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Miss Stuart's Legacy

by Flora Annie Webster Steel · English · Gutenberg #40142 · 608,911 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Miss Stuart's Legacy

Author: Flora Annie Webster Steel


        
Release date: July 4, 2012 [eBook #40142]
                Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/40142

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MISS STUART'S LEGACY ***

Transcriber's Notes:

   1. Page scan source:
      http://books.google.com/books?id=UGopAQAAIAAJ
      (University of California)

   2. The diphthong oe is represented by [oe].






                         Miss Stuart's Legacy



                                  By

                          Flora Annie Steel

                              AUTHOR OF
                  'ON THE FACE OF THE WATERS,' ETC.




                                London
                          William Heinemann
                                 1900





_All rights reserved_






                         MISS STUART'S LEGACY



                              CHAPTER I.


An Indian railway station in the first freshness of an autumn dawn,
with a clear decision of light and shade, unknown to northern
latitudes, lending a fictitious picturesqueness to the low-arched
buildings festooned with purple creepers. There was a crispness in the
air which seemed to belie the possibility of a noon of brass; yet the
level beams of the sun had already in them a warning of warmth.

The up-country mail had just steamed out of the station after
depositing a scanty store of passengers on the narrow platform, while
the down-country train, duly placarded with the information that it
carried the homeward-bound mail, had shunted in from the siding where
it had been patiently awaiting the signal of a clear line. The engine
meanwhile drank breathlessly at the tank, where, in a masonry tower
overhead, a couple of bullocks circled round and round, engaged in
raising the water from the well beneath to the reservoir beside them.
Round and round sleepily, while the primeval wooden wheel creaked and
clacked, and the clumsy rope-ladder with its ring of earthen pots let
half their contents fall back into the bowels of the earth; round and
round dreamily, with the fresh gurgle of the water in their ears, and
the blindness of leathern blinkers in their eyes; round and round, as
their forebears had gone for centuries in the cool shade of sylvan
wells. What was it to the patient creatures whether they watered a
snorting western demon labelled "homeward mail," or the chequered
mud-fields where the tender wheat spikelets took advantage of every
crack in the dry soil? It was little to them who sowed the seed, or
who gave the increase, so long as the goad lay in some one's hands. So
much the cattle knew, and in this simple knowledge were not far behind
the comprehension of their driver, who, wrapped in his cotton sheet,
lay dozing while he drove.

The sweetmeat-seller dawdled by, pursued even at dawn by his pest of
flies. The water-carriers lounged along uttering their monotonous
chant, "Any Hindu drinkers? Any Mussulman drinkers?" while in their
van, dusky hands stretched out holding metal cups and bowls, from the
very shape of which the religion of the owners might be inferred,
owners sitting cheek by jowl in third-class compartments with a gulf
unfathomable, impassable, between them in this world and the next. The
lank yellow dogs crept among the wheels, licking a precarious meal
from the grease-boxes. The grey-headed carrion-crows sat in lines on
the wire fencing with beaks wide open in unending yawns. Nothing else
appeared to mark the passage of time; indeed the absence of hurry on
all sides gave the scene a curious unreality to Western eyes, a
feeling which was plainly shown in the expression of a young girl who
stood alone beside a small pile of luggage.

"A new arrival," remarked a tall man in undress uniform, who was
leaning against the door of a first-class compartment, and talking to
its occupants.

"Yes, to judge by complexion and baggage," was the reply. "You'd
hardly believe it, but Kate was as trim once; now!--just look at the
carriage!"

A gay laugh came from behind a perfect barrier of baths, bundles, and
bassinettes. "We hadn't four babies to drag about in those days,
George, and I can assure Major Marsden that I'm not a bit ashamed of
them, or my complexion. George, dear! do for goodness' sake get baby's
bottle filled with hot water at the engine; if he doesn't have
something to eat he will cry in ten minutes, and then you will have to
take him."

While George, with the proverbial docility of the Anglo-Indian husband
and father, strolled off on his errand, the feminine voice came into
view in the shape of a cheerful round little woman with a child in her
arms and another clinging to her dress. She looked with interest at
the girl on the platform. "She seems lonely, doesn't she?"

Major Marsden frowned. He had been thinking the same thing, though he
was fond of posing as a man devoid of sentiment; a not unusual
affectation with those who are conscious of an over-soft heart. "I
wonder what she is doing here," he said, kicking his heels viciously
against the iron step of the carriage.

A twinkle of mischief lurked in his companion's blue eyes as she
replied:


             "'What are you doing here, my pretty maid?'
              'Going a-marrying, sir,' she said.


Can't you see the square wooden box which betrays the wedding cake?"

"Then if you want to do a Christian act,--and you ladies love
aggressive charity--just step out of your car as _dea ex machine_, and
take her home again. India is no place for Englishwomen to be married
in."

"Now don't go on! I know quite well what you are going to say, and I
agree,--theoretically. India is an ogre, eating us up body and soul;
ruining our health, our tempers, our morals, our manners, our babies."

The laugh died from her lips at the last word, for the spectre of
certain separation haunts Indian motherhood too closely to be treated
as a jest. Instinctively she held the child tighter to her breast with
a little restless sigh; a short holiday at home, and then an empty
nest,--that was the future for her! So she went on recklessly: "Oh,
yes! Of course we are all bad lots,--neither good mothers, nor good
wives."

"My dear Mrs. Gordon! I never said one or the other. I only remarked
that Englishwomen had no business in India."

"What's that?" asked George, returning with the bottle.

"Only Major Marsden in a hurry to get rid of me," replied his wife.

"Don't believe her, Gordon! For all-embracing generalities,
convertible into rigid personalities at a moment's notice, commend me
to you, Mrs. Gordon. But there, I regret to say, goes the last bell."

The train moved off in a series of dislocations, which, painful to
witness, were still more painful to endure, and Philip Marsden was
left watching the last nod of George Gordon's friendly head, with that
curious catching at the heart which comes to all Anglo-Indians as they
say good-bye to the homeward-bound. He was contented enough, happy in
his work and his play; yet the feeling of exile ran through it
all,--as it does always, till pension comes to bid one leave the
interests and friends of a lifetime. Then, all too late, the glamour
of the East claims the heart, in exchange for the body.

The girl was still standing sentinel by her luggage, and as he passed
their eyes met. In sudden impulse he went up and offered help if she
required it. His voice, singularly sweet for a man, seemed to make the
girl realise her own loneliness, for her lips quivered distinctly. "It
is father! I expected him to meet me, and he has not come."

"Should you know him if you saw him?" She stared, evidently surprised,
so he went on quickly, "I beg your pardon! I meant that you might not
have seen him for some time, and--"

"I haven't seen him since I was a baby," she interrupted, with a sort
of hurt dignity; "but of course I should know him from his
photograph."

"Of course!" He scanned her face curiously, thinking her little more
than a baby now; but he only suggested the possibility of a telegram,
and went off in search of one, returning a minute afterwards with
several. Behind him came the stationmaster explaining, with the
plentiful plurals and Addisonian periods dear to babudom, that without
due givings of names it was unpermissible, not to say non-regulation,
to deliver telegrams.

"I forgot you couldn't know my name," said the girl frankly, when a
rapid scrutiny had shown that none were addressed to her. "I'm Belle
Stuart; my father lives at Faizapore."

"Not Colonel Stuart of the Commissariat?"

"Yes! Do you know him?"

A radiant smile lit up her face with such a curve of red lips, and
flash of white teeth, that the spectator might well have been infected
by its wholesome sweetness into an answering look. Major Marsden's
eyes, however, only narrowed with perplexed enquiry as he said
bluntly, "Yes, slightly."

"Then perhaps father sent you to fetch me?"

This time he relaxed; confidence is catching. "I'm afraid not; but
possibly if he had known I was to be here he might. At all events I
can make myself useful."

"How?"

"I can get you a _gharri_--that is a carriage--and start you for
Faizapore. It is sixty miles from here as you know."

She bent down to pick up her rugs. "I did not know. You see I expected
father."

Philip Marsden felt impelled to consolation. "He has been delayed.
Most likely there has been"--in his haste to put forward a solid
excuse he was just about to say "an accident," but floundered instead
into a bald "something to detain him."

"There generally _is_ something to detain one in every delay, isn't
there?" she asked dryly; adding hastily, "but it is very kind of you
to help. You see I have only just arrived in India, so I am quite a
stranger."

"People generally _are_ strangers when they first arrive in a new
country aren't they?" retorted her companion grimly. Then as his eyes
met her smiling ones, he smiled too and asked with a kinder ring in
his voice, if there were anything else he could do for her.

"I'm _so_ hungry," she said simply. "Couldn't you take me to get
breakfast somewhere? I don't see a refreshment-room, and I hate going
by myself."

"There is the _dâk_ bungalow, but," he hesitated for an instant and
stood looking at her, as if making up his mind about something; then
calling some coolies he bade them take up the luggage. "This way
please, Miss Stuart; you will have to walk about half a mile, but you
won't mind that either, I expect."

In reply she launched out, as they went along the dusty road, into
girlish chatter about the distances she could go without fatigue, the
country life at home which seemed so very far off now, and the new
existence on which she was just entering.

"You are not in the least like your sisters," he said suddenly.

She laughed. "They aren't my real sisters, you see. Father married
again, and they are my stepmother's children. There are five of
them--three girls and two boys, besides Charlie who is only six years
old--but then he is my brother--my half-brother I mean. It's very
funny, isn't it? to have so many brothers and a mother one has never
seen. But of course I have their photographs."

He said he was glad of that; yet when he had seen her safely started
at breakfast, he retired to the verandah under excuse of a cigar, and
found fault with Providence. Briefly, he knew too much of the reality,
not to make poor Belle's anticipations somewhat of a ghastly mockery.
"Poor child," he thought, "how much easier life would be to some of
us, if like Topsy, we growed. What business has that girl's father to
be a disreputable scamp? For the matter of that what business has a
disreputable scamp to be any girl's father? It's the old problem."

Belle meanwhile eating her breakfast with youthful appetite felt no
qualms. Life to her was at its brightest moment. This coming out to
India in order to rejoin her father had been the Hegira of her
existence, with reference to which all smaller events had to be
classified. His approval or disapproval had been her standard of right
and wrong, his mind and body her model of human perfection; and so far
distance had enabled Colonel Stuart to do justice to this pedestal;
for it is easy to touch perfection in a letter, especially when it
only extends to one sheet of creamlaid note-paper. Most of us have
sufficient principal for such a small dividend.

"I knew father had not forgotten," she said calmly, when an abject
badge-wearer was discovered asleep under a castor-oil bush, and proved
to be the bearer of a note addressed in the familiar bold flourish to
Miss Belle Stuart. "You see he had made all the arrangements, and I am
not to start till the heat of the day is over."

"Then I will resign my charge, and say good-bye."

When they had shaken hands he went round to the other verandah where
her baggage lay, and looked at the wooden box. Was it a wedding-cake?
Even that might be better than life in the home to which she was
going, though, for all he knew, the latter might suit her admirably.
Then he went and kicked his heels at the station in order to be out of
the way, for the bungalow only boasted one room.




                             CHAPTER II.


The dawn of another day was just breaking, when the rattle and clatter
which had formed an accompaniment to Belle's wakeful dreams all night
long, ceased at the last stage out from Faizapore. Belle stepped out
of the _palki-gharri_ to stretch her cramped limbs, and looked round
her with eyes in which sleep still lingered.

A mud village lay close to the road, and from an outlying hut the
ponies, destined to convey her the remaining five miles, struggled
forth reluctantly. The coachman was furtively pulling at some one
else's pipe; a naked anatomy, halt and blind of an eye, dribbled water
from an earthen pot over the hot axles; two early travellers were
bathing in a pool of dirty water. Belle standing in the middle of the
glaring white highway, instinctively turned to where, in the distance,
a slender church-spire rose above the bank of trees on the horizon.
_That_ was familiar!--_that_ she understood. Born in India, and
therefore a daughter of the soil, she could not have been further
removed in taste and feeling from the toiling self-centred cosmogony
of the Indian village in which she stood, had she dropped into it from
another planet. So, alien in heart, she passed through the tide of
life which sets every morning towards a great cantonment, looking on
it as on some strange, new picture. Beyond all this, among people who
ate with forks and spoons and went to church on Sundays, lay the life
of which she had dreamed for years. The rest was a picturesque
background; that was all.

A final flourish of an excruciating horn, gateposts guiltless of
gates, a ragged privet hedge curving intermittently to a bright blue
house set haphazard, cornerwise, in a square dusty expanse,--and the
journey was over.

It was not only her cramped limbs that made Belle feel weak and
unsteady as she stood before the seemingly deserted house. Suddenly,
from behind a projecting corner, came a wrinkled beldame clad in dingy
white bordered with red. With one hand she grasped a skinny child
dressed in flannel night garments of Macgregor tartan, with the other
she held up her draggling petticoats and salaamed profusely, thus
displaying a pair of bandy, blue-trousered legs.

Belle looked at her with distinct aversion. "I think I have made a
mistake," she said; "this can't be Colonel Stuart's house."

The woman grinned from ear to ear. "Ar'l right, missy _ba_. _Mem
sahib_ comin'. This b'y sonny _baba_." She broke in on the whining
wail of her voice (which made Belle think of a professional beggar) to
apostrophise her charge with loud-tongued abuse for not saying good
morning to his "sissy."

Belle gasped. Could this dirty dark boy be her brother Charlie? Then a
sudden rush of pity for the little fellow whose big black eyes met
hers with such distrust, made her stoop to kiss him. But the child,
reluctant and alarmed, struck at her face with his lean brown fingers
and then fled into the house howling, followed full tilt by his aged
attendant.

Belle would have felt inclined to cry, if the very unexpectedness of
the attack, joined to the sight of the ayah's little bandy legs in hot
pursuit, had not roused her ever-ready sense of humour. She laughed
instead, and in so doing showed that she could hold her own with life;
for no one throws up the sponge until the faculty of coming up
smiling, even at one's own discomfiture, has been lost. And while she
laughed, a new voice asserted itself above the howls within; a voice
with, to Belle's ears, a strangely novel intonation, soft yet
distinctly _staccato_, sharpening the vowels, clipping the consonants,
and rising in pitch at the end of each sentence. It heralded the
advent of a tall, stout lady in a limp cotton wrapper, who straightway
took Belle to a languidly-effusive embrace, while she poured out an
even flow of wonderings, delights, and endearments. The girl, with the
reserve taught by long years of homelessness, felt embarrassed at the
warm kisses and tepid tears showered upon her; then, ashamed of her
own unresponsiveness, tried hard to realise that this was really the
great event,--the homecoming to which she had looked forward ever
since she could remember. She felt vexed with herself, annoyed at her
own failure to reach high pressure point. Yet she was not conscious of
disappointment, and gave herself up willingly to the voluble welcomes
of three slender, dark-eyed girls, who presently came running in, clad
like their mother in limp cotton wrappers. They sat beside her on the
bare string bed in the bare room which looked so cheerless to Belle's
English eyes, and chattered, fluttered, and pecked at her with little
kisses, like a group of birds on a branch.

Mrs. Stuart was meanwhile drying her ready tears on a coarse,
highly-scented pocket handkerchief, giving orders for boundless
refreshments, and expressing her joy in alternate English and
Hindustani. Belle, beset on all sides by novelty, found it difficult
to recognise which language was being spoken, so little change was
there in voice or inflection. At last, amid the babel of words and
embraces, she managed to enquire for her father. The question produced
a sudden gravity, as if some sacred subject had been introduced. In
after years she recognised this extreme deference to the housemaster
as typical of the mixed race, but at the time, it made her heart beat
with a sudden fear of evil.

"Colonel Stuart is very well, thank you," replied her stepmother,
showing a distinct tendency to reproduce the coarse handkerchief. "He
will, I am sure, be very pleased to see you;--indeed that is one
reason why I am glad myself. Though, of course, I welcome you for your
own sake too, my darling girl. I am only a stepmother, I know, but I
will allow no difference between you and my own three. So I told the
mess-president yesterday--'My daughters cannot go to your ball,
Captain Jenkins,' I said, 'unless Belle goes also.' So, of course, he
sent you an invitation." Mrs. Stuart had a habit of saying "of course"
as if she agreed plaintively with the decrees of Providence.

"But when"--began Belle, her mind far from balls.

"To-night," chorused the three girls; a chorus followed by voluble
solos adjuring her to put on her smartest frock, because all the men
were frantic to see the original of the photograph which, it appeared,
had been duly handed round for inspection and admiration. Belle
neither blushed nor felt indignant; her face fell however when she
found that her father would not be up for another two hours, but the
bated breath with which they spoke of his morning sleep prevented her
from rebellion. Those two hours seemed an eternity, and as she sat
waiting for him in the dim drawing-room, her heart beat with almost
sickening force at each sound.

Unconscious as yet of disappointment, of anything save not unpleasant
surprise, she still was conscious of an almost pathetic insistence
that father _must_ be the father of her dreams.

A mellow voice from the window calling her by name startled her from
her watch by the door. She turned, to see a tall figure in scarlet and
gold standing against the light which glittered on a trailing sword.

There was no doubt this time. With a cry of "Father? oh yes, you are
father!" she was in his arms. To him also came the re-incarnation of a
half-forgotten dream. The fair, slim, white-robed girl standing in the
dim shadows, made the years vanish and youth return. "Good God, child,
how like you are to your poor mother!" he faltered, and the ring in
his voice made his daughter feel as if life held no more content.

Despite years of dissipation Colonel Stuart was still a singularly
fine-looking man; well set up, and if a trifle fat in his
dressing-gown, no more than portly in a tightly-buttoned tunic. He had
always had a magnificent way with women, a sort of masterful
politeness, a beautiful overbearing condescension, which the majority
of the sex described as the sweetest of manners. And now, inspired by
his little girl's undisguised admiration, he excelled himself,
discoursing on his delight in having her with him, and on the
impossibility of thanking Heaven sufficiently for the care it had
taken of her. On this last point he spoke in the same terms that he
was accustomed to use towards his hostess at the conclusion of a
visit; that is to say, with the underlying conviction that she had
only done her duty. He drew a touching picture of his own forlornness,
when, as a matter of fact, the very thought of her had passed so
completely out of his life, that her death would only have caused an
unreal regret. His eloquence however brought conviction to himself.
So, to all intents and purposes, he became a fond father, because he
felt as if he had been one. After all, Belle, even had she known the
truth, would have no real cause for distress. We have no lien on the
past of another, or on the future either; the present is all we can
claim, and that only to a certain limited extent.

In truth it would have required little self-deception to convince any
one that Belle had always been an abiding factor in life. She was a
daughter any man might well have been proud to possess. Tall and
straight, clear-eyed and bright, with wholesome thoughts and tastes
expressed in every feature. As she brought a cup of tea to her father,
her face alight with pleasure, her eyes brilliant with happiness, she
looked the picture of all an English girl ought to be.

"Thank you, my dear," said the Colonel viewing the offering dubiously.
"I think,--I mean,--I should prefer a peg,--a B. and S.,--a brandy and
soda. The fact is I had a confounded bad night, and it might do me
good, you know."

He was faintly surprised at finding himself making excuses for what
was a daily habit; but it was delightful to bask in the tender
solicitude of Belle's grey eyes, as he poured out, and drank the dose
with an air of accurate virtue. Once more he imposed on himself; on
every one in fact but the servant, who, with the forethought of
laziness, sat outside with the brandy-bottle lest he should be
summoned again. And when, finally, the Colonel rode off to his
committee on his big Australian charger, Belle thought the world could
never have contained a more magnificently martial figure. That this
gorgeous apparition should condescend to wave its hand to her at the
gate, was at once so bewildering and so natural, that all lesser
details faded into insignificance before this astounding realisation
of her dreams.

This was fortunate, for many were the readjustments necessary ere the
day was over. Breakfast, where Belle sat blissfully at her father's
side, revealed two handsome, overdressed young men redolent of scent
and sleek as to hair. These the Miss Van Milders, still in rumpled
wrappers, introduced as their brothers Walter and Stanley, adding by
no means covert chaff about "store clothes," whereat the young fellows
giggled like girls, and Belle became almost aggressively sisterly in
her manner. Walter was in tea, or rather had been so; as the
plantation appeared to be undergoing transmutation into a limited
Company, in order, Belle was told, to produce a dividend. Stanley was
reading for some examination, after which somebody was to do something
for him. It was all very voluble and vague. Meanwhile they stayed at
home quite contentedly; satisfied to lounge about, play tennis, and
keep a tame mongoose.

Towards the end of the meal, however, a red-haired youth slouched into
the room, thrust an unwilling hand into Belle's when introduced as
"your cousin Dick," and then sat down in silence with all the open
awkwardness of an English schoolboy. Afterwards, whenever Belle's cool
grey eyes wandered to that corner, they met a pair of fiery brown ones
also on the reconnoitre.

Besides these present relations there were others constantly cropping
up in conversation; and of them Belle had enough ere the day was done.
The young men chattered over their cigarettes on the verandah; the
girls chattered over Belle's boxes, which they insisted on unpacking
at once; Mrs. Stuart chattered of, and to her servants. It was a
relief when, after luncheon, the whole house settled into the silence
of siesta, though Belle herself was far too excited to rest.

Dinner brought a bitter disappointment in Colonel Stuart's absence;
for she had excused herself from the ball on plea of fatigue, in the
hopes of an evening with her father. It was Cousin Dick who, as they
sat down to table, answered the expectation in Belle's face. "The
Colonel never dines on ball nights, he goes to mess. You see, the
girls bobbing up and down annoy him, and it is beastly to see people
bolting their food in curl-papers."

"I'd speak grammar if I were you," retorted Mildred Van Milder,
flushing up. Her fringe was a perpetual weariness to her, sometimes
demanding the sacrifice of a dance in order to allow hair-curlers to
do their perfect work.

"And I wouldn't wear a fringe like a poodle," growled Dick; whereat
Mrs. Stuart plaintively wondered whence he got his manners, and wished
he was more like her own boys.

Poodles or no poodles, when the dancing-party appeared ready for the
fray, Belle could hardly believe her eyes. The sallow-faced girls of
the morning in their limp cotton wrappers were replaced by admirable
copies of the latest French fashion-prints. Their elaborately-dressed
hair, large dark eyes, and cream-coloured skins (to which art had lent
a soft bloom denied by nature under Indian skies), joined to the
perfect fit of their gowns, compelled attention. Indeed, when Maud, to
try the stability of a shoe, waltzed round the room with her brother,
Belle was startled at her own admiration for their lithe, graceful,
sensuous beauty.

"I'll tell you what it is," cried Mabel, the eldest of the three;
"you'll have a ripping good time tonight, Maudie. I never saw you look
so cheek." She meant _chic_, but the spelling was against her. As for
Mrs. Stuart, she appeared correctly attired in black satin and bugles.
The girls saw to that, suppressing with inexorable firmness the good
lady's hankering after gayer colours and more flimsy stuffs.

Left alone with Cousin Dick, Belle pretended to read, while in reality
she was all ears for the sound of returning wheels. It was nearly ten
o'clock, and, to her simple imagination, time for her father to come
home. The clock struck, and Dick, who had been immersed in a book at
the further corner of the room, laid it aside, and bringing out a
chessboard began to set the men. He paused, frowned, passed both hands
through his rough red hair, and finally asked abruptly if she played.
A brief negative made him shift the pieces rapidly to a problem, and
no more was said. Again the clock struck, and this time Dick came and
stood before her. He was a middle-sized, broad-shouldered youth about
her own age, with a promise of strength in face and figure. "You had
better go to bed," he said still more abruptly. "The Colonel won't be
home till morning. It isn't a bit of good your waiting for him."

This was the second time that he had stepped in to her thoughts, as it
were, and Belle resented the intrusion. "Don't let me keep you up,"
she replied. "I'd just as soon be alone."

"Then you'll have your wish, I expect," he answered coolly, as he
swept the chessmen together and left the room.

Some two hours after Belle woke from sleep to the sound of an
impatient voice. "Bearer! Bearer! _peg lao_, quick! Hang it all, Raby!
you must, you shall stop and give me my revenge. You've the most
cursed good luck--"

"Father!" She rose from her chair with cheeks flushed like those of a
newly-awakened child. The tall, fair young man who stood beside
Colonel Stuart turned at the sound of her voice, then touched his
companion on the arm. "Some one is speaking to you."

"God bless my soul, child! I thought you were at the ball. Why didn't
you go?" His tone was kind, if a little husky, and he stretched a
trembling hand towards her.

"I waited to see you, father," she replied, laying hers on his arm
with a touch which was a caress.

The tall young man smiled to himself. "Will you not introduce me to
your daughter, Colonel?" he said with a half-familiar bow towards
Belle.

Colonel Stuart looked from one to the other as if he had never seen
either of them before. "Introduce you,--why not? Belle, this is John
Raby: a fellow who has the most infernal good luck in creation."

"I have no inclination to deny the fact at _this_ moment," interposed
the other, bowing again.

The implied compliment was quite lost on Belle, whose eyes and ears
were for her father only. "I waited for you," she said with a little
joyous laugh, "and fell asleep in my chair!"

Once more the Colonel looked from one to the other. The mere fact of
his daughter's presence was in his present state confusing, but that
she should have been waiting for him was bewildering in the extreme.
How many years ago was it that another slim girl in white had gazed on
him with similar adoration?

"You had better go to bed now," he said with almost supernatural
profundity. "Good night. God bless you."

"Let me stay, please, father. I'm not a bit tired," she pleaded.

He stood uncertain, and John Raby drew out his watch with a
contemptuous smile. "Half-past one, Colonel; I must be off."

"Hang it all!" expostulated the other feebly. "You can't go without my
revenge. It ain't fair!"

"You shall have it sometime, never fear. Good night, Miss Stuart; we
can't afford to peril such roses by late hours."

Again his words fell flat, their only result being that he looked at
her with a flash of real interest. When he had gone Belle knelt beside
her father's chair, timidly asking if he was angry with her for
sitting up.

"Angry!" cried the Colonel, already in a half doze. "No, child!
certainly not. Dear! dear! how like you are to your poor mother." The
thought roused him, for he stood up shaking his head mournfully. "Go
to bed, my dear. We all need rest. It has been a trying day, a very
trying day."

Belle, as she laid her head on the pillow, felt that it had been so
indeed; yet she was not disappointed with it. She was too young to
criticise kindness, and they had all been kind, very kind; even
Charlie had forgotten his first fright; and so she fell asleep,
smiling at the remembrance of the old _ayah's_ bandy legs.




                             CHAPTER III.


Early morning in the big bazaar at Faizapore. So much can be said; but
who with pen alone could paint the scene, or who with brush give the
aroma, physical and moral, which, to those familiar with the life of
Indian streets, remains for ever the one indelible memory? The
mysterious smell indescribable to those who know not the East; the air
of sordid money-getting and giving which pervades even the children;
the gaily-dressed, chattering stream of people drifting by; but from
the grey-bearded cultivator come on a lawsuit from his village, to the
sweeper, besom in hand, propelling the black flood along the gutter,
the only subject sufficiently interesting to raise one voice above the
universal hum, is money. Even the stalwart herdswomen with their
kilted skirts swaying at each free bold step, their patchwork bodices
obeying laws of decency antipodal to ours, even they, born and bred in
the desert, talk noisily of the _ghee_ they are bringing to market in
the russet and black jars poised on their heads; and if _ghee_ be not
actually money, it is inextricably mixed up with it in the native
mind.

All else may fade from the memory; the glare of sunlight, the
transparent shadows, the clustering flies and children round the
cavernous sweetmeat-shops, the glitter of brazen pots, and the
rainbow-hued overflow from the dyers' vats staining the streets like a
reflection of the many-tinted cloths festooned to dry overhead. Even
the sharper contrasts of the scene may be forgotten; the marriage
procession swerving to give way to the quiet dead, swathed in muslins
and bound with tinsel, carried high on the string bed, or awaiting
sunset and burial in some narrow by-way among green-gold melons and
piles of red wheat. But to those who have known an Indian bazaar well,
the chink of money, and the smell of a chemist's shop, will ever
remain a more potent spell to awaken memory than any elaborate
pictures made by pen or pencil.

On this particular morning quite a little crowd was collected round
the doorway leading to the house of one Shunker Dâs, usurer,
contractor, and honorary magistrate; a man who combined those three
occupations into one unceasing manufacture of money. In his hands pice
turned to annas, annas to rupees, and rupees in their turn to fat. For
there is no little truth in the assertion that the real test of a
_buniah's_ (money-lender's) wealth is his weight, and the safest guard
for income-tax his girth in inches.

Nevertheless a skeleton lay hidden under Shunker Dâs's mountain of
prosperous flesh; a gruesome skeleton whose bones rattled ominously.
Between him and the perdition of a sonless death stood but one life; a
life so frail that it had only been saved hitherto by the expedient of
dressing the priceless boy in petticoats, and so palming him off on
the dread Shiva as a girl. At least so said the _zenana_ women, and so
in his inmost heart thought Shunker Dâs, though he was a prime
specimen of enlightened native society. But on that day the fateful
first decade during which the Destroyer had reft away so many
baby-heirs from the usurer's home was over; and amid countless
ceremonies, and much dispensation of alms, the little Nuttu, with his
ears and nose pierced like a girl's, had been attired in the _pugree_
and _pyjamas_ of his sex. Hence the crowd closing in round the Lâlâ's
Calcutta-built barouche which waited for its owner to come out. Hence
the number of professional beggars, looking on the whole more fat and
well-liking than the workers around them, certainly more so than a
small group of women who were peeping charily from the door of the
next house,--a very different house from Shunker Dâs's pretentious
stucco erection with its blue elephants and mottled tigers frescoed
round the top storey, and a railway train, flanked by two caricatures
of the British soldier, over the courtyard doorway. This was a tall,
square, colourless tower, gaining its only relief from the numerous
places where the outer skin of bricks had fallen away, disclosing
the hard red mortar beneath; mortar that was stronger than stone;
mortar that had been ground and spread long years before the word
"contractor" was a power in India. Here in poverty, abject in all save
honour, dwelt Mahomed Lateef, a Syyed of the Syyeds;[1] and it was his
hewers of wood and drawers of water who formed the group at the door,
turning their lean faces away disdainfully when the baskets of dough
cakes, and trays of sweet rice were brought out for distribution from
the idolater's house.

The crowd thickened, but fell away instinctively to give place to a
couple of English soldiers who came tramping along shoulder to
shoulder, utterly unconcerned and unsympathetic; their Glengarry caps
set at the same angle, the very pipes in their mouths having a drilled
appearance. Such a quiet, orderly crowd it was; not even becoming
audible when Shunker Dâs appeared with little Nuttu, the hero of the
day, who in a coat of the same brocade as his father's, and a _pugree_
tied in the same fashion, looked a wizened, changeling double of his
unwieldy companion. The barouche was brilliant as to varnish, vivid as
to red linings, and the bay Australians were the best money could buy;
yet the people, as it passed, took small notice of the Lâlâ, lolling
in gorgeous attire against the Berlin-wool-worked cushion which he had
bought from the Commissioner's wife at a bazaar in aid of a cathedral.
They gave far more attention to a hawk-eyed old man with a cruel,
high-bred face, who rode by on a miserable pony, and after returning
the Lâlâ's contemptuous salutation with grave dignity, spat solemnly
into the gutter.

This was Mahomed Lateef, who but the day before had put the
talisman-signet on his right hand to a deed mortgaging the last acre
of his ancestral estate to the usurer. Yet the people stood up with
respectful _salaams_ to him, while they had only obsequious grins for
the other. Indeed, one old patriarch waiting for death in the sun,
curled up comfortably, his chin upon his knees, on a bed stuck well
into the street, nodded his head cheerfully and muttered "Shunker's
father was nobody," over and over again till he fell asleep; to dream
perchance of the old order of things.

Meanwhile the Lâlâ waited his turn for audience at the District
Officer's bungalow. There were many other aspirants to that honour,
seated on a row of cane-bottomed chairs in the verandah, silent,
bored, uncomfortable. It is an irony of fate which elevates the chair
in India into a patent of position, for nowhere does the native look
more thoroughly out of place than in the coveted honour. As it is he
clings to it, notably with his legs; those thin legs round whose
painful want of contour the tight cotton pantaloons wrinkle all too
closely, and which would be so much better tucked away under dignified
skirts in true Eastern fashion. But the exotic has a strange
fascination for humanity. Waiting there for his turn, the Lâlâ
inwardly cursed the Western morality which prevented an immediate and
bribe-won entry; but the red-coated badge-wearers knew better than to
allow even a munificent shoe-money to interfere with the roster. The
harassed-looking, preoccupied official within had an almost uncanny
quickness of perception, so the rupees chinked into their pockets, but
produced no effect beyond whining voices and fulsome flattery.

"Well, Lâlâ-ji! and what do _you_ want?" asked the representative of
British majesty when, at last, Shunker Dâs's most obsequious smile
curled out over his fat face. There was no doubt a certain brutality
of directness in the salutation, but it came from a deadly conviction
that a request lay at the bottom of every interview, and that duty
bade its discovery without delay. The abruptness of the magistrate was
therefore compressed politeness. As he laid down the pen with which he
had been writing a judgment, and leant wearily back in his chair, his
bald head was framed, as it were, in a square nimbus formed by a
poster on the wall behind. It was four feet square, and held, in
treble columns, a list of all the schedules and reports due from his
office during the year to come. That was his patent of position; and
it was one which grows visibly, as day by day, and month by month, law
and order become of more consequence than truth and equity in the
government of India.

The Lâlâ's tact bade him follow the lead given. "I want, _sahib_," he
said, "to be made a _Rai Bâhâdur_."

Now _Rai Bâhâdur_ is an honorific title bestowed by Government for
distinguished service to the State. So without more ado Shunker Dâs
detailed his own virtues, totalled up the money expended in public
utility, and wound up with an offer of five thousand rupees towards a
new Female Hospital. The representative of British majesty drew
diagrams on his blotting-paper, and remarked, casually, that he would
certainly convey the Lâlâ's liberal suggestion about the hospital to
the proper authorities; adding his belief that one Puras Râm, who was
about to receive the coveted honour, had offered fifteen thousand for
the same purpose.

"I will give ten thousand, _Huzoor_" bid the usurer, with a scowl
struggling with his smile; "that will make seventy-five thousand in
all; and Tôta Mull got it for building the big tank that won't hold
water. If it cost him fifty thousand, may I eat dirt; and I ought to
know for I had the contract. It won't last, _Huzoor_; I know the stuff
that went into it."

"Tôta Mull had other services."

"Other services!" echoed Shunker fumbling in his garments, and
producing a printed book tied up in a cotton handkerchief. "See my
certificates; one from your honour's own hand."

Perhaps the District Officer judged the worth of the others by the
measure of his own testimonial, wherein, being then a "griff" of six
months' standing, he had recorded Shunker's name opposite a list of
the cardinal virtues, for he set the book aside with a sad smile. Most
likely he was thinking that in those days his ambition had been a
reality, and his liver an idea, and that now they had changed places.
"I am glad to see your son looking so well," he remarked with pointed
irrelevance. "I hear you are to marry him next month, and that
everything is to be on a magnificent scale. Tôta Mull will be quite
eclipsed; though his boy's wedding cost him sixty-five thousand,--he
told me so himself. Accept my best wishes on the occasion."

"_Huzoor!_ I will give fifteen thou--" British majesty rose gravely
with the usual intimation of dismissal, and a remark that it was
always gratified at liberality. Shunker Dâs left the presence with his
smile thoroughly replaced by a scowl, though his going there had
simply been an attempt to save his pocket; for he knew right well that
he had not yet filled up the measure of qualification for a _Rai
Bâhâdur_-ship.

While this interview had been going on, another of a very different
nature was taking place outside a bungalow on the other side of the
road, where Philip Marsden stood holding the rein of his charger and
talking to Mahomed Lateef, whose pink-nosed pony was tied to a
neighbouring tree.

The old man, in faded green turban and shawl, showed straight and tall
even beside the younger man's height and soldierly carriage.
"_Sahib_," he said, "I am no beggar to whine at the feet of a stranger
for alms. I don't know the _sahib_ over yonder whose verandah, as you
see, is crowded with such folk. They come and go too fast these
_sahibs_, nowadays; and I am too old to tell the story of my birth. If
it is forgotten, it is forgotten. But you know me, Allah be praised!
You feel my son's blood there on your heart where he fell fighting
beside you! Which of the three was it? What matter? They all died
fighting. And this one is Benjamin; I cannot let him go. He is a
bright boy, and will give brains, not blood, to the Sirkar, if I can
only get employment for him. So I come to you, who know me and mine."

Philip Marsden laid his hand on the old man's shoulder. "That is true.
Khân _sahib_. What is it I can do for you?"

"There is a post vacant in the office, _Huzoor!_ It is not much, but a
small thing is a great gain in our poor house. The boy could stay at
home, and not see the women starve. It is only writing-work, and
thanks to the old mullah, Murghub Admed is a real _khush nawis_
(penman). Persian and Arabic, too, and Euclidus, and Algebra; all a
true man should know. If you would ask the _sahib_."

"I'll go over now. No, no, _Khân sahib!_ I am too young, and you are
too old."

But Mahomed Lateef held the stirrup stoutly with lean brown fingers.
"The old help the young into the saddle always, _sahib_. It is for you
boys to fight now, and for us to watch and cry 'Allah be with the
brave!'"

So it happened that as Shunker Dâs drove out of the District Officer's
compound, Major Marsden rode in. Despite his scowl, the usurer stood
up and _salaamed_ profusely with both hands, receiving a curt salute
in return.

British majesty was now in the verandah disposing of the smaller fry
in batches. "Come inside," it said, hastily dismissing the final lot.
"I've only ten minutes left for bath and breakfast, but you'll find a
cigar there, and we can talk while I tub."

Amid vigorous splashings from within Major Marsden unfolded his
mission, receiving in reply a somewhat disjointed enquiry as to
whether the applicant had passed the Middle School examination, for
otherwise his case was hopeless.

"And why, in Heaven's name?" asked his hearer impatiently.

The magistrate having finished his ablutions appeared at the door in
scanty attire rubbing his bald head with a towel. "Immutable decree of
government."

"And loyalty, family, influence--what of them?"

A shrug of the shoulders,--"Ask some one else. I am only a
barrel-organ grinding out the executive and judicial tunes sent down
from headquarters."

"And a lively discord you'll make of it in time! But you are wrong. A
man in your position is, as it were, trustee to a minor's estate and
bound to speak up for his wards."

"And be over-ridden! No good! I've tried it. Oh lord! twelve o'clock
and I had a case with five pleaders in it at half-past eleven. Well,
I'll bet the four-anna bit the exchange left me from last month's pay,
that my judgment will be upset on appeal."

"I pity you profoundly."

"Don't mention it; there's balm in Gilead. This is mail-day, and I
shall hear from my wife and the kids. Good-bye!--I'm sorry about the
boy, but it can't be helped."

"It strikes me it will have to be helped some day," replied Major
Marsden as he rode off.

Meanwhile a third interview, fraught with grave consequences to this
story, had just taken place in the Commissariat office whither Shunker
Dâs had driven immediately after his rebuff, with the intention of
robbing Peter to pay Paul; in other words, of getting hold of some
Government contract, out of which he could squeeze the extra rupees
required for the purchase of the _Rai Bâhâdur_-ship; a proceeding
which commended itself to his revengeful and spiteful brain. As it so
happened, he appeared in the very nick of time; for he found Colonel
Stuart looking helplessly at a telegram from headquarters, ordering
him to forward five hundred camels to the front at once.

Now the Faizapore office sent in the daily schedules, original,
duplicate, and triplicate, with commendable regularity, and drew the
exact amount of grain sanctioned for transport animals without fail;
nevertheless a sudden demand on its resources was disagreeable. So, as
he had done once or twice before in this time of war and rumours of
wars, the chief turned to the big contractor for help; not without a
certain uneasiness, for though a long course of shady transactions had
blunted Colonel Stuart's sense of honour towards his equals, it had
survived to an altogether illogical extent towards his inferiors. Now
his private indebtedness to the usurer was so great that he could not
afford to quarrel with him; and this knowledge nurtured a suspicion
that Shunker Dâs made a tool of him, an idea most distasteful both to
pride and honour. No mental position is more difficult to analyse than
that of a man, who having lost the desire to do the right from a
higher motive, clings to it from a lower one. Belle's father, for
instance, did not hesitate to borrow cash from monies intrusted to his
care; but he would rather not have borrowed it from a man with whom he
had official dealings.

Shunker Dâs, however, knew nothing, and had he known would have
credited little, of this survival of honour. It seemed impossible in
his eyes that the innumerable dishonesties of the Faizapore office
could exist without the knowledge of its chief. Bribery was to him no
crime; nor is it one to a very large proportion of the people of
India. To the ignorant, indeed, it seems such a mere detail of daily
life that it is hard for them to believe in judicial honesty. Hence
the ease with which minor officials extort large sums on pretence of
carrying the bribe to the right quarter; and hence again comes, no
doubt, many a whispered tale of corruption in high places.

"I shall lose by this contract, _sahib_," said the Lâlâ, when the
terms had been arranged; "but I rely on your honour's generous aid in
the future. There are big things coming in, when the Protector of the
Poor will doubtless remember his old servant, whose life and goods are
always at your honour's disposal."

"I have the highest opinion of,--of your integrity, Lâlâ _sahib_,"
replied the Colonel evasively, "and of course shall take it,--I mean
your previous services--into consideration, whenever it--it is
possible to do so." The word integrity had made him collapse a little,
but ere the end of the sentence he had recovered his self-esteem, and
with it his pomposity.

The Lâlâ's crafty face expanded into a smile. "We understand each
other, _sahib_, and if--!" here he dropped his voice to a confidential
pitch.

Five minutes after Colonel Stuart's debts had increased by a thousand
rupees, and the Lâlâ was carefully putting away a duly stamped and
signed I.O.U. in his pocket-book; not that he assigned any value to
it, but because it was part of the game. Without any distinct idea of
treachery, he always felt that Lukshmi, the goddess of Fortune, had
given him one more security against discomfiture when he managed to
have the same date on a contract and a note of hand. Not that he
anticipated discomfiture either. In fact, had any one told him that he
and the Colonel were playing at cross-purposes, he would have laughed
the assertion to scorn. He had too high an opinion of the perspicacity
of the _sahib-logue_, and especially of the _sahib_ who shut his eyes
to so many irregularities, to credit such a possibility.

So he drove homewards elate, and on the way was stopped in a narrow
alley by an invertebrate crowd, which, without any backbone of
resistance, blocked all passage, despite the abuse he showered around.
"Run over the pigs! Drive on, I say," he shouted to the driver, when
other means failed.

"Best not, Shunker," sneered a little gold-earringed Rajpoot amongst
the crowd, "there's a sepoy in yonder shooting free."

The Lâlâ sank back among his cushions, green with fear. At the same
moment an officer in undress uniform rode up as if the street were
empty, the crowd making way before him. "What is it, _havildar_
(sergeant)?" he asked sharply, reining up before an open door where a
sentry stood with rifle ready.

"Private Afzul Khân run amuck, _Huzoor!_"

Major Marsden threw himself from his horse and looked through the door
into the little court within. It was empty, but an archway at right
angles led to an inner yard. "When?"

"Half an hour gone--the guard will be here directly, _Huzoor!_ They
were teasing him for being an Afghan, and saying he would have to
fight his own people."

"Any one hurt?"

"Jeswunt Rai and Gurdit Singh, not badly; he has--seven rounds left,
_sahib_, and swears he won't be taken alive."

The last remark came hastily, as Major Marsden stepped inside the
doorway. He paused, not to consider, but because the tramp of soldiers
at the double came down the street. "Draw up your men at three paces
on either side of the door," he said to the native officer. "If you
hear a shot, go on the house-top and fire on him as he sits. If he
comes out alone, shoot him down."

"Allah be with the brave!" muttered one or two of the men, as Philip
Marsden turned once more to enter the courtyard. It lay blazing in the
sunshine, open and empty; but what of the dim archway tunnelling a row
of buildings into that smaller yard beyond, where Afzul Khân waited
with murder in his heart, and his finger on the trigger of his rifle?
There the Englishman would need all his nerve. It was a rash attempt
he was making; he knew that right well, but he had resolved to attempt
it if ever he got the opportunity. Anything, he had told himself, was
better than the wild-beast-like scuffle he had witnessed not long
before; a hopeless, insane struggle ending in death to three brave
men, one of them the best soldier in the regiment. The remembrance of
the horrible scene was strong on him as his spurs clicked an even
measure across the court.

It was cooler in the shadow, quite a relief after the glare. Ah!...
just as he had imagined! In the far corner a crouching figure and a
glint of light on the barrel of a rifle. No pause; straight on into
the sunlight again; then suddenly the word of command rang through the
court boldly. "Lay down your arms!"

The familiar sound died away into silence. It was courage against
power, and a life hung on the balance. Then the long gleam of light on
the rifle wavered, disappeared, as Private Afzul Khân stood up and
saluted. "You are a braver man than I, _sahib_," he said. That was
all.

A sort of awed whisper of relief and amazement ran through the crowd
as Philip Marsden came out with his prisoner, and gave orders for the
men to fall in. Two Englishmen in mufti had ridden up in time for the
final tableau; and one of them, nodding his head to the retreating
soldiers, said approvingly, "That is what gave, and keeps us India."

"And that," returned John Raby pointing to Shunker Dâs who with
renewed arrogance was driving off, "will make us lose it."

"My dear Raby! I thought the moneyed classes--"

"My dear Smith! if you think that when the struggle comes, as come it
must, our new nobility, whose patent is plunder, will fight our
battles against the old, I don't."

They argued the point all the way home without convincing each other,
while Time with the truth hidden in his wallet passed on towards the
Future.




                             CHAPTER IV.


Had any one, a week before his daughter arrived, told Colonel Stuart
that her presence would be a pleasant restraint upon him, he would
have been very angry. Yet such was the fact. Her likeness to her
mother carried him back to days when his peccadilloes could still be
regarded as youthful follies, and people spared a harsh verdict on
what age might be expected to remedy. Then her vast admiration gave a
reality to his own assumptions of rectitude; for the Colonel clung
theoretically to virtue with great tenacity, in a loud-voiced,
conservative "d---- you if you don't believe what I say" sort of
manner. He also maintained a high ideal in regard to the honour of
every one else, based on a weak-kneed conviction that his own was
above suspicion.

He was proud of Belle too, fully recognising that with her by his side
his grey hairs became reverend. So he pulled himself up to some small
degree, and began to sprinkle good advice among the younger men with
edifying gravity. As for Belle she was supremely happy. No doubt had
she been "earnest" or "soulful" or "intense" she might have found
spots on her sun with the greatest ease; but she was none of these
things. At this period of her existence nothing was further from her
disposition than inward questionings on any subject. She took life as
she found it, seeing only her own healthy, happy desires in its dreary
old problems, and remaining as utterly unconscious that she was
assimilating herself to her surroundings as the caterpillar which
takes its colour from the leaf on which it feeds. For a healthy mind
acts towards small worries as the skin does towards friction; it
protects itself from pain by an excess of vitality. It is only when
pressure breaks through the blister that its extent is realised.

In good truth Belle's life was a merry one. The three girls were
good-nature itself, especially when they found the new arrival
possessed none of their own single-hearted desire for matrimony. Her
stepmother, if anything, was over-considerate, being a trifle inclined
to make a bugbear of the girl's superior claims to her father's
affection. The housekeeping was lavishly good, and men of a certain
stamp were not slow to avail themselves of the best mutton and prawn
curry in Faizapore. Where the money came from which enabled the
Stuarts to keep open house, they did not enquire. Neither did Belle,
who knew no more about the value of things than a baby in arms. As for
the Colonel, he had long years before acquired the habit of looking on
his debts as his principal, and treating his pay as the interest. So
matters went smoothly and swiftly for the first month or so, during
which time Belle might have been seen everywhere in the company of the
three Miss Van Milders, cheerfully following their lead with a serene
innocence that kept even the fastest of a very fast set in check. Once
or twice she saw Philip Marsden, and was rallied by the girls on her
acquaintance with that solitary misogynist. Mrs. Stuart, indeed, went
so far as to ask him to dinner, even though he had not called, on the
ground that he was the richest man in the station, and Belle's
interests must not be neglected though she was only a stepdaughter.
But he sent a polite refusal, and so the matter dropped; nor to Mrs.
Stuart's open surprise did Belle make any other declared conquest.

Yet, unnoticed by all, there was some one, who long before the first
month was out, would willingly have cut himself into little pieces in
order to save his idol from the least breath of disappointment. So it
was from Cousin Dick's superior knowledge of Indian life that Belle
learnt many comforting, if curious excuses for things liable to ruffle
even her calm of content.

Poor Dick! Hitherto his efforts in all directions had resulted in
conspicuous failure; chiefly, odd though it may seem, because he
happened to be born under English instead of Indian skies. In other
words, because he was not what bureaucracies term "a Statutory
Native." His mother, Mrs. Stuart's younger sister, had run away with a
young Englishman who, having ruined himself over a patent, was keeping
soul and body together by driving engines. In some ways she might have
done worse, for Smith senior was a gentleman; but he possessed,
unfortunately, just that unstable spark of genius which, like a
will-o'-the-wisp leads a man out of the beaten path without guiding
him into another. The small sum of money she brought him was simply so
much fuel to feed the flame; and, within a few months of their
marriage, the soft, luxurious girl was weeping her eyes out in a
miserable London lodging, while he went the rounds with his patent.
There Dick was born, and thence after a year or two she brought them
both back to the elastic house, the strong family affection, and
lavish hospitality which characterise the Eurasian race. Not for long,
however, since her husband died of heat-apoplexy while away seeking
for employment, and she, after shedding many tears, succumbed to
consumption brought on by the fogs and cold of the north. So,
dependent on various uncles and aunts in turn, little Dick Smith had
grown up with one rooted desire in the rough red head over which his
sleek, soft guardians shook theirs ominously. Briefly, he was to be an
engineer like his father. He broke open everything to see how it
worked, and made so many crucial experiments that the whole family
yearned for the time when he should join the Government Engineering
College at Roorkee. And then, just when this desirable consummation
was within reach, some one up among the deodars at Simla, or in an
office at Whitehall, invented the "Statutory Native," and there was an
end of poor Dick's career; for a Statutory Native is a person born in
India of parents habitually resident and domiciled in the country.
True, the college was open to the boy for his training; but with all
the Government appointments awarded to successful students closed to
him by the accident of his birth, his guardians naturally shook their
heads again over an expensive education which would leave him,
practically, without hope of employment. For, outside Government
service, engineers are not, as yet, wanted in India. He might, of
course, had he been the son of a rich man, have been sent home to pass
out as an Englishman through the English college. As it was the boy,
rebellious to the heart's core, was set to other employment. Poor
Dick! If his European birth militated against him on the one side, his
Eurasian parentage condemned him on the other. After infinite trouble
his relations got him a small post on the railway, whence he was
ousted on reduction; another with a private firm which became
bankrupt. The lad's heart and brains were elsewhere, and as failure
followed on failure, he gave way to fits of defiance, leading him by
sheer excess of energy into low companionship and bad habits. At the
time of Belle's arrival he was trying to work off steam as an unpaid
clerk in his uncle's office when a boy's first love revolutionized his
world; love at first sight, so enthralling, so compelling, that he did
not even wonder at the change it wrought in him. Belle never knew,
perhaps he himself did not recognise, how much of the calm content of
those first few months was due to Dick's constant care. A silent,
unreasoning devotion may seem a small thing viewed by the head, but it
keeps the heart warm. Poor, homeless, rebellious Dick had never felt
so happy, or so good, in all his life; and he would kneel down in his
hitherto prayerless room and pray that she might be kept from sorrow,
like any young saint. Yet he had an all-too-intimate acquaintance with
the corruption of Indian towns, and an all-too-precocious knowledge of
evil.

Belle in her turn liked him; there was something more congenial in his
breezy, tempestuous, nature than in the sweetness of her stepbrothers,
and unconsciously she soon learnt to come to him for comfort. "Charlie
tells such dreadful stories," she complained one day, "and he really
is fond of whisky-and-water. I almost wish father wouldn't give him
any."

"The governor thinks it good for him, I bet," returned Dick stoutly.
"I believe it is sometimes. Then as for lies! I used to tell 'em
myself; it's the climate. He'll grow out of it, you'll see; I did."

Now Dick's truthfulness was, as a rule, so uncompromising that Belle
cheered up; as for the boy, his one object then was to keep care from
those clear eyes; abstract truth was nowhere.

The next time Sonny _baba_ was offered a sip from his father's glass,
he refused hastily. Pressure produced a howl of terror; nor was it
without the greatest difficulty that he was subsequently brought to
own that Cousin Dick had threatened to kill him if he ever touched a
"peg" again. Luckily for the peace of the household this confession
was made in the Colonel's absence, when only Mrs. Stuart's high,
strident voice could be raised in feeble anger. The culprit remained
unrepentant; the more so because Belle assoilzied him, declaring that
Charlie ought not to be allowed to touch the horrid mixture. Whereupon
her stepmother sat and cried softly with the boy on her lap, making
both Belle and Dick feel horribly guilty, until, the incident having
occurred at lunch, both the sufferers fell asleep placidly. When Belle
returned from her afternoon ride she found Mrs. Stuart in high good
humour, decanting a bottle of port wine. "You frightened me so, my
dear," she said affectionately, "that I sent for the doctor, and he
says port wine _is_ better, so I'm glad you mentioned it." And Belle
felt more guilty than ever.

These afternoon rides were Dick's only trouble. He hated the men who
came about the house, and more especially the favoured many who were
allowed to escort the "Van" as Belle's three stepsisters were
nick-named. It made him feel hot and cold all over to think of her in
the company which he found suitable enough for his cousins. But then
it seemed to him as if no one was good enough for Belle,--he himself
least of all. He dreamed wild, happy dreams of doing something brave,
fine, and manly; not so much from any desire of thereby winning her,
but because his own love demanded it imperiously. For the first time
the needle of his compass pointed unhesitatingly to the pole of right.
He confided these aspirations to the girl, and they would tell each
other tales of heroism until their cheeks flushed, and their eyes
flashed responsive to the deeds of which they talked. One day Dick
came home full of the story of Major Marsden and the Afghan sepoy; and
they agreed to admire it immensely. After that Dick made rather a hero
of the Major, and Belle began to wonder why the tall quiet man who had
been so friendly at their first meeting, kept so persistently aloof
from her and hers. He was busy, of course, but so were others, for
these were stirring times. The arsenal was working over hours, and all
through the night, long files of laden carts crept down the dusty
roads, bearing stores for the front.

To all outward appearance, however, society took no heed of these wars
or rumours of wars, but went on its way rejoicing in the winter
climate which made amusement possible. And no one in the station
rejoiced more than Belle. Major Marsden, watching her from afar, told
himself that a girl who adopted her surroundings--and such
surroundings!--so readily, was not to be pitied. She was evidently
well able to take care of herself; yet, many a time, as he sat playing
whist while others were dancing, he caught himself looking up to see
who the partner might be with whom she was hurrying past to seek the
cooler air of the gardens, where seats for two were dimly visible
among the coloured lanterns.

For the most part, however, Belle's partners were boys, too young to
have lost the faculty of recognising innocent unconsciousness. But one
night at a large ball given to a departing regiment, she fell into the
hands of a stranger who had come in from an outstation in order to
continue a pronounced flirtation which Maud Van Milder had permitted
during a dull visit to a friend. That astute young lady having no
intention of offending permanent partners for his sake, handed him
over to Belle for a dance, and the latter, failing to fall in with his
step during the first turn, pleaded fatigue as the easiest way of
getting through the penance.

Philip at his whist, saw her pass down the corridor towards the
garden; and, happening to know her companion, played a false card,
lost the trick, and apologised.

"Time yet, if we look out," replied his partner; but this was exactly
what the Major could not do, and the rubber coming swiftly to an end,
he made an excuse for cutting out, and followed Belle into the garden,
wondering who could have introduced her to such a man. To begin with
he was not fit for decent society, and in addition he had evidently
favoured the champagne. Philip had no definite purpose in his pursuit,
until from a dark corner he heard Belle's clear young voice with a
touch of hauteur in it. Then the impulse to get her away from her
companion before he had a chance of making himself objectionable, came
to the front, joined to an unexpected anger and annoyance.

"I have been looking for you everywhere, Miss Stuart. You are wanted,"
said Philip going up to them.

"Hallo, Marsden! what a beast you are to come just as we were gettin'
confidential--weren't we?" exclaimed Belle's companion with what was
meant to be a fascinating leer. She turned from one face to the other;
but if the one aroused dislike and contempt, the air of authority in
Major Marsden's touched her pride.

"Who wants me?" she asked calmly.

"Who!" echoed her partner. "Come, that's a good one! We both want you;
don't we, Marsden?"

Luckily for the speaker Philip recognised his own imprudence in
risking an altercation. The only thing to be done now, was to get the
girl away as soon as possible.

"Exactly so;" he replied, crushing down his anger, "Miss Stuart can
choose between us."

Belle rose superbly.

"You seem to forget I can go alone." And alone she went, while her
partner shrieked with noisy laughter, avowing that he loved a spice of
the devil in a girl.

Philip moodily chewing the end of his cheroot ere turning in felt that
the rebuff served him right, though he could not restrain a smile as
he thought of Belle's victorious retreat. By that time, however,
subsequent facts had enlightened her as to Philip's possible meaning,
and the sight of her former partner being inveigled away from waltzing
to the billiard room by the senior subaltern, made her turn so pale
that John Raby, on whose arm she was leaning, thought she was afraid.

"He won't be allowed to come back, Miss Stuart," he said consolingly.
"And I apologise in the name of the committee for the strength of the
champagne."

Belle's mouth hardened. "There is no excuse for that sort of thing.
There never can be one."

He looked at her curiously.

"I wouldn't say that, Miss Stuart. It is a mistake to be so stern. For
my part I can forgive anything. It is an easy habit to acquire--and
most convenient."


Belle, however, could not even forgive herself. She lay tossing about
enacting the scene over and over again, wondering what Major Marsden
must think of her. How foolish she had been! Why had she not trusted
him? Why had he not made her understand?

Being unable to sleep, she rose, and long ere her usual hour was
walking about the winding paths which intersected the barren desert of
garden where nothing grew but privet and a few bushes of oleander.
This barrenness was not Dame Nature's fault, for just over the other
side of the wide white road John Raby's garden was ablaze with
blossom. Trails of Maréchale Niel roses, heavy with great creamy cups,
hung over the low hedge, and a sweet English scent of clove-pinks and
mignonette was wafted to her with every soft, fitful gust of wind. She
felt desperately inclined to cross the intervening dust into this
paradise, and stood quite a long time at the blue gate-posts wondering
why a serpent seemed to have crept into her own Eden. The crow's
long-drawn note came regularly from a _kuchnâr_ tree that was sheeted
with white geranium-like flowers; the Seven Brothers chattered noisily
among the yellow tassels of the cassia, and over head, against the
cloudless sky, a wedge-shaped flight of cranes was winging its way
northward, all signs that the pleasant cold weather was about to give
place to the fiery furnace of May; but Belle knew nothing of such
things as yet, so the vague sense of coming evil, which lay heavily on
her, seemed all the more depressing from its unreasonableness. A
striped squirrel became inquisitive over her still figure and began
inspection with bushy tail erect and short starts of advance, till it
was scared by the clank of bangles and anklets as a group of Hindu
women, bearing bunches of flowers and brazen _lotahs_ of milk for
Seetlâs' shrine, came down the road; beside them, in various stages of
toddle, the little children for whom their mothers were about to beg
immunity from small-pox. Of all this again Belle knew nothing; but
suddenly, causelessly, it struck her for the first time that she ought
to know something. Who were these people? What were they doing? Where
were they going? One small child paused to look at her and she smiled
at him. The mother smiled in return, and the other women looked back
half surprised, half pleased, nodding, and laughing as they went on
their way.

Why? Belle, turning to enquire after the late breakfast, felt
oppressed by her own ignorance. In the verandah she met the bearer
coming out of the Colonel's window with a medicine bottle in his hand.
Did her ignorance go so far that her father should be ill and she not
know of it? "Budlu!" she asked hastily, "the Colonel _sahib_ isn't
ill, is he?"

The man, who had known her mother, and grown grey with his master,
raised a submissive face. "No, missy _baba_, not ill. Colonel _sahib_,
he drunk."

"Drunk!" she echoed mechanically, too astonished for horror. "What
_do_ you mean?"

"Too much wine drunk,--very bad," explained Budlu cheerfully.

She caught swiftly at the words with a sense of relief from she knew
not what. "Ah, I see! the wine last night was bad, and disagreed with
him?"

"Damn bad!" Budlu's English was limited but not choice. She remarked
on it at the breakfast-table, repeating his words and laughing. None
of the girls were down, but Walter and Stanley giggled; and the latter
was apparently about to say something facetious, when his words
changed into an indignant request that Dick would look out, and keep
his feet to himself.

"Was it you I kicked?" asked Dick innocently. "I thought it was the
puppy." Then he went on fast as if in haste to change the subject: "I
often wonder why you don't learn Hindustani, Belle. You'd be ashamed
not to speak the lingo in other countries. Why not here? I'll teach
you if you like."

"There's your chance, Belle!" sneered Stanley, still smarting from
Dick's forcible method of ensuring silence. "He really is worth ten
rupees a month as _moonshee_, and 'twill save the governor's pocket if
it goes in the family."

An unkind speech, no doubt; yet it did good service to Dick by
ensuring Belle's indignant defence, and her immediate acceptance of
his offer; for she was ever ready of tongue, and swift of sympathy,
against injustice or meanness.

So the little incident of the morning passed without her understanding
it in the least. Nevertheless Dick found it harder and harder every
day to manipulate facts, and to stand between his princess and the
naked, indecent truth. Her curiosity in regard to many things had been
aroused, and she asked more questions in the next four days than she
had asked in the previous four months; almost scandalizing the Van
Milder clan by the interest she took in things of which they knew
nothing. It was all very well, the girls said, if she intended to be a
_zenana_-mission lady, but without that aim it seemed to them barely
correct that she should know how many wives the _khansamah_ (butler)
had. As for the boys, they rallied her tremendously about her
Hindustani studies, for, like most of their race, they prided
themselves on possessing but a limited acquaintance with their mother
tongue; Walter, indeed, being almost boastful over the fact that he
had twice failed for the Higher Standard. Then the whole family
chaffed her openly because she had a few sensible talks with John
Raby, the young civilian; and when she began to show a certain
weariness of pursuing pleasure in rear of the "Van," insisted that she
must be in love with him without knowing it.

"I don't like Raby," said Mildred, the youngest and least artificial
of the sisters. "Jack Carruthers told me the governor had been
dropping a lot of money to him at _écarté_."

"I don't see what you and Mr. Carruthers have to do with father's
amusements," flashed out Belle in swift anger. "I suppose he can
afford it, and at least he never stints you,--I mean the family," she
added hastily, fearing to be mean.

"Quite true, my dear! He's a real good sort, is the governor, about
money, and he can of course do as he likes; but Raby oughtn't to
gamble; it isn't form in a civilian. You needn't laugh, Belle, it's
true; it would be quite different if he was in the army."

"Soldiers rush in where civilians fear to tread," parodied Belle
contemptuously. "I wish people wouldn't gossip so. Why can't they
leave their neighbours alone?"

Nevertheless that afternoon she stole over to the office, which was
only separated from the house by an expanse of dusty, stubbly grass,
and seeing her father alone in his private room comfortably reading
the paper, slipped to his side, and knelt down.

"Well, my pretty Belle," he said caressing her soft fluffy hair, "why
aren't you out riding with the others?"

"I didn't care to go; then you were to be at home, and I like that
best. I don't see much of you as a rule, father."

Colonel Stuart's virtue swelled visibly, as it always did under the
vivifying influence of his daughter's devotion. "I am a busy man, my
dear, you must not forget that," he replied a trifle pompously; "my
time belongs to the Government I have the honour to serve." The girl
was a perfect godsend to him, acting on his half-dead sensibilities
like a galvanic battery on paralysed nerve-centres. He was dimly
conscious of this, and also of relief that the influence was not
always on him.

"I know you are very busy, dear," she returned, nestling her head on
his arm, as she seated herself on the floor. "That's what bothers me.
Couldn't I help you in your work sometimes? I write a very good hand,
so people say."

Colonel Stuart let his paper fall in sheer astonishment. "Help me! why
my dear child, I have any number of clerks."

"But I should like to help!" Her voice was almost pathetic; there was
quite a break in it.

Her father looked at her in vague alarm. "You are not feeling ill, are
you, Belle? Not feverish, I hope, my dear! It's a most infernal
climate though, and one can't be too careful. You'd better go and get
your mother to give you five grains of quinine. I can't have you
falling sick, I can't indeed; just think of the anxiety it would be."

Belle, grateful for her father's interest, took the quinine; but no
drug, not even poppy or mandragora, had power to charm away her
restless dissatisfaction. Dick's office was no sinecure, and even his
partial eyes could not fail to see that she was often captious, almost
cross. It came as a revelation to him, for hitherto she had been a
divinity in his eyes; and now, oh strange heresy! he found himself
able to laugh at her with increased, but altered devotion. Hitherto he
had wreathed her pedestal with flowers; now he kept the woman's feet
from thorns, and the impulse to make their pathways one grew stronger
day by day. She, unconscious of the position, added fuel to the flame
by choosing his society, and making him her confidant. Naturally with
one so emotional as Dick, the crisis was not long in coming, and
music, of which he was passionately fond, brought it about in this
wise; for Belle played prettily, and he used to sit and listen to her
like the lover in Frank Dicksee's _Harmony_, letting himself drift
away on a sea of pleasure or pain, he scarcely knew which. So, one
afternoon when they were alone in the house together, she sat down to
the piano and played Schubert's _Frühlingslied_. The sunshine lay like
cloth of gold outside, the doves cooed ceaselessly, the scent of the
roses in John Raby's garden drifted in through the window with the
warm wind which stirred the little soft curls on Belle's neck. The
perfume of life got into the lad's brain, and almost before he knew
it, his arms were round the girl, his kisses were on her lips, and his
tale of love in her ears.

It was very unconventional of course, but very natural,--for him. For
her the sudden rising to her full height with amazement and dislike in
her face was equally natural, and even more unforeseen. The sight of
it filled poor Dick with such shame and regret, that his past action
seemed almost incredible to his present bewilderment. "Forgive me,
Belle," he cried, "I was mad; but indeed I love you,--I love you."

She stood before him like an insulted queen full of bitter anger. "I
will never forgive you. How dare you kiss me? How dare you say you
love me?"

The lad's combativeness rose at her tone. "I suppose any one may dare
to love you. I'm sorry I kissed you, Belle, but my conduct doesn't
alter my love."

His manner, meant to be dignified, tended to bombast, and the girl
laughed scornfully. "Love indeed! You're only a boy! what do you know
about love?"

"More than you do apparently."

"I'm glad you realise the fact if _that_ is what you call love."

"At any rate I'm older than you."

The retort that he was old enough to know better rose to Belle's lips,
but a suspicion that this childish squabbling was neither correct nor
dignified, made her pause and say loftily, "How can you ask me to
forgive such a mean ungentlemanly thing?"

The last epithet was too much for Dick; he looked at her as if she had
struck him. "Don't say that, Belle," he said hoarsely. "It's bad
enough that it's true, and that you don't understand; but don't say
that." He leant over the piano and buried his face in his hands in
utter despair. For the first time a pulse of pity shot through the
storm of physical and mental repulsion in the girl's breast, but she
put it from her fiercely. "Why shouldn't I say it if it is true?"

"Because you are kind; always so good and kind."

Again the pity had to be repulsed, this time still more harshly. "You
will say next that I've been too kind, that I encouraged you, I
suppose; that would put the finishing touch to your meanness."

This speech put it to Dick's patience; he caught her by both hands,
and stood before her masterful in his wrath. "You shall not say such
things to me, Belle! Look me in the face and say it again if you dare.
You know quite well how I love and reverence you; you know that I
would die rather than offend you. I forgot everything but you,--I lost
myself,--you know it."

The thrill in his voice brought a new and distinctly pleasurable sense
of power to the young girl, and, alas! that it should be so, made her
more merciless. "I prefer actions to words. You have insulted me and I
will never speak to you again." She regretted this assertion almost as
it was uttered; it went too far and bound her down too much. She was
not always going to be angry with poor Dick surely? No! not always,
but for the present decidedly angry, very angry indeed.

"Insult!" echoed Dick drearily, letting her hands slip from his.
"There you go again; but fellows do kiss their cousins sometimes."

Had there been any grown-up spectators to this scene they must have
laughed at the full-blown tragedy of both faces, and the alternate
bathos and pathos of the pleas. They were so young, so very young,
this girl and boy, and neither of them really meant what they said,
Belle especially, with her vicious retort: "I am not your cousin, and
I'm glad of it. I'm glad that I have nothing to do with you."

As before her harshness overreached itself, and made a man of him.
"You want to put me out of your life altogether, Belle," he said more
steadily, "because I have made you angry. You have a right to be
angry, and I will go. But not for always. You don't wish that
yourself, I think, for you are kind. Oh Belle! be like yourself! say
one kind word before I go."

Again the consciousness of power made her merciless, and she stood
silent, yet tingling all over with a half-fearful curiosity as to what
he would say next.

"One kind word," he pleaded; "only one."

He waited a minute, then, with a curse on his own folly in expecting
pity, flung out of the room. So it was all over! A genuine regret came
into the girl's heart and she crept away miserably to her own room,
and cried.

"I wonder Dick isn't home to dinner," remarked Mrs. Stuart when that
meal came round. "I do hope he isn't going back to his old habit of
staying out. He heard to-day that his application for a post in the
Salt Department was refused, and he has no patience like my own boys.
I do hope he will come to no harm."

The empty chair renewed Belle's remorseful regret.

"Well! I can't have him kicking his heels in my office much longer,"
remarked the Colonel crossly. "The head-clerk complains of him.
Confound his impudence! he actually interfered in the accounts the
other day, and showed regular distrust. I must have good feeling in
the office; that's a _sine qua non_."

"Oh, Dick's got a splendid opinion of himself," broke in Stanley. "He
had the cheek to tell Raby yesterday that he played too much _écarté_
with--" The speaker remembered his audience too late.

Colonel Stuart grew purple and breathless. "Do you mean to say that
the boy,--that _boy_--presumed to speak to Raby,--to _my friend_
Raby--about his private actions? Lucilla! What is the world coming
to?"

This was a problem never propounded to his wife save under dire
provocation, and the answer invariably warned him not to expect his
own high standard from the world. This time she ventured upon a timid
addition to the effect that rumour did accuse Mr. Raby of playing
high.

"And if he does," retorted the Colonel, "he can afford to pay. Raby,
my dear, is a fine young fellow, with good principles,--deuced good
principles, let me tell you."

"I am very glad to hear it, Charles, I'm sure; for it would be a pity
if a nice, clever, young man, who would make any girl a good husband,
were to get into bad habits."

"Raby is a man any girl might be proud to marry. He is a good fellow."
He looked at Belle, who smiled at him absently; she was wondering
where Dick could be.

"Raby isn't a Christian," remarked Mabel. "He told us yesterday he was
something else. What was it, Maud?"

"An erotic Buddhist."

"Esoteric," suggested Belle.

"It's all the same. He said we were the three Thibetan sisters and he
worshipped us all. But we know who it is, don't we?"

"How you giggle, girls!" complained Colonel Stuart fretfully. "Belle
never giggles. Dear child, I will teach you _écarté_ this evening. It
will amuse you."

It amused him, which was more to the purpose; in addition it prevented
him from falling asleep after dinner, which he was particularly
anxious not to do that evening. So they played until, just as the
clock was striking ten, a step was heard outside, and Colonel Stuart
rose with a relieved remark that it must be John Raby at last. The
opening door, however, only admitted truant Dick with rather a flushed
face. "From Raby," he said handing a note to his uncle. "I met the man
outside."

The scowl, which the sight of the culprit had raised on Colonel
Stuart's face, deepened as he read a palpable excuse for not coming
over to play _écarté_. It seemed inconceivable that Dick's
remonstrance could have wrought this disappointment; yet even the
suggestion was unpleasant. He turned on his nephew only too anxious to
find cause of quarrel. It was not hard to find, for Dick was
manifestly excited. "At your old tricks again, sir?" said his uncle
sternly. "You've been drinking in the bazaar."

Now Dick, ever since the day on which Belle had come to him in
distress over Charlie's abandonment to "pegs," had forsworn liquor, as
he had forsworn many another bad habit. Even when driven to despair,
he had not flown to the old anodyne. But his very virtue had been his
undoing, and a single stiff tumbler of whisky and water, forced on him
by a friend who was startled by his looks as he returned fagged from a
wander into the wilderness, had gone to his unaccustomed head in a
most unlooked-for degree. The injustice of the accusation maddened
him, and he retorted fiercely: "I haven't had so much to drink as you
have, sir."

"Don't speak to your uncle like that, Dick," cried Mrs. Stuart
alarmed. "You had better go to bed, dear; it is the best place for
you."

"Leave the room, you dissipated young meddler," thundered the Colonel
breaking in on his wife's attempt to avert a collision. It was the
first time Belle had witnessed her father's passion, and the sight
made her cling to him as if her touch might soothe his anger.

Dick, seeing her thus, felt himself an outcast indeed. "I've not been
drinking," he burst out, beside himself with jealousy and rage. "The
man who says I have is a liar."

"Go to bed, sir," bawled his uncle, "or I'll kick you out of the room.
I'll have no drunkards here."

Luckless Dick's evil genius prompted an easy retort. "Then you'd
better go first, sir; for I've seen you drunk oftener than you've seen
me!"

The next instant he was at Belle's side pleading for disbelief. "No,
no, Belle! it's a lie! I am mad--drunk--anything--only it is not
true!" His denial struck home to the girl's heart when the angry
assertion might have glanced by. A flash of intelligence lit up the
past: she recollected a thousand incidents, she remembered a thousand
doubts which had made no impression at the time; and before Colonel
Stuart's inarticulate splutterings of wrath found words, her eyes met
Dick's so truthfully, so steadily, that he turned away in despair, in
blank, hopeless despair.

"Why to-morrow?" he cried bitterly in answer to his uncle's order to
leave the room instantly and the house to-morrow. "There's no time
like the present, and I deserve it. Good-bye, Aunt Lucilla; you've
been very kind, always; but I can't stand it any longer. Good-bye, all
of you!"

He never even looked at Belle again; the door closed and he was gone.

"Poor, dear Dick!" remarked Mrs. Stuart in her high complaining
voice. "He always had a violent temper, even as a baby. Don't fret
about it, my dear,"--for large tears were slowly rolling down Belle's
cheeks--"He will be all right to-morrow, you'll see; and he has really
been steadiness itself of late."

"He wasn't anything to speak of either," urged Mildred with her usual
good-nature. "Only a little bit on, and I expect he had no dinner."

"Dinner or no dinner, I say he was drunk," growled Colonel Stuart
sulkily. "No one lies like that unless he is,--that's my experience."

But Belle scarcely realised what they said. Her heart was full of
fear, and though sleep came with almost unwelcome readiness to drive
thought away, she dreamt all night long that some one was saying, "One
kind word, Belle, only one kind word," and she could not speak.




                              CHAPTER V.


Outside the parallelograms of white roads centred by brown stretches
of stubbly grass, and bordered by red and blue houses wherein the
European residents of Faizapore dwelt after their kind, and our poor
Belle lay dreaming, a very different world had been going on its way
placidly indifferent, not to her only, but to the whole colony of
strangers within its gates. The great plains, sweeping like a sea to
the horizon, had been ploughed, sown, watered, harvested: children had
been born, strong men had died, crimes been committed, noble acts
done; and of all this not one word had reached the alien ears. Only
the District Officer and his subaltern, John Raby, bridged the gulf by
driving down every day to the court-house, which lay just beyond the
boundaries of the cantonment and close to the native city; there, for
eight weary hours, to come in contact with the most ignoble attributes
of the Indian, and thence to drive at evening heartily glad of escape.
In the lines of the native regiment Philip Marsden went in and out
among his men, knowing them by name, and sympathising with their
lives. But they too were a race apart from the tillers of soil, the
hewers of wood and drawers of water, who pay the bills for the great
Empire.

Even old Mahomed Lateef came but seldom to see the Major _sahib_ since
he had been forced to send his Benjamin to Delhi, there, in a hotbed
of vice and corruption, to gain a livelihood by his penmanship. The
lad was employed on the staff of a red-hot Mahometan newspaper
entitled "The Light of Islâm," and spent his days in copying blatant
leaders on to the lithographic stones. Nothing could exceed the lofty
tone of "The Light of Islâm." No trace of the old Adam peeped through
its exalted sentiments save when it spoke of the Government, or of its
Hindu rival "The Patriot." Then the editor took down his dictionary of
synonyms, and, looking out all the bad epithets from "abandoned" to
"zymotic," used them with more copiousness than accuracy. Sometimes,
however, it would join issue with one adversary against another, and
blaze out into fiery paragraphs of the following order:


We are glad to see that yet once more "The Patriot," forgetting its
nonsensical race-prejudice for the nonce, has, to use a colloquialism,
followed our lead in pertinently calling on Government for some worthy
explanation of the dastardly outrage perpetrated by its minions on a
virtuous Mahometan widow, &c, &c.


And lovers of the dreadful, after wading through a column of abuse,
would discover that the ancestral dirt of an old lady's cowhouse had
been removed by order of the Deputy Commissioner! Yet the paper did
good: it could hardly do otherwise, considering its exalted
sentiments; but for all that the occupation was an unwholesome one for
an excitable lad like Murghub Ahmed. While his fingers inked
themselves hopelessly over the fine words, his mind also became
clouded by them. The abuse of language intoxicated him, until
moderation seemed to him indifference, and tolerance sympathy. He took
to sitting up of nights composing still more turgid denunciations; and
the first time "The Light of Islâm" went forth, bearing not only his
hand-writing, but his heart's belief on its pages, he felt that he had
found his mission. To think that but four months ago he had wept with
disappointment because he was refused the post of statistical writer
in a Government office! Between striking averages, and evolving
Utopias, what a glorious difference! He thanked Providence for the
change, though his heart ached cruelly at times when he could spare
nothing from his modest wage for the dear ones at home. He had a wife
waiting there for him; ere long there might be a child, and he knew
her to be worse fed than many a street-beggar. It seemed to him part
of the general injustice which set his brain on fire.

"Words! Nothing but words," muttered old Mahomed Lateef as he lay
under the solitary _nim_ tree in his courtyard and spelt out "The
Light of Islâm" with the aid of a huge horn-rimmed pair of spectacles.
"Pish! '_The pen is mightier than the sword!_' What white-livered fool
said that? The boy should not have such water in his veins unless his
mother played me false. God knows! women are deceitful, and full of
guile."

This was only his habit of thought; he had no intention of casting
aspersions on his much respected wife Fâtma Bibi, who just then
appeared with a hookah full of the rankest tobacco. "I shall send for
the boy, oh Fâtma Bi!" said the stern old domestic tyrant. "He is
learning to say more than he dare do, and that I will not have. He
shall come home and do more than he says--ha! ha!" Fâtma Bi laughed
too, and clapped her wrinkled hands, while the shy girl, dutifully
doing the daughter-in-law's part of cooking, turned her head away to
smile lest any one should accuse her of joy because _he_ was coming
back.

So Mahomed Lateef covered a sheet of flimsy German note-paper, bought
in the bazaar, with crabbed Arabic lettering, and the women rejoiced
because the light of their eyes was coming back. And after all the lad
refused stoutly to return. He wrote his father a letter, full of the
most trite and beautiful sentiments, informing his aged parent that
times had changed, the old order given place to the new, and that he
intended to raise the banner of _jehâd_ (religious war) against the
infidel. The women cried _Bismillah_, and Mahomed Lateef, despite his
annoyance at the disobedience, could not help, as it were, cocking his
ears like an old war-horse. Yet he wrote the lad a warning after his
lights, which ran thus:


God and His prophet forbid, oh son of my heart, that I should keep
thee back, if, as thou sayest, thou wouldst raise the banner of
_jehâd_. If a sword be needed, I will send thee mine own friend;
but remember always what the mullah taught thee, nor confound the
three great things,--the Dur-ul-Islâm, the Dur-ul-Husub, and the
Dur-ul-Ummun.[2] Have at the Hindu pigs, especially any that bear
kindred to Shunker's fat carcase; he hath cheated me rascally, and
built a window overlooking my yard for which I shall have the law of
him. But listen for the cry of the muezzin, and put thy sword in the
scabbard when its sound falls on thine ear, remembering 'tis the House
of Protection, and not the House of the Foe. If thou goest to China,
as perhaps may befall, seeing the _sahibs_ fight the infidel there,
remember to cool thy brother's grave with tears. Meanwhile, play
singlestick with Shâhbâz Khân the Mogul, and if thou canst get the old
Meean _sahib_, his father, on his legs, put the foils into his hand,
rap him over the knuckles once, and he will teach thee more in one
minute than his son in five.


Then the old Syyed lay down on his bed under the _nim_ tree, and Fâtma
Bi fanned the mosquitoes from him with a tinsel fan, and talked in
whispers to Nasibun, the childless wife, of the deeds their boy was to
do, while Haiyât Bi, the young bride, busy as usual, found time to dry
her tears unseen. A fire burning dim in one corner of the courtyard
was almost eclipsed by the moon riding gloriously in the purple-black
sky overhead. From the other side of the high partition wall came the
dull throbbing of the _dholki_ (little drum) and an occasional wild
skirling of pipes. The marriage festivities in Shunker Dâs's house had
begun, and every day some ceremony or other had to be gone through,
bringing an excuse for having the _marânsunis_ (female musicians) in
to play and sing. High up near the roof of the sugar-cake house with
its white filigree mouldings gleamed the objectionable window. Within
sat the usurer himself conferring with his jackal, one Râm Lâl, a man
of small estate but infinite cunning. It was from no desire of
overlooking Mahomed Lateef's women that Shunker Dâs frequented the
upper chamber. He had other and far more important business on hand,
necessitating quiet and the impossibility of being overheard. Even up
there the two talked in whispers, and chuckled under their breath;
while in the courtyard below the delicate child who stood between
Shunker and damnation ate sweetmeats and turned night into day with
weary, yet sleepless, eyes.

The moon, shining in on the two courtyards, shone also on the church
garden, as Major Marsden after going his rounds turned his horse into
its winding paths. A curious garden it was, guiltless of flowers and
planted for the most part with tombstones. Modern sanitation, stepping
in like Aaron's rod to divide the dead from the living, had ceased to
use it as a cemetery; but the records of long forgotten sorrows
remained, looking ghostly in the moonlight. The branch of a rose-tree
encroaching on the walk caught in the tassel of Major Marsden's
bridle, and he stooped to disentangle it. Straightening himself again,
he paused to look on the peaceful scene around him and perceived that
some one, a belated soldier most likely, was lying not far off on a
tombstone. The horse picked its way among many a nameless grave to
draw up beside a figure lying still as if carved in stone.

"Now, my man, what's up?" said Major Marsden dismounting to lay a
heavy hand on its shoulder. The sleeper rose almost automatically, and
stood before him alert and yet confused. "Dick Smith! What on earth
brings you here?"

The boy could scarcely remember at first, so far had sleep taken him
from his troubles. Then he hung his head before memory. "I'm leaving
Faizapore, and came here--to wait for daylight; that's all."

But the moonlight on the tombstone showed its inscription, "Sacred to
the memory of John Smith"; and Philip Marsden judged instantly that
there was trouble afoot; boys do not go to sleep on their father's
graves without due cause. Some scrape no doubt, and yet--. His dislike
to Colonel Stuart made him a partisan, and he was more ready to
believe ill of the elder, than of the younger man.

"Don't be in a hurry," he said kindly. "There's something wrong of
course, but very few scrapes necessitate running away."

"There's nothing to make me run away," replied Dick, with a lump in
his throat as he unconsciously contrasted this stranger's kindness
with other people's harshness; "but go I must."

"Where?"

The question roused the sense of injury latent for years. "Where? How
do I know? I tell you there's nothing for me to do anywhere--nothing!
And then, when a fellow is sick of waiting, and runs wild a bit, they
throw it in his teeth, when he has given it all up."

It was not very lucid, but the lad's tone was enough for Philip
Marsden. "Come home with me," he said with a smile full of pity; "and
have a real sleep in a real bed. You don't know how different things
will seem to-morrow."

Dick looked at his hero, thought how splendid he was, and went with
him like a lamb.

Next morning when the boy with much circumlocution began to tell the
tale of his troubles, Major Marsden felt inclined to swear. Would he
never learn to mistrust his benevolent impulses, but go down to his
grave making a fool of himself? A boy and girl lovers' quarrel,--was
that all? Yet as the story proceeded he became interested in spite of
himself. "Do you mean to tell me," he said incredulously, "that Miss
Stuart is absolutely ignorant of what goes on in that house?"

Dick laid his head on the table in sheer despair. "Ah Major, Major!"
he cried, "I told her--I--you should have seen her face!" He burst
into incoherent regrets, and praises of Belle's angelic innocence.

"It appears to me," remarked Major Marsden drily, "to be about the
best thing that could have happened. Fiction is always unsafe.
Belle,--as you call her--must have found it out sooner or later. The
sooner the better, in my opinion."

"You wouldn't say that if you knew her as I do," explained the other
eagerly; "or if you knew all that I do. There will be a smash some day
soon, and it will kill Belle outright. Ah! if I hadn't been a fool and
a brute, I might have stayed and perhaps kept things from going
utterly wrong."

"Then why don't you go back?" asked his hearer impatiently.

"I can't! He won't have me in the office again. You don't know what
mischief is brewing there."

"Thank you, I'd rather not know; but if you're certain this move of
yours is final,--that is to say if you don't want to kiss and make
friends with your cousin--[Poor Dick writhed inwardly, for he had kept
back the full enormity of his offence]--then I might be able to help
you in getting employment. They are laying a new telegraph-line to the
front, and, as it so happens, a friend wrote to me a few days ago
asking if I knew of any volunteers for the work."

The lad's face brightened. "Telegraphs! oh, I should like that! I've
been working at them these two years, and I think--but I'm not
sure--that I've invented a new--"

"All right," interrupted Major Marsden brusquely; "they can try you,
at any rate. You can start tonight; that settles it. Now you had
better go round and get your things ready."

Dick writhed again in mingled pride and regret. "I can't; I've said
good-bye to them all; besides, I left a bundle of sorts in the bazaar
before I went--there."

Philip Marsden shrugged his shoulders, remarking that the boy might do
as he liked, and went off to his work; returning about two o'clock,
however, to find Dick asleep, wearied out even by a half-night's
vigil of sorrow. "How soft these young things are," he thought, as
he looked down on the sleeping boy, and noticed a distinctly damp
pocket-handkerchief still in the half-relaxed hand. A certain scorn
was in his heart, yet the very fact that he did notice such details
showed that he was not so hard as he pretended. He went into the
rough, disorderly room where he spent so many solitary evenings, lit a
cigar, and walked about restlessly. Finally, telling himself the while
that he was a fool for his pains, he sat down and wrote to Belle
Stuart in this wise:--


My Dear Miss Stuart,--At the risk of once more being meddlesome, I
venture to tell you that your cousin, Dick Smith, goes off to
Beluchistan to-night as telegraph overseer. It is dangerous work, and
perhaps you might like to see him before he leaves. If so, by riding
through the church garden about six o'clock you will meet him. He
doesn't know I am writing, and would most likely object if he did; but
I know most women believe in the duty of forgiveness. Yours truly,
P. H. Marsden.

P.S. If you were to send a small selection of warm clothing to meet
him at the bullock train office it, at any rate, could not fail to be
a comfort to him.


Belle read this rather brusque production with shining eyes and a
sudden lightening of her heart. Perhaps, as she told herself, this
arose entirely from her relief on Dick's account; perhaps the
conviction that Major Marsden could not judge her very harshly if he
thought it worth while to appeal to her in this fashion, had something
to do with it. The girl however did not question herself closely on
any subject. Even the dreadful doubt which Dick's mad words had raised
the night before had somehow found its appointed niche in the orderly
pageant of her mind where love sat in the place of honour. Was it
true? The answer came in a passionate desire to be ignorant, and yet
to protect and save. Very illogical, no doubt, but very womanly; to a
certain extent very natural also, for her father, forced by the
circumstances detailed in the last chapter to retire early to bed, had
arisen next morning in a most edifying frame of mind, and a somewhat
depressed state of body. He was unusually tender towards Belle, and
spoke with kindly dignity of unhappy Dick's manifest ill-luck. These
dispositions therefore rendered it easy for Belle to make excuses in
her turn. Not that she made them consciously; that would have argued
too great a change of thought. The craving to forget and forgive was
imperative, and the sense of wrong-doing which her innate truthfulness
would not allow to be smothered, found an outlet in self-blame for her
unkindness to dear Dick. As for poor father--: the epithets spoke
volumes.

"There is your cousin," said Major Marsden to Dick as Belle rode
towards them through the overarching trees in the church garden.
"Don't run away; I asked her to come. You'll find me by the bridge."

The lad was like Mahomet's coffin, hanging between a hell of remorse
and a heaven of forgiveness, as he watched her approach, and when she
reined up beside him, he looked at her almost fearfully.

"I'm sorry I was cross to you, Dick," she said simply, holding out her
hand to him. The clouds were gone, and Dick Smith felt as if he would
have liked to stand up and chant her praises, or fight her battles,
before the whole world. They did not allude to the past in any way
until the time for parting came, when Dick, urged thereto by the
rankle of a certain epithet, asked with a furious blush if she would
promise to forget--everything. She looked at him with kindly smiling
eyes. "Good-bye, dear Dick," she said; and then, suddenly, she stooped
and kissed him.

The young fellow could not speak. He turned aside to caress the horse,
and stood so at her bridle-rein for a moment. "God bless you for that,
Belle," he said huskily and left her.

Belle, with a lump in her own throat and tearful shining eyes, rode
back past the bridge where Philip Marsden, leaning over the parapet,
watched the oily flow of the canal water in the cut below. He looked
up, thinking how fair and slim and young she was, and raised his hat
expecting her to pass, but she paused. He felt a strange thrill as his
eyes met hers still wet with tears.

"I have so much to thank you for, Major Marsden," she said with a
little tremor in her voice, "and I do it so badly. You see I don't
always understand--"

Something in her tone smote Philip Marsden with remorse. "Please not
to say any more about it, Miss Stuart. _I_ understand,--and,--and,--
I'm glad you do not." Thinking over his words afterwards he came to
the conclusion that both these statements had wandered from the truth;
but how, he asked himself a little wrathfully, could any man tell the
naked, unvarnished, disagreeable truth with a pair of grey eyes soft
with tears looking at him?

Dick, of course, raved about his cousin for the rest of the evening,
and besought the Major to send him confidential reports on the
progress of events. In his opinion disaster was unavoidable, and he
was proceeding to detail his reasons, when Major Marsden cut him short
by saying: "I would rather not hear anything about it; and I should
like to know, first, if you are engaged to your cousin?"

Dick confessed he was not; whereupon his companion told him that he
would promise nothing, except, he added hastily, catching sight of
Dick's disappointed face, to help the girl in any way he could. With
this the boy professed to be quite content; perhaps he had grasped the
fact that Philip Marsden was apt to be better than his word. And
indeed a day or two after Dick's departure Marsden took the trouble to
go over and inquire of John Raby what sort of a man Lâlâ Shunker Dâs,
the great contractor, was supposed to be.

The young civilian laughed. "Like them all, not to be trusted. Why do
you ask?" He broke in on the evasive answer by continuing, "The man is
a goldsmith by caste. I suppose you know that in old days they were
never allowed in Government service. As the proverb says, 'A goldsmith
will do his grandmother out of a pice.' But if the Lâlâ-ji gives you
trouble, bring him to me. I've been kind to him, and he is grateful,
in his way."

Now the history of John Raby's kindness to Lâlâ Shunker Dâs was
briefly this: he had discovered him in an attempt to cheat the revenue
in the matter of income-tax, and had kept the knowledge in his own
hands. "Purists would say I ought to report it, and smash the man,"
argued this astute young casuist; "but the knowledge that his ruin in
the matter of that _Rai Bâhâdur_-ship hangs by a thread will keep the
old thief straighter; besides it is always unwise to give away power."

That to a great extent was the keynote of John Raby's life. He coveted
power, not so much for its own sake as for the use he could make of
it. For just as some men inherit a passion for drink, he had inherited
greed of gain from a long line of Jewish ancestry. The less said of
his family the better: indeed, so far as his own account went, he
appeared to have been born when he went to read with a celebrated
"coach" at the age of sixteen. Memory never carried him further in
outward speech; but as this is no uncommon occurrence in Indian
society, the world accepted him for what he appeared to be, a
well-educated gentleman, and for what he was, a man with a pension for
himself and his widow. His first collector, a civilian of the old
type, used to shake his head when John Raby's name was mentioned, and
augur that he would either be hanged or become a Chief Court Judge.
"He was in camp with me, sir," this worthy would say, "when a flight
of wild geese came bang over the tent. I got a couple, the last with
the full choke; and I give you my word of honour Raby never lifted his
eyes from the _buniah's_ book he was deciphering in a petty bond
case!"

In truth the young man's faculty for figures, and his aptitude for
discovering fraud, partook of the nature of genius, and gained him the
reputation of being a perfect _shaitan_ (devil) among the natives.
Philip Marsden, associated with him on a committee for the purchase of
mules, learnt to trust his acumen implicitly, and became greatly
interested in the clear-headed, well-mannered young fellow who knew
such a prodigious amount for his years; pleasant in society too,
singing sentimental songs in a light tenor voice, and having a store
of that easy small-talk which makes society smooth by filling up the
chinks. Being a regular visitor of Colonel Stuart's house John Raby
saw a good deal of Belle, and liked her in a friendly, approving
manner; but, whatever Mrs. Stuart may have thought, he had no more
intention of marrying a penniless girl than of performing a
pilgrimage, or any other pious act savouring of the Middle Ages.

"By the way, I haven't seen the Miss Van Milders or their mother
lately," remarked Major Marsden one day to him, as they came home from
their committee together and met Belle going out for her afternoon
ride by herself.

"Oh, they've gone to Mussoorie; Belle's keeping house for her father."

"Alone?"

"Yes, alone; queer _ménage_, ain't it? I believe the girl thinks
she'll reform the Colonel; and he _is_ awfully fond of her, but--" The
younger man shook his head with a laugh. It jarred upon Philip Marsden
and he changed the subject quickly. So she had elected to stay with
her father! Well, he admired her courage, and could only hope that she
would not have to pay too dearly for it.




                             CHAPTER VI.


Lâlâ Shunker Dâs having discarded all clothing save a scarf of white
muslin tied petticoat-wise round his loins, lay on a wooden bed
perched high on the topmost platform of his tall house. But even there
the burning breezes of May brought no relief from the heat; and he lay
gasping, while his faithful jackal Râm Lâl pounded away with lean
brown knuckles at his master's fat body. The _massage_ seemed to do
little good, for he grunted and groaned dismally. In truth the Lâlâ
ached all over, both in body and soul. A thousand things had conspired
against him: his last and most expensive wife (after spending a
fortune in pilgrimages) had committed the indiscretion of presenting
him with a girl baby; his grandmother having died, he had been forced
much against his will to shave his head; his greatest rival had been
elevated to the Honorary Magistracy and (adding injury to insult) been
associated with him on a _bunch_ (bench), and justice grown in bunches
is not nearly so remunerative to the grower as single specimens. These
were serious ills, but there was one, far more trivial, which
nevertheless smarted worst of all; perhaps because it was the most
recent.

That very morning Shunker Dâs, as behoved one of his aspirations, had
testified to his loyalty by attending the usual parade in honour of
the Queen's birthday. On previous occasions he had driven thither in
his barouche, but ambition had suggested that an appearance on
horseback would show greater activity, and please the Powers. So he
bought a cast horse from the cavalry regiment just ordered on service,
and having attired himself in glittering raiment, including a
magnificent turban of pink Benares muslin, he took his place by the
flagstaff. People congratulated him warmly on his confidential charger
which, even at the _feu de joie_, seemed lost in philosophic
reflections. Shunker Dâs waxed jubilant over the success of his
scheme, and was just giving himself away in magnificent lies, when the
bugle sounded for "close order" preparatory to a few words from the
General to the departing cavalry regiment. On this the war-horse
pricked up its ears, and starting off at a dignified trot rejoined its
old companions, while the Lâlâ, swearing hideously, tugged vainly at
the reins. Arrived at the line the conscientious creature sidled down
it, trying vainly to slip into a vacant place. Failing of success, the
intelligent beast concluded it must be on orderly duty, and just as
the Lâlâ was congratulating himself on having finished his involuntary
rounds, his horse, turning at right angles, bounded off to rejoin the
General's staff. Away went the Lâlâ's stirrups. He must have gone too,
despite his clutch on the mane, had not the streaming end of his
_pugree_ caught in the high crupper-strap and held fast. So stayed,
fore and aft, he might have reached the goal in safety, had not the
General, annoyed by the suppressed tittering around him, lost
patience, and angrily ordered some one to stop that man. Whereupon a
mischievous aide-de-camp gave the word for the "halt" to be sounded.
Confused out of everything save obedience, the charger stopped dead in
his tracks, and the Lâlâ shot over his head, still in a sitting
posture. On being relieved of his burden, the co-ordination "stables"
apparently came uppermost in the horse's mind, for it walked away
slowly, bearing with it the end of the Lâlâ's turban still fastened in
the crupper. He, feeling a sudden insecurity in his headgear, and
being, even in his confusion, painfully conscious of his baldness,
clung to the lower folds with both hands. At this slight check, the
charger, not to be baulked, set off at a canter, and over rolled the
fat Lâlâ, heels in air. Then, and not till then, one roar of laughter
rent the air. For as he lay there on his back, kicking like a turned
turtle, the _pugree_ began to unwind like a ball of thread, while the
Lâlâ held on like grim death to the lower portion. Not until the last
fold had slipped through his fingers and a quarter of a mile or so of
pink muslin was fluttering across the parade ground, did he realise
the position, and struggling to his seat pass his hand over his bald
head with a deprecating smile.

"Go out, Raby, and pick him up," gasped the General aching with
laughter. "You're in political charge, aren't you?"

But Philip Marsden, who happened to be on staff duty that day, was
already pouring in oil and wine to the Lâlâ's hurt dignity when the
young civilian came up with nonchalant courtesy. "_Shâhbâsh, sahib!_"
he said, "you sat him splendidly, and that last prop would have undone
a Centaur."

The Lâlâ, grinned a ghastly smile, and Philip Marsden turned
impatiently, saying aside: "Get him home, do! He looks so helpless
with his bald head; it seems a shame to laugh."

John Raby raised his eyebrows. "The General shall lend him his
carriage. That will soothe his wounded vanity."

So the Lâlâ, with his head tied up in a red pocket-handkerchief, went
home in the big man's barouche, and the spectators of his discomfiture
laughed again at the recollection of it.

"You ought to be the editor of a native newspaper, Marsden," remarked
John Raby. "You would be grand on the unsympathetic Anglo-Indian. But
if I'd seen the Viceroy himself being unwound like a reel of cotton I
must have chuckled."

"No doubt," replied the other laughing himself. "Yet I am sure a keen
sense of the ludicrous is unfortunate in a conquering race. We English
always laugh when policy should make us grave; that is why we don't
succeed."

"Perhaps; for myself I prefer to grin. As some one says, humour is the
religion of to-day. Those who believe in eternity have time for tears.
We others,--why we cry '_Vogue la galère!_'"

Lâlâ Shunker Dâs, however, without any abiding belief in a future
state, was in no laughing mood as he lay under Râm Lâl's
manipulations, listening captiously to his items of bazaar rumour.

"And they say, Lâl-ji, that the Sirkar thinks of transferring Colonel
Estuart _sahib_."

Shunker Dâs sat up suddenly and scowled. "Transfer Estuart
_sahib!_--why?"

Râm Lâl redoubled his exertions on the new portion of the Lâlâ's frame
thus brought within reach, until the latter, uttering dismal groans,
sank back to his former position. "They say," he continued calmly,
"that the Sirkar is beginning to suspect."

"Fool! idiot! knave!" growled his master, gasping at the furious
onslaught on his fat stomach. "'Tis all thy bungling. Have I not bid
thee not go so fast? Times have changed since the Commissariat
_sahibs_ sat in their verandahs, and one could walk a file of twenty
camels round and round the house until they counted the proper number.
But remember! 'Tis thou who goest to the wall, not I. That's the
compact. Shunker finds the money, Râmu runs the risk."

"Have I forgotten it, Lâlâ-ji?" replied the other with some spirit.
"Râmu is ready. And 'tis Shunker's part to look after the wife and
children when I'm in jail; don't forget that! The master would do
better if he were bolder. This one would have made much in that fodder
contract, but your heart was as water; it always is."

"And if Estuart is transferred; what then?"

"If the branch be properly limed, the bird sticks. Is it limed? Such
things are the master's work, not mine."

"Ay! limed right enough for _him_. But the money, Râmu, the money! It
will take months to lay the snare for a new man, and the war will be
over." The Lâlâ positively wept at the idea.

Râm Lâl looked at him contemptuously. "Get what is to be got from this
_sahib_, at any rate; that's my advice."

The very next day Lâla Shunker Dâs drove down to the Commissariat
office, intent on striking a grand blow.

Things had been going on better than could have been expected in the
large, empty house, where Belle, thinner and paler as the days of
intense heat went by, did the honours cheerfully. It was not without a
struggle that she had been allowed to remain with her father. Mrs.
Stuart had prophesied endless evil, beginning with a bad reputation
for herself as stepmother; but prudential reasons had given their
weight in favour of the girl's earnest desire. To make light of the
heat, and avoid flight to the hills, was a great recommendation for a
civilian's wife, and that, Mrs. Stuart had decreed, was to be Belle's
fate. So with many private injunctions to the _khansamah_ not to allow
the Miss _sahib_ to interfere too much in the management, the good
lady had, as usual, taken herself and her family to Mussoorie. Shortly
after they left Fate played a trump for Belle by sending a slight
attack of malarious fever to the Colonel. He was always dreadfully
alarmed about himself, and a hint from the doctor about the
consequences of over-free living, reduced him to toast and water for a
week, and kept him from mess for three. Belle was in a heaven of
delight; and she was just enjoying the sight of her father actually
drinking afternoon tea, when Budlu came in to say the Lâlâ-ji wanted
to see the Colonel.

"Don't go, father," pleaded Belle. "It's only that horrid fat man;
tell him to come again."

John Raby, who often strolled across about tea-time, looked at Colonel
Stuart and smiled. He knew most things in the station; among others
how unpleasant a visitor Shunker Dâs might be to his host, and not
being ill-natured, he chimed in with the girl by offering to see the
man himself.

The Lâlâ, leaning back magnificently in his barouche, felt a sudden
diminution of dignity at the sight of John Raby. "Bruises all right,
Lâlâ?" asked the young man cheerfully, and Shunker's dignity sank
lower still. "They ought to give you that _Rai Bâhâdur_-ship for the
way you stuck to him; by George, they should! We don't often get men
of your stamp, Lâlâ, with estates in every district,--do we? So you
want to see the Colonel; what for?" he added suddenly and sternly.

"_Huzoor!_" bleated the fat man. "I,--I came to inquire after his
honour's health."

"Much obliged to you! He is better; and I really think if you were to
come, say this day fortnight, he might be able to see you."

Shunker Dâs hesitated, fear for his money making him brave. "There
were rumours," he began, "that my good patron was about to be
transferred."

"Sits the wind in that quarter," thought Raby, amused. "My dear Lâlâ,"
he said, "it's absolutely untrue. Your eighty thousand is quite safe,
I assure you."

"_Huzoor!_"

"Good-bye, Lâlâ-ji--this day fortnight," and he returned to his cup of
tea in high good-humour. Then he sat and played _écarté_ with the
Colonel for an hour while Belle worked and watched them carelessly.

"That makes fifteen," remarked the young man as he rose to go,
whereupon Colonel Stuart assented cheerfully, for he had won that
evening; and Belle looked up with a smiling farewell, unconscious and
content. She lived in a fool's paradise, hugging the belief that her
presence was the charm; as though Niagara was to be stemmed by a
straw, or the habit of years by a sentiment. As time wore on, the few
remaining ladies fled before that last awful pause ere the rains
break, when a deadly weariness settles on all living things. Belle,
feeling shy among so many men, ceased to go out except on the rare
occasions when she could persuade her father to accompany her. But,
though he still adhered to his habit of dining at home, he was moody
and out of sorts. He, too, had heard rumours of transfer, and that
meant the possibility of disaster not to be faced with composure.
Restless and irritable, he began to relieve the great craving which
took possession of him by all sorts of stimulant and narcotic drugs.
And one day came an almost illegible note from him, bidding Belle not
wait dinner for him. She felt instinctively that this was the
beginning of trouble; nor was she wrong, for though Colonel Stuart was
full of excuses the next evening, he never even sent a note the day
after that. So Belle ate her solitary dinners as best she might, and
though she often lay awake till the small hours of the morning brought
an altercation between Budlu and her father, she never sat up for him,
or made any effort to meet him on his return. From this time, brutal
though it may seem to say so, poor Belle's presence in the house, so
far from being an advantage, became a distinct drawback. But for it,
Colonel Stuart would have yielded to the mad craze for drink which
generally beset him at this time of the year; and after a shorter or
longer bout, as the case might be, have been pulled up short by
illness. Instead of this, he tried to keep up appearances, and drugged
himself with chloral and laudanum till the remedy grew worse than the
disease so far as he himself was concerned. It served, however, to
hide the real facts from his daughter; for he met her timid protests
by complaints of ill-health, assertions that he knew what was best for
him, and absolute refusal to call in a doctor.

She grew alarmed. The long, silent days spent in brooding over her
father's altered demeanour were too great a strain on her nerves, and
she began to exaggerate the position. Her thoughts turned again and
again to Dick; if he were there! ah, if he were only there! No one who
has not had in extreme youth to bear anxiety alone, can fully
understand the horror of silence to the young. Belle felt she must
speak, must tell some one of her trouble; it seemed to her as if her
silence was a sort of neglect, and that some one must be able to do
something to set matters straight. But who? She hesitated and shrank,
till one day her father broke down and began to cry piteously in the
middle of his ordinary abuse of the servants at lunch. A stiff glass
of whisky-and-water restored his anger effectually, and he made light
of the incident; but that evening, when Philip Marsden came in late to
dress for dinner he found a note awaiting him from Belle.

She, having received no answer, had been expecting him all the
afternoon, and as time passed began to wonder at her own temerity in
writing. Dick, it is true, had bidden her look on Major Marsden as one
willing to help if needs be; but what could Dick know? She went out,
after a pretence of dinner, to the little raised platform in the
garden where chairs were set every evening for those who preferred it
to the house. Belle liked it far better; the purple arch of sky,
spangled with stars save where the growing moon outshone them, rested
her tired eyes, and the ceaseless quiver of the cicala prevented her
from thinking by its insistence. Suddenly her half-doze was
interrupted by a voice asking for the Miss _sahib_, and she stood up
trembling and uncertain. Why had she sent for him, and what should she
say now that he had come?

"I came as soon as I could, Miss Stuart," said Major Marsden,
formally, as their hands met. "But I was out all day, and had a guest
to entertain at mess." He stopped, dismayed at her appearance, and
added in quite a different tone, "I am afraid you are ill."

She did indeed look ghastly pale in the moonlight, her eyes full of
appeal and her lips quivering; yet her shyness had gone with the first
look at his face, and she felt glad that she had sent for him. "It is
father," she began, then could say no more for fear of breaking down.

The trivial words brought back the recollection of that first meeting
with her months before, when she had made the same reply to his offer
of help; and as he stood waiting for her to master the fast-rising
sobs, a remorse seized him with the thought that surely some of this
pain might have been prevented somehow, by some one.

"You must think me very silly," she murmured hastily.

"I think you are overdone," he replied, "and I don't expect you've had
any dinner. Now have you?"

A smile struggled to her face. "I don't think I had,--much."

"Then I will tell the _khansamah_ to bring you something now."

The full-blown tragedy of life seemed to have departed. She even
wondered at her own tears as she sipped her soup, and told him of her
troubles with a lightening heart. "Budlu says he never saw father like
this before," was the climax, and even that did not seem a hopeless
outlook.

"Could he not take leave?" suggested Major Marsden at once; leave
being the panacea for all ills in India.

"That's what I want to know. I begged him to go, but the very idea
excites him. Would it harm him officially? Is there any reason why he
should not?"

Dick's words of warning recurred to Major Marsden unpleasantly. "None
that I know of," he replied. "I will go round to Seymour's to-morrow,
and get him to bundle you both off to the hills. You want change as
much as your father. In a month's time you will be laughing at all
these fears."

"I think you are laughing at them now," said Belle wistfully.

"Am I? Well, I promise not to laugh at you any more, Miss Stuart." He
stood up, tall and straight, to say good-bye.

"Isn't that rather a rash promise, Major Marsden?"

"I don't think so. Anyhow I make it, and I'm very glad you sent for
me. Considering how little you knew of me,--and how disagreeable that
little had been--it was kind."

"I know a great deal of you," she replied, smiling softly. "Dick has
told me a lot,--about the brevet,--and the intelligence-work--and the
Afghan sepoy--"

"And the men in buckram too, I suppose? I'm afraid Dick is not to be
trusted. Did he tell you how the man escaped next day, and I got a
wigging?"

"No!" cried Belle indignantly. "Did he?--Did you, I mean?--what a
shame!"

"On the contrary, it was quite right. I'll tell you about it some day,
if I may. Meanwhile, good-bye, and don't starve; it really doesn't do
any good!"

She watched him jingle down the steps, thinking how like an overgrown
school-boy he looked in his mess-jacket. So life was not a tragedy
after all, but a serio-comedy in which only the monologues were
depressing and dull. She went in and played the piano till it was time
to go to bed. Yet nothing had really changed, and Fate marched on
relentlessly as before. We make our own feelings, and then sit down to
weep or smile over them.

The very next afternoon Colonel Stuart was brooding silently over
nothing at all in his private office-room, passing the time, as it
were, out of mischief, till he went to dine with John Raby. For the
latter, with a sort of contemptuous kindness, put the drag of an
occasional game of _écarté_ on to the Colonel's potations. Sitting in
the dusk his face looked wan and haggard, and, despite his profound
stillness, every nerve was wearied and yet awake with excitement; as
might be seen from his unrestrained start when Shunker Dâs came into
the room unannounced; for the office-hours being over the _chuprassie_
had departed.

"Well, what is it now?" he cried sharply. "I saw you this morning.
Haven't you got enough for one day? Am I never to have any peace?"

An angry tone generally reduced his native visitors to submission, but
the Lâlâ was evidently in no mood for silence. He had taken up a small
contract that morning, the earnest-money of which lay for the time in
Colonel Stuart's safe. Since then he had heard casually that a
long-expected source of profit over which he had often talked with the
Colonel, and for which he had even made preparations, had slipped
through his fingers. In other words, that all the mule-transport was
to be bought by a special officer. "I've come, _sahib_," he blurted
out, sitting down unasked, "to know if it is true that Mardsen _sahib_
has the purchase of mules."

"And if he has, what the devil is it to you, or to me?" The man's
arrogance was becoming unbearable, and Colonel Stuart was a great
stickler for etiquette.

"Only this; that if you are not going to deal fairly by me, you
mustn't count on my silence; that's all!"

"Go and tell the whole bazaar I owe you money, you black scoundrel,"
cried his hearer, annoyed beyond endurance by the man's assumption of
equality. "I'll pay you every penny, if I sell my soul for it, curse
you!"

"Eighty thousand rupees is a tall price, _sahib_," sneered the Lâlâ.
"And how about the contracts, and the commission, and the general
partnership? Am I to tell that also?"

The Colonel stared at him in blank surprise. God knows in his queer
conglomerate of morality it was hard to tell what elementary rock of
principle might be found; yet to a certain extent honour remained as
it were in pebbles, worn and frayed by contact with the stream of
life. "General partnership! you black devil, what do you mean?"

"Mean!" echoed the Lâlâ shrilly. "Why, the money I've lent you, _paid_
you for each contract; the commission I've given your clerks; the
grain your horses have eaten; the--"

The Colonel's right hand was raised above his head; the first coarse
rage of his face had settled into a stern wrath that turned it white.
"If you stop here another instant, by God I'll kill you!"

The words came like a steel-thrust, and the Lâlâ without a word turned
and fled before the Berserk rage of the Northman; it is always
terrible to the Oriental, and the Lâlâ was a heaven-sent coward.

"Stop!" cried the Colonel as the wretched creature reached the door.
He obeyed and came back trembling. "Take your money for the contract
with you; it's cancelled. I won't have it in the house. Take it back
and give me the receipt I gave you; give it me, I say." The Colonel,
fumbling at the lock of the safe, stuttered and shook with excitement.
"Take 'em back," he continued, flourishing a roll of notes. "The
receipt!--quick! out with it!--the receipt for the three thousand five
hundred I gave you this morning!"

"_Huzoor! Huzoor!_ I am looking for it; be patient one moment!"
The Lâlâ's quivering fingers blundered among the papers in his
pocket-book.

"Give it me, or, by heaven, I'll break every bone in your body!" His
hand came down with an ominous thud on the table.

"I will give it, _sahib_,--I have it,--here--no--ah! praise to the
gods!" He shook so that the paper rustled in his hand. Colonel Stuart
seized it, and tearing it to bits, flung the pieces in the waste paper
basket at his feet. "There goes your last contract from me, and
there's the door, and there's your money!" As he flung the notes in
the man's face they went fluttering over the floor, and he laughed
foolishly to see them gathered up in trembling haste.

"Gad!" he muttered as he sank exhausted into a chair, "there isn't
much fear of Shunker so long as I've a stick in my hand. Hullo! what's
that? Something rustled under the table. Here, Budlu! quick, lights!
It may be a snake! Confound the servants; they're never to be found!"

He stopped and drew his hand over his forehead two or three times.
Just then Budlu, entering with the lamp, stooped to pick something
from the floor. It was a note for a thousand rupees, crisp and
crackling.

Colonel Stuart looked at it in a dazed sort of way, then burst into a
roar of laughter and put it in his pocket-book. "My fair perquisite,
by Jove! and it will come in useful to-night at _écarté_. Budlu, give
me the little bottle. I must steady my nerves a bit if I'm to play
with Raby."




                             CHAPTER VII.


People who talk of the still Indian night can scarcely do so from
experience, for, especially during the hot weather, darkness in the
East is vocal with life. The cicala shrills its loudest, the birds are
awake, and the very trees and plants seem to blossom audibly. Go round
an Indian garden at sunset and it is a sepulchre; the roses shrivelled
in their prime, the buds scorched in the birth, the foliage beaten
down by the fierce sun. Visit it again at sunrise and you will find it
bright with blossom, sweet with perfume, refreshed with dew. That is
the work of night; what marvel then if it is instinct with sound and
movement! Never for one hour does silence fall upon the world. The
monotonous beat of some native musician's drum goes on and on; a
village dog barks, and is answered by another until seventy times
seven; a crow takes to cawing irrelatively; the birds sing in
snatches, and the Indian cock, like that of scriptural story, crows
for other reasons besides the dawn.

The long-legged rooster who habitually retired to sleep on the summit
of Colonel Stuart's cook-room, had, however, legitimate cause for his
vociferations, and dawn was just darkening the rest of the sky when
the sudden flapping of his wings startled the horse of an early
wayfarer who came at a walk down the Mall.

It was Philip Marsden setting out betimes for a two days' scour of the
district in search of the very mules out of which Shunker Dâs had
hoped to make so much profit. Most men, carrying ten thousand rupees
with them, would have applied for a treasure-chest and a police guard;
but Major Marsden considered himself quite sufficient security for the
roll of currency notes in his breast-pocket. As he quieted the
frightened horse, his close proximity to the Commissariat office
reminded him that he had forgotten to apply for a certain form on
which he had to register his purchases; the omission would entail
delay, so he anathematised his own carelessness and was riding on,
when a light in the office-windows attracted his attention. It was
early for any one to be at work, but knowing how time pressed in all
departments under the strain of war, he thought it not improbable that
some energetic _babu_ was thus seeking the worm of promotion, and
might be able to give him what he required. Dismounting, lest his
horse's tread should disturb the sleepers in the house by which he had
to pass, he hitched the reins to a tree, and made his way towards the
office; not without a kindly thought of the girl, forgetful of care,
who lay sleeping so near to him that, unconsciously, he slackened his
step and trod softly. He had been as good as his word, and that very
day the doctor was to go over and prescribe immediate change. Change!
he smiled at the idea, wondering what change could stem the course of
the inevitable.

As he drew near he saw that the light came, not from the office, but
from its chief's private room. He hesitated an instant; then a
suspicion that something might be wrong made him go on till he could
see through the open door into the room. Thefts were common enough in
cantonments, and it was as well to make sure. Through the _chick_ he
could distinctly see a well-known figure seated at the writing-table,
leaning forward on its crossed arms.

"Drunk!" said Philip Marsden to himself with a thrill of bitter
contempt and turned away. The bearer would find the Colonel and put
him decently to bed long before the girl was up. Poor Belle! The
little platform where she had stood but the night before was faintly
visible, bringing a recollection of her pale face and sad appeal. "It
is father,"--the first words she had ever said to him; the very first!
He retraced his steps quickly, set the _chick_ aside, and entered the
room. The lamp on the table was fast dying out, but its feeble flicker
fell full on the Colonel's grey hair, and lit up the shining gold lace
on his mess-jacket. Silver, and gold, and scarlet,--a brilliant show
of colour in the shabby, dim room. A curious smell in the air and a
great stillness made Philip Marsden stop suddenly and call the sleeper
by name. In the silence which followed he heard the ticking of a
chronometer which lay close to him. He called again, not louder, but
quicker, then with swift decision passed his arm round the leaning
figure and raised it from the table. The grey head fell back inertly
on his breast, and the set, half-closed eyes looked up lifelessly into
his.

"Dead," he heard himself say, "dead!"--dead, not drunk. As he stood
there for an instant with the dead man's head finding a resting-place
so close to his heart, the wan face looking up at him as if in a mute
appeal, a flame of bitter regret for his own harsh judgment seemed to
shrivel up all save pity. The great change had come, to end poor
Belle's anxieties. And she? Ah! poor child, who was to tell her of it?

He lifted the head from his breast, laying it once more, as he had
found it, on the crossed arms; then looked round the room rapidly. An
empty bottle of chloral on the table accounted for the faint sickly
smell he had noticed. Was it a mistake? If not, why? Perhaps there was
a letter. Something at any rate lay under the nerveless hands,
powerless now to defend their secret. Philip Marsden took the paper
from them gently and turned up the expiring lamp till it flared
smokily. The blotted writing was hard to read, yet easy to understand,
for it told a tale too often written; a tale of debt, dishonour,
remorse, despair. Ten thousand rupees borrowed from the safe, and an
unsigned cheque for the amount, drawn on no one, but payable to the
Government of India, lying beside the dead man in mute witness to the
last desire for restitution in the poor stupefied brain. A pile of
official letters were scattered on the floor as if they had fallen
from the table. All save one were unopened, but that one contained a
notification of Colonel Stuart's transfer. Major Marsden drew a chair
to the table and deliberately sat down to think.

Something must be done, and that quickly, for already the merciless
light of day was gaining on the darkness. "And there is nothing hid
that shall not be made manifest;" the words somehow recurred to his
memory bringing another pulse of pity for poor Belle. What was to be
done? The answer came to him suddenly in a rush, as if it had all been
settled before. Why had Fate sent him there with more than enough
money to save the girl from shame? Money that was his to use as he
chose, for he could repay it twenty times over ere nightfall. Why had
Fate mixed the girl's life with his, despite his efforts to stand
aloof? Why had she sent for him? Why,--why was he there? The dead
man's keys lay on the table, the sum owed was clearly set down in
black and white, the safe close at hand. What was there, save a
personal loss he could well afford, to prevent silence? And he had
promised help--

When the hastily-summoned doctor came in a few minutes later the
bottle of chloral still lay on the table, but the blotted paper and
the cheque were gone. The lamp had flared out, and a little heap of
grey ashes on the hearth drifted apart as the doors and windows were
flung wide open to let in all the light there was.

"He has been dead about two hours," said the doctor. "Over-dose of
chloral, of course. I forbade it from the hospital, but he got it
elsewhere."

They had laid the dead man on the floor, and the grey dawn falling on
his face made it seem greyer still. The native servants huddled
trembling at the door; the two Englishmen stood looking down upon the
still figure.

"There is always the fear of an over-dose," said Philip Marsden
slowly, "or of some rash mistake."

The doctor met his look comprehensively. "Exactly! who can tell?
Unless there is circumstantial evidence, and I see none as yet. Anyhow
he was not responsible, for he has been on the verge of _delirium
tremens_ for days."

"Then you give the benefit of the doubt?"

"Always, if possible."

Again the wind of dawn fanning the dead man's hair drifted the grey
ashes further apart.

"He had better stay here," continued the doctor. "Moving him might
rouse the poor girl, and there's no need for that as yet. By the way,
who is to tell her? There isn't a lady or a parson in the place."

"I suppose I must," returned Philip after a pause. "I think it might
be best, since she confided her trouble to me. But couldn't I get some
sort of a woman from barracks just to stay with her?"

"Right; you're a thoughtful fellow, Marsden. Take my buggy and go to
the sergeant-major; his wife will know of some one. I'll stay till you
return in case she wakes; and look here, as you pass send a man about
the coffin. The funeral must be this evening, and--"

Philip Marsden fled from the dreary details of death with a remark
that the doctor could send a messenger. He was no coward, yet he felt
glad to escape into the level beams of the rising sun. As he drove
down along the staring white roads he asked himself more than once why
he had interfered to save a girl he scarcely knew from the knowledge
of her father's dishonour; and if he could find no sufficient reason
for it he could find no regret either. It had been an impulse, and it
was over. He had kept his word to Dick, and done his best to drive
care from those clear eyes,--what beautiful eyes they were!

"Och then!" cried Mrs. O'Grady, the sergeant-major's wife, who,
hastily roused from her slumbers, came out into the verandah in scanty
attire, "and is the swate young leddy alone? It's meself wud go at
wanst but that I'm a Holy Roman, surr, and shud be talkin' of the
blessed saints in glory. An' that's not the thing wid a Prothestant in
his coffin."

Despite his anxiety her hearer could not repress a smile. "I don't set
so much store by religious consolation, Mrs. O'Grady. It's more a
kind, motherly person I want."

"Then, Tim!" cried the good lady, appealing to her spouse who had
appeared in shirt and trousers, "Mrs. Flanigan wud be the woman, but
that she's daily expectin' her tinth--"

"Isn't there some kindly person who's seen trouble?" hastily
interrupted the Major.

"Ah, if it's the throuble you're wantin', take little Mrs. Vickary. A
Baptist and a widder,--more by token twice; bore with two dhrunken
bastes, Major, like a blissed angel, and wud be ready to spake up for
anny one."

Major Marsden, with a recollection of Widow Vickary's sad face as
nurse by a comrade's sick bed, pleaded for a younger and brighter one.
Thereupon the serjeant-major suggested poor Healy's Mary Ann, but his
wife tossed her head. "What the men see in that gurrll, surr, I can't
say; but she'll go, and cheerful, wid her little boy; a swate little
boy, surr, like thim cherubs with a trumpet--for her father she come
to live wid died of the fayver a month gone, and her man is waiting to
be killed by thim Afghans somewhere."

So Major Marsden, driving back with poor Healy's Mary Ann and the
cherub wielding a piece of sugarcane as trumpet, found Belle still
sleeping.

Then together, in the fresh early morning, they broke the sad tidings
to the girl. How, it does not much matter, for words mean nothing. We
say, "He is dead," many and many a time, carelessly, indifferently.
Then comes a day when the sentence is fraught with wild despair and
helpless pain. The sun seems blotted out, and the world is dark. Yet
the words are the same, nor can pen and ink write them differently.

"Let me see that he is dead! Oh, let me see him!" was her cry; so they
took her across to the shabby room where everything stood unchanged
save for the sheeted figure on the string bed. The gardener had strewn
some roses over it and the sun streamed in brightly. The sight brought
no real conviction to Belle. It all seemed more dreamlike than ever.
To fall asleep, as she had done, in the turmoil of life, and to wake
finding the hush of death in possession of all things! She let Philip
Marsden lead her away passively like a child, and all through the long
day she sat idle and tearless, with her hands on her lap, as if she
were waiting for something or some one. Yet it was a busy day in that
quiet, empty house; for in India death comes rudely. Many a time has
the father to superintend the making of the little coffin, while the
mother stitches away to provide a daintier resting-place for the
golden head that is used to frills and lace; until, in the dawn, those
two go forth alone to the desolate graveyard, and he reads the Church
service as best he can, and she says "Amen" between her sobs. There
was none of this strain for Belle, nothing to remind her of the
inevitable; so she wondered what they wanted of her when, as the glare
of sunset reddened the walls of her room, Major Marsden came and
looked at her with pitying eyes. "It is time we were starting, Miss
Stuart," he said gently.

"Starting! where?"

"We thought you would like to go to the cemetery, and I have arranged
to drive you down. It will be a military funeral, of course."

She rose swiftly in passionate entreaty. "Ah no, no! not so soon! he
is not dead! Oh I cannot, I cannot!" Then seeing the tender gravity of
his face, she clasped her hands on his arm and begged to see _him_
once more,--just to say good-bye.

He shook his head. "It is too late--it is best not."

"But I have no dress,--it can't be--" she pleaded vainly.

"Every one will be in white as you are," he returned with tears he
could not check in his eyes. "Come! it will be better for you by and
by." He laid his hand on her clasped ones. She looked in his eyes
doubtfully, and did as she was bidden.

"We will drive out a bit first," said Philip, when she had taken her
seat by his side in the tall dog-cart that seemed so out of keeping
with its dismal office. "We have plenty of time for I thought the air
would do your head good,--and,--it was best for you to be away just
now."

Better, and best! As if anything could make any difference now! "You
are very kind," she said in dull recognition of his care.

Philip Marsden never forgot that drive; the memory of it remained with
him for years as a kind of nightmare. The girl in her white dress and
sailor hat as he had seen her at many a tennis-party; the great bank
of clouds on the horizon telling of welcome rain; the little squirrels
leaping across the white road; the cattle returning homewards amid
clouds of dust; the stolid stare of the natives as they passed by. It
was almost a relief to stand side by side before an open grave
listening to an even, disciplined tramp audible above the muffled
drums coming nearer and nearer.

A dingy brick wall bleached to mud-colour shut out all view, but high
up in the sky, above the fringe of grey tamarisk trees, a procession
of flame-edged clouds told that, out in the west, Nature was
celebrating the obsequies of day in glorious apparel. Suddenly _The
Dead March_ struck up, loud and full, bringing to Philip Marsden's
memory many a sword-decked coffin and riderless charger behind which
he had walked, wondering if his turn would come next. The music ceased
with a clash of arms at the gate; and after a low-toned order or two
the procession appeared in narrow file up the central path. The white
uniforms looked ghostly in the deepening shadows; but through a break
in the trees a last sunbeam slanted over the wall, making the spikes
on the officers' helmets glow like stars.

Belle's clasped yet listless fingers tightened nervously as the
Brigade-Major's voice rose and fell in monotonous cadence about "our
dear brother departed." It seemed to her like a dream; or rather as if
she too were dead and had no tears, no grief, nothing but a great
numbness at her heart. Then some one put a clumsily-made cross of
white flowers into her hands, bidding her lay it on the coffin, bared
now of the protecting flag; and she obeyed, wondering the while why
other people should have thought of these things when she had not, and
thinking how crooked it was, and how much better she could have made
it herself. Perhaps; for the hands that twined it were not used to
such woman's work. It was Philip Marsden's task, also, to throw the
first handful of earth into the grave, and draw Belle's arm within his
own before the salutes rang out. They startled the screaming parrots
from their roost among the trees, and sent them wheeling and flashing
like jewels against the dark purple clouds.

"Was it never going to end?" she thought wearily as they waited again,
and yet again, for the rattle of the rifles. Yet she stood heedlessly
silent, even when the band struck into quick time and the cheerful
echo of the men's answering footsteps died away into the distance.

"Take her home," said the doctor, who with John Raby had remained to
see the grave properly filled in. "I'll call round by and by with a
sleeping draught; that will do her more good than anything."

As they drove back she complained, quite fretfully, of the cold, and
her companion reined in the horse while he wrapped his military coat
round her, fastening it beneath her soft dimpled chin with hands that
trembled a little. She seemed to him inexpressibly pitiful in her
grief, and his heart ached for her.

"It is going to rain, I think," she said suddenly, with her eyes fixed
on the dull red glow barred by heavy storm clouds in the west; adding
in a lower tone, "Father will get wet!"

Major Marsden looked at her anxiously and drove faster, frightened at
the dull despair of her tone. He had meant to say good-bye at the
door, but he could not. How could he leave her to that unutterable
loneliness? And yet what good could he do beyond beguiling her to take
a few mouthfuls of food? Poor Healy's Mary Ann proved helpless before
a form of grief to which she was utterly unaccustomed, and as her
presence seemed to do more harm than good Philip Marsden sent her into
the next room, where she nursed her boy and wept profusely. He sat
talking to Belle till long after the mess-hour, and then, when he did
turn to go, the sight of her seated alone, tearless and miserable in
the big, empty room was too much for his soft heart. He came back
hastily, bending over her, then kneeling to look in her downcast face,
and take her cold little hands into his warm ones and say kind words
that came from his very heart. Perhaps they brought conviction,
perhaps the touch of his hand assured her of sympathy, for suddenly
her dull despair gave way; she laid her head on his shoulder and cried
pitifully, as children cry themselves to sleep.

With the clasp of his fingers on hers and his breath stirring her soft
curly hair, Philip Marsden's heart beat fast and his pulses thrilled.
His own emotion startled and perplexed him; he shrank from it, and yet
he welcomed it. Did he love her? Was this the meaning of it all?

"How good you are," she whispered, trying to regain her composure.
"What should I have done without you?" Her unconsciousness smote him
with regret and a great tenderness.

"There are plenty who will be kind to you," he answered unsteadily.
"Life holds everything for you yet, my dear; peace, and happiness, and
love."

Love! Did it hold his for her? he asked himself again as he walked
homewards in the dark. Love! He was quite a young man still, only two
and thirty, yet he had deliberately set passion and romance from him
years before. Poverty had stood between him and the realisation of a
dream till, with the sight of his ideal profoundly happy as some one
else's wife, had come distrust and contempt for a feeling that
experience showed him did not, could not last. Why, therefore, should
it enter into and disturb his life at all? Friendship? ah, that was
different! Perhaps the future held a time when he would clasp hands
with a life-companion; a woman to be the mistress of his home, the
mother of his children. But Belle! poor little, soft Belle Stuart,
with her beautiful grey eyes! He seemed to feel the touch of her hand
in his, the caress of her hair on his lips; and though he laughed
grimly at himself, he could not master the joy that took possession of
him at the remembrance. Dear little Belle! Amidst the doubt and
surprise which swept over him as he realised his own state of mind,
but one thing gave him infinite satisfaction,--he had saved her from
the far more lasting trouble of her father's disgrace. Friend, or
lover, it had been a good deed to do, and he was glad that he had done
it. Nothing could alter that. And while he slept, dreaming still of
his clasp on the little cold yet willing hand, an official envelope
lay on the table beside him mocking his security. He opened it next
morning, to lay it aside with a curse at his own ill luck, though it
was only a notification that Major P. H. Marsden would carry on the
current duties of the Commissariat office till further orders. He had
half a mind to go over to the Brigade office and get himself excused:
a word or two about his other work would do it; but his pride rose in
arms against any shirking for private reasons. Besides, there might be
nothing wrong in Colonel Stuart's accounts, and even if there was, he
would be the best man to find it out. Yet he walked up and down the
verandah a prey to conflicting desires, bitterly angry with himself
for hesitating an instant. Common sense told him that it might be as
well for one less biassed than he was by previous knowledge to
undertake the scrutiny, that it was scarcely fair for him to go to the
task with a foregone conclusion in his mind; but pride suggested that
he could not trust himself to decide fairly even now. How could he,
when he was bitterly conscious of one overmastering desire to save
Belle? Then came the thought that if she was indeed what in his heart
he believed her to be, if her steadfastness and straightforwardness
were more than a match for his own, then the very idea of his refusing
the task would be an offence to her. After that, nothing could have
prevented him from placing himself with open eyes in a position from
which, in common fairness to himself and others, he ought to have
escaped.




                            CHAPTER VIII.


A few days after Colonel Stuart's death John Raby was making up his
accounts in a very unenviable frame of mind, though the balance on the
right side was a large one. As a rule this result would have given him
keen pleasure; for though he was as yet too young to enjoy that
delight of dotage, the actual fingering of gold, he inherited the
instinct too strongly not to rejoice at the sight of its equivalent in
figures. There were two reasons for his annoyance. First, the
constantly recurring regret of not being able to invest his savings as
he chose. With endless opportunities for turning over a high
percentage coming under his notice, it was galling to be restricted by
the terms of his covenant with Government from any commercial
enterprise. Not that he would have scrupled to evade the regulation
had the game been worth the candle; but as yet it was not. By and by,
when his capital warranted a plunge, he had every intention of risking
his position, and, if need be, of throwing it up. But for this
justification he must wait years, unless indeed Fate sent him a rich
wife. Heiresses however are scarce in India, and furlough was not yet
due. So John Raby had to content himself with four per cent, which was
all the more annoying when he remembered that Shunker Dâs was making
forty out of the very indigo business on which he had tried to evade
the income-tax. Sooner or later John Raby intended to have his finger
in that pie, unless some more fortunate person plucked the plum out
first.

The other reason for his annoyance arose from the fact, clearly
demonstrated by his neat system of accounts, that over nine thousand
rupees of his balance were the proceeds of _écarté_ played with a man
who had had the confidence to make him his executor. The young
civilian had no qualms of conscience here either; it had been a fair
fight, the Colonel considering himself quite as good at the game as
his antagonist. But somehow the total looked bad beside that other
one, where intricate columns of figures added themselves into a row of
nothings for the widow and orphans. Not a penny, so far as the
executor could see, after paying current debts. About Madame and the
black-and-tans, as he irreverently styled her family, he did not much
concern himself; but for Belle it was different. He liked the girl,
and had often told himself that the addition of money would have made
her an excellent wife; just the sort one could safely have at home;
and that to a busy man meant much. The thought that Philip Marsden
with his large fortune showed a disposition to annex the prize
lessened his regrets for her poverty, and yet increased them. Why, he
asked himself savagely, did nice girls never have money? The only
gleam of satisfaction, in short, to be yielded by the balance was the
remembrance that his possession of the nine thousand rupees prevented
Lâlâ Shunker Dâs from absorbing it. As a matter of fact his
executorship had proved a wholesome check on the usurer's outcries,
and it gave the young man some consolation to think that no one could
have managed the Lâlâ so well as he did. The smile raised by this
remembrance lingered still when Major Marsden walked, unannounced,
through the window in unceremonious Indian fashion.

"Hullo," said John Raby, "glad to see you. Miss Stuart is much better
to-day."

There was no reason why this very pleasant and natural remark should
annoy his hearer, but it did. It reminded him that John Raby had
acquired a sort of authority over the dead man's daughter by virtue of
his executorship. Neither of them had seen her since the day of the
funeral, for she had been hovering on the verge of nervous fever; but
the responsibility of caring for her had fallen on John Raby and not
on Philip Marsden. John Raby, and not he, had had to make all the
necessary arrangements for her comfort and speedy departure to the
hills as soon as possible; for Mrs. Stuart had collapsed under the
shock of her husband's death, and the rapid Indian funeral had made
the presence of the others impossible. So Philip Marsden felt himself
to be out in the cold, and resented it.

"The nurse told me so when I inquired just now," he replied shortly.

"I'm to see her this afternoon when she comes back from her drive.
I've sent for Shunker Dâs's carriage."

Major Marsden frowned. "You might have chosen some one else's, surely.
He ruined her father."

"Not at all; he lent him money. Some one had to do it."

"Well, it's a grim world, and her drive can't be more so than the last
she had." The remembrance evidently absorbed him, for he sat silent.

"You're looking used up, Marsden," said the other kindly. "Anything
the matter?"

"Yes."

"Well, if it has to do with the Commissariat business I don't wonder.
The Colonel's private affairs are simply chaos." He pointed to the
piles of papers on and below the table with a contemptuous smile.

Major Marsden shook his head. "The public ones are in fairly good
order. I'm surprised at the method; but of course he had good clerks;
and then the system of checks--"

"Make it possible to be inaccurate with the utmost accuracy. What's
wrong?"

Philip Marsden moved uneasily in his chair and gave an impatient sigh.
"I suppose I've got to tell you, because you're the man's executor;
but I don't want to."

"Never do anything you don't want, my dear fellow; it's a mistake. You
don't know what will please other people, and you generally have a
rough guess at your own desires."

"I don't suppose this will please you, the fact is there is a deficit
of four thousand five hundred rupees in the private safe of which
Colonel Stuart kept the key."

"Is that all?"

"All! Surely it is enough?"

"Quite enough; but I'm not exactly surprised."

"Then I am," returned the Major emphatically. "In fact I don't believe
there really is any deficit at all. Do you think Shunker Dâs is the
sort of man to make a false claim?"

"Not unless he has fallen upon fair proofs," said the other coolly.
"What claim does he make?"

"He says he paid in three thousand five hundred the very day of
Colonel Stuart's death and produces a receipt. Another thousand was
paid in by some one else the day before. It seems odd that this should
just make up the deficiency."

"But you have no proof that these are actually the notes missing?"

"Curiously enough I have. Contrary to what one would have expected,
Colonel Stuart made a practice of writing the numbers of notes
received in a private ledger, and none of the four entered as having
been given by Shunker are to be found. Now, as you were Stuart's
friend, and are his executor, do you know of any large payment made to
any one within two days of his death? It limits itself, you see, to
that time."

"Nothing to account for three thousand five hundred," returned John
Raby a little hastily. "Let's stick to Shunker's claim first; it may
be false. You say he holds a receipt?"

"Yes, and gives the numbers of the notes also."

"Right?"

"All but one. The book gives a 3 where he gives a 5; but natives often
confuse figures."

John Raby nodded, and leant back in his chair thinking. "I believe the
notes were paid," he said at last, "and if they are not to be found,
the inference, I'm afraid, is clear. The Colonel _borrowed_ them."

"I don't believe it," returned the Major slowly. He had been drawing
diagrams idly on a piece of paper and now threw aside the pen with
decision. "I don't believe it," he repeated, "and I'll tell you why;
I'd rather not tell you, as I said before, but as you're his executor
I must. When I found him dead that morning there was a paper,--it
wasn't a mistake, you understand"--his hearer nodded again--"and
in it he had set down the reasons, or want of reasons, clearly
enough. I haven't got the paper; I burnt it. I suppose I ought to
have kept it, but it seemed a pity at the time. Anyhow the total he
had,--borrowed--was close on ten thousand."

"Ten! you said there was only--"

"Just so; you see, as luck would have it, I had money with me at the
time. So I replaced it."

"Ten thousand?"

"No; to be strictly accurate nine thousand seven hundred and fifty.
Well,--you needn't stare so, Raby! Why the devil shouldn't I if I
chose?"

John Raby gave a low whistle. "You must be awfully fond of Belle," he
said after a pause.

Philip flushed a deep angry red. Ever since the possible necessity for
giving his action to the world had dawned upon him he had known what
comment would be made; but the knowledge did not lessen its sting.
"Don't you think we had better keep Miss Stuart's name out of the
conversation? I merely tell you this to show that I have good reasons
for supposing that there is some chicanery, or confusion--"

"I beg your pardon! exactly so," assented John Raby with a smile. "I
am as anxious as you can be to keep her out of it; and so, as
executor, I'll undertake to refund the deficiency at once. There may
be some mistake, but it is best to have no inquiry."

"I hardly see how that is to be prevented, for of course I had to
report the matter."

John Raby literally bounded from his chair in unrestrained vexation.
"Reported it! my dear Marsden, what the devil!--Oh, I beg your pardon,
but really, to begin with, you cut your own throat."

"What else could I do?" asked the other quietly. "You forget I am in
charge of the office."

"Do?" returned his hearer, pausing in his rapid pacing of the room.
"Ah, I don't suppose _you_ could do anything else; but I'm not so
high-flown myself, and I can't see the good of chucking ten thousand
rupees into the gutter for the sake of a sentiment, and then chucking
the sentiment after it. For the girl adored her father, and I warn
you--"

"If we can't keep off that subject I'll go," interrupted Philip
rising. "I thought you might know something. Colonel Stuart dined with
you that last evening, if you remember."

The civilian needed no reminder; indeed for the last ten minutes he
had been distractingly conscious of a note for a thousand rupees lying
in his despatch-box which might throw-some light on the mysterious
disappearances. "Yes," he replied, "he did, and,--I see what you are
thinking of, Marsden--he played _écarté_ too; but to tell the truth,
he was so fuddled and excited that I refused to go on, and sent him
home. See what comes of benevolence. If I had let him play and rooked
him, he wouldn't have had the opportunity of brooding over
difficulties and putting an end to them. Again, you see there's
nothing so unsafe as unselfishness."

Philip, remembering the notice of transfer he had found open by the
dead man's side, wondered if matters might not have turned out
differently had it been viewed by the calm light of day.

"Well, it can't be helped now," continued the speaker. "I don't
approve of what has been done, but I'll do my best,--in fact I'm bound
as executor--to clear the matter up. Though I'm sure I don't know
where the inquiry may not lead me. It's an infernal nuisance, nothing
less! Well, hand me over the papers and--I suppose you've no objection
to my searching the office?"

"None; the Colonel's room is as he left it. I was afraid of noise so
near the house." The speaker frowned at his own words, annoyed to find
how thought for Belle crept into all his actions.

"So far, good. And look here, Marsden, if you value that girl's
opinion go and tell her the downright truth. She will be able to see
you this afternoon."

A piece of sound advice meant kindly, which had the not unusual effect
of making the recipient hesitate about a course of action on which he
had almost decided. In after years, when he considered the tangled
clew Fate held at this time for his unwinding, he never hesitated to
say, "Here I went wrong;" but at the time it seemed of small
importance whether he saw the girl that day or the next. And once more
the assumption of authority on John Raby's part irritated him into
contradiction. "It will be a pity to disturb Miss Stuart's first day,"
he replied stiffly, and rode away.

The young civilian shrugged his shoulders. Philip Marsden wasn't a bad
fellow on the whole, but a prig of the first water. Imagine any one
gifted with a grain of common sense acting as he had done! Why, if he
wanted the girl's good graces, had he not paid up the rest of the
money and finished the whole affair? It was a long price to pay, of
course, but it was better than giving ten thousand for nothing. Only a
morbid self-esteem could have prevented him. Really, the sense of duty
to be found in some people was almost enough to engender a belief in
original sin. The mere struggle for existence could never have
produced such a congeries of useless sentiment.

He threw himself into a chair determining to have a quiet cigar before
tasking his brain with further thought about what he had just heard.
But the first glance at the daily paper which had just come in made
him throw it from him in disgust; for it contained a fulsomely
flattering notice extolling Major Marsden at the expense of Colonel
Stuart, and openly hinting at discrepancies in the accounts which the
former officer was determined to bring home to the latter. The style
betrayed the hand of some clerk toadying for promotion; but style or
no style, the matter was clear, and to be read by the million. It all
came from Marsden's infernal sense of duty, and John Raby had half a
mind to spoil his little game by sending the paper over to Belle as
usual. But with all his faults he was not a spiteful man, or one
inclined to play the part of dog-in-the-manger. Consequently when Lâlâ
Shunker Dâs's carriage went over for Belle the _chuprassi_ in charge
only carried a bouquet; the newspaper remained behind, keeping company
with John Raby and magnanimity.

Belle never noticed the omission, for she was still strangely
forgetful and indifferent; even when she drove along the familiar
road, she hardly remembered anything of her last dismal ride. Only one
or two things showed distinctly in the midst of past pain; such
trivial things as a crooked cross of flowers, and screaming parrots in
a stormy sky. The rest had gone, to come back,--the doctor told John
Raby--ere long; just now the forgetfulness was best, though it showed
how narrowly she had escaped brain-fever. So nobody spoke of the past,
and while Philip was cherishing the remembrance of that first day, and
using it to build up his belief in her trust, she was not even
conscious that he had been the kindest among many kind.

Meanwhile Philip Marsden had not found himself in a bed of roses. The
impossibility of seeing Belle left him a prey to uncertainty, and if
he was ready fifty times a day to admit that he was in love, there
were quite as many times when he doubted the fact. Yet love or no
love, he was strenuously eager to save her from trouble; so his relief
at finding the office in good order had been great. In regard to
matters which had been in Colonel Stuart's own hands he naturally felt
safe; the discovery of the deficiency therefore had been a most
unpleasant shock, the more so because he saw at once that inquiry
might make it necessary for him to betray his own action. He wearied
himself fruitlessly with endeavours to discover any error, but the
thought of hushing the matter up never occurred to him as possible. To
some men it might have been a temptation; to him it was none, so he
deserved no credit on that score. He told himself again that if Belle
were what he deemed her, she would see the necessity of a report also;
but then he was reckoning on perfection, and poor Belle, as it so
happened, was in such a state of nervous tension that she was utterly
incapable of judging calmly about anything relating to her father.

She lay on the sofa after she returned from her drive, feeling all the
dreariness of coming back to everyday life, and, in consequence,
exalting the standard of her loss till the tears rolled quietly down
her cheeks. Whereupon poor Healy's Mary Ann, full of the best
intentions, brewed her a cup of tea, and sent over the road for the
newspaper, which she imagined had been forgotten. The master of the
house was out for his evening ride, and thus it came to pass that when
he called on his way home, he found Belle studying the misleading
paragraph with flushed cheeks and tearful eyes. "What does it mean?"
she asked tempestuously. "What is it that he dares to say of father?"

With her pretty, troubled face looking into his John Raby washed his
hands of further magnanimity. He refused to play the part of
Providence to a man who could not look after his own interests, and
whom, in a vague way, he felt to be a rival. So, considering Belle
only, he told the modified truth, making as light as he could of the
deficiency, and openly expressing his regret that it should ever have
been reported, the more so because Major Marsden himself believed
there was some mistake. This consolation increased her indignation.

"Do you mean to say," she cried, trembling with anger and weakness,
"that he has dragged father's name in the dirt for a mistake? Why
didn't he come to me, or to you? _We_ would have told him it was
impossible. But he always misjudged father; he hated him; he never
would come here. Ah yes! I see it all now! I understand."

The "we" sounded sweetly in the young man's ears, but its injustice
was too appalling to be passed over. He felt compelled to defence. For
a moment he thought of telling the whole truth, but he reflected that
Philip had a tongue as well as he, and that no one had a right to make
free with another man's confidence. Consequently his palliation only
referred to the culprit's well-known inflexibility and almost morbid
sense of duty; all of which made Belle more and more angry, as if the
very insistence on such virtues involved some depreciation of their
quality in the dead man.

"I do not care what happens now," she said vehemently. "I know well
enough that nothing he can say will harm father's good name; but I
will never forgive him, never! It is no use excusing him; all you say
only makes it more unnecessary, and cruel, and,--and stupid. I will
never forgive him; no, never!"

And all that night she lay awake working herself into a fever, mental
and bodily, by piling up the many evidences in favour of her theory as
to Philip's long-cherished enmity. He had never called, never spoken
to them when all the world beside had been friendly. His very kindness
to Dick was tainted; for had he not sided with the boy against her
father? Once the train of thought started, it was easy to turn the
points so that there seemed no possibility of its following any other
line than the one she laid down for it as she went along. Finally, to
clinch the matter, memory served her a sorry trick by suddenly
recalling to her recollection Philip Marsden's gloomy face when
she had told him who she was on their first meeting at the
railway-station. She sat up in bed with little hot hands stretched
into the darkness. "O father! father! I was the only one who loved
you,--the only one!" A climax at once of sorrow and consolation which
somehow soothed her to sleep.

Now, while she was employed in blackening his character, Philip
Marsden was crediting her with all the cardinal virtues. He had not
seen the daily paper, for reasons which put many other things out of
his head for the time being. He had no idea when he wilfully went to
play racquets that evening instead of following Raby's advice of
seeing Belle, that he was throwing away his last chance of an
interview; but as he sat outside the court, cooling himself after the
game, an urgent summons came from the orderly-room. Ten minutes after
he was reading a telegram bidding the 101st Sikhs start to the front
immediately. Farewell to leisure; for though the regiment had been
under warning for service and in a great measure prepared for it, the
next forty-eight hours were ones of exceeding bustle. Philip, harassed
on all sides, had barely time to realise what it meant; and, despite a
catch at his heart when he thought of Belle, the blood ran faster in
his veins from the prospect of action. His own certainty, moreover,
was so great, that it seemed almost incredible that one, of whose
sympathy he felt assured, should see the matter with other eyes.
Nevertheless he was determined to tell her all at the first
opportunity; and often, as he went untiringly through the wearisome
details of inspection, his mind was busy over the interview to come;
but the end was always the same, and left him with a smile on his
face.

John Raby happened to be standing in the verandah when, between pillar
and post, Philip found that vacant five minutes which he had been
chasing all day long.

"Can't see you, I'm afraid," he returned, cheerfully, to the inquiry
for Miss Stuart. "The fact is she has worried herself into a fever
over that paragraph. I don't wonder; it was infernal!"

"What paragraph?" asked Philip innocently.

John Raby looked at him and laughed, not a very pleasant kind of
laugh. "Upon my soul," he said, "you _are_ an unlucky beggar. I begin
to think it's a true case, for you've enough real bad luck to make a
three-volume-course of true love run rough! So you haven't seen it?
Then I'll fetch it out. The paper is just inside."

Philip, reining in his restive horse viciously, read the offending
lines, punctuating them with admonitory digs of his heels and tugs at
the bridle as the charger fretted at the fluttering paper. He looked
well on horseback, and the civilian, lazily leaning against a pillar,
admired him, dangling sword, jingling spurs, and all. He folded the
paper methodically against his knee and handed it back. "And Miss
Stuart believed all that?" he asked quietly.

"Women always believe what they see printed. She is in an awful rage,
of course; but I warned you, Marsden, you know I did."

"You were most kind. Will you tell Miss Stuart, when you see her, that
I called to say good-bye and that I was sorry,--yes! you can say I was
sorry, for the cause of her fever." His tone was bitterness itself.

"Look here, Marsden," said the other, "don't huff; take my advice this
time and write to her."

"Do you think the belief of women extends to what they see written? I
didn't know you had such a high opinion of the sex, Raby! Well,
good-bye to you, and thanks."

"Oh, I shall be down to see the 101st march out. Five A.M., isn't it?"

Philip nodded as he rode off. All through that last night in
cantonments he was angry with everything and everybody, himself
included. Why had he meddled? What demon had possessed the Brigadier
to put him in charge of the Commissariat office? Why had not this
order for the front come before? Why had it come now? What induced the
_babu_ who penned that paragraph to be born? And why did a Mission
school teach him the misuse of adjectives? He was still too angry to
ask himself why he had not taken John Raby's advice; that touched too
closely on the real mistake to be acknowledged yet awhile.

The gloom on his face was not out of keeping with the scene, as the
regiment marched down the Mall at early dawn while the band played
_Zakhmi_, that plaintive lament of the Afghan maiden for her wounded
lover. Yet there was no pitiful crowd of weeping women and children,
such as often mars the spectacle of a British regiment going on
service. The farewells had all been said at home, and if the women
wept in the deserted lines, the men marched, eyes front without a
waver, behind the sacred flag borne aloft by the tall drum-major,
whose magnificent stature was enhanced by an enormous high-twined
turban. Close at his heels went two men waving white silver-mounted
whisks over the Holy Grunth, watchful lest aught might settle on the
sacred page which lay open on a yellow satin cushion borne by four
sergeants. There, plainly discernible even by the half-light, was
inscribed in broad red and black lettering the sure guide through
death to life for its faithful followers. Then, separated by a wide
blank from the book in front and the men behind, rode the Colonel.
Finally, shoulder to shoulder, marched as fine a body of men as could
be seen east or west, with dexterously knotted turbans neutralising
the least difference in height, so that the companies came by as if
carved out of one block.

It was a stirring sight, making the blood thrill, especially when, at
the turn of the road leading to barracks, the bands of the British
regiments formed in front to play their fellow soldiers out of the
station, and the Sikhs broke into their old war cry, "_Jai! Jail
guru-ji ke Jai!_ (Victory, victory, our Teachers' victory)." It
mingled oddly with the--strains of "The Girl I left Behind Me."

A little group of horsemen waited for the last farewells at the
cantonment boundary, and one of them riding alongside told Philip
Marsden that a clue had been found, and the truth would be made
manifest. The conventional answer of pleasure came reluctantly, but as
the hands of the two men met, the gloomy, troubled face looked almost
wistfully into the clever, contented one. "You are very good to her,
Raby; I know that; good-bye." The workmanlike groans and shrieks of
the fife and drum replaced the retiring bands, and as cheer after
cheer greeted the final departure Philip Marsden felt that John Raby
was left completely master of the situation.

That evening, twenty miles out among the sandhills, he put his pride
in his pocket, impelled thereto by a persistent gnawing at his heart,
and followed the advice of writing to Belle; an honest, if somewhat
hard letter, telling her, not of his good deeds, but the truth of
those which seemed to her bad. Ten days after at Peshawar, with the
last civilised post he was to see for many weeks, his letter came back
to him unopened and re-addressed in a shaky hand.

The heart-ache was better by that time. "She might have afforded me
the courtesy of an envelope," he said as he threw the letter into the
camp-fire.




                              CHAPTER IX.


The clue spoken of by John Raby lay in the note for a thousand rupees
with which Colonel Stuart had paid a portion of his card debts during
his last deal in the great game. It proved to be not only one of the
missing notes, but, as luck would have it, the very one about the
number of which uncertainty existed. The figures stood as the Colonel
had written them; so the mistake lay with the usurer, if it was really
a mistake. John Raby lit a cigarette and meditated, with the list
before him; but beyond an odd persistency in threes and fives, the
figures presented no peculiarity. So he set the problem aside till he
could tackle it on the spot where it had arisen; for he was a great
believer in scenery as an aid to the senses.

The day was almost done, however, ere he found leisure for the task;
nevertheless, fatigued as he was, he set to work methodically and was
rewarded by the immediate discovery that uncertainty existed as to the
number of another note, the one which had been paid in by some one
else. The entry had been blotted by the hasty closing of the ledger,
and though it read like 159934, it was quite conceivable that it might
be something else. Again those threes and fives! Idly enough he wrote
the two uncertainties on a sheet of paper, and sat staring at them
till suddenly a suggestion came to him, making him re-write the number
given by Shunker in close imitation of the dead man's bold black
figures, and then deliberately blot it by placing it in the ledger.
The result bore so close a resemblance to the blurred entry that his
quick brain darted off in a wonder how the usurer had got hold of the
number of a note which he had not paid in. No reasonable explanation
suggesting itself, he began a systematic search in the waste paper
basket; the scraps there would at least tell him on what work the
Colonel had been engaged during his last day. He knew that Shunker had
had an interview with him in the morning, but that did not account for
the shreds of a receipt for three thousand five hundred maunds of
grain which he found almost on the top. An old receipt dated some
months back; three thousand five hundred too--an odd coincidence! So
far good; the next thing was to have a sight of Shunker's face before
he had time to hear rumours or make plans.

The summons to come up for an interview early next morning rather
pleased the Lâlâ, for he received it while at the receipt of custom,
when it added to his importance in the eyes of the wedding guests who
sat watching a nautch girl sidle, like a pouter pigeon, over a strip
of dirty carpet. She was stout to obesity; her oiled hair was
plastered so as to narrow her forehead to a triangle; her voluminous
skirts ended just under the arms in a superfluity of bust. She held
one fat hand to her cheek persistently as if in the agonies of
toothache, while she yelled away as if the dentist had failed to
comfort her. Yet the best native society of Faizapore had sat there
for an hour and a half with the impassive faces of the Asiatic bent on
amusement; a face which surely will make Paradise dull work for the
_houris_.

"Yea! I will come to Raby if he needs me," assented the rich man,
turning with a spiteful chuckle to his right hand, where old Mahomed
Lateef sat solemn and dignified. "See you, Khân _sahib_, how even the
Sirkar favours money?"

"When I was young, Oh Shunker!" retorted the other grimly, "the hands
of Nikalsane and Jan Larnce held the sword too tight to leave room for
the rupees."

"Ay! when you Khâns of Kurtpore brought fifty swords to flash behind
theirs, without payment. Swords are bought nowadays, and those who
lack money must e'en go to the wall."

The old Mahomedan's eyes flared. "_Mashâllâh_, oh _buniah-ji_, if they
go to the wall in my poor house they will find swords enow! But
yesterday a hut fell--I mean 'twas pulled down for repairs--and we
came on five Persian blades![3] Ready to use, O Lâlâ-ji; no spot or
blemish of rust. Haply they may help back the rupees some day."

Shunker moved uneasily in his chair, and the guests sank again into
silence, broken only by the occasional tributary hiccup which native
etiquette demands for the memory of dinner. The stars shone overhead,
and a great trail of smoke from the brazier of oil and cotton-seed
seemed to mix itself up with the Milky Way. Little Nuttu, the hero of
the feast, had fallen asleep in his chair, his baby bride being
engaged in cutting her teeth elsewhere. A group of younger men,
squatted in the far corner round a flaring paraffin lamp, talked
vociferously in a mixed jargon of "individual freedom," "political
rights," and "representative government." And no one laughed or cried
at anything; neither at the nautch girl with her unmentionable songs,
nor the spectacle of people discussing freedom while engaged in taking
it away from two harmless infants.

So the night wore on in dull dissipation, leaving Shunker at a
disadvantage when he came to confront the young civilian's clear-cut,
clean-shaven face in the morning.

"You have made a mistake, Lâlâ-ji," he began, opening fire at once; "a
serious mistake about the notes you claim to have left with Colonel
Stuart." So much, at least, was certain; John Raby, however, saw more
in the unrestrained start of alarm which the surprise evoked. "It
isn't so very serious," he continued blandly; "nothing for you to be
so frightened about, Lâlâ-ji; we all make mistakes at times. By the
way, did you keep your original memorandum of the numbers in English
or Mâhâjani [accountant's character]?" "In Mâhâjani, _Huzoor_,"
bleated Shunker, and John Raby smiled. For this diminished the
possibility of clerical error enormously; indeed it was to settle this
point that he had sent for the usurer. "So much the better for you,"
he went on carelessly, "and if you will bring the paper to me this
evening, say about six, I'll see if we can get the error in your claim
altered. You have interchanged a five and a three in one number, and
it is as well to be accurate before the inquiry commences. It will be
a very stringent one. By the by, what time did you last see Colonel
Stuart?"

But the usurer was prepared this time, and when he finally bowed
himself out, John Raby was as much in the dark as ever in regard to
the details of a plot which he felt sure had been laid.

All day long in a sort of under-current of thought he was busy
ransacking memory and invention for a theory, coming back again and
again, disheartened, to the half-tipsy laugh with which Colonel Stuart
had given him the note, declaring it was a windfall. A windfall! what
could that mean! Had Shunker given it back? Then there must have been
a second interview; but none of the servants could speak to one. He
went over early to the office and sat in the dead man's chair trying
to piece things together. The shadows were beginning to cling to the
corners ere the usurer was announced, and something in the scared
glance he gave towards the tall figure in the seat of office convinced
John Raby that the man was reminded of another and similar visit to
that room. The quaver in hand and voice with which he produced his
day-book, and said that the _Huzoor's_ number was right after all,
clinched the matter.

"I suppose," remarked the young man coolly, "you were confused by the
other note." A random shot, but it struck home!

"_Huzoor!_" faltered the fat man.

John Raby looked him full in the face, and went one better; poker was
a game of which he was passionately fond. "The other note with the
threes and the fives which you saw,--which you got when,--I mean the
second time you came here--when you brought the receipt for the grain
which he destroyed--By Jove!" He threw his hand up, and a light came
into his face. "Fool not to see it before--the receipt,--the _wrong_
receipt of course."

"But he never gave me the money; I swear he didn't!" protested
Shunker, completely off his guard.

His hearer broke into a fit of cynical laughter. "Thank you, Shunker,
thank you! Of course he gave you the money: I see it all; and as one
of the numbers were different, you improved on your original
memorandum, thinking you had made a mistake. Stay,--number 150034
wasn't your note. By Jove! he must have given you back the whole roll
of four thousand five hundred by mistake. You're a bigger blackguard
than I thought!"

"No, no!" cried the usurer, beside himself with fear of this
_shaitan_. "Only three! I swear it! I only picked up three."

"Thank you again, Lâlâ. You picked up three. Let me see; how was it?"
The young man rose, pacing the room quickly and talking rapidly.
"Stuart must have taken four from the safe. The windfall! by George!
the windfall. The Colonel must have thought Shunker had only taken
two. Well! you're a nice sort of scoundrel," he went on, stopping
opposite the usurer and viewing him with critical eyes. "So you gave
him the wrong receipt on purpose, and now claim a second payment, is
that it?"

Shunker collapsed to the floor as if every bone had left his body. "I
didn't,--I'll swear by holy Ganges, by my son's head--I didn't mean
it. I thought he would kill me, and I gave him the wrong receipt in my
hurry. Oh, sir, I swear--"

"Let go my legs, you fool, or I shall! Stand up, and don't let your
teeth chatter. I'm not going to kill you. So you weren't even a good
scoundrel, Shunker, only a pitiful fortune-finder. Having done a
clever trick by mistake, you thought it safe to claim the money again,
as the only witness was dead. And it was safe, but for that chance of
the other note! It was hard luck, Lâlâ-ji, hard luck!"

There was something almost uncanny in John Raby's jeering smile as he
threw himself into a chair and began to light one of his eternal
cigarettes. The fact being that he was elated beyond measure at his
own success, and unwilling to detract, as it were, from his own skill
by any hint of carelessness on the other side.

"And now, Shunker," he asked, his chief attention being apparently
given to his tobacco, "what do you intend to do?" Coolly as he spoke,
he was conscious of inward anxiety; for he had rapidly reviewed the
position, and confessed himself impotent should the usurer regain the
courage of denial, since any attempt to prove the facts must bring to
light his own possession of the unlucky note. His best chance
therefore was to work on the Lâlâ's terror without delay.

"I throw myself on your honour's mercy," quavered the usurer in a dull
despairing tone, knowing by experience that it was but a broken reed
on which to rely.

"You don't deserve any; still there are reasons which incline me to be
lenient. Your son is young to be deprived of a father's care; besides,
as the Colonel _sahib's_ executor, I do not wish to have a committee
of inquiry in the office. You understand?"

"_Sahib_, I understand." This eminently sensible view of the matter
was as welcome as it was unexpected.

"Therefore I shall be content if you withdraw your claim, in some
credible way of course. Equally, of course, you will sign a
confession, which I will burn when--"

"But, _sahib_, how--?"

"Not another word. I particularly do not wish to know what you are
going to do; but I haven't lived seven years in India without being
aware how things _can_ be burked."

"If the _sahib_ would only tell me--"

"I tell you to burke it! Why, man, if I only had _your conscience_ all
things would be possible; I'd make money even out of this. I'll help
you so far. You have somehow or another to restore certain notes, the
numbers of which are known. I happen to have traced one of these
already, and you happen to have got hold of a wrong one. I will
exchange. If you haven't got it about you,--ah! I see you have; that
is a great saving of trouble."

A quarter of an hour later John Raby wrote a few lines to Major
Marsden's successor enclosing a thousand-rupee note which he had found
in an unexpected place in Colonel Stuart's office, adding his belief
that the others would doubtless turn up ere long, and suggesting a few
days' grace in order that a thorough search might be made.

"Never lie if you can help it," he said to himself sardonically. "That
dear old prig Marsden would be shocked at my squaring this business,
though at one stage of the proceedings he tried to do so himself. What
the devil would be the good of an inquiry to any living soul? And as
I've lost a thousand in avoiding one, no one could accuse me of
interested motives. Marsden and I row in the same boat, and if I had
had as much money as he has!-- Well, she is a dear little girl, and
that's a fact."

He called on the dear little girl after leaving the office, and
comforted her greatly by general expressions of hope. They made her
almost more grateful to him than any certainty would have done, for
they showed a more perfect trust in her father's integrity. So even
the young man's caution told in his favour, and he went home very well
satisfied with himself, to await the final explanation that was to
emanate from the Lâlâ's fertile brain. The notes would be found
somewhere, no doubt; or else in looking over his accounts he would
discover a like sum owing to Government which would cause the
disappearance of the apparent deficiency.

But amid all his terror, the Lâlâ had noted John Raby's assertion
that, given a certain conscience, he could make money out of the
restitution; and these idle words stood between him and many a
solution of the difficulty. His soul (if he had one) was full of hate,
a sense of defeat, and a desire for revenge. If only he could devise
some plan by which he could retain the plunder, especially that
thousand-rupee note the white-faced _shaitan_ had given him in
exchange!

Dawn found him still in the upper chamber alone with his faithful
jackal. There was determination in his face and dogged resistance in
Râm Lâl's.

"Fool!" whispered the usurer. "If I fall, where art thou? And I swear
I will let the whole thing go. I have money,--thou hast none. It is
only a year without opium or tobacco, Râmu, and the wife and children
well cared for meanwhile. Are you going to back out of the agreement,
unfaithful to salt?"

"A year is ten years without opium, Lâlâ; and there is no need for
this. I am the scapegoat, it is true, but only for safety."

"Son of owls!" cursed the usurer, still under his breath. "It is for
safety, thy safety as well as mine. For if thou wilt do as I bid thee,
it will tie that _shaitan's_ hands; and if they be not tied, they will
meddle. Besides, the _sahib-logue_ are never satisfied without a
scapegoat, and if some one go not to jail they will inquire; and then,
Râmu, wilt thou fare better? 'Twill be longer in the cells, that is
all. Opium can be smuggled, Râmu! See, I promise five rupees a month
to the warder, and a big caste dinner when thou returnest from the
father-in-law's house [a native euphemism for the jail]. And listen,
Râmu--"

So the whispered colloquy went on and on through the hot night, and
during the course of the next day John Raby was asked to sign a
search-warrant for the house of one Râmu Lâl, who was suspected by his
master, Shunker Dâs, of having stolen the missing notes from Colonel
Stuart's office-table. For a moment the young man, taken aback by this
unexpected turn of affairs, hesitated; but reflection showed him that,
for all he could prove to the contrary, the crime might have been
committed. At least there would be time enough for interference at a
later stage of the proceedings. So Râmu and his house were searched; a
note for five hundred rupees was found on his person, and two previous
convictions against him promptly produced by the police.

The discovery of but one, and that the smalle

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