The Potter's Thumb Part 20

'Dan,' she began desperately in sudden resolve, 'I want to talk about business. The fact is, I've had a windfall of money lately. And so--I--I intend to pay you back that loan of yours. It isn't fair----'

He was on his knees beside her, to get a closer look at her face ere she had finished. 'What is it, Gwen?' he asked rapidly. 'You owe me nothing. What do you mean? There is no question of money between us,'

he went on in answer to her silence. 'There never was but once. There never shall be again. Is it anything else, Gwen?--anything in which I can help; or are you only feeling afraid of the future? Tell me outright, dear.'

Where was the good, she thought petulantly, of delays and preparations when he met her first hint in this direct fashion; yet against the grain, for she hated scenes, she took her courage in her hand and spoke up--

'Yes, I am afraid; afraid of the future for you as well as for myself--O Dan! I really wish you would sit down like a Christian and listen properly. Kissing my hand is no answer. And I am serious. This idle foolish promise of thinking about it all seriously next year when you get your promotion is not fair on you--don't laugh, Dan, it isn't.

It ties you down, and prevents you doing yourself justice. And then it isn't fair on me.'

He interrupted her quickly. 'How is it not fair on you, Gwen? I don't see it. You do not like any one else as much as you like me; you know you don't. And if this half promise to me holds you back from marrying some one you do not like as you like me, why, then,' his voice lowered to tender gravity, 'I thank G.o.d for it as I should thank Him for any good He sent into your life.'

'You do not understand,' she retorted querulously. 'Surely I am the best judge of myself, and there is no reason why I should want to marry some one else because I don't think it would be right to marry you. I should make a bad wife, Dan, to any poor man; and I should not be happy. Surely, surely, I ought to know best! It isn't as if I were the inexperienced girl I was before. I have been married for years, and I think, yes I am sure, that I am happier as I am.' Her last words degenerated into something between a laugh and a sob. It really was too ridiculous, too grievous, that she, Gwen Boynton, with all her knowledge of the world, should not be considered fit to judge for herself.

'Married!' he echoed thoughtfully, and something in his voice arrested her. 'No, Gwen, my dear, you have never been married. You don't even understand what it means to be married; for your knowledge of it is all evil. That's the worst of it. Don't be angry, dear, I'm not going to lecture like Mrs. Grundy on the sin of a loveless marriage, or the degradation of one, like the sentimentalists. Surely, surely a man or a woman may marry from pity, from honour, from self-devotion, and yet touch the perfection of the tie. But you,'--he paused a while, 'you did not only lose the love of it, Gwen; the thing itself was never yours.

The facing of life, hand in hand; two of you where there was but one before. See! there is my hand, Gwen, and there is yours. A difference, isn't there? But how close they fit, each to each! How close and warm,'--he paused again to smile at her. 'What is it the song says, Gwen, about giving your hand where your heart can never be? Fudge! It should be, "How can I give my heart where my hand can never be?" Yes!

there they are, close, and I am there too, my darling. Ready, always ready. Never again, Gwen, without the touch of a hand, like--how does it run?--like children frightened in the night, like children crying for the light. Never again, Gwen, never again.'

They were sitting together side by side on the sofa, her hand held in his so lightly that she could have withdrawn it without an effort. But it lay there in his clasp as she sat listening to the soft voice.

Listening on, even when it ceased, as if its spell lingered. They were not even looking at each other. Beyond the silent room, through the open door, the sunshine showed Gwen's bearer cleaning the lamps with a dirty duster. Not a romantic sight; but it is to be doubted if either saw it, for their eyes were blinded by the great darkness in which they found themselves, trustfully, hand in hand.

At last, with a little shiver, she tried to move, but his fingers closed on hers more firmly.

'Too late, Gwen! Too late. You should have taken it away when you had the chance,' he said joyously. 'Oh, Gwen, my darling, if we were married you would forget to be afraid, as you did just now; didn't you, Gwen?'

'I believe you mesmerise me,' she replied, trying to jest, 'and forgetting bills doesn't help to pay them; does it, Dan?'

'So you are back at the money again. Well, I don't care. Money or no money; promotion or no promotion----'

'No! no!' she interrupted, yielding, as she always did, to his decision, 'that really is not fair--the bargain was promotion--it was indeed.'

'Promotion be it,' he a.s.sented with a contented laugh, 'though I can't for the life of me see what it has got to do with the matter.'

'You would at least have more pay,' she put in, wondering faintly the while how it came about that they should be discussing such questions when she had meant to be so firm. 'I could not marry a pauper; could I?'

'Indeed, and indeed, it might be the best thing for you; then n.o.body would give you credit, dear, but me. And I--Oh, Gwen, my dear, my dear,--you might be bereft of everything--of all, save your own self, and sure I would give you credit for the all, still. Credit!' he echoed to his own words, 'isn't it absurd to be talking of it, as if either of us could be debtor or creditor to the other.'

That was all she gained from the interview. That, and the unwelcome remembrance of full five minutes when the touch of her lover's hand and the sound of his voice had made her forget the world, the flesh, and the devil.

But not for long. As she sat after Dan had gone, trying to comfort herself by the fact that one never knew what might happen, that they might all be dead and buried before the necessity for action arose--which, by the way, was her favourite consolation--she looked up to see the servant standing at the door, doubtfully expectant.

'What is it?' she asked languidly.

'The vakeel of the Diwans of Hodinuggur, Huzoor. He hath brought an offering, and desires an audience.'

'The Diwans of Hodinuggur!' repeated Gwen, startled.

'The agent, Huzoor. Shall I tell him the mem sahiba is going to eat the air in her carriage? It is but to say something about a pot, he bade me mention. A pot that the Huzoor fancied.'

Gwen stood up, holding to the table.

'Now!' she said after a pause, 'show him in now.'

Mrs. Boynton's neat victoria waited for its mistress long after the smiling and obsequious visitor had given his shoe-money to the servant and departed. Waited patiently till, as it grew dark, the ayah came out and removed the cushions and parasols. Mem sahiba was not well, and would not go to the gardens; she would not go out to dinner either, so the horses could be put up. Then, the bearer coming into the verandah with the lighted lamps, a shrill altercation began over the shoe-money; the ayah a.s.serting that when the visit was to a lady, her female attendant had a right to half, and even the grooms putting in a claim on the ground that they had been present. Their mistress, lying on the sofa where but a short time before she had sat hand in hand with Dan Fitzgerald, heard the dispute and had not the courage to rebuke their greed.

And yet the vakeel of the Diwans had simply brought a message, that if the mem sahiba would like another Ayodhya pot, _similar in all respects to the last_, one could doubtless be found and forwarded without delay.

She had refused the offer promptly, decisively; but the fact of its having been made filled her with regrets and alarms. If--oh! how lonely she felt, without a soul to stand between her and trouble. Then Dan's words recurred to her! bankrupt of everything yet credited with all!

They brought no comfort, however; only a vague irritation against the speaker. But for him she would not have been tempted; but for him she would never have kept the discovery of the jewels secret--if indeed it was a discovery. Could it be a bribe? For what? Had they found out her entanglement with Dan Fitzgerald? Her vexation blazed up at the bare suspicion, and though every fresh proof of the attraction he had for her unstable nature invariably resulted in a recoil of the pendulum, she was conscious this time that it had never before swung back so far.

He was to blame; yes! he was undoubtedly to blame for the whole miserable business.

She felt herself too much upset for Lewis Gordon's sharp eyes to be a safe ordeal, so, as he was to be one of the dinner-party, she sent an excuse, and spent the long evening in nursing her wrath; a very necessary process if Gwen Boynton was to bear malice, since her temper was of the sweetest. Even with this encouragement the next morning found her ready with excuses for everybody, herself included. After all, matters were not so serious. Three days would see her safe in Simla, where six thousand rupees would be better than three, infinitely better than none; and it would be quite easy to keep her understanding with Lewis dark for some time to come. Then what proof could any one have that she had kept, or even found the jewels? Who was to say that the pot had not been stolen, jewels and all? As for the jewellers who had bought them, they neither knew her real name nor address. The only possible danger lay in weakly yielding to conscience in the way of attempted rest.i.tution. Besides, if the pearls were really meant as a bribe, surely those who offered it deserved to lose them and gain nothing; for, of course, the idea of gaining anything from her was preposterous.

She went to the hall that evening, cheerful as ever, and exclaimed airily at the changes one short twenty-four hours had wrought in the shifting society of mid-April. The Grahams had left, the Taylors were to start that evening if there was room in the train laden with women and babies flying before the punkahs. Laden, too, with melancholy husbands conveying their families to the foot of the hills, whence they would return to stew in solitude. Lewis Gordon divided these unfortunates, cynically, into two cla.s.ses--those who would be sent home in charge of the khansamah, with a menu of the first month's dinners, and an almost tearful injunction not to let the master, when he went out to dine, eat things which were likely to disagree with him; and those given over to the 'bottlewasher' who 'can cook a little, you know.' And there was truth in his cynicism. Mankind is not like an Am[oe]ba, all stomach, yet nothing can be closer to tears than two sights often to be seen during an Indian hot weather: the one, a meal sent away untouched in favour of a clean whisky and soda; the other, an elderly Mohammedan at a big dinner-party waving the lobster salad away behind his master's back, and presenting him with cheese and biscuits instead. There is full-blown tragedy in both. Tragedy also in Lewis Gordon's cheerful remark to his companion--

'And, by the by, Robinson has been ordered home next mail. They were afraid of abscess. So that jolly little house at Simla is going a-begging. He asked me if I knew of a tenant, but it is rather late in the day, I fear, even though he only asks half-rent.'

'I'll take it,' said Gwen calmly. 'Don't stare so. The fact is, I have had a little windfall of money lately, and I hate hotels. This will be almost as cheap, and much more comfortable.'

'Infinitely so,' a.s.sented Lewis. The house was fully a mile nearer his quarters at Colonel Tweedie's and that was a great convenience, especially during the rains.

CHAPTER XIII

'Send it back! It is hers; it is not mine! He gave it her! I stole it.

Don't tell. Oh! send it back! send it back!'

Over and over again, through the long hot days and nights, the murmur, in its monotonous hurry, blent with the hum of the potter's wheel. The old man had removed the latter to the farther courtyard, where he sat working feverishly, yet without avail, so far as the village people could see through the door, beyond which they were forbidden to go. The simple folk were agog at the potter's strange looks and strange ways.

He never seemed to cease working, for even when the familiar sound of the wheel was hushed something like an echo of it rose from within.

Those were the times when he stood wistfully in the dark airless hut beside a restless head turning itself from side to side on the hard pillow, and keeping time to the monotonous rhythm of the murmur, 'Send it back, send it back.'

'Yea! dear heart, I will send it.' Then there would be silence for a while; but only for a while, since the fever strengthened day by day.

Small wonder, when all Nature seemed in the grip of heat. The thermometer, we are told, is accurately divided into degrees. If so, the fallacy of such cla.s.sification is self-evident, since every one with experience knows that the difference between eighty-four degrees and eighty-six degrees of Fahrenheit's instrument embraces the difference between comfort and discomfort. Between these two points that engine of torture, the punkah, trembles ere it begins the steady swing which is only one degree less awful than the unsteady swing necessitating the occultation of boots and other light articles of furniture with a human head. Doubtless to the uninitiated it seems a trivial affair to loop a parti-coloured rope through hooks in the rafters, and to attach to it a whitewashed board with a newly starched frill tacked to its lowest edge, thereinafter making mysterious dispositions of a leathern thong, the neck of an old whisky bottle thrust through the mud wall, and a circ.u.mambient flask of evil-smelling oil. But those who know what it is, on returning from a morning ride, to find the punkah in possession of your home, feel a chill at the very thought, such as the thing itself will never produce by legitimate means. The hot weather is upon one, and G.o.d only knows if fever, cholera, home-sickness, sheer deadly _ennui_, will allow you to pa.s.s through it unscathed as an honest gentleman.

George Keene, however, over in the branded bungalow, knew nothing of the horrors of a hot weather in the jungles, and, while poor little Aziz lay moaning out her impotent repentance, was actually superintending the swinging of his punkahs; which is equivalent to a man personally conducting his own hanging. He even, after the manner of engineers, took pride in a device which was to secure a perfect silence in the infernal machine. All unwitting of a time when, in the scorched darkness, it might be preferable to curse a monotonous scroop giving tangible excuse for wakefulness, than to lie visualising the unseen swoop, as of some vampire eager to suck your heart's-blood.

Those two degrees of heat bring a thousand other changes. Even at Hodinuggur, arid as it always was, they intensified the drought till a drop of water seemed as visionary a consolation to the parched horizon as it must have been to poor Dives in the fires of h.e.l.l. The very ca.n.a.l denied its nature as it slipped past yellow and thick with silt from the clayey defiles of the lower hills, each little swirl and eddy looking as if streaked and pitted in mud. Yet the chill of its snowy birth came with the flood, so that in the red-hot evenings George's factotum used to call through the yellow-dust haze to the groom who sat on the edge of the ca.n.a.l, apparently moored to his place by a soda-water bottle tied to a string, and then Ganesha would haul in the strange buoy and scramble up the bank with it rapidly, so as to give the master's dinner-drink a chance of being cool.

All this amused George Keene hugely at first. He drew caricatures of it for the rectory, and sent a very impressionist sketch of his world to Mrs. Boynton. It consisted of a dust-storm, a caper-bush, and a rat-hole. She put it on the mantelpiece of the pretty drawing-room in the little house among scented pine-woods, where she was just beginning to appreciate the soothing effect of having a decent balance at your banker's. Her lady-visitors laughed and said it was very clever, but some of the men looked queer and muttered 'poor devil' under their breath. Not that George looked on himself in that light. On the contrary, Hodinuggur amused him. Its dreary antiquity was all new to him, and as he went through the cool, dark pa.s.sages of the old palace on his way to play chess with the Diwan, he learnt to admire some things about it; notably the thickness of its walls, through which the sun never filtered, though it soaked piteously into his red-brick bungalow. Upon the roof Zubr-ul-Zaman shrivelled under the heat almost as much as a certain figure which still lay huddled up on the landing of the secret stair in the thickness of the tower beneath him as he sat at chess. Below that again Khush-hal Beg lay stark naked, like a huge baby, in a swinging cradle, which was pulled to and fro by a drowsy coolie, while a bheestic supplied the fat carca.s.s alternately outside and inside with tepid water from his skin bag, and as the latter shrank, Khush-hal swelled visibly--horribly.

Yet further, in the bazaar by the Mori gate, Dalel Beg, abandoning Europe-fashion under the stress of climate, slept all day and waked all night, doing both more viciously than before, like a snake rendered lively and dangerous by the heat. But Chandni, from her cool arches, smiled calmly, even when 'Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay' rose from the opposite balcony, which was now occupied by some one who could dance as well as sing. To tell truth, she was glad to be quit of Dalel's amus.e.m.e.nt for a time. Such deviations from her control never lasted long, and this time she knew that the Diwan himself was on her side. So she lounged about in the shadows, watching the pigeons in the niches, and rubbing her soft palms together. Sometimes a pellet of opium lay between them; sometimes nothing at all, for it was a trick of hers. Sometimes, on the other hand, it was a great deal; neither more nor less than one of the Hodinuggur pearls, which were as well known to all the jewellers of that part of the country as the Koh-i-nur diamond is to the keeper of the regalia. That was why Chandni on her return from Delhi, whither she had gone ostensibly to learn new music-hall songs for Dalel's benefit, had laughed so triumphantly at her own cleverness as she sat at the Diwan's feet telling him what she had done.

'It was easy, with my cousin a jeweller; and we of the bazaar know a trick or two with goldsmiths. Manohar Lal hath the pearls, sure enough.

All thou hast to do is to offer him a rupee more than he gave the mem (which will not be half their value). The Hindu pig will take it, seeing it is better than having the yellow-trousered ones[3] set on him as a receiver of stolen goods.'

Zubr-ul-Zaman looked at her approvingly from under his bushy eyebrows.

She was a clever woman, but he would improve on her plan. He would put the screw tighter on the Hindu pig, and get the pearls back in exchange for a promise to pay. So far, however, Chandni's plot had been unexpectedly successful. Both George Keene, by giving the Ayodhya pot to the mem, and Dan Fitzgerald, by taking the jewels himself to Manohar Lal, as Chandni's spies said he had done, were mixed up in the affair.

There was sufficient foundation for an _esclandre_, of course, but how would that help them? They did not merely want revenge, as is so often the case, they wanted the key of the sluice-gate. The courtesan standing with wide-spread arms to fold her veil around her decently ere she left the Diwan's presence, laughed shrilly at his difficulties.