The Bronze Bell Part 25

One travels dak by relays casually disposed along the route at the whim of the native contractor. Between Badshah Junction and Kuttarpur there were ten stages, of which the conclusion of the first was at hand--Amber having all but abandoned belief in its existence.

Slamming recklessly down the bed of an ancient watercourse, the tonga spun suddenly upon one wheel round a shoulder of the banks and dashed out upon a rolling plain, across which the trail snaked to other farther hills that lay dim and low, a wavy line of blue, upon the horizon--the hills in whose heart Kuttarpur itself lay occult. And, by the roadside, in a compound fenced with camel-thorn, sat an aged and indigent dak-bungalow, marking the end of the first stage, the beginning of the second.

It wore a look of Heaven to the traveller. In the shade of its veranda he read an urgent invitation to rest and surcease of sunlight. He approved it thoroughly; the ramshackle rest-house itself, the sheds in the rear for the accommodation of relays, the syce squatting asleep in the sunshine, the few scrawny chickens squabbling and scratching over their precarious sustenance in the deep hot dust of the compound, even the broken tonga reposing with its shafts uplifted at a piteous angle of decrepitude--all these Amber surveyed with a kindly eye.

Ram Nath reined in with a flourish and lifted a raucous voice, hailing the syce, while Amber, painfully disengaging his cramped limbs, climbed down and stumbled toward the veranda. The abrupt transition from violent and erratic motion to a solid and substantial footing affected him unpleasantly, with an undeniable qualm; the earth seemed to rock and flow beneath him as if under the influence of an antic earthquake.

He was for some seconds occupied with the problem of regaining his poise, and it was not until he heard an Englishwoman's voice uplifted in accents of anger, that he remembered the other wayfarer with whom he was to share his tonga, or a.s.sociated the white-clad figure in the dark doorway of the bungalow with anything but the khansamah, coming to greet and cheat the chance-brought guest.

"Where is that tonga-wallah who deserted me here last night?" the woman was demanding of Ram Nath, too preoccupied with her resentment to have eyes for the other traveller, who at sight of her had stopped and removed his pith helmet and now stood staring as if he had come from a land in which there were no women. "Where," she continued, with an imperative stamp of a daintily-shod foot, "is that wretched tonga-wallah?"

"Sahiba," protested Ram Nath, with a great show of deference, "how should I know? Belike he is in Badshah Junction, whither ha returned very late last night, being travel-worn and weary, and where I left him, being sent with this excellent tonga to take his place."

"You were? And why have I been detained here, alone and unprotected, this long night? Simply because that other tonga-wallah was a fool, am I to be imposed upon in this fashion?"

"What am I," whimpered Ram Nath, "to endure the wrath of the sahiba for a fault that is none of mine?"

"I beg your pardon, sir," said the girl, turning to Amber, "but it is very annoying." She looked him over, first with abstraction, then with a puzzled gathering of her brows, for he was far from her thoughts--the last person she would have expected to meet in that place, and very effectually disguised in dust and dirt besides, "The tire came off the wheel just as we got here, late yesterday evening, and in trying, or pretending to try, to fit it on again, that block-head of a tonga-wallah hammered the rim with a rock as big as his head and naturally smashed it to kindling-wood. Then, before I could stop him, he flung himself on the back of a pony and went away, saying that it was the will of G.o.d that he should return to Badshah for a better tonga. Since when I have had for company one stable-syce, one deaf-and-dumb patriarch of a khansamah and ... the usual dak-bungalow discomforts--insects, bad food, and a terrible fear of dacoits."

"I am so sorry, Miss Farrell," Amber put in. "If I had only been here...."

The girl gave a little gasp and sat down abruptly in one of the veranda chairs, thereby threatening it with instant demolition and herself with a bad spill; for the chair was feeble with the burden of its many years, and she was a quite substantial young person. Indeed, so loudly did it croak a protest and a warning that she immediately arose in alarm.

"Mr. Amber!" she said; and, "Well ...!"

"You'll forgive me the surprise?" he begged, going up on the veranda to her. "I myself had no hope of finding you here."

"But," she protested, with a pretty flush of colour--"but I left you in the States such a little while ago!"

"Yes?" he said gravely. "It seems so long to me.... And when you had gone, Long Island was a very lonely place indeed," he added, with calculated impudence.

Her colour deepened and she sought another chair, seating herself with gingerly decision. "I'm sure you don't mean me to a.s.sume that you've followed me half round the world?"

"Why not?" He brought another chair to face her. "Besides, I haven't seen anything of ... India for a good many years."

"Mr. Amber!"

"Ma'am?" he countered with affected humility.

"You're spoiling it all. I was so glad to see you--I'd have been glad to see any white man, of course----"

"Much obliged, I'm sure."

"And now you're actually flirting with me--or pretending to."

"I'm not," he declared soberly. "As a matter of solemn fact, I had to come to India."

"You _had_ to?"

"On a matter of serious business. Please don't ask me what, just yet; but it's very serious, to my way of thinking. This happy accident--I count myself a very happy man to have been so fortunate--only makes my errand the more pleasant."

She regarded him intently, chin in hand, her brown eyes sedate with speculation, for some time. "I believe you've been speaking in parables," she a.s.serted, at length. "If I'm unjust, bear with me; appearances are against you. There isn't any reason I know of why you should tell me what brought you here----"

"There's every reason, in point of fact, Miss Farrell; only ... I can't explain just now."

"Very well," she agreed briskly; "let's be content with that. I am glad to see you again, truly; and--we're to travel on to Kuttarpur in the same tonga?"

"If you'll permit----"

"After what I've endured, this awful night, I wouldn't willingly let you out of my sight."

"Or any other white man?"

She laughed, pleased. "I presume you're wondering what I'm doing here?"

"You were to join your father in Darjeeling, I believe?" he countered, cautious.

"But I found he'd been transferred unexpectedly to Kuttarpur. So, of course, I had to follow. I telegraphed him day before yesterday when I was to arrive at Badshah Junction, and naturally expected he'd come in person or have some one meet me, but I presume the message must have gone astray. At all events there was no one there for me and I had to come on alone. It's hardly been a pleasant experience; that incompetent tonga-wallah behaved precisely as though he had deliberately made up his mind to delay me.... And the tonga's nearly ready; I must lock my kit-bag."

She went into the bungalow, leaving him thoughtful, for perhaps.... But the back of Ram Nath, as that worthy busied himself superintending the harnessing in of fresh ponies, conveyed to him no support for his half-credited hypothesis that this "accident" had been carefully planned by Labertouche for Amber's especial benefit.

He vexed himself with vain speculations, for it was perfectly certain that he would get nothing in the way of either denial or confirmation out of Ram Nath; and, presently, acknowledging this, he called the khansamah and ordered a peg for the sake of the dust in his throat.

The girl joined him on the veranda in due course, very demure and sweet to look upon in her travelling-dress of light pongee and her pith helmet, whose green under-brim and puggaree served very handsomely to set off her fair colouring. If she overlooked the adoration of his eyes, she was rather less than woman; for it was in them, plain to be seen for the looking. The khansamah followed her from the bungalow, staggering under the weight of her box and kit-bag, and with Ram Nath's surly a.s.sistance made them fast to the front seat. While Amber gave the girl his hand to help her to her place, and lifted himself to her side in a mute glow of ecstasy. Fate, he thought with reason, was most kind to him.

They rattled headlong from the compound, making for the distant hills of blue. The girl drew down her puggaree, with its soft, thin folds sheltering the pure contours of her face from the dust and burning sun-glare. He watched her hungrily, holding his breath as the thought came to him that he was seated elbow to elbow with the woman who was to be his wife, his hand still a-tingle with the reminiscence of her gloved fingers that had touched it so transiently. She caught his intent look and smiled, her eyes l.u.s.trous through the veiling.

She was very tired after her night-long vigil, and after a few words of commonplace as they drew away from the station, he forebore to weary her with talk, and a silence as sweet as communion lengthened between them as the stage lengthened. He was very intent upon her presence; the consciousness of her there beside him seemed, at times, almost suffocating. He could by no means forget that she had in a curious way been a.s.signed to him--set aside to be his wife, the partner of all his days; and she tolerated him kindly, all unsuspicious of the significance of his advent into her life.... If she were made to suspect, to understand, what effect would it have upon their relations, slight and but lately established as they were? Would she shrink from or encourage him?

His wife! He wagged his head in solemn stupefaction, trying to appreciate the intangible, the chimerical dream of yesterday resolved into the actuality of to-day; realising that, even when most intrigued by the adventure of which she was at once the cause and the prize, even though he had met and been charmed by her before becoming enmeshed in its web of incident, he had thought of her with a faint trace of incredulity, as though she had been a thing of fable, trapped with all the fanciful charms of beleaguered fairy princesses, rather than a living woman of flesh and fire and blood--such as she proved to be who rode with him, her thoughts drowsily astray in the vastnesses of her inscrutable, virginal moods.

To think that she was foreordained to be his wife was not more unbelievable than the consciousness that he, her undeclared lover, her predestined mate and protector, was listlessly permitting her to delve further into the black heart of a land out of which he had promised to convey her with all possible speed, for the salvation of her body and soul.... Yet what could he do, save be pa.s.sive for the time, and wait upon the turn of events? He could not, dared not seize her in his arms and insist that she love him, marry him, fly with him--all within the compa.s.s of an hour or even of a day. For words of love came haltingly to his unskilled tongue, though they came from a surcharged heart, and to him the strategy of love was as a sealed book, at whose contents he could but guess, and that with a diffidence and distrust sadly handicapping to one who had urgent need of expedition in his courting.

With a rueful smile and a perturbed heart he pondered his problem. The second stage wore away without a dozen words pa.s.sing between them; so also the third. The pauses were brief enough, the ponies being exchanged with gratifying despatch. The tonga would pull up, Ram Nath would jump down ... and in a brace of minutes or little more the vehicle would be _en route_ again, Amber engaged with the infinite ramifications of this labyrinthal riddle of his, and the girl insensibly yielding to the need of sleep. She pa.s.sed, at length, into sound unconsciousness.

Thus the morning stages flowed beneath the tonga, personified in a winding ribbon of roadway, narrow, deep-rutted, inexpressibly dusty, lined uncertainly over a scrubby, sun-scorched waste. Sophia napped uneasily by fits and starts, waking now and again with a sleepy smile and a fragmentary, murmured apology. She roused finally very much refreshed for the midday halt for rest and tiffin, which they pa.s.sed at one of the conventional bungalows, in nothing particularly unlike its fellows unless it were that they enjoyed, before tiffin, the gorgeous luxury of plenty of clean water, cooled in porous earthen jars. Amber, overwhelmed by the discovery of this abundance, promptly went to the extreme of calling in the khansamah to sluice him down with jar after jar, and felt like himself for the first time in five days when, shaved and dressed, he returned to the common living-room of the resthouse.

The girl kept him waiting but a little while. Lacking the attentions of an ayah she had probably been unable to bathe so extensively as he, but eventually she appeared in an immeasurably more happy state of body and mind, calling up to him the simile, stronger than any other, of a tall, fair lily after a morning shower. And she was in a bewitching humour, one that ingenuously enough succeeded in entangling him more thoroughly than ever before in the web of her fascinations. Over an execrable curry of stringy fowl and questionable rice, eked out with tea and tinned delicacies of their own, their chatter, at the beginning sufficiently gay and inconsequent, drifted by imperceptible and unsuspected gradations perilously close to the shoals of intimacy. And subsequently, when they had packed themselves back into the narrow tonga-seat and Again were being bounced and juggled breathlessly over shocking roads, the exchange of confidences continued with unabated interest. Amber on his part was led to talk of his life and work, of his adventures in the name of Science, of his ambitions and achievements. In return he received a vivid impression of the lives of those women who share with their men the burden of official life in British India: of serene days in the brisk, invigorating, clear atmosphere of hill stations; of sunsmitten days and steaming nights in the Deccan; of the uncertain, anchorless existences of those who know not from one day to another when they may be whisked half across an Empire at the whim of that awful force simply nominated Government....

For all the taint upon her pedigree, she proved herself to Amber at heart a simple, lonely Englishwoman--a stranger in a sullen and suspicious land, desiring nothing better than to return to the England she had seen and learned to love, the England of ample lawns, of box-hedges, and lanes, of travelled highways, pavements and gaslights, of shops and theatres, of home and family ties....

But India she knew. "I sometimes fancy," she told him with the conscious laugh that deprecates a confessed superst.i.tion, "that I must have lived here in some past incarnation." She paused, but he did not speak. "Do you believe in reincarnation?" Again he had no answer for her, though temporarily he saw the daylight as darkness. "It's hard to live here for long and resist belief in it.... But as a matter of fact I seem to understand these people better than they're understood by most of _my_ people. Don't you think it curious? Perhaps it's merely intuition----"

"That's the birthright of your s.e.x," he said, rousing. "On the other hand, you have to remember that your father is one of a family that for generations has served the Empire. And your mother?"

"She, too, came of an Anglo-Indian family. Indeed, they met and courted here, though they were married in England.... So you think my insight into native character a sort of birthright--a sense inherited?"

"Perhaps--something of the sort."