Could anything be more opportune for the decorous presentation of a retaining fee?
So next day, while Lateefa Khanum st.i.tched, repenting not at all yet, still with a flutter of her heart, and Khulasa Khanum, with an odd flutter at her heart also, which kept the colour even from her lips, worked and prayed, Aftaba used the privacy of a tiny kitchen for the preparation of other things than a scanty dinner of herbs. It meant the loss of her only silver bangle, sold on the sly through the market woman who came every morning. It was quite the most valuable thing in the house; yet there was but a farthing or two left by the time the pumpkin preserve, covered with silver leaf, lay in a tinselled rush basket with the precious brocaded bag on the top, and the market woman, bribed to return for it in the afternoon, had received a generous douceur which would surely ensure its due delivery.
All this took time, and was tiring, to boot; so it was nigh sunset when, after a sleep which had taken her almost unawares in the little cook room, Aftaba came out again to the limited life on the roof. As she did so, the familiar tentative cough of Shamira the _bhisti_ on his rounds, accompanied by the squelching of his water-skin, made her step back into the screening wall.
"_Bismillah!_" she said, wondering not to hear the familiar greeting.
But old Shamira was staring helplessly at something he had never seen before. It was old Khulasa Khanum.
"She must be dead," he said, simply, to Aftaba"s horrified disbelief.
"See! She sits with face unveiled."
And she was dead. Her retaining fee had brought justice swiftly. And Lateefa?
Aftaba, when she realised the emptiness of the roof save for herself and the dead woman, wondered if it was the sight of one who belonged to it slipping downstairs from its virtue that, by its terrible confirmation of wantonness, had sent Khulasa to seek to a higher tribunal.
As for herself!
That night, when the waiters had gone, promising to return at dawn, and she was left really alone for the first time, she sat wondering what fate her preserved pumpkins would bring. And then she did something she had never done in all her life before. She, too, used the hole left by the displaced brick to gain a glimpse of the world which was doing honour to dead heroes, and to the Queen for whom they died. As she did so the first rockets rose from the unseen Residency to commemorate its brave defenders, and set their stars of glory in high heaven.
Up and up, valiantly, higher and higher, full of the best intentions, they went, typical, so far, of the hands that sent them on their mission. And then?
Then old Aftaba stepped down from her vain vantage, and creeping back to where Khulasa lay waiting the dawn, put her head down beside hers and wept.
For the stars had fallen, but the dead woman"s retaining fee had reached the Mercy Seat.
HIS CHANCE
He sate biting his nails viciously. It was not a habit of his, but, at the moment, the tangle of his nineteen years of life had been too much for him, and he sate before it, helpless yet resentful.
He was trying to write a letter to his mother, his widowed mother far away over the black water in England, to tell her that he had been placed under arrest for cowardice--since that was what it came to in the end!--and yet not to hurt her, not to blame her, whom every bit of his being blamed. Why had she brought him up a nincomp.o.o.p? Why had she been so afraid of him?--poor little mother whose nerves had been shattered once and for all by her hero husband"s death ere her child was born. Yet that father had been brave to recklessness....
The boy"s head went down on his arm. Something like a sob quivered through the hot air. For it was hot, though the sun was but an hour old, in the little gra.s.s-thatched bungalow which boasted of but one room, two verandahs, and two corresponding slips of dark enclosed s.p.a.ce; one a bathroom, the other full of saddles, corn, empty boxes--briefly, the factotum"s go-down. The whole house being nothing but a square mushroom set down causelessly in a dusty plain and guarded by two whitewashed gate-pillars, one of which bore the legend, on a black board, "Ensign Hector Clive, 1st Pioneers."
A good name, Hector Clive, and yet the boy"s head was down on his arm.
Why had he been such a cursed fool?
A brain-fever bird was hard at work in a far-off _sirus_ tree. He could see it in his mind"s eye--green, with its red head held high among the powder-puff flowers, as it gave its incessant cry with the regularity of a coppersmith"s hammer--for, though he had been but one year in the country, he knew all its birds, and beasts, and flowers; aye! and had a good smattering of its lingo also--it was that, partly, which had made him--what was it--afraid--or--or cautious?
His brain was in such a whirl he could not tell which. And he had no one to whom he could talk; not a friend in the whole regiment, for he was shy. That was why he was living alone in this cursed shanty where the centipedes and snakes, too, sometimes (but he was not afraid of them, or of any animal, thank heaven), fell from the cloth ceiling, and the sparrows (poor devils, after all they were only making their nests) dropped straws over one"s letters. That one had made a blot--like a tear-mark--or was it, indeed...?
He cursed again under his breath, and a rigid obstinacy came to his face.
Like his name, it was a good enough face, though curiously young even for his young age. The great height of his forehead, it is true, took away from its breadth, and the short-sighted blink of the eyes set so close upon the high narrow nose prevented their piercing clearness from being seen. On the lower part of his face, hair had scarcely begun to show itself. All was callow, immature; yet the square chin showed stiff and strong enough.
There should, at least, be no suspicion of tear marks, so he took a fresh sheet: and then the thought struck him. He would write two letters. One to the dear little Mother who had devoted herself to him--him only--ever since he was born; the other to the woman who had spoiled him and his life, whose timidity had accentuated his birth-legacy of fear. It would do him good to have it out with himself and with Fate--not with Her--no! never with Her!
So this was what he wrote, and left lying on the table when an orderly came to summon him to the Colonel:
"Dear Mother,--It has come at last! I always knew it must come if you would make a soldier of me, just because my father was one! Why didn"t you think? Why didn"t you know? Poor Mother! I"m sorry to write all this. How could you dream I have felt more or less of a coward all my life, when _he_ was so brave!
"And then you made me worse--you know you did. I wasn"t allowed to risk things like the other boys did; because I was your only one. Ah! I don"t blame you, but it was rough on me. I should have made an excellent parson, I expect. And yet I"ll be d.a.m.ned--this isn"t really for your eyes, mother darling--if I can see what good I should have done if I had ordered that Sepoy under arrest? The men wouldn"t have obeyed orders. I saw murder in their eyes. I"ve seen it for a long time, and I haven"t dared to say so--haven"t dared to warn those who should be warned for fear of being thought a coward--Isn"t that cowardice in itself? Oh, Mother, Mother! Well, it was very simple. A Sepoy was cheeky over these greased cartridges; actually threatened to shoot me if I ordered him under arrest, and--I--you see I know a lot of their lingo, and I understand--I was afraid to do what I ought to have done--chanced it. Of course it doesn"t read as bare as that in the Adjutant"s report--but I am under arrest. Not that it matters. It must have come sooner or later--for I"m a coward--that is what I am--a coward...."
The words, still wet, stared up into the baggy cloth ceiling, and the sparrows dropped straws over them while Ensign Hector Clive was being interviewed by his Colonel. He sate stolid, acquiescing in every word of blame; and yet he was obstinate.
"I don"t see, sir, what good it would have done," he began drearily, when the Colonel stopped him with a high hand.
"Now, I won"t have a word of that sort, Mr. Clive," he said severely.
"There is enough of that silly talk amongst civilians, and I won"t have it amongst the officers of my regiment. It is as good a regiment as any in India, and I"ll stake----"
Here, feeling some lack of dignity in what he was about to say, he stood up, and the lad standing up also, overtopped his senior by many inches. Something suggestive in his still lanky length seemed to strike the Colonel. "I"ll tell you what it is, Clive, you live too much alone.
You"re altogether too--too--why! I don"t believe you even had a cup of tea before you started. There! I was sure of it. Absolute suicide! How can you expect, in this climate--and with a Colonel"s wigging before you--Really too foolish--my wife shall give you one now--she"s in the verandah with the boy--and--and, of course, I can"t promise--but you--you shall have your chance--if--if possible."
The--lad--for he was but that--murmured something unintelligible.
Perhaps to his dejected mind, another chance seemed to be but another opportunity of disgracing himself.
"How very shy he is," thought the tall slim woman who gave a cup of tea into his reluctant hand and sent Sonnie round to him with the toast and b.u.t.ter. "I must get you to give my small son a lesson, Mr. Clive," she said, smiling, trying to make conversation. "He was telling me all sorts of dreadful things he has heard--so he says--from Budlu, his bearer, and that he was frightened. And I told him a soldier"s son never could be frightened at anything. Isn"t that true?"
Ensign Hector Clive turned deadly pale. The child standing, with the plate of toast and b.u.t.ter, looked up at him confidently, as children look always where they feel there is sympathy.
"But you are flightened, aren"t you?" he asked.
There was an instant"s silence; then the answer came, desperately true: "Yes! I am--but then I"m a coward--that"s what I am--a coward!"
You might have heard a pin drop in the pause. Then something in the wise, gentle face of the Colonel"s wife broke down the barriers.
"Ah! you don"t know----" he began; and so with a rush it all came out.
The Colonel"s wife sate quite still; she was accustomed to confidences, and even when they did not come voluntarily she had the art of beguiling them. The art also of comforting the confider; and so when the lad"s face had gone into his hands with his last words, as he sate--his elbows on his knees--the picture of dejection, she just rose gently, and came over with soft step to where he was. And she laid a soft hand on either of his lank long-fingered ones and pulled them apart. So, standing, smiled down upon him brilliantly--confidently.
"I don"t believe it!" she said, "I don"t believe a word of it! You"ll be brave--oh! so brave, when your chance comes. Now, my dear, dear boy----" she looked at him as if he had been her son--"go away and forget all this nonsense. And see! Come back at dinner time and tell me before dinner that you"ve obeyed orders and haven"t even thought about it."
She stood and waved her hand at him as he rode away in the blare of sunlight. Her voice echoing through the hot dry air reached him faintly as he turned out of her garden into the dust of the world beyond. "Till dinner-time--remember!"
Remember! The memory of those words came back to her idly as she sate clasping her baby to her breast, while Sonnie, wearied out with fear, slept in her lap, and her one disengaged hand busied itself in fanning a half-delirious man who lay on a string bed set in the close darkness.
Dinner time! Yes, it must be about dinner time, for through a c.h.i.n.k in the door you could see the sun flaring to his death in the west.
What had happened? She shuddered as she thought of it. What had come first, of all the horrors of that long hot May day? She could not piece it together. All that she knew was that someone had taken pity on the women and the children. And that they were all huddled together in that one room waiting till darkness should give a chance of escape; for the hut was built against an old ruin through which some underground pa.s.sage gave upon ground not quite so sentry-warded as the barrack square in front. She could hear the familiar words of command, the clank of arms as they changed guard, and she shuddered again. Aye! the women and children might be safe, even if the almost hopeless stratagem failed; but what of the man--her husband--the only one, so far as she knew, of all the officers of the regiment who had escaped the ma.s.sacre on the parade ground? How had he been saved? She scarcely knew. She remembered his running back like a hare--yes! he, the bravest of men--all bleeding and fainting, to gasp some words of almost hopeless directions for her safety. And then old Iman Khan--yes! it had been he--faithful old servant! Why had she not remembered before? For there he was, his bald head bereft of its concealing turban, keeping watch and ward at the door.
What a ruffian he looked, so--poor, faithful Iman Khan!