What, no tears? Fatma, Fatma! the boy hath fallen and on my life he hath not shed a tear. _Ai_, the bold heart! _ai_, the brave man!"
An old woman, bent almost double with age, crept from the door. She kissed the child"s feet as it sat throned in its grandfather"s arms.
Her lips could reach no higher, but that was high enough for worship.
"He never cries! None of them cried, and he is like them all,"
she crooned. "Dost have a mind, Khan _sahib_, of Futteh Mahomed falling?--the first, and I so frightened. There was a scratch a finger long on his knee and--"
"Peace, Fatma, and go back! There is a stranger at the door. Go back, I say!"
It was a difficult task to draw the veil over those bent shoulders, but the old woman"s wrinkled hands did their best as she scurried away obediently.
"_Salaam Alaikoom!_" said the Pathan. "The mother may return. It is I, Afzul, brother of the breast."
"Afzul!" The old martinet"s face grew dark. "The only Afzul I knew was a runaway and a deserter. Art thou he?"
"Ay! Khan _sahib_," replied the man calmly. "I ran away because I had sold my life to Marsden _sahib_, and I wanted to buy it back again. I have done it, and I am free."
"Marsden _sahib!_ "Tis long since I heard that name. Allah be with the brave! Pity there was none to stand between him and death as on that day when my son died."
"Thou liest, Khan _sahib_. I stood in my brother"s place. Marsden _sahib_ is not dead. I left him three days ago at Saudaghur."
"Not dead? This is a tale! A prisoner no doubt. _Inshallah!_ my blood scents something worth words. Here, Fatma, take the child; or, stay, it"s best he should hear too. Such things sink through the skin and strengthen the heart. And bring food, woman, what thou hast, and no excuses. A brave man stomachs all save insult."
So, with the child on his knee, the old soldier listened to Afzul Khan"s story, while in the dark room beyond the women positively shed tears of shame over the poor appearance which the plain _bajra_,[6]
cakes, unsweetened, unb.u.t.tered, presented on the big bra.s.s platter.
"There is the boy"s curdled milk," suggested his sad-faced mother. "He will not mind for a day."
"Peace, unnatural!" scolded the grandmother. "The boy"s milk, forsooth! What next? Women nowadays have no heart. A strange man, and the boy"s milk forsooth!"
Haiyat _bibi_ blushed under her brown skin. Hers was a hard life with her husband far over the black water, and this stern old man and woman for gaolers. But the boy was hers; she hugged that knowledge to her heart and it comforted her.
The evening drew in, the child dozed off to sleep, but not one jot or t.i.ttle of adventure was to be pa.s.sed over in silence. "_Inshallah!_ but thou didst well!" "G.o.d send the traitors to h.e.l.l!" "Ay! Marsden _sahib_ was ever the bravest of the brave!" These and many another exclamation testified to the old campaigner"s keen interest. But when Afzul began tentatively to question him about the blue envelope, the light died from the hollow eyes. Raby _sahib?_ Nay, he knew nought, save that the people said it was the _mem-sahib"s_ money he was spending in this new talk of indigo and what not. He wished them no ill, but Murghub Ahmad, far away in the Andamans, had saved the _mem_ from insult,--perhaps worse--and she had given evidence against him in the trial. He wished no man ill, but if what the people said was true, and Raby _sahib"s_ new dam would prevent the river from doing its duty, then it would be a different matter. Ay! the new factory was but ten miles up the river, but no one lived there as yet.
Now the matter of the blue envelope became more and more oppressive to Afzul Khan the more he thought of it. Easy enough to send it anonymously to Raby _sahib"s mem_, and so be quit of it once for all; but what if she had taken the Major"s money, as Shunker a.s.serted, in order to buy a new husband? And what if this paper of Eshmitt _sahib"s_ meant more loot? Afzul was, all unconsciously, jealous of this white-faced _mem_, and but for a strange sort of loyalty to the boy he had betrayed would have liked to put the letter in the fire, shake himself loose of all ties, and return to his people.
"Nay! thou askest more than I have to give," replied Mahomed Lateef to his questioning. "I know "tis on paper they leave their moneys, for, as I said, the Colonel _sahib_ once asked me--"twas in China, during the war--to set my name as witness to something."
"Was it long-shaped, in a blue cover?" asked Afzul, eagerly.
"There was no cover, but it was long, like the summons from the courts. Stay! if thy mind be really set on such knowledge there is a friend of my poor Murghub"s--one who pleads in the courts--even now resting in his father"s village but a s.p.a.ce from here. He must know more than thou canst want to hear."
So in the cool of the next morning Afzul walked through the barren fields to see the pleader. A keen-faced sallow young man, seemingly glad to escape for the time from patent-leather boots and such like products of civilisation. The Pathan found him squatting over against a _hookah_ and basking in the sunshine like the veriest villager. For all that he was fulfilled with strange knowledge of law and order as administered by the alien, and Afzul sat open-eyed while he discoursed of legacies, and settlements, of the _feme covert_ and the Married Women"s Property Act, with a side glance at divorces and permanent alimony--strange topics to be gravely discussed at the gateway of an Indian village through which men were carried to their rest and women to their bridal beds, with scant appeal to anything but custom. It utterly confused Afzul, though it sent him away convinced that the blue envelope must mean the loot of another lover to the _mem-sahib_.
"I will wait," he said to himself decisively; "yes, I will wait until she is faithful and goes back to the Major; then, as that pleader fellow says, he will get the money. But if _he_ leaves her and takes his money instead, then I will send her the envelope. That is but fair. G.o.d and his Prophet! but their ways are confusing. "Tis better to steal and fight as we do; it makes the women faithful."
That evening he spent half an hour with a needle and thread, borrowed from old Fatma, in sewing the blue envelope safely into his skin-coat.
Then he sat once more stirring the old Mohammedan"s blood with tales of fight and adventure till far on into the night. Yet the earliest blink of dawn found him creeping away from the still sleeping household, and his right arm bare of a ma.s.sive gold bracelet he had worn for years. That he had left lying on the baby"s pillow; for was not the child the son of his brother? Had not his father saved Marsden _sahib_ also? Ah! that score was not paid off yet. He still seemed to see the tall figure standing in the sunlight. Fool that he had been not to fire, instead of giving himself away at a mere word! Even now, though he knew that but for him Philip Marsden"s bones would have been churning in a dreary dance of death at the bottom of some boiling pool in the Terwan torrent, he felt the bitterness of defeat. His very admiration, growing as it did with the other"s display of pluck, added to his resentment. To take an order from a man when you had your finger on the trigger of your rifle! It was all very well to save a wounded comrade, to stand by him through thick and thin, but that did not show him, or convince yourself, that you cared as little for his menace as he had done for yours. Some day, yes, some day! he would stand up before Marsden _sahib_ and defy him. Then he could cry quits, and go home to his own people in peace.
Nevertheless, the news of his master"s accident which met him on his return to Saudaghur sent him without an instant"s pause to the factory where Philip still lay unconscious. And when he walked, at the dead of night, into the big bare room where Belle sat watching, his face softened at the sight of that dark head on the pillow. It softened still more when something of the past--Heaven knows what--seemed to come with him, rousing a low, quick voice from the bed. "Afzul, it is cold; put on more fuel. Do you not feel the cold? Afzul, Afzul!" For that something had carried Philip Marsden back to the smoky cave among the snows, although the windows stood wide open to let in the tardy coolness of the summer night.
The Pathan drew himself together and stood at attention. "_Huzoor!_"
he answered quietly. "It is done; the fire blazes."
Belle in the half-shadows thrown by the sheltered lamp stood up looking kindly at the new-comer. "I"m glad you have come, Afzul," she whispered; "he has been calling for you so often."
Behind his military salute the man smiled approvingly. She was of the right sort, faithful to the old love. Marsden _sahib_ should marry her and get the money, if that was the way they managed things over the black water. And this solution of the question grew upon him as he watched her unfailing devotion when, between them, they helped the sick man through the dreary trouble which was all too familiar to the Pathan. "It was so in the cave," he would say, as time dragged on through days when the sick man lay still and silent, through nights when the quick hurried words never seemed to leave his lips and it was all they could do to keep on the bandages.
"It"s the bullet in the shoulder blade that"s troublin" him," said the clever little Irish doctor, who rode forty miles every day between two trains in order to see his patient and keep an eye on his hospital.
"Put three more days" strength into him, Mrs. Raby, and I"ll bring over another man and we"ll have at it somehow. The wound has niver haled, and niver will till it gets a fair chance."
Shortly after this Belle found herself pacing up and down the verandah, scarcely daring to think of what was going on within. Would he die? Was this really the end? Was it to be peace at last, and no more struggle? And lo and behold! when the doctors let her into the room again he was lying with a smile on his face, because the pain, the ceaseless pain which had annihilated everything else in the world, was gone.
"I"ve given you a lot of trouble," he said; and even as he spoke fell asleep from sheer, blessed ease.
After that again came a time when even Afzul stood aside and let the _mem_ take the lead while he sat watching her curiously--a time when it positively seemed more to her that Philip should take so many spoonfuls of nourishment every hour than that he should get better; when the content of immediate success blotted out the thought of future failure, and the fear of death was forgotten in the desire of staving it off. Most people who have nursed a case in which even the doctors stay their hands and wait on Nature, know that strange dream-like life wherein the peaks and pa.s.ses on the temperature chart seem by contraries to raise or depress the whole world. Belle fought the fight bravely; and not until she stood one day looking at a thermometer which registered normal did she feel a sinking at her heart. They had come down into the low levels of life; they were back in the work-day world. Yet it was not the one they had left six weeks before. Even outwardly it had changed. The last green blade of gra.s.s had withered to a brown shadow on the sunbaked soil, and the dust-storms of May swept over the half-finished house.
"It looks dreary enough now, but just you wait till next year," said John Raby, in his cheerful confident way. "The new dam will be finished, I hope, the water will come in at high level to the garden, the place will be a paradise of flowers, and we shall be dividing thirty per cent, profit! There"s a prospect! Oh, by the way, did I ever tell you that beast Shunker Das came down just after you did, Marsden, expecting to find me on my back like a turned turtle? His face, when he saw I was jolly as a sand-boy, was a caution! By George!
that man does hate me and no mistake."
Belle moved a step nearer her husband and laid her hand on the back of his easy-chair. Perhaps it was only his good-nature in leaving her free to nurse Philip, but somehow she felt they had drifted far apart during the past six weeks. "I seem to have heard nothing," she began, wistfully.
"Better employed on the head of the firm, my dear," he replied with a laugh. "You do her credit, Marsden. And now I must be off again, for there is some idiotic fuss at a village a few miles off. Shunker"s work, I expect; but we are too strong for him. Even the native recognises the almighty dollar, and if they will only have patience, I"ll engage to treble the revenue of this district. Well, good-bye, Belle. I"ll be back to-morrow or next day. Soon as I can "get," as the Americans say. Take care of yourselves."
When he had gone the punkah went on swinging, Belle"s hands knitted busily, Philip"s lay idle in the languor of convalescence; all was as before, and yet there was a difference--a difference of which each was conscious, and which brought a certain restraint.
"Why does Shunker hate him?" asked Major Marsden.
There was no lack of confidence now between these two, and if he asked many questions, she was quite ready to answer them faithfully, according to her lights. In this one, however, she failed to give a just impression, for the simple reason that she herself had no conception of the extent of the usurer"s malice. In fact, his impotent rage on discovering that Philip"s return had apparently made no difference to the Rabys would have been incredible to an educated Englishwoman, had she been aware of it, which she was not. The man, coming down to Saudaghur expectant of consternation, had found nothing but a stir of fresh enterprise which his keen business eye told him meant money. He wandered about from village to village, noting the golden seed being sown by his adversary, until the thought of the harvest in which he would have no share positively worried him into spleen and ague. And as he lay among the simple village folk a fresh idea for revenge came to console him. It is never hard to change the stolid opposition of the Indian peasant into stolid obstruction. No overt injustice is required; nothing but a disregard of custom. And so Shunker, taking advantage of the short period during which he had been a.s.sociated in partnership with John Raby, began cautiously to call in debts in the name of the firm. Now in an Indian village a debt to the ancestral usurer is a debt; that is to say no nighty ephemeral liability which may crop up at any time claiming payment, but a good, solid inheritance going back sometimes a generation or two; a patent almost of solvency, a claim certainly for consideration at the hands of your banker; since a b.u.mper crop might any day give you the upper-hand, or a bad one make it still more unwise for the creditor to present his bill. Thus, when Shunker disregarded time-worn prejudices to the extent of asking one Peru, an old-established customer, to make a settlement, the latter looked as if the foundations of the round world had been moved.
"Pay," he said slowly, his broad nostrils inflated like those of a horse shying at novelty, "I am always paying, _buniak-ji_, year by year, one harvest or another. G.o.d knows how much, but "tis the old way, and old ways are good."
"They are good," sighed the usurer, piously. "I like them myself, Peru; but new masters have new ways."
"New masters do not make new land," retorted the peasant shrewdly enough. "That remains the same. It must be sown; yet when I ask the seed-grain, as my fathers have done, the answer is "_Pay!_" Pay! of course I will pay when the crops ripen. Does not harvest mean payment to the peasant?"
"Your crops won"t ripen long on those fields, I"m afraid, my poor Peru! The _sahib_ wants land, here, everywhere, for this new factory of his. The men who will not pay will see what befalls. A little will go this year, a little more next. If I were alone "twould be a different matter, for I was ever faithful to my friends."
Shunker"s air of virtuous distress was admirable, but Peru laughed; the rough peasant laugh full of broad toleration. "As vermin to the Pathan, so are the grain-dealers to the farmer! We warm you, and you feed on us till you grow troublesome, then--off goes the coat! One _buniah_ is like another; why then dost change?"
"I change not, dunderhead!" cried Shunker enraged at a certain slow superiority in the other. ""Tis Raby _sahib_ claims payment."
"Then tell Raby _sahib_ I will pay when the river comes. It will come this year perhaps, if not, next year; if luck be bad, it may tarry twain, not longer. It comes ever sooner or later; then, let us talk of payment."
Shunker leaned forward, his evil face kindling with malice. "But what, Peru, if the river never returns? What if Raby _sahib"s_ new dam is built to prevent the water coming, so that he may have a grip on the land? What if the seed-grain thou sowest springs green, to die yellow, year after year?"
Pera Ditta"s ox-eyes opened helplessly. What if the river never returned? The idea was too vast for him, and yet it remained with him long after Shunker had gone to sow the same seed of mischief in other minds. He did it deftly, taking care not to turn the screw too tightly at first, lest he should bring down on himself the villagers" final argument of the stick. The reason given by the Laird of Inverawe for hanging the Laird of Inverie, "that he just didna like him," has been given before now as fair cause for doing an unfortunate usurer to death with quarterstaves. So Shunker did not disturb primeval calm too rudely. Nevertheless as he paused for a night ere returning to Faizapore, in the empty house at Saudaghur, where Kirpo had pa.s.sed the months of Ramu"s captivity, he felt content with his labours. He had started a stone of unpopularity on its travels, which by and by would bring down an avalanche on his enemy.
As he lounged on the string bed, set for coolness on the flat roof, he told himself, not without a measure of truth, that sooner or later all his enemies perished. Ah, if it were only as easy to keep those you loved in life, as it was to drive those you hated down to death! But it was not; and the thought of frail, sickly Nuttu came, as it often did, to take the savour even from revenge. The memory of deserted Kirpo"s sons,--those strapping youngsters whom he had often seen playing on that very roof--made him groan and roll over on his fat stomach to consider the possibility of marrying yet another wife. He had married so many only to find disappointment! As his face came back, disheartened, to the unsympathetic stars which fought against him, he started as if he had been shot. For there was Kirpo herself tall and menacing standing beside the bed. The veil wrapped tightly round her body, left her disfigured death"s-head face visible.