Rung Ho! Part 16

Without another word, the Prince got up and shuffled in his decorated slippers to a door at one end of the cloister. Five minutes later Ali Partab--high-chinned, but looking miserable--was led between two men through the same door, while the old woman went on very ostentatiously with her sweeping about the yard. She even turned her back, to prove how little she was interested.

Ali Partab was hustled forward into a high-ceilinged room, whose light came filtered through a scrollwork mesh of chiselled stone where the wall and ceiling joined. There were no windows, but six doors opened from it, and every one of them was barred, as though they opened into treasure-vaults. The Prince sat restlessly in a high, carved wooden chair; there was no other furniture at all, and Ali Partab was left standing between his guards. The Prince drew a pistol from inside his clothing.

"Leave us alone!" he ordered; and the guards went out, closing the door behind them.

"I gave no orders for your capture," said Jaimihr, with a smile.

"Then, let me go," grinned Ali Partab.

"First, I must be informed on certain matters."

Ali Partab still grinned, but the muscles of his face changed their position slightly, and it took no expert in physiognomy to read that questions he would answer must be very tactfully asked.

"Ask on!"

"You are Mahommed Gunga's man?"

"Yes. It is an honorable service."

"Did he order you to stay here?"

"Here--in this palace? Allah forbid!"

"Did he order you to stay in Howrah?"

"He gave me certain orders. I obeyed them until your men invited swift death for themselves and you by interfering with me!"

"What were the orders?"

Ali Partab grinned again--this time insolently.

"To make sure that the Jaimihr-sahib did not make away with the treasure of his brother Howrah!" he answered.

"If you were released now what would you proceed to do?"

"To obey my orders."

Jaimihr changed his tactics and a.s.sumed the frequently successful legal line of pretending to know far more than he really did.

"I am told by one who overheard you speak that you were to take the missionary and his daughter to Alwa's place. How much is my brother Howrah paying for Mahommed Gunga's services in this matter? It is well known that he and Alwa between them could call out all the Rangars in the district for whichever side they chose. Since they are not on my side, they must be for Howrah. How much does he pay? I might offer more."

"I know not," said Ali Partab, perfectly ready to admit anything that was not true.

"It is true, then, that Howrah has designs on the missionary's daughter?

Alwa is to keep her prisoner until the great blow is struck, and Howrah dare take possession of her?"

"That is not my business," answered Ali Partab, with the air of a man who knew all of the secret details but would not admit it. Jaimihr began to think that he had lit at random on the answer to the riddle.

"Where is Mahommed Gunga?"

"I know not."

"At Alwa's place?"

"Am I G.o.d that I should know where any man is whom I cannot see?"

"Oh! So he is at Alwa's, eh?" That overdose of opium had rendered Jaimihr's brain very dull indeed; he considered himself clever, and overlooked the fact that Ali Partab would be almost surely lying to him.

In India men never tell the truth to chance-met strangers or to their enemies; the truth is a valuable thing, to be shared cautiously among friends.

"If Mahommed Gunga is at Alwa's," reasoned Jaimihr, "then he is much too close at hand to take any chances with. I must keep this man close confined." He raised his voice in a high-pitched command, and the guards opened the door instantly; at a sign from the Prince they seized Ali Partab by the wrists.

"I will send a message to Mahommed Gunga for thee," said Jaimihr. "On his answer will depend your release or otherwise." He nodded. The guards took their prisoner out between them--led him past the wrinkled old woman in the courtyard--and halted him in a far corner, where an evil-smelling cage of a place stood open to receive him. A moment later, in order to make sure, the master of the horse sent for the old woman and made her sweep out the cell a little; then he drove her away with a fierce injunction not to let herself be caught anywhere near the cell again unless ordered. Following the line of eastern reasoning, had he not given that order he would not have known what her object could be should she make her way toward the cell; but now, if she risked his wrath by disobeying, he would know beyond the least shadow of a doubt that she had a message to deliver to the prisoner--the man who was hidden in the dark corner need entertain no hope of keeping the secret to himself for purposes of sale or blackmail!

They trust each other wonderfully--with an almost childlike confidence--in a household such as Jaimihr's!

CHAPTER XV

Ho! I am king! All lesser fry Must cringe, and crawl, and cry to me, And none have any rights but I,-- Except the right to lie to me.

JAIMIHR was not the only man who would have dearly liked to know of the whereabouts of Mahommed Gunga. It had been reported to Maharajah Howrah, by his spies, that the redoubtable ex-Risaldar of horse had visited his relatives in Howrah City, and, though he had not been able to ascertain a word of what had pa.s.sed, he was none the less anxious.

He knew, of course--for every soul in Howrah knew--that Jaimihr was plotting for the throne. He knew, too, that the priests of Siva, who with himself were joint keepers of the wickedly won, tax-swollen treasure, had sounded Jaimihr; they had tentatively hinted that they might espouse his cause, provided that an equitable division of the treasure were arranged beforehand. The question uppermost in Maharajah Howrah's mind was whether the Rangars--the Moslem descendants of once Hindoo Rajputs, who formed such a small but valuable proportion of the local population--could or could not be induced to throw in their lot with him.

No man on the whole tax-ridden countryside believed or considered it as a distant possibility that the Rangars would strike for any hand except their own; they were known, on the other hand, to be more or less cohesive, and it was considered certain that, whichever way they swung, when the priest-pulled string let loose the flood of revolution, they would swing all together. The question, then, was how to win the favor of the Rangars. It was not at all an easy question, for the love lost between Hindoos and Mohammedans is less than that between dark-skinned men and white--a lot less.

Within two hours of its happening he had been told of the capture of Ali Partab; and he knew--for that was another thing his spies had told him--that Ali Partab was Mahommed Gunga's man. Apparently, then, Ali Partab--a prisoner in Jaimihr's palace-yard--was the only connecting link between him and the Rangars whom he wished to win over to his side.

He was as anxious as any to help overwhelm the British, but he naturally wished to come out of the turmoil high and dry himself, and he was, therefore, ready to consider the protection of individual British subjects if that would please the men whom he wanted for his friends.

Mahommed Gunga was known to have carried letters for the missionaries.

He was known to have engaged a new servant when he rode away from Howrah and to have left his trusted man behind. Miss McClean was known to have conversed with the retainer, immediately after which the man had been seized and carried off by Jaimihr's men. Jaimihr was known to have placed watchers round the mission house and--once--to have killed a man in Miss McClean's defense. The deduction was not too far-fetched that the retainer had been left as a protection against Jaimihr, and consequently that the Rangars, at the behest of Mahommed Gunga, had decided--on at least the white girl's safety.

Therefore, he argued, if he now proceeded to protect the McCleans, he would, at all events, not incur the Rangars' enmity.

It was a serious decision that he had to make, for, for one thing, he dared not yet make any move likely to incite his strongly supported brother to open rebellion; he dared not, therefore, interfere at present with the watchers near the mission house. To openly befriend the Christian priests would be to set the whole Hindoo population against himself, for it had been mainly against suttee and its kindred horrors that the missionaries had bent all their energy.

The great palace of Howrah was ahum. Elephants with painted tusks, and loaded to the groaning-point under howdahs decked with jewels and gold-leaf, came and went through the carved entrance-gates. Occasionally camels, loaded too until their legs all but buckled underneath them, strutted with their weird, mixed air of foolishness and dignity, to be disburdened of great cases that eight men could scarcely lift; on the outside the cases were marked "Hardware," but a horde of armed and waiting malcontents scattered about the countryside could have given a more detailed and accurate guess at what was in them.

Men came and went--men almost of all castes and many nationalities.

Priests--not all of them fat, but every single one fat-smiling--sunned themselves, or waited in the shade until they could have audience; no priest of any Hindoo temple had to wait long to be admitted to that Rajah's presence, and there was an everlasting chain of them, each with his axe to grind, coming and going by day and night.

Color rioted in the blazing sun and deep, dark shadows lurked in all the thousand places where the sun could never penetrate. It was India in essence--noise and blaze and flouted splendor, with a back-ground and underground of mystery. Any but the purblind British could have told at half a glance, merely by the att.i.tude of Howrah's armed sepoys, that a concerted movement of some kind was afoot--that there was a tight-held thread of plan running through the whole confusion; but no man--not even a native--could have guessed what secret plotting might be going on within the acres of the straggling palace.

From the courtyard there was no least hint obtainable even of the building's size; its shape could only have been marked down from a bird's-eye view aloft. Even the roof was so uneven, and so subdivided by traced and deep-carved walls and ramparts, that a sentry posted at one end could not have seen the next man to him, perhaps some twenty feet away. Building had been piled on building--other buildings had been added end to end and crisscrosswise--and each extension had been walled in as new centuries saw new additions, until the many acres were a maze of bricks and stone and fountain-decorated gardens that no lifelong palace denizen could have learned to know in their entirety.