The Potter's Thumb Part 30

The peasant and the courtesan had munched melons in the very shadow, but George's cultured nerves had no such courage. He was no coward, but he had received a shock which was bound to make its mark on the highly sensitised mind and body; bound to weaken them for the time.

Ah! that was better! The room did not seem quite so dreary after the whisky and soda! Then he took another, and after that the outlook itself seemed less dreary, and he told himself that Dan had been right in saying that he, George, did not know the temptation of stimulants.

Temptation?--if they brought you up to your bearings with a round turn in this fashion--Why! he felt twice the man he had been five minutes ago. Now he could think; now he could reason; now he could see clearly and decide what ought to be done. To begin with, she was safe. Those papers, joined to little Azizan's confession of having stolen the Ayodhya pot, made it quite impossible to prove she had ever known about the jewels. As for himself, that did not matter; though, as a fact, he was quite as safe as Dan. That is to say, the palace devils might raise a scandal, but the breakdown of their case in regard to her would show it was no more than revenge for their failure; for they would fail, of course. So far, nothing had happened. There was no water in the overflow cut; he had made sure of that as he rode along. And now that he was on the spot he could do quite as much, off his own bat, to prevent treachery as any one--the Colonel and all the Department to boot--could have done had he reported the whole affair. To-morrow the guard would be changed, and doubled to provide against any violent attempt; an unlikely event, as such an a.s.sault would take time, and he meant to pitch his tent down at the sluice so as to be on the spot at night, and during the day he could watch from the bungalow. Against other and more stealthy treachery he was also provided absolutely--so absolutely that he gave a short laugh as he drew a couple of Chubb's keys and a lock from his wallet. That would puzzle them if they came thinking they had hit on the old fastening. But that also was for to-morrow; there remained only to-night. No! not to-night; since already it was past one o'clock. What wonder that he was tired--did any one in the wide world know or care how tired? He stood up sharply, every vein tingling now; his whole mind aglow despite his weariness. He must have something to eat first, of course--his very determination insisted on that; but not from those plague-stricken purlieus out yonder--cautious civilisation insisted on that. There must be biscuits or something of that sort in the cupboard, and as he crossed over to it the memory of his raid while _she_ slept among the red cushions returned to make him laugh again.

'And when she went there The cupboard was bare.'

The childish doggerel fitted the occasion and left him smiling at some ship's biscuit--the last resource by sea or land--left at the bottom of a tin. Dan certainly _was_ a bad housekeeper. The comedy of his disappointment struck him; the tragedy, needing the sequel to develop it, remained invisible like a photograph in film-embryo.

It was dry work, eating ship's biscuit in a fiery furnace, with a ten-pound thirst upon you and whisky and soda within reach. When he stood up again the weariness seemed to have crept upwards, leaving nothing alert save his brain. Had he ever been so tired in all his life? As tired as _she_ must have been when she fell asleep in the chair he was just pa.s.sing. His hand lingered on the back of it for an instant, almost caressingly.

By Jove! what a furnace it was outside! Lighter than it had been, however, because of the suggestion of a moon low down in the heat-haze.

And there was the potter's lamp twinkling like a star above the domed shadow of the Hodinuggur mound. Queer old chap--queer start the whole thing--if one came to think of it. A crazy, irresponsible creator! as Dan had called him. Why not he as well as another? Who knew? who cared?

He stood so for a s.p.a.ce, looking out with sensitive, seeing eyes to the broad shadows, formless save for the pinpoint flicker of the potter's light. Face to face at last, he and Hodinuggur; between them the sliding water, mother of all things. Then came a memory.

'Hath not the Potter power over the Clay?'

Ah! if that was all the light amid the shadows of life, better far were darkness! If that he turned quickly, beset by uncontrolled, pa.s.sionate contempt, uncontrolled, pa.s.sionate desire for action, and beneath his shaking hand the lamp on the table flared out, smokily. A poor protest; yet the dark was better. Darkness and rest--if rest could come to one so tired as he was, as it had come to her. Not that it mattered if he were tired or not----

Five minutes after, the twinkling light, could it have reached so far, would have found him asleep, peaceful as a child, among the red cushions where _she_ had slept. But even Azizan's eyes, set keen as they were by devotion, could not pierce the darkness. For the light George had seen was in her hand, as she stood looking out from the yard towards the other bank of the ca.n.a.l.

'It hath gone out again,' she murmured; 'a servant likely, on no good errand; and the old man tells me the truth, I think. Another week ere he returns. I would it had been sooner, so that I might warn him. But there! 'tis the same! The task is mine in the end.'

As she crossed back to the hut, she paused an instant to look, by the light of the cresset she shaded with her thin fingers, on the figure of old Fuzl Elahi asleep in the open beside his wheel.

'Poor fool,' she said softly, as if to the sleeper. And after that even the potter's light disappeared, leaving both sides of the sliding water to darkness.

The dawn came and went; the sun climbing into the sky turned it to bra.s.s--a brazen dome in which the sun itself seemed merged and lost.

Yet still George slept on, undisturbed even by the water-carrier's cautious peepings through the chick.

'Lo! the Huzoor is young, and he was broken into pieces by thy bad animal,' he said to the camel man who was impatiently awaiting payment.

'Sleep is even as food and drink to him, and besides, ere he wakes, my wife's cousin, whom I have sent for, will be present to cook my lord's breakfast. There is great virtue in being _majood_ (created), and the man who cooks one meal hath himself to blame if he cook not many. If thou art hurried, go. Who wants thee and thy evil-smelling brute?'

So George slept on, and when he woke at last it was to the confused, unreasoning consciousness of those who have been drugged. He stared round him incredulously, until out of the mist, as it were, the empty whisky bottle on the table grew clear, accusingly clear, and he sprang to his feet, becoming aware, as he did so, of a racking headache.

Undoubtedly he had taken more whisky than usual; not perhaps without excuse, he added, as memory began to return. The next instant he was at the door. Yellow haze and yellow heat, and through it a silver streak steering for the south!----

That was all he saw, but that little changed the whole world for him in the twinkling of an eye. The sluice-gate was open. The devils had won--they had won!--they had won!

What use is there in saying that he felt this, that he felt that? What use in pointing out whether anger or regret came uppermost in the conglomerate of pa.s.sion? As a matter of fact, George felt nothing consciously; not even when, after an hour or more, he came back wearily to the red-hot bungalow, out of the red-hot air.

He sat down then on the table, now cleared of last night's crumbs, and relaid by the wife's cousin with that superfluity which marks new zeal in India, and tried to think of what he had thought, or said, or done since he first caught sight of that silver streak steering southward where no streak should be. But, after a time, he found himself deeply interested in reconstructing the pyramid of five forks intertwined, with which the new hand had adorned the centre of the table. What a fool! what an arrant fool he was, to be sure. Even if there had been any one upon whom to use the revolver, he would most likely have lost his opportunity or missed the beggar! But there had been n.o.body, and he might as well have left it at home, lying on the table ready, as it was now. The sluice-gate, not ten minutes before he woke, had been opened by a key--a key which had broken in the lock, making it impossible to close it again till it was repaired. Of course there were the other keys and the new lock; but what need was there for hurry now? No power in earth or heaven could hide the fact that the sluice-gate had been open. For months to come, miles on miles of crop ripening to harvest would proclaim the failure, the treachery. 'As ye have sown so shall ye reap.' Concealment was impossible; that much was certain--and the certainty brought with it an odd sort of content. Since it was all his fault from beginning to end, it was as well he should suffer. Yes! it had been opened quietly while the guard was eating his dinner; opened quietly while he, George, was asleep; why not say drunk at once--that was nearer the truth.

And the Diwan! George's listless hands tightened as he thought of that brief interview with the old man on the roof. His own torrent of reckless abuse, the courteous regrets and replies ignoring his very accusations. But those palace devils could afford to eat abuse!

Zubr-ul-Zaman had played, and the game was done indeed. But how? Half mechanically George drew out the key attached to his watch-chain and looked at it; carelessly at first, then carefully. And what he saw there clinging to the inner surface of a ward, changed heaven for him in the twinkling of an eye, even as the silver streak of water had changed the world.

It was a very simple thing; only a piece of wax. How long he sat there staring at it he did not realise. The yellow haze outside grew ruddier with the sinking of the sun, the water-carrier, shadowed by a white-robed aspirant to the dead factotum's duties, hovered about the verandah expectantly.

'What do you want, you fool?' bawled George, looking up, surprised at his own anger, surprised that anything should touch him save the thought that _she_ had known--must have known--that _she_ had done it, must have done it.

The man edged in through the screen, signing to the white-robed one to follow his example.

'Only to bring the Huzoor this,' he began noisily. 'Only to bring this proof of honesty to the feet of justice. Lo! it was found even now by this man with a foresight and quickness to be commended. In the sahib's own room, Huzoor, beneath the matting, thus causing the face of the big sahib's ill-begotten servant to be blackened by reason of his base insinuation of theft! Theft! How can there be theft in a house where the water-carrier is as I am, and the kit will be as this one--mine own wife's brother, Huzoor----'

George broke out suddenly into dull laughter, 'Oh! go to blazes with your wife's brother--put the thing down there on the table, I tell you, and go--go--do you hear?'

Anger, and something more than anger was back in his tone ere he ended, and the water-carrier, knowing his master's voice, fled. The white-robed one with the courage of ignorance risked all by a salaam.

'At what hour will the Huzoor please to dine?'

The young man looked at him curiously, feeling that the world was past his comprehension.

'The usual time, I suppose.'

As well this fool as another--as well to-morrow as to-day. Everything was trivial of course, and yet the trivial commonplace interruption had somehow brought home the reality of what had happened to the lad, and his head sank on his crossed arms once more in utter dejection. _She_ might have told him, warned him. Surely when he had promised she might have done so much for his sake, and Dan's--by the way, what was it that Dan had lost and that chattering idiot had brought in with him?

George's right hand trembled a little as it reached over the table to take a plain gold locket on a slender gold chain. It was familiar enough to him. Dan wore it day and night, and many a time had George chaffed him about the young woman, so it was no wonder the dear old man had been vexed at the thought of losing it. Losing it? or losing her?

In the keen thrust of this thought, the locket slipped through George's fingers, and falling, opened. So it lay, face upwards, while the boy sat staring out into the room blindly, intent on the remembrance that after all it was not a case of whether a man or a woman should suffer; it was one woman or another. The woman _he_ loved or the woman _Dan_ loved. A hundred thoughts beset him, but, a.n.a.lysed, they all resolved themselves to this: his love or Dan's. To save _her_ from even a breath of scandal he was willing to bear the blame; but how could this be without also imperilling Dan's future? No! if the worst came; if he could find no way--yet surely, surely, there must be some way, some simple way--of taking all the responsibility on his shoulders; then _she_ must be brave; _she_ must tell the truth and save this woman whom Dan loved--whose face lay there in the locket. His eyes sought it mechanically----

'_Gwen_.'

The sound, barely a whisper, scarcely stirred the sodden air. After a while he pushed back his chair slowly and crossed to stand once more looking out over Hodinuggur.

It seemed to have a fascination for him; yet his mind held but one thought--a desire to get away--to find some place where there was neither truth nor lies, where he need say nothing--need think nothing.

That surely would settle it.

'_No, you wouldn't, old chap, not unless you wanted them to believe you guilty_.' Lewis Gordon's idle words as they had stood laughing and jesting on the balcony yonder but a few months ago came back to him; the only real, living memory in the chaos of his present pain. The scene reproduced itself before his haggard young eyes. Yes! that would settle it; and after all he was guilty. Why had he not told the Colonel? why had he slept? why----

The sound was louder this time; yet not loud enough to disturb the servants, chattering across in the cook-room over the chances of perquisites under the new regime. Loud enough, for all that, to deafen the lad's ears for ever to questionings of truth or untruth.

He lay on his back, face upwards, and a faint stream of blood oozing from the blue bruise just over his heart traced a fine girdle round his breast; perhaps to show that the potter's thumb had slipped, and the pot had cracked in the firing.

Maybe a fiery furnace and a ed-hot bungalow are overtrying even to the best of clay when it is fresh from the moulder's hand; but that is neither here nor there.

The fact remains that George had run away; from truth and untruth, from himself and his fellow-men, but most of all from Hodinuggur and the crazy irresponsible creator; yet could he have realised the fact, no one in the wide, wide world would have been more incredulous of his own action. And as he lay dead, with a bullet through his heart, the barometer upon the mantelpiece was falling faster and faster, while Dan, with a telegram in his pocket, was riding all he knew across the desert to open the sluice-gate against the biggest flood within the memory of man. To open it so far and no farther, and so to prevent any weakening of the channel for a while. Too late! For already the peasants were knee-deep in their fields breaking through every obstacle which might stem the rising water. And still the barometer fell faster and faster; but the only one who could have understood the silent warning had deserted his post.

CHAPTER XIX

Azizan was waiting for darkness, like many another woman in India; waiting for the veil of night to destroy the veil of man's contriving.

Not so much because she dreaded to show her face in the daylight, but because it suited her to keep up the mystery of her appearance.

Waiting, however, for the last time; since once her work of warning was done there need be no more concealment, no more playing like a cat over a mouse with the palace folk. Once that was done, she meant to forget caution and kill some of them; for she felt that her own death was nigh, and revenge would sweeten the end of life. As she sat, her back against the wall, her knees drawn up to her chin, Azizan had no very distinct plans for that revenge, save that the Ayodhya pot which she had taken from its hiding-place in the stair of the old tower and kept in her bosom must be her chief aid. With its secret bribe of jewels, it would prove to the sahib that there was truth in the tale she had gathered during her nightly wanderings as a ghost about Hodinuggur.

When that was done, she would be free in some of those nightly wanderings to kill the Diwan or his son, the man who killed her mother.