"I wanted you to come to Peshawur straight from Bombay six months ago,"
Ralston went on. "But I counted without the Indian Government. They brought you out to India, at my special request, for a special purpose, and then, when they had got you, they turned you over to work which anyone else could have done. So six months have been wasted. But that"s their little way."
"You have special work for me?" said Linforth quietly enough, though his heart was beating quickly in his breast. An answer came which still quickened its beatings.
"Work that you alone can do," Ralston replied gravely. But he was a man who had learned to hope for little, and to expect discouragements as his daily bread, and he added:
"That is, if you can do it."
Linforth did not answer at once. He was leaning with his elbows on the parapet, and he raised a hand to the side of his face, that side on which Ralston stood. And so he remained, shutting himself in with his thoughts, and trying to think soberly. But his head whirled. Below him lay the city of Peshawur. Behind him the plains came to an end, and straight up from them, like cliffs out of the sea, rose the dark hills, brown and grey and veined with white. Here on this tower of Northern India, the long dreams, dreamed for the first time on the Suss.e.x Downs, and nursed since in every moment of leisure--in Alpine huts in days of storm, in his own quarters at Chatham--had come to their fulfilment.
"I have lived for this work," he said in a low voice which shook ever so little, try as he might to quiet it. "Ever since I was a boy I have lived for it, and trained myself for it. It is the Road."
Linforth"s evident emotion came upon Ralston as an unexpected thing. He was carried back suddenly to his own youth, and was surprised to recollect that he, too, had once cherished great plans. He saw himself as he was to-day, and, side by side with that disillusioned figure, he saw himself as he had been in his youth. A smile of friendliness came over his face.
"If I had shut my eyes," he said, "I should have thought it was your father who was speaking."
Linforth turned quickly to Ralston.
"My father. You knew him?"
"Yes."
"I never did," said d.i.c.k regretfully.
Ralston nodded his head and continued:
"Twenty-six years ago we were here in Peshawur together. We came up on to the top of this tower, as everyone does who comes to Peshawur. He was like you. He was dreaming night and day of the Great Road through Chiltistan to the foot of the Hindu Kush. Look!" and Ralston pointed down to the roof-tops of the city, whereon the women and children worked and played. For the most part they were enclosed within brick walls, and the two men looked down into them as you might look in the rooms of a doll"s house by taking off the lid. Ralston pointed to one such open chamber just beneath their eyes. An awning supported on wooden pillars sheltered one end of it, and between two of these pillars a child swooped backwards and forwards in a swing. In the open, a woman, seated upon a string charpoy, rocked a cradle with her foot, while her hands were busy with a needle, and an old woman, with a black shawl upon her shoulders and head, sat near by, inactive. But she was talking. For at times the younger woman would raise her head, and, though at that distance no voice could be heard, it was evident that she was answering.
"I remember noticing that roof when your father and I were talking up here all those years ago. There was just the same family group as you see now. I remember it quite clearly, for your father went away to Chiltistan the next day, and never came back. It was the last time I saw him, and we were both young and full of all the great changes we were to bring about." He smiled, half it seemed in amus.e.m.e.nt, half in regret.
"We talked of the Road, of course. Well, there"s just one change. The old woman, sitting there with the shawl upon her shoulders now, was in those days the young woman rocking the cradle and working with her needle. That"s all. Troubles there have been, disturbances, an expedition or two--but there"s no real change. Here are you talking of the Road just as your father did, not ambitious for yourself," he explained with a kindly smile which illumined his whole face, "but ambitious for the Road, and the Road still stops at Kohara."
"But it will go on--now," cried Linforth.
"Perhaps," said Ralston slowly. Then he stood up and confronted Linforth.
"It was not that you might carry on the Road that I brought you out from England," he skid. "On the contrary."
Once more disappointment seized upon d.i.c.k Linforth, and he found it all the more bitter in that he had believed a minute since that his dreams were to be fulfilled. He looked down upon Peshawur, and the words which Ralston had lately spoken, half in amus.e.m.e.nt, half with regret, suddenly took for him their full meaning. Was it true that there was no change but the change from the young woman to the old one, from enthusiasm to acquiescence? He was young, and the possibility chilled him and even inspired him with a kind of terror. Was he to carry the Road no further than his father had done? Would another Linforth in another generation come to the tower in Peshawur with hopes as high as his and with the like futility?
"On the contrary?" he asked. "Then why?"
"That you might stop the Road from going on," said Ralston quietly.
In the very midst of his disappointment Linforth realised that he had misjudged his companion. Here was no official, here was a man. The att.i.tude of indifference had gone, the air of la.s.situde with it. Here was a man quietly exacting the hardest service which it was in his power to exact, claiming it as a right, and yet making it clear by some subtle sympathy that he understood very well all that the service would cost to the man who served.
"I am to hinder the making of that Road?" cried Linforth.
"You are to do more. You are to prevent it."
"I have lived so that it should be made."
"So you have told me," said Ralston quietly, and d.i.c.k was silent. With each quiet sentence Ralston had become more and more the dominating figure. He was so certain, so a.s.sured. Linforth recognised him no longer as the man to argue with; but as the representative of Government which overrides predilections, sympathies, ambitions, and bends its servants to their duty.
"I will tell you more," Ralston continued. "You alone can prevent the extension of the Road. I believe it--I know it. I sent to England for you, knowing it. Do your duty, and it may be that the Road will stop at Kohara--an unfinished, broken thing. Flinch, and the Road runs straight to the Hindu Kush. You will have your desire; but you will have failed."
There was something implacable and relentless in the tone and the words.
There was more, too. There was an intimation, subtly yet most clearly conveyed, that Ralston who spoke had in his day trampled his ambitions and desires beneath his feet in service to the Government, and asked no more now from Linforth than he himself had in his turn performed. "I, too, have lived in Arcady," he added. It twas this last intimation which subdued the protests in Linforth"s mind. He looked at the worn face of the Commissioner, then he lifted his eyes and swept the horizon with his gaze. The violet light upon the hills had lost its brightness and its glamour. In the far distance the hills themselves were withdrawn.
Somewhere in that great barrier to the east was the gap of the Malakand Pa.s.s, where the Road now began. Linforth turned away from the hills towards Peshawur.
"What must I do?" he asked simply.
Ralston nodded his head. His att.i.tude relaxed, his voice lost its dominating note.
"What you have to understand is this," he explained. "To drive the Road through Chiltistan means war. It would be the cause of war if we insisted upon it now, just as it was the cause of war when your father went up from Peshawur twenty-six years ago. Or it might be the consequence of war. If the Chiltis rose in arms, undoubtedly we should carry it on to secure control of the country in the future. Well, it is the last alternative that we are face to face with now."
"The Chiltis might rise!" cried Linforth.
"There is that possibility," Ralston returned. "We don"t mean on our own account to carry on the Road; but the Chiltis might rise."
"And how should I prevent them?" asked d.i.c.k Linforth in perplexity.
"You know Shere Ali?" said Ralston
"Yes."
"You are a friend of his?"
"Yes."
"A great friend. His chief friend?"
"Yes."
"You have some control over him?"
"I think so," said Linforth.
"Very well," said Ralston. "You must use that control."
Linforth"s perplexity increased. That danger should come from Shere Ali--here was something quite incredible. He remembered their long talks, their joint ambition. A day pa.s.sed in the hut in the Promontoire of the Meije stood out vividly in his memories. He saw the snow rising in a swirl of white over the Breche de la Meije, that gap in the rock-wall between the Meije and the Rateau, and driving down the glacier towards the hut. He remembered the eagerness, the enthusiasm of Shere Ali.
"But he"s loyal," Linforth cried. "There is no one in India more loyal."
"He was loyal, no doubt," said Ralston, with a shrug of his shoulders, and, beginning with his first meeting with Shere Ali in Lah.o.r.e, he told Linforth all that he knew of the history of the young Prince.
"There can be no doubt," he said, "of his disloyalty," and he recounted the story of the melons and the bags of grain. "Since then he has been intriguing in Calcutta."
"Is he in Calcutta now?" Linforth asked.
"No," said Ralston. "He left Calcutta just about the time when you landed in Bombay. And there is something rather strange--something, I think, very disquieting in his movements since he left Calcutta. I have had him watched, of course. He came north with one of his own countrymen, and the pair of them have been seen at Cawnpore, at Lucknow, at Delhi."