In the Guardianship of God Part 21

True. But if one was not blind? My thought was interrupted by Robbins'

voice from behind.

"Hope you haven't found it long, old chap; but the _baboo_ really knows a lot about Asoka. Fine old beggar he must have been. And then he has got a chant about some female called atma who had a lot of lovers, don't you know." Robbins pulled himself up hastily, and, to cover his confusion, protested that it was just the sort of unintelligible gibberish which interested me, and thereupon bade the _baboo_ give me a specimen.

Before I could stop him, the brute had got well into the first line; but even in my wrath I was relieved to find that it was indeed absolutely unintelligible. New India evidently did not understand the old. I came to this conclusion before I got my fingers, as gently as I could, inside his rainbow-hued comforter and choked him off.

"I cannot help it, Robbins," I said as I tendered the _baboo_ five rupees as hush-money. "If you knew all you would excuse me."

Robbins gave me one of his most sympathetic looks and said he quite understood.

Did he? Did I? I asked myself that question over and over again, until in the dead of the night I could ask it no longer. The desire for an answer grew too strong.

It was still night when I stood once more beside the water's edge. The moon had paled the red ranks of the sentinel pillars, the dust and heat and burden of the day was gone. All things were clear and flooded with cool, quiet, pa.s.sionless light. And on the water lay the crown of starry flowers. It had drifted close to the edge, at the extreme end of the pool, beside a square projection in the marble floor, whence you could look clear into the depths. No doubt the place of divination. I went over to it moved by an irresistible impulse, and, kneeling down, thrust my hand into the cool water.

Was it fancy, or did I feel a cold, soft hand in mine? Was it a pa.s.sing dizziness, or did a white, scented vapour close round me like a cloud, hiding all things save the water framed in that crown of jasmine?

_atma! Mai atma!!_

There was no need so far as I am concerned for the appeal--

"Forget not she was fair."

I have never forgotten it, though it is years since I saw, or fancied I saw, her face in the water.

But I have forgotten other things. Indeed, I forgot them so speedily that I saw poor old Robbins was quite puzzled and hurt in his feelings. So, before my wedding tour came to an end, I thought it kinder to give him something definite as an excuse for my cheerfulness. I told him, therefore, that I had fallen in love with some one else.

He gave a low whistle, said, "By Jove!" then added heartily, "Upon my soul, old chap, I believe it's the wisest thing you can do."

Perhaps it was. But I am not yet married. I am waiting for a woman who does not want a lover.

IN A FOG

A great flock of fleecy white clouds were browsing up the steep hillside like sheep, and hiding part of the great map of India which lay spread out five thousand feet below one of the isolated peaks which rise, in sheer ma.s.ses of granite, from the dusty deserts of Rajputana.

Even to their dustiness, however, had come a faint tinting of green, since the seasonal rains had begun. For the moment, nevertheless, the incessant deluge had ceased, giving place to one of those brilliantly fine monsoon days--fine with the fineness of gentian skies, and snowdrift clouds, which remind Indian exiles of the cold, crisp North.

But already these same clouds were losing their lightness and beginning to sink earthwards; sure sign that the break in the rains was at an end. Still here, in the little station beside the lake, which looks as if the least tilt would make it brim over and send it rolling like quicksilver to the sun-dry plains below, the sky was all the clearer because of the steady increase of those fleecy flocks among the glens and ravines which spread outwards, downwards, ray-like, star-shaped, from the summit.

The increase was so steady that, after a time, the flocks coalesced, and the likeness pa.s.sed into that of a rolling sea, through whose waves the knolls and peaks rose like islands; until the whole scene, lake and all, showed as a cl.u.s.tered coral reef shows in the Pacific Ocean--still, dream-like, peaceful utterly.

There was no peace, however, on the face of the Englishman in undress uniform who was sitting at an office table in the verandah of a thatched bungalow, which, fenced in perfunctorily from a sheer precipice on three sides by a frail trellis of bamboo solidified by morning glories, was perched above the now unseen levels below.

"If I could get reliable information," he muttered irritably, "I could be prepared. But I can hear nothing of the relief columns, and it is quite impossible for me to predicate the movements of the mutineers; yet without this it is difficult to know how to receive them."

His voice rose as he went on, for a yawn and a stir from a lounge-chair set in the shade, told him he had a listener.

"Not the laste bit in loife, me dear bhoy," came with the yawn. "Sure we've got to kill them somehow."

The first speaker looked up angrily from the map he was studying.

"Perhaps if I were only directly responsible for fifteen convalescents, as you are, Tiernay, I should be content to--to be in a fog. But I am the Brigade Major, and in the absence on duty of the commanding officer, and, I regret to say, all but a mere handful of native troops, I am responsible for the safety of a hundred and thirty-five helpless women and children--their lives and deaths--"

He was interrupted by the mixed sound of a laugh and the finishing of some brandy and water over which Dr. Tiernay had evidently been snoozing.

"Divvle a bit. Loife and death's my business from wan year's end to the other. There's responsibility for yez. And I kill as many as I cure, as all we pill-boxes do. Sure we haven't a fair chance, for a man keeps well without a doctor. It's when he thinks of dyin' he comes to us--an' nine toimes out of ten we can't help him. For talk of bein'

in a fog! Be jabers! it's nothing to the British Pharmacop[oe]ia. When I write a prescription I always put D.V., weather permitting, at the tail of it."

The Brigade Major looked at the dishevelled, lazy figure, so different from his own, distastefully.

"Well, I prefer a clearer conception of my line of treatment. Now if this portion of the rebels, which, there seems little doubt, are making for us here"--his finger followed a red line he had marked, "elect to proceed--"

"Elect, is it?" interrupted the doctor. "Sure they won't elect to do anything. It will come to them widout their knowing how, like fayver or catarrh. An' it's no manner of use beginning to physic a patient till ye know what disease fancies him. So lave off wid worrying, me dear bhoy, and just get out the salts and senna--"

"Salts and senna!" echoed the Brigade Major, angrily. "Really, Tiernay, considering you are the only other man in the place--for I don't count your miserable convalescents, of course, and my handful of natives is more an anxiety than a help--I do think you might talk sense."

Dr. Tiernay rose, yawned, and walked over to the office table, a tall, lank figure with a reckless, whimsical face, alert now to the uttermost.

"An' isn't it sinse? Salts and senna is what's generally wanted to begin with. Well, I've collected every lethal weapon I can lay hands on, including the dintistry case and the horse-pistols with which me grand-uncle, Macturk of Turksville, shot his wife's brother; so me salts and senna's ready. And, by the Lord, I'll exhibit it too whin the patient comes along--trust Micky Tiernay for that. But till he does"--here his face took a sudden, almost serious gravity--"ah, just quit cultivating omniscience, and lave the fog alone. Sure only the divvle himself could say what the blackguards will do."

"But Hoshyari Mul, the banker, thinks--"

"Is it that fat, oily brute? Oh, don't belave him. Don't belave what anybody says. They don't know--not even what they'll be at themselves if the mutineers _do_ come. There's only wan thing certain--there's but wan straight road from Nusseerabad up the hill to us. That's the tail end of it yonder through the break in the mist. Oh, I've been kaping an eye on it, I tell yez, even in my sleep. Well, if they come, they'll come that way."

"But Koomar the priest--"

Dr. Tiernay looked across the placid, still sunbright levels of the little lake, at the wonderful Jain temples which made this hilltop one of the holiest spots in all India, and shook his head.

"Don't trust him either, for all his white robes and his piety. He means well; but he's more in a fog than we are, for we know that we don't want the mutineers to come, and he isn't sure. How can he be?

I'd just throuble ye to imagine his mental position--if ye can."

So saying, he took up his battered helmet, which looked as if some one had been playing football with it, and strolled over to the hospital.

It was perched on another knoll close by, yet the mist now lay almost level between it and him; for the curved waves had given place, like the fleecy flocks, to a new formation of fog. This, far as the eye could see, was a flat plain of cotton-wool, white, luminous, on which the knolls, the temples, the glittering lake, showed like jewels.

He dipped into the cotton-wool as it lay soft in the hollow, and out of it again ere entering the hospital verandah, where a man in the loose uniform of a dresser rose from his task of polishing a pair of horse-pistols and saluted; a trifle unsteadily, for he, though the best of the bunch of convalescents, was somewhat of a cripple. Had he not been so, he would not have been left behind when every man who could hold a rifle tramped down the hill to do the work that had to be done in the plains, if not only Englishwomen, but England herself was to be saved.

"Parade will be a bit short to-day, sir," he said, with cheerful regret, "for Corporal Flanagan 'e 'ave 'ad to 'ave a hemetic, sir, and the fly-blister on Private MacTartan's chest is has big has a hostrich's hegg."

"Dear, dee-ar," commented the doctor in long-drawn sympathy, as he pa.s.sed into where a dozen or more of men in grey flannel dressing-gowns were lounging about in their cots or out of them. They were an unshaven, haggard-looking lot, though one or two were beginning to show that air of alertness which tells that soul and body are coming back to the bustle of life.