By not so much as the flicker of an eyelid did Shere Ali betray that he heard the words. Linforth sought to revive that night so vividly that he needs must turn, needs must respond to the call, and needs must renew the pledge.
"We sat for a long while that night, smoking our pipes on the step of the door. It was a dark night. We watched a planet throw its light upwards from behind the amphitheatre of hills on the left, and then rise clear to view in a gap. There was a smell of hay, like an English meadow, from the hut behind us. You pledged your friendship that night. It"s not so very long ago--two years, that"s all."
He came to a stop with a queer feeling of shame. He remembered the night himself, and always had remembered it. But he was not given to sentiment, and here he had been talking sentiment and to no purpose.
Shere Ali spoke again to his courtier, and the courtier stepped forward more bland than ever.
"His Highness would like to know if his Excellency is still talking, and if so, why?" he said to the Pathan, who translated it.
Linforth gave up the attempt to renew his friendship with Shere Ali. He must go back to Peshawur and tell Ralston that he had failed. Ralston would merely shrug his shoulders and express neither disappointment nor surprise. But it was a moment of bitterness to Linforth. He looked at Shere Ali"s indifferent face, he listened for a second or two to the tune he still hummed, and he turned away. But he had not taken more than a couple of steps towards the entrance of the balcony when his guide touched him cautiously upon the elbow.
Linforth stopped and looked back. The three men were once more gazing at the steps which led down from the road to the well. And once more a water-carrier descended with his great earthen jar upon his head. He descended very cautiously, but as he came to the turn of the steps his foot slipped suddenly.
Linforth uttered a cry, but the man had not fallen. He had tottered for a moment, then he had recovered himself. But the earthen jar which he carried on his head had fallen and been smashed to atoms.
Again the three made a simultaneous movement, but this time it was a movement of joy. Again an exclamation burst from Shere Ali"s lips, but now it was a cry of triumph.
He stood erect, and at once he turned to go. As he turned he met Linforth"s gaze. All expression died out of his face, but he spoke to his young courtier, who fluttered forward sn.i.g.g.e.ring with amus.e.m.e.nt.
"His Highness would like to know if his Excellency is interested in a Road. His Highness thinks it a d.a.m.n-fool road. His Highness much regrets that he cannot even let it go beyond Kohara. His Highness wishes his Excellency good-morning."
Linforth made no answer to the gibe. He pa.s.sed out into the courtyard, and from the courtyard through the archway into the grain-market.
Opposite to him at the end of the street, a gra.s.s hill, with the chalk showing at one bare spot on the side of it, ridged up against the sky curiously like a fragment of the Suss.e.x Downs. Linforth wondered whether Shere Ali had ever noticed the resemblance, and whether some recollection of the summer which he had spent at Poynings had ever struck poignantly home as he had stood upon these steps. Or were all these memories quite dead within his breast?
In one respect Shere Ali was wrong. The Road would go on--now. Linforth had done his best to hinder it, as Ralston had bidden him to do, but he had failed, and the Road would go on to the foot of the Hindu Kush. Old Andrew Linforth"s words came back to his mind:
"Governments will try to stop it; but the power of the Road will be greater than the power of any Government. It will wind through valleys so deep that the day"s sunshine is gone within the hour. It will be carried in galleries along the faces of the mountains, and for eight months of the year sections of it will be buried deep in snow. Yet it will be finished."
How rightly Andrew Linforth had judged! But d.i.c.k for once felt no joy in the accuracy of the old man"s forecast. He walked back through the city silent and with a heavy heart. He had counted more than he had thought upon Shere Ali"s co-operation. His friendship for Shere Ali had grown into a greater and a deeper force than he had ever imagined it until this moment to be. He stopped with a sense of weariness and disillusionment, and then walked on again. The Road would never again be quite the bright, inspiring thing which it had been. The dream had a shadow upon it. In the Eton and Oxford days he had given and given and given so much of himself to Shere Ali that he could not now lightly and easily lose him altogether out of his life. Yet he must so lose him, and even then that was not all the truth. For they would be enemies, Shere Ali would be ruined and cast out, and his ruin would be the opportunity of the Road.
He turned quickly to his companion.
"What was it that the Prince said," he asked, "when the first of those water-carriers came down the steps and did not slip? He beat his hands upon the bal.u.s.trade of the balcony and cried out some words. It seemed to me that his companion warned him of your presence, and that he stopped with the sentence half spoken."
"That is the truth," Linforth"s guide replied. "The Prince cried out in anger, "How long must we wait?""
Linforth nodded his head.
"He looked for the pitcher to fall and it did not fall," he said. "The breaking of the pitcher was to be a sign."
"And the sign was given. Do not forget that, your Excellency. The sign was given."
But what did the sign portend? Linforth puzzled his brains vainly over that problem. He had not the knowledge by which a man might cipher out the intrigues of the hill-folk beyond the Frontier. Did the breaking of the pitcher mean that some definite thing had been done in Chiltistan, some breaking of the British power? They might look upon the _Raj_ as a heavy burden on their heads, like an earthen pitcher and as easily broken. Ralston would know.
"You must travel back to Peshawur to-night," said Linforth. "Go straight to his Excellency the Chief Commissioner and tell him all that you saw upon the balcony and all that you heard. If any man can interpret it, it will be he. Meanwhile, show me where the Prince Shere Ali lodges in Ajmere."
The policeman led Linforth to a tall house which closed in at one end a short and narrow street.
"It is here," he said.
"Very well," said Linforth, "I will seek out the Prince again. I will stay in Ajmere and try by some way or another to have talk with him."
But again Linforth was to fail. He stayed for some days in Ajmere, but could never gain admittance to the house. He was put off with the politest of excuses, delivered with every appearance of deep regret. Now his Highness was unwell and could see no one but his physician. At another time he was better--so much better, indeed, that he was giving thanks to Allah for the restoration of his health in the Mosque of Shah Jehan. Linforth could not reach him, nor did he ever see him in the streets of Ajmere.
He stayed for a week, and then coming to the house one morning he found it shuttered. He knocked upon the door, but no one answered his summons; all the reply he got was the melancholy echo of an empty house.
A Babu from the Customs Office, who was pa.s.sing at the moment, stopped and volunteered information.
"There is no one there, Mister," he said gravely. "All have skedaddled to other places."
"The Prince Shere Ali, too?" asked Linforth.
The Babu laughed contemptuously at the t.i.tle.
"Oho, the Prince! The Prince went away a week ago."
Linforth turned in surprise.
"Are you sure?" he asked.
The Babu told him the very day on which Shere Ali had gone from Ajmere.
It was on the day when the pitcher had fallen on the steps which led down to the well. Linforth had been tricked by the smiling courtier like any schoolboy.
"Whither did the Prince go?"
The Babu shrugged his shoulders.
"How should I know? They are not of my people, these poor ignorant hill-folk."
He went on his way. Linforth was left with the a.s.surance that now, indeed, he had really failed. He took the train that night back to Peshawur.
CHAPTER XXVII
AN ARRESTED CONFESSION
Linforth related the history of his failure to Ralston in the office at Peshawur.
"Shere Ali went away on the day the pitcher was broken," he said. "It was the breaking of the pitcher which gave him the notice to go; I am sure of it. If one only knew what message was conveyed--" and Ralston handed to him a letter.
The letter had been sent by the Resident at Kohara and had only this day reached Peshawur. Linforth took it and read it through. It announced that the son of Abdulla Mahommed had been murdered.
"You see?" said Ralston. "He was shot in the back by one of his attendants when he was out after Markhor. He was the leader of the rival faction, and was bidding for the throne against Shere Ali. His murder clears the way. I have no doubt your friend is over the Lowari Pa.s.s by this time. There will be trouble in Chiltistan. I would have stopped Shere Ali on his way up had I known."
"But you don"t think Shere Ali had this man murdered!" cried Linforth.