Voices in the Night Part 45

'Lateef! Help!' moaned Khojee, who was clinging frantically, uselessly, to one corner of the lone white veil. 'She is mad! the ring!--I had to dress--and she too---for the Lord-_sahib_--and it was not there! I told you how it would be--it is the ring!'

An awful laugh echoed through the courtyard.

'Yea! the ring! the ring!' repeated Noormahal mockingly. 'Sa'adut's ring--the Ring of Kingship. Liar! Lo! I could kill thee for the lie.

It is not there--Noormahal! Mother of Kings, dost hear? It is not there--it was not there when I went to find it.'

There was self-pity, amazement, now, in the voice which had begun so recklessly, and Jack Raymond--watching the figure with every nerve and muscle tense for action--breathed a quick breath of relief; for self-pity meant almost the only hope of averting the mad leap there was so little chance of preventing.

But Lateefa's high voice followed sharply, almost exultingly--

'What then?' he cried, 'when I have it safe! Yea! Mother of Kings! The ring is safe. I swear it. I have it yonder in the bazaar--in the Nawab's house--I----'

He paused, compelled to silence by her face, by the outstretched hand which, falling from its appeal to high Heaven, pointed its finger at him accusingly.

'Dost hear him?' she asked mincingly, and Jack Raymond instinctively moved a step nearer. 'He, the pandar, hath the ring safe; safe in the bazaar; safe in the Nawab's house; safe for the Nawab's bride----'

'Look out!' shouted Jack Raymond, dashing forward, for he knew what that thought would bring.

But he was too late. With one cry of 'Liars,' one horrid laugh, the slender white figure leaped into the air, the veil--detained uselessly in Khojee's helpless hold--falling from the small sleek head; and the Nawabin Noormahal, the Light-of-Palaces, went down as she had stood, mocking, defiant, into the depth of the well; the last thing seen of her, those wild appealing hands.

And outside the crowd was listening, eager to find fault, eager for a tragedy to tell in the bazaars.

CHAPTER XIX

ON THE BED ROCK

'My dear Chris, if you insist on going to see your mother in that horrid filthy city where, every one knows, the plague has regularly begun,' said Mrs. Chris Davenant to her husband, 'I won't stop in your house. That's an end of it. I don't see why I should. Of course, if it was your duty to inspect, and that sort of thing, I'd have to grin and bear it. But it isn't; so you can't expect me to run the risk.'

'It is my duty to see my mother,' replied Chris, with that faint pomp which is inseparable in the native from a virtuous sentiment, be it ever so trite.

She laughed, quite good-naturedly. 'The fact is, Chris, you've an awkward team of duties to drive; but a man's got to leave his father and mother, you know. Not that I want you to leave yours. Go to her, by all means, if you want to, but in that case I shall go where _I_ want.'

'And where is that?' he asked almost fiercely.

She laughed again. 'To the hotel, of course. My dear Chris, I am not a fool. Not as a rule, I mean, though I was one, of course, when I married you. But you were a greater fool in marrying me; for you _knew_ you were a bit of a prig, and I didn't! However, let's drop that, though, as I've told you before, the best thing for you to do would be to let me slide and marry your cousin----'

'Will you hold your tongue,' he burst out, almost as an Englishman might have done, and she raised her eyebrows and nodded approvingly.

'Bravo, Chris! that was very nearly right--but as you don't favour that easy solution, you must stick to me. You can't eat your cake and have it, my dear boy. If you marry a civilised woman, you must behave _as sich_. And civilised people don't run the risk of infection needlessly.

They don't go and see their relations if though of course no civilised person's mother would live in a dirty plague-stricken town by choice, would she?'

Poor Chris! If he had not been so civilised himself, if he had not been such a good sort, he could have faced the position better; but he saw the justice of hers. 'I think if she were sick'--he began.

She gave a little scream. 'Sick! my dear Chris! that settles it. I can't have you bringing back microbes. It--it isn't fair on _us_, you know. And there are a lot of jolly globe-trotters at the hotel--one of them says he knew me in London.'

There was a world of regret in her tone, and the pity of it, the hideous mistake for _her_ came home to Chris. 'There is no reason,' he said, in a sort of despair, 'why I should turn you out of this'--here he gave a hard sort of laugh--'I don't really care for it, you know, Viva, though I used to think I did. So you had better stop here, and--I'll--I'll go.'

The pity of the hideous mistake for _him_ came home even to her.

'Where?' she asked. 'You won't go and live in that awful city--you mustn't do that. You're not like them, you know; you'd die of it.'

He felt it was true; that he belonged to No-man's-land.

'Perhaps that would be the best solution of the difficulty,' he said gloomily, with a sententiousness which quite took the pathos from the remark.

She looked at him gloomily in her turn, with a certain exasperation.

'Oh! if you want to, of course; but, my dear Chris, do you really think I'm worth that sort of thing; from your point of view, I mean?'

Something about her as she stood, dainty as ever, reminded him of those days in the boarding-house down the Hammersmith Road, when India, and that part of himself which belonged to India, had seemed so very far off. He took a step nearer to her.

'You might be, Viva, you might be.'

She drew back. 'In fifty years' time, perhaps,' she replied shrewdly--for, as she said, she was no fool. 'Why, Chris! can't you see that you have just gone dotty over the new idea of woman as a helpmeet, and companion, and that sort of "biz." And I--why--we girls have left it behind us a bit in England, nowadays.

The fatal truth of her remarks invariably silenced Chris, born as he was of a long line of men to whom argument was a religion.

'Well! good-bye, Viva, I will try and not trouble you any more,' he said, accepting defeat with a pang of remorse at his own readiness to do so, at the sense of relief which would not be ignored.

She shrugged her shoulders. 'Don't be so tragic, please. And remember I didn't send you away. You want to go visiting your mother in the city, and I'm quite willing you should, provided you take proper precautions; so good-bye, and take care of yourself. There is nothing to worry about. You are up to the ropes there, and I am up to them here, so there is no harm done.'

Chris, however, as he packed a portmanteau of necessaries, felt that though this might be true for the present, and though--so far as she was concerned--it might even remain true, it was a different affair for him; there was danger ahead in his future.

And this became more and more certain, as, in packing, he had to decide on what were necessaries and what were not. For that depended so much on the sort of life you were going to lead. And what sort of life _was_ he going to lead?

He ended by taking very little; but amongst that little were two things which, though they both contained the staple of life--common corn-- could scarcely be called necessaries. Man, however, does not live by bread alone.

So he put these and himself into a hired green box on wheels, and drove to a lodging he knew of, close to the city, yet not of it. It was in the upper part of a house used as a meeting-place by the Brahmo Somaj, who, by this means, paid the rent of the quaint, semi-Europeanised building. It stood in a bit of garden, thick with plantains, between which two straight mud walks and a curved one showed curiously black and damp, as if the soil was sodden with sewage, as it may have been.

But upstairs, when the green shutters were thrown back, it was fresh and breezy enough.

A Brahmo-Somaj clerk in the railway, whom Chris knew and liked, had quarters on the ground floor in consideration of his services as secretary, and with his help Chris soon found himself settled in. A bed, a table, a chair--the last two doubtfully desirable--completed the furniture, and left a delightful sense of s.p.a.ce and freedom in the wide empty room. He had escaped, he felt, from Shark Lane. Surely from this standpoint it might be possible to be sincere. Here it might be possible to reconcile himself to his environment, his environment to himself.

He took off his European dress, not from any distaste to it, but because he knew it to be an absolute barrier between him and his desire. So, in the ordinary costume of a native clerk, he strolled out to pa.s.s the time till he could safely go and see his mother; safely, because she lived amongst the strictest of neighbours, whom he did not wish to meet--as yet. That might be afterwards, but not now. It was already growing dusk--for he had changed his quarters after the day's work was over--but the irregular sort of bazaar between him and one of the city gates had not yet begun to twinkle with little lights after its usual fashion. Indeed, many of the shops were closed. Yet there was no lack of possible customers. The roadway was crowded with all sorts and conditions of men. It suddenly struck him that nearly all were coming towards him; therefore there must be some attraction behind him.

He turned and drifted with the tide until, after a few hundred yards, he saw ahead of him to one side of the road, a dim clump of stunted trees, with a red rag on a stick tied to the topmost branch, and, showing in a soft yellow radiance which rose from the ground, a glint of white tombs among the lower ones. Then he remembered--an odd regret that he should have forgotten something which to his childhood had been all-important, coming with the remembrance--that this must be the day of Sheikh Chilli's fair, which was held every year at this shrine; Sheikh Chilli, the pantaloon of India; the man of straw, the lover's dupe, the b.u.t.t of every one; the type which, in varying form, plays its part in the serio-comic tragedy of s.e.x all over the world. Sheikh Chilli, whose beard any one can pull, whose wife is never his own, whom a child can deceive.

Perhaps that was the reason, Chris thought, why, as a child, Sheikh Chilli's fair had been such a supreme occasion; that and the toys--those toys which, as it were, set Nushapore the fashion in playthings for a whole year. And that meant something, since the two hundred and odd thousand people in the city, idlers by inheritance, were great in the manufacture of toys.

Chris, who had not seen a Sheikh Chilli fair for years, went forward eagerly as a child himself, the whole scene coming back to him with absolute familiarity: the rows of little lights set on the ground to mark the streets, and behind them, ranged in squares, the toys; thousands of them, millions of them; baked mud, bent bamboo, curled cotton; soda-water corks, match-boxes, even bra.s.s cartridges, all pressed into the service by a truly marvellous ingenuity. And between the lights, along the paths, jammed almost to solidity by the barriers of toys, humanity of all sorts and sizes, seen in that curious soft radiance rising from the earth below its feet! humanity trying to pause and admire, trying to pause and laugh; helpless for either when standing, and driven to gain absolute solidity by squatting down and letting the stream sweep over it.

A group of dancing-girls showed on the flat plinth of the shrine; musicians strummed here and there; here and there a conjurer essayed tricks. But all this was trivial beside the toys.

Yet they were still more trivial: one for a farthing, two for a farthing, even three for a farthing if you chose mud monkeys, or bra.s.s rings made out of sliced cartridge-cases set with drops of blue or red sealing-wax.

'Lo!' came the voices of peasants in for the show. 'See to that! That is new!' And some grave-faced husbandman would buy a sort of Mercury's _caduceus_ made of bamboo, with two writhing, twisting snakes to it, fearfully, horribly alive.

This piece of ingenuity, indeed, ran a couple of cotton-wool bears who chased each other endlessly over a loop of bamboo, close for the pride of first place in the fair; a place for which there was keen compet.i.tion. So that, whenever any toy seemed to hit the fancy, there were instantly trays of it being hawked about above the crush, above the soft light, with the cry--'The best in the fair, one farthing! one farthing for the best in the fair!'