Chapter VII: Part 7

Tristram drew rein to watch them. Beyond the river the white ungarnered corn lay in its silver fields awaiting its long-delayed hour. He remembered how in the winter months all Heerut had laboured at its irrigation--even as they laboured now--thinking of the harvest. And now the harvest was there and had begun to rot. Disease and the dreaded, docilely accepted quarantine had stayed the hands which should have gathered it. Now those who survived turned to the more pressing task--to the crumbling canals which were to bring life to the summer rice-crop. What was lost was lost. The past was past; but the grim, forbidding shadow of the future remained always.

Therein lay the tragedy of the unresting, patient figures--the labour that was so often foredoomed to fruitlessness, the struggle against an enemy who could never be wholly vanquished, the hope of a victory that could never be more than a breathing-space, a mere margin of life. But the greater tragedy was their patience, their passive acceptance of life as suffering.

It was that tragedy which Tristram saw as he watched them. For him it blotted out what was lovely and full of promise in the scene--the gay colours, the rich, deep sunlight on the fruitful fields, the semblance of prosperity. It made his greeting to those who passed him somewhat grim and less cheery than was its wont. The men and women nodded to him and smiled gravely in return. There was no formal, deferential salutation such as the Burra Sahib would have expected and received. He was less and greater than any of the Sahibs who ruled their destinies, and they merely smiled at him. No other man was to them what he had become. Rough and ready of tongue, imperious sometimes, occasionally ruthless, he yet was never the representative of a ruling race. Other Sahibs they feared and worshipped--the great warriors, the myth figures of the rulers beyond the unknown, but Tristram was the man of their daily lives, of their great sorrows and little happinesses, the man who sat under the council-tree at night and listened to the last village scandal, or to some wonderful tale told by the village story-teller, who tracked his way down the contaminated stream of their faith to its pure source and drank with them. And they who had known little of pity and less of love came through him to a dim, faltering knowledge.

Through the busy stillness there sounded a shrill trumpeting and the rustle and crack of the high grasses before swift and headlong passage of an elephant. Tristram drew Arabella to one side. Already in the distance he had seen the glitter and flash of the Rajah's gaudy howdah, and was not unprepared for the procession which, now bore down towards the river. There were five elephants in all, the first showily caparisoned with a mahout in splendid livery, the others more seriously equipped for the hunt. Rasaldu and his guest, the new Colonel, whose face was overshadowed by his helmet, rode in the first, and, seeing Tristram, nodded with a cheerful condescension and held up two fat fingers to indicate the success of their expedition. Then the procession rumbled past like a noisy, gorgeous carnival of life leaving a cloud of sullen dust and the grey bed-rock of reality.

An old man who had taken refuge under Arabella's lee put up a palsied hand and pointed in fierce scorn after the disappearing Rajah.

"His father--a cowherd----" he stammered. "His father served mine and betrayed him to the English."

Tristram nodded.

"And the Rajah who then was?"

"Dead, Sahib."

"He left no heirs?"

The sunken eyes were lifted for a moment.

"Sahib, there are things we do not even whisper among ourselves." Then his expression changed. It was as though a vizor had dropped over his shrivelled features. With bowed head he shuffled towards a group of villagers who had gathered farther off, and Tristram, becoming uncomfortably aware of a third presence, turned in his saddle. He saw then that, under cover of the procession's passing, he had been overtaken by a second horseman whose delicately built Arab showed traces of hard and recent galloping. The rider lifted his brown hand in formal salutation.

"I was loafing round the temple when I saw you pass, Major," he said easily. "It occurred to me that our long-planned interview might take place now and here. Are you agreeable?"

"If you wish it."

"May I ride with you?"

"Are you going to Heerut?"

Barclay showed his white teeth in a brief smile.

"I hope so."

There was a moment of uncertainty on Tristram's side. He stroked Arabella's long neck thoughtfully.

"Still, I think we'd better say what we want to say now. Your mare looks pretty winded--mine's all in. It won't hurt to breathe them both."

"As you like," Barclay answered. His manner was touched with a certain tremulousness which might have resulted from his rash gallop through the treacherous grass. But otherwise there was no trace of the man who had broken down at the temple gateway. "Look here," he began abruptly, "do you think you're playing the game, Major Tristram? What's your idea? What have I done to you? We don't need to beat about the bush. I know quite well whom I'm up against. I tell you straight--I've got a short way with people who oppose me--I smash them. But I don't smash till I've tried reason. Why don't you let my affairs alone?"

Tristram stirred impatiently in his saddle.

"I'm not interested in your affairs, Mr. Barclay, except in so far as they concern my friends."

"Friends!" Barclay laughed out with a forced good-humour. "And what have I done to your friends, pray? Look around you. Look at these rotten crops. Well, I've lent good money on these crops--lent it to your precious proteges. When am I going to see my money back?"

"When you want to," Tristram returned. "Next harvest, or as soon as the poor devils get a cow they can call their own--and fifty per cent. into the bargain."

Barclay shrugged his shoulders.

"Fifty per cent. covers the risks--no more."

"Then it's a pity you bother yourself."

"That's your idea of humour, no doubt, Major. But I'm dead serious. I know what you've done. You've set these people against me. You've used your influence to prevent my doing business with them. I've no doubt you used your power to terrify them."

Tristram laughed gaily.

"I did that," he admitted. "I believe they think you're the devil himself."

"And you think that's fair? What right had you----?"

"I don't care to see people paying fifty per cent. interest."

"Very well. But what's going to happen? You're so damned thoughtful for your friends--perhaps you'll tell me what's going to happen to them. Those weavers--at Heerut and Bjura and all round--they're smashed. No one will touch their stuff for a year at least. Are they going to starve--or are you going to advance them money out of your screw?"

Tristram looked up, his blue eyes resting calmly and even with a certain amusement on the other's dark and bitter face.

"In a sort of way--at least I'm getting the Government to take a hand."

"You--you did that?"

"I'm trying to. You're quite right. I've done all I can to keep you and your agents out. I'm a doctor, and the material conditions of my people concern me. I've seen some of your business methods, and I think you're unhealthy, Mr. Barclay."

Barclay contained himself with a desperate effort.

"My word, that may be truer than you think. I'm unhealthy to people who get in my way. Look here, Major Tristram--I don't want to use the screw--after all, we're Englishmen in a foreign country, and it's our infernal duty to hang together--but I won't be kicked out of things like that. I give you fair warning to leave my preserves alone, and I'll tell you why. I know things--I know something that would----" He stopped short. Tristram's eyes were still on his face. They had neither flickered nor lost their quizzical good-humour.

"Well, what do you know? It's rather funny, but we both seem to have found out something detrimental about each other. For instance, though this is only our second meeting, I'm convinced that you're a thorough-paced blackguard, Mr. Barclay."

"That may be. My father was one."

"I'm sorry."

"You have good reason to be sorry." His lips were quivering. He burst out ungovernably. "You have your share in him."

"Mr. Barclay----"

"Tristram--that's what my name should be. Your father was mine----"

"Is that your attack, then?"

Barclay put up his hand as though to hide his unsteady mouth.

"No," he said. "It is not. But it is the truth. I can prove it. I guessed it some time back, but I wasn't certain. Your--our father, lived in my bungalow. It was there he was murdered--he and my mother by her husband. How much you know----"

"I didn't know that," Tristram put in quietly. He looked away from Barclay, and the latter, watching him with a fevered anxiety, saw that the fine hand lying on Arabella's neck had lost its absolute steadiness. "You must prove it."

"I can do so."

"If it's true--then I'm sorry--sorry I spoke as I did. You've had the beastliest luck--I beg your pardon."

He lifted his head again. The white gravity of his face lent the rather boyish words a sincerity which Barclay recognized with an inward faltering of his anger. For a vivid instant the two men touched spiritually, or met on some common ground of emotion--then broke apart.

"I don't want pity," Barclay exclaimed childishly, bitterly.

"I didn't offer you pity. Or if I did--I meant it for us both. It's not as bad--but I was rather proud of my father. My mother--we'll leave that out. And, anyhow--I suppose it's a small thing compared to what he did to you. It was a pitiless thing to do." He hesitated, and then added, with a shyness which sat quaintly enough on his big manhood: "I suppose we're brothers, then?"

Barclay drew back from the outstretched hand. A mad impulse had almost driven him to grasp it and kiss it, but he crushed it under, shivering from head to foot in the violence of the revulsion.

"So you acknowledge the relationship?"

"Why shouldn't I?"

"We'd better look the thing in the face. I'm an Eurasian, and illegitimate at that. Are you going to own me before your friends?"

"Yes. I don't care what you are by circumstance. Illegitimacy and race are nothing to me. A man's a man."

"That's not the law," Barclay returned sneeringly.

"And I don't care a fig for the law either," Tristram said with a faint smile.

Barclay was silent. A dull anger was kindling in him. It was a deeper, more dangerous passion than that which had driven him to strike before he had intended. It had its roots in their fundamental antagonism of character as it revealed itself now, in Barclay's failure to strike hatred out of a man he hated. For a moment whatever was fine in him had flashed up in response to Tristram's simple humanity, but that was gone, and there remained nothing but the galling recognition of an inferiority which was not that of race or circumstance. And with that recognition the little light he had within him went out.

"That's all very well," he said at last, "but it's just talk. It won't help me. If you did recognize me, neither of us would get anything out of it. I should have to leave Gaya, and you'd get into trouble. That's not my game. The only brotherly act I ask of you is to leave me alone."

"I have told you already I don't want to interfere. I've got to."

Barclay gnawed at his thick under-lip, holding himself in, calculating.

"Look here," he began again, "I guess I've inherited something from my mother besides my infernal colour--a sort of instinct--a knowledge of people. That night I met you at Sigrid Fersen's I found out something about you. I knew what was going on in you though you didn't know it yourself. I know what's wrong with you now. Well, I'll do the brotherly first. If you treat me fairly, you'll have nothing to fear from me--and besides that, I'll give you the straight tip--I know something of Sigrid Fersen. She wants the cream of life--it's a sort of religion with her. In London there wasn't a man or woman who could stand up to her in magnificence. There were the wildest stories told about her, and they were truer than most stories. She wouldn't stand this sort of thing--not if she were dying of love for you. Take my word for it--you'll want money--any amount of it--then you'll stand a chance with her----"

Tristram, urged by a sudden disgust, and an intolerable unrest, turned Arabella's head and touched her to a walk. But Barclay was beside him, leaning towards him, talking rapidly.

"Well, you can have money, Tristram"--and now he was using the Christian name with a deliberate purpose--"you can have as much as you need. I tell you this country is like an unworked mine. I'm going to work it. I'm going to be as rich and powerful as the pioneers in South Africa. These Anglo-Indian officials treat India as though it was a sort of toy--a kind of game against heavy odds. There isn't a business man among them. I'm a business man. And I'll take you into partnership--a sleeping partner with a quarter share and nothing to do but to sleep hard. I swear to you that in a year or two you can marry any one you please--I tell you she's hard up----"

Tristram pulled Arabella to a standstill.

"Don't talk like that," he blazed out. "I don't want to think you a scoundrel. If there is any blood common to us both I don't want to loathe it. You've had rough luck--it doesn't need to make you a cad."

"Doesn't it? I'm not so sure. What do you expect me to do?"

"Throw up this slave-driving business. I'll stand by you. I'll see you through, Barclay--whatever one man can do for another I will do----"

"Will you? Will you come and live with me in Calcutta--with my people--the only people who won't treat me as though I were a nasty cross between a human being and an animal--blowsy, feckless, shiftless outcasts--will you? Well, you might--you're credited with queer things of that sort, but it would do for you. Your white blood wouldn't stand it. Nor will mine. I've got to get away from them. It's our father in me. But there's nowhere for me to go. I've got to make my world--make it in blood and sweat if needs must. When I've money enough to buy up Gaya, Gaya will accept me fast enough."

Tristram shook his head.

"You said just now that we behaved as though we were playing a big game," he said. "You may be right. And good sportsmen can't be bought."

"Can't they? Well, we'll see. Meantime, if there's a word of sincerity in all you've said, either come in with me or keep out of my way. I can make you a rich man, Tristram; don't forget that."

"You're asking me to visit the sins of your father and mine on to thousands of these luckless people."

"Put it that way if you like. I'm going forward, whatever you do."

"Then I shall fight you with every atom of influence and power I have."

Barclay tore at his horse's mouth, dragging the animal round on its haunches so that he faced Tristram. Both men were breathing heavily as though the struggle between them had become a physical one. Barclay thrilled with a savage satisfaction as he saw that the man before him was as shaken as himself, black-browed, hot-eyed, with a mouth set like a vice behind the short beard.

"Then I'll smash you, Tristram--I've got reason enough to hate you without that--you've got everything--now I'll smash you--I can and I will----"

Suddenly Tristram's face relaxed. He broke into a big unaffected laugh.

"We're like two villains out of old Adelphi melodrama," he said. "We've made each other unacceptable offers and threatened each other, and now I suppose it's to be a fight to the finish."

Barclay nodded. The laugh had been more bitter than a blow. He turned his head away so that Tristram should not see the treacherous weakness of his mouth. Then with a muttered exclamation that was half a curse, half a sob of ungovernable passion, he gave his trembling mare her head and galloped recklessly back the way he had come.

Tristram looked after him until Arabella, of her own accord, resumed her patient amble towards Heerut. The darkness began its race over the plain and swept up the little shadows of the field workers as a wave sweeps up driftwood. They came together silently; in a weary, dejected stream resumed their trudge along the rough tracts, bearing Tristram on his gaunt steed in their midst like the high effigy of a god. Thus they brought him to the doors of his hut and there left him, each man creeping in the same ghostly silence to his own hovel.

Owen Meredith was seated at Tristram's carved table, reading by the light of an oil-lamp. Tristram had seen the reflection beneath the ill-fitting doorway, but first had settled Arabella for the night, talking cheerily to her and lingering over his task as though deliberately avoiding the moment when he should meet his unknown visitor. Now seeing Meredith, his face expressed something akin to relief. The two men greeted each other quietly, sincerely, but without effusion. They were men of equal moral rank but of a different spiritual race. They respected each other, but real intimacy was not possible between them.

"I thought you wouldn't mind my dropping in on you like this," Meredith said. "I've been doing a round of the villages, and it was too late to go on. Besides, I was dog-tired. I daresay that's my real reason." He closed his pocket Bible as he spoke and laid his hand on it. He had not spoken the whole truth, but of that fact he was not even dimly conscious. He told himself that it was only right to look in on this lonely man. Tristram nodded absently.

"I'm jolly glad to see you. I've got a shakedown for visitors. You won't mind eating off one plate, will you?"

"Thankful to eat anything."

"That's good." He began to rummage in his little kitchen at the back of the hut and returned presently with the plate and some preserves. "It's not much," he apologized ruefully. "I always forget about food until I'm hungry. And then I want to kick myself."

"I expect we'll manage. You're all alone now."

"Yes. No indoor patients. It's quite queer not having a paw or a wing to bandage up."

"You've never found poor Wickie."

The man seemed to shrink a little.

"No. I guess if the next life allows it, he's not far off, poor old chap. He wouldn't be happy in Paradise without me."

Meredith winced. It was the more painful to him because Tristram was obviously quite serious. To Meredith he seemed like a big, unconsciously blasphemous child.

"And Ayeshi--you must miss him, too."

"Yes." The answer sounded curt, but Meredith persisted. He had the feeling that, though Gaya's suspicions had been kept quiet for Tristram's sake, the latter knew more than he betrayed.

"It was rather queer of him, the way he went off in the middle of your illness. You thought he was so devoted."

"He was." Tristram spread out an old newspaper over the table. "You got the Rajah to subscribe for his education. Well, I suppose he's gone to be educated. It's what you wanted."

"I didn't expect him to go when he did."

"He had good reason. I trust Ayeshi. But what your education will make of him Heaven knows. A rotten, dissatisfied little clerk in a Government office, I suppose. A hundred years ago he would have been a king."

Meredith sighed wearily.

"I know you resented my interference. I've got to do what I can in my own way, Tristram."

"I know. But I wish you'd make Christians of our own people first. If you did that thoroughly, you'd find my villagers would come of themselves. They hear a lot about Christianity. They don't see much of it."

Meredith's eyes flashed in answer. He leant forward across the table with his hand clenched on the black-bound Bible.

"You are quite right, Tristram," he said, with restrained passion. "We have failed badly hitherto. We have acted like cowards, whispering and murmuring of our religion as though we were half-ashamed of it. Who can believe in cowards? This people has got to see Christianity as the Romans saw it, apparent weakness pitted against the majority and triumphant. They have got to see what our faith means to us. Out here we are the early Christians. We must pass through the same ordeals, we must pay the same price. Therein lies our only hope of salvation, for ourselves, for these, our brethren for whose souls we are responsible to God."

"I don't know much about their souls," Tristram returned quietly. "I'm responsible for their bodies. It's quite enough. What do you mean to do?"

Meredith threw back his square head. There was something vivid and dominating about his personality at that moment which lifted mere fanatical rhetoric to real grandeur. In some such spirit Luther might have flung down his immortal challenge.

"Testify to my faith before Caesar, Tristram."

"And who is Caesar?"

"The people. When they go down to the river to worship their gods--at the Feast of Siva----"

Tristram got up, pushing his food from him.

"You must be mad," he said hotly. "What should we do, civilized though we are, if at Easter some Brahmin insulted Christ from our altar?"

Meredith met him without flinching.

"Yours is the wretched toleration of our age," he said. "There can be no righteous toleration of lies and wickedness."

"You know what will happen? There'll be rioting--bloodshed----"

"Possibly. I believe it to be necessary. I don't shrink from it."

"That's good of you." Tristram ruffled his shock of reddish hair in a fit of angry humour. "What the rest of your victims feel about it doesn't matter, of course. Martyrs you'd call them. They wouldn't be martyrs. If a horde of infuriated fanatics descend on Gaya, it will be a slaughter stage-managed and engineered by yourself. You and your like would be chucked out of India, and serve you right. Gaya doesn't want to testify to its faith. I doubt if it knows what its faith is." He stalked over to the open door with his back to Meredith. "Well, I shall warn the authorities," he finished.

There was a silence. Meredith considered his companion with a gradual relaxation of his intensity. He got up at last and laid his hand on Tristram's broad shoulder. There was something shy and uncertain in his manner, like a school-boy who has been caught in heroics.

"You won't need to inform the authorities," he said. "I dare say I'm a pompous idiot. There won't be any slaughter. We're miles from Gaya. Their enthusiasm won't carry them that far. They'll duck me, and that'll be about the extent of it."

Tristram looked down at the dark eager face, and, catching the lurking humour in Meredith's eyes, laughed.

"Oh, well, if only you and I are going to be massacred, it's of no consequence whatever," he said. "There, man, finish your supper!"

But he himself left his food untouched. He went over to a little roughly carved cabinet and produced a tobacco jar and an old disreputable pipe. Meredith looked away from him, playing absent-mindedly with the knife which formed Tristram's dinner-service. His pulses had begun to beat faster. He was dimly aware now that he had come to Heerut with a purpose that he had cherished secretly and painfully for many months past.

"I suppose you've not seen Boucicault lately?" he asked suddenly.

Tristram did not answer at once. He seemed absorbed in the accurate filling of his pipe-bowl.

"Yes," he said, at last. "I saw him today."

"Any change?"

"None. I'm beginning to be afraid there never will be."

"Poor Anne!" Meredith said, scarcely above a breath.

Tristram came over to the table and sat down on the edge. He lit his pipe, and Meredith, alert now for every guiding sign, saw that the hand with the match shook.

"Why 'poor Anne'? It's been ghastly, of course--but then, what was her life like before? At least, there's no one to cow the spirit out of her. She's free."

"You don't understand Anne. I've known her so long. Perhaps, as a clergyman, I had a deeper insight into her mind. Boucicault terrified her, but she loved him. It seems odd, doesn't it, but at the bottom he was a kind of hero to her. She thought of him as he once was--Tiger Sahib--a daring, handsome leader of men. That's what's uppermost in her now. Everything else is forgotten and forgiven. So you can see for yourself what she is suffering. It's the pitiableness of the man's utter helplessness in the face of her mother's amazing attitude----"

Tristram swung himself off the table and began to pace the room with long, impatient strides. Meredith watched him unceasingly.

"I approve of Mrs. Boucicault's attitude," Tristram said, in angry challenge.

"A great many people do. They think she's well rid of a ruffian. But, as I've told you, Anne loved him. She has a rare and wonderful spirit, Tristram, and she has forgiven. Her mother's flaunted happiness and frivolity were unbearable. She fled from it, and now she's longing for her father. She hasn't a penny of her own. It's a ghastly situation. The devil who did for Boucicault did for Anne."

Tristram stopped short. He was staring down at his pipe, which had gone out.

"You're confoundedly sure of things," he said brutally. "You know her so well. Why don't you marry her?"

"I asked her to marry me two months ago," was the answer. Meredith's hands were clasped on the table in an attitude which, but for his level voice and composed features, would have suggested an almost intolerable suffering. "She wouldn't have me, Tristram."

"I don't wonder," with a rough laugh. "What woman would care to share your life or mine?"

"You don't understand--it wasn't that. She'd be glad and proud to go into the desert with the man she loved. I wasn't the man. That's all." He was breathing thickly, and suddenly he got up with a gesture that even then Tristram recognized as poignant. "My God, man, why don't you go in and win?" he burst out.

They stared at each other through a long minute of silence. The pipe slipped from Tristram's hand and fell with a crack on the hard floor. He bent down and picked it up. The stem was broken. He tried to piece it together with a sightless persistency.

"Are you--you trying to be damned funny?" he stammered.

"Do you think I should make a jest of a thing like that?" was the fierce retort. "What I've done would be the action of a cad if you weren't the man I know you to be. It hasn't been easy--you can guess that. But I wasn't going to see Anne's happiness break up or want of a little sincerity. I believed you cared. I've been watching you. I was almost certain tonight. I understood your principles--you wouldn't ask a woman to share your life--but I know what Anne feels--she'd stick by you, Tristram----" He faltered, the thread of his argument lost in a sudden ugly sense of uncertainty. He saw Tristram's face in the shadow, and its sheer expressionlessness frightened him. "I suppose I've behaved like a fool," he said. "A man who cares as I do is liable to become obsessed with an idea. Forget it----"

Tristram started a little, as though awakening from a deep mental abstraction. He came and stood at Meredith's side, laying the fragments of the old pipe on the table with a mechanical care.

"That's the only foolish thing you've said," he remarked, gently. "I don't believe any one ever forgets anything. It's just a sort of comfortable phrase-- You did quite right--you clergymen have a kind of insight into things--you--you see where the shoe pinches--don't worry--I'm awfully grateful. Even now, I see what a fine thing you've done--I shall realize it much better later on. You've lived up to your faith--you've made me respect it. It's a case of the old Pagan and the early Christian. No, I'm not jeering. I'm in deadly earnest. There, turn in and go to sleep. I shan't want my bunk tonight. I've got to think things out--get clear with myself. So many things have been sprung on me--I've got to be alone. But don't worry. You've done the right thing. Good night."

He held out his hand, and now it was quite steady. Meredith took it and wondered at the strength of it. In the dull, bitter reaction from sacrifice, he visualized the fervour of Tristram's happiness.

"Good night. Don't let Anne guess----"

"Never--on my word."

He went out. The night was dark and oppressive. A hush of exhaustion hung over the village. Afar off a jackal howled dismally, and was answered nearer by a prowling pariah dog. Tristram crossed the deep gutter which lined the uneven roadway. Though he could see nothing, he knew every stone, every turn; he could have named the invisible huts and their owners as he passed them. The pariah dog came snuffing round his heels, and he threw it a crust which it was his habit to carry in his pocket for the starving strays of the village. He heard the snap of its famished teeth, and a hurried scamper through the darkness.

At the cross-roads a breeze came down from the west. It rustled through the mysterious, never-silent leaves of the council-tree. It seemed to him that their whisperings were the ghosts of familiar voices now still. He stopped to listen. He could hear Ayeshi's voice, low-pitched and meditative, the harsher notes of the headman:

"Ah, those were the great days--the great days----"

The headman had been swept away in the last epidemic. Ayeshi was gone. He would never sit again by the red firelight and listen to the story of the Rani Kurnavati. He would never lie and stare up through the fret-work of peepul leaves and dream his boyish dreams of her. Gone--all gone.

He walked on rapidly. He had no consciousness of distance or any purpose--only a desire to be always moving. But at last a sound broke through to him--the dull, menacing roar of unseen water sliding past him into the darkness. He knew then that he had reached the limit of his respite. The menace was for him. This was the end of drifting--of all dreams. Here was the reality--the whole future to be faced.

He stood there listening--bracing himself....

It was close on daybreak when he returned. The lamp still burned dimly. Meredith lay on the camp-bed, fully dressed, apparently asleep. Tristram glanced at the composed face and then stumbled over to the table against the wall and sat down. The struggle was over, but it had left him exhausted, broken, his mind blank save for odd distortions of memory. He thought he heard Wickie patter over the floor to meet him--Ayeshi's soft and friendly foot-fall--a voice in his ear---"I could make you a rich man--you could marry whom you pleased----" He heard a woman speaking gently with a subdued triumph--"Is this your confession, Major Tristram?"

But Meredith was not asleep. He had spent the night in a bitter conflict of uncertainties, in prayer, in alternating thankfulness and dread. Up to now, his growing purpose had been a light in his path, brightening as his eyes strengthened to the prospect it revealed. He had hugged sacrifice to himself and grown peaceful in his surrender. Now that his sacrifice and surrender had been made full and complete, he had lost his vision.

On Tristram's return, he had feigned sleep instinctively. Now the big, powerful figure huddled by the table fascinated him. He watched through half-opened eyes, painfully aware that he was eavesdropping, spying, but unable to turn away. Something was to be shown, made clear to him. He saw Tristram pick up a photograph which had stood hidden in the shadow and hold it before him. He remained thus motionless for many minutes. Meredith tried to speak to him, to hinder at all costs the self-betrayal which was to come. But it was too late. Without a sound, Tristram had dropped forward, hiding the portrait with his body, his face in his arms.

Thereafter Meredith lay still, with closed eyes, sick with an unformed sense of disaster.

By daybreak Tristram had disappeared. He left a brief note. He had been called to the next village--a case of fever. He hoped that the eggs would be all right for Meredith's breakfast. All very matter-of-fact and natural.

But the portrait on the table had vanished with him.

*CHAPTER XVII*

*MRS. SMITHERS DOES ACCOUNTS*

As she would have been the first to admit, arithmetic was not one of Mrs. Smithers's intellectual strongholds. Figures baulked her. They were an inexhaustible enemy which, when aroused, flung themselves upon her in serried legions and battalions, eluded pursuit, barricaded themselves behind mysterious lines, multiplied themselves into preposterous quantities, and utterly refused to "come out" and surrender to Mrs. Smithers's somewhat individual laws of subtraction and addition.

On this particular afternoon, she had determined on a grand assault, and had armed herself with a large sheet of paper, a pencil sharpened to a nicety, removed her mittens, straightened her wig, and figuratively rolled up her sleeves. Having made these preparations, which were probably intended more as a demonstration of impending "frightfulness" than as an actual assistance in her task, she took up her position in the dak-bungalow dining-room and opened fire.

She had fought unflinchingly for an hour, when the curtains at the far end of the room were pushed aside with an impatience which Mrs. Smithers seemed to recognize. Before she even looked up, she turned the sheet of paper, with its pattern of astonishing hieroglyphics on its face, and set her mittens upon it with an air of fixing a tombstone over the body of her enemy.

"Why, lawks a-mercy, Sigrid, I thought you were sleeping!" she exclaimed.

"The punkah-coolie had a nap instead. It was so hot--oh, Smithy, what an annoying person you can be! I've been hunting for you for the last hour."

"In which case," Mrs. Smithers commented, with a judicial flavour of speech culled from the law reports, "you must have looked under all the chairs and tables. I can't see how anybody could hunt for anything in this nasty barn of a place without running into them in ten minutes. Not a decent door, not a corner where you can get a moment to yourself--let alone escape from those crawling black things----"

Sigrid Fersen sighed. She had been standing in the doorway, one slender arm, from which the sleeve of her pale green tea-gown had dropped back, raised to hold aside the curtain. Now she came forward, moving restlessly and noiselessly about the room, picking up one ornament after another and putting it down without apparently having looked at it.

"You never will let me wipe my boots on you, Smithy," she complained. "I've trained you to be a doormat ever since I was an infant in arms, and you still show not the slightest aptitude. One of these days, I shall lose patience and send you flying." She caught the line of contempt at the corner of Mrs. Smithers's prim mouth and came over and pinched her ear with real severity. "I saw that sneer, you horrid, disreputable old tyrant! You think I can't get on without you. I wish I could, just to spite you----"

She stopped short, as though losing interest in her train of thought, and stood at Mrs. Smithers's side stroking the latter's withered cheek with a light, absent-minded hand. Mrs. Smithers accepted the attention much as a cat would have done, without gush or undignified gratitude, but with sedate I-fully-deserve-it satisfaction. "Smithy, do you realize that we shall have to pack up soon?"

"And a very good thing, too. A nice sight you're getting to look in this oven of a place."

"Am I? I thought so myself this afternoon. It quite frightened me. Smithy, make an effort and tell the truth. Am I showing signs of--of wear and tear?"

Mrs. Smithers unbent. She took the hand on her shoulder and kissed it abruptly and shamefacedly.

"Steel doesn't rust, Sigrid."

"Doesn't it? That shows what you know about steel. Also it proves you've been reading penny novelettes again. Still, there is such a thing as poetic licence, and as a compliment it will pass. No, I shan't rust, Smithy--I'd rather snap like the good blade of your metaphor----" She drifted along the currents of her thoughts for a moment, and then added abruptly, "So it's hey for England and the end of things."

"The beginning, my dear."

"I don't know. We're almost at the end of our tether."

"Well, you knew that would happen."

"Yes--I suppose I did. I remember making admirable, lucid plans to meet the event. Nothing particular has happened to upset them."

"Nothing at all, my dear."

"By the way, the Rajah has asked me to marry him."

Mrs. Smithers laughed. Her amusement was usually of a more restrained kind, and the laugh had a rusty, disused sound.

"That's a good joke."

"Isn't it? I don't think he would have offered me anything so respectable if he had had more pluck. He's terrified of me and of Gaya. He imagines Gaya would make him impossible if he insulted me. I've outgrown his original intentions altogether."

"What did you say?"

"I told him he wasn't rich enough. It was horribly vulgar, but it's the sort of thing he understands. I've never seen a man more humiliated. If I had told him he was a blackguard, he wouldn't have minded. It's wonderful how he has assimilated our Western ideals."

"Sigrid----"

"Yes, I know--I'm in a detestable mood. I'm upset, Smithy. I've always controlled my life, moulded it into the shape I wanted. I was so sure that I could never be beaten by it. I thought there was only one real catastrophe we human beings were afflicted with--ill-health--and that I was prepared to master in my own way. But now----"

Mrs. Smithers picked up her pencil and tapped the table with a judicial air of summing up.

"You're out of sorts, Sigrid. Look at things straight. Two years ago we started off on a wild-goose chase. I knew it was a wild-goose chase, but you had to be humoured and so I just let you run. Besides, you had a grain of horse-sense in you. If you couldn't find what you wanted in those two years, you'd take the next best thing. Well, you haven't found it----"

"How do you know? What about the Rajah?"

"Sigrid--your mind wants a good spring-cleaning. It's full of cobwebs and horrors----"

"Or Major Tristram?"

Mrs. Smithers seized upon her mittens and folded them up into a tight ball and smacked them viciously down on the table.

"Of course, you're in love with him, the poor benighted, footling ninny. That's the whole trouble."

"And you're dying for me to marry him. That's why you're always insulting him."

She moved away from Mrs. Smithers's side and stood at the open window looking out on to the garden, her hand to her cheek in her favourite attitude of meditation. "Yes, I am in love with him in a superficial sort of way. It's his absurdity, his unreality, his utterly impossible conception of life. And his love of me. Just as absurd as the rest of him. A fantasia. Two years' worship of a woman he saw dancing for ten minutes before a vulgar, gaping, unseeing mob! Think of it. It's sheer worship, Smithy. He sees something miraculous--divine in me. That's the wonderful part of him. He's right. He's gone right through me to what is divine--my art. He saw me dance--he was just a country-bumpkin who didn't know Beethoven from Bizet--and he didn't worry about my beauty or the shape of my limbs, or wonder whether my pearls were real or who gave them to me. He saw God in me. I knew that when I found my photograph on his table. In a kind of flash. It wasn't a silly, stage-door infatuation. It was real--a perfect understanding." She threw out her arms with a gesture of freedom, of spiritual expansion. "Oh, it tasted good, that understanding. I couldn't have done less than love him." She seemed to sink into a deep, brooding contentment, and Mrs. Smithers did not move or speak. "But I shan't marry him. I am not young any longer. I have built my house and have lived in it too long. I need space and splendour, magnificence. I should stifle in his hovel. I am no sensualist. I belong to the best of the old Greeks. No vulgar display of wealth, no ugliness of poverty--but absolute Beauty--that's my religion--the most austere religion of the world. He understands, but he cannot follow. He doesn't know it, but he has chosen the road of the Galilean--not the Galilean of the Cross, but the simple man who loved the sparrows and the lilies--and I follow Diana and Apollo----" She broke off with a sigh and turned away. "So that's the end of that. We shall pack our trunks, and one day it will be just an episode. But today--don't let any one worry me today, Smithy. There's some one coming up the drive now. Tell them I'm ill--anything--only don't let them worry me----"

She touched the old cheek with her lips, and then soundlessly, like a flash of pale light, had vanished.

Mrs. Smithers unfolded her mittens and put them on. Apparently unmoved, she was about to resume her offensive against her enemy, when Mary Compton made her appearance on the balcony. Whereupon Mrs. Smithers postponed her attack in order to settle first with the intruder. Her manner, however, was almost gracious. She liked Mrs. Compton. She liked her especially this afternoon because she was wearing one of Sigrid's frocks--by no means an old one--which Mrs. Smithers had altered with her own hands. This detail formed an unbreakable link of affection and fraternity.

Mrs. Compton did not wait for an invitation. She dropped into the nearest chair, discarded her garden hat, and flung her parasol on the floor, proceeding thereafter to ruffle her grey-threaded curly hair with an exasperated hand.

"Oh, the heat! Smithy, for pity's sake, don't tell me I've faced it for nothing. Sigrid's in?"

"She's in, Mrs. Compton, but she's not at home."

"Not even for me?"

"Not for a living soul."

"She's--she's not ill?"

"Not that I know of." She shot a glance at Mrs. Compton's crestfallen countenance, and relaxed her official attitude. "You can have a cup of tea if you like."

Mrs. Compton laughed.

"Well, it's a poor substitute, but I'll take it. I should expire on your doorstep if you didn't give me something to revive me. I met that brute of a Barclay on the road and he offered me a lift. The mere thought of it will keep me on the frazzle for days. I only hope he isn't coming here."

"He'd better not," Mrs. Smithers observed, with grim significance. There was a moment's silence, and then she jerked her head in the direction of the curtained doorway. "It's the heat," she explained. "It's just wearing her to ribbons. The Lord be praised, we shall be going back to civilization soon."

Mrs. Compton sat bolt upright, red with consternation.

"She's not going back to England?"

"I hope so, I'm sure."

"It's--it's an engagement, I suppose?"

"H'm, a sort of one."

"Smithy--and it's just as though she only arrived yesterday. What shall I do? Everything will be nothing without her. What did she come for? Just to make us all hate each other, just to show us what a silly, colourless world we live in? Smithy, this means a divorce for me. I shall desert Archie. I shall live at stage-doors and spend my fortune on front seats in the pit. I shall see her dance at last----"

The very poignant feeling which underlay her desperate humour touched Mrs. Smithers to the quick. At all times she was inclined to treat facetiousness seriously, most of life's jokes having been made at her expense, and she saw more of Mary Compton's grief than the latter knew.

"My dear, don't you do nothing silly. You wouldn't see her dance."

"In London."

"No."

"In Paris, then----"

"Not in Paris--nowhere."

"But, Smithy----"

"If she did, she'd----" Mrs. Smithers took her tongue between her teeth. She leant across the table, her stiff old body quivering with menace. "Don't you breathe a word--don't you let on--if you do, I'll--I'll----"

What Mrs. Smithers would or would not have done Mrs. Compton never knew. In a state of uncomprehending consternation, she almost welcomed the diversion created by the entry of a frightened-looking servant.

"Mem-Sahib--if you please, Mem-Sahib----"

His announcement was also lost. He was pushed roughly aside and James Barclay entered. At sight of his tall, perfectly clad figure Mrs. Smithers was on her feet, and for a moment Mrs. Compton believed she intended a personal assault--a belief which Barclay himself appeared to share, for his attitude became more deferential though not less resolute. He bowed gravely to his opponent, including Mrs. Compton in the greeting. Mrs. Compton ignored him.

"I am sorry to be forced to intrude in this way," he began with a certain dignity. "It seems to be fated that I should have to burgle my entry. But I was practically certain that an ordinary appeal for admission would be ignored. So I just followed on your butler's heels. May I speak to Miss Fersen?"

Mrs. Smithers drew a deep breath of indignation.

"No, you may not. She's not seeing any one--much less you--you blackguard----"

Mrs. Compton jumped at the sheer vigour and audacity of the attack, and then, as she saw Barclay's face, was conscious of a pang of the half-angry pity which he had caused her once before. A peculiar pallor showed under his olive skin. He was no longer smiling, and his eyes had a sick, stricken look like that of an animal badly hurt. The next minute he was himself again, cool, resolute, without that insolence which stamped most of his actions as weak and fundamentally diffident.

"I am sorry you think of me like that, Mrs. Smithers, but I won't argue about it. I must see Miss Fersen----"

"Do you want me to throw you out with my own hands?"

"No, I don't," he returned, with perfect gravity. "All I ask of you is to give Miss Fersen this letter. It was written in case she refused to see me. It is a business matter."

Mrs. Smithers wavered, obviously nonplussed by the man's quiet resolution. In despair, she appealed to Mrs. Compton.

"What shall I do with him?"

Mrs. Compton stared out into the garden.

"You'd better take the letter, hadn't you? It gives Sigrid a chance to decide for herself."

"Oh, very well." She snatched the letter from Barclay's hands and made her exit with what sounded like the challenging snort of an old war-horse. Barclay maintained his position quietly. He made no effort to speak to Mrs. Compton, who continued to ignore him. But, without knowing it, his restraint began to trouble her, and she resorted to the mannerism of stage heroes when confronted by the villain and a painful situation. She opened a silver case on the table beside her, selected a cigarette, and began to smoke with an insulting satisfaction. Had Barclay offered her the lighter which she was certain he possessed, she felt that she would have infallibly struck him; but he stood stroking his moustache, and apparently as unconscious of her as she pretended to be of him. The silence became intolerable. Furiously conscious that he had beaten her on her own ground, she got up and went out on to the balcony, only to realize with increased annoyance that she had been beaten by a second. Mrs. Smithers had returned. She did not look at Barclay, and addressed her message to the opposite wall.

"You can go in," she said.

He bowed, showing no sign of elation or surprise, and the door closed behind him. Mary Compton returned, and the two women busied themselves with the tea-things which had been brought in, paying the function more intent interest than was usual. They were both nervous. For all Mrs. Smithers's excessive clatter, they could hear voices, muffled and continuous, and something in the sound paralysed their initiative. Neither wished to listen, but they found nothing with which to cover their compulsory attention. When Mrs. Smithers spoke at last it was with a breathless tremulousness.

"I don't know what Sigrid did it for," she said. "She didn't want to see any one, and now this creature comes along. Just because he met her once at some reception he'd managed to wriggle himself into--she can be so idiotically good-natured--it was a begging letter, I'm sure: the nasty, cadging blackamoor."

Mrs. Compton did not respond directly. She had what, for all men say, is a quality equally rare in both sexes, a profound reverence for the reticences and secrets of her friends, and she wished to avoid the confidences which might be hovering on Mrs. Smithers's unsteady lips.

"I hate meeting that man," she said, by way of an answer. "He frightens me. I always think of him as an English sin come home to roost--a bird of ill-omen, not necessarily bad, just foredoomed to evil. I wish he hadn't come to Gaya."

"I wish he'd leave Sigrid alone," Mrs. Smithers muttered.

Mary Compton knew now that Barclay had been at the dak-bungalow before, and wished she did not know. The knowledge troubled her, increasing an inexplicable uneasiness. Something was going on in that next room. Though she could not and would not have heard the words, the voices persisted in attaining her consciousness. Their tone was neither angry nor excited, but intensely earnest. Business? What business could James Barclay have with a woman he scarcely knew? She could not avoid the question. Then came a silence infinitely worse than the voices--it was so sudden and prolonged.

Mary Compton became almost panic-stricken in her effort to escape from the fascination of that silence. She turned her attention to Mrs. Smithers, who had deserted her tea and gone back to her figures.

"Are you drawing patterns?" she asked hurriedly. Mrs. Smithers shook her head.

"Sums," she explained. "Never could do them even in me board-school days, and that's some time ago. Are you any good?"

"I wrestle with accounts once a week--not successfully. But that's not the fault of my arithmetic. It's Archie's pay. Can I help?"

Mrs. Smithers sat back and folded her hands.

"What I'm trying to find out," she began, "is, what income would one have if one had two thousand pounds?"

"It depends on the rate of interest."

"What rate of interest can one have?"

"Well, three-and-a-half per cent. if you're rich, and five per cent. if you're poor. If one hasn't much, it's a case of sink or swim."

"Let's split the difference--say, four per cent. Here--you can have the pencil----"

Mrs. Compton laughed.

"I can manage that in my head. Eighty pounds would be about your income."

"Lawks a-mercy!" said Mrs. Smithers under her breath. She brooded over this information for a minute, in which her companion became aware that Sigrid was speaking again--very quietly. If she had spoken angrily Mary Compton would not have felt her heart beating against her ribs in an absurd, horrible excitement. "It's amazing what a little a lot of money is," Mrs. Smithers philosophized gloomily. "I've done a powerful lot of saving, and two thousand pounds seems a powerful lot to have saved, but what's eighty pounds a year? A mere drop in an ocean. One couldn't keep oneself in boots and shoes with it."

Mrs. Compton stared. Mrs. Smithers's elastic-sided foot-gear did not suggest eighty pounds' expenditure, or anything like it.

"No--I suppose not," she ventured.

"And two thousand pounds, for that matter," Mrs. Smithers continued, with increased contempt. "What's the good of that? One couldn't live decently for six months on it."