilderness. Miles and miles of it all the same. Piles of red rocks, blackened on the upper surface, scattered, as if they had been shot from a cart, among dry bents and stunted bushes; curious bushes with a plenitude of twig and a paucity of leaf. Here and there was a still more stunted tree with a paucity of both: a rudimentary tree, splay, gouty, with half-a-dozen or so of kidney-shaped lobes in place of foliage, parched, dusty, unwholesome.

Not a level country, but one dented into causeless dells, raised into irrelevant hillocks; both, however, trending almost imperceptibly upwards, so that the eye, deceived by this, imagined greater things on the horizon.

But there was nothing. Only here and there a bigger patch of charred and blackened bents, telling where a spark from a passing train had found a wider field for fire than usual, unchecked by the piles of red rocks. That, then, was the secret of their blackened surface.

It was too still in that hot windless dawn for flame, but as we sped on, we added to the dull trails of smoke creeping slowly among the stones and bushes, each with a faint touch of fire showing like an eye to the snaky curves behind. A sinister-looking landscape, indeed, to unaccustomed eyes like mine. I sate watching those stealthy, fire-tipped fingers in the grass, till at a curve in the line, due to a steeper rise, I saw something. "What on earth's that?" I cried involuntarily.

"What's what?" returned my unknown companion, in such a curious tone of voice that, involuntarily, I turned to him for a moment.

"That--that tree I suppose it is," I began; "but look for yourself."

I turned back to the sight which had startled me, and gave a low gasp. It was gone. On more level ground we were steaming quickly past a very ordinary dent of a dell, where, as usual, one of these stunted rudimentary trees stood on an open patch of dry bents, seamed and seared by fire trails.

I looked at my companion incredulously. "What an extraordinary thing!" I exclaimed. "I could have sworn that I saw--" I paused from sheer astonishment.

"What?" asked the other passenger, curiously.

"What?" I echoed. "That is just the question. It looked like a tree--a skeleton tree. Absolutely white, with curved ribs of branches--and there were tongues of flame." I paused again, looking out on what we were passing. "It must, of course," I continued, "have been some curious effect of light on that stunted tree yonder. Its branches are curved like ribs, and, if you notice, the bark is lighter."

"Exactly," assented my companion. Then he told me a long botanical name, and pointed out that there were many such trees or bushes in the low jungle, all distinctly to be seen against the darker kinds, distinctly but not blindingly like that curious effect of dawn-light I had seen.

I had, however, almost forgotten my vision, as, thus started, we talked over our tea, when he suddenly said, "Going on to Agra, I suppose?"

"No," I replied, "I'm globe-trotting for sport. I'm going to spend all I can of my return-ticket in these jungles after leopard and tiger. I hear it's first-class if you don't mind letting yourself go--getting right away from the beaten track and all that. I mean to get hold of a jungle tribe if I can--money's no object, and--"

I ran on, glad to detail plans for what had been a long-cherished dream of mine, when my companion arrested me by the single word--

"Don't."

It was in consequence of my surprise that he told me the following story:--

"I surveyed this railway ten years ago. The country was very much the same as it is now, except that it was all, naturally, off the beaten track. There were two of us in camp together, Graham and myself. He was a splendid chap; keen as mustard on everything. It did not matter what it was. So that one day, when he and I were working out levels after late breakfast, he jumped up like a shot--just as if he had not been tramping over these cursed rubbish shoots of red rocks for six hours--at the sound of a feeble whimpering near the cook-room tent.

"'That devil of yours is at it again,' he said, 'and I won't have it, that's all!'

"As he went off I followed, for I did not relish Graham's justice when it disabled the cook.

"But this time I owned that the brute deserved punishment, for a more forlorn little tragedy than that which was being enacted among the pots and pans I never saw.

"Mohubbut Khan, chief villain, was seated--naked to the waist, bald as to head, after the manner of native cooks at work, on a low reed stool, brandishing a knife in one hand, while the other held a skrawking leggy white cock.

"Exactly in front of him was a group more suggestive of monkeys than men. It consisted of a very old man, wizened, bandy-legged, bandy-armed, whose white teeth showed in animal perfection as he howled, and a child of the same build, clinging to him convulsively, all legs, and arms, and shrieks.

"Between them and the cook stood Graham. He was a big fellow; fair as you are. In fact you are rather like him. There was a moment's pause, during which the old anatomy's voice rose in plaintive howls of resignation.

"'Lo! sonling, be comforted. Death comes to all, even to white cocks. It is but a few years. And grand-dad will hatch another. It is a sacrifice. Sacrifice to the sahib logue who bring death as they choose!'

"Well, it turned out, of course, to be a case of wanton cruelty. It always is. For hopeless inability to be considerate commend me to a native jack-in-office. There were fifty other fowls in the neighbouring village, but nothing would serve the underling whose duty it was to collect supplies, but that this wretched child's pet should serve for the Huzoor's dinner. The old man's joy when it was released was purely pitiable. He would have reared another for his grandson, he asserted garrulously; ay! even to the hatching of an egg from the very beginning, with toil by day and night. But only the Great God knew if the child's heart would have gone out to the chick as it had to the cock, for the heart was capricious. It was not to be counted upon, since the Great God made some men, yea! even some Huzoors, different from others. He looked from Graham to me as he spoke, and somehow I felt small. So as Graham was evidently master of the situation, I slunk back to my work.

"There were sounds of woe thereinafter from the cook-room tent, and Graham himself supervised the dinner that night, in order, he explained somewhat apologetically, that I might not suffer from his conceptions of duty.

"It was two days after this, and we had shifted camp fifteen miles, when, having occasion to go into Graham's tent after dark, I stumbled over some one sitting among the corner tent-pegs. It was the grandpapa of the white cock, and he explained to me in his lingo--for he was one of the jungle people--that he had come in exchange for that precious bird. One life or another mattered little. Grim-sahib had spared the child's heart's joy, which was now living with him in the maternal mansion. There being, therefore, no necessity for the occupation of hatching eggs, he, Bunder--yea! of a surety, it was the same name as that of the monkey people--had come to do service to the Huzoors instead of the white cock.

"That was absolutely all I could get out of him. So for days and weeks he followed us. He was useful in his way, especially to Graham, who had a passion not only for sport, but for all sorts of odd knowledge."

I remember interrupting here that that was half the pleasure of new surroundings, to which my fellow-traveller replied drily that he had expected I would say so, as I really reminded him very much of Graham.

"This passion of his, however, led him into being a bit reckless, and as the hot weather came on he began to get touched up by fever. Still, he continued working during the off days, and seemed little the worse until one evening when he went to bed with the shivers after a leopard hunt. Then old Bunder crept over to my tent.

"'Grim-sahib must go home across the Black Water at once, Huzoor,' he said quietly, 'or his bones will whiten the jungle. He has seen the Skeleton Tree.'

"That was, in essence, all he had to say, though his explanations were lengthy. It was simply a Skeleton Tree, and it was always seen where fire fingers met; but those who saw it became skeletons in the jungle before long unless they possessed a certain talisman. There were such talismans among the hill tribes, and those who fell sick of fever always wore one if they could compass it. That was not often, since they were rare. He himself had one, but what use was it when life, from old age, had become no more worth than a white cock's? So his grandson wore it; wore it as he fed the joy of his heart peacefully in the ancestral home; thanks to Grim-sahib!

"'But how do you know he saw the Tree?' I asked.

"'It was when we had crawled up nigh the end of a dip, Huzoor,' replied Bunder. 'He looked up and said, "What's that?" And when I asked him what he had seen, he said: "It is gone. It must have been that stunted tree. But it looked like a skeleton, and there were fire fingers round it." So I knew. Send him home, Huzoor, away from its power, or his bones will whiten the jungle.'

"During the following days I really began--though I'm not an imaginative chap--to feel a bit queer about things. Graham couldn't shake off his fever, and more than once when he was delirious in the evenings he would startle me by saying, 'What's that?' But he would laugh the next moment, and add, 'Only a tree, of course; it was the light.'

"There was no doctor within miles; and, besides, it was not really such a bad case as all that. At least it didn't seem so to me or to Graham himself. Only to old Bunder, who became quite a nuisance with his warnings, so that I was glad when, after a confused rigmarole about white cocks and sacrifices, he disappeared one day and was seen no more. Partly, perhaps, because we moved back to a higher camp in the hopes of escaping the malaria.

"But we didn't. Graham grew appreciably worse. He was fairly well by day; it was at night that the fever seemed to grip him. I used to sit up with him till twelve or one o'clock, and then turn in till about dawn, when the servants had orders to call me, and I would go over and see after him again.

"But one day, or rather night, it was still quite dark when my bearer roused me with his persistent drone of 'Saheeb, saheeb!' and I knew in an instant something was wrong. Graham, shortly after I left him, had got out of bed, dressed himself in his shikar clothes, taken his gun, and gone away from the camp. His bearer, a lad whom he had promoted to the place in one of his impulsive generous fits of revolt against things unjustifiable, had failed to take alarm until his master's prolonged absence had made him seek and rouse my man. The latter was full of apologies; but what else, he protested, could be expected of babes and sucklings promoted out of due season? The babe and suckling meanwhile was blubbering incoherently, and asserting that he was not to blame. The sahib had called for Bunder and Bunder had come; and they had gone off together.

"'Bunder?' I exclaimed. 'Impossible! He hasn't been near the camp for days. Did any one else see him?' But no one had. And as there was no time to be lost in inquiries I dismissed the idea as an attempt on the boy's part to relieve himself from responsibility, and organised the whole camp into a search party.

"It was a last-quarter moon, and I shall never forget the eeriness of that long, fruitless search. At first I kept calling 'Graham, Graham!' but after a time I felt this to be useless, and that he must be either unconscious, or delirious, or determined to keep out of our way. So I pushed on and on in silence, through the bushes and bents, expecting the worst. But after all it was the best. We found him at dawn lying under one of those stunted trees fast asleep. So sound asleep that he did not wake when we carried him back to camp on a litter of boughs. So sound that it was not until the afternoon, when he stirred and asked for beef-tea, that I discovered he wore round his neck a plaited cord of dirty red silk with a small bag attached to it.

"'How the deuce did that come there?' he asked drowsily, putting his hand up to feel it. How, indeed? He could never explain; and the bag held nothing but a bit of blank paper folded into four. He took the thing to England with him when he went home on sick leave the next month, and so far as I know is no wiser than he was then as to how it came round his neck."

Here my fellow-traveller paused, as a whistle from the engine told we were pulling up again. "Well," I said, a trifle plaintively, "but why should not I?"

He was already standing on the platform among a miscellaneous pile of belongings, such as Indian travellers delight to carry about with them, ere he replied:--

"Good-by. Glad to have met you--for you remind me awfully of Graham!"

I sometimes wonder if I should have taken his warning seriously or treated it as a traveller's tale. As it was, I had not the chance of testing its truth. For, at my destination, I found a telegram recalling me to England on urgent business. So, beyond that passing glimpse of the Skeleton Tree, I have no experience.

FOOTNOTES

Footnote 1: Ghazie--religious fanatic.

Footnote 2: The natives call Freemasonry Lodges by this name.

Footnote 3: The Mutiny.

Footnote 4: Violet.

When she woke next morning, a be-capped and be-aproned upper housemaid was bringing in her early cup of tea.

"Yes, milady, we 'ave hall come. Mr. 'Ooper 'e 'ave come too, milady. Indeed, if it 'adn't bin for Mr. 'Ooper, we should 'ave bin picking hup cattle in that horful Minch till hevenin'; but 'e took it on 'imself to tell the capting as master would willin' pay hextra for us to come as quick as might be. And thankful we was, milady, for some of us mightn't 'ave lived to see land."

Jane looked as if she certainly would have been one of those to succumb, and Lady Maud gave a sigh of relief.

"Tell Hooper to go to his master,--he wasn't very well last night,--and tell Josephine I shall breakfast in my room."

"Mr. 'Ooper 'ave gone to master," replied Jane in a voice which implied that the reminder was unnecessary; "and if you please, milady, Capting Weeks 'e 'ave come too. We picked 'im up with some cattle in a boat from some place as begins with an 'Hoich.'"

Lady Maud gave another sigh of relief. The sand-bags of civilization were a great protection after all; and if Captain Weeks had come, Eustace would go out shooting with him. That would give her a whole day to face the situation. Honestly, she thought far more of possible difficulties with him than with her husband. The shock had been terrible at the time, but perhaps, after all, it was an isolated offence. Heaps of men in society got drunk decently out of sight of their legal womenkind, and no one thought-- The recurrence of the phrase she had used the night before made her pause and hide her face in the pillow in sudden horror at herself and him. No! without going so far as that, one could still be rational. Edward was devoted to her, and if a wife by her influence made a better man of her husband, wherein lay the degradation? Last night--great heavens! what had come over her last night? She had been taken by surprise, placed in conditions which no one could possibly have foreseen, dragged by main force from every shelter. Her face burnt as she remembered, and yet how natural it had been! Natural and therefore absurd, ridiculous. To-day, however, was different, and so the little pencilled note from Eustace, which Josephine brought in with the breakfast, received no reply save a message to say she was perfectly well and hoped he would look after Captain Weeks, if Mr. Wilson was not able to go out. A bold parry, which made Eustace Gordon set his teeth.

Yes! to-day was different; a new heaven and a new earth. The very house transformed; for when she came down to lunch, the drawing-room was full of tables, screens, photographs, and ferns, while in the dining-room the butler stood ready to remove the silver covers, and so let loose the pent-up energies of two footmen who, with bent heads, seemed waiting for some one to say grace. Mr. Gordon, the report ran, had taken Captain Weeks to the Carbost beat, and would not be back till late. Her ladyship was to open any telegram which might come, as it would relate to the yacht. Mr. Wilson had gone to shoot rock-pigeon with the head keeper. The professor was exploring, and begged her ladyship not to wait lunch for him. So said the butler gravely as he filled her glass. Through the window she could see the Atlantic guiltless of a white feather, and her own courage rose with the outlook. As she strolled about the heathery knolls after lunch, a boy on a pony appeared with the expected telegram. "Started, should be with you to-morrow." So that was an end of one trouble. Then Cynthia Strong and some others were to come by the next boat. Will Lockhart was cruising about the coast and might look in on them at any time. There would be no more solitude; not even to-day, since there across the moor came Miss Macdonald, attired for calling, and beside her that good-looking young sailor. Lady Maud liked boys, especially handsome ones with palpable adoration in their blue eyes.

The professor, coming in very hot about tea-time, found the trio having it like children out in a bieldy bit by the burn, but with the butler solemnly presiding over the fire. A fire which gave James, the under footman, the hugest delight until his enjoyment was crushed out of him by his superior officer. For the butler knew his duty: afternoon tea was afternoon tea wherever her ladyship chose to take it; that is to say, a function at which a footman must preserve an impassive face. So poor James put on the sticks with funeral calm and burnt his fingers with great decorum.

"Here is a lady, professor," said Lady Maud,--"Miss Macdonald--Professor Endorwick,--who will tell you everything you can possibly want to know about the island. She is a mine of useful information; at least I have found her so."

That gracious voice, face, and manner had been a sort of rapture to young Rick Halmar for the last half hour, and when, after launching the others into conversation, she turned to him with the undefinable change in manner she could no more avoid in talking to men than the magnet can keep its influence, his heart gave quite a throb.

"I didn't introduce you," she said, smiling, "because I only know your Christian name; and I'm not sure of that."

"Rick! Rick Halmar," he replied with a blush which took him by surprise; for he was not as a rule self-conscious.

"Rick?" she echoed curiously.

"Eric. My father was a Norwegian. But it was a boshy name and the fellows on the Britannia called me 'Little by Little'--after the book, you know."

She laughed. "A very inappropriate name, Mr. Halmar. You must be six feet."

He shook his head. "Five feet eleven and three-quarters. It's too big for a sailor. You get in the way of the ropes and things."

"Not too big for a man--but listen! the professor is overcome already; how delightful!"

In good sooth he was actually reduced to the position of listener, an isolated assertion of interest being all the speech allowed him as Miss Willina waxed eloquent over the crass superstitions of the islanders and her own select beliefs.

Rick's face grew brimful of smiles.

"Aunt Will is as bad as the best, herself. Why, the other day I carved out a sort of devil,--a thing they worship in the Caribbees,--and she was in quite a taking because it was left out on a harp,--that's a Viking's tomb, Lady Maud. She has some rigmarole about 'tribute to the dead,' their sending back things to work evil to the living. But, do you know, Lady Maud, it's awfully rum, but I couldn't find the thing when I went to look for it yesterday morning."

"You couldn't find it? Mr. Halmar, don't speak loud; don't attract their attention by looking surprised! Was it--the devil, I mean--fearfully ugly?"

"The best I ever made."

"Had it white eyes with a shot stuck in them?"

"Lady Maud! did you find it?"

"Not I, but the professor did. It's a footstep of a discredited belief, and he is going to lecture on it to the British Association. Isn't it perfectly lovely? How we shall all laugh!"

"But you will tell him, of course?"

"Tell him! Why should I? These things are one of my chief joys in life."

Rick Halmar winced. "But don't you see, Lady Maud, it's my fault more or less? I oughtn't to go carving devils and leaving them about. It isn't fair."

She raised her eyebrows. "When you are older, Mr. Halmar, you won't be so eager to accept responsibility. By the way, does yours extend to another devil of the same sort which was found on Grada Sands?"

He let his head drop into his hands in comic despair. "How one's sins do find one out! It must be the one Aunt Will flung into the Minch. Everything comes round sooner or later to the sands. Has the professor got it too?"

"No, Mr. Halmar. I have it."

"You! Oh, Lady Maud--I am sorry."

"You well may be. I have put it into my own room because the professor declared it was genuine--a real savage fate. No--that isn't true, so don't distress yourself. I took a fancy to it. I have a habit of taking fancies to things and to people; so there it shall remain."

Rick's face lit up. "Let me make you a better one," he began.

"I said, Mr. Halmar, that I took a fancy to it; and now, don't you think you should make your confession like a good boy?"

He made it very prettily, but with a frank enjoyment of the mistake, which was infectious. So much so, that the chief sufferer, stimulated into unusual playfulness by Miss Willina's wit, actually went into the house for his discredited belief and brought it out for her to burn.

So, with much laughter, they stood round the fire, causing poor James almost to burst under his efforts after dignity, till suddenly, with something between a chuckle and a cough, the butler himself gave way into the remark that "I 'adn't made a Guy Forks--kck-kh-kh--since 'e was a boy,--kh-kh-kh,--but if 'er ladyship pleased, Jeames could run round to the gun-room for some powder and 'e'd 'ave some squibs ready in no time."

So Numbo Jumbo was burnt with all the honours, and the butler, going back for his own tea to the housekeeper's room, hummed, "Remember, remember, the fifth of November," until the cook, with a snort, asked wherever to goodness he had picked up such a vulgar ditty.

"Now I have no doubt all you learned people think me very foolish," said Miss Willina, drawing on her gloves with the air of one who has completed a good work; "but I really am immensely relieved in my mind. I had a presentiment about that devil of Rick's; besides, these old superstitions invariably have their origin in some fundamental fact or law of Nature. Don't you think so, professor?"

"Undoubtedly, my dear madam; the Folklore Society--"

But Miss Willina had a profound contempt for all societies and proclaimed it cheerfully. "Therefore, the only remaining thing to be done," she continued, shaking her head at Rick, "is to make restitution for that naughty boy's mischief. So, if you will walk over to Eval some day, Mr. Endorwick, I will give you that bone ring with the Runic inscription about which I was telling you."

"My dear lady," cried the professor with greed in his eyes, "I really could not dream--"

"I don't want to give it to you, of course," she went on frankly; "but my brother says it should be in a museum; so you can put 'Given by Miss Macdonald through Professor Endorwick' on the ticket. And, by the bye, it was found on Grada and Malcolm, Aig says."

Meanwhile Lady Maud had turned to Rick with a quizzical smile. "Do you accept the responsibility of my fate, Mr. Halmar? or shall I have a private auto-da-fe in my room?"

The boy's face positively shone with pleasure as he took her hand to say goodbye.

"I couldn't do anything that would bring you harm, I think--you are too--too beautiful." The absolute simplicity of the statement rendered it inoffensive, and Lady Maud laughed.

"Take your nephew away, Miss Macdonald; he is paying me compliments."

"I don't wonder at it," retorted the little lady, nodding her head, "and compliments are pleasant things; at least, I used to find them so."

"Why employ the past tense, dear lady?" said the professor with a bow, as he shook hands, whereat Miss Willina declared that the only safety lay in flight; and Lady Maud, as she went back to the house, told herself once more that to-day was very different from yesterday. This background of persiflage, with just a serious touch here and there to help out the chiaro-oscuro, suited figures in modern dress. Tailor-made figures guiltless of a wrinkle and oblivious of vitality's claim for an uncrushed organ or two.

"If her ladyship please," said Josephine, when the dressing bell brought her to her mistress' room, "Mr. 'Ooper, he desire a few word of milady."

"Hooper! didn't they say he had gone with Mr. Wilson?"

"Monsieur 'ave just return; Mr. Gordon also wid Capitaine Veek and--Mon Dieu! quel gibier! Sall I bid him come?"

Lady Maud, at the writing-table, rested her head on her hand, feeling a sudden need of courage. They had all come back, and some things must be faced before life could run smoothly once more. Eustace must be made to understand that there was to be no drifting, and her husband must consent to let her hand be on the tiller ropes.

"Well, Hooper?"

Rather a diffident-looking man; nervous too in his manner. "I am sorry to have to trouble your ladyship, but I think Dr. Haddon would wish it, under the circumstances. It is about master, your ladyship."

Her heart gave a great throb. "Your master, Hooper? Well?"

The diffident man, holding on to the doorknob as for support, cleared his throat. "It is a little difficult, my lady, and Mr. Gordon, when he spoke to me, was for saying nothing; but I have been considering the matter and I think Dr. Haddon--"

"Who is Dr. Haddon?"

"I was not quite sure if your ladyship knew--anything. But master was under Dr. Haddon for a time. It--it is for the liquor habit, my lady, and Dr. Haddon is most successful. He was most successful with master. Four years I have been with him since we came back from America, and never till last night--" he coughed slightly and paused. Lady Maud sate staring at him without a word.

"I am very sorry, my lady. The other servants will tell you how distressed I was to be absent from my duty. It arose from my not understanding the porter's accent, my lady; but it will not occur again. I mean, my lady, that--ahem--nothing of the sort will occur again. So there is no need for--for distress or anxiety."

"You mean that as long as--as you are with Mr. Wilson--" so far she managed in a cold hard voice; then came silence.

"Just so, my lady--it is a question of influence. I undertake the entire responsibility. There is really no cause for alarm."

"That--that will do, Hooper; you can go." Her one thought was to get rid of this man, this servant, who seemed to have reached out his common hand and touched her very soul. He paused, still with his hand on the door.

"I beg pardon, my lady, but there is one thing. Dr. Haddon's system is based on influence. It does not allow any appeal to--ahem--to the moral sense. Therefore, if your ladyship could kindly treat the mistake of yesterday with silence, it would be better--for the system. Dr. Haddon ignores failure on principle, it--it is part of the system; and any interference may be dangerous. Therefore, if your ladyship--"

"I quite understand. You can go."

When she was left alone, she sate staring on at the door he had closed behind him. Behind whom? why the man who--oh! it was an impossible, an incredible, position! She had married her husband without caring for him, but she had married him also because she intended that he should care for her. And now! What was he but a puppet, dependent on this man? She had not married Edward Wilson, but Wilson-cum-Haddon, -cum-Hooper. And Eustace knew it! Her husband, the possible father of her children! She had known all along that he was a weak man, but that the very possibility of his living decently lay in the will of another was hopeless, horrible degradation. She had often in society talked lightly of the part hypnotism was to play in the future regeneration of the world; but now that even a suspicion of it touched her inner life, it left her in wild revolt. When all was said and done, that man to whom they paid so many pounds a year was master of her fate. It should never be! Better, far better, that her husband should be drunk; and yet what right had she to interfere?

"It will be too late to make milady charmante," suggested Josephine, coming in, reproachfully.

She stood up hastily with clenched hands. Eustace should not see her degradation--she would show him--

"There is plenty of time," she said coldly. "Put on my diamonds, Josephine--that dress is dull. They can wait if I am not ready."

She was worth waiting for, and Mr. Wilson's weak face brightened as she went up to him with easy grace. "Did you have a good day, Edward? I saw Hooper for a moment, but I forgot to ask him about the sport."

She failed in her object for all her bravado. The eyes she sought to blind saw too clearly.

"So Louisa comes to-morrow," she said lightly, as, after keeping all the men, her husband included, at her feet during the evening, she rose to say good-night and let her hand linger purposely in her cousin's, so that he should see she did not care, that she was not afraid.

"No!" he replied coldly; "I've had another wire. She came as far as Portree, and, hearing that the gathering is next week, decided to stay and show off her new dresses. She got about a ton of them in Paris if you remember, and women, even the best of them, love to show off."

His tone roused her to reckless resentment by its assumption of knowledge and condemnation.

"He does not look very sorry for his wife's decision, does he, professor?" she asked with a laugh.

"My dear lady, how could he be sorry for anything, in his present position?"

"Or I in mine?" she retorted, giving a little mock curtsey over the hand she still held.

Eustace Gordon bit his lip, but said nothing.