The beaters drew in: the elephants, raising their trunks in air and sniffing suspicion, moved slowly inward. We had girt him round now with a perfect ring, through which he could not possibly break without attacking somebody. The Maharajah kept a fixed eye on my personal safety. But still the royal animal crouched and skulked, and still the black beaters shrieked, howled, and gesticulated. At last, among the tall perpendicular lights and shadows of the big gra.s.ses and bamboos, I seemed to see something move--something striped like the stems, yet pa.s.sing slowly, slowly, slowly between them. It moved in a stealthy undulating line. No one could believe till he saw it how the bright flame-coloured bands of vivid orange-yellow on the monster"s flanks, and the interspersed black stripes, could fade away and harmonise, in their native surroundings, with the lights and shades of the upright jungle.
It was a marvel of mimicry. "Look there!" I cried to the Maharajah, pointing one eager hand. "What is that thing there, moving?"
He stared where I pointed. "By Jove," he cried, raising his rifle with a sportsman"s quickness, "you have spotted him first! The tiger!"
The terrified beast stole slowly and cautiously through the tall gra.s.ses, his lithe, silken side gliding in and out snakewise, and only his fierce eyes burning bright with gleaming flashes between the gloom of the jungle. Once I had seen him, I could follow with ease his sinuous path among the tangled bamboos, a waving line of beauty in perpetual motion. The Maharajah followed him too, with his keen eyes, and pointed his rifle hastily. But, quick as he was, Lord Southminster was before him. I had half expected to find the pea-green young man turn coward at the last moment; but in that I was mistaken: I will do him the justice to say, whatever else he was, he was a born sportsman. The gleam of joy in his leaden eye when he caught sight of the tiger, the flush of excitement on his pasty face, the eagerness of his alert att.i.tude, were things to see and remember. That moment almost enn.o.bled him. In sight of danger, the best instincts of the savage seemed to revive within him. In civilised life he was a poor creature; face to face with a wild beast he became a mighty shikari. Perhaps that was why he was so fond of big-game shooting. He may have felt it raised him in the scale of being.
He lifted his rifle and fired. He was a cool shot, and he wounded the beast upon its left shoulder. I could see the great crimson stream gush out all at once across the shapely sides, staining the flame-coloured stripes and reddening the black shadows. The tiger drew back, gave a low, fierce growl, and then crouched among the jungle. I saw he was going to leap; he bent his huge backbone into a strong downward curve, took in a deep breath, and stood at bay, glaring at us. Which elephant would he attack? That was what he was now debating. Next moment, with a frightful R"-r"-r"-r", he had straightened out his muscles, and, like a bolt from a bow, had launched his huge bulk forward.
I never saw his charge. I never knew he had leapt upon me. I only felt my elephant rock from side to side like a ship in a storm. He was trumpeting, shaking, roaring with rage and pain, for the tiger was on his flanks, its claws buried deep in the skin of his forehead. I could not keep my seat; I felt myself tossed about in the frail howdah like a pill in a pill-box. The elephant, in a death grapple, was trying to shake off his ghastly enemy. For a minute or two, I was conscious of nothing save this swinging movement. Then, opening my eyes for a second, I saw the tiger, in all his terrible beauty, clinging to the elephant"s head by the claws of his fore paws, and struggling for a foothold on its trunk with his mighty hind legs, in a wounded agony of despair and vengeance. He would sell his life dear; he would have one or other of us.
Lord Southminster raised his rifle again; but the Maharajah shouted aloud in an angry voice: "Don"t fire! Don"t fire! You will kill the lady! You can"t aim at him like that. The beast is rocking so that no one can say where a shot will take effect. Down with your gun, sir, instantly!"
[Ill.u.s.tration: IT WENT OFF UNEXPECTEDLY.]
My mahout, unable to keep his seat with the rocking, now dropped off his cushion among the scrub below. He could speak a few words of English.
"Shoot, Mem Sahib, shoot!" he cried, flinging his hands up. But I was tossed to and fro, from side to side, with my rifle under my arm. It was impossible to aim. Yet in sheer terror I tried to draw the trigger. I failed; but somehow I caught my rifle against the side of my cage.
Something snapped in it somewhere. It went off unexpectedly, without my aiming or firing. I shut my eyes. When I opened them again, I saw a swimming picture of the great sullen beast, loosing his hold on the elephant. I saw his brindled face; I saw his white tusks. But his gleaming pupils burned bright no longer. His jaw was full towards me: I had shot him between the eyes. He fell, slowly, with blood streaming from his nostrils, and his tongue lolling out. His muscles relaxed; his huge limbs grew limp. In a minute, he lay stretched at full length on the ground, with his head on one side, a grand, terrible picture.
My mahout flung up his hands in wonder and amazement. "My father!" he cried aloud. "Truly, the Mem Sahib is a great shikari!"
The Maharajah stretched across to me. "That was a wonderful shot!" he exclaimed. "I could never have believed a woman could show such nerve and coolness."
Nerve and coolness, indeed! I was trembling all over like an Italian greyhound, every limb a jelly; and I had not even fired: the rifle went off of itself without me. I am innocent of having ever endangered the life of a hayc.o.c.k. But once more I dissembled. "Yes, it _was_ a difficult shot," I said jauntily, as if I rather liked tiger-hunting.
"I didn"t think I"d hit him." Still the effect of my speech was somewhat marred, I fear, by the tears that in spite of me rolled down my cheek silently.
""Pon honah, I nevah saw a finah piece of shooting in my life," Lord Southminster drawled out. Then he added aside, in an undertone, "Makes a fellow moah determined to annex her than evah!"
I sat in my howdah, half dazed. I hardly heard what they were saying. My heart danced like the elephant. Then it stood still within me. I was only aware of a feeling of faintness. Luckily for my reputation as a mighty sportswoman, however, I just managed to keep up, and did not actually faint, as I was more than half inclined to do.
Next followed the native paean. The beaters crowded round the fallen beast in a chorus of congratulation. Many of the villagers also ran out, with prayers and e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.ns, to swell our triumph. It was all like a dream. They hustled round me and salaamed to me. A woman had shot him!
Wonderful! A babel of voices resounded in my ears. I was aware that pure accident had elevated me into a heroine.
"Put the beast on a pad elephant," the Maharajah called out.
The beaters tied ropes round his body and raised him with difficulty.
The Maharajah"s face grew stern. "Where are the whiskers?" he asked, fiercely, in his own tongue, which Major Balmossie interpreted for me.
The beaters and the villagers, bowing low and expanding their hands, made profuse expressions of ignorance and innocence. But the fact was patent--the grand face had been mangled. While they had crowded in a dense group round the fallen carca.s.s, somebody had cut off the lips and whiskers and secreted them.
"They have ruined the skin!" the Maharajah cried out in angry tones. "I intended it for the lady. I shall have them all searched, and the man who has done this thing----"
[Ill.u.s.tration: I SAW HIM NOW THE ORIENTAL DESPOT.]
He broke off, and looked around him. His silence was more terrible by far than the fiercest threat. I saw him now the Oriental despot. All the natives drew back, awe-struck.
"The voice of a king is the voice of a great G.o.d," my mahout murmured, in a solemn whisper. Then n.o.body else said anything.
"Why do they want the whiskers?" I asked, just to set things straight again. "They seem to have been in a precious hurry to take them!"
The Maharajah"s brow cleared. He turned to me once more with his European manner. "A tiger"s body has wonderful power after his death,"
he answered. "His fangs and his claws are very potent charms. His heart gives courage. Whoever eats of it will never know fear. His liver preserves against death and pestilence. But the highest virtue of all exists in his whiskers. They are mighty talismans. Chopped up in food, they act as a slow poison, which no doctor can detect, no antidote guard against. They are also a sovereign remedy against magic or the evil eye.
And administered to women, they make an irresistible philtre, a puissant love-potion. They secure you the heart of whoever drinks them."
"I"d give a couple of monkeys for those whiskahs," Lord Southminster murmured, half unnoticed.
We began to move again. "We"ll go on to where we know there is another tiger," the Maharajah said, lightly, as if tigers were partridges. "Miss Cayley, you will come with us?"
I rested on my laurels. (I was quivering still from head to foot.) "No, thank you, Maharajah," as unconcernedly as I could; "I"ve had quite enough sport for my first day"s tiger-hunting. I think I"ll go back now, and write a newspaper account of this little adventure."
"You have had luck," he put in. "Not everyone kills a tiger his first day out. This will make good reading."
"I wouldn"t have missed it for a hundred pounds," I answered.
"Then try another."
"I wouldn"t try another for a thousand," I cried, fervently. That evening, at the palace, I was the heroine of the day. They toasted me in a b.u.mper of Heidsieck"s dry monopole. The men made speeches. Everybody talked gushingly of my splendid courage and my steadiness of hand. It was a brilliant shot, under such difficult circ.u.mstances. For myself, I said nothing. I pretended to look modest. I dared not confess the truth--that I never fired at all. And from that day to this I have never confessed it, till I write it down now in these confiding memoirs.
[Ill.u.s.tration: IT"S I WHO AM THE WINNAH.]
One episode cast a gloom over my ill-deserved triumph. In the course of the evening, a telegram arrived for the pea-green young man by a white-turbaned messenger. He read it, and crumpled it up carelessly in his hand. I looked inquiry. "Yaas," he answered, nodding. "You"re quite right. It"s that! Pooah old Marmy has gone, aftah all! Ezekiel and Habakkuk have carried off his sixteen stone at last! And I don"t mind telling yah now--though it was a neah thing--it"s _I_ who am the winnah!"
X
THE ADVENTURE OF THE CROSS-EYED Q.C.
The "cold weather," as it is humorously called, was now drawing to a close, and the young ladies in sailor hats and cambric blouses, who flock to India each autumn for the annual marriage-market, were beginning to resign themselves to a return to England--unless, of course, they had succeeded in "catching." So I realised that I must hurry on to Delhi and Agra, if I was not to be intercepted by the intolerable summer.
When we started from Moozuffernuggar for Delhi and the East, Lord Southminster was starting for Bombay and Europe. This surprised me not a little, for he had confided to my unsympathetic ear a few nights earlier, in the Maharajah"s billiard-room, that he was "stony broke,"
and must wait at Moozuffernuggar for lack of funds "till the oof-bird laid" at his banker"s in England. His conversation enlarged my vocabulary, at any rate.
"So you"ve managed to get away?" I exclaimed, as he dawdled up to me at the hot and dusty station.
"Yaas," he drawled, fixing his eye-gla.s.s, and lighting a cigarette.
"I"ve--p"f--managed to get away. Maharaj seems to have thought--p"f--it would be cheepah in the end to pay me out than to keep me."
"You don"t mean to say he offered to lend you money?" I cried.
"No; not exactly that: _I_ offahed to borrow it."
"From the man you call a n.i.g.g.e.r?"
His smile spread broader over his face than ever. "Well, we borrow from the Jews, yah know," he said pleasantly, "so why the jooce shouldn"t we borrow from the heathen also? Spoiling the Egyptians, don"t yah see?--the same as we used to read about in the Scripchah when we were innocent kiddies. Like marriage, quite. You borrow in haste--and repay at leisure."
He strolled off and took his seat. I was glad to get rid of him at the main line junction.