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 pa.s.s 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 G.o.d! 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-gra.s.s--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.
"G.o.d 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.
"G.o.d 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."
SURaBHI
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.