Chapter IV: Part 4

It had come to be an accepted fact in Gaya that the old bungalow lying on the outskirts was haunted and therefore undesirable. Not that Gaya feared ghosts or anything else in heaven or earth. The average Anglo-Indian's nerve, strained by the subtle but immediate juxtaposition of frivolity and danger which shade so imperceptibly into each other, that the border-line can be crossed unconsciously and in an instant, cannot indulge in emotionalism or fancies. He has to close his mind both to the fascination and the veiled menace of Indian life, or be lost. It is for that reason that he is always the last to admit the fascination, except in regard to the social conditions, or the danger, beyond the obvious ones of ill health and consequent retirement on a beggarly half-pay.

So Gaya's inhabitants locked up fear, and hid the key where it could not be found even by the most unbaked, fluttered newcomer, and the old bungalow with its ugly secret left them unmoved. But they never denied the existence of the blight which rested on the gloomy, tumbled-down building, and they avoided the place as unpleasant and depressing, and took care that innocent newly appointed officers and their wives, for whom so large and spacious a dwelling seemed eminently suited, should house elsewhere. It was owing to this circumstance that James Barclay had been able to obtain possession and a consequent but dubious foothold on the outskirts of Gaya's sternly fortified social life. The bungalow had been built in the dim ages before the Mutiny, and had been patched and patched till little was left of the original. James Barclay promptly renovated it from end to end, and added various bizarre additions of his own which, however, did not alter the place's fundamental characteristic of mouldering gloom and depression.

In the room in which he sat talking to Lalloo, the money-lender, everything of native origin had been rigorously excluded. The chairs were covered with English chintzes, the curtains were futurist in design and colour; there were copies of European masterpieces in heavy gilded frames on the walls, and a new art bronze lamp suspended from the hand of a marble Venus cast a bright, garish reflection on the upturned, contemplative face of its owner.

It was curious, therefore, that, as little as he had been able to eradicate the gloom, as little had he been able to oust the indigenous element. The objects might be Western, but the atmosphere remained obstinately Oriental. Perhaps it was the irrepressible outbursts of colour-love betrayed by the chintzes, or perhaps Lalloo supplied the cause of this phenomena. He sat cross-legged on the carpet and stroked his grizzled beard with a dark hand, that seemed all the darker for the scrupulous whiteness of his _puggri_ and loose tunic. Compared with him, Barclay looked almost blond, almost English. Yet Lalloo also accentuated what was un-English in him. There were lines about the old usurer's mouth and nostrils which were already dimly suggested in Barclay's face. There was a gulf between them, but there was also a bridge across.

"There is Seetul, who says he cannot pay," Lalloo detailed monotonously, and as though he were reading from an account-book. "He has owed us ten rupees these last six months, and still he says he cannot pay. But he has had many fine stuffs in his loom--and his daughter's hands have been busy with rich embroideries on which the Sahibs' wives have cast longing eyes. It would be well to claim your due, Meester Barclay, before it is too late."

Barclay nodded absently.

"Good. I can leave that to you, Lalloo," he said.

"It is well. Then Heera Singh--we lent him five rupees a year ago when the harvest failed. Twenty-five rupees is what I claimed from him two days ago, and he has nothing--that is to say, he has some fine cattle and this year the rabi has done well. Your claim would be a just one, Meester Barclay."

"You'd better make it quick, then, before the beggar sells out. Afterwards he'll come whining with some infernal lie. He's had rope enough."

"It is well." The old man continued to stroke his beard for a moment in silence, watching the face under the light with a blank intentness which revealed nothing. "Nehal Pal has paid in full," he resumed at length. "His daughter was given in marriage to Meer Ali a week since. Meer Ali is a very old man, and there was some difficulty, for in these degenerate days the tongues of the women wag to some purpose--but the marriage contract was very favourable to Nehal Pal. And he has paid in full." Lalloo patted his waistband and drew out a small jangling bag, which he set with an almost religious gravity at his patron's feet. "These and the other moneys of which I have already rendered account are now before you, Meester Barclay."

Barclay picked up the bag and weighed it negligently in his lean, brown hand.

"You've got an amazing head for figures, Lalloo," he commended. "And you're some business man, as our American friends would say. We shall want both qualities badly in the future. I want money--as much as I can get. I mean to rope in all the industries of every village within three hundred miles and make them paying concerns. At present, they're just in a state of straggling, unprofitable hugger-mugger, out of which nobody gets anything."

"I have done my best," Lalloo insinuated deprecatingly.

Barclay tossed the bag on to the polished oak table beside him.

"One man's best isn't enough. Nothing's of any good without organization, and to organize one must have the power to make others do what they're told. So far we've got most of the grain-dealers into the net, and by the next harvest they'll have to sell me their grain at my own price. But that's a drop in the ocean. The weaving--that's the thing. That's what's going to count. There are three hundred thousand weavers round and about Gaya, swamped by rotten fakes from Manchester. I'm going to change all that. It's Manchester that's going to be swamped. One of these days, I shall be a power in Gaya, Lalloo."

He said it with a mixture of arrogance, complacency, and appeal which elicited no more than an enigmatic "It may well be, Meester Barclay," from the expressionless Hindu Kara cross-legged on the carpet.

Barclay got up and stood with his hands thrust into the pockets of his riding-breeches, his eyes roving from one to another of the expensive atrocities with which the room was crowded.

"I've begun here," he went on, in the same tone. "I daresay they would have fought me tooth and nail for possession of the place if they'd had the power. But they hadn't. Even in Gaya money spells the last word, and I had money. There isn't another bungalow like this in Gaya."

"That also is true," Lalloo assented. He turned his head for a moment, fixing an intent look on the curtained doorway as though it reminded him of something. "I know the place well. It was here in this room many years ago that I found the body of the great Tristram Sahib. He had been murdered. There was blood on the floor--almost where Meester Barclay stands now. The carpet hides the stain. We tried to wash it out, but the blood had soaked into the wood." He made a little regretful gesture. "It had flowed freely, and we came many hours too late," he finished. He gave his account as casually, tonelessly as he had recited his accounts, not noting the uneasy start of the man in front of him, but seeming to fall into a mood of profound retrospection. Barclay came nearer to the light again.

"Murdered?" he echoed. "In this room--by whom?"

The sharp brown eyes lifted for a moment.

"That is not known. One could tell, perhaps, but he has been long silent. The young and foolish swear he has not spoken for a hundred years, but that is vulgar superstition. I remember Vahana the Holy Man when he was young and handsome and loved a beautiful wife." He jerked his head significantly. "It was her body I found out in the garden well yonder," he added.

"Murdered, too----?"

Lalloo smiled subtly.

"Tristram Sahib was handsome and brave and lonely. It was said that he had a way with women--and he was Sahib. No doubt she came willingly. In those days, Gaya was not as now. She lived with him for a year before the--accident. There was a child, but that was never found."

"And Vahana?"

The smile, unchanged, gained in significance.

"He was on a great pilgrimage to Holy Benares, Meester Barclay." The old usurer put his hand to the neck of his tunic and pulled up something which hung there by a cord. The thing glittered yellow in the light. "See, this is what I found on her body-0an old bracelet--strange and wonderful in design, Meester Barclay. I wear it, for there is a saying that a murdered woman's jewels shield a man from the evil eye, and I, Lalloo, who believe in nothing, am cautious. There was a fellow to it, but that I gave to Vahana in remembrance of the wife he had loved. He thanked me and went his way--some say to Kailasa, but there is no knowing, for since that day no man has heard him speak."

Barclay, who had bent down for a moment, let the bracelet slip from his fingers. He turned away and went and stood near the spot which Lalloo had indicated, frowning down at it as though the stain were still visible or bore for him some deeper significance.

"And so, because of a sordid tragedy, many years old, the place is boycotted by all save outsiders--such as I am. Is that the delicate point of your story, Lalloo?" he asked.

"They say a spirit dwells in this room," Lalloo answered indirectly, "--an evil spirit," he added.

"Or a living one. Ghosts, if there are any, are men's deeds which live after them. But there are no ghosts." He shrugged his shoulders and laughed. "Look about you, Lalloo. A ghost couldn't haunt this room now. He'd lose his bearings. It's changed since those days, eh?"

Lalloo looked at the marble Venus with her lamp.

"It is indeed wonderful," he assented.

Barclay swung on his heel and came back. He was suddenly neither arrogant nor pleading, but utterly and rather terribly sincere.

"You don't think it wonderful," he said, softly and bitterly. "What you think, God knows, but at least it's not admiration for me that you're hiding behind your damned impassivity. I'm your partner--a very rich partner. I'm Meester Barclay, that's all. But the youngest whipper-snapper with a pink and white face and a pair of epaulettes is Sahib." He stopped, trying to master himself physically. The lean brown hands were clenched at his side in the effort. "Why am I not Sahib?" he asked.

Lalloo spread out his hands.

"I speak to you in English. Is not 'Meester Barclay' the English way?" he asked with deference.

Barclay laughed. The muscles of his handsome features still quivered with the gust of nervous passion which had swept over him, but there was a certain satisfaction in his laughter.

"Well, you have always a soft answer--and I understood. I am simply not Sahib. They--your masters--have not recognized me, so you do not recognize me. But all that is going to change, and when you see me cheek by jowl with the best of them you will salaam and ask the bidding of Barclay Sahib." He paced restlessly backwards and forwards in his excitement, the mincing quality of his accent asserting itself. "You know the law, Lalloo. A man is what his father was. My father was English--I have got good English blood in my veins. I've always known it--it would be damned awkward for some of them if I proved it. But, at any rate, they've got to have me. I'm forging a gold key to their strongest locks, and if that won't do, then----" He broke off again, changing his tone to one of trenchant decision.

"I've got to have money--money enough to swamp them. I've got to have those weavers. Once get a hold on the throat of the industries and the rest's easy. Start at Heerut, Lalloo. They've had an epidemic, and will be ready to sell their souls. You can give them easy terms--"

Lalloo got up leisurely.

"At Heerut--no, Meester Barclay," he said. "Not there."

"And why not?"

"The Dakktar Sahib lives in Heerut. He is a strange man. He has no love for my calling."

"Well, are you afraid of him?"

"No; he drove a devil out of my son," Lalloo explained, without particular emotion.

Barclay laughed irritably.

"That means fear, right enough. You think if he can drive out devils, he can also inflict them. I know your ways of argument. Well, in the name of the devil he exorcised, who is the fellow?"

"Tristram Sahib."

"Tristram----?"

"The son," Lalloo explained, his eyes on the spot near the curtain.

James Barclay turned on his heel and went over to the window. For a full minute he stood there motionless and silent, seemingly intent on the sound of English voices which drifted towards him over the darkness of the compound. When he spoke again it was with a drawling heaviness.

"Tristram----the son? That's a curious coincidence. Still, I see your point, Lalloo. You could not very well oppose him. Leave Heerut to me. I shall manage. You can go now."

The old usurer lingered. He was watching the tall, stooping figure by the window, his head a little on one side, as though he, too, listened, but apparently to other sounds. Presently he slid noiselessly to the door and drew back the curtain.

A woman entered.

Lalloo greeted her with silent deference. He lifted his hand half-way to his forehead, looking in Barclay's direction, and the gesture was nicely expressive of a courteous equality. Then he was gone.

Barclay continued to stand by the window. He had noticed neither Lalloo's departure nor the woman's entry. Evidently the English party outside on the road had just returned from some entertainment. He could hear a fragment of a laughing reference to champagne, then an indistinguishable murmur pitched in a graver key, and a woman's exclamation of contemptuous disgust. Some one called good-night, a whip cracked, and a light-wheeled vehicle rolled on its way down-hill towards the dak-bungalow.

Barclay drew in his breath between his teeth like some one who has received a hurt, but he did not move. The woman came nearer to him. Her movements were quiet and graceful, and curiously typical of the whole of her. Everything about her was harmonious in a supple, boneless way. The big straw hat, made garishly ornate with artificial poppies, flopped over the dark little face and its untidy, beautiful frame of straight, jet-black hair. The light sprig dress revealed the yielding lines of her body, and was in itself pretty and badly made and carelessly put on. She had all the charm, all the lithesome fascination of a young animal, but there were also lines in her face, in her figure, which gave warning of a less lovely maturity.

As she came softly forward she clasped her hands, half in excitement, half in a childish appeal, and they were long-fingered, olive-tinted, and gaudy with bright rings.

"Jim!" she whispered. "Jim!"

He started. The moody dejection passed. He swung round, his features blank with the very violence of contending emotions. For a moment he stared at her, whilst the breathless joy in her eyes faded into hesitant questioning, then into fear. "Oh, Jim," she repeated helplessly.

"Jim!"

He strode up to her, catching her roughly by the wrist, shaking her less with anger than in a kind of panic.

"Why have you come?" he stammered. "How did you get here?"

She cowered like a dog before threatening punishment, and her eyes, lifted to his face, were dog-like in their steadfast, wistful appeal.

"By train to Bhara and then I drove--for two days, Jim. But no one knew me. I didn't ask any questions--I didn't tell any one. Not a soul. I just found my way here. I had your letters and they described things so wonderfully, I felt I was coming home. Jim, how beautiful it all is! Much more beautiful than I ever dreamed!"

Partly she was trying to propitiate him, but partly the exclamation was sincere. Her brown eyes were wide and bright as they passed over the room's treasures, resting at last on the culminating vulgarity of the Venus. Barclay followed her gaze, then, without a word, he released her, and going over to the lamp, turned down the wick. It sputtered feebly, throwing up decreasing flashes of light on to the white, stupid loveliness of the goddess, and then died out. Through the darkness, Barclay's voice sounded thick with anger.

"Anybody might have seen us from the road," he said. "You must be mad, Marie, or bent on doing for my chances. Don't you know what I told you--or did you just choose to forget? Good God, don't whimper! You're like a child. You smash something and then you cry as though you were the injured party----"

"I was so awfully lonely----" she broke in, piteously.

He was silent. She could not read his expression, but the quiet following on his first violence suggested a furious effort to regain self-control. She waited, not moving or speaking, and presently he took up her plea, scrutinizing it with the level coldness of suppressed anger.

"Lonely, you say? Hadn't you friends enough? You used to make me sick with your boasts about them. There were the Mazzinis and the Aostas--in our Calcutta days they lived with us, fed on us, borrowed from us. What's become of them? You had money enough to buy the lot. Lonely!" He exploded on the word, falling on it with a raging bitterness, then choked himself back to his pose of judicial deliberation. "It did not at all occur to you that I might be lonely, I suppose. It did not occur to you that whilst you were lolling comfortably in your rut, I was cutting new roads for us both through a granite opposition with not a soul to help me. You imagined me in a whirl of conviviality, no doubt--feted, courted, the catch of Gaya----" He laughed out. "You fool!" he flung at her, in a paroxysm of exasperation.

She gasped, as though he had struck her across the face, but she was no longer crying. Her voice sounded flat and tired like a child's.

"I was lonely," she reiterated patiently. "I had the Mazzinis and the Aostas. I saw them every day, and they were very kind. But they were not you, Jim. I wanted you all the time, night and day, worse and worse. I thought I should have died, wanting you. And I did imagine things. I couldn't help it. I thought how brilliant and handsome you were, and I knew you'd win through and climb--ever so high--and I should be left behind. I couldn't bear it, Jim, dear. I had to come."

Barclay did not answer, but now his silence was no longer the tense, savage thing it had been. She could see his tall, slight figure dimly outlined against the paler darkness of the garden. Presently he turned and drew up, the Chesterfield to the shadow's edge.

"Come here!" he said authoritatively.

She came, groping blindly towards him and knelt down at his knees. She put her hands up, touching his face his shoulders, his whole body.

"Oh, Jim!" she whispered huskily. "Just to feel you again--just to know you're there--near me. It's like slaking an awful thirst--you don't know what it's been----"

"Hush!" he whispered back. She had flung aside her hat, and he bent and kissed her hair. A curious fragrance rose to meet him--Eastern, sensuous, intoxicating. He flung his arms round, dragging her close to him, kissing her eyes, her lips with a ruthless desire.

"And haven't I thirsted--haven't I wanted you? Do you think I haven't been lonely--among these strangers who turn their backs on me, shrink from me as though I were a leper? Hush, don't cry! I'm not angry now. I'm glad. We shall have these few hours together. Tomorrow----"

"Tomorrow?" she interrupted fearfully.

"Tomorrow you must go back." He laid his hand on her lips, stifling her involuntary cry of pain. His own voice grew clearer and less passionate. "You must. We can't let ourselves be carried away by our feelings like this. It would be ridiculous to sell the whole future for the present."

"We were happy before," she whispered. "What more can one be than happy?"

He made a little impatient movement.

"You were happy. But I--couldn't you see for yourself--I didn't belong there--not among your set or the set I'd been brought up in--poor, mean, petty folk, squabbling and wrangling over the degrees of their insignificance. Who was your father?--a rotten little clerk, sweating in a Government office, too poor to get an English wife. But my father----" He broke off, and then went on rapidly. "I'm different, Marie. I've got good blood in my veins--good English blood. It's restless in me. It won't let me rot like the others. I've got to get on. I've got to win through--back to my own people. Don't you understand?"

"Yes," she said dully, "and I am afraid."

He went on, with gathering determination:

"So you must go back and wait. I shall pull through, but you couldn't, and I couldn't help you. You'd drag me back. You must have patience and faith. When I've made my position safe here----"

"You will not want me," she interrupted gently. "You'll have climbed too high for me, Jim. That's why I am afraid."

He laughed a little. His hand brushed the tears from her hot cheeks, and passed on caressingly down her arm to her wrist and lingered there.

"You're tired and fanciful, Marie. Some one's been putting ideas into your head. You've got to trust me and help me----"

"Jim--what are you doing?" she whispered.

"The bracelet--the one I gave you--you're still wearing it----?"

"Always. Night and day. It's been like a bit of you----"

"I want it back----"

She tried to wrench herself free from him. "Jim--don't--don't, dear."

"I want it. Hush, don't make a fuss. You shall have it back, I promise you. Heavens--what a child----!"

She was crying now convulsively. He put his arms round her and pressed her closer with an impatient tenderness.

"It was all I had of you," she sobbed. "It was our luck--a sort of link--now it's gone----"

"--into my pocket," he retorted, good-humouredly, "and in a week or two it'll be back on your wrist. I'll put it there if I have to come all the way to Calcutta. Hush, for God's sake; don't cry like that----"

She became suddenly very quiet. Instinctively she knew that he was trying to listen to something beyond her sobbing, and she too listened, intently, with the alertness of a frightened animal.

"Jim--what is it----?"

He freed himself deliberately from her arms.

"It's down at the dak-bungalow. Some one playing. It's a long way off. The wind must be in the east----"

"The dak-bungalow? Who lives there?"

"Sigrid Fersen----"

"A woman. Jim, do you know her?"

He got up. It was as though she no longer existed for him. The D minor valse came down to them on the breath of the night-breeze--maddening and exhilarating--a song of life at its full tide.

"Yes--I--I know her," he said.

"Jim, where are you going?"

He turned on her, thrusting aside her clinging hands with a cold violence.

"Stay there!" he said. "Don't let any one see you. Stay there----!"

He pushed past her and went down the verandah steps. It was as though he had thrust a dog out of his path. She called to him, but he did not hear her--a minute later, he had vanished into the shadow of the trees.

*CHAPTER X*

*AN ENCOUNTER*

Ayeshi, with his face buried in his arms, had neither seen nor heard, and it was Mrs. Smithers who stepped challengingly into the man's path. Her old heart beat terrifyingly, but she held herself with a very dour and acrimonious determination.

"Of all the impertinence!" she hissed at him. "Go away with you, you nasty, maraudering heathen----"

But it was then that Sigrid saw him, and the D minor valse broke off sharply, leaving a flat and drear silence, as though some splendid, glowing spirit had fallen lifeless. She herself had risen and stood with one hand on the keys, the other at her side. Her mouth was still a little open, but no longer with her wide smile of joyous living. She looked tired, and rather wan.

"Who are you?" she asked, breathlessly. "What are you doing here?"

"I beg your pardon." Barclay bowed to her. "I assure you, I did not mean to interrupt your playing, but this--this lady caught sight of me and I had to present myself at once or be taken for a burglar. I hope I am forgiven?"

She shrugged her shoulder, studying him with an impassivity before which his suave manner faltered and became uncertain.

"I neither know you nor your business," she said. "When I have heard your explanation, it will be time to consider whether I can accept your apology."

"Meantime, I accept the reproof," he retorted. "But we are old acquaintances--at least, we have met before. That is the first paragraph of my excuse. We met at the dinner Lord Kirkdale gave in honour of your return, and I was introduced to you. My name is Barclay--James Barclay."

"There are many thousands of people who have been introduced to me and whose names and faces I have forgotten," she said, simply. "That does not warrant their walking into my drawing-room at odd hours of the night."

His smile, uneasily ingratiating, persisted.

"Haven't I apologized, and won't you make some allowances? I had missed you this afternoon at Colonel Boucicault's--business detained me--and was bitterly disappointed. Passing your bungalow, I heard you playing--I was mortally tempted--and, relying on the fact that we are in India and not in stiff-necked England, I ventured to present myself at once."

"You relied on the facts that I am a dancer, that you once paid half a guinea for a stall to see me dance, that you cadged for an introduction where introductions were valueless, and that, once a woman ventures out into publicity, men of a certain type consider her fair game." She spoke quietly enough, but there was a whiteness about her distended nostrils which betrayed a rising anger. "Well, as you rightly say, we are not in England. The half-guinea stall is of no value here. My privacy is my right, and I beg of you to respect it."

He held his ground. His impulse had carried him into an _impasse_ from which he could not possibly retreat with dignity.

"You are like royalty, Miss Fersen," he said fluently. "People whom you don't know, know you. It's the penalty of greatness. You can't be hard on us poor mortals who take the sunshine when they can get it. Besides, I have only forestalled events. Sooner or later, I should have met you----"

"I have lived in Gaya for two months," she interrupted, "and I have neither met you nor heard of you, Mr. Barclay."

She closed the piano, sighing impatiently. Had she looked at him at that moment she might have repented her only half-intended cruelty, for his insolent ease had become a desperate and rather pitiable humiliation. He had committed a blunder which he had neither the art nor the social adroitness to cover over, and he looked to her to make his escape possible--decent. And she ignored him. Whereat what little self-possession he owned deserted him, leaving him to the mad guidance of a raw and quivering pride.

"You know very well who and what I am, Miss Fersen," he stammered, "or you wouldn't behave like this. If I'd been one of the others, you'd have welcomed me. You wouldn't have dared treat the merest subaltern as you've treated me. If Rajah Rasaldu, a full-blown native, from whom you accept----"

She turned like a flash.

"Will you go, Mr. Barclay?" she said, scarcely above her breath.

He remained stubbornly unmoved. A minute before, he had been merely a tragi-comic figure, a victim of a midsummer night's ambition, and his own intoxicated senses. He might, to himself at least, have pleaded many things in extenuation--certainly a fundamental harmlessness and even a rather painful humility. Now he had become dangerous.

"I'll go at my own time," he said unevenly. Mrs. Smithers had once more intervened and he pushed her back.

"I can afford a scandal--you can't----"

It was at that moment that Tristram stalked in through the open verandah. Sigrid saw him first, and laughed.

"So it's your turn to play _deus ex machina_," she said gaily. It was as though his advent had swept away every vestige of her annoyance. She looked at Barclay with bright, malicious eyes. "You've just come in time to show Mr. Barclay the way out," she said. "He was unable to find it for himself."

The two men stared at each other. At that moment either of them could have passed easily for the villain of the little drama, Barclay's quivering, passion-distorted features being balanced by the Englishman's general appearance, which was ragamuffinly, not to say ruffianly. His white clothes had been washed since Sigrid had seen him last, but had not been ironed, an unfortunate omission, since the result was one of soiled inelegance. The stubble on his unusual chin had become a reddish beard, in itself an unlovely object, and lent his countenance a look of aggression and truculence.

Barclay laughed. He was beside himself, less with anger than with panic before the inevitable _debacle_, and he groped round for any weapon which might deliver him with a semblance of dignity.

"I appreciate my blunder, Miss Fersen," he jerked out. "I had no idea that I interrupted an--an appointment. I can quite understand your annoyance--and I apologize. I wish you both good-night."

Tristram blocked his way.

"Your name's Barclay?" he asked quietly.

"It is."

"I've heard of you."

"I daresay." The Eurasian's eyes narrowed. He looked into his opponent's face with a sudden curiosity. "I daresay we have met before, Major Tristram."

"I don't think so."

"Perhaps in a third person."

"I don't understand," Tristram returned simply. "But I have heard of you. Some time I'd like to have a little talk--about various things, which concern us both--notably about some friends of mine who have been hard pressed.----"

"I shall be delighted to meet you any time, Major Tristram," Barclay retorted. "I, too, may have matters of interest to discuss with you."

Tristram stood on one side.

"Shall we go together now?" he suggested. "Since we are both intruding----"

"Not you, Major Tristram," Sigrid interposed quietly.

There was a moment's silence. The way was now open to Barclay, and the three implacable watchers gave him no choice. He tried to insinuate into his bearing, into his exaggerated bow, a mocking ease, a cynical suggestiveness which might give him even a semblance of advantage. But he failed, and knew it. He stumbled out, blind and sick with the consciousness of defeat, of a hideous, self-inflicted humiliation.

Mrs. Smithers saw him to the verandah steps as a policeman sees a doubtful intruder off premises specially recommended to his care. She adjusted her neat wig with dignity and a touch of wrathful defiance.

"In a brace of shakes, I'd have boxed his ears," she muttered ferociously. "Not but what my heart was beating about inside me like a fly in a bottle. The impudent blackguard! Called himself an acquaintance! What next! We shall have the sweep dropping in for tea and the butcher leaving his card----" She caught herself up. "There, in another minute, I'd have forgotten I was a lady and said things. Shall I see about coffee for you, Sigrid?"

"Please, Smithy."

Sigrid Fersen stood near the middle of the room, looking out on to the dark garden, her hand raised to her small face in the familiar attitude of half-whimsical, half-sad reflection. Tristram glanced at her and then hurriedly away.

"I was dancing," she said suddenly, with a catch in her breath. "I don't think I'd ever danced like that before. And then he came. It was as though something vital in me had been snapped--a bird brought down in full flight----"

"Ayeshi came out and told me you were in difficulties," he said. "I was eavesdropping. I suppose I behaved like a cad, too."

She shook her head.

"I was playing to you--and dancing. I knew you would see me dancing."

"Then you knew----?"

"Ayeshi told me you were coming. I knew if I played you would come into the garden and listen. I wanted you to come. And you came."

He tried to laugh, and the laugh failed him.

"I am almost afraid of you," he said.

She considered him quaintly.

"Smithy would say you were quite right to be afraid. And Smithy would be right, too. I am dangerous."

"And I am a believer in the theory which bids us 'live dangerously,'" he retorted more lightly.

"But with you the theory would work out as self-sacrifice--with me it would mean the sacrifice of others." She drew a lounge chair out on to the verandah and sat down with a little sigh of relief. "How tired I am! The D minor valse always tired me--not my body--that doesn't matter--but the invisible spirit which makes a single step a divine thing. Mr. Meredith would call it the soul, if he could connect his speciality with anything so vulgar and mundane." She laughed and snuggled herself back among the cushions. "Anyhow, my soul has danced and my soul is tired," she announced contentedly.

Tristram remained standing. He was looking down at her profile with a puzzled intentness.

"Yes," he admitted, "very tired."

"That means--I'm looking ugly?" she suggested.

"No," he answered, abruptly.

At that moment, seated there with her back to the light, she looked elfish, something aerial and inhuman. Her fair hair, smoothed down with a delicious primness on either side of her small head, made an aureole in which her face gleamed white and transparent. Beauty and ugliness were terms inapplicable to her. As well have measured air and fire by the standards of a Venus de Milo. "Still, you're not well tonight," Tristram persisted obstinately.

"Feel that, then, Dakktar Sahib!"

He took her outstretched hand. For a second it lay in his, small, cool, amazingly soft and supple, then clasped itself round his fingers like a steel band made living by electric forces, and he looked up wincing and laughing, and their eyes met. She was smiling at him with a childlike satisfaction.

"You see, I am stronger than you, Dakktar Sahib!" she said gaily.

"That wouldn't be saying much tonight," he answered.

She still held his hand, but her hold had changed its character.

"I had forgotten--Ayeshi told us--you are ill----"

"It is nothing," he muttered.

She became thoughtful in her silence. Wickie made a scrambling rush up the verandah steps and flung himself, with an hysterical yell of triumph, against Tristram's legs. By what cunning he had eluded Mrs. Smithers's methodical but unpractised search cannot be told--but he was there, a wriggling, writhing, panting mass of delirious happiness. Tristram caught him up and hugged him.

"And how in the name of the Creator of Mongrel Puppies did you get here?" he asked.

"I commandeered him," Sigrid Fersen answered.

"I left him with Miss Boucicault."

"And Colonel Boucicault threatened to knock his brains out, so I commandeered him."

Tristram glanced down at her wonderingly.

"You bearded the Colonel? That was plucky of you. Anne must have been frightened, poor little soul."

A faint, malicious smile quivered at the corner of Sigrid's lips.

"A little, I think. But she had no time to interfere. I was nearest to the scene of action."

"I am awfully grateful. Wickie and I are old pals."

"I know. If I deserve reward, let him stay with me. What will you do with small dogs out there?"

"I don't know--would he stay with you?"

"Try him!"

He set Wickie on his short bandy legs and she called the dog by name. He came and sat in front of her, beating the ground with his lengthy tail, his ears flat in an ingratiating humility. She bent and patted him. "You see!"

Tristram nodded. His silence became tense and painful, as though he laboured under a physical weakness, kept only at bay by a sheer effort of will. She looked at him critically, and saw that he was trembling.

"You are ill, Major Tristram. Sit down and rest. Smithy will bring us coffee--it will do you good to sit with me here in the darkness and quiet."

"I ought to be on my way," he answered unevenly.

"Well, then, if not for yourself--for me. I will admit that I am ill and that I need the Dakktar Sahib's ministrations. It comforts me to have you here. It is your duty, therefore, to remain."

"You are stronger than I," he answered, with an unsteady laugh. But he sat down opposite her, his body bent forward, his hands clasped between his knees. She could see nothing of his face, but the outline of his fine head, distorted a little by its mass of thick hair, trimmed by an amateur hand, lent his shadow a look of way-worn distress and physical disintegration. Yet it remained an indomitable shadow. She remembered him as she had seen him once before. Since then the Quixote had had his tussle with the windmill and now, bruised and broken, prepared himself for a fresh onslaught.

"Why do you do it?" she flung at him, almost angrily.

He looked up at her, as though waking from a dream.

"Do what?" he asked.

She shrugged her shoulders.

"Oh, I know. Ayeshi has told me. You're going into that hell single-handed and crippled. Boucicault has refused to get you help. Why do you let him trample on you? He is not in your service. Are you afraid of him, too?"

He met her taunt with a grave simplicity.

"No, I am not afraid. Up till now, Colonel Boucicault has blocked my line of communication with the authorities. That's over. There's going to be a tussle to the death between us, and he knows it. That's why I didn't come myself tonight."

"Then why need you go? Any one would exonerate you. Ayeshi said it might mean----" She recoiled from her own thought. "It's almost your duty not to go," she exclaimed.

"Do you want me to remain?" he asked.

She beat her clenched fist irritably on the arm of her chair.

"No--because it wouldn't be you then--because you are a fool, Major Tristram--a sublime fool whom one wouldn't have changed even to save him from destruction. Go, by all means, and sacrifice yourself to your duty. For that you were born."

He sank back in his chair, his face lifted to where the jungle of the neglected compound thinned before the night's luminous sapphire.

"I don't believe in duty and sacrifices," he said, "but in happiness."

"And isn't your happiness here?" she demanded, imperiously; "isn't this happiness--the thing you dreamed of?"

She saw his hands clench themselves.

"Yes--but a dream that can't be fulfilled--a secret corner of fancy--that isn't enough. In the end--if one lived on it, set it before one as the end-all--one would sicken and starve. The dream itself would die. I've figured it out--happiness is the consciousness of purpose----"

"What purpose can any one of us have?" she retorted scornfully, "we who are ourselves purposeless creations?"

He waited a moment. When he answered, his voice sounded clear and steady, though his words were faltering, groping efforts of expression.

"I don't know--I mean rather that I can't explain. I'm an inarticulate sort of fellow. It seems to me--ninety-nine days out of a hundred we don't worry as to where we're going or why. We do what we've got to do blindly. But the hundredth day is a day of reckoning. You were going to say just now that I might die if I went out there. Well, that doesn't seem to me so important. Death is the only visible goal we have. What matters, what is vital, what is happiness is that we should reach that goal splendidly--as splendidly as we can. Surely happiness is this, that in our moments of reckoning, when we have to face ourselves, or when we reach the goal, perhaps suddenly and unexpectedly, we can look back on our course with the knowledge that, whether punishment or reward or nothing awaits us, we ran straight according to our lights."

"And 'running straight' for you means plunging into the sickness and suffering of others?" she asked moodily.

She saw him throw back his tired shoulders.

"What other 'running straight' is there that matters?" he returned, ardently. "Those poor folk out in Bjura--I'm the only hope they've got. Supposing I fail them? No one would blame me---no one would say I hadn't run straight--but I should have broken the only law I recognize--I should have denied the only god I know. And more than that--I'm English. When I go out there, I carry my colours with me. It depends on me whether those colours signify to these people suffering or happiness, and whether, in the end, they signify happiness or suffering to us----" He paused, and then went on quietly. "And they must be held higher and steadier because others have forgotten."

"As Colonel Boucicault has forgotten," she put in.

"And is he happy?" he asked quickly. She was silent, and he made a little gesture of apology. "I'm sorry--I'm like all lonely men--I've grown preachy and prosy. I've tired you----"

But she turned to him, her head high, her eyes brilliant with a suddenly revealed feeling.

"Why should you apologize? I also have my theories of life and death. Yes--to die splendidly--on the mountain top, in a palace of gold and silver, in the full tide of youth and strength, of one's own free-will, not knowing decay or suffering--to look back on a life without ugliness, without poverty or meanness--that is the goal--that is happiness."

"That is your vision," he said, smiling at her wistfully. "But you are fire and air, and I am heavy earth."

She got up and went to the steps of the verandah, and stood there with her back turned to him.

"Oh, your vision of me, Major Tristram--beware of it. Why do you make an idol of me?"

But he did not answer.

Ayeshi came out of the shadow of the trees, leading the grotesque Arabella and his own sturdy pony. Tristram half rose.

"No!" she said imperatively. "You have made me tired and wretched and angry. You, a physician! You have got to cure me before you go."

"What shall I do?" he asked humbly.

She was quiet a moment, her finger to her lips. Her anger had gone, and she was once more the being of swift and joyous fancies.

"Look--the moon is showing between the trees. It has made a white pool at my feet, Tristram Sahib. Do you remember what you told me--how at night-time you sat by the village fire and listened to Ayeshi's stories of the great past? You promised that one day I should listen, too. Now I claim fulfilment. We will sit round the moonlight and warm our hands at it, and Ayeshi shall tell the story that his Sahib loves best. Shall it be so?"

"Yes," he answered.

Both Mrs. Smithers and the soft-footed native servant, whom she now marshalled in with a forbidding air of distrust, were waved imperiously aside.

"No--coffee and Smithy are civilized--and we are miles from civilization. We are on the borders of the jungle. If I listened, I should hear the howl of the jackals--so I shan't listen, for I detest jackals. There are monkeys overhead peeping at us and chattering soft insults--and birds pluming themselves for sleep. The moonlight will be on our faces, and it will be like the firelight. And the river shall make the music to Ayeshi's story."

She slipped down on to the stone floor and sat there, cross-legged, her chin cupped in her hand. The circle of pale silver reflected itself back on to her earnest face and painted faint, mocking shadows at the corners of her composed lips. Ayeshi crouched dreamingly on the lower step of the verandah. On the other side of the little circle, Tristram sat with Wickie drowsing at his feet, his hands outstretched as though, to please her fancy, he warmed them at the firelight. Once, as Ayeshi told his story, he looked across at her and his face was haunted with weariness and suffering and famished desire.

Thus Ayeshi told of the Rani Kurnavati and her Bracelet Brother.

* * * * *

The moonlight faded. With Ayeshi's last words a chill darkness crept over them, hiding them from one another and silencing them. It was as though they had indeed warmed themselves at a fire which had gone out, leaving them to the grey ash of their dreams.

Silently Ayeshi had risen and untethered the horses and led them towards the gates of the compound. But Tristram lingered, standing on the steps of the verandah, his face turned from the woman who looked down at him.

She laid her hands on his shoulders.

"And you who go out very gallantly, perhaps to meet the end which you fear so little--have you nothing to ask first of life, nothing you desire, no fulfilment of mad dreams dreamed by the river and by your fireside--nothing that I might not grant?"

He made no answer. She felt him tremble under her hands. Her laugh was subdued, pityingly triumphant.

"Oh, Tristram Sahib, do you think I don't know--do you think I haven't read your heart?" she said.

And bent and kissed him.

*CHAPTER XI*

*INFERNO*

He pitched his tent outside the village in a paradise of brilliantly painted flowers and high grass, whose bright emerald shone luminously where the dying sun touched it. A pool in the shadow of the trees wore a score of lotus-flowers on its still breast, and the ghosts of yellow blossoms from the overhanging mango shimmered tremulously beneath among the tangled undergrowth.

But there was no living thing. The sand at the water's edge was unbroken by the familiar _pugs_, and the trees and the long grasses were empty and silent. Death and over-abundant sensuous life lay side by side. The very soil, rich and moist, gave out an aroma of sickly sweetness tainted with corruption.

The native bearers shook their heads and crouched down near their sleeping quarters, awaiting the loathsome, invisible thing with the fatality of their race.

But Tristram shouldered his case of medicaments and sought the road leading to the village.

The road was ankle deep in a fine powdery dust, which rose at each step and hung in the dead air long after he had passed. There were treacherous ruts which the dust covered, zig-zagging through what had been slimy marsh-land and was now a crumbling, sun-baked bed of miasma. Here, too, the stillness was absolute. The village roofs rose out of the flatness like irregular ant-heaps, deserted by their once restless workers. The night which came striding over the plain was a stifling mantle, choking out the last breath of life under its smothering folds of darkness. The quiet itself was eerie, unnatural, the terrible quiet of a suffering which has passed protest.

Then at last there came a sound--a whimpering, inhuman cry--and the man stood still, peering through the darkness. A form lay by the roadside and held out thin arms of appeal towards him.

"Siva! Siva! Have mercy!"

He came nearer and knelt down. Once it had been a woman, but the mysterious spectre which had laid hold of Bjura had laid hold of her and twisted her out of human semblance. A child lay under her side, round-limbed, smooth-cheeked, as sweet as the lotus-flower growing out of the poisoned waters of the pool. The bloated, shapeless horror slobbered and whispered over it.

"Siva--my little son--have mercy!"

Perhaps some knowledge of another, gentler faith had reached her that she appealed for mercy to a power which knew none. Tristram bent over her and drew the child away from her clawing, swollen hands.

"I am not Siva. I am the Dakktar Sahib come to help you. Do not be afraid!"

"Have mercy, Sahib!" She lay on her back staring up at him through the gathering gloom with terrible eyes. "Have mercy!"

"Give me your child. I will take care of it. It shall come to no harm--I promise you. Trust me!"

She gaped at him with the chill non-comprehension of gathering insensibility. Only the piteous appeal hung perpetually on her lips like a maddening refrain. He took the child and freed it from its filthy rags, and gave it to Ayeshi standing near him, impassive and watchful.

"Take it back to the camp and do the best you can," he ordered.

"And you, Sahib?"

"I shall go on--presently."

He went back to the woman and knelt down beside her, taking the terrible head upon his knee, and forcing a sedative between her lips. A nauseating odour of disease rose up to him, but it did not nauseate him. He knelt there and waited for the first sign of relief. And presently the laboured, agonized breathing softened; she half turned, and her palsied, distorted hand fumbled over his coat, groping its way down the sleeve to his wrist. She took his hand and pressed it against her burning cheek, against her lips. And he bore with her, holding her closer as she neared the brink, whispering to her in her own tongue, a medley of all the words of comfort that he knew. And all at once she sighed deeply, and was quiet, with the quietness which was more than sleep.

He got up and straightened out her poor body and covered her with her rags, and went on towards the village.

It was night now. A smouldering fire from behind the first hut threw up a sullen glow against which the low, ramshackle building stood out spectrely. Tristram passed it, and a gust of foetid wind goaded the flames to a sudden brilliance, so that he saw upon what it was they fed themselves. A gaunt, naked figure crouched near the hideous embers, and, turning as though to see whence the wind came, saw the Englishman, and leapt up, wild-eyed, and fled, shrieking, into the black fastness of the village.

Now the silence was gone, and in its place there were whisperings and the pattering of naked feet. A woman's scream came from afar off. Tristram stumbled over a body which neither moved nor cried out. He stood still, knowing that he was no longer alone. The eye of the electric torch which he carried flashed through the pitch darkness and rested upon distorted faces, turned to him in an agony of dread. And behind them, through the yellow haze, he caught a glimpse of bodies heaped together in the gutter, of cowering figures, faces hidden against the mud walls, of gaping doors, blacker than the pervading gloom, and threatening a nameless horror. He himself stood out in the dim light, tall and white and spectral. He moved, and the faces bowed before him like the heads of corn in the wind, and a voice went up wailing, piteous:

"Oh, Siva, it is the end--the end----"

The man whom he had seen crouching by the fire leapt suddenly out at him, and he felt the cold breath of steel against his cheek. He warded off the blow, and the madman came on again and again, and each time he defended himself patiently and without aggression. The circle of faces closed in. His light was out, but he could feel how the air about him grew hot and stifling. They waited--stupidly, hungrily, with a frenzied lust of death. If he fell--though they believed him God--still it would be the end.

Even then he did not strike out. The last time, the delirious fanatic stumbled and went crashing to the ground. Tristram bent over him, turning his light on to the foam-flecked old face.

"He'll come round all right," he said calmly. "But we've got to get him shut up somewhere before he does damage. Help me, some of you."

His voice sounded loud and clear amidst their low, formless whisperings, but they did not move, and he picked the old man up as though he had been a child. "Make way there!" he commanded.

They let him pass, but on the threshold of the hut he came to a halt, arrested by a stench which was like a blow, staggering his senses. With his free hand, he sent the light darting about the corners of the hut, and then turned and came quickly out. There was nothing to be done. Death, most hideous, had leered at him in triumph from a dozen frozen distortions of the human body.