On the Face of the Waters Part 18

"Likely; when the day's work is done. How go the crops thy way? Here, as thou seest, 'tis G.o.d's dew on G.o.d's grain."

"With us also. There will be marriages galore this May."

"Ay! if this bring naught." The speaker nodded toward the cake which now lay on the ground between them, for they had inevitably squatted down to take alternate pulls at a pipe. "What can it bring?"

"G.o.d knows," replied the host in his turn. So the two, with that final reference in their minds, sat looking dully at the _chupatti_ as if it were some strange wild fowl. Sat silently, as men will do over a pipe, till a clinking of anklets and a chatter of feminine voices came round the corner, and the foremost woman of the troop on their way to the tank drew her veil close swiftly at sight of a stranger. Yet her voice came as swiftly. "What news, brother? What news?"

"None for thee, Mother Kirpo," answered the resident watchman tartly.

"'Tis for the elders."

The t.i.tterings and tossings of veiled heads at this snub to the worst gossip in the village, ended in an expectant pause as a very old woman, with a fine-cut face which had long since forsworn concealment, stepped up to the watchmen, and squatting down beside them, raised the cake in her wrinkled hands.

"From the North to the South or the South to the North. From the East to the West or the West to the East. Which?" she asked, nodding her old head.

"Sure it was so, mother," replied the stranger, surprised. "Dost know aught?"

"Know?" she echoed; "I know 'tis an old tale--an old tale."

"What is an old tale, mother?" asked the women eagerly, as, emboldened by the presence of the village spey-wife, they crowded round, eying the cake curiously.

She gave a scornful laugh, let the _chupatti_ drop, and, rising to her feet, pa.s.sed on to the tank. It suited her profession to be mysterious, and she knew no more than this, that once, or at most twice in her long life, such a token had come peacefully into the village, and pa.s.sed out of it as peacefully with its message.

"Mai Dhunnoo knows something, for sure," commented a deep-bosomed mother of sons as the troop followed their "chaperone's" lead, closer serried than before, full of whispering surmise. "The G.o.ds send it mean not smallpox. I will give curds and sugar to thee, Mata jee, each Friday for a year! I swear it for safety to the boys."

"He slipped in a puddle and cried 'Hail to the Ganges,'" retorted her neighbor, an ill-looking woman blind of one eye. She had been the richest heiress in the village, and was in consequence the wife of the handsomest young man in it; a childless wife into the bargain. "Boys do not fill the world, Veru; not even thine! Their welfare will not set tokens a-going. It needs some real misfortune for that."

"Then thy life is safe for sure," began the other hotly, when a peacemaker intervened.

"Wrangle not, sisters! All are naked when their clothes are gone; and the warning may be for us all. Mayhap the Toorks are coming once more--Mai Dhunnoo said 'twas an old tale. G.o.d send we be not all reft from our husbands."

"That would I never be," protested the heiress, provoking uproarious t.i.tterings among some girls.

"No such luck for poor Ramo," whispered one. "And she sonless too!"

"He shaved for the heat, and then the hail fell on his bald pate,"

quoted the prettiest callously. "Serve him right, say I. He, at least, had two eyes."

The burst of laughter following this sally made the peacemaker, who, as the wife of the headman, had authority, turn in rebuke. 'Twas no laughing matter to Jatnis, as they were, who did so much of the field work, that a token, maybe of ill, should come to the village when the harvest promised so well. The revenue had to be paid, smallpox or no smallpox, Toork or no Toork. And was not one of the Huzoors in camp already giving an eye to the look of the crops, and the other to the shooting of wild things? Could they not hear the sound of his gun for themselves if they listened instead of chattering? And truly enough, in the pause which came to mirth, there echoed from the pale northern horizon, beyond which lay the big jheels, a shot or two, faint and far; for all that dealing death to some of G.o.d's creatures. And these listeners dealt death to none; their faith forbade it.

"Think you they will come our way and kill our deer as they did once?"

asked a slender slip of a girl anxiously. Her tame fawn had lately taken to joining the wild ones when they came at dawn to feed upon the wheat.

"G.o.d knows," replied one beside her. "They will come if they like, and kill if they like. Are they not the masters?"

So the final reference was in the women's minds also, as, while the muddy water strained slowly into their pots through a filtering corner of their veils, they raised their eyes curiously, doubtfully, to the horizon which held the master. It had held him always. To the north or to the south, the east or the west. Mohammedan, Mahratta, Christian.

But always coming over the far horizon and slaying something. In old days husbands, brothers, fathers. Nowadays the herds of deer which the sacredness of life allowed to have their full of the wheat unchecked, or the peac.o.c.ks who spread their tails, securely vainglorious, on the heaps of corn upon the threshing floors.

So the unleavened cake stayed in the village all day long, and when the slant shadows brought leisure, the headman's wife baked two cakes, one for the north the other for the west, and Dittu the old watchman, and the embryo watchman his son, set off with them to the next village west and north, since that was the old custom. So much must be done because their fathers had done it; for the rest, who could tell?

Nevertheless, as the messengers pa.s.sed through the village street where the women sat spinning, many paused to look after them, with a vague relief that the unknown, unsought, had gone out of their life.

Then the moon rose peacefully, and one by one the sights and sounds of that life ceased. The latest of all was the hum of a mill in one of the poorest houses, and a s.n.a.t.c.h of a harvest-song in murmuring accompaniment:

"When the sickle meets the corn, From their meeting joy is born; When the sickle smites the wheat, Care is conquered, sorrow beat."

"Have a care, sister, have a care!" came that rebuking voice from the headman's house close by. "Wouldst bring ill-luck on us all, that grinding but millet thou singest the song of wheat?"

And thereinafter there was no song at all, and sleep settled on all things peacefully. The token had come and gone, leaving the mud sh.e.l.l and the laboring life within it as it had been before. Curiously impa.s.sive, impa.s.sively curious. There was one more portent in the sky, one more mist on the dim horizon. That was all.

So through the dew-hung fields the mysterious message sped west and south.

Sent by whom? And wherefore?

The question was being asked by the masters in desultory fashion as they sat round a bonfire, which blazed in the center of the Resident's camp, on the banks of the great jheel. It was a shooting camp, a standing camp, lavish in comfort. The white tents were ranged symmetrically on three sides of a square, and, in the moonlight, shone almost as brightly as the long levels of water stretching away on the fourth side to the sedgy brakes and isolated palms of the snipe marshes. Behind rose a heavy ma.s.s of burnished foliage, and in front of the big mess-tent the English flag drooped from its mast in the still night air. Nearer the jheel again the bonfire flashed and crackled, sending a column of smoke and sparks into the star-set sky.

The ground about it was spread with carpets and Persian rugs, and here, in luxurious armchairs, the comfortably-tired sportsmen were lounging after dinner, some of them in mess uniform, some in civilian black, but all in decorous dress; for not only was the Brigadier present, but also a small sprinkling of ladies wrapped in fur cloaks above their evening fineries. Briefly, a company more suitable to the foyer of a theater than this barbaric bonfire. But the whole camp, with its endless luxury, stood out in keen contrast with the sordid savagery of a wretched hamlet which lay half-hidden behind the trees.

The contrast struck Jim Douglas, who for that evening only, happened to be the Resident's guest; for, having been on the jheel in a very different sort of camp when the Resident had invaded his solitude, the usual invitation to dine had followed as a matter of course; as it would have followed to any white face with pretensions to be considered a gentleman's. He had accepted it, because, every now and again, a desire "to chuck" as he expressed it, and go back to the ordinary life of his cla.s.s came over him. This mood had been on him persistently ever since the Yama and Indra incident, so that, for the time being, he had dismissed his scoundrels and given up spying in disgust. He had, he told himself, wasted his time, and the military magnate was justified in politely dispensing with his further services. There was, in truth, no need for them so far as he could see. There was plenty of talk, plenty of discontent, but nothing more.

And even that anyone could observe and gauge; for there was no mystery, no concealment. The whole affair was invertebrate utterly, except every now and again when you came upon the track of the Moulvie of Fyzabad. It was conceivable that the aspect might change, but for the present he was sick of the whole thing, ambition and all.

Horse-dealing was better. So he had established himself in a small house in Duryagunj, started a stable, and then taken a holiday in a shooting _pal_ among the jheels and jungles, where in his younger days he had spent so much of his time.

Thus, after eating a first-cla.s.s dinner, he was smoking a first-cla.s.s cigar, and, being a stranger to everyone there, thinking his own thoughts, when the Resident's voice came from the other side of the fire which, with its dancing flame-light distorting every feature in myriad variation, disguised rather than revealed the faces seen by it.

"You have bagged one or two in your district, haven't you, Ford?"

"What, sir? Bustard?" inquired the Collector of the next district, who had come over his border for a day or two's shoot, and who had been engrossed in sporting talk with his neighbor. There was a laugh from the other side of the fire.

"No! these _chupatties_. The Brigadier was asking me if they were as numerous as they are further south, and Fraser, here, said none had come into the Delhi district as yet."

"One came to-day into the hamlet behind the tents," said Jim Douglas quietly. "I met the man bringing it. A watchman from over the border in Mr. Ford's district."

Half a dozen faces turned to the voice which spoke so confidently, and then asked in whispers who the man was? But there was nothing in the whispered replies to warrant that tone of imparting information to others, and a man in black clothes seemed to resent it, for he appealed to the Resident rather fulsomely.

"It will be in the reports to-morrow, no doubt, sir. For myself I attach no importance to it. The custom is an old one. I remember observing it in Muttra when smallpox was bad. But I should like to have your opinion. You ought to know if anyone does."

The compliment was no idle flattery. None had a better right to it than Sir Theophilus Metcalfe, whose ill.u.s.trious name had been a power in Delhi for two generations, and whose uncle had been one of India's most distinguished statesmen. So there was a hush for his reply.

"I can't say," he answered deliberately. "Personally I doubt the dissatisfaction ever coming to a head. There is a good deal, of course, but of late, so it has seemed to me, it is quieting down.

People are getting tired of fermenting. As for the causes of the disaffection it is patent. We can't, simply, do the work we are doing without making enemies of those whose vested interests we have to destroy. We may have gone ahead a little too fast; but that is another question. As for the army, I've no right to speak of it, but it seems to me it has been allowed to get out of hand, out of touch. It will need care to bring it into discipline, but I don't antic.i.p.ate trouble.

Its mixed character is our safeguard. It would be hard for even a good leader to hit on a general grievance which would touch both the army and the civil population, Hindoos and Mohammedans--and as a matter of fact they have no leader at all."

"Have you ever come across the Moulvie of Fyzabad, sir?" remarked Jim Douglas again. "If I had the power I would shoot him like a mad dog.

But for the rest I quite agree."

Here a stir behind them distracted both his attention and the attention of those who were listening to this authoritative voice with bated breath.

"Is that the post? Oh, how delightful!" chorused the ladies, and more than one added plaintively, "I wonder if the English mail is in."

"Let's bet on it. Sir Theophilus to hold the stakes," cried a young fellow who had been yawning through the discussion. But the subject was too serious for such light handling, to judge by the eager faces which crowded round, while the red-coated _chupra.s.sies_ poured the contents of the bags into a heap on the carpet at their master's feet.