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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 10755 ***
+
+THE BROKEN ROAD
+
+BY A.E.W. MASON
+
+AUTHOR OF "FOUR FEATHERS," "THE TRUANTS," "RUNNING WATER," ETC.
+
+1907
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+CHAPTER
+
+     I.      THE BREAKING OF THE ROAD
+
+    II.      INSIDE THE FORT
+
+   III.      LINFORTH'S DEATH
+
+    IV.      LUFFE LOOKS FORWARD
+
+     V.      A MAGAZINE ARTICLE
+
+    VI.      A LONG WALK
+
+   VII.      IN THE DAUPHINÉ
+
+  VIII.      A STRING OF PEARLS
+
+    IX.      LUFFE IS REMEMBERED
+
+     X.      AN UNANSWERED QUESTION
+
+    XI.      AT THE GATE OF LAHORE
+
+   XII.      ON THE POLO-GROUND
+
+  XIII.      THE INVIDIOUS BAR
+
+   XIV.      IN THE COURTYARD
+
+    XV.      A QUESTION ANSWERED
+
+   XVI.      SHERE ALI MEETS AN OLD FRIEND
+
+  XVII.      NEWS FROM MECCA
+
+ XVIII.      SYBIL LINFORTH'S LOYALTY
+
+   XIX.      A GIFT MISUNDERSTOOD
+
+    XX.      THE SOLDIER AND THE JEW
+
+   XXI.      SHERE ALI IS CLAIMED BY CHILTISTAN
+
+  XXII.      THE CASTING OF THE DIE
+
+ XXIII.      SHERE ALI'S PILGRIMAGE
+
+  XXIV.      NEWS FROM AJMERE
+
+   XXV.      IN THE ROSE GARDEN
+
+  XXVI.      THE BREAKING OF THE PITCHER
+
+ XXVII.      AN ARRESTED CONFESSION
+
+XXVIII.      THE THIEF
+
+  XXIX.      MRS. OLIVER RIDES THROUGH PESHAWUR
+
+   XXX.      THE NEEDED IMPLEMENT
+
+  XXXI.      AN OLD TOMB AND A NEW SHRINE
+
+ XXXII.      SURPRISES FOR CAPTAIN PHILLIPS
+
+XXXIII.      IN THE RESIDENCY
+
+ XXXIV.      ONE OF THE LITTLE WARS
+
+  XXXV.      A LETTER FROM VIOLET
+
+ XXXVI.      "THE LITTLE LESS--"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+THE BREAKING OF THE ROAD
+
+
+It was the Road which caused the trouble. It usually is the road. That
+and a reigning prince who was declared by his uncle secretly to have sold
+his country to the British, and a half-crazed priest from out beyond the
+borders of Afghanistan, who sat on a slab of stone by the river-bank and
+preached a _djehad_. But above all it was the road--Linforth's road. It
+came winding down from the passes, over slopes of shale; it was built
+with wooden galleries along the precipitous sides of cliffs; it snaked
+treacherously further and further across the rich valley of Chiltistan
+towards the Hindu Kush, until the people of that valley could endure it
+no longer.
+
+Then suddenly from Peshawur the wires began to flash their quiet and
+ominous messages. The road had been cut behind Linforth and his coolies.
+No news had come from him. No supplies could reach him. Luffe, who was in
+the country to the east of Chiltistan, had been informed. He had gathered
+together what troops he could lay his hands on and had already started
+over the eastern passes to Linforth's relief. But it was believed that
+the whole province of Chiltistan had risen. Moreover it was winter-time
+and the passes were deep in snow. The news was telegraphed to England.
+Comfortable gentlemen read it in their first-class carriages as they
+travelled to the City and murmured to each other commonplaces about the
+price of empire. And in a house at the foot of the Sussex Downs
+Linforth's young wife leaned over the cot of her child with the tears
+streaming from her eyes, and thought of the road with no less horror than
+the people of Chiltistan. Meanwhile the great men in Calcutta began to
+mobilise a field force at Nowshera, and all official India said uneasily,
+"Thank Heaven, Luffe's on the spot."
+
+Charles Luffe had long since abandoned the army for the political
+service, and, indeed, he was fast approaching the time-limit of his
+career. He was a man of breadth and height, but rather heavy and dull of
+feature, with a worn face and a bald forehead. He had made enemies, and
+still made them, for he had not the art of suffering fools gladly; and,
+on the other hand, he made no friends. He had no sense of humour and no
+general information. He was, therefore, of no assistance at a
+dinner-party, but when there was trouble upon the Frontier, or beyond it,
+he was usually found to be the chief agent in the settlement.
+
+Luffe alone had foreseen and given warning of the danger. Even Linforth,
+who was actually superintending the making of the road, had been kept in
+ignorance. At times, indeed, some spokesman from among the merchants of
+Kohara, the city of Chiltistan where year by year the caravans from
+Central Asia met the caravans from Central India, would come to his tent
+and expostulate.
+
+"We are better without the road, your Excellency. Will you kindly stop
+it!" the merchant would say; and Linforth would then proceed to
+demonstrate how extremely valuable to the people of Chiltistan a better
+road would be:
+
+"Kohara is already a great mart. In your bazaars at summer-time you
+see traders from Turkestan and Tibet and Siberia, mingling with the
+Hindoo merchants from Delhi and Lahore. The road will bring you still
+more trade."
+
+The spokesman went back to the broad street of Kohara seemingly well
+content, and inch by inch the road crept nearer to the capital.
+
+But Luffe was better acquainted with the Chiltis, a soft-spoken race of
+men, with musical, smooth voices and polite and pretty ways. But
+treachery was a point of honour with them and cold-blooded cruelty a
+habit. There was one particular story which Luffe was accustomed to tell
+as illustrative of the Chilti character.
+
+"There was a young man who lived with his mother in a little hamlet close
+to Kohara. His mother continually urged him to marry, but for a long
+while he would not. He did not wish to marry. Finally, however, he fell
+in love with a pretty girl, made her his wife, and brought her home, to
+his mother's delight. But the mother's delight lasted for just five days.
+She began to complain, she began to quarrel; the young wife replied, and
+the din of their voices greatly distressed the young man, besides making
+him an object of ridicule to his neighbours. One evening, in a fit of
+passion, both women said they would stand it no longer. They ran out of
+the house and up the hillside, but as there was only one path they ran
+away together, quarrelling as they went. Then the young Chilti rose,
+followed them, caught them up, tied them in turn hand and foot, laid them
+side by side on a slab of stone, and quietly cut their throats.
+
+"'Women talk too much,' he said, as he came back to a house unfamiliarly
+quiet. 'One had really to put a stop to it.'"
+
+Knowing this and many similar stories, Luffe had been for some while on
+the alert. Whispers reached him of dangerous talk in the bazaars of
+Kohara, Peshawur, and even of Benares in India proper. He heard of the
+growing power of the old Mullah by the river-bank. He was aware of the
+accusations against the ruling Khan. He knew that after night had fallen
+Wafadar Nazim, the Khan's uncle, a restless, ambitious, disloyal man,
+crept down to the river-bank and held converse with the priest. Thus he
+was ready so far as he could be ready.
+
+The news that the road was broken was flashed to him from the nearest
+telegraph station, and within twenty-four hours he led out a small force
+from his Agency--a battalion of Sikhs, a couple of companies of Gurkhas,
+two guns of a mountain battery, and a troop of irregular levies--and
+disappeared over the pass, now deep in snow.
+
+"Would he be in time?"
+
+Not only in India was the question asked. It was asked in England, too,
+in the clubs of Pall Mall, but nowhere with so passionate an outcry as in
+the house at the foot of the Sussex Downs.
+
+To Sybil Linforth these days were a time of intolerable suspense. The
+horror of the Road was upon her. She dreamed of it when she slept, so
+that she came to dread sleep, and tried, as long as she might, to keep
+her heavy eyelids from closing over her eyes. The nights to her were
+terrible. Now it was she, with her child in her arms, who walked for
+ever and ever along that road, toiling through snow or over shale and
+finding no rest anywhere. Now it was her boy alone, who wandered along
+one of the wooden galleries high up above the river torrent, until a
+plank broke and he fell through with a piteous scream. Now it was her
+husband, who could go neither forward nor backward, since in front and
+behind a chasm gaped. But most often it was a man--a young Englishman,
+who pursued a young Indian along that road into the mists. Somehow,
+perhaps because it was inexplicable, perhaps because its details were so
+clear, this dream terrified her more than all the rest. She could tell
+the very dress of the Indian who fled--a young man--young as his
+pursuer. A thick sheepskin coat swung aside as he ran and gave her a
+glimpse of gay silk; soft leather boots protected his feet; and upon his
+face there was a look of fury and wild fear. She never woke from this
+dream but her heart was beating wildly. For a few moments after waking
+peace would descend upon her.
+
+"It is a dream--all a dream," she would whisper to herself with
+contentment, and then the truth would break upon her dissociated from the
+dream. Often she rose from her bed and, kneeling beside the boy's cot,
+prayed with a passionate heart that the curse of the Road--that road
+predicted by a Linforth years ago--might overpass this generation.
+
+Meanwhile rumours came--rumours of disaster. Finally a messenger broke
+through and brought sure tidings. Luffe had marched quickly, had come
+within thirty miles of Kohara before he was stopped. In a strong fort at
+a bend of the river the young Khan with his wife and a few adherents had
+taken refuge. Luffe joined the Khan, sought to push through to Kohara and
+rescue Linforth, but was driven back. He and his troops and the Khan were
+now closely besieged by Wafadar Nazim.
+
+The work of mobilisation was pressed on; a great force was gathered at
+Nowshera; Brigadier Appleton was appointed to command it.
+
+"Luffe will hold out," said official India, trying to be cheerful.
+
+Perhaps the only man who distrusted Luffe's ability to hold out was
+Brigadier Appleton, who had personal reasons for his views. Brigadier
+Appleton was no fool, and yet Luffe had not suffered him gladly. All the
+more, therefore, did he hurry on the preparations. The force marched out
+on the new road to Chiltistan. But meanwhile the weeks were passing, and
+up beyond the snow-encumbered hills the beleaguered troops stood
+cheerfully at bay behind the thick fort-walls.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+INSIDE THE FORT
+
+
+The six English officers made it a practice, so far as they could, to
+dine together; and during the third week of the siege the conversation
+happened one evening to take a particular turn. Ever afterwards, during
+this one hour of the twenty-four, it swerved regularly into the same
+channel. The restaurants of London were energetically discussed, and
+their merits urged by each particular partisan with an enthusiasm which
+would have delighted a shareholder. Where you got the best dinner, where
+the prettiest women were to be seen, whether a band was a drawback or an
+advantage--not a point was omitted, although every point had been
+debated yesterday or the day before. To-night the grave question of the
+proper number for a supper party was opened by Major Dewes of the 5th
+Gurkha Regiment.
+
+"Two," said the Political Officer promptly, and he chuckled under his
+grey moustache. "I remember the last time I was in London I took out to
+supper--none of the coryphées you boys are so proud of being seen about
+with, but"--and, pausing impressively, he named a reigning lady of the
+light-opera stage.
+
+"You did!" exclaimed a subaltern.
+
+"I did," he replied complacently.
+
+"What did you talk about?" asked Major Dewes, and the Political Officer
+suddenly grew serious.
+
+"I was very interested," he said quietly. "I got knowledge which it was
+good for me to have. I saw something which it was well for me to see. I
+wished--I wish now--that some of the rulers and the politicians could
+have seen what I saw that night."
+
+A brief silence followed upon his words, and during that silence certain
+sounds became audible--the beating of tom-toms and the cries of men. The
+dinner-table was set in the verandah of an inner courtyard open to the
+sky, and the sounds descended into that well quite distinctly, but
+faintly, as if they were made at a distance in the dark, open country.
+The six men seated about the table paid no heed to those sounds; they had
+had them in their ears too long. And five of the six were occupied in
+wondering what in the world Sir Charles Luffe, K.C.S.I., could have
+learnt of value to him at a solitary supper party with a lady of comic
+opera. For it was evident that he had spoken in deadly earnest.
+
+Captain Lynes of the Sikhs broke the silence:
+
+"What's this?" he asked, as an orderly offered to him a dish.
+
+"Let us not inquire too closely," said the Political Officer. "This is
+the fourth week of the siege."
+
+The rice-fields of the broad and fertile valley were trampled down and
+built upon with sangars. The siege had cut its scars upon the fort's
+rough walls of mud and projecting beams. But nowhere were its marks more
+visible than upon the faces of the Englishmen in the verandah of that
+courtyard.
+
+Dissimilar as they were in age and feature, sleepless nights and the
+unrelieved tension had given to their drawn faces almost a family
+likeness. They were men tired out, but as yet unaware of their
+exhaustion, so bright a flame burnt within each one of them. Somewhere
+amongst the snow-passes on the north-east a relieving force would surely
+be encamped that night, a day's march nearer than it was yesterday.
+Somewhere amongst the snow-passes in the south a second force would be
+surely advancing from Nowshera, probably short of rations, certainly
+short of baggage, that it might march the lighter. When one of those two
+forces deployed across the valley and the gates of the fort were again
+thrown open to the air the weeks of endurance would exact their toll. But
+that time was not yet come. Meanwhile the six men held on cheerily,
+inspiring the garrison with their own confidence, while day after day a
+province in arms flung itself in vain against their blood-stained walls.
+Luffe, indeed, the Political Officer, fought with disease as well as with
+the insurgents of Chiltistan; and though he remained the master-mind of
+the defence, the Doctor never passed him without an anxious glance. For
+there were the signs of death upon his face.
+
+"The fourth week!" said Lynes. "Is it, by George? Well, the siege won't
+last much longer now. The Sirkar don't leave its servants in the lurch.
+That's what these hill-tribes never seem to understand. How is Travers?"
+he asked of the Doctor.
+
+Travers, a subaltern of the North Surrey Light Infantry, had been shot
+through the thigh in the covered waterway to the river that morning.
+
+"He's going on all right," replied the Doctor. "Travers had bad luck. It
+must have been a stray bullet which slipped through that chink in the
+stones. For he could not have been seen--"
+
+As he spoke a cry rang clearly out. All six men looked upwards
+through the open roof to the clear dark sky, where the stars shone
+frostily bright.
+
+"What was that?" asked one of the six.
+
+"Hush," said Luffe, and for a moment they all listened in silence, with
+expectant faces and their bodies alert to spring from their chairs. Then
+the cry was heard again. It was a wail more than a cry, and it sounded
+strangely solitary, strangely sad, as it floated through the still air.
+There was the East in that cry trembling out of the infinite darkness
+above their heads. But the six men relaxed their limbs. They had
+expected the loud note of the Pathan war-cry to swell sonorously, and
+with intervals shorter and shorter until it became one menacing and
+continuous roar.
+
+"It is someone close under the walls," said Luffe, and as he ended a Sikh
+orderly appeared at the entrance of a passage into the courtyard, and,
+advancing to the table, saluted.
+
+"Sahib, there is a man who claims that he comes with a message from
+Wafadar Nazim."
+
+"Tell him that we receive no messages at night, as Wafadar Nazim knows
+well. Let him come in the morning and he shall be admitted. Tell him that
+if he does not go back at once the sentinels will fire." And Luffe nodded
+to one of the younger officers. "Do you see to it, Haslewood."
+
+Haslewood rose and went out from the courtyard with the orderly. He
+returned in a few minutes, saying that the man had returned to Wafadar
+Nazim's camp. The six men resumed their meal, and just as they ended it a
+Pathan glided in white flowing garments into the courtyard and bowed low.
+
+"Huzoor," he said, "His Highness the Khan sends you greeting. God has
+been very good to him. A son has been born to him this day, and he sends
+you this present, knowing that you will value it more than all that he
+has"; and carefully unfolding a napkin, he laid with reverence upon the
+table a little red cardboard box. The mere look of the box told the six
+men what the present was even before Luffe lifted the lid. It was a box
+of fifty gold-tipped cigarettes, and applause greeted their appearance.
+
+"If he could only have a son every day," said Lynes, and in the laugh
+which followed upon the words Luffe alone did not join. He leaned his
+forehead upon his hand and sat in a moody silence. Then he turned towards
+the servant and bade him thank his master.
+
+"I will come myself to offer our congratulations after dinner if his
+Highness will receive me," said Luffe.
+
+The box of cigarettes went round the table. Each man took one, lighted
+it, and inhaled the smoke silently and very slowly. The garrison had run
+out of tobacco a week before. Now it had come to them welcome as a gift
+from Heaven. The moment was one of which the perfect enjoyment was not to
+be marred by any speech. Only a grunt of satisfaction or a deep sigh of
+pleasure was now and then to be heard, as the smoke curled upwards from
+the little paper sticks. Each man competed with his neighbour in the
+slowness of his respiration, each man wanted to be the last to lay down
+his cigarette and go about his work. And then the Doctor said in a
+whisper to Major Dewes:
+
+"That's bad. Look!"
+
+Luffe, a mighty smoker in his days of health, had let his cigarette go
+out, had laid it half-consumed upon the edge of his plate. But it seemed
+that ill-health was not all to blame. He had the look of one who had
+forgotten his company. He was withdrawn amongst his own speculations, and
+his eyes looked out beyond that smoke-laden room in a fort amongst the
+Himalaya mountains into future years dim with peril and trouble.
+
+"There is no moon," he said at length. "We can get some exercise
+to-night"; and he rose from the table and ascended a little staircase on
+to the flat roof of the fort. Major Dewes and the three other officers
+got up and went about their business. Dr. Bodley, the surgeon, alone
+remained seated. He waited until the tramp of his companions' feet had
+died away, and then he drew from his pocket a briarwood pipe, which he
+polished lovingly. He walked round the table and, collecting the ends of
+the cigarettes, pressed them into the bowl of the pipe.
+
+"Thank Heavens I am not an executive officer," he said, as he lighted his
+pipe and settled himself again comfortably in his chair. It should be
+mentioned, perhaps, that he not only doctored and operated on the sick
+and wounded, but he kept the stores, and when any fighting was to be
+done, took a rifle and filled any place which might be vacant in the
+firing-line.
+
+"There are now forty-four cigarettes," he reflected. "At six a day they
+will last a week. In a week something will have happened. Either the
+relieving force will be here, or--yes, decidedly something will have
+happened." And as he blew the smoke out from between his lips he added
+solemnly: "If not to us, to the Political Officer."
+
+Meanwhile Luffe paced the roof of the fort in the darkness. The fort was
+built in the bend of a swift, wide river, and so far as three sides were
+concerned was securely placed. For on three the low precipitous cliffs
+overhung the tumbling water. On the fourth, however, the fertile plain of
+the valley stretched open and flat up to the very gates.
+
+In front of the forts a line of sangars extended, the position of each
+being marked even now by a glare of light above it, which struck up from
+the fire which the insurgents had lit behind the walls of stone. And from
+one and another of the sangars the monotonous beat of a tom-tom came to
+Luffe's ears.
+
+Luffe walked up and down for a time upon the roof. There was a new sangar
+to-night, close to the North Tower, which had not existed yesterday.
+Moreover, the almond trees in the garden just outside the western wall
+were in blossom, and the leaves upon the branches were as a screen, where
+only the bare trunks showed a fortnight ago.
+
+But with these matters Luffe was not at this moment concerned. They
+helped the enemy, they made the defence more arduous, but they were
+trivial in his thoughts. Indeed, the siege itself was to him an
+unimportant thing. Even if the fortress fell, even if every man within
+perished by the sword--why, as Lynes had said, the Sirkar does not forget
+its servants. The relieving force might march in too late, but it would
+march in. Men would die, a few families in England would wear mourning,
+the Government would lose a handful of faithful servants. England would
+thrill with pride and anger, and the rebellion would end as rebellions
+always ended.
+
+Luffe was troubled for quite another cause. He went down from the roof,
+walked by courtyard and winding passage to the quarters of the Khan. A
+white-robed servant waited for him at the bottom of a broad staircase in
+a room given up to lumber. A broken bicycle caught Luffe's eye. On the
+ledge of a window stood a photographic camera. Luffe mounted the stairs
+and was ushered into the Khan's presence. He bowed with deference and
+congratulated the Khan upon the birth of his heir.
+
+"I have been thinking," said the Khan--"ever since my son was born I have
+been thinking. I have been a good friend to the English. I am their
+friend and servant. News has come to me of their cities and colleges. I
+will send my son to England, that he may learn your wisdom, and so return
+to rule over his kingdom. Much good will come of it." Luffe had expected
+the words. The young Khan had a passion for things English. The bicycle
+and the camera were signs of it. Unwise men had applauded his
+enlightenment. Unwise at all events in Luffe's opinion. It was, indeed,
+greatly because of his enlightenment that he and a handful of English
+officers and troops were beleaguered in the fortress.
+
+"He shall go to Eton and to Oxford, and much good for my people will come
+of it," said the Khan. Luffe listened gravely and politely; but he was
+thinking of an evening when he had taken out to supper a reigning queen
+of comic opera. The recollection of that evening remained with him when
+he ascended once more to the roof of the fort and saw the light of the
+fires above the sangars. A voice spoke at his elbow. "There is a new
+sangar being built in the garden. We can hear them at work," said Dewes.
+
+Luffe walked cautiously along the roof to the western end. Quite clearly
+they could hear the spades at work, very near to the wall, amongst the
+almond and the mulberry trees.
+
+"Get a fireball," said Luffe in a whisper, "and send up a dozen Sikhs."
+
+On the parapet of the roof a rough palisade of planks had been erected to
+protect the defenders from the riflemen in the valley and across the
+river. Behind this palisade the Sikhs crept silently to their positions.
+A ball made of pinewood chips and straw, packed into a covering of
+canvas, was brought on to the roof and saturated with kerosene oil. "Are
+you ready?" said Luffe; "then now!" Upon the word the fireball was lit
+and thrown far out. It circled through the air, dropped, and lay blazing
+upon the ground. By its light under the branches of the garden trees
+could be seen the Pathans building a stone sangar, within thirty yards of
+the fort's walls.
+
+"Fire!" cried Luffe. "Choose your men and fire."
+
+All at once the silence of the night was torn by the rattle of musketry,
+and afar off the tom-toms beat yet more loudly.
+
+Luffe looked on with every faculty alert. He saw with a smile that the
+Doctor had joined them and lay behind a plank, firing rapidly and with a
+most accurate aim. But at the back of his mind all the while that he
+gave his orders was still the thought, "All this is nothing. The one
+fateful thing is the birth of a son to the Khan of Chiltistan." The
+little engagement lasted for about half an hour. The insurgents then
+drew back from the garden, leaving their dead upon the field. The rattle
+of the musketry ceased altogether. Behind the parapet one Sikh had been
+badly wounded by a bullet in the thigh. Already the Doctor was attending
+to his hurts.
+
+"It is a small thing, Huzoor," said the wounded soldier, looking upwards
+to Luffe, who stood above him; "a very small thing," but even as he spoke
+pain cut the words short.
+
+"Yes, a small thing"; Luffe did not speak the words, but he thought them.
+He turned away and walked back again across the roof. The new sangar
+would not be built that night. But it was a small thing compared with all
+that lay hidden in the future.
+
+As he paced that side of the fort which faced the plain there rose
+through the darkness, almost beneath his feet, once more the cry which
+had reached his ears while he sat at dinner in the courtyard.
+
+He heard a few paces from him the sharp order to retire given by a
+sentinel. But the voice rose again, claiming admission to the fort, and
+this time a name was uttered urgently, an English name.
+
+"Don't fire," cried Luffe to the sentinel, and he leaned over the wall.
+
+"You come from Wafadar Nazim, and alone?"
+
+"Huzoor, my life be on it."
+
+"With news of Sahib Linforth?"
+
+"Yes, news which his Highness Wafadar Nazim thinks it good for you to
+know"; and the voice in the darkness rose to insolence.
+
+Luffe strained his eyes downwards. He could see nothing. He listened, but
+he could hear no whispering voices. He hesitated. He was very anxious to
+hear news of Linforth.
+
+"I will let you in," he cried; "but if there be more than one the lives
+of all shall be the price."
+
+He went down into the fort. Under his orders Captain Lynes drew up inside
+the gate a strong guard of Sikhs with their rifles loaded and bayonets
+fixed. A few lanterns threw a dim light upon the scene, glistening here
+and there upon the polish of an accoutrement or a rifle-barrel.
+
+"Present," whispered Lynes, and the rifles were raised to the shoulder,
+with every muzzle pointing towards the gate.
+
+Then Lynes himself went forward, removed the bars, and turned the key in
+the lock. The gate swung open noiselessly a little way, and a tall man,
+clad in white flowing robes, with a deeply pock-marked face and a hooked
+nose, walked majestically in. He stood quite still while the gate was
+barred again behind him, and looked calmly about him with inquisitive
+bright eyes.
+
+"Will you follow me?" said Luffe, and he led the way through the
+rabbit-warren of narrow alleys into the centre of the fort.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+LINFORTH'S DEATH
+
+
+Luffe had taken a large bare low-roofed room supported upon pillars for
+his council-chamber. Thither he conducted his visitor. Camp chairs were
+placed for himself and Major Dewes and Captain Lynes. Cushions were
+placed upon the ground for his visitor. Luffe took his seat in the
+middle, with Dewes upon his right and Lynes upon his left. Dewes expected
+him at once to press for information as to Linforth. But Luffe knew very
+well that certain time must first be wasted in ceremonious preliminaries.
+The news would only be spoken after a time and in a roundabout fashion.
+
+"If we receive you without the distinction which is no doubt your due,"
+said Luffe politely, "you must remember that I make it a rule not to
+welcome visitors at night."
+
+The visitor smiled and bowed.
+
+"It is a great grief to his Highness Wafadar Nazim that you put so little
+faith in him," replied the Chilti. "See how he trusts you! He sends me,
+his Diwan, his Minister of Finance, in the night time to come up to your
+walls and into your fort, so great is his desire to learn that the
+Colonel Sahib is well."
+
+Luffe in his turn bowed with a smile of gratitude. It was not the time to
+point out that his Highness Wafadar Nazim was hardly taking the course
+which a genuine solicitude for the Colonel Sahib's health would
+recommend.
+
+"His Highness has but one desire in his heart. He desires peace--peace so
+that this country may prosper, and peace because of his great love for
+the Colonel Sahib."
+
+Again Luffe bowed.
+
+"But to all his letters the Colonel Sahib returns the same answer, and
+truly his Highness is at a loss what to do in order that he may ensure
+the safety of the Colonel Sahib and his followers," the Diwan continued
+pensively. "I will not repeat what has been already said," and at once he
+began at interminable length to contradict his words. He repeated the
+proposals of surrender made by Wafadar Nazim from beginning to end. The
+Colonel Sahib was to march out of the fort with his troops, and his
+Highness would himself conduct him into British territory.
+
+"If the Colonel Sahib dreads the censure of his own Government, his
+Highness will take all the responsibility for the Colonel Sahib's
+departure. But no blame will fall upon the Colonel Sahib. For the British
+Government, with whom Wafadar Nazim has always desired to live in amity,
+desires peace too, as it has always said. It is the British Government
+which has broken its treaties."
+
+"Not so," replied Luffe. "The road was undertaken with the consent of the
+Khan of Chiltistan, who is the ruler of this country, and Wafadar, his
+uncle, merely the rebel. Therefore take back my last word to Wafadar
+Nazim. Let him make submission to me as representative of the Sirkar, and
+lay down his arms. Then I will intercede for him with the Government, so
+that his punishment be light."
+
+The Diwan smiled and his voice changed once more to a note of insolence.
+
+"His Highness Wafadar Nazim is now the Khan of Chiltistan. The other,
+the deposed, lies cooped up in this fort, a prisoner of the British,
+whose willing slave he has always been. The British must retire from
+our country. His Highness Wafadar Nazim desires them no harm. But they
+must go now!"
+
+Luffe looked sternly at the Diwan.
+
+"Tell Wafadar Nazim to have a care lest they go never, but set their foot
+firmly upon the neck of this rebellious people."
+
+He rose to signify that the conference was at an end. But the Diwan did
+not stir. He smiled pensively and played with the tassels of his cushion.
+
+"And yet," he said, "how true it is that his Highness thinks only of the
+Colonel Sahib's safety."
+
+Some note of satisfaction, not quite perfectly concealed, some sly accent
+of triumph sounding through the gently modulated words, smote upon
+Luffe's ears, and warned him that the true meaning of the Diwan's visit
+was only now to be revealed. All that had gone before was nothing. The
+polite accusations, the wordy repetitions, the expressions of good
+will--these were the mere preliminaries, the long salute before the
+combat. Luffe steeled himself against a blow, controlling his face and
+his limbs lest a look or a gesture should betray the hurt. And it was
+well that he did, for the next moment the blow fell.
+
+"For bad news has come to us. Sahib Linforth met his death two days ago,
+fifty miles from here, in the camp of his Excellency Abdulla Mahommed,
+the Commander-in-Chief to his Highness. Abdulla Mahommed is greatly
+grieved, knowing well that this violent act will raise up a prejudice
+against him and his Highness. Moreover, he too would live in friendship
+with the British. But his soldiers are justly provoked by the violation
+of treaties by the British, and it is impossible to stay their hands.
+Therefore, before Abdulla Mahommed joins hands with my master, Wafadar
+Nazim, before this fort, it will be well for the Colonel Sahib and his
+troops to be safely out of reach."
+
+Luffe was doubtful whether to believe the words or no. The story might be
+a lie to frighten him and to discourage the garrison. On the other hand,
+it was likely enough to be true. And if true, it was the worst news which
+Luffe had heard for many a long day.
+
+"Let me hear how the accident--occurred," he said, smiling grimly at the
+euphemism he used.
+
+"Sahib Linforth was in the tent set apart for him by Abdulla Mahommed.
+There were guards to protect him, but it seems they did not watch well.
+Huzoor, all have been punished, but punishment will not bring Sahib
+Linforth to life again. Therefore hear the words of Wafadar Nazim, spoken
+now for the last time. He himself will escort you and your soldiers and
+officers to the borders of British territory, so that he may rejoice to
+know that you are safe. You will leave his Highness Mir Ali behind, who
+will resign his throne in favour of his uncle Wafadar, and so there will
+be peace."
+
+"And what will happen to Mir Ali, whom we have promised to protect?"
+
+The Diwan shrugged his shoulders in a gentle, deprecatory fashion and
+smiled his melancholy smile. His gesture and his attitude suggested that
+it was not in the best of taste to raise so unpleasant a question. But he
+did not reply in words.
+
+"You will tell Wafadar Nazim that we will know how to protect his
+Highness the Khan, and that we will teach Abdulla Mahommed a lesson in
+that respect before many moons have passed," Luffe said sternly. "As for
+this story of Sahib Linforth, I do not believe a word of it."
+
+The Diwan nodded his head.
+
+"It was believed that you would reply in this way.
+
+"Therefore here are proofs." He drew from his dress a silver watch upon a
+leather watch-guard, a letter-case, and to these he added a letter in
+Linforth's own hand. He handed them to Luffe.
+
+Luffe handed the watch and chain to Dewes, and opened the letter-case.
+There was a letter in it, written in a woman's handwriting, and besides
+the letter the portrait of a girl. He glanced at the letter and glanced
+at the portrait. Then he passed them on to Dewes.
+
+Dewes looked at the portrait with a greater care. The face was winning
+rather than pretty. It seemed to him that it was one of those faces which
+might become beautiful at many moments through the spirit of the woman,
+rather than from any grace of feature. If she loved, for instance, she
+would be really beautiful for the man she loved.
+
+"I wonder who she is," he said thoughtfully.
+
+"I know," replied Luffe, almost carelessly. He was immersed in the second
+letter which the Diwan had handed to him.
+
+"Who is it?" asked Dewes.
+
+"Linforth's wife."
+
+"His wife!" exclaimed Dewes, and, looking at the photograph again, he
+said in a low voice which was gentle with compassion, "Poor woman!"
+
+"Yes, yes. Poor woman!" said Luffe, and he went on reading his letter.
+
+It was characteristic of Luffe that he should feel so little concern in
+the domestic side of Linforth's life. He was not very human in his
+outlook on the world. Questions of high policy interested and engrossed
+his mind; he lived for the Frontier, not so much subduing a man's natural
+emotions as unaware of them. Men figured in his thoughts as the
+instruments of policy; their womenfolk as so many hindrances or aids to
+the fulfilment of their allotted tasks. Thus Linforth's death troubled
+him greatly, since Linforth was greatly concerned in one great
+undertaking. Moreover, the scheme had been very close to Linforth's
+heart, even as it was to Luffe's. But Linforth's wife was in England, and
+thus, as it seemed to him, neither aid nor impediment. But in that he was
+wrong. She had been the mainspring of Linforth's energy, and so much was
+evident in the letter which Luffe read slowly to the end.
+
+"Yes, Linforth's dead," said he, with a momentary discouragement. "There
+are many whom we could more easily have spared. Of course the thing will
+go on. That's certain," he said, nodding his head. A cold satisfaction
+shone in his eyes. "But Linforth was part of the Thing."
+
+He passed the second letter to Dewes, who read it; and for a while both
+men remained thoughtful and, as it seemed, unaware for the moment of the
+Diwan's presence. There was this difference, however. Luffe was thinking
+of "the Thing"; Dewes was pondering on the grim little tragedy which
+these letters revealed, and thanking Heaven in all simplicity of heart
+that there was no woman waiting in fear because of him and trembling at
+sight of each telegraph boy she met upon the road.
+
+The grim little tragedy was not altogether uncommon upon the Indian
+frontier, but it gained vividness from the brevity of the letters which
+related it. The first one, that in the woman's hand, written from a house
+under the Downs of Sussex, told of the birth of a boy in words at once
+sacred and simple. They were written for the eyes of one man, and Major
+Dewes had a feeling that his own, however respectfully, violated their
+sanctity. The second letter was an unfinished one written by the husband
+to the wife from his tent amongst the rabble of Abdulla Mahommed.
+Linforth clearly understood that this was the last letter he would write.
+"I am sitting writing this by the light of a candle. The tent door is
+open. In front of me I can see the great snow-mountains. All the ugliness
+of the lower shale slopes is hidden. By such a moonlight, my dear, may
+you always look back upon my memory. For it is over, Sybil. They are
+waiting until I fall asleep. I have been warned of it. But I shall fall
+asleep to-night. I have kept awake for two nights. I am very tired."
+
+He had fallen asleep even before the letter was completed. There was a
+message for the boy and a wish:
+
+"May he meet a woman like you, my dear, when his time comes, and love her
+as I love you," and again came the phrase, "I am very tired." It spoke of
+the boy's school, and continued: "Whether he will come out here it is too
+early to think about. But the road will not be finished--and I wonder. If
+he wants to, let him! We Linforths belong to the road," and for the third
+time the phrase recurred, "I am very tired," and upon the phrase the
+letter broke off.
+
+Dewes could imagine Linforth falling forward with his head upon his
+hands, his eyes heavy with sleep, while from without the tent the patient
+Chiltis watched until he slept.
+
+"How did it happen?" he asked.
+
+"They cast a noose over his head," replied the Diwan, "dragged him from
+the tent and stabbed him."
+
+Dewes nodded and turned to Luffe.
+
+"These letters and things must go home to his wife. It's hard on her,
+with a boy only a few months old."
+
+"A boy?" said Luffe, rousing himself from his thoughts. "Oh! there's a
+boy? I had not noticed that. I wonder how far the road will have gone
+when he comes out." There was no doubt in Luffe's mind, at all events, as
+to the boy's destiny. He turned to the Diwan.
+
+"Tell Wafadar Nazim that I will open the gates of this fort and march
+down to British territory after he has made submission," he said.
+
+The Diwan smiled in a melancholy way. He had done his best, but the
+British were, of course, all mad. He bowed himself out of the room and
+stalked through the alleys to the gates.
+
+"Wafadar Nazim must be very sure of victory," said Luffe. "He would
+hardly have given us that unfinished letter had he a fear we should
+escape him in the end."
+
+"He could not read what was written," said Dewes.
+
+"But he could fear what was written," replied Luffe.
+
+As he walked across the courtyard he heard the crack of a rifle. The
+sound came from across the river. The truce was over, the siege was
+already renewed.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+LUFFE LOOKS FORWARD
+
+
+It was the mine underneath the North Tower which brought the career of
+Luffe to an end. The garrison, indeed, had lived in fear of this peril
+ever since the siege began. But inasmuch as no attempt to mine had been
+made during the first month, the fear had grown dim. It was revived
+during the fifth week. The officers were at mess at nine o'clock in the
+evening, when a havildar of Sikhs burst into the courtyard with the news
+that the sound of a pick could be heard from the chamber of the tower.
+
+"At last!" cried Dewes, springing to his feet. The six men hurried to the
+tower. A long loophole had been fashioned in the thick wall on a downward
+slant, so that a marksman might command anyone who crept forward to fire
+the fort. Against this loophole Luffe leaned his ear.
+
+"Do you hear anything, sir?" asked a subaltern of the Sappers who was
+attached to the force.
+
+"Hush!" said Luffe.
+
+He listened, and he heard quite clearly underneath the ground below him
+the dull shock of a pickaxe. The noise came almost from beneath his feet;
+so near the mine had been already driven to the walls. The strokes fell
+with the regularity of the ticking of a clock. But at times the sound
+changed in character. The muffled thud of the pick upon earth became a
+clang as it struck upon stone.
+
+"Do you listen!" said Luffe, giving way to Dewes, and Dewes in his turn
+leaned his ear against the loophole.
+
+"What do you think?" asked Luffe.
+
+Dewes stood up straight again.
+
+"I'll tell you what I am thinking. I am thinking it sounds like the
+beating of a clock in a room where a man lies dying," he said.
+
+Luffe nodded his head. But images and romantic sayings struck no response
+from him. He turned to the young Sapper.
+
+"Can we countermine?"
+
+The young Engineer took the place of Major Dewes.
+
+"We can try, but we are late," said he.
+
+"It must be a sortie then," said Luffe.
+
+"Yes," exclaimed Lynes eagerly. "Let me go, Sir Charles!"
+
+Luffe smiled at his enthusiasm.
+
+"How many men will you require?" he asked. "Sixty?"
+
+"A hundred," replied Dewes promptly.
+
+All that night Luffe superintended the digging of the countermine, while
+Dewes made ready for the sortie. By daybreak the arrangements were
+completed. The gunpowder bags, with their fuses attached, were
+distributed, the gates were suddenly flung open, and Lynes raced out with
+a hundred Ghurkhas and Sikhs across the fifty yards of open ground to the
+sangar behind which the mine shaft had been opened. The work of the
+hundred men was quick and complete. Within half an hour, Lynes, himself
+wounded, had brought back his force, and left the mine destroyed. But
+during that half-hour disaster had fallen upon the garrison. Luffe had
+dropped as he was walking back across the courtyard to his office. For a
+few minutes he lay unnoticed in the empty square, his face upturned to
+the sky, and then a clamorous sound of lamentation was heard and an
+orderly came running through the alleys of the Fort, crying out that the
+Colonel Sahib was dead.
+
+He was not dead, however. He recovered conciousness that night, and early
+in the morning Dewes was roused from his sleep. He woke to find the
+Doctor shaking him by the shoulder.
+
+"Luffe wants you. He has not got very long now. He has something to say."
+
+Dewes slipped on his clothes, and hurried down the stairs. He followed
+the Doctor through the little winding alleys which gave to the Fort the
+appearance of a tiny village. It was broad daylight, but the fortress was
+strangely silent. The people whom he passed either spoke not at all or
+spoke only in low tones. They sat huddled in groups, waiting. Fear was
+abroad that morning. It was known that the brain of the defence was
+dying. It was known, too, what cruel fate awaited those within the Fort,
+if those without ever forced the gates and burst in upon their victims.
+
+Dewes found the Political Officer propped up on pillows on his camp-bed.
+The door from the courtyard was open, and the morning light poured
+brightly into the room.
+
+"Sit here, close to me, Dewes," said Luffe in a whisper, "and
+listen, for I am very tired." A smile came upon his face. "Do you
+remember Linforth's letters? How that phrase came again and again:
+'I am very tired.'"
+
+The Doctor arranged the pillows underneath his shoulders, and then
+Luffe said:
+
+"All right. I shall do now."
+
+He waited until the Doctor had gone from the room and continued:
+
+"I am not going to talk to you about the Fort. The defence is safe in
+your hands, so long as defence is possible. Besides, if it falls it's not
+a great thing. The troops will come up and trample down Wafadar Nazim and
+Abdulla Mahommed. They are not the danger. The road will go on again,
+even though Linforth's dead. No, the man whom I am afraid of is--the son
+of the Khan."
+
+Dewes stared, and then said in a soothing voice:
+
+"He will be looked after."
+
+"You think my mind's wandering," continued Luffe. "It never was clearer
+in my life. The Khan's son is a boy a week old. Nevertheless I tell you
+that boy is the danger in Chiltistan. The father--we know him. A good
+fellow who has lost all the confidence of his people. There is hardly an
+adherent of his who genuinely likes him; there's hardly a man in this
+Fort who doesn't believe that he wished to sell his country to the
+British. I should think he is impossible here in the future. And everyone
+in Government House knows it. We shall do the usual thing, I have no
+doubt--pension him off, settle him down comfortably outside the borders
+of Chiltistan, and rule the country as trustee for his son--until the son
+comes of age."
+
+Dewes realised surely enough that Luffe was in possession of his
+faculties, but he thought his anxiety exaggerated.
+
+"You are looking rather far ahead, aren't you, sir?" he asked.
+
+Luffe smiled.
+
+"Twenty-one years. What are twenty-one years to India? My dear Dewes!"
+
+He was silent. It seemed as though he were hesitating whether he would
+say a word more to this Major who in India talked of twenty-one years as
+a long span of time. But there was no one else to whom he could confide
+his fears. If Dewes was not brilliant, he was at all events all that
+there was.
+
+"I wish I was going to live," he cried in a low voice of exasperation. "I
+wish I could last just long enough to travel down to Calcutta and _make_
+them listen to me. But there's no hope of it. You must do what you can,
+Dewes, but very likely they won't pay any attention to you. Very likely
+you'll believe me wrong yourself, eh? Poor old Luffe, a man with a bee in
+his bonnet, eh?" he whispered savagely.
+
+"No, sir," replied Dewes. "You know the Frontier. I know that."
+
+"And even there you are wrong. No man knows the Frontier. We are all
+stumbling in the dark among these peoples, with their gentle voices and
+their cut-throat ways. The most that you can know is that you are
+stumbling in the dark. Well, let's get back to the boy here. This country
+will be kept for him, for twenty-one years. Where is he going to be
+during those twenty-one years?"
+
+Dewes caught at the question as an opportunity for reassuring the
+Political Officer.
+
+"Why, sir, the Khan told us. Have you forgotten? He is to go to Eton and
+Oxford. He'll see something of England. He will learn--" and Major Dewes
+stopped short, baffled by the look of hopelessness upon the Political
+Officer's face.
+
+"I think you are all mad," said Luffe, and he suddenly started up in his
+bed and cried with vehemence, "You take these boys to England. You train
+them in the ways of the West, the ideas of the West, and then you send
+them back again to the East, to rule over Eastern people, according to
+Eastern ideas, and you think all is well. I tell you, Dewes, it's sheer
+lunacy. Of course it's true--this boy won't perhaps suffer in esteem
+among his people quite as much as others have done. He belongs and his
+people belong to the Maulai sect. The laws of religion are not strict
+among them. They drink wine, they eat what they will, they do not lose
+caste so easily. But you have to look at the man as he will be, the
+hybrid mixture of East and West."
+
+He sank back among his pillows, exhausted by the violence of his outcry,
+and for a little while he was silent. Then he began again, but this time
+in a low, pleading voice, which was very unusual in him, and which kept
+the words he spoke vivid and fresh in Dewes' memory for many years to
+come. Indeed, Dewes would not have believed that Luffe could have spoken
+on any subject with so much wistfulness.
+
+"Listen to me, Dewes. I have lived for the Frontier. I have had no other
+interest, almost no other ties. I am not a man of friends. I believed at
+one time Linforth was my friend. I believed I liked him very much. But I
+think now that it was only because he was bound up with the Frontier. The
+Frontier has been my wife, my children, my home, my one long and lasting
+passion. And I am very well content that it has been so. I don't regret
+missed opportunities of happiness. What I regret is that I shall not be
+alive in twenty-one years to avert the danger I foresee, or to laugh at
+my fears if I am wrong. They can do what they like in Rajputana and
+Bengal and Bombay. But on the Frontier I want things to go well. Oh, how
+I want them to go well!"
+
+Luffe had grown very pale, and the sweat glistened upon his forehead.
+Dewes held to his lips a glass of brandy which stood upon a table
+beside the bed.
+
+"What danger do you foresee?" asked Dewes. "I will remember what you
+say."
+
+"Yes, remember it; write it out, so that you may remember it, and din it
+into their ears at Government House," said Luffe. "You take these boys,
+you give them Oxford, a season in London--did you ever have a season in
+London when you were twenty-one, Dewes? You show them Paris. You give
+them opportunities of enjoyment, such as no other age, no other place
+affords--has ever afforded. You give them, for a short while, a life of
+colour, of swift crowding hours of pleasure, and then you send them
+back--to settle down in their native States, and obey the orders of the
+Resident. Do you think they will be content? Do you think they will have
+their heart in their work, in their humdrum life, in their elaborate
+ceremonies? Oh, there are instances enough to convince if only people
+would listen. There's a youth now in the South, the heir of an Indian
+throne--he has six weeks' holiday. How does he use it, do you think? He
+travels hard to England, spends a week there, and travels back again. In
+England he is treated as an _equal_; here, in spite of his ceremonies, he
+is an _inferior_, and will and must be so. The best you can hope is that
+he will be merely unhappy. You pray that he won't take to drink and make
+his friends among the jockeys and the trainers. He has lost the taste for
+the native life, and nevertheless he has got to live it.
+Besides--besides--I haven't told you the worst of it."
+
+Dewes leaned forward. The sincerity of Luffe had gained upon him. "Let me
+hear all," he said.
+
+"There is the white woman," continued Luffe. "The English woman, the
+English girl, with her daintiness, her pretty frocks, her good looks,
+her delicate charm. Very likely she only thinks of him as a picturesque
+figure; she dances with him, but she does not take him seriously. Yes,
+but he may take her seriously, and often does. What then? When he is
+told to go back to his State and settle down, what then? Will he be
+content with a wife of his own people? He is already a stranger among
+his own folk. He will eat out his heart with bitterness and jealousy.
+And, mind you, I am speaking of the best--the best of the Princes and
+the best of the English women. What of the others? The English women who
+take his pearls, and the Princes who come back and boast of their
+success. Do you think that is good for British rule in India? Give me
+something to drink!"
+
+Luffe poured out his vehement convictions to his companion, wishing with
+all his heart that he had one of the great ones of the Viceroy's Council
+at his side, instead of this zealous but somewhat commonplace Major of a
+Sikh regiment. All the more, therefore, must he husband his strength, so
+that all that he had in mind might be remembered. There would be little
+chance, perhaps, of it bearing fruit. Still, even that little chance must
+be grasped. And so in that high castle beneath the Himalayas, besieged by
+insurgent tribes, a dying Political Officer discoursed upon this question
+of high policy.
+
+"I told you of a supper I had one night at the Savoy--do you
+remember? You all looked sufficiently astonished when I told you to
+bear it in mind."
+
+"Yes, I remember," said Dewes.
+
+"Very well. I told you I learned something from the lady who was with me
+which it was good for me to know. I saw something which it was good for
+me to see. Good--yes, but not pleasant either to know or see. There was a
+young Prince in England then. He dined in high places and afterwards
+supped at the Savoy with the _coryphées;_ and both in the high places and
+among the _coryphées_ his jewels had made him welcome. This is truth I am
+telling you. He was a boaster. Well, after supper that night he threw a
+girl down the stairs. Never mind what she was--she was of the white
+ruling race, she was of the race that rules in India, he comes back to
+India and insolently boasts. Do you approve? Do you think that good?"
+
+"I think it's horrible," exclaimed Dewes.
+
+"Well, I have done," said Luffe. "This youngster is to go to Oxford.
+Unhappiness and the distrust of his own people will be the best that can
+come of it, while ruin and disasters very well may. There are many ways
+of disaster. Suppose, for instance, this boy were to turn out a strong
+man. Do you see?"
+
+Dewes nodded his head.
+
+"Yes, I see," he answered, and he answered so because he saw that Luffe
+had come to the end of his strength. His voice had weakened, he lay with
+his eyes sunk deep in his head and a leaden pallor upon his face, and his
+breath laboured as he spoke.
+
+"I am glad," replied Luffe, "that you understand."
+
+But it was not until many years had passed that Dewes saw and understood
+the trouble which was then stirring in Luffe's mind. And even then, when
+he did see and understand, he wondered how much Luffe really had
+foreseen. Enough, at all events, to justify his reputation for sagacity.
+Dewes went out from the bedroom and climbed up on to the roof of the
+Fort. The sun was up, the day already hot, and would have been hotter,
+but that a light wind stirred among the almond trees in the garden. The
+leaves of those trees now actually brushed against the Fort walls. Five
+weeks ago there had been bare stems and branches. Suddenly a rifle
+cracked, a little puff of smoke rose close to a boulder on the far side
+of the river, a bullet sang in the air past Dewes' head. He ducked behind
+the palisade of boards. Another day had come. For another day the flag,
+manufactured out of some red cloth, a blue turban and some white cotton,
+floated overhead. Meanwhile, somewhere among the passes, the relieving
+force was already on the march.
+
+Late that afternoon Luffe died, and his body was buried in the Fort. He
+had done his work. For two days afterwards the sound of a battle was
+heard to the south, the siege was raised, and in the evening the
+Brigadier-General in Command rode up to the gates and found a tired and
+haggard group of officers awaiting him. They received him without cheers
+or indeed any outward sign of rejoicing. They waited in a dead silence,
+like beaten and dispirited men. They were beginning to pay the price of
+their five weeks' siege.
+
+The Brigadier looked at the group.
+
+"What of Luffe?" he asked.
+
+"Dead, sir," replied Dewes.
+
+"A great loss," said Brigadier Appleton solemnly. But he was paying his
+tribute rather to the class to which Luffe belonged than to the man
+himself. Luffe was a man of independent views, Brigadier Appleton a
+soldier clinging to tradition. Moreover, there had been an encounter
+between the two in which Luffe had prevailed.
+
+The Brigadier paid a ceremonious visit to the Khan on the following
+morning, and once more the Khan expounded his views as to the education
+of his son. But he expounded them now to sympathetic ears.
+
+"I think that his Excellency disapproved of my plan," said the Khan.
+
+"Did he?" cried Brigadier Appleton. "On some points I am inclined to
+think that Luffe's views were not always sound. Certainly let the boy go
+to Eton and Oxford. A fine idea, your Highness. The training will widen
+his mind, enlarge his ideas, and all that sort of thing. I will myself
+urge upon the Government's advisers the wisdom of your Highness'
+proposal."
+
+Moreover Dewes failed to carry Luffe's dying message to Calcutta. For on
+one point--a point of fact--Luffe was immediately proved wrong. Mir Ali,
+the Khan of Chiltistan, was retained upon his throne. Dewes turned the
+matter over in his slow mind. Wrong definitely, undeniably wrong on the
+point of fact, was it not likely that Luffe was wrong too on the point
+of theory? Dewes had six months furlong too, besides, and was anxious to
+go home. It would be a bore to travel to Bombay by way of Calcutta. "Let
+the boy go to Eton and Oxford!" he said. "Why not?" and the years
+answered him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+A MAGAZINE ARTICLE
+
+
+The little war of Chiltistan was soon forgotten by the world. But it
+lived vividly enough in the memories of a few people to whom it had
+brought either suffering or fresh honours. But most of all it was
+remembered by Sybil Linforth, so that even after fourteen years a chance
+word, or a trivial coincidence, would bring back to her the horror and
+the misery of that time as freshly as if only a single day had
+intervened. Such a coincidence happened on this morning of August.
+
+She was in the garden with her back to the Downs which rose high from
+close behind the house, and she was looking across the fields rich with
+orchards and yellow crops. She saw a small figure climb a stile and come
+towards the house along a footpath, increasing in stature as it
+approached. It was Colonel Dewes, and her thoughts went back to the day
+when first, with reluctant steps, he had walked along that path, carrying
+with him a battered silver watch and chain and a little black leather
+letter-case. Because of that memory she advanced slowly towards him now.
+
+"I did not know that you were home," she said, as they shook hands. "When
+did you land?"
+
+"Yesterday. I am home for good now. My time is up." Sybil Linforth looked
+quickly at his face and turned away.
+
+"You are sorry?" she said gently.
+
+"Yes. I don't feel old, you see. I feel as if I had many years' good work
+in me yet. But there! That's the trouble with the mediocre men. They are
+shelved before they are old. I am one of them."
+
+He laughed as he spoke, and looked at his companion.
+
+Sybil Linforth was now thirty-eight years old, but the fourteen years had
+not set upon her the marks of their passage as they had upon Dewes.
+Indeed, she still retained a look of youth, and all the slenderness of
+her figure.
+
+Dewes grumbled to her with a smile upon his face.
+
+"I wonder how in the world you do it. Here am I white-haired and creased
+like a dry pippin. There are you--" and he broke off. "I suppose it's the
+boy who keeps you young. How is he?"
+
+A look of anxiety troubled Mrs. Linforth's face; into her eyes there came
+a glint of fear. Colonel Dewes' voice became gentle with concern.
+
+"What's the matter, Sybil?" he said. "Is he ill?"
+
+"No, he is quite well."
+
+"Then what is it?"
+
+Sybil Linforth looked down for a moment at the gravel of the garden-path.
+Then, without raising her eyes, she said in a low voice:
+
+"I am afraid."
+
+"Ah," said Dewes, as he rubbed his chin, "I see."
+
+It was his usual remark when he came against anything which he did not
+understand.
+
+"You must let me have him for a week or two sometimes, Sybil. Boys will
+get into trouble, you know. It is their nature to. And sometimes a man
+may be of use in putting things straight."
+
+The hint of a smile glimmered about Sybil Linforth's mouth, but she
+repressed it. She would not for worlds have let her friend see it, lest
+he might be hurt.
+
+"No," she replied, "Dick is not in any trouble. But--" and she struggled
+for a moment with a feeling that she ought not to say what she greatly
+desired to say; that speech would be disloyal. But the need to speak was
+too strong within her, her heart too heavily charged with fear.
+
+"I will tell you," she said, and, with a glance towards the open windows
+of the house, she led Colonel Dewes to a corner of the garden where, upon
+a grass mound, there was a garden seat. From this seat one overlooked the
+garden hedge. To the left, the little village of Poynings with its grey
+church and tall tapering spire, lay at the foot of the gap in the Downs
+where runs the Brighton road. Behind them the Downs ran like a rampart to
+right and left, their steep green sides scarred here and there by
+landslips and showing the white chalk. Far away the high trees of
+Chanctonbury Ring stood out against the sky.
+
+"Dick has secrets," Sybil said, "secrets from me. It used not to be so. I
+have always known how a want of sympathy makes a child hide what he feels
+and thinks, and drives him in upon himself, to feed his thoughts with
+imaginings and dreams. I have seen it. I don't believe that anything but
+harm ever comes of it. It builds up a barrier which will last for life. I
+did not want that barrier to rise between Dick and me--I--" and her voice
+shook a little--"I should be very unhappy if it were to rise. So I have
+always tried to be his friend and comrade, rather than his mother."
+
+"Yes," said Colonel Dewes, wisely nodding his head. "I have seen you
+playing cricket with him."
+
+Colonel Dewes had frequently been puzzled by a peculiar change of manner
+in his friends. When he made a remark which showed how clearly he
+understood their point of view and how closely he was in agreement with
+it, they had a way of becoming reticent in the very moment of expansion.
+The current of sympathy was broken, and as often as not they turned the
+conversation altogether into a conventional and less interesting channel.
+That change of manner became apparent now. Sybil Linforth leaned back and
+abruptly ceased to speak.
+
+"Please go on," said Dewes, turning towards her.
+
+She hesitated, and then with a touch of reluctance continued:
+
+"I succeeded until a month or so ago. But a month or so ago the secrets
+came. Oh, I know him so well. He is trying to hide that there are any
+secrets lest his reticence should hurt me. But we have been so much
+together, so much to each other--how should I not know?" And again she
+leaned forward with her hands clasped tightly together upon her knees and
+a look of great distress lying like a shadow upon her face. "The first
+secrets," she continued, and her voice trembled, "I suppose they are
+always bitter to a mother. But since I have nothing but Dick they hurt me
+more deeply than is perhaps reasonable"; and she turned towards her
+companion with a poor attempt at a smile.
+
+"What sort of secrets?" asked Dewes. "What is he hiding?"
+
+"I don't know," she replied, and she repeated the words, adding to them
+slowly others. "I don't know--and I am a little afraid to guess. But I
+know that something is stirring in his mind, something is--" and she
+paused, and into her eyes there came a look of actual terror--"something
+is calling him. He goes alone up on to the top of the Downs, and stays
+there alone for hours. I have seen him. I have come upon him unawares
+lying on the grass with his face towards the sea, his lips parted, and
+his eyes strained, his face absorbed. He has been so lost in dreams that
+I have come close to him through the grass and stood beside him and
+spoken to him before he grew aware that anyone was near."
+
+"Perhaps he wants to be a sailor," suggested Dewes.
+
+"No, I do not think it is that," Sybil answered quietly. "If it were so,
+he would have told me."
+
+"Yes," Dewes admitted. "Yes, he would have told you. I was wrong."
+
+"You see," Mrs. Linforth continued, as though Dewes had not interrupted,
+"it is not natural for a boy at his age to want to be alone, is it? I
+don't think it is good either. It is not natural for a boy of his age to
+be thoughtful. I am not sure that that is good. I am, to tell you the
+truth, very troubled."
+
+Dewes looked at her sharply. Something, not so much in her words as in
+the careful, slow manner of her speech, warned him that she was not
+telling him all of the trouble which oppressed her. Her fears were more
+definite than she had given him as yet reason to understand. There was
+not enough in what she had said to account for the tense clasp of her
+hands, and the glint of terror in her eyes.
+
+"Anyhow, he's going to the big school next term," he said; "that is, if
+you haven't changed your mind since you last wrote to me, and I hope you
+haven't changed your mind. All that he wants really," the Colonel added
+with unconscious cruelty, "is companions of his own age. He passed in
+well, didn't he?"
+
+Sybil Linforth's face lost for the moment all its apprehension. A smile
+of pride made her face very tender, and as she turned to Dewes he thought
+to himself that really her eyes were beautiful.
+
+"Yes, he passed in very high," she said.
+
+"Eton, isn't it?" said Dewes. "Whose house?"
+
+She mentioned the name and added: "His father was there before him." Then
+she rose from her seat. "Would you like to see Dick? I will show you him.
+Come quietly."
+
+She led the way across the lawn towards an open window. It was a day of
+sunshine; the garden was bright with flowers, and about the windows
+rose-trees climbed the house-walls. It was a house of red brick, darkened
+by age, and with a roof of tiles. To Dewes' eyes, nestling as it did
+beneath the great grass Downs, it had a most homelike look of comfort.
+Sybil turned with a finger on her lips.
+
+"Keep this side of the window," she whispered, "or your shadow will fall
+across the floor."
+
+Standing aside as she bade him, he looked into the room. He saw a boy
+seated at a table with his head between his hands, immersed in a book
+which lay before him. He was seated with his side towards the window and
+his hands concealed his face. But in a moment he removed one hand and
+turned the page. Colonel Dewes could now see the profile of his face. A
+firm chin, a beauty of outline not very common, a certain delicacy of
+feature and colour gave to him a distinction of which Sybil Linforth
+might well be proud.
+
+"He'll be a dangerous fellow among the girls in a few years' time," said
+Dewes, turning to the mother. But Sybil did not hear the words. She was
+standing with her head thrust forward. Her face was white, her whole
+aspect one of dismay. Dewes could not understand the change in her. A
+moment ago she had been laughing playfully as she led him towards the
+window. Now it seemed as though a sudden disaster had turned her to
+stone. Yet there was nothing visible to suggest disaster. Dewes looked
+from Sybil to the boy and back again. Then he noticed that her eyes were
+riveted, not on Dick's face, but on the book which he was reading.
+
+"What is the matter?" he asked.
+
+"Hush!" said Sybil, but at that moment Dick lifted his head, recognised
+the visitor, and came forward to the window with a smile of welcome.
+There was no embarrassment in his manner, no air of being surprised. He
+had not the look of one who nurses secrets. A broad open forehead
+surmounted a pair of steady clear grey eyes.
+
+"Well, Dick, I hear you have done well in your examination," said the
+Colonel, as he shook hands. "If you keep it up I will leave you all I
+save out of my pension."
+
+"Thank you, sir," said Dick with a laugh. "How long have you been back,
+Colonel Dewes?"
+
+"I left India a fortnight ago."
+
+"A fortnight ago." Dick leaned his arms upon the sill and with his eyes
+on the Colonel's face asked quietly: "How far does the Road reach now?"
+
+At the side of Colonel Dewes Sybil Linforth flinched as though she had
+been struck. But it did not need that movement to explain to the Colonel
+the perplexing problem of her fears. He understood now. The Linforths
+belonged to the Road. The Road had slain her husband. No wonder she lived
+in terror lest it should claim her son. And apparently it did claim him.
+
+"The road through Chiltistan?" he said slowly.
+
+"Of course," answered Dick. "Of what other could I be thinking?"
+
+"They have stopped it," said the Colonel, and at his side he was aware
+that Sybil Linforth drew a deep breath. "The road reaches Kohara. It does
+not go beyond. It will not go beyond."
+
+Dick's eyes steadily looked into the Colonel's face; and the Colonel had
+some trouble to meet their look with the same frankness. He turned aside
+and Mrs. Linforth said,
+
+"Come and see my roses."
+
+Dick went back to his book. The man and woman passed on round the corner
+of the house to a little rose-garden with a stone sun-dial in the middle,
+surrounded by low red brick walls. Here it was very quiet. Only the bees
+among the flowers filled the air with a pleasant murmur.
+
+"They are doing well--your roses," said Dewes.
+
+"Yes. These Queen Mabs are good. Don't you think so? I am rather proud of
+them," said Sybil; and then she broke off suddenly and faced him.
+
+"Is it true?" she whispered in a low passionate voice. "Is the road
+stopped? Will it not go beyond Kohara?"
+
+Colonel Dewes attempted no evasion with Mrs. Linforth.
+
+"It is true that it is stopped. It is also true that for the moment there
+is no intention to carry it further. But--but--"
+
+And as he paused Sybil took up the sentence.
+
+"But it will go on, I know. Sooner or later." And there was almost a note
+of hopelessness in her voice. "The Power of the Road is beyond the Power
+of Governments," she added with the air of one quoting a sentence.
+
+They walked on between the alleys of rose-trees and she asked:
+
+"Did you notice the book which Dick was reading?"
+
+"It looked like a bound volume of magazines."
+
+Sybil nodded her head.
+
+"It was a volume of the 'Fortnightly.' He was reading an article
+written forty years ago by Andrew Linforth--" and she suddenly cried
+out, "Oh, how I wish he had never lived. He was an uncle of Harry's--my
+husband. He predicted it. He was in the old Company, then he became a
+servant of the Government, and he was the first to begin the road. You
+know his history?"
+
+"No."
+
+"It is a curious one. When it was his time to retire, he sent his money
+to England, he made all his arrangements to come home, and then one night
+he walked out of the hotel in Bombay, a couple of days before the ship
+sailed, and disappeared. He has never been heard of since."
+
+"Had he no wife?" asked Dewes.
+
+"No," replied Sybil. "Do you know what I think? I think he went back to
+the north, back to his Road. I think it called him. I think he could not
+keep away."
+
+"But we should have come across him," cried Dewes, "or across news of
+him. Surely we should!"
+
+Sybil shrugged her shoulders.
+
+"In that article which Dick was reading, the road was first proposed.
+Listen to this," and she began to recite:
+
+"The road will reach northwards, through Chiltistan, to the foot of the
+Baroghil Pass, in the mountains of the Hindu Kush. Not yet, but it will.
+Many men will die in the building of it from cold and dysentery, and
+even hunger--Englishmen and coolies from Baltistan. Many men will die
+fighting over it, Englishmen and Chiltis, and Gurkhas and Sikhs. It will
+cost millions of money, and from policy or economy successive
+Governments will try to stop it; but the power of the Road will be
+greater than the power of any Government. It will wind through valleys
+so deep that the day's sunshine is gone within the hour. It will be
+carried in galleries along the faces of mountains, and for eight months
+of the year sections of it will be buried deep in snow. Yet it will be
+finished. It will go on to the foot of the Hindu Kush, and then only the
+British rule in India will be safe."
+
+She finished the quotation.
+
+"That is what Andrew Linforth prophesied. Much of it has already been
+justified. I have no doubt the rest will be in time. I think he went
+north when he disappeared. I think the Road called him, as it is now
+calling Dick."
+
+She made the admission at last quite simply and quietly. Yet it was
+evident to Dewes that it cost her much to make it.
+
+"Yes," he said. "That is what you fear."
+
+She nodded her head and let him understand something of the terror with
+which the Road inspired her.
+
+"When the trouble began fourteen years ago, when the road was cut and day
+after day no news came of whether Harry lived or, if he died, how he
+died--I dreamed of it--I used to see horrible things happening on that
+road--night after night I saw them. Dreadful things happening to Dick and
+his father while I stood by and could do nothing. Oh, it seems to me a
+living thing greedy for blood--our blood."
+
+She turned to him a haggard face. Dewes sought to reassure her.
+
+"But there is peace now in Chiltistan. We keep a close watch on that
+country, I can tell you. I don't think we shall be caught napping
+there again."
+
+But these arguments had little weight with Sybil Linforth. The tragedy of
+fourteen years ago had beaten her down with too strong a hand. She could
+not reason about the road. She only felt, and she felt with all the
+passion of her nature.
+
+"What will you do, then?" asked Dewes.
+
+She walked a little further on before she answered.
+
+"I shall do nothing. If, when the time comes, Dick feels that work upon
+that road is his heritage, if he wants to follow in his father's steps, I
+shall say not a single word to dissuade him."
+
+Dewes stared at her. This half-hour of conversation had made real to him
+at all events the great strength of her hostility. Yet she would put the
+hostility aside and say not a word.
+
+"That's more than I could do," he said, "if I felt as you do. By
+George it is!"
+
+Sybil smiled at him with friendliness.
+
+"It's not bravery. Do you remember the unfinished letter which you
+brought home to me from Harry? There were three sentences in that which I
+cannot pretend to have forgotten," and she repeated the sentences:
+
+"'Whether he will come out here, it is too early to think about. But the
+road will not be finished--and I wonder. If he wants to, let him.' It is
+quite clear--isn't it?--that Harry wanted him to take up the work. You
+can read that in the words. I can imagine him speaking them and hear the
+tone he would use. Besides--I have still a greater fear than the one of
+which you know. I don't want Dick, when he grows up, ever to think that I
+have been cowardly, and, because I was cowardly, disloyal to his father."
+
+"Yes, I see," said Colonel Dewes.
+
+And this time he really did understand.
+
+"We will go in and lunch," said Sybil, and they walked back to the house.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+A LONG WALK
+
+
+The footsteps sounded overhead with a singular regularity. From the
+fireplace to the door, and back again from the door to the fireplace. At
+each turn there was a short pause, and each pause was of the same
+duration. The footsteps were very light; it was almost as though an
+animal, a caged animal, padded from the bars at one end to the bars at
+the other. There was something stealthy in the footsteps too.
+
+In the room below a man of forty-five sat writing at a desk--a very tall,
+broad-shouldered man, in clerical dress. Twenty-five years before he had
+rowed as number seven in the Oxford Eight, with an eye all the while upon
+a mastership at his old school. He had taken a first in Greats; he had
+obtained his mastership; for the last two years he had had a House. As he
+had been at the beginning, so he was now, a man without theories but with
+an instinctive comprehension of boys. In consequence there were no
+vacancies in his house, and the Headmaster had grown accustomed to
+recommend the Rev. Mr. Arthur Pollard when boys who needed any special
+care came to the school.
+
+He was now so engrossed with the preparations for the term which was to
+begin to-morrow that for some while the footsteps overhead did not
+attract his attention. When he did hear them he just lifted his head,
+listened for a moment or two, lit his pipe and went on with his work.
+
+But the sounds continued. Backwards and forwards from the fireplace to
+the door, the footsteps came and went--without haste and without
+cessation; stealthily regular; inhumanly light. Their very monotony
+helped them to pass as unnoticed as the ticking of a clock. Mr. Pollard
+continued the preparation of his class-work for a full hour, and only
+when the dusk was falling, and it was becoming difficult for him to see
+what he was writing, did he lean back in his chair and stretch his arms
+above his head with a sigh of relief.
+
+Then once more he became aware of the footsteps overhead. He rose and
+rang the bell.
+
+"Who is that walking up and down the drawingroom, Evans?" he asked of
+the butler.
+
+The butler threw back his head and listened.
+
+"I don't know, sir," he replied.
+
+"Those footsteps have been sounding like that for more than an hour."
+
+"For more than an hour?" Evans repeated. "Then I am afraid, sir, it's the
+new young gentleman from India."
+
+Arthur Pollard started.
+
+"Has he been waiting up there alone all this time?" he exclaimed. "Why in
+the world wasn't I told?"
+
+"You were told, sir," said Evans firmly but respectfully. "I came into
+the study here and told you, and you answered 'All right, Evans.' But I
+had my doubts, sir, whether you really heard or not."
+
+Mr. Pollard hardly waited for the end of the explanation. He hurried out
+of the room and sprang up the stairs. He had arranged purposely for the
+young Prince to come to the house a day before term began. He was likely
+to be shy, ill-at-ease and homesick, among so many strange faces and
+unfamiliar ways. Moreover, Mr. Pollard wished to become better acquainted
+with the boy than would be easily possible once the term was in full
+swing. For he was something more of an experiment than the ordinary
+Indian princeling from a State well under the thumb of the Viceroy and
+the Indian Council. This boy came of the fighting stock in the north. To
+leave him tramping about a strange drawing-room alone for over an hour
+was not the best possible introduction to English ways and English life.
+Mr. Pollard opened the door and saw a slim, tall boy, with his hands
+behind his back and his eyes fixed on the floor, walking up and down in
+the gloom.
+
+"Shere Ali," he said, and he held out his hand. The boy took it shyly.
+
+"You have been waiting here for some time," Mr. Pollard continued, "I am
+sorry. I did not know that you had come. You should have rung the bell."
+
+"I was not lonely," Shere Ali replied. "I was taking a walk."
+
+"Yes, so I gathered," said the master with a smile. "Rather a long walk."
+
+"Yes, sir," the boy answered seriously. "I was walking from Kohara up the
+valley, and remembering the landmarks as I went. I had walked a long way.
+I had come to the fort where my father was besieged."
+
+"Yes, that reminds me," said Pollard, "you won't feel so lonely to-morrow
+as you do to-day. There is a new boy joining whose father was a great
+friend of your father's. Richard Linforth is his name. Very likely your
+father has mentioned that name to you."
+
+Mr. Pollard switched on the light as he spoke and saw Shere All's face
+flash with eagerness.
+
+"Oh yes!" he answered, "I know. He was killed upon the road by my
+uncle's people."
+
+"I have put you into the next room to his. If you will come with me I
+will show you."
+
+Mr. Pollard led the way along a passage into the boys' quarters.
+
+"This is your room. There's your bed. Here's your 'burry,'" pointing to a
+bureau with a bookcase on the top. He threw open the next door. "This is
+Linforth's room. By the way, you speak English very well."
+
+"Yes," said Shere Ali. "I was taught it in Lahore first of all. My father
+is very fond of the English."
+
+"Well, come along," said Mr. Pollard. "I expect my wife has come back and
+she shall give us some tea. You will dine with us to-night, and we will
+try to make you as fond of the English as your father is."
+
+The next day the rest of the boys arrived, and Mr. Pollard took the
+occasion to speak a word or two to young Linforth.
+
+"You are both new boys," he said, "but you will fit into the scheme of
+things quickly enough. He won't. He's in a strange land, among strange
+people. So just do what you can to help him."
+
+Dick Linforth was curious enough to see the son of the Khan of
+Chiltistan. But not for anything would he have talked to him of his
+father who had died upon the road, or of the road itself. These things
+were sacred. He greeted his companion in quite another way.
+
+"What's your name?" he asked.
+
+"Shere Ali," replied the young Prince.
+
+"That won't do," said Linforth, and he contemplated the boy solemnly. "I
+shall call you Sherry-Face," he said.
+
+And "Sherry-Face" the heir to Chiltistan remained; and in due time the
+name followed him to College.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+IN THE DAUPHINÉ
+
+
+The day broke tardily among the mountains of Dauphiné. At half-past three
+on a morning of early August light should be already stealing through the
+little window and the chinks into the hut upon the Meije. But the four
+men who lay wrapped in blankets on the long broad shelf still slept in
+darkness. And when the darkness was broken it was by the sudden spit of a
+match. The tiny blue flame spluttered for a few seconds and then burned
+bright and yellow. It lit up the face of a man bending over the dial of a
+watch and above him and about him the wooden rafters and walls came dimly
+into view. The face was stout and burned by the sun to the colour of a
+ripe apple, and in spite of a black heavy moustache had a merry and
+good-humoured look. Little gold earrings twinkled in his ears by the
+light of the match. Annoyance clouded his face as he remarked the time.
+
+"Verdammt! Verdammt!" he muttered.
+
+The match burned out, and for a while he listened to the wind wailing
+about the hut, plucking at the door and the shutters of the window. He
+climbed down from the shelf with a rustle of straw, walked lightly for a
+moment or two about the hut, and then pulled open the door quickly. As
+quickly he shut it again.
+
+From the shelf Linforth spoke:
+
+"It is bad, Peter?"
+
+"It is impossible," replied Peter in English with a strong German accent.
+For the last three years he and his brother had acted as guides to the
+same two men who were now in the Meije hut. "We are a strong party, but
+it is impossible. Before I could walk a yard from the door, I would have
+to lend a lantern. And it is after four o'clock! The water is frozen in
+the pail, and I have never known that before in August."
+
+"Very well," said Linforth, turning over in his blankets. It was warm
+among the blankets and the straw, and he spoke with contentment. Later in
+the day he might rail against the weather. But for the moment he was very
+clear that there were worse things in the world than to lie snug and hear
+the wind tearing about the cliffs and know that there was no chance of
+facing it.
+
+"We will not go back to La Bérarde," he said. "The storm may clear. We
+will wait in the hut until tomorrow."
+
+And from a third figure on the shelf there came in guttural English:
+
+"Yes, yes. Of course."
+
+The fourth man had not wakened from his sleep, and it was not until he
+was shaken by the shoulder at ten o'clock in the morning that he sat up
+and rubbed his eyes.
+
+The fourth man was Shere Ali.
+
+"Get up and come outside," said Linforth.
+
+Ten years had passed since Shere Ali had taken his long walk from Kohara
+up the valley in the drawing-room of his house-master at Eton. And those
+ten years had had their due effect. He betrayed his race nowadays by
+little more than his colour, a certain high-pitched intonation of his
+voice and an extraordinary skill in the game of polo. There had been a
+time of revolt against discipline, of inability to understand the points
+of view of his masters and their companions, and of difficulty to
+discover much sense in their institutions.
+
+It is to be remembered that he came from the hill-country, not from the
+plains of India. That honour was a principle, not a matter of
+circumstance, and that treachery was in itself disgraceful, whether it
+was profitable or not--here were hard sayings for a native of Chiltistan.
+He could look back upon the day when he had thought a public-house with a
+great gilt sign or the picture of an animal over the door a temple for
+some particular sect of worshippers.
+
+"And, indeed, you are far from wrong," his tutor had replied to him. "But
+since we do not worship at that fiery shrine such holy places are
+forbidden us."
+
+Gradually, however, his own character was overlaid; he was quick to
+learn, and in games quick to excel. He made friends amongst his
+schoolmates, he carried with him to Oxford the charm of manner which is
+Eton's particular gift, and from Oxford he passed to London. He was rich,
+he was liked, and he found a ready welcome, which did not spoil him.
+Luffe would undoubtedly have classed him amongst the best of the native
+Princes who go to England for their training, and on that very account,
+would have feared the more for his future. Shere Ali was now just
+twenty-four, he was tall, spare of body and wonderfully supple of limbs,
+and but for a fulness of the lower lip, which was characteristic of his
+family, would have been reckoned more than usually handsome.
+
+He came out of the door of the hut and stood by the side of Linforth.
+They looked up towards the Meije, but little of that majestic mass of
+rock was visible. The clouds hung low; the glacier below them upon their
+left had a dull and unillumined look, and over the top of the Breche de
+la Meije, the pass to the left of their mountain, the snow whirled up
+from the further side like smoke. The hut is built upon a great spur of
+the mountain which runs down into the desolate valley des Étançons, and
+at its upper end melts into the great precipitous rock-wall which forms
+one of the main difficulties of the ascent. Against this wall the clouds
+were massed. Snow lay where yesterday the rocks had shone grey and ruddy
+brown in the sunlight, and against the great wall here and there icicles
+were hung.
+
+"It looks unpromising," said Linforth. "But Peter says that the
+mountain is in good condition. To-morrow it may be possible. It is
+worth while waiting. We shall get down to La Grave to-morrow instead of
+to-day. That is all."
+
+"Yes. It will make no difference to our plans," said Shere Ali; and so
+far as their immediate plans were concerned Shere Ali was right. But
+these two men had other and wider plans which embraced not a summer's
+holiday but a lifetime, plans which they jealously kept secret; and these
+plans, as it happened, the delay of a day in the hut upon the Meije was
+deeply to affect.
+
+They turned back into the room and breakfasted. Then Linforth lit his
+pipe and once more curled himself up in his rug upon the straw. Shere Ali
+followed his example. And it was of the wider plans that they at once
+began to talk.
+
+"But heaven only knows when I shall get out to India," cried Linforth
+after a while. "There am I at Chatham and not a chance, so far as I can
+see, of getting away. You will go back first."
+
+It was significant that Linforth, who had never been in India, none the
+less spoke habitually of going back to it, as though that country in
+truth was his native soil. Shere Ali shook his head.
+
+"I shall wait for you," he said. "You will come out there." He raised
+himself upon his elbow and glanced at his friend's face. Linforth had
+retained the delicacy of feature, the fineness of outline which ten years
+before had called forth the admiration of Colonel Dewes. But the ten
+years had also added a look of quiet strength. A man can hardly live with
+a definite purpose very near to his heart without gaining some reward
+from the labour of his thoughts. Though he speak never so little, people
+will be aware of him as they are not aware of the loudest chatterer in
+the room. Thus it was with Linforth. He talked with no greater wit than
+his companions, he made no greater display of ability, he never outshone,
+and yet not a few men were conscious of a force underlying his quietude
+of manner. Those men were the old and the experienced; the unobservant
+overlooked him altogether.
+
+"Yes," said Shere Ali, "since you want to come you will come."
+
+"I shall try to come," said Linforth, simply. "We belong to the Road,"
+and for a little while he lay silent. Then in a low voice he spoke,
+quoting from that page which was as a picture in his thoughts.
+
+"Over the passes! Over the snow passes to the foot of the Hindu Kush!"
+
+"Then and then only India will be safe," the young Prince of Chiltistan
+added, speaking solemnly, so that the words seemed a kind of ritual.
+
+And to both they were no less. Long before, when Shere Ali was first
+brought into his room, on his first day at Eton, Linforth had seen his
+opportunity, and seized it. Shere Ali's father retained his kingdom with
+an English Resident at his elbow. Shere Ali would in due time succeed.
+Linforth had quietly put forth his powers to make Shere Ali his friend,
+to force him to see with his eyes, and to believe what he believed. And
+Shere Ali had been easily persuaded. He had become one of the white men,
+he proudly told himself. Here was a proof, the surest of proofs. The
+belief in the Road--that was one of the beliefs of the white men, one of
+the beliefs which marked him off from the native, not merely in
+Chiltistan, but throughout the East. To the white man, the Road was the
+beginning of things, to the Oriental the shadow of the end. Shere Ali
+sided with the white men. He too had faith in the Road and he was proud
+of his faith because he shared it with the white men.
+
+"We shall be very glad of these expeditions, some day, in Chiltistan,"
+said Linforth.
+
+Shere Ali stared.
+
+"It was for that reason--?" he asked.
+
+"Yes."
+
+Shere Ali was silent for a while. Then he said, and with some regret:
+
+"There is a great difference between us. You can wait and wait. I want
+everything done within the year."
+
+Linforth laughed. He knew very well the impulsiveness of his friend.
+
+"If a few miles, or even a few furlongs, stand to my credit at the end, I
+shall not think that I have failed."
+
+They were both young, and they talked with the bright and simple faith in
+their ideals which is the great gift of youth. An older man might have
+laughed if he had heard, but had there been an older man in the hut to
+overhear them, he would have heard nothing. They were alone, save for
+their guides, and the single purpose for which--as they then
+thought--their lives were to be lived out made that long day short as a
+summer's night.
+
+"The Government will thank us when the work is done," said Shere Ali
+enthusiastically.
+
+"The Government will be in no hurry to let us begin," replied Linforth
+drily. "There is a Resident at your father's court. Your father is
+willing, and yet there's not a coolie on the road."
+
+"Yes, but you will get your way," and again confidence rang in the voice
+of the Chilti prince.
+
+"It will not be I," answered Linforth. "It will be the Road. The power of
+the Road is beyond the power of any Government."
+
+"Yes, I remember and I understand." Shere Ali lit his pipe and lay back
+among the straw. "At first I did not understand what the words meant. Now
+I know. The power of the Road is great, because it inspires men to strive
+for its completion."
+
+"Or its mastery," said Linforth slowly. "Perhaps one day on the other
+side of the Hindu Kush, the Russians may covet it--and then the Road will
+go on to meet them."
+
+"Something will happen," said Shere Ali. "At all events something
+will happen."
+
+The shadows of the evening found them still debating what complication
+might force the hand of those in authority. But always they came back to
+the Russians and a movement of troops in the Pamirs. Yet unknown to both
+of them the something else had already happened, though its consequences
+were not yet to be foreseen. A storm had delayed them for a day in a hut
+upon the Meije. They went out of the hut. The sky had cleared; and in
+the sunset the steep buttress of the Promontoire ran sharply up to the
+Great Wall; above the wall the small square patch of ice sloped to the
+base of the Grand Pic and beyond the deep gap behind that pinnacle the
+long serrated ridge ran out to the right, rising and falling, to the
+Doight de Dieu.
+
+There were some heavy icicles overhanging the Great Wall, and
+Linforth looked at them anxiously. There was also still a little snow
+upon the rocks.
+
+"It will be possible," said Peter, cheerily. "Tomorrow night we shall
+sleep in La Grave."
+
+"Yes, yes, of course," said his brother.
+
+They walked round the hut, looked for a little while down the stony
+valley des Étançons, with its one green patch up which they had toiled
+from La Bérarde the day before, and returned to watch the purple flush of
+the sunset die off the crags of the Meije. But the future they had
+planned was as a vision before their eyes, and even along the high cliffs
+of the Dauphiné the road they were to make seemed to wind and climb.
+
+"It would be strange," said Linforth, "if old Andrew Linforth were still
+alive. Somewhere in your country, perhaps in Kohara, waiting for the
+thing he dreamed to come to pass. He would be an old man now, but he
+might still be alive."
+
+"I wonder," said Shere Ali absently, and he suddenly turned to Linforth.
+"Nothing must come between us," he cried almost fiercely. "Nothing to
+hinder what we shall do together."
+
+He was the more emotional of the two. The dreams to which they had given
+utterance had uplifted him.
+
+"That's all right," said Linforth, and he turned back into the hut. But
+he remembered afterwards that it was Shere Ali who had protested against
+the possibility of their association being broken.
+
+They came out from the hut again at half-past three in the morning and
+looked up to a cloudless starlit sky which faded in the east to the
+colour of pearl. Above their heads some knobs of rock stood out upon the
+thin crest of the buttress against the sky. In the darkness of a small
+couloir underneath the knobs Peter was already ascending. The traverse of
+the Meije even for an experienced mountaineer is a long day's climb. They
+reached the summit of the Grand Pic in seven hours, descended into the
+Brèche Zsigmondy, climbed up the precipice on the further side of that
+gap, and reached the Pic Central by two o'clock in the afternoon. There
+they rested for an hour, and looked far down to the village of La Grave
+among the cornfields of the valley. There was no reason for any hurry.
+
+"We shall reach La Grave by eight," said Peter, but he was wrong, as they
+soon discovered. A slope which should have been soft snow down which they
+could plunge was hard ice, in which a ladder of steps must be cut before
+the glacier could be reached. The glacier itself was crevassed so that
+many a devour was necessary, and occasionally a jump; and evening came
+upon them while they were on the Rocher de L'Aigle. It was quite dark
+when at last they reached the grass slopes, and still far below them the
+lights were gleaming in La Grave. To both men those grass slopes seemed
+interminable. The lights of La Grave seemed never to come nearer, never
+to grow larger. Little points of fire very far away--as they had been at
+first, so they remained. But for the slope of ground beneath his feet and
+the aching of his knees, Linforth could almost have believed that they
+were not descending at all. He struck a match and looked at his watch and
+saw that it was after nine; and a little while after they had come to
+water and taken their fill of it, that it was nearly ten, but now the low
+thunder of the river in the valley was louder in his ears, and then
+suddenly he saw that the lights of La Grave were bright and near at hand.
+
+Linforth flung himself down upon the grass, and clasping his hands
+behind his head, gave himself up to the cool of the night and the
+stars overhead.
+
+"I could sleep here," he said. "Why should we go down to La Grave
+to-night?"
+
+"There is a dew falling. It will be cold when the morning breaks. And La
+Grave is very near. It is better to go," said Peter.
+
+The question was still in debate when above the roar of the river there
+came to their ears a faint throbbing sound from across the valley. It
+grew louder and suddenly two blinding lights flashed along the
+hill-side opposite.
+
+"A motor-car," said Shere Ali, and as he spoke the lights ceased
+to travel.
+
+"It's stopping at the hotel," said Linforth carelessly.
+
+"No," said Peter. "It has not reached the hotel. Look, not by a hundred
+yards. It has broken down."
+
+Linforth discussed the point at length, not because he was at all
+interested at the moment in the movements of that or of any other
+motor-car, but because he wished to stay where he was. Peter, however,
+was obdurate. It was his pride to get his patron indoors each night.
+
+"Let us go on," he said, and Linforth wearily rose to his feet.
+
+"We are making a big mistake," he grumbled, and he spoke with more truth
+than he was aware.
+
+They reached the hotel at eleven, ordered their supper and bathed. It was
+half-past eleven before Linforth and Shere Ali entered the long
+dining-room, and they found another party already supping there. Linforth
+heard himself greeted by name, and turned in surprise. It was a party of
+four--two ladies and two men. One of the men had called to him, an
+elderly man with a bald forehead, a grizzled moustache, and a shrewd
+kindly face.
+
+"I remember you, though you can't say as much of me," he said. "I
+came down to Chatham a year ago and dined at your mess as the guest
+of your Colonel."
+
+Linforth came forward with a smile of recognition.
+
+"I beg your pardon for not recognising you at once. I remember you, of
+course, quite well," he said.
+
+"Who am I, then?"
+
+"Sir John Casson, late Lieutenant-Governor of the United Provinces," said
+Linforth promptly.
+
+"And now nothing but a bore at my club," replied Sir John cheerfully. "We
+were motoring through to Grenoble, but the car has broken down. You are
+mountain-climbing, I suppose. Phyllis," and he turned to the younger of
+the two ladies, "this is Mr. Linforth of the Royal Engineers. My
+daughter, Linforth!" He introduced the second lady.
+
+"Mrs. Oliver," he said, and Linforth turning, saw that the eyes of Mrs.
+Oliver were already fixed upon him. He returned the look, and his eyes
+frankly showed her that he thought her beautiful.
+
+"And what are you going to do with yourself?" said Sir John.
+
+"Go to the country from which you have just come, as soon as I can," said
+Linforth with a smile. At this moment the fourth of the party, a stout,
+red-faced, plethoric gentleman, broke in.
+
+"India!" he exclaimed indignantly. "Bless my soul, what on earth sends
+all you young fellows racing out to India? A great mistake! I once went
+to India myself--to shoot a tiger. I stayed there for months and never
+saw one. Not a tiger, sir!"
+
+But Linforth was paying very little attention to the plethoric gentleman.
+Sir John introduced him as Colonel Fitzwarren, and Linforth bowed
+politely. Then he asked of Sir John:
+
+"Your car was not seriously damaged, I suppose?"
+
+"Keep us here two days," said Sir John. "The chauffeur will have to go on
+by diligence to-morrow to get a new sparking plug. Perhaps we shall see
+more of you in consequence."
+
+Linforth's eyes travelled back to Mrs. Oliver.
+
+"We are in no hurry," he said slowly. "We shall rest here probably for a
+day or so. May I introduce my friend?"
+
+He introduced him as the son of the Khan of Chiltistan, and Mrs. Oliver's
+eyes, which had been quietly resting upon Linforth's face, turned towards
+Shere Ali, and as quietly rested upon his.
+
+"Then, perhaps, you can tell me," said Colonel Fitzwarren, "how it was I
+never saw a tiger in India, though I stayed there four months. A most
+disappointing country, I call it. I looked for a tiger everywhere and I
+never saw one--no, not one."
+
+The Colonel's one idea of the Indian Peninsula was a huge tiger waiting
+somewhere in a jungle to be shot.
+
+But Shere Ali was paying no more attention to the Colonel's
+disparagements than Linforth had done.
+
+"Will you join us at supper?" said Sir John, and both young men replied
+simultaneously, "We shall be very pleased."
+
+Sir John Casson smiled. He could never quite be sure whether it was or
+was not to Mrs. Oliver's credit that her looks made so powerful an appeal
+to the chivalry of young men. "All young men immediately want to protect
+her," he was wont to say, "and their trouble is that they can't find
+anyone to protect her from."
+
+He watched Shere Ali and Dick Linforth with a sly amusement, and as a
+result of his watching promised himself yet more amusement during the
+next two days. He was roused from this pleasing anticipation by his
+irascible friend, Colonel Fitzwarren, who, without the slightest warning,
+flung a loud and defiant challenge across the table to Shere All.
+
+"I don't believe there is one," he cried, and breathed heavily.
+
+Shere Ali interrupted his conversation with Mrs. Oliver. "One what?" he
+asked with a smile.
+
+"Tiger, sir, tiger," said the Colonel, rapping with his knuckles upon the
+table. "Of what else should I be speaking? I don't believe there's a
+tiger in India outside the Zoo. Otherwise, why didn't I see one?"
+
+Colonel Fitzwarren glared at Shere Ali as though he held him personally
+responsible for that unhappy omission. Sir John, however, intervened with
+smooth speeches and for the rest of supper the conversation was kept to
+less painful topics. But the Colonel had not said his last word. As they
+went upstairs to their rooms he turned to Shere Ali, who was just behind
+him, and sighed heavily.
+
+"If I had shot a tiger in India," he said, with an indescribable look
+of pathos upon his big red face, "it would have made a great difference
+to my life."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+A STRING OF PEARLS
+
+
+"So you go to parties nowadays," said Mrs. Linforth, and Sir John Casson,
+leaning his back against the wall of the ball-room, puzzled his brains
+for the name of the lady with the pleasant winning face to whom he had
+just been introduced. At first it had seemed to him merely that her
+hearing was better than his. The "nowadays," however, showed that it was
+her memory which had the advantage. They were apparently old
+acquaintances; and Sir John belonged to an old-fashioned school which
+thought it discourtesy to forget even the least memorable of his
+acquaintances.
+
+"You were not so easily persuaded to decorate a ball-room at Mussoorie,"
+Mrs. Linforth continued.
+
+Sir John smiled, and there was a little bitterness in the smile.
+
+"Ah!" he said, and there was a hint, too, of bitterness in his voice, "I
+was wanted to decorate ball-rooms then. So I didn't go. Now I am not
+wanted. So I do."
+
+"That's not the true explanation," Mrs. Linforth said gently, and she
+shook her head. She spoke so gently and with so clear a note of sympathy
+and comprehension that Sir John was at more pains than ever to discover
+who she was. To hardly anyone would it naturally have occurred that Sir
+John Casson, with a tail of letters to his name, and a handsome pension,
+enjoyed at an age when his faculties were alert and his bodily strength
+not yet diminished, could stand in need of sympathy. But that precisely
+was the fact, as the woman at his side understood. A great ruler
+yesterday, with a council and an organized Government, subordinated to
+his leadership, he now merely lived at Camberley, and as he had
+confessed, was a bore at his club. And life at Camberley was dull.
+
+He looked closely at Mrs. Linforth. She was a woman of forty, or perhaps
+a year or two more. On the other hand, she might be a year or two less.
+She had the figure of a young woman, and though her dark hair was flecked
+with grey, he knew that was not to be accounted as a sign of either age
+or trouble. Yet she looked as if trouble had been no stranger to her.
+There were little lines about the eyes which told their tale to a shrewd
+observer, though the face smiled never so pleasantly. In what summer, he
+wondered, had she come up to the hill station of Mussoorie.
+
+"No," he said. "I did not give you the real explanation. Now I will."
+
+He nodded towards a girl who was at that moment crossing the ball-room
+towards the door, upon the arm of a young man.
+
+"That's the explanation."
+
+Mrs. Linforth looked at the girl and smiled.
+
+"The explanation seems to be enjoying itself," she said. "Yours?"
+
+"Mine," replied Sir John with evident pride.
+
+"She is very pretty," said Mrs. Linforth, and the sincerity of her
+admiration made the father glow with satisfaction. Phyllis Casson was a
+girl of eighteen, with the fresh looks and the clear eyes of her years. A
+bright colour graced her cheeks, where, when she laughed, the dimples
+played, and the white dress she wore was matched by the whiteness of her
+throat. She was talking gaily with the youth on whose arm her hand
+lightly rested.
+
+"Who is he?" asked Mrs. Linforth.
+
+Sir John raised his shoulders.
+
+"I am not concerned," he replied. "The explanation is amusing itself, as
+it ought to do, being only eighteen. The explanation wants everyone to
+love her at the present moment. When she wants only one, then it will be
+time for me to begin to get flurried." He turned abruptly to his
+companion. "I would like you to know her."
+
+"Thank you," said Mrs. Linforth, as she bowed to an acquaintance.
+
+"Would you like to dance?" asked Sir John. "If so, I'll stand aside."
+
+"No. I came here to look on," she explained.
+
+"Lady Marfield," and she nodded towards their hostess, "is my cousin,
+and--well, I don't want to grow rusty. You see I have an explanation
+too--oh, not here! He's at Chatham, and it's as well to keep up with the
+world--" She broke off abruptly, and with a perceptible start of
+surprise. She was looking towards the door. Casson followed the direction
+of her eyes, and saw young Linforth in the doorway.
+
+At last he remembered. There had been one hot weather, years ago, when
+this boy's father and his newly-married wife had come up to the
+hill-station of Mussoorie. He remembered that Linforth had sent his wife
+back to England, when he went North into Chiltistan on that work from
+which he was never to return. It was the wife who was now at his side.
+
+"I thought you said he was at Chatham," said Sir John, as Dick Linforth
+advanced into the room.
+
+"So I believed he was. He must have changed his mind at the last moment."
+Then she looked with a little surprise at her companion. "You know him?"
+
+"Yes," said Sir John, "I will tell you how it happened. I was dining
+eighteen months ago at the Sappers' mess at Chatham. And that boy's face
+came out of the crowd and took my eyes and my imagination too. You know,
+perhaps, how that happens at times. There seems to be no particular
+reason why it should happen at the moment. Afterwards you realise that
+there was very good reason. A great career, perhaps, perhaps only some
+one signal act, an act typical of a whole unknown life, leaps to light
+and justifies the claim the young face made upon your sympathy. Anyhow, I
+noticed young Linforth. It was not his good looks which attracted me.
+There was something else. I made inquiries. The Colonel was not a very
+observant man. Linforth was one of the subalterns--a good bat and a good
+change bowler. That was all. Only I happened to look round the walls of
+the Sappers' mess. There are portraits hung there of famous members of
+that mess who were thought of no particular account when they were
+subalterns at Chatham. There's one alive to-day. Another died at
+Khartoum."
+
+"Yes," said Mrs. Linforth.
+
+"Well, I made the acquaintance of your son that night," said Sir John.
+
+Mrs. Linforth stood for a moment silent, her face for the moment quite
+beautiful. Then she broke into a laugh.
+
+"I am glad I scratched your back first," she said. "And as for the
+cricket, it's quite true. I taught him to keep a straight bat myself."
+
+Meanwhile, Dick Linforth was walking across the floor of the ball-room,
+quite unconscious of the two who talked of him. He was not, indeed,
+looking about him at all. It seemed to both his mother and Sir John, as
+they watched him steadily moving in and out amongst the throng--for it
+was the height of the season, and Lady Marfield's big drawing-room in
+Chesterfield Gardens was crowded--that he was making his way to a
+definite spot, as though just at this moment he had a definite
+appointment.
+
+"He changed his mind at the last moment," said Sir John with a laugh,
+which gave to him the look of a boy. "Let us see who it is that has
+brought him up from Chatham to London at the last moment!"
+
+"Would it be fair?" asked Mrs. Linforth reluctantly. She was, indeed, no
+less curious upon the point than her companion, and while she asked the
+question, her eyes followed her son's movements. He was tall, and though
+he moved quickly and easily, it was possible to keep him in view.
+
+A gap in the crowd opened before them, making a lane--and at the end of
+the lane they saw Linforth approach a lady and receive the welcome of
+her smile. For a moment the gap remained open, and then the bright
+frocks and black coats swept across the space. But both had seen, and
+Mrs. Linforth, in addition, was aware of a barely perceptible start made
+by Sir John at her side.
+
+She looked at him sharply. His face had grown grave.
+
+"You know her?" asked Mrs. Linforth. There was anxiety in her voice.
+There was also a note of jealousy.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Who is she?"
+
+"Mrs. Oliver. Violet Oliver."
+
+"Married!"
+
+"A widow. I introduced her to your son at La Grave in the Dauphiné
+country last summer. Our motor-car had broken down. We all stayed for a
+couple of days together in the same hotel. Mrs. Oliver is a friend of my
+daughter's. Phyllis admires her very much, and in most instances I am
+prepared to trust Phyllis' instincts."
+
+"But not in this instance," said Mrs. Linforth quietly. She had been
+quick to note a very slight embarrassment in Sir John Casson's manner.
+
+"I don't say that," he replied quickly--a little too quickly.
+
+"Will you find me a chair?" said Mrs. Linforth, looking about her. "There
+are two over here." She led the way to the chairs which were placed in a
+nook of the room not very far from the door by which Linforth had
+entered. She took her seat, and when Sir John had seated himself beside
+her, she said:
+
+"Please tell me what you know of her."
+
+Sir John spread out his hands in protest.
+
+"Certainly, I will. But there is nothing to her discredit, so far as I
+know, Mrs. Linforth--nothing at all. Beyond that she is beautiful--really
+beautiful, as few women are. That, no doubt, will be looked upon as a
+crime by many, though you and I will not be of that number."
+
+Sybil Linforth maintained a determined silence--not for anything would
+she admit, even to herself, that Violet Oliver was beautiful.
+
+"You are telling me nothing," she said.
+
+"There is so little to tell," replied Sir John. "Violet Oliver comes of a
+family which is known, though it is not rich. She studied music with a
+view to making her living as a singer. For she has a very sweet voice,
+though its want of power forbade grand opera. Her studies were
+interrupted by the appearance of a cavalry captain, who made love to her.
+She liked it, whereas she did not like studying music. Very naturally she
+married the cavalry officer. Captain Oliver took her with him abroad,
+and, I believe, brought her to India. At all events she knows something
+of India, and has friends there. She is going back there this winter.
+Captain Oliver was killed in a hill campaign two years ago. Mrs. Oliver
+is now twenty-three years old. That is all."
+
+Mrs. Linforth, however, was not satisfied.
+
+"Was Captain Oliver rich?" she asked.
+
+"Not that I know of," said Sir John. "His widow lives in a little house
+at the wrong end of Curzon Street."
+
+"But she is wearing to-night very beautiful pearls," said Sybil
+Linforth quietly.
+
+Sir John Casson moved suddenly in his chair. Moreover, Sybil Linforth's
+eyes were at that moment resting with a quiet scrutiny upon his face.
+
+"It was difficult to see exactly what she was wearing," he said. "The gap
+in the crowd filled up so quickly."
+
+"There was time enough for any woman," said Mrs. Linforth with a smile.
+"And more than time enough for any mother."
+
+"Mrs. Oliver is always, I believe, exquisitely dressed," said Sir John
+with an assumption of carelessness. "I am not much of a judge myself."
+
+But his carelessness did not deceive his companion. Sybil Linforth was
+certain, absolutely certain, that the cause of the constraint and
+embarrassment which had been audible in Sir John's voice, and noticeable
+in his very manner, was that double string of big pearls of perfect
+colour which adorned Violet Oliver's white throat.
+
+She looked Sir John straight in the face.
+
+"Would you introduce Dick to Mrs. Oliver now, if you had not done it
+before?" she asked.
+
+"My dear lady," protested Sir John, "if I met Dick at a little hotel in
+the Dauphiné, and did not introduce him to the ladies who were travelling
+with me, it would surely reflect upon Dick, not upon the ladies"; and
+with that subtle evasion Sir John escaped from the fire of questions. He
+turned the conversation into another channel, pluming himself upon his
+cleverness. But he forgot that the subtlest evasions of the male mind are
+clumsy and obvious to a woman, especially if the woman be on the alert.
+Sybil Linforth did not think Sir John had showed any cleverness whatever.
+She let him turn the conversation, because she knew what she had set out
+to know. That string of pearls had made the difference between Sir John's
+estimate of Violet Oliver last year and his estimate of her this season.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+LUFFE IS REMEMBERED
+
+
+Violet Oliver took a quick step forward when she caught sight of
+Linforth's tall and well-knit figure coming towards her; and the smile
+with which she welcomed him was a warm smile of genuine pleasure. There
+were people who called Violet Oliver affected--chiefly ladies. But
+Phyllis Casson was not one of them.
+
+"There is no one more natural in the room," she was in the habit of
+stoutly declaring when she heard the gossips at work, and we know, on her
+father's authority, that Phyllis Casson's judgments were in most
+instances to be respected. Certainly it was not Violet Oliver's fault
+that her face in repose took on a wistful and pathetic look, and that her
+dark quiet eyes, even when her thoughts were absent--and her thoughts
+were often absent--rested pensively upon you with an unconscious
+flattery. It appeared that she was pondering deeply who and what you
+were; whereas she was probably debating whether she should or should not
+powder her nose before she went in to supper. Nor was she to blame
+because at the approach of a friend that sweet and thoughtful face would
+twinkle suddenly into mischief and amusement. "She is as God made her,"
+Phyllis Casson protested, "and He made her beautiful."
+
+It will be recognised, therefore, that there was truth in Sir John's
+observation that young men wanted to protect her. But the bald statement
+is not sufficient. Whether that quick transition from pensiveness to a
+dancing gaiety was the cause, or whether it only helped her beauty, this
+is certain. Young men went down before her like ninepins in a bowling
+alley. There was something singularly virginal about her. She had, too,
+quite naturally, an affectionate manner which it was difficult to resist;
+and above all she made no effort ever. What she said and what she did
+seemed always purely spontaneous. For the rest, she was a little over the
+general height of women, and even looked a little taller. For she was
+very fragile, and dainty, like an exquisite piece of china. Her head was
+small, and, poised as it was upon a slender throat, looked almost
+overweighted by the wealth of her dark hair. Her features were finely
+chiselled from the nose to the oval of her chin, and the red bow of her
+lips; and, with all her fragility, a delicate colour in her cheeks spoke
+of health.
+
+"You have come!" she said.
+
+Linforth took her little white-gloved hand in his.
+
+"You knew I should," he answered.
+
+"Yes, I knew that. But I didn't know that I should have to wait," she
+replied reproachfully. "I was here, in this corner, at the moment."
+
+"I couldn't catch an earlier train. I only got your telegram saying you
+would be at the dance late in the afternoon."
+
+"I did not know that I should be coming until this morning," she said.
+
+"Then it was very kind of you to send the telegram at all."
+
+"Yes, it was," said Violet Oliver simply, and Linforth laughed.
+
+"Shall we dance?" he asked.
+
+Mrs. Oliver nodded.
+
+"Round the room as far as the door. I am hungry. We will go downstairs
+and have supper."
+
+Linforth could have wished for nothing better. But the moment that his
+arm was about her waist and they had started for the door, Violet Oliver
+realised that her partner was the lightest dancer in the room. She
+herself loved dancing, and for once in a way to be steered in and out
+amongst the couples without a bump or even a single entanglement of her
+satin train was a pleasure not to be foregone. She gave herself up to it.
+
+"Let us go on," she said. "I did not know. You see, we have never danced
+together before. I had not thought of you in that way."
+
+She ceased to speak, being content to dance. Linforth for his part was
+content to watch her, to hold her as something very precious, and to
+evoke a smile upon her lips when her eyes met his. "I had not thought of
+you in that way!" she had said. Did not that mean that she had at all
+events been thinking of him in some way? And with that flattery still
+sweet in his thoughts, he was aware that her feet suddenly faltered. He
+looked at her face. It had changed. Yet so swiftly did it recover its
+composure that Linforth had not even the time to understand what the
+change implied. Annoyance, surprise, fear! One of these feelings,
+certainly, or perhaps a trifle of each. Linforth could not make sure.
+There had been a flash of some sudden emotion. That at all events was
+certain. But in guessing fear, he argued, his wits must surely have gone
+far astray; though fear was the first guess which he had made.
+
+"What was the matter?"
+
+Violet Oliver answered readily.
+
+"A big man was jigging down upon us. I saw him over your shoulder. I
+dislike being bumped by big men," she said, with a little easy laugh.
+"And still more I hate having a new frock torn."
+
+Dick Linforth was content with the answer. But it happened that Sybil
+Linforth was looking on from her chair in the corner, and the corner was
+very close to the spot where for a moment Violet Oliver had lost
+countenance. She looked sharply at Sir John Casson, who might have
+noticed or might not. His face betrayed nothing whatever. He went on
+talking placidly, but Mrs. Linforth ceased to listen to him.
+
+Violet Oliver waltzed with her partner once more round the room.
+Then she said:
+
+"Let us stop!" and in almost the same breath she added, "Oh, there's
+your friend."
+
+Linforth turned and saw standing just within the doorway his friend
+Shere Ali.
+
+"You could hardly tell that he was not English," she went on; and indeed,
+with his straight features, his supple figure, and a colour no darker
+than many a sunburnt Englishman wears every August, Shere Ali might have
+passed unnoticed by a stranger. It seemed that he had been watching for
+the couple to stop dancing. For no sooner had they stopped than he
+advanced quickly towards them.
+
+Linforth, however, had not as yet noticed him.
+
+"It can't be Shere Ali," he said. "He is in the country. I heard from him
+only to-day."
+
+"Yet it is he," said Mrs. Oliver, and then Linforth saw him.
+
+"Hallo!" he said softly to himself, and as Shere Ali joined them he added
+aloud, "something has happened."
+
+"Yes, I have news," said Shere Ali. But he was looking at Mrs. Oliver,
+and spoke as though the news had been pushed for a moment into the back
+of his mind.
+
+"What is it?" asked Linforth.
+
+Shere Ali turned to Linforth.
+
+"I go back to Chiltistan."
+
+"When?" asked Linforth, and a note of envy was audible in his voice. Mrs.
+Oliver heard it and understood it. She shrugged her shoulders
+impatiently.
+
+"By the first boat to Bombay."
+
+"In a week's time, then?" said Mrs. Oliver, quickly.
+
+Shere Ali glanced swiftly at her, seeking the meaning of that question.
+Did regret prompt it? Or, on the other hand, was she glad?
+
+"Yes, in a week's time," he replied slowly.
+
+"Why?" asked Linforth. "Is there trouble in Chiltistan?" He spoke
+regretfully. It would be hard luck if that uneasy State were to wake
+again into turmoil while he was kept kicking his heels at Chatham.
+
+"Yes, there is trouble," Shere Ali replied. "But it is not the kind of
+trouble which will help you forward with the Road."
+
+The trouble, indeed, was of quite another kind. The Russians were not
+stirring behind the Hindu Kush or on the Pamirs. The turbulent people of
+Chiltistan were making trouble, and profit out of the trouble, it is
+true. That they would be sure to do somewhere, and, moreover, they would
+do it with a sense of humour more common upon the Frontier than in the
+Provinces of India. But they were not at the moment making trouble in
+their own country. They were heard of in Masulipatam and other cities of
+Madras, where they were badly wanted by the police and not often caught.
+The quarrel in Chiltistan lay between the British Raj, as represented by
+the Resident, and the Khan, who was spending the revenue of his State
+chiefly upon his own amusements. It was claimed that the Resident should
+henceforth supervise the disposition of the revenue, and it had been
+suggested to the Khan that unless he consented to the proposal he would
+have to retire into private life in some other quarter of the Indian
+Peninsula. To give to the suggestion the necessary persuasive power, the
+young Prince was to be brought back at once, so that he might be ready at
+a moment's notice to succeed. This reason, however, was not given to
+Shere Ali. He was merely informed by the Indian Government that he must
+return to his country at once.
+
+Shere Ali stood before Mrs. Oliver.
+
+"You will give me a dance?" he said.
+
+"After supper," she replied, and she laid her hand within Linforth's arm.
+But Shere Ali did not give way.
+
+"Where shall I find you?" he asked.
+
+"By the door, here."
+
+And upon that Shere Ali's voice changed to one of appeal. There came a
+note of longing into his voice. He looked at Violet Oliver with burning
+eyes. He seemed unaware Linforth was standing by.
+
+"You will not fail me?" he said; and Linforth moved impatiently.
+
+"No. I shall be there," said Violet Oliver, and she spoke hurriedly and
+moved by through the doorway. Beneath her eyelids she stole a glance at
+her companion. His face was clouded. The scene which he had witnessed had
+jarred upon him, and still jarred. When he spoke to her his voice had a
+sternness which Violet Oliver had not heard before. But she had always
+been aware that it might be heard, if at any time he disapproved.
+
+"'Your friend,' you called him, speaking to me," he said. "It seems that
+he is your friend too."
+
+"He was with you at La Grave. I met him there."
+
+"He comes to your house?"
+
+"He has called once or twice," said Mrs. Oliver submissively. It was by
+no wish of hers that Shere Ali had appeared at this dance. She had, on
+the contrary, been at some pains to assure herself that he would not be
+there. And while she answered Linforth she was turning over in her mind a
+difficulty which had freshly arisen. Shere Ali was returning to India. In
+some respects that was awkward. But Linforth's ill-humour promised her a
+way of escape. He was rather silent during the earlier part of their
+supper. They had a little table to themselves, and while she talked, and
+talked with now and then an anxious glance at Linforth, he was content to
+listen or to answer shortly. Finally she said:
+
+"I suppose you will not see your friend again before he starts?"
+
+"Yes, I shall," replied Linforth, and the frown gathered afresh upon his
+forehead. "He dines to-morrow night with me at Chatham."
+
+"Then I want to ask you something," she continued. "I want you not to
+mention to him that I am paying a visit to India in the cold weather."
+
+Linforth's face cleared in an instant.
+
+"I am glad that you have made that request," he said frankly. "I have no
+right to say it, perhaps. But I think you are wise."
+
+"Things are possible here," she agreed, "which are impossible there."
+
+"Friendship, for instance."
+
+"Some friendships," said Mrs. Oliver; and the rest of their supper they
+ate cheerily enough. Violet Oliver was genuinely interested in her
+partner. She was not very familiar with the large view and the definite
+purpose. Those who gathered within her tiny drawing-room, who sought her
+out at balls and parties, were, as a rule, the younger men of the day,
+and Linforth, though like them in age and like them, too, in his capacity
+for enjoyment, was different in most other ways. For the large view and
+the definite purpose coloured all his life, and, though he spoke little
+of either, set him apart.
+
+Mrs. Oliver did not cultivate many illusions about herself. She saw very
+clearly what manner of men they were to whom her beauty made its chief
+appeal--lean-minded youths for the most part not remarkable for
+brains--and she was sincerely proud that Linforth sought her out no less
+than they did. She could imagine herself afraid of Linforth, and that
+fancy gave her a little thrill of pleasure. She understood that he could
+easily be lost altogether, that if once he went away he would not return;
+and that knowledge made her careful not to lose him. Moreover, she had
+brains herself. She led him on that evening, and he spoke with greater
+freedom than he had used with her before--greater freedom, she hoped,
+than he had used with anyone. The lighted supper-room grew dim before his
+eyes, the noise and the laughter and the passing figures of the other
+guests ceased to be noticed. He talked in a low voice, and with his keen
+face pushed a trifle forward as though, while he spoke, he listened. He
+was listening to the call of the Road.
+
+He stopped abruptly and looked anxiously at Violet.
+
+"Have I bored you?" he asked. "Generally I watch you," he added with a
+smile, "lest I should bore you. To-night I haven't watched."
+
+"For that reason I have been interested to-night more than I have
+been before."
+
+She gathered up her fan with a little sigh. "I must go upstairs
+again," she said, and she rose from her chair. "I am sorry. But I have
+promised dances."
+
+"I will take you up. Then I shall go."
+
+"You will dance no more?"
+
+"No," he said with a smile. "I'll not spoil a perfect evening." Violet
+Oliver was not given to tricks or any play of the eyelids. She looked at
+him directly, and she said simply "Thank you."
+
+He took her up to the landing, and came down stairs again for his hat and
+coat. But, as he passed with them along the passage door he turned, and
+looking up the stairs, saw Violet Oliver watching him. She waved her hand
+lightly and smiled. As the door closed behind him she returned to the
+ball-room. Linforth went away with no suspicion in his mind that she had
+stayed her feet upon the landing merely to make very sure that he went.
+He had left his mother behind, however, and she was all suspicion. She
+had remarked the little scene when Shere Ali had unexpectedly appeared.
+She had noticed the embarrassment of Violet Oliver and the anger of Shere
+Ali. It was possible that Sir John Casson had also not been blind to it.
+For, a little time afterwards, he nodded towards Shere Ali.
+
+"Do you know that boy?" he asked.
+
+"Yes. He is Dick's great friend. They have much in common. His father was
+my husband's friend."
+
+"And both believed in the new Road, I know," said Sir John. He pulled at
+his grey moustache thoughtfully, and asked: "Have the sons the Road in
+common, too?" A shadow darkened Sybil Linforth's face. She sat silent for
+some seconds, and when she answered, it was with a great reluctance.
+
+"I believe so," she said in a low voice, and she shivered. She turned her
+face towards Casson. It was troubled, fear-stricken, and in that assembly
+of laughing and light-hearted people it roused him with a shock. "I wish,
+with all my heart, that they had not," she added, and her voice shook and
+trembled as she spoke.
+
+The terrible story of Linforth's end, long since dim in Sir John Casson's
+recollections, came back in vivid detail. He said no more upon that
+point. He took Mrs. Linforth down to supper, and bringing her back again,
+led her round the ball-room. An open archway upon one side led into a
+conservatory, where only fairy lights glowed amongst the plants and
+flowers. As the couple passed this archway, Sir John looked in. He did
+not stop, but, after they had walked a few yards further, he said:
+
+"Was it pale blue that Violet Oliver was wearing? I am not clever at
+noticing these things."
+
+"Yes, pale blue and--pearls," said Sybil Linforth.
+
+"There is no need that we should walk any further. Here are two chairs,"
+said Sir John. There was in truth no need. He had ascertained something
+about which, in spite of his outward placidity, he had been very curious.
+
+"Did you ever hear of a man named Luffe?" he asked.
+
+Sybil Linforth started. It had been Luffe whose continual arguments,
+entreaties, threats, and persuasions had caused the Road long ago to be
+carried forward. But she answered quietly, "Yes."
+
+"Of course you and I remember him," said Sir John. "But how many others?
+That's the penalty of Indian service. You are soon forgotten, in India as
+quickly as here. In most cases, no doubt, it doesn't matter. Men just as
+good and younger stand waiting at the milestones to carry on the torch.
+But in some cases I think it's a pity."
+
+"In Mr. Luffe's case?" asked Sybil Linforth.
+
+"Particularly in Luffe's case," said Sir John.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+AN UNANSWERED QUESTION
+
+
+Sir John had guessed aright. Shere Ali was in the conservatory, and
+Violet Oliver sat by his side.
+
+"I did not expect you to-night," she said lightly, as she opened and
+shut her fan.
+
+"Nor did I mean to come," he answered. "I had arranged to stay in the
+country until to-morrow. But I got my letter from the India Office this
+morning. It left me--restless." He uttered the word with reluctance, and
+almost with an air of shame. Then he clasped his hands together, and
+blurted out violently: "It left me miserable. I could not stay away," and
+he turned to his companion. "I wanted to see you, if only for five
+minutes." It was Violet Oliver's instinct to be kind. She fitted herself
+naturally to the words of her companions, sympathised with them in their
+troubles, laughed with them when they were at the top of their spirits.
+So now her natural kindness made her eyes gentle. She leaned forward.
+
+"Did you?" she asked softly. "And yet you are going home!"
+
+"I am going back to Chiltistan," said Shere Ali.
+
+"Home!" Violet Oliver repeated, dwelling upon the word with a friendly
+insistence.
+
+But the young prince did not assent; he remained silent--so long silent
+that Violet Oliver moved uneasily. She was conscious of suspense; she
+began to dread his answer. He turned to her quickly as she moved.
+
+"You say that I am going home. That's the whole question," he said. "I am
+trying to answer it--and I can't. Listen!"
+
+Into the quiet and dimly lit place of flowers the music of the violins
+floated with a note of wistfulness in the melody they played--a
+suggestion of regret. Through a doorway at the end of the conservatory
+Shere Ali could see the dancers swing by in the lighted ball-room, the
+women in their bright frocks and glancing jewels, some of whom had
+flattered him, a few of whom had been his friends, and all of whom had
+treated him as one of their own folk and their equal.
+
+"I have heard the tune, which they are playing, before," he said slowly.
+"I heard it one summer night in Geneva. Linforth and I had come down from
+the mountains. We were dining with a party on the balcony of a restaurant
+over the lake. A boat passed hidden by the darkness. We could hear the
+splash of the oars. There were musicians in the boat playing this melody.
+We were all very happy that night. And I hear it again now--when I am
+with you. I think that I shall remember it very often in Chiltistan."
+
+There was so unmistakable a misery in his manner, in his voice, in his
+dejected looks, that Violet was moved to a deep sympathy. He was only a
+boy, of course, but he was a boy sunk in distress.
+
+"But there are your plans," she urged. "Have you forgotten them? You were
+going to do so much. There was so much to do. So many changes, so many
+reforms which must be made. You used to talk to me so eagerly. No more of
+your people were to be sold into slavery. You were going to stop all
+that. You were going to silence the mullahs when they preached sedition
+and to free Chiltistan from their tyranny."
+
+Violet remembered with a whimsical little smile how Shere All's
+enthusiasm had wearied her, but she checked the smile and continued:
+
+"Are all those plans mere dreams and fancies?"
+
+"No," replied Shere Ali, lifting his head. "No," he said again with
+something of violence in the emphasis; and for a moment he sat erect,
+with his shoulders squared, fronting his destiny. Almost for a moment he
+recaptured that for which he had been seeking--his identity with his own
+race. But the moment passed. His attitude relaxed. He turned to Violet
+with troubled eyes. "No, they are not dreams; they are things which need
+to be done. But I can't realise them now, with you sitting here, any more
+than I can realise, with this music in my ears, that it is my home to
+which I am going back."
+
+"Oh, but you will!" cried Violet. "When you are out there you will.
+There's the road, too, the road which you and Mr. Linforth--"
+
+She did not complete the sentence. With a low cry Shere All broke in upon
+her words. He leaned forward, with his hands covering his face.
+
+"Yes," he whispered, "there's the road--there's the road." A passion of
+self-reproach shook him. Not for nothing had Linforth been his friend. "I
+feel a traitor," he cried. "For ten years we have talked of that road,
+planned it, and made it in thought, poring over the maps. Yes, for even
+at the beginning, in our first term at Eton, we began. Over the passes to
+the foot of the Hindu Kush! Only a year ago I was eager, really, honestly
+eager," and he paused for a moment, wondering at that picture of himself
+which his words evoked, wondering whether it was indeed he--he who sat in
+the conservatory--who had cherished those bright dreams of a great life
+in Chiltistan. "Yes, it is true. I was honestly eager to go back."
+
+"Less than a year ago," said Violet Oliver quickly. "Less than a week
+ago. When did I see you last? On Sunday, wasn't it?"
+
+"But was I honest then?" exclaimed Shere Ali. "I don't know. I thought I
+was--right up to to-day, right up to this morning when the letter came.
+And then--" He made a despairing gesture, as of a man crumbling dust
+between his fingers.
+
+"I will tell you," he said, turning towards her. "I believe that the last
+time I was really honest was in August of last year. Linforth and I
+talked of the Road through a long day in the hut upon the Meije. I was
+keen then--honestly keen. But the next evening we came down to La Grave,
+and--I met you."
+
+"No," Violet Oliver protested. "That's not the reason."
+
+"I think it is," said Shere Ali quietly; and Violet was silent.
+
+In spite of her pity, which was genuine enough, her thoughts went out
+towards Shere Ali's friend. With what words and in what spirit would he
+have received Shere Ali's summons to Chiltistan? She asked herself the
+question, knowing well the answer. There would have been no
+lamentations--a little regret, perhaps, perhaps indeed a longing to take
+her with him. But there would have been not a thought of abandoning the
+work. She recognised that truth with a sudden spasm of anger, but yet
+admiration strove with the anger and mastered it.
+
+"If what you say is true," she said to Shere Ali gently, "I am very
+sorry. But I hope it is not true. You have been ten years here; you have
+made many friends. Just for the moment the thought of leaving them behind
+troubles you. But that will pass."
+
+"Will it?" he asked quietly. Then a smile came upon his face. "There's
+one thing of which I am glad," he whispered.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"You are wearing my pearls to-night."
+
+Violet Oliver smiled, and with a tender caressing movement her fingers
+touched and felt the rope of pearls about her neck. Both the smile and
+the movement revealed Violet Oliver. She had a love of beautiful things,
+but, above all, of jewels. It was a passion with her deeper than any she
+had ever known. Beautiful stones, and pearls more than any other stones,
+made an appeal to her which she could not resist.
+
+"They are very lovely," she said softly.
+
+"I shall be glad to remember that you wore them to-night," said Shere
+Ali; "for, as you know, I love you."
+
+"Hush!" said Mrs. Oliver; and she rose with a start from her chair. Shere
+Ali did the same.
+
+"It's true," he said sullenly; and then, with a swift step, he placed
+himself in her way. Violet Oliver drew back quietly. Her heart beat
+quickly. She looked into Shere Ali's face and was afraid. He was quite
+still; even the expression of his face was set, but his eyes burned upon
+her. There was a fierceness in his manner which was new to her.
+
+His hand darted out quickly towards her. But Violet Oliver was no less
+quick. She drew back yet another step. "I didn't understand," she said,
+and her lips shook, so that the words were blurred. She raised her hands
+to her neck and loosened the coils of pearls about it as though she meant
+to lift them off and return them to the giver.
+
+"Oh, don't do that, please," said Shere Ali; and already his voice and
+his manner had changed. The sullenness had gone. Now he besought. His
+English training came to his aid. He had learned reverence for women,
+acquiring it gradually and almost unconsciously rather than from any
+direct teaching. He had spent one summer's holidays with Mrs. Linforth
+for his hostess in the house under the Sussex Downs, and from her and
+from Dick's manner towards her he had begun to acquire it. He had become
+conscious of that reverence, and proudly conscious. He had fostered it.
+It was one of the qualities, one of the essential qualities, of the white
+people. It marked the sahibs off from the Eastern races. To possess that
+reverence, to be influenced and moved and guided by it--that made him one
+with them. He called upon it to help him now. Almost he had forgotten it.
+
+"Please don't take them off," he implored. "There was nothing to
+understand."
+
+And perhaps there was not, except this--that Violet Oliver was of those
+who take but do not give. She removed her hands from her throat. The
+moment of danger had passed, as she very well knew.
+
+"There is one thing I should be very grateful for," he said humbly. "It
+would not cause you very much trouble, and it would mean a great deal to
+me. I would like you to write to me now and then."
+
+"Why, of course I will," said Mrs. Oliver, with a smile.
+
+"You promise?"
+
+"Yes. But you will come back to England."
+
+"I shall try to come next summer, if it's only for a week," said Shere
+Ali; and he made way for Violet.
+
+She moved a few yards across the conservatory, and then stopped for Shere
+Ali to come level with her. "I shall write, of course, to Chiltistan,"
+she said carelessly.
+
+"Yes," he replied, "I go northwards from Bombay. I travel straight
+to Kohara."
+
+"Very well. I will write to you there," said Violet Oliver; but it seemed
+that she was not satisfied. She walked slowly towards the door, with
+Shere Ali at her side.
+
+"And you will stay in Chiltistan until you come back to us?" she asked.
+"You won't go down to Calcutta at Christmas, for instance? Calcutta is
+the place to which people go at Christmas, isn't it? I think you are
+right. You have a career in your own country, amongst your own people."
+
+She spoke urgently. And Shere Ali, thinking that thus she spoke in
+concern for his future, drew some pride from her encouragement. He
+also drew some shame; for she might have been speaking, too, in pity
+for his distress.
+
+"Mrs. Oliver," he said, with hesitation; and she stopped and turned to
+him. "Perhaps I said more than I meant to say a few minutes ago. I have
+not forgotten really that there is much for me to do in my own country; I
+have not forgotten that I can thank all of you here who have shown me so
+much kindness by more than mere words. For I can help in Chiltistan--I
+can really help."
+
+Then came a smile upon Violet Oliver's face, and her eyes shone.
+
+"That is how I would have you speak," she cried. "I am glad. Oh, I am
+glad!" and her voice rang with the fulness of her pleasure. She had been
+greatly distressed by the unhappiness of her friend, and in that distress
+compunction had played its part. There was no hardness in Violet Oliver's
+character. To give pain flattered no vanity in her. She understood that
+Shere Ali would suffer because of her, and she longed that he should find
+his compensation in the opportunities of rulership.
+
+"Let us say good-bye here," he said. "We may not be alone again
+before I go."
+
+She gave him her hand, and he held it for a little while, and then
+reluctantly let it go.
+
+"That must last me until the summer of next year," he said with a smile.
+
+"Until the summer," said Violet Oliver; and she passed out from the
+doorway into the ball-room. But as she entered the room and came once
+more amongst the lights and the noise, and the familiar groups of her
+friends, she uttered a little sigh of relief. The summer of next year
+was a long way off; and meanwhile here was an episode in her life ended
+as she wished it to end; for in these last minutes it had begun to
+disquiet her.
+
+Shere Ali remained behind in the conservatory. His eyes wandered about
+it. He was impressing upon his memory every detail of the place, the
+colours of the flowers and their very perfumes. He looked through the
+doorway into the ball-room whence the music swelled. The note of regret
+was louder than ever in his ears, and dominated the melody. To-morrow the
+lights, the delicate frocks, the laughing voices and bright eyes would be
+gone. The violins spoke to him of that morrow of blank emptiness softly
+and languorously like one making a luxury of grief. In a week's time he
+would be setting his face towards Chiltistan; and, in spite of the brave
+words he had used to Violet Oliver, once more the question forced itself
+into his mind.
+
+"Do I belong here?" he asked. "Or do I belong to Chiltistan?"
+
+On the one side was all that during ten years he had gradually learned to
+love and enjoy; on the other side was his race and the land of his birth.
+He could not answer the question; for there was a third possibility which
+had not yet entered into his speculations, and in that third possibility
+alone was the answer to be found.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+AT THE GATE OF LAHORE
+
+
+Shere Ali, accordingly, travelled with reluctance to Bombay, and at that
+port an anonymous letter with the postmark of Calcutta was brought to him
+on board the steamer. Shere Ali glanced through it, and laughed, knowing
+well his countrymen's passion for mysteries and intrigues. He put the
+letter in his pocket and took the northward mail. These were the days
+before the North-West Province had been severed from the Punjab, and
+instructions had been given to Shere Ali to break his journey at Lahore.
+He left the train, therefore, at that station, on a morning when the
+thermometer stood at over a hundred in the shade, and was carried in a
+barouche drawn by camels to Government House. There a haggard and
+heat-worn Commissioner received him, and in the cool of the evening took
+him for a ride, giving him sage advice with the accent of authority.
+
+"His Excellency would have liked to have seen you himself," said the
+Commissioner. "But he is in the Hills and he did not think it necessary
+to take you so far out of your way. It is as well that you should get to
+Kohara as soon as possible, and on particular subjects the Resident,
+Captain Phillips, will be able and glad to advise you."
+
+The Commissioner spoke politely enough, but the accent of authority was
+there. Shere Ali's ears were quick to notice and resent it. Some years
+had passed since commands had been laid upon him.
+
+"I shall always be glad to hear what Captain Phillips has to say," he
+replied stiffly.
+
+"Yes, yes, of course," said the Commissioner, taking that for granted.
+"Captain Phillips has our views."
+
+He did not seem to notice the stiffness of Shere Ali's tone. He was tired
+with the strain of the hot weather, as his drawn face and hollow eyes
+showed clearly.
+
+"On general lines," he continued, "his Excellency would like you to
+understand that the Government has no intention and no wish to interfere
+with the customs and laws of Chiltistan. In fact it is at this moment
+particularly desirable that you should throw your influence on the side
+of the native observances."
+
+"Indeed," said Shere Ali, as he rode along the Mall by the Commissioner's
+side. "Then why was I sent to Oxford?"
+
+The Commissioner was not surprised by the question, though it was
+abruptly put.
+
+"Surely that is a question to ask of his Highness, your father," he
+replied. "No doubt all you learnt and saw there will be extremely
+valuable. What I am saying now is that the Government wishes to give no
+pretext whatever to those who would disturb Chiltistan, and it looks to
+you with every confidence for help and support."
+
+"And the road?" asked Shere Ali.
+
+"It is not proposed to carry on the road. The merchants in Kohara think
+that by bringing more trade, their profits would become less, while the
+country people look upon it as a deliberate attack upon their
+independence. The Government has no desire to force it upon the people
+against their wish."
+
+Shere Ali made no reply, but his heart grew bitter within him. He had
+come out to India sore and distressed at parting from his friends, from
+the life he had grown to love. All the way down the Red Sea and across
+the Indian Ocean, the pangs of regret had been growing keener with each
+new mile which was gathered in behind the screw. He had lain awake
+listening to the throb of the engine with an aching heart, and with every
+longing for the country he had left behind growing stronger, every
+recollection growing more vivid and intense. There was just one
+consolation which he had. Violet Oliver had enheartened him to make the
+most of it, and calling up the image of her face before him, he had
+striven so to do. There were his plans for the regeneration of his
+country. And lo! here at Lahore, three days after he had set foot on
+land, they were shattered--before they were begun. He had been trained
+and educated in the West according to Western notions and he was now
+bidden to go and rule in the East according to the ideals of the East.
+Bidden! For the quiet accent of authority in the words of the unobservant
+man who rode beside him rankled deeply. He had it in his thoughts to cry
+out: "Then what place have I in Chiltistan?"
+
+But though he never uttered the question, it was none the less answered.
+
+"Economy and quiet are the two things which Chiltistan needs," said the
+Commissioner. Then he looked carelessly at Shere Ali.
+
+"It is hoped that you will marry and settle down as soon as possible,"
+he said.
+
+Shere Ali reined in his horse, stared for a moment at his companion and
+then began quietly to laugh. The laughter was not pleasant to listen to,
+and it grew harsher and louder. But it brought no change to the tired
+face of the Commissioner, who had stopped his horse beside Shere Ali's
+and was busy with the buckle of his stirrup leather. He raised his head
+when the laughter stopped. And it stopped as abruptly as it had begun.
+
+"You were saying--" he remarked politely.
+
+"That I would like, if there is time, to ride through the Bazaar."
+
+"Certainly," said the Commissioner. "This way," and he turned at right
+angles out of the Mall and its avenue of great trees and led the way
+towards the native city. Short of it, however, he stopped.
+
+"You won't mind if I leave you here," he said. "There is some work to be
+done. You can make no mistake. You can see the Gate from here."
+
+"Is that the Delhi Gate?" asked Shere Ali.
+
+"Yes. You can find your own way back, no doubt"; and the unobservant
+Commissioner rode away at a trot.
+
+Shere Ali went forward alone down the narrowing street towards the Gate.
+He was aflame with indignation. So he was to be nothing, he was to do
+nothing, except to practice economy and marry--a _nigger_. The
+contemptuous word rose to his mind. Long ago it had been applied to him
+more than once during his early school-days, until desperate battles and
+black eyes had won him immunity. Now he used it savagely himself to
+stigmatise his own people. He was of the White People, he declared. He
+felt it, he looked it. Even at that moment a portly gentleman of Lahore
+in a coloured turban and patent-leather shoes salaamed to him as he
+passed upon his horse. "Surely," he thought, "I am one of the Sahibs.
+This fool of a Commissioner does not understand."
+
+A woman passed him carrying a babe poised upon her head, with silver
+anklets upon her bare ankles and heavy silver rings upon her toes. She
+turned her face, which was overshadowed by a hood, to look at Shere Ali
+as he rode by. He saw the heavy stud of silver and enamel in her nostril,
+the withered brown face. He turned and looked at her, as she walked
+flat-footed and ungainly, her pyjamas of pink cotton showing beneath her
+cloak. He had no part or lot with any of these people of the East. The
+face of Violet Oliver shone before his eyes. There was his mate. He
+recalled the exquisite daintiness of her appearance, her ruffles of lace,
+the winning sweetness of her eyes. Not in Chiltistan would he find a
+woman to drive that image from his thoughts.
+
+Meanwhile he drew nearer to the Delhi Gate. A stream of people flowed out
+from it towards him. Over their heads he looked through the archway down
+the narrow street, where between the booths and under the carved
+overhanging balconies the brown people robed and turbaned, in saffron and
+blue, pink and white, thronged and chattered and jostled, a kaleidoscope
+of colour. Shere Ali turned his eyes to the right and the left as he
+went. It was not merely to rid himself of the Commissioner that he had
+proposed to ride on to the bazaars by way of the Delhi Gate. The
+anonymous letter bearing the postmark of Calcutta, which had been placed
+in his hand when the steamer reached Bombay, besought him to pass by the
+Delhi Gate at Lahore and do certain things by which means he would hear
+much to his advantage. He had no thought at the moment to do the
+particular things, but he was sufficiently curious to pass by the Delhi
+Gate. Some intrigue was on hand into which it was sought to lure him. He
+had not forgotten that his countrymen were born intriguers.
+
+Slowly he rode along. Here and there a group of people were squatting on
+the ground, talking noisily. Here and there a beggar stretched out a
+maimed limb and sought for alms. Then close to the gate he saw that for
+which he searched: a man sitting apart with a blanket over his head. No
+one spoke to the man, and for his part he never moved. He sat erect with
+his legs crossed in front of him and his hands resting idly on his knees,
+a strange and rather grim figure; so motionless, so utterly lifeless he
+seemed. The blanket reached almost to the ground behind and hung down
+to his lap in front, and Shere Ali noticed that a leathern begging-bowl
+at his side was well filled with coins. So he must have sat just in that
+attitude, with that thick covering stifling him, all through the fiery
+heat of that long day. As Shere Ali looked, he saw a poor bent man in
+rags, with yellow caste marks on his forehead, add a copper pi to the
+collection in the bowl. Shere Ali stopped the giver.
+
+"Who is he?" he asked, pointing to the draped figure.
+
+The old Hindu raised his hand and bowed his forehead into the palm.
+
+"Huzoor, he is a holy man, a stranger who has lately come to Lahore, but
+the holiest of all the holy men who have ever sat by the Delhi Gate. His
+fame is already great."
+
+"But why does he sit covered with the blanket?" asked Shere Ali.
+
+"Huzoor, because of his holiness. He is so holy that his face must
+not be seen."
+
+Shere Ali laughed.
+
+"He told you that himself, I suppose," he said.
+
+"Huzoor, it is well known," said the old man. "He sits by the road all
+day until the darkness comes--"
+
+"Yes," said Shere Ali, bethinking him of the recommendations in his
+letter, "until the darkness comes--and then?"
+
+"Then he goes away into the city and no one sees him until the morning";
+and the old man passed on.
+
+Shere Ali chuckled and rode by the hooded man. His curiosity increased.
+It was quite likely that the blanket hid a Mohammedan Pathan from beyond
+the hills. To come down into the plains and mulct the pious Hindu by some
+such ingenious practice would appeal to the Pathan's sense of humour
+almost as much as to his pocket. Shere Ali drew the letter from his
+pocket, and in the waning light read it through again. True, the postmark
+showed that the letter had been posted in Calcutta, but more than one
+native of Chiltistan had come south and set up as a money-lender in that
+city on the proceeds of a successful burglary. He replaced the letter in
+his pocket, and rode on at a walk through the throng. The darkness came
+quickly; oil lamps were lighted in the booths and shone though the
+unglazed window-spaces overhead. A refreshing coolness fell upon the
+town, the short, welcome interval between the heat of the day and the
+suffocating heat of the night. Shere Ali turned his horse and rode back
+again to the gate. The hooded beggar still sat upon the ground, but he
+was alone. The others, the blind and the maimed, had crawled away to
+their dens. Except this grim motionless man, there was no one squatting
+upon the ground.
+
+Shere Ali reined in beside him, and bending forward in his saddle spoke
+in a low voice a few words of Pushtu. The hooded figure did not move, but
+from behind the blanket there issued a muffled voice.
+
+"If your Highness will ride slowly on, your servant will follow and come
+to his side."
+
+Shere Ali went on, and in a few moments he heard the soft patter of a man
+running barefoot along the dusty road. He stopped his horse and the
+patter of feet ceased, but a moment after, silent as a shadow, the man
+was at his side.
+
+"You are of my country?" said Shere Ali.
+
+"I am of Kohara," returned the man. "Safdar Khan of Kohara. May God keep
+your Highness in health. We have waited long for your presence."
+
+"What are you doing in Lahore?" asked Shere Ali.
+
+In the darkness he saw a flash of white as Safdar Khan smiled.
+
+"There was a little trouble, your Highness, with one Ishak Mohammed
+and--Ishak Mohammed's son is still alive. He is a boy of eight, it is
+true, and could not hold a rifle to his shoulder. But the trouble took
+place near the road."
+
+Shere Ali nodded his head in comprehension. Safdar Khan had shot his
+enemy on the road, which is a holy place, and therefore he came
+within the law.
+
+"Blood-money was offered," continued Safdar Khan, "but the boy would not
+consent, and claims my life. His mother would hold the rifle for him
+while he pulled the trigger. So I am better in Lahore. Moreover, your
+Highness, for a poor man life is difficult in Kohara. Taxes are high. So
+I came down to this gate and sat with a cloak over my head."
+
+"And you have found it profitable," said Shere Ali.
+
+Again the teeth flashed in the darkness and Safdar Khan laughed.
+
+"For two days I sat by the Delhi Gate and no one spoke to me or dropped a
+single coin in my bowl. But on the third day a good man, may God preserve
+him, passed by when I was nearly stifled and asked me why I sat in the
+heat of the sun under a blanket. Thereupon I told him, what doubtless
+your Highness knows, that my face is much too holy to be looked upon, and
+since then your Highness' servant has prospered exceedingly. The device
+is a good one."
+
+Suddenly Safdar Khan stumbled as he walked and lurched against the
+horse and its rider. He recovered himself in a moment, with prayers
+for forgiveness and curses upon his stupidity for setting his foot
+upon a sharp stone. But he had put out his hand as he stumbled and
+that hand had run lightly down Shere Ali's coat and had felt the
+texture of his clothes.
+
+"I had a letter from Calcutta," said the Prince, "which besought me to
+speak to you, for you had something for my ear. Therefore speak, and
+speak quickly."
+
+But a change had come over Safdar Khan. Certainly Shere Ali was wearing
+the dress of one of the Sahibs. A man passed carrying a lantern, and the
+light, feeble though it was, threw into outline against the darkness a
+pith helmet and a very English figure. Certainly, too, Shere Ali spoke
+the Pushtu tongue with a slight hesitation, and an unfamiliar accent. He
+seemed to grope for words.
+
+"A letter?" he cried. "From Calcutta? Nay, how can that be? Some foolish
+fellow has dared to play a trick," and in a few short, effective
+sentences Safdar Khan expressed his opinion of the foolish fellow and of
+his ancestry distant and immediate.
+
+"Yet the letter bade me seek you by the Delhi Gate of Lahore," continued
+Shere Ali calmly, "and by the Delhi Gate of Lahore I found you."
+
+"My fame is great," replied Safdar Khan bombastically. "Far and wide it
+has spread like the boughs of a gigantic tree."
+
+"Rubbish," said Shere Ali curtly, breaking in upon Safdar's vehemence.
+"I am not one of the Hindu fools who fill your begging-bowl," and he
+laughed.
+
+In the darkness he heard Safdar Khan laugh too.
+
+"You expected me," continued Shere Ali. "You looked for my coming. Your
+ears were listening for the few words of Pushtu. Why else should you say,
+'Ride forward and I will follow'?"
+
+Safdar Khan walked for a little while in silence. Then in a voice of
+humility, he said:
+
+"I will tell my lord the truth. Yes, some foolish talk has passed from
+one man to another, and has been thrown back again like a ball. I too,"
+he admitted, "have been without wisdom. But I have seen how vain such
+talk is. The Mullahs in the Hills speak only ignorance and folly."
+
+"Ah!" said Shere Ali. He took the letter from his pocket and tore it into
+fragments and scattered the fragments upon the Road. "So I thought. The
+letter is of their prompting."
+
+"My lord, it may be so," replied Safdar Khan. "For my part I have no lot
+or share in any of these things. For I am now of Lahore."
+
+"Aye," said Shere Ali. "The begging-bowl is filled to overflowing at the
+Delhi Gate. So you are of Lahore, though your name is Safdar Khan and you
+were born at Kohara," and suddenly he leaned down and asked in a wistful
+voice with a great curiosity, "Are you content? Have you forgotten the
+hills and valleys? Is Lahore more to you than Chiltistan?"
+
+So perpetually had Shere All's mind run of late upon his isolation that
+it crept into all his thoughts. So now it seemed to him that there was
+some vague parallel between his mental state and that of Safdar Khan. But
+Safdar Khan's next words disabused him:
+
+"Nay, nay," he said. "But the widow of a rich merchant in the city here,
+a devout and holy woman, has been greatly moved by my piety. She seeks my
+hand in marriage and--" here Safdar Khan laughed pleasantly--"I shall
+marry her. Already she has given me a necklace of price which I have had
+weighed and tested to prove that she does not play me false. She is very
+rich, and it is too hot to sit in the sun under a blanket. So I will be a
+merchant of Lahore instead, and live at my ease on the upper balcony of
+my house."
+
+Shere Ali laughed and answered, "It is well." Then he added shrewdly:
+"But it is possible that you may yet at some time meet the man in
+Calcutta who wrote the letter to me. If so, tell him what I did with it,"
+and Shere Ali's voice became hard and stern. "Tell him that I tore it up
+and scattered it in the dust. And let him send the news to the Mullahs in
+the Hills. I know that soft-handed brood with their well-fed bodies and
+their treacherous mouths. If only they would let me carry on the road!"
+he cried passionately, "I would drag them out of the houses where they
+batten on poor men's families and set them to work till the palms of
+their hands were honestly blistered. Let the Mullahs have a care, Safdar
+Khan. I go North to-morrow to Kohara."
+
+He spoke with a greater vehemence than perhaps he had meant to show. But
+he was carried along by his own words, and sought always a stronger
+epithet than that which he had used. He was sore and indignant, and he
+vented his anger on the first object which served him as an opportunity.
+Safdar Khan bowed his head in the darkness. Safe though he might be in
+Lahore, he was still afraid of the Mullahs, afraid of their curses, and
+mindful of their power to ruin the venturesome man who dared to stand
+against them.
+
+"It shall be as your Highness wishes," he said in a low voice, and he
+hurried away from Shere Ali's side. Abuse of the Mullahs was
+dangerous--as dangerous to listen to as to speak. Who knew but what the
+very leaves of the neem trees might whisper the words and bear witness
+against him? Moreover, it was clear that the Prince of Chiltistan was a
+Sahib. Shere Ali rode back to Government House. He understood clearly why
+Safdar Khan had so unceremoniously fled; and he was glad. If the fool of
+a Commissioner did not know him for what he was, at all events Safdar
+Khan did. He was one of the White People. For who else would dare to
+speak as he had spoken of the Mullahs? The Mullahs would hear what he had
+said. That was certain. They would hear it with additions. They would try
+to make things unpleasant for him in Chiltistan in consequence. But Shere
+Ali was glad. For their very opposition--in so loverlike a way did every
+thought somehow reach out to Violet Oliver--brought him a little nearer
+to the lady who held his heart. He found the Commissioner sealing up his
+letters in his office.
+
+That unobservant man had just written at length, privately and
+confidentially, both to the Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab at the
+hill-station and to the Resident at Kohara. And to both he had written to
+the one effect:
+
+"We must expect trouble in Chiltistan."
+
+He based his conclusions upon the glimpse which he had obtained into the
+troubled feelings of Shere Ali. The next morning Shere Ali travelled
+northwards and forty-eight hours later from the top of the Malakand Pass
+he saw winding across the Swat valley past Chakdara the road which
+reached to Kohara and there stopped.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+ON THE POLO-GROUND
+
+
+Violet Oliver travelled to India in the late autumn of that year, free
+from apprehension. Somewhere beyond the high snow-passes Shere Ali would
+be working out his destiny among his own people. She was not of those who
+seek publicity either for themselves or for their gowns in the daily
+papers. Shere Ali would never hear of her visit; she was safe. She spent
+her Christmas in Calcutta, saw the race for the Viceroy's Cup run without
+a fear that on that crowded racecourse the importunate figure of the
+young Prince of Chiltistan might emerge to reproach her, and a week later
+went northwards into the United Provinces. It was a year, now some while
+past, when a royal visitor came from a neighbouring country into India.
+And in his honour at one great city in those Provinces the troops
+gathered and the tents went up. Little towns of canvas, gay with bordered
+walks and flowers, were dotted on the dusty plains about and within the
+city. Great ministers and functionaries came with their retinues and
+their guests. Native princes from Rajputana brought their elephants and
+their escorts. Thither also came Violet Oliver. It was, indeed, to attend
+this Durbar that she had been invited out from England. She stayed in a
+small camp on the great Parade Ground where the tents faced one another
+in a single street, each with its little garden of grass and flowers
+before the door. The ends of the street were closed in by posts, and
+outside the posts sentries were placed.
+
+It was a week of bright, sunlit, rainless days, and of starry nights. It
+was a week of reviews and State functions. But it was also a week during
+which the best polo to be seen in India drew the visitors each afternoon
+to the club-ground. There was no more constant attendant than Violet
+Oliver. She understood the game and followed it with a nice appreciation
+of the player's skill. The first round of the competition had been played
+off on the third day, but a native team organised by the ruler of a
+Mohammedan State in Central India had drawn a by and did not appear in
+the contest until the fourth day. Mrs. Oliver took her seat in the front
+row of the stand, as the opposing teams cantered into the field upon
+their ponies. A programme was handed to her, but she did not open it. For
+already one of the umpires had tossed the ball into the middle of the
+ground. The game had begun.
+
+The native team was matched against a regiment of Dragoons, and from the
+beginning it was plain that the four English players were the stronger
+team. But on the other side there was one who in point of skill
+outstripped them all. He was stationed on the outside of the field
+farthest away from Violet Oliver. He was a young man, almost a boy, she
+judged; he was beautifully mounted, and he sat his pony as though he and
+it were one. He was quick to turn, quick to pass the ball; and he never
+played a dangerous game. A desire that the native team should win woke in
+her and grew strong just because of that slim youth's extraordinary
+skill. Time after time he relieved his side, and once, as it seemed to
+her, he picked the ball out of the very goalposts. The bugle, she
+remembered afterwards, had just sounded. He drove the ball out from the
+press, leaned over until it seemed he must fall to resist an opponent who
+tried to ride him off, and then somehow he shook himself free from the
+tangle of polo-sticks and ponies.
+
+"Oh, well done! well done!" cried Violet Oliver, clenching her hands in
+her enthusiasm. A roar of applause went up. He came racing down the very
+centre of the ground, the long ends of his white turban streaming out
+behind him like a pennant. The seven other players followed upon his
+heels outpaced and outplayed. He rode swinging his polo-stick for the
+stroke, and then with clean hard blows sent the ball skimming through
+the air like a bird. Violet Oliver watched him in suspense, dreading
+lest he should override the ball, or that his stroke should glance. But
+he made no mistake. The sound of the strokes rose clear and sharp; the
+ball flew straight. He drove it between the posts, and the players
+streamed in behind as though through the gateway of a beleaguered town.
+He had scored the first goal of the game at the end of the first
+chukkur. He cantered back to change his pony. But this time he rode
+along the edge of the stand, since on this side the ponies waited with
+their blankets thrown over their saddles and the syces at their heads.
+He ran his eyes along the row of onlookers as he cantered by, and
+suddenly Violet Oliver leaned forward. She had been interested merely in
+the player. Now she was interested in the man who played. She was more
+than interested. For she felt a tightening of the heart and she caught
+her breath. "It could not be," she said to herself. She could see his
+face clearly, however, now; and as suddenly as she had leaned forward
+she drew back. She lowered her head, until her broad hat-brim hid her
+face. She opened her programme, looked for and found the names of the
+players. Shere Ali's stared her in the face.
+
+"He has broken his word," she said angrily to herself, quite forgetting
+that he had given no word, and that she had asked for none. Then she fell
+to wondering whether or no he had recognised her as he rode past the
+stand. She stole a glance as he cantered back, but Shere Ali was not
+looking towards her. She debated whether she should make an excuse and go
+back to her camp. But if he had thought he had seen her, he would look
+again, and her empty place would be convincing evidence. Moreover, the
+teams had changed goals. Shere Ali would be playing on this side of the
+ground during the next chukkur unless the Dragoons scored quickly. Violet
+Oliver kept her place, but she saw little of the game. She watched Shere
+Ali's play furtively, however, hoping thereby to learn whether he had
+noticed her. And in a little while she knew. He played wildly, his
+strokes had lost their precision, he was less quick to follow the twists
+of the ball. Shere Ali had seen her. At the end of the game he galloped
+quickly to the corner, and when Violet Oliver came out of the enclosure
+she saw him standing, with his long overcoat already on his shoulders,
+waiting for her.
+
+Violet Oliver separated herself from her friends and went forward towards
+him. She held out her hand. Shere Ali hesitated and then took it. All
+through the game, pride had been urging him to hold his head high and
+seek not so much as a single word with her. But he had been alone for six
+months in Chiltistan and he was young.
+
+"You might have let me know," he said, in a troubled voice.
+
+Violet Oliver faltered out some beginnings of an excuse. She did not want
+to bring him away from his work in Chiltistan. But Shere Ali was not
+listening to the excuses.
+
+"I must see you again," he said. "I must."
+
+"No doubt we shall meet," replied Violet Oliver.
+
+"To-morrow," continued Shere Ali. "To-morrow evening. You will be going
+to the Fort."
+
+There was to be an investiture, and after the investiture a great
+reception in the Fort on the evening of the next day. It would be as good
+a place as any, thought Violet Oliver--nay, a better place. There would
+be crowds of people wandering about the Fort. Since they must meet, let
+it be there and soon.
+
+"Very well," she said. "To-morrow evening," and she passed on and
+rejoined her friends.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+THE INVIDIOUS BAR
+
+
+Violet Oliver drove back to her camp in the company of her friends and
+they remarked upon her silence.
+
+"You are tired, Violet?" her hostess asked of her.
+
+"A little, perhaps," Violet admitted, and, urging fatigue as her excuse,
+she escaped to her tent. There she took counsel of her looking-glass.
+
+"I couldn't possibly have foreseen that he would be here," she pleaded to
+her reflection. "He was to have stayed in Chiltistan. I asked him and he
+told me that he meant to stay. If he had stayed there, he would never
+have known that I was in India," and she added and repeated, "It's really
+not my fault."
+
+In a word she was distressed and sincerely distressed. But it was not
+upon her own account. She was not thinking of the awkwardness to her of
+this unexpected encounter. But she realised that she had given pain where
+she had meant not to give pain. Shere Ali had seen her. He had been
+assured that she sought to avoid him. And this was not the end. She must
+go on and give more pain.
+
+Violet Oliver had hoped and believed that her friendship with the young
+Prince was something which had gone quite out of her life. She had closed
+it and put it away, as you put away upon an upper shelf a book which you
+do not mean to read again. The last word had been spoken eight months ago
+in the conservatory of Lady Marfield's house. And behold they had met
+again. There must be yet another meeting, yet another last interview. And
+from that last interview nothing but pain could come to Shere Ali.
+Therefore she anticipated it with a great reluctance. Violet Oliver did
+not live among illusions. She was no sentimentalist. She never made up
+and rehearsed in imagination little scenes of a melting pathos where
+eternal adieux were spoken amid tears. She had no appreciation of the
+woeful luxury of last interviews. On the contrary, she hated to confront
+distress or pain. It was in her character always to take the easier way
+when trouble threatened. She would have avoided altogether this meeting
+with Shere Ali, had it been possible.
+
+"It's a pity," she said, and that was all. She was reluctant, but she had
+no misgiving. Shere Ali was to her still the youth to whom she had said
+good-bye in Lady Marfield's conservatory. She had seen him in the flush
+of victory after a close-fought game, and thus she had seen him often
+enough before. It was not to be wondered at that she noted no difference
+at that moment.
+
+But the difference was there for the few who had eyes to see. He had
+journeyed up the broken road into Chiltistan. At the Fort of Chakdara, in
+the rice fields on the banks of the Swat river, he had taken his luncheon
+one day with the English commandant and the English doctor, and there he
+had parted with the ways of life which had become to him the only ways.
+He had travelled thence for a few hundred yards along a straight strip of
+road running over level ground, and so with the levies of Dir to escort
+him he swung round to the left. A screen of hillside and grey rock moved
+across the face of the country behind him. The last outpost was left
+behind. The Fort and the Signal Tower on the pinnacle opposite and the
+English flag flying over all were hidden from his sight. Wretched as any
+exile from his native land, Shere All went up into the lower passes of
+the Himalayas. Days were to pass and still the high snow-peaks which
+glittered in the sky, gold in the noonday, silver in the night time,
+above the valleys of Chiltistan were to be hidden in the far North. But
+already the words began to be spoken and the little incidents to occur
+which were to ripen him for his destiny. They were garnered into his
+memories as separate and unrelated events. It was not until afterwards
+that he came to know how deeply they had left their marks, or that he set
+them in an ordered sequence and gave to them a particular significance.
+Even at the Fort of Chakdara a beginning had been made.
+
+Shere Ali was standing in the little battery on the very summit of the
+Fort. Below him was the oblong enclosure of the men's barracks, the stone
+landings and steps, the iron railings, the numbered doors. He looked down
+into the enclosure as into a well. It might almost have been a section of
+the barracks at Chatham. But Shere Ali raised his head, and, over against
+him, on the opposite side of a natural gateway in the hills, rose the
+steep slope and the Signal Tower.
+
+"I was here," said the Doctor, who stood behind him, "during the Malakand
+campaign. You remember it, no doubt?"
+
+"I was at Oxford. I remember it well," said Shere Ali.
+
+"We were hard pressed here, but the handful of men in the Signal Tower
+had the worst of it," continued the Doctor in a matter-of-fact voice. "It
+was reckoned that there were fourteen thousand men from the Swat Valley
+besieging us, and as they did not mind how many they lost, even with the
+Maxims and our wire defences it was difficult to keep them off. We had to
+hold on to the Signal Tower because we could communicate with the people
+on the Malakand from there, while we couldn't from the Fort itself. The
+Amandara ridge, on the other side of the valley, as you can see, just
+hides the Pass from us. Well, the handful of men in the tower managed to
+keep in communication with the main force, and this is how it was done. A
+Sepoy called Prem Singh used to come out into full view of the enemy
+through a porthole of the tower, deliberately set up his apparatus, and
+heliograph away to the main force in the Malakand Camp, with the Swatis
+firing at him from short range. How it was he was not hit, I could never
+understand. He did it day after day. It was the bravest and coolest thing
+I ever saw done or ever heard of, with one exception, perhaps. Prem Singh
+would have got the Victoria Cross--" and the Doctor stopped suddenly
+and his face flushed.
+
+Shere Ali, however, was too keenly interested in the incident itself to
+take any note of the narrator's confusion. Baldly though it was told,
+there was the square, strong tower with its door six feet from the
+ground, its machicoulis, its narrow portholes over against him, to give
+life and vividness to the story. Here that brave deed had been done and
+daily repeated. Shere Ali peopled the empty slopes which ran down from
+the tower to the river and the high crags beyond the tower with the
+hordes of white-clad Swatis, all in their finest robes, like men who have
+just reached the goal of a holy pilgrimage, as indeed they had. He saw
+their standards, he heard the din of their firearms, and high above them
+on the wall of the tower he saw the khaki-clad figure of a single Sepoy
+calmly flashing across the valley news of the defenders' plight.
+
+"Didn't he get the Victoria Cross?" he asked.
+
+"No," returned the Doctor with a certain awkwardness. But still Shere Ali
+did not notice.
+
+"And what was the exception?" he asked eagerly. "What was the other brave
+deed you have seen fit to rank with this?"
+
+"That, too, happened over there," said the Doctor, seizing upon the
+question with relief. "During the early days of the siege we were able to
+send in to the tower water and food. But when the first of August came we
+could help them no more. The enemy thronged too closely round us, we were
+attacked by night and by day, and stone sangars, in which the Swatis lay
+after dark, were built between us and the tower. We sent up water to the
+tower for the last time at half-past nine on a Saturday morning, and it
+was not until half-past four on the Monday afternoon that the relieving
+force marched across the bridge down there and set us free."
+
+"They were without water for all that time--and in August?" cried
+Shere Ali.
+
+"No," the Doctor answered. "But they would have been had the Sepoy not
+found his equal. A bheestie"--and he nodded his head to emphasise the
+word--"not a soldier at all, but a mere water-carrier, a mere
+camp-follower, volunteered to go down to the river. He crept out of the
+tower after nightfall with his water-skins, crawled down between the
+sangars--and I can tell you the hill-side was thick with them--to the
+brink of the Swat river below there, filled his skins, and returned
+with them."
+
+"That man, too, earned the Victoria Cross," said Shere Ali.
+
+"Yes," said the Doctor, "no doubt, no doubt."
+
+Something of flurry was again audible in his voice, and this time Shere
+Ali noticed it.
+
+"Earned--but did not get it?" he went on slowly; and turning to the
+Doctor he waited quietly for an answer. The answer was given reluctantly,
+after a pause.
+
+"Well! That is so."
+
+"Why?"
+
+The question was uttered sharply, close upon the words which had preceded
+it. The Doctor looked upon the ground, shifted his feet, and looked up
+again. He was a young man, and inexperienced. The question was repeated.
+
+"Why?"
+
+The Doctor's confusion increased. He recognised that his delay in
+answering only made the answer more difficult to give. It could not be
+evaded. He blurted out the truth apologetically.
+
+"Well, you see, we don't give the Victoria Cross to natives."
+
+Shere Ali was silent for a while. He stood with his eyes fixed upon the
+tower, his face quite inscrutable.
+
+"Yes, I guessed that would be the reason," he said quietly.
+
+"Well," said his companion uncomfortably, "I expect some day that will
+be altered."
+
+Shere Ali shrugged his shoulders, and turned to go down. At the gateway
+of the Fort, by the wire bridge, his escort, mounted upon their horses,
+waited for him. He climbed into the saddle without a word. He had been
+labouring for these last days under a sense of injury, and his thoughts
+had narrowed in upon himself. He was thinking. "I, too, then, could never
+win that prize." His conviction that he was really one of the White
+People, bolstered up as it had been by so many vain arguments, was put to
+the test of fact. The truth shone in upon his mind. For here was a
+coveted privilege of the White People from which he was debarred, he and
+the bheestie and the Sepoy. They were all one, he thought bitterly, to
+the White People. The invidious bar of his colour was not to be broken.
+
+"Good-bye," he said, leaning down from his saddle and holding out his
+hand. "Thank you very much."
+
+He shook hands with the Doctor and cantered down the road, with a smile
+upon his face. But the consciousness of the invidious bar was rankling
+cruelly at his heart, and it continued to rankle long after he had swung
+round the bend of the road and had lost sight of Chakdara and the
+English flag.
+
+He passed through Jandol and climbed the Lowari Pass among the fir trees
+and the pines, and on the very summit he met three men clothed in brown
+homespun with their hair clubbed at the sides of their heads. Each man
+carried a rifle on his back and two of them carried swords besides, and
+they wore sandals of grass upon their feet. They were talking as they
+went, and they were talking in the Chilti tongue. Shere Ali hailed them
+and bade them stop.
+
+"On what journey are you going?" he asked, and one of the three bowed low
+and answered him.
+
+"Sir, we are going to Mecca."
+
+"To Mecca!" exclaimed Shere Ali. "How will you ever get to Mecca? Have
+you money?"
+
+"Sir, we have each six rupees, and with six rupees a man may reach Mecca
+from Kurrachee. Till we reach Kurrachee, there is no fear that we shall
+starve. Dwellers in the villages will befriend us."
+
+"Why, that is true," said Shere Ali, "but since you are countrymen of my
+own and my father's subjects, you shall not tax too heavily your friends
+upon the road."
+
+He added to their scanty store of rupees, and one after another they
+thanked him and so went cheerily down the Pass. Shere Ali watched them as
+they went, wondering that men should take such a journey and endure so
+much discomfort for their faith. He watched their dwindling figures and
+understood how far he was set apart from them. He was of their faith
+himself, nominally at all events, but Mecca--? He shrugged his
+shoulders at the name. It meant no more to him than it did to the White
+People who had cast him out. But that chance meeting lingered in his
+memory, and as he travelled northwards, he would wonder at times by night
+at what village his three countrymen slept and by day whether their faith
+still cheered them on their road.
+
+He came at last to the borders of Chiltistan, and travelled thenceforward
+through a country rich with orchards and green rice and golden amaranth.
+The terraced slopes of the mountains, ablaze with wild indigo, closed in
+upon him and widened out. Above the terraces great dark forests of pines
+and deodars, maples and horse chestnuts clung to the hill sides; and
+above the forests grass slopes stretched up to bare rock and the
+snowfields. From the villages the people came out to meet him, and here
+and there from some castle of a greater importance a chieftain would ride
+out with his bodyguard, gay in velvets, and silks from Bokhara and chogas
+of gold kinkob, and offer to him gold dust twisted up in the petal of a
+flower, which he touched and remitted. He was escorted to polo-grounds
+and sat for hours witnessing sports and trials of skill, and at night to
+the music of kettledrums and pipes men and boys danced interminably
+before him. There was one evening which he particularly remembered. He
+had set up his camp outside a large village and was sitting alone by his
+fire in the open air. The night was very still, the sky dark but studded
+with stars extraordinarily bright--so bright, indeed, that Shere Ali
+could see upon the water of the river below the low cliff on which his
+camp fire was lit a trembling golden path made by the rays of a planet.
+And as he sat, unexpectedly in the hush a boy with a clear, sweet voice
+began to sing from the darkness behind him. The melody was plaintive and
+sweet; a few notes of a pipe accompanied him; and as Shere Ali listened
+in this high valley of the Himalayas on a summer's night, the music took
+hold upon him and wrung his heart. The yearning for all that he had left
+behind became a pain almost beyond endurance. The days of his boyhood and
+his youth went by before his eyes in a glittering procession. His school
+life, his first summer term at Oxford, the Cherwell with the shadows of
+the branches overhead dappling the water, the strenuous week of the
+Eights, his climbs with Linforth, and, above all, London in June, a
+London bright with lilac and sunshine and the fair faces of women,
+crowded in upon his memory. He had been steadily of late refusing to
+remember, but the sweet voice and the plaintive melody had caught him
+unawares. The ghosts of his dead pleasures trooped out and took life and
+substance. Particular hours were lived through again--a motor ride alone
+with Violet Oliver to Pangbourne, a dinner on the lawn outside the inn,
+the drive back to London in the cool of the evening. It all seemed very
+far away to-night. Shere Ali sat late beside his fire, nor when he went
+into his tent did he close his eyes.
+
+The next morning he rode among orchards bright with apricots and
+mulberries, peaches and white grapes, and in another day he looked down
+from a high cliff, across which the road was carried on a scaffolding,
+upon the town of Kohara and the castle of his father rising in terraces
+upon a hill behind. The nobles and their followers came out to meet him
+with courteous words and protestations of good will. But they looked him
+over with curious and not too friendly eyes. News had gone before Shere
+Ali that the young Prince of Chiltistan was coming to Kohara wearing the
+dress of the White People. They saw that the news was true, but no word
+or comment was uttered in his hearing. Joking and laughing they escorted
+him to the gates of his father's palace. Thus Shere Ali at the last had
+come home to Kohara. Of the life which he lived there he was to tell
+something to Violet Oliver.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+IN THE COURTYARD
+
+
+The investiture was over, and the guests, thronging from the Hall of
+Audience, came out beneath arches and saw the whole length of the great
+marble court spread before them. A vast canopy roofed it in, and a soft
+dim light pervaded it. To those who came from the glitter of the
+ceremonies it brought a sense of coolness and of peace. From the arches a
+broad flight of steps led downwards to the floor, where water gleamed
+darkly in a marble basin. Lilies floated upon its surface, and marble
+paths crossed it to the steps at the far end; and here and there, in its
+depth, the reflection of a lamp burned steadily. At the far end steps
+rose again to a great platform and to gilded arches through which lights
+poured in a blaze, and gave to that end almost the appearance of a
+lighted stage, and made of the courtyard a darkened auditorium. From one
+flight of steps to the other, in the dim cool light, the guests passed
+across the floor of the court, soldiers in uniforms, civilians in their
+dress of state, jewelled princes of the native kingdoms, ladies in their
+bravest array. But now and again one or two would slip from the throng,
+and, leaving the procession, take their own way about the Fort. Among
+those who slipped away was Violet Oliver. She went to the side of the
+courtyard where a couch stood empty. There she seated herself and waited.
+In front of her the stream of people passed by talking and laughing,
+within view, within earshot if only one raised one's voice a trifle above
+the ordinary note. Yet there was no other couch near. One might talk at
+will and not be overheard. It was, to Violet Oliver's thinking, a good
+strategic position, and there she proposed to remain till Shere Ali found
+her, and after he had found her, until he went away.
+
+She wondered in what guise he would come to her: a picturesque figure
+with a turban of some delicate shade upon his head and pearls about his
+throat, or--as she wondered, a young man in the evening dress of an
+Englishman stepped aside from the press of visitors and came towards her.
+Before she could, in that dim light, distinguish his face, she recognised
+him by the lightness of his step and the suppleness of his figure. She
+raised herself into a position a little more upright, and held out her
+hand. She made room for him on the couch beside her, and when he had
+taken his seat, she turned at once to speak.
+
+But Shere Ali raised his hand in a gesture of entreaty.
+
+"Hush!" he said with a smile; and the smile pleaded with her as much as
+did his words. "Just for a moment! We can argue afterwards. Just for a
+moment, let us pretend."
+
+Violet Oliver had expected anger, accusations, prayers. Even for some
+threat, some act of violence, she had come prepared. But the quiet
+wistfulness of his manner, as of a man too tired greatly to long for
+anything, took her at a disadvantage. But the one thing which she surely
+understood was the danger of pretence. There had been too much of
+pretence already.
+
+"No," she said.
+
+"Just for a moment," he insisted. He sat beside her, watching the clear
+profile of her face, the slender throat, the heavy masses of hair so
+daintily coiled upon her head. "The last eight months have not
+been--could not be. Yesterday we were at Richmond, just you and I. It was
+Sunday--you remember. I called on you in the afternoon, and for a wonder
+you were alone. We drove down together to Richmond, and dined together in
+the little room at the end of the passage--the room with the big windows,
+and the name of the woman who was murdered in France scratched upon the
+glass. That was yesterday."
+
+"It was last year," said Violet.
+
+"Yesterday," Shere Ali persisted. "I dreamt last night that I had gone
+back to Chiltistan; but it was only a dream."
+
+"It was the truth," and the quiet assurance of her voice dispelled Shere
+Ali's own effort at pretence. He leaned forward suddenly, clasping his
+hands upon his knees in an attitude familiar to her as characteristic of
+the man. There was a tenseness which gave to him even in repose a look
+of activity.
+
+"Well, it's the truth, then," he said, and his voice took on an accent of
+bitterness. "And here's more truth. I never thought to see you here
+to-night."
+
+"Did you think that I should be afraid?" asked Violet Oliver in a low,
+steady voice.
+
+"Afraid!" Shere Ali turned towards her in surprise and met her
+gaze. "No."
+
+"Why, then, should I break my word? Have I done it so often?"
+
+Shere Ali did not answer her directly.
+
+"You promised to write to me," he said, and Violet Oliver replied at
+once:
+
+"Yes. And I did write."
+
+"You wrote twice," he cried bitterly. "Oh, yes, you kept your word.
+There's a post every day, winter and summer, into Chiltistan. Sometimes
+an avalanche or a snowstorm delays it; but on most days it comes. If you
+could only have guessed how eagerly I looked forward to your letters,
+you would have written, I think, more often. There's a path over a high
+ridge by which the courier must come. I could see it from the casement
+of the tower. I used to watch it through a pair of field-glasses, that I
+might catch the first glimpse of the man as he rose against the sky.
+Each day I thought 'Perhaps there's a letter in your handwriting.' And
+you wrote twice, and in neither letter was there a hint that you were
+coming out to India."
+
+He was speaking in a low, passionate voice. In spite of herself, Violet
+Oliver was moved. The picture of him watching from his window in the
+tower for the black speck against the skyline was clear before her mind,
+and troubled her. Her voice grew gentle.
+
+"I did not write more often on purpose," she said.
+
+"It was on purpose, too, that you left out all mention of your visit
+to India?"
+
+Violet nodded her head.
+
+"Yes," she said.
+
+"You did not want to see me again."
+
+Violet turned her face towards him, and leaned forward a little.
+
+"I don't say that," she said softly. "But I thought it would be better
+that we two should not meet again, if meeting could be avoided. I saw
+that you cared--I may say that, mayn't I?" and for a second she laid her
+hand gently upon his sleeve. "I saw that you cared too much. It seemed to
+me best that it should end altogether."
+
+Shere Ali lifted his head, and turned quickly towards her.
+
+"Why should it end at all?" he cried. His eyes kindled and sought hers.
+"Violet, why should it end at all?"
+
+Violet Oliver drew back. She cast a glance to the courtyard. Only a few
+paces away the stream of people passed up and down.
+
+"It must end," she answered. "You know that as well as I."
+
+"I don't know it. I won't know it," he replied. He reached out his hand
+towards hers, but she was too quick for him. He bent nearer to her.
+
+"Violet," he whispered, "marry me!"
+
+Violet Oliver glanced again to the courtyard. But it was no longer to
+assure herself that friends of her own race were comfortably near at
+hand. Now she was anxious that they should not be near enough to listen
+and overhear.
+
+"That's impossible!" she answered in a startled voice.
+
+"It's not impossible! It's not!" And the desperation in his voice
+betrayed him. In the depths of his heart he knew that, for this woman, at
+all events, it was impossible. But he would not listen to that knowledge.
+
+"Other women, here in India, have had the courage."
+
+"And what have their lives been afterwards?" she asked. She had not
+herself any very strong feeling on the subject of colour. She was not
+repelled, as men are repelled. But she was aware, nevertheless, how
+strong the feeling was in others. She had not lived in India for nothing.
+Marriage with Shere Ali was impossible, even had she wished for it. It
+meant ostracism and social suicide.
+
+"Where should I live?" she went on. "In Chiltistan? What life would there
+be there for me?"
+
+"No," he replied. "I would not ask it. I never thought of it. In
+England. We could live there!" and, ceasing to insist, he began
+wistfully to plead. "Oh, if you knew how I have hated these past months.
+I used to sit at night, alone, alone, alone, eating my heart for want of
+you; for want of everything I care for. I could not sleep. I used to see
+the morning break. Perhaps here and there a drum would begin to beat,
+the cries of children would rise up from the streets, and I would lie in
+my bed with my hands clenched, thinking of the jingle of a hansom cab
+along the streets of London, and the gas lamps paling as the grey light
+spread. Violet!"
+
+Violet twisted her hands one within the other. This was just what she had
+thought to avoid, to shut out from her mind--the knowledge that he had
+suffered. But the evidence of his pain was too indisputable. There was no
+shutting it out. It sounded loud in his voice, it showed in his looks.
+His face had grown white and haggard, the face of a tortured man; his
+hands trembled, his eyes were fierce with longing.
+
+"Oh, don't," she cried, and so great was her trouble that for once she
+did not choose her words. "You know that it's impossible. We can't alter
+these things."
+
+She meant by "these things" the natural law that white shall mate with
+white, and brown with brown; and so Shere Ali understood her. He ceased
+to plead. There came a dreadful look upon his face.
+
+"Oh, I know," he exclaimed brutally. "You would be marrying a nigger."
+
+"I never said that," Violet interrupted hastily.
+
+"But you meant it," and he began to laugh bitterly and very quietly. To
+Violet that laughter was horrible. It frightened her. "Oh, yes, yes," he
+said. "When we come over to England we are very fine people. Women
+welcome us and are kind, men make us their friends. But out here! We
+quickly learn out here that we are the inferior people. Suppose that I
+wanted to be a soldier, not an officer of my levies, but a soldier in
+your army with a soldier's chances of promotion and high rank! Do you
+know what would happen? I might serve for twenty years, and at the end of
+it the youngest subaltern out of Sandhurst, with a moustache he can't
+feel upon his lip, would in case of war step over my head and command me.
+Why, I couldn't win the Victoria Cross, even though I had earned it ten
+times over. We are the subject races," and he turned to her abruptly. "I
+am in disfavour to-night. Do you know why? Because I am not dressed in a
+silk jacket; because I am not wearing jewels like a woman, as those
+Princes are," and he waved his hand contemptuously towards a group of
+them. "They are content," he cried. "But I was brought up in England, and
+I am not."
+
+He buried his face in his hands and was silent; and as he sat thus,
+Violet Oliver said to him with a gentle reproach:
+
+"When we parted in London last year you spoke in a different way--a
+better way. I remember very well what you said. For I was glad to hear
+it. You said: 'I have not forgotten really that there is much to do in my
+own country. I have not forgotten that I can thank all of you here who
+have shown me so much kindness by more than mere words. For I can help in
+Chiltistan--I can really help.'"
+
+Shere All raised his face from his hands with the air of a man listening
+to strange and curious words.
+
+"I said that?"
+
+"Yes," and in her turn Violet Oliver began to plead. "I wish that
+to-night you could recapture that fine spirit. I should be very glad of
+it. For I am troubled by your unhappiness."
+
+But Shere Ali shook his head.
+
+"I have been in Chiltistan since I spoke those words. And they will not
+let me help."
+
+"There's the road."
+
+"It must not be continued."
+
+"There is, at all events, your father," Violet suggested. "You can
+help him."
+
+And again Shere Ali laughed. But this time the bitterness had gone from
+his voice. He laughed with a sense of humour, almost, it seemed to
+Violet, with enjoyment.
+
+"My father!" he said. "I'll tell you about my father," and his face
+cleared for a moment of its distress as he turned towards her. "He
+received me in the audience chamber of his palace at Kohara. I had not
+seen him for ten years. How do you think he received me? He was sitting
+on a chair of brocade with silver legs in great magnificence, and across
+his knees he held a loaded rifle at full cock. It was a Snider, so that I
+could be quite sure it was cocked."
+
+Violet stared at him, not understanding.
+
+"But why?" she asked.
+
+"Well, he knew quite well that I was brought back to Kohara in order to
+replace him, if he didn't mend his ways and spend less money. And he
+didn't mean to be replaced." The smile broke out again on Shere Ali's
+face as he remembered the scene. "He sat there with his great beard, dyed
+red, spreading across his chest, a long velvet coat covering his knees,
+and the loaded rifle laid over the coat. His eyes watched me, while his
+fingers played about the trigger."
+
+Violet Oliver was horrified.
+
+"You mean--that he meant to kill you!" she cried incredulously.
+
+"Yes," said Shere Ali calmly. "I think he meant to do that. It's not so
+very unusual in our family. He probably thought that I might try to kill
+him. However, he didn't do it. You see, my father's very fond of the
+English, so I at once began to talk to him about England. It was evening
+when I went into the reception chamber; but it was broad daylight when I
+came out. I talked for my life that night--and won. He became so
+interested that he forgot to shoot me; and at the end I was wise enough
+to assure him that there was a great deal more to tell."
+
+The ways of the Princes in the States beyond the Frontier were unknown to
+Violet Oliver. The ruling family of Chiltistan was no exception to the
+general rule. In its annals there was hardly a page which was not stained
+with blood. When the son succeeded to the throne, it was, as often as
+not, after murdering his brothers, and if he omitted that precaution, as
+often as not he paid the penalty. Shere Ali was fortunate in that he had
+no brothers. But, on the other hand, he had a father, and there was no
+great security. Violet was startled, and almost as much bewildered as she
+was startled. She could not understand Shere Ali's composure. He spoke in
+so matter-of-fact a tone.
+
+"However," she said, grasping at the fact, "he has not killed you. He has
+not since tried to kill you."
+
+"No. I don't think he has," said Shere Ali slowly. But he spoke like one
+in doubt. "You see he realised very soon that I was not after all
+acceptable to the English. I wouldn't quite do what they wanted," and the
+humour died out of his face.
+
+"What did they want?"
+
+Shere Ali looked at her in hesitation.
+
+"Shall I tell you? I will. They wanted me to marry--one of my own people.
+They wanted me to forget," and he broke out in a passionate scorn. "As if
+I could do either--after I had known you."
+
+"Hush!" said she.
+
+But he was not to be checked.
+
+"You said it was impossible that you should marry me. It's no less
+impossible that I should marry now one of my own race. You know that. You
+can't deny it."
+
+Violet did not try to. He was speaking truth then, she was well aware. A
+great pity swelled up in her heart for him. She turned to him with a
+smile, in which there was much tenderness. His life was all awry; and
+both were quite helpless to set it right.
+
+"I am very sorry," she said in a whisper of remorse. "I did not think. I
+have done you grave harm."
+
+"Not you," he said quietly. "You may be quite sure of that. Those who
+have done me harm are those who sent me, ten years ago, to England."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+A QUESTION ANSWERED
+
+
+Thereafter both sat silent for a little while. The stream of people
+across the courtyard had diminished. High up on the great platform by the
+lighted arches the throng still pressed and shifted. But here there was
+quietude. The clatter of voices had died down. A band playing somewhere
+near at hand could be heard. Violet Oliver for the first time in her life
+had been brought face to face with a real tragedy. She was conscious of
+it as something irremediable and terribly sad. And for her own share in
+bringing it about she was full of remorse. She looked at Shere Ali as he
+sat beside her, his eyes gazing into the courtyard, his face tired and
+hopeless. There was nothing to be done. Her thoughts told her so no less
+clearly than his face. Here was a life spoilt at the beginning. But that
+was all that she saw. That the spoilt life might become an instrument of
+evil--she was blind to that possibility: she thought merely of the youth
+who suffered and still must suffer; who was crippled by the very means
+which were meant to strengthen him: and pity inclined her towards him
+with an ever-increasing strength.
+
+"I couldn't do it," she repeated silently to herself. "I couldn't do it.
+It would be madness."
+
+Shere Ali raised his head and said with a smile, "I am glad they are not
+playing the tune which I once heard on the Lake of Geneva, and again in
+London when I said good-bye to you."
+
+And then Violet sought to comfort him, her mind still working on what he
+had told her of his life in Chiltistan.
+
+"But it will become easier," she said, beginning in that general way. "In
+time you will rule in Chiltistan. That is certain." But he checked her
+with a shake of the head.
+
+"Certain? There is the son of Abdulla Mohammed, who fought against my
+father when Linforth's father was killed. It is likely enough that those
+old days will be revived. And I should have the priests against me."
+
+"The Mullahs!" she exclaimed, remembering in what terms he was wont to
+speak of them to her.
+
+"Yes," he answered, "I have set them against me already. They laid their
+traps for me while I was on the sea, and I would not fall into them. They
+would have liked to raise the country against my father and the English,
+just as they raised it twenty-five years ago. And they would have liked
+me to join in with them."
+
+He related to Violet the story of his meeting with Safdar Khan at the
+Gate of Lahore, and he repeated the words which he had used in Safdar
+Khan's hearing.
+
+"It did not take long for my threats to be repeated in the bazaar of
+Kohara, and from the bazaar they were quickly carried to the ears of the
+Mullahs. I had proof of it," he said with a laugh.
+
+Violet asked him anxiously for the proof.
+
+"I can tell to a day when the words were repeated in Kohara. For a
+fortnight after my coming the Mullahs still had hopes. They had heard
+nothing, and they met me always with salutations and greetings. Then
+came the day when I rode up the valley and a Mullah who had smiled the
+day before passed me as though he had not noticed me at all. The news
+had come. I was sure of it at the time. I reined in my horse and called
+sharply to one of the servants riding behind me, 'Who is that?' The
+Mullah heard the question, and he turned and up went the palm of his
+hand to his forehead in a flash. But I was not inclined to let him off
+so easily."
+
+"What did you do?" Violet asked uneasily.
+
+"I said to him, 'My friend, I will take care that you know me the next
+time we meet upon the road. Show me your hands!' He held them out, and
+they were soft as a woman's. I was close to a bridge which some workmen
+were repairing. So I had my friend brought along to the bridge. Then I
+said to one of the workmen, 'Would you like to earn your day's wage and
+yet do no work?' He laughed, thinking that I was joking. But I was not. I
+said to him, 'Very well, then, see that this soft-handed creature does
+your day's work. You will bring him to me at the Palace this evening, and
+if I find that he has not done the work, or that you have helped him, you
+will forfeit your wages and I will whip you both into the bargain.' The
+Mullah was brought to me in the evening," said Shere Ali, smiling grimly.
+"He was so stiff he could hardly walk. I made him show me his hands
+again, and this time they were blistered. So I told him to remember his
+manners in the future, and I let him go. But he was a man of prominence
+in the country, and when the story got known he became rather
+ridiculous." He turned with a smile to Violet Oliver.
+
+"My people don't like being made ridiculous--least of all Mullahs."
+
+But there was no answering smile on Violet's face. Rather she was
+troubled and alarmed.
+
+"But surely that was unwise?"
+
+Shere Ali shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"What does it matter?" he said. He did not tell her all of that story.
+There was an episode which had occurred two days later when Shere Ali was
+stalking an ibex on the hillside. A bullet had whistled close by his ear,
+and it had been fired from behind him. He was never quite sure whether
+his father or the Mullah was responsible for that bullet, but he inclined
+to attribute it to the Mullah.
+
+"Yes, I have the priests against me," he said. "They call me the
+Englishman." Then he laughed. "A curious piece of irony, isn't it?"
+
+He stood up suddenly and said: "When I left England I was in doubt. I
+could not be sure whether my home, my true home, was there or in
+Chiltistan."
+
+"Yes, I remember," said Violet.
+
+"I am no longer in doubt. It is neither in England nor in Chiltistan. I
+am a citizen of no country. I have no place anywhere at all."
+
+Violet Oliver stood up and faced him.
+
+"I must be going. I must find my friends," she said, and as he took her
+hand, she added, "I am so very sorry."
+
+The words, she felt, were utterly inadequate, but no others would come to
+her lips, and so with a trembling smile she repeated them. She drew her
+hand from his clasp and moved a step or two away. But he followed her,
+and she stopped and shook her head.
+
+"This is really good-bye," she said simply and very gravely.
+
+"I want to ask you a question," he explained. "Will you answer it?"
+
+"How can I tell you until you ask it?"
+
+He looked at her for a moment as though in doubt whether he should speak
+or not. Then he said, "Are you going to marry--Linforth?"
+
+The blood slowly mounted into her face and flushed her forehead
+and cheeks.
+
+"He has not even asked me to marry him," she said, and moved down into
+the courtyard.
+
+Shere Ali watched her as she went. That was the last time he should see
+her, he told himself. The last time in all his life. His eyes followed
+her, noting the grace of her movements, the whiteness of her skin, all
+her daintiness of dress and person. A madness kindled in his blood. He
+had a wild thought of springing down, of capturing her. She mounted the
+steps and disappeared among the throng.
+
+And they wanted him to marry--to marry one of his own people. Shere Ali
+suddenly saw the face of the Deputy Commissioner at Lahore calmly
+suggesting the arrangement, almost ordering it. He sat down again upon
+the couch and once more began to laugh. But the laughter ceased very
+quickly, and folding his arms upon the high end of the couch, he bowed
+his head upon them and was still.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+SHERE ALI MEETS AN OLD FRIEND
+
+
+The carriage which was to take Violet Oliver and her friends back to
+their camp had been parked amongst those farthest from the door. Violet
+stood for a long while under the awning, waiting while the interminable
+procession went by. The generals in their scarlet coats, the ladies in
+their satin gowns, the great officers of state attended by their escorts,
+the native princes, mounted into their carriages and were driven away.
+The ceremony and the reception which followed it had been markedly
+successful even in that land of ceremonies and magnificence. The voices
+about her told her so as they spoke of this or that splendour and
+recalled the picturesque figures which had given colour to the scene. But
+the laughter, the praise, the very tones of enjoyment had to her a
+heartless ring. She watched the pageantry of the great Indian
+Administration dissolve, and was blind to its glitter and conscious only
+of its ruthlessness. For ruthless she found it to-night. She had been
+face to face with a victim of the system--a youth broken by it,
+needlessly broken, and as helpless to recover from his hurt as a wounded
+animal. The harm had been done no doubt with the very best intention, but
+the harm had been done. She was conscious of her own share in the blame
+and she drove miserably home, with the picture of Shere Ali's face as she
+had last seen it to bear her company, and with his cry, that he had no
+place anywhere at all, sounding in her ears.
+
+When she reached the privacy of her own tent, and had dismissed her maid,
+she unlocked one of her trunks and took out from it her jewel case. She
+had been careful not to wear her necklace of pearls that night, and she
+took it out of the case now and laid it upon her knees. She was very
+sorry to part with it. She touched and caressed the pearls with loving
+fingers, and once she lifted it as though she would place it about her
+neck. But she checked her hands, fearing that if she put it on she would
+never bring herself to let it go. Already as she watched and fingered it
+and bent her head now and again to scrutinise a stone, small insidious
+voices began to whisper at her heart.
+
+"He asked for nothing when he gave it you."
+
+"You made no promise when you took it."
+
+"It was a gift without conditions hinted or implied."
+
+Violet Oliver took the world lightly on the whole. Only this one passion
+for jewels and precious stones had touched her deeply as yet. Of love
+she knew little beyond the name and its aspect in others. She was
+familiar enough with that, so familiar that she gave little heed to what
+lay behind the aspect--or had given little heed until to-night. Her
+husband she had accepted rather than actively welcomed. She had lived
+with him in a mood of placid and unquestioning good-humour, and she had
+greatly missed him when he died. But it was the presence in the house
+that she missed, rather than the lover. To-night, almost for the first
+time, she had really looked under the surface. Insight had been
+vouchsafed to her; and in remorse she was minded to put the thing she
+greatly valued away from her.
+
+She rose suddenly, and, lest the temptation to keep the necklace should
+prove too strong, laid it away in its case.
+
+A post went every day over the passes into Chiltistan. She wrapped up the
+case in brown paper, tied it, sealed it, and addressed it. There was need
+to send it off, she well knew, before the picture of Shere Ali, now so
+vivid in her mind, lost its aspect of poignant suffering and faded out of
+her thoughts.
+
+But she slept ill and in the middle of the night she rose from her bed.
+The tent was pitch dark. She lit her candle; and it was the light of the
+candle which awoke her maid. The tent was a double one; the maid slept in
+the smaller portion of it and a canvas doorway gave entrance into her
+mistress' room. Over this doorway hung the usual screen of green matting.
+Now these screens act as screens, are as impenetrable to the eye as a
+door--so long as there is no light behind them. But place a light behind
+them and they become transparent. This was what Violet Oliver had done.
+She had lit her candle and at once a part of the interior of her tent was
+visible to her maid as she lay in bed.
+
+The maid saw the table and the sealed parcel upon it. Then she saw Mrs.
+Oliver come to the table, break the seals, open the parcel, take out a
+jewel case--a jewel case which the maid knew well--and carry it and the
+parcel out of sight. Mrs. Oliver crossed to a corner of the room where
+her trunks lay; and the next moment the maid heard a key grate in a lock.
+For a little while the candle still burned, and every now and then a
+distorted shadow was flung upon the wall of the tent within the maid's
+vision. It seemed to her that Mrs. Oliver was sitting at a little writing
+table which stood close by the trunk. Then the light went out again. The
+maid would have thought no more of this incident, but on entering the
+room next morning with a cup of tea, she was surprised to see the packet
+once more sealed and fastened on the centre table.
+
+"Adela," said Mrs. Oliver, "I want you to take that parcel to the Post
+Office yourself and send it off."
+
+The maid took the parcel away.
+
+Violet Oliver, with a sigh of relief, drank her tea. At last, she
+thought, the end was reached. Now, indeed, her life and Shere Ali's life
+would touch no more. But she was to see him again. For two days later, as
+the train which was carrying her northwards to Lahore moved out of the
+station, she saw from the window of her carriage the young Prince of
+Chiltistan standing upon the platform. She drew back quickly, fearing
+that he would see her. But he was watching the train with indifferent
+eyes; and the spectacle of his indifference struck her as something
+incongruous and strange. She had been thinking of him with remorse as a
+man twisting like Hamlet in the coils of tragedy, and wearing like Hamlet
+the tragic mien. Yet here he was on the platform of a railway station,
+waiting, like any commonplace traveller, with an uninterested patience
+for his train. The aspect of Shere Ali diminished Violet Oliver's
+remorse. She wondered for a moment why he was not travelling upon the
+same train as herself, for his destination must be northwards too. And
+then she lost sight of him. She was glad that after all the last vision
+of him which she was to carry away was not the vision of a youth helpless
+and despairing with a trouble-tortured face.
+
+Shere Ali was following out the destiny to which his character bound
+him. He had been made and moulded and fashioned, and though he knew he
+had been fashioned awry, he could no more change and rebuild himself
+than the hunchback can will away his hump. He was driven down the ways
+of circumstance. At present he saw and knew that he was so driven. He
+knew, too, that he could not resist. This half-year in Chiltistan had
+taught him that.
+
+So he went southwards to Calcutta. The mere thought of Chiltistan was
+unendurable. He had to forget. There was no possibility of forgetfulness
+amongst his own hills and the foreign race that once had been his own
+people. Southwards he went to Calcutta, and in that city for a time was
+lost to sight. He emerged one afternoon upon the racecourse, and while
+standing on the grass in front of the Club stand, before the horses
+cantered down to the starting post, he saw an elderly man, heavy of build
+but still erect, approach him with a smile.
+
+Shere Ali would have avoided that man if he could. He hesitated,
+unwilling to recognise and unable quite to ignore. And while he
+hesitated, the elderly man held out his hand.
+
+"We know each other, surely. I used to see you at Eton, didn't I? I used
+to run down to see a young friend of mine and a friend of yours, Dick
+Linforth. I am Colonel Dewes."
+
+"Yes, I remember," said Shere Ali with some embarrassment; and he took
+the Colonel's outstretched hand. "I thought that you had left India
+for good."
+
+"So did I," said Dewes. "But I was wrong." He turned and walked along by
+the side of Shere Ali. "I don't know why exactly, but I did not find life
+in London so very interesting."
+
+Shere Ali looked quickly at the Colonel.
+
+"Yet you had looked forward to retiring and going home?" he asked with a
+keen interest. Colonel Dewes gave himself up to reflection. He sounded
+the obscurities of his mind. It was a practice to which he was not
+accustomed. He drew himself erect, his eyes became fixed, and with a
+puckered forehead he thought.
+
+"I suppose so," he said. "Yes, certainly. I remember. One used to buck at
+mess of the good time one would have, the comfort of one's club and one's
+rooms, and the rest of it. It isn't comfortable in India, is it? Not
+compared with England. Your furniture, your house, and all that sort of
+thing. You live as if you were a lodger, don't you know, and it didn't
+matter for a little while whether you were comfortable or not. The little
+while slips on and on, and suddenly you find you have been in the country
+twenty or thirty years, and you have never taken the trouble to be
+comfortable. It's like living in a dak-bungalow."
+
+The Colonel halted and pulled at his moustache. He had made a discovery.
+He had reflected not without result. "By George!" he said, "that's
+right. Let me put it properly now, as a fellow would put it in a book,
+if he hit upon anything as good." He framed his aphorism in different
+phrases before he was satisfied with it. Then he delivered himself of it
+with pride.
+
+"At the bottom of the Englishman's conception of life in India, there is
+always the idea of a dak-bungalow," and he repeated the sentence to
+commit it surely to memory. "But don't you use it," he said, turning to
+Shere Ali suddenly. "I thought of that--not you. It's mine."
+
+"I won't use it," said Shere Ali.
+
+"Life in India is based upon the dak-bungalow," said Dewes. "Yes, yes";
+and so great was his pride that he relented towards Shere Ali. "You may
+use it if you like," he conceded. "Only you would naturally add that it
+was I who thought of it."
+
+Shere Ali smiled and replied:
+
+"I won't fail to do that, Colonel Dewes."
+
+"No? Then use it as much as you like, for it's true. Out here one
+remembers the comfort of England and looks forward to it. But back there,
+one forgets the discomfort of India. By George! that's pretty good, too.
+Shall we look at the horses?"
+
+Shere Ali did not answer that question. With a quiet persistence he kept
+Colonel Dewes to the conversation. Colonel Dewes for his part was not
+reluctant to continue it, in spite of the mental wear and tear which it
+involved. He felt that he was clearly in the vein. There was no knowing
+what brilliant thing he might not say next. He wished that some of those
+clever fellows on the India Council were listening to him.
+
+"Why?" asked Shere Ali. "Why back there does one forget the discomfort
+of India?"
+
+He asked the question less in search of information than to discover
+whether the feelings of which he was conscious were shared too by his
+companion.
+
+"Why?" answered Dewes wrinkling his forehead again. "Because one misses
+more than one thought to miss and one doesn't find half what one thought
+to find. Come along here!"
+
+He led Shere Ali up to the top of the stand.
+
+"We can see the race quite well from here," he said, "although that is
+not the reason why I brought you up. This is what I wanted to show you."
+
+He waved his hand over towards the great space which the racecourse
+enclosed. It was thronged with natives robed in saffron and pink, in blue
+and white, in scarlet and delicate shades of mauve and violet. The whole
+enclosure was ablaze with colour, and the colours perpetually moved and
+grouped themselves afresh as the throng shifted. A great noise of cries
+rose up into the clear air.
+
+"I suppose that is what I missed," said Dewes, "not the noise, not the
+mere crowd--you can get both on an English racecourse--but the colour."
+
+And suddenly before Shere Ali's eyes there rose a vision of the Paddock
+at Newmarket during a July meeting. The sleek horses paced within the
+cool grove of trees; the bright sunlight, piercing the screen of leaves
+overhead, dappled their backs with flecks of gold. Nothing of the
+sunburnt grass before his eyes was visible to him. He saw the green turf
+of the Jockey Club enclosure, the seats, the luncheon room behind with
+its open doors and windows.
+
+"Yes, I understand," he said. "But you have come back," and a note of
+envy sounded in his voice. Here was one point in which the parallel
+between his case and that of Colonel Dewes was not complete. Dewes had
+missed India as he had missed England. But Dewes was a free man. He
+could go whither he would. "Yes, you were able to come back. How long do
+you stay?"
+
+And the answer to that question startled Shere Ali.
+
+"I have come back for good."
+
+"You are going to live here?" cried Shere Ali.
+
+"Not here, exactly. In Cashmere. I go up to Cashmere in a week's time. I
+shall live there and die there."
+
+Colonel Dewes spoke without any note of anticipation, and without any
+regret. It was difficult for Shere Ali to understand how deeply he felt.
+Yet the feeling must be deep. He had cut himself off from his own people,
+from his own country. Shere Ali was stirred to yet more questions. He was
+anxious to understand thoroughly all that had moved this commonplace
+matter-of-fact man at his side.
+
+"You found life in England so dull?" he asked.
+
+"Well, one felt a stranger," said Dewes. "One had lost one's
+associations. I know there are men who throw themselves into public life
+and the rest of it. But I couldn't. I hadn't the heart for it even if I
+had the ability. There was Lawrence, of course. He governed India and
+then he went on the School Board," and Dewes thumped his fist upon the
+rail in front of him. "How he was able to do it beats me altogether. I
+read his life with amazement. He was just as keen about the School Board
+as he had been about India when he was Viceroy here. He threw himself
+into it with just as much vigour. That beats me. He was a big man, of
+course, and I am not. I suppose that's the explanation. Anyway, the
+School Board was not for me. I put in my winters for some years at Corfu
+shooting woodcock. And in the summer I met a man or two back on leave at
+my club. But on the whole it was pretty dull. Yes," and he nodded his
+head, and for the first time a note of despondency sounded in his voice.
+"Yes, on the whole it was pretty dull. It will be better in Cashmere."
+
+"It would have been still better if you had never seen India at all,"
+said Shere Ali.
+
+"No; I don't say that. I had my good time in India--twenty-five years of
+it, the prime of my life. No; I have nothing to complain of," said Dewes.
+
+Here was another difference brought to Shere Ali's eyes. He himself was
+still young; the prime years were before him, not behind. He looked down,
+even as Dewes had done, over that wide space gay with colours as a garden
+of flowers; but in the one man's eyes there was a light of satisfaction,
+in the other's a gleam almost of hatred.
+
+"You are not sorry you came out to India," he said. "Well, for my part,"
+and his voice suddenly shook with passion, "I wish to heaven I had never
+seen England."
+
+Dewes turned about, a vacant stare of perplexity upon his face.
+
+"Oh, come, I say!" he protested.
+
+"I mean it!" cried Shere Ali. "It was the worst thing that could have
+happened. I shall know no peace of mind again, no contentment, no
+happiness, not until I am dead. I wish I were dead!"
+
+And though he spoke in a low voice, he spoke with so much violence that
+Colonel Dewes was quite astounded. He was aware of no similiarity between
+his own case and that of Shere Ali. He had long since forgotten the
+exhortations of Luffe.
+
+"Oh, come now," he repeated. "Isn't that a little ungrateful--what?"
+
+He could hardly have chosen a word less likely to soothe the exasperated
+nerves of his companion. Shere Ali laughed harshly.
+
+"I ought to be grateful?" said he.
+
+"Well," said Dewes, "you have been to Eton and Oxford, you have seen
+London. All that is bound to have broadened your mind. Don't you feel
+that your mind has broadened?"
+
+"Tell me the use of a broad mind in Chiltistan," said Shere Ali. And
+Colonel Dewes, who had last seen the valleys of that remote country more
+than twenty years before, was baffled by the challenge.
+
+"To tell the truth, I am a little out of touch with Indian problems," he
+said. "But it's surely good in every way that there should be a man up
+there who knows we have something in the way of an army. When I was
+there, there was trouble which would have been quite prevented by
+knowledge of that kind."
+
+"Are you sure?" said Shere Ali quietly; and the two men turned and went
+down from the roof of the stand.
+
+The words which Dewes had just used rankled in Shere Ali's mind, quietly
+though he had received them. Here was the one definite advantage of his
+education in England on which Dewes could lay his finger. He knew enough
+of the strength of the British army to know also the wisdom of keeping
+his people quiet. For that he had been sacrificed. It was an
+advantage--yes. But an advantage to whom? he asked. Why, to those
+governing people here who had to find the money and the troops to
+suppress a rising, and to confront at the same time an outcry at home
+from the opponents of the forward movement. It was to their advantage
+certainly that he should have been sent to England. And then he was told
+to be grateful!
+
+As they came out again from the winding staircase and turned towards the
+paddock Colonel Dewes took Shere Ali by the arm, and said in a voice of
+kindliness:
+
+"And what has become of all the fine ambitions you and Dick Linforth used
+to have in common?"
+
+"Linforth's still at Chatham," replied Shere Ali shortly.
+
+"Yes, but you are here. You might make a beginning by yourself."
+
+"They won't let me."
+
+"There's the road," suggested Dewes.
+
+"They won't let me add an inch to it. They will let me do nothing, and
+they won't let Linforth come out. I wish they would," he added in a
+softer voice. "If Linforth were to come out to Chiltistan it might make a
+difference."
+
+They had walked round to the rails in front of the stand, and Shere Ali
+looked up the steps to the Viceroy's box. The Viceroy was present that
+afternoon. Shere Ali saw his tall figure, with the stoop of the shoulders
+characteristic of him, as he stood dressed in a grey frock-coat, with the
+ladies of his family and one or two of his _aides-de-camp_ about him.
+Shere Ali suddenly stopped and nodded towards the box.
+
+"Have you any influence there?" he asked of Colonel Dewes; and he spoke
+with a great longing, a great eagerness, and he waited for the answer in
+a great suspense.
+
+Dewes shook his head.
+
+"None," he replied; "I am nobody at all."
+
+The hope died out of Shere Ali's face.
+
+"I am sorry," he said; and the eagerness had changed into despair. There
+was just a chance, he thought, of salvation for himself if only Linforth
+could be fetched out to India. He might resume with Linforth his old
+companionship, and so recapture something of his old faith and of his
+bright ideals. There was sore need that he should recapture them. Shere
+Ali was well aware of it. More and more frequently sure warnings came to
+him. Now it was some dim recollection of beliefs once strongly clung to,
+which came back to him with a shock. He would awaken through some chance
+word to the glory of the English rule in India, the lessening poverty of
+the Indian nations, the incorruptibility of the English officials and
+their justice.
+
+"Yes, yes," he would say with astonishment, "I was sure of these things;
+I knew them as familiar truths," even as a man gradually going blind
+might one day see clearly and become aware of his narrowing vision. Or
+perhaps it would be some sudden unsuspected revulsion of feeling in his
+heart. Such a revulsion had come to him this afternoon as he had gazed up
+to the Viceroy's box. A wild and unreasoning wrath had flashed up within
+him, not against the system, but against that tall stooping man, worn
+with work, who was at once its representative and its flower. Up there
+the great man stood--so his thoughts ran--complacent, self-satisfied,
+careless of the harm which his system wrought. Down here upon the grass
+walked a man warped and perverted out of his natural course. He had been
+sent to Eton and to Oxford, and had been filled with longings and desires
+which could have no fruition; he had been trained to delicate thoughts
+and habits which must daily be offended and daily be a cause of offence
+to his countrymen. But what did the tall stooping man care? Shere Ali now
+knew that the English had something in the way of an army. What did it
+matter whether he lived in unhappiness so long as that knowledge was the
+price of his unhappiness? A cruel, careless, warping business, this
+English rule.
+
+Thus Shere Ali felt rather than thought, and realised the while the
+danger of his bitter heart. Once more he appealed to Colonel Dewes,
+standing before him with burning eyes.
+
+"Bring Linforth out to India! If you have any influence, use it; if you
+have none, obtain it. Only bring Linforth out to India, and bring him
+very quickly!"
+
+Once before a passionate appeal had been made to Colonel Dewes by a man
+in straits, and Colonel Dewes had not understood and had not obeyed. Now,
+a quarter of a century later another appeal was made by a man sinking, as
+surely as Luffe had been sinking before, and once again Dewes did not
+understand.
+
+He took Shere Ali by the arm, and said in a kindly voice:
+
+"I tell you what it is, my lad. You have been going the pace a bit, eh?
+Calcutta's no good. You'll only collect debts and a lot of things you are
+better without. Better get out of it."
+
+Shere Ali's face closed as his lips had done. All expression died from it
+in a moment. There was no help for him in Colonel Dewes. He said good-bye
+with a smile, and walked out past the stand. His syce was waiting for him
+outside the railings.
+
+Shere Ali had come to the races wearing a sun-helmet, and, as the fashion
+is amongst the Europeans in Calcutta, his syce carried a silk hat for
+Shere Ali to take in exchange for his helmet when the sun went down.
+Shere Ali, like most of the Europeanised Indians, was more scrupulous
+than any Englishman in adhering to the European custom. But to-day, with
+an angry gesture, he repelled his syce.
+
+"I am going," he said. "You can take that thing away."
+
+His sense of humour failed him altogether. He would have liked furiously
+to kick and trample upon that glossy emblem of the civilised world; he
+had much ado to refrain. The syce carried back the silk hat to Shere
+Ali's smart trap, and Shere Ali drove home in his helmet. Thus he began
+publicly to renounce the cherished illusion that he was of the white
+people, and must do as the white people did.
+
+But Colonel Dewes pointed unwittingly the significance of that trivial
+matter on the same night. He dined at the house of an old friend, and
+after the ladies had gone he moved up into the next chair, and so sat
+beside a weary-looking official from the Punjab named Ralston, who had
+come down to Calcutta on leave. Colonel Dewes began to talk of his
+meeting with Shere Ali that afternoon. At the mention of Shere Ali's name
+the official sat up and asked for more.
+
+"He looked pretty bad," said Colonel Dewes. "Jumpy and feverish, and with
+the air of a man who has been sitting up all night for a week or two. But
+this is what interested me most," and Dewes told how the lad had implored
+him to bring Linforth out to India.
+
+"Who's Linforth?" asked the official quickly. "Not the son of that
+Linforth who--"
+
+"Yes, that's the man," said the Colonel testily. "But you interrupt me.
+What interested me was this--when I refused to help, Shere Ali's face
+changed in a most extraordinary way. All the fire went from his eyes, all
+the agitation from his face. It was like looking at an open box full of
+interesting things, and then--bang! someone slaps down the lid, and you
+are staring at a flat piece of wood. It was as if--as if--well, I can't
+find a better comparison."
+
+"It was as if a European suddenly changed before your eyes into an
+Oriental."
+
+Dewes was not pleased with Ralston's success in supplying the simile he
+could not hit upon himself.
+
+"That's a little fanciful," he said grudgingly; and then recognised
+frankly the justness of its application. "Yet it's true--a European
+changing into an Oriental! Yes, it just looked like that."
+
+"It may actually have been that," said the official quietly. And he
+added: "I met Shere Ali last year at Lahore on his way north to
+Chiltistan. I was interested then; I am all the more interested now, for
+I have just been appointed to Peshawur."
+
+He spoke in a voice which was grave--so grave that Colonel Dewes looked
+quickly towards him.
+
+"Do you think there will be trouble up there in Chiltistan?" he asked.
+
+The Deputy-Commissioner, who was now Chief Commissioner, smiled wearily.
+
+"There is always trouble up there in Chiltistan," he said. "That I know.
+What I think is this--Shere Ali should have gone to the Mayo College at
+Ajmere. That would have been a compromise which would have satisfied his
+father and done him no harm. But since he didn't--since he went to Eton,
+and to Oxford, and ran loose in London for a year or two--why, I think he
+is right."
+
+"How do you mean--right?" asked the Colonel.
+
+"I mean that the sooner Linforth is fetched out to India and sent up to
+Chiltistan, the better it will be," said the Commissioner.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+NEWS FROM MECCA
+
+
+Mr. Charles Ralston, being a bachelor and of an economical mind even when
+on leave in Calcutta, had taken up his quarters in a grass hut in the
+garden of his Club. He awoke the next morning with an uncomfortable
+feeling that there was work to be done. The feeling changed into sure
+knowledge as he reflected upon the conversation which he had had with
+Colonel Dewes, and he accordingly arose and went about it. For ten days
+he went to and fro between the Club and Government House, where he held
+long and vigorous interviews with officials who did not wish to see him.
+Moreover, other people came to see him privately--people of no social
+importance for the most part, although there were one or two officers of
+the police service amongst them. With these he again held long
+interviews, asking many inquisitive questions. Then he would go out by
+himself into those parts of the city where the men of broken fortunes,
+the jockeys run to seed, and the prize-fighters chiefly preferred to
+congregate. In the low quarters he sought his information of the waifs
+and strays who are cast up into the drinking-bars of any Oriental port,
+and he did not come back empty-handed.
+
+For ten days he thus toiled for the good of the Indian Government,
+and, above all, of that part of it which had its headquarters at
+Lahore. And on the morning of the eleventh day, as he was just
+preparing to leave for Government House, where his persistence had
+prevailed, a tall, black-bearded and very sunburnt man noiselessly
+opened the door of the hut and as noiselessly stepped inside. Ralston,
+indeed, did not at once notice him, nor did the stranger call attention
+to his presence. He waited, motionless and patient, until Ralston
+happened to turn and see him.
+
+"Hatch!" cried Ralston with a smile of welcome stealing over his startled
+face, and making it very pleasant to look upon. "You?"
+
+"Yes," answered the tall man; "I reached Calcutta last night. I went into
+the Club for breakfast. They told me you were here."
+
+Robert Hatch was of the same age as Ralston. But there was little else
+which they had in common. The two men had met some fifteen years ago for
+the first time, in Peshawur, and on that first meeting some subtle chord
+of sympathy had drawn them together; and so securely that even though
+they met but seldom nowadays, their friendship had easily survived the
+long intervals. The story of Hatch's life was a simple one. He had
+married in his twenty-second year a wife a year younger than himself, and
+together the couple had settled down upon an estate which Hatch owned in
+Devonshire. Only a year after the marriage, however, Hatch's wife died,
+and he, disliking his home, had gone restlessly abroad. The restlessness
+had grown, a certain taste for Oriental literature and thought had been
+fostered by his travels. He had become a wanderer upon the face of the
+earth--a man of many clubs in different quarters of the world, and of
+many friends, who had come to look upon his unexpected appearance and no
+less sudden departure as part of the ordinary tenour of their lives. Thus
+it was not the appearance of Hatch which had startled Ralston, but rather
+the silence of it.
+
+"Why didn't you speak?" he asked. "Why did you stand waiting there for me
+to look your way?"
+
+Hatch laughed as he sat down in a chair.
+
+"I have got into the habit of waiting, I suppose," he said. "For the last
+five months I have been a servant in the train of the Sultan of the
+Maldive Islands."
+
+Ralston was not as a rule to be surprised by any strange thing which
+Hatch might have chosen to do. He merely glanced at his companion
+and asked:
+
+"What in the world were you doing in the Maldive Islands?"
+
+"Nothing at all," replied Hatch. "I did not go to them. I joined the
+Sultan at Suez."
+
+This time Ralston, who had been moving about the room in search of some
+papers which he had mislaid, came to a stop. His attention was arrested.
+He sat down in a chair and prepared to listen.
+
+"Go on," he said.
+
+"I wanted to go to Mecca," said Hatch, and Ralston nodded his head as
+though he had expected just those words.
+
+"I did not see how I was going to get there by myself," Hatch continued,
+"however carefully I managed my disguise."
+
+"Yet you speak Arabic," said Ralston.
+
+"Yes, the language wasn't the difficulty. Indeed, a great many of the
+pilgrims--the people from Central Asia, for instance--don't speak Arabic
+at all. But I felt sure that if I went down the Red Sea alone on a
+pilgrim steamer, landed alone at Jeddah, and went up with a crowd of
+others to Mecca, living with them, sleeping with them, day after day,
+sooner or later I should make some fatal slip and never reach Mecca at
+all. If Burton made one mistake, how many should I? So I put the journey
+off year after year. But this autumn I heard that the Sultan of the
+Maldive Islands intended to make the pilgrimage. He was a friend of mine.
+I waited for him at Suez, and he reluctantly consented to take me."
+
+"So you went to Mecca," exclaimed Ralston.
+
+"Yes; I have just come from Mecca. As I told you, I only landed at
+Calcutta last night."
+
+Ralston was silent for a few moments.
+
+"I think you may be able to help me," he said at length. "There's a man
+here in Calcutta," and Ralston related what he knew of the history of
+Shere Ali, dwelling less upon the unhappiness and isolation of the Prince
+than upon the political consequences of his isolation.
+
+"He has come to grief in Chiltistan," he continued. "He won't
+marry--there may be a reason for that. I don't know. English women are
+not always wise in their attitude towards these boys. But it seems to me
+quite a natural result of his education and his life. He is suspected by
+his people. When he goes back, he will probably be murdered. At present
+he is consorting with the lowest Europeans here, drinking with them,
+playing cards with them, and going to ruin as fast as he can. I am not
+sure that there's a chance for him at all. A few minutes ago I would
+certainly have said that there was none. Now, however, I am wondering.
+You see, I don't know the lad well enough. I don't know how many of the
+old instincts and traditions of his race and his faith are still alive in
+him, underneath all the Western ideas and the Western feelings to which
+he has been trained. But if they are dead, there is no chance for him. If
+they are alive--well, couldn't they be evoked? That's the problem."
+
+Hatch nodded his head.
+
+"He might be turned again into a genuine Mohammedan," he said. "I
+wonder too."
+
+"At all events, it's worth trying," said Ralston. "For it's the only
+chance left to try. If we could sweep away the effects of the last few
+years, if we could obliterate his years in England--oh, I know it's
+improbable. But help me and let us see."
+
+"How?" asked Hatch.
+
+"Come and dine with me to-morrow night. I'll make Shere Ali come. I _can_
+make him. For I can threaten to send him back to Chiltistan. Then talk to
+him of Mecca, talk to him of the city, and the shrine, and the pilgrims.
+Perhaps something of their devotion may strike a spark in him, perhaps he
+may have some remnant of faith still dormant in him. Make Mecca a symbol
+to him, make it live for him as a place of pilgrimage. You could,
+perhaps, because you have seen with your own eyes, and you know."
+
+"I can try, of course," said Hatch with a shrug of his shoulders. "But
+isn't there a danger--if I succeed? I might try to kindle faith, I might
+only succeed in kindling fanaticism. Are the Mohammedans beyond the
+frontier such a very quiet people that you are anxious to add another to
+their number?"
+
+Ralston was prepared for the objection. Already, indeed, Shere Ali
+might be seething with hatred against the English rule. It would be no
+more than natural if he were. Ralston had pondered the question with an
+uncomfortable vision before his eyes, evoked by certain words of
+Colonel Dewes--a youth appealing for help, for the only help which
+could be of service to him, and then, as the appeal was rejected,
+composing his face to a complete and stolid inexpressiveness, no longer
+showing either his pain or his desire--reverting, as it were, from the
+European to the Oriental.
+
+"Yes, there is that danger," he admitted. "Seeking to restore a friend,
+we might kindle an enemy." And then he rose up and suddenly burst out:
+"But upon my word, were that to come to pass, we should deserve it. For
+we are to blame--we who took him from Chiltistan and sent him to be
+petted by the fine people in England." And once more it was evident from
+his words that he was thinking not of Shere Ali--not of the human being
+who had just his one life to live, just his few years with their
+opportunities of happiness, and their certain irrevocable periods of
+distress--but of the Prince of Chiltistan who might or might not be a
+cause of great trouble to the Government of the Punjab.
+
+"We must take the risk," he cried as one arguing almost against himself.
+"It's the only chance. So we must take the risk. Besides, I have been at
+some pains already to minimise it. Shere Ali has a friend in England. We
+are asking for that friend. A telegram goes to-day. So come to-morrow
+night and do your best."
+
+"Very well, I will," said Hatch, and, taking up his hat, he went away. He
+had no great hopes that any good would come of the dinner. But at the
+worst, he thought, it would leave matters where they were.
+
+In that, however, he was wrong. For there were important moments in the
+history of the young Prince of Chiltistan of which both Hatch and Ralston
+were quite unaware. And because they were unaware the dinner which was to
+help in straightening out the tangle of Shere Ali's life became a
+veritable catastrophe. Shere Ali was brought reluctantly to the table in
+the corner of the great balcony upon the first floor. He had little to
+say, and it was as evident to the two men who entertained him as it had
+been to Colonel Dewes that the last few weeks had taken their toll of
+him. There were dark, heavy pouches beneath his eyes, his manner was
+feverish, and when he talked at all it was with a boisterous and a
+somewhat braggart voice.
+
+Ralston turned the conversation on to the journey which Hatch had taken,
+and for a little while the dinner promised well. At the mere mention of
+Mecca, Shere Ali looked up with a swift interest. "Mecca!" he cried, "you
+have been there! Tell me of Mecca. On my way up to Chiltistan I met three
+of my own countrymen on the summit of the Lowari Pass. They had a few
+rupees apiece--just enough, they told me, to carry them to Mecca. I
+remember watching them as they went laughing and talking down the snow on
+their long journey. And I wondered--" He broke off abruptly and sat
+looking out from the balcony. The night was coming on. In front stretched
+the great grass plain of the Maidan with its big trees and the wide
+carriage-road bisecting it. The carriages had driven home; the road and
+the plain were empty. Beyond them the high chimney-stacks of the steamers
+on the river could still be seen, some with a wisp of smoke curling
+upwards into the still air; and at times the long, melancholy hoot of a
+steam-syren broke the stillness of the evening.
+
+Shere Ali turned to Hatch again and said in a quiet voice which had some
+note of rather pathetic appeal: "Will you tell me what you thought of
+Mecca? I should like to know."
+
+The vision of the three men descending the Lowari Pass was present to him
+as he listened. And he listened, wondering what strange, real power that
+sacred place possessed to draw men cheerfully on so long and hazardous a
+pilgrimage. But the secret was not yet to be revealed to him. Hatch
+talked well. He told Shere Ali of the journey down the Red Sea, and the
+crowded deck at the last sunset before Jeddah was reached, when every one
+of the pilgrims robed himself in spotless white and stood facing the east
+and uttering his prayers in his own tongue. He described the journey
+across the desert, the great shrine of the Prophet in Mecca, the great
+gathering for prayer upon the plain two miles away. Something of the
+fervour of the pilgrims he managed to make real by his words, but Shere
+Ali listened with the picture of the three men in his thoughts, and with
+a deep envy of their contentment.
+
+Then Hatch made his mistake. He turned suddenly towards Ralston and said:
+
+"But something curious happened--something very strange and
+curious--which I think you ought to know, for the matter can hardly be
+left where it is."
+
+Ralston leaned forward.
+
+"Wait a moment," he said, and he called to the waiter. "Light a cigar
+before you begin, Hatch," he continued.
+
+The cigars were brought, and Hatch lighted one.
+
+"In what way am I concerned?" asked Ralston.
+
+"My story has to do with India," Hatch replied, and in his turn he looked
+out across the Maidan. Darkness had come and lights gleamed upon the
+carriage-way; the funnels of the ships had disappeared, and above, in a
+clear, dark sky, glittered a great host of stars.
+
+"With India, but not with the India of to-day," Hatch continued.
+"Listen"; and over his coffee he told his story. "I was walking down a
+narrow street of Mecca towards the big tank, when to my amazement I saw
+written up on a signboard above a door the single word 'Lodgings.' It was
+the English word, written, too, in the English character. I could hardly
+believe my eyes when I saw it. I stood amazed. What was an English
+announcement, that lodgings were to be had within, doing in a town where
+no Englishman, were he known to be such, would live for a single hour? I
+had half a mind to knock at the door and ask. But I noticed opposite to
+the door a little shop in which a man sat with an array of heavy
+country-made bolts and locks hung upon the walls and spread about him as
+he squatted on the floor. I crossed over to the booth, and sitting down
+upon the edge of the floor, which was raised a couple of feet or so from
+the ground, I made some small purchase. Then, looking across to the sign,
+I asked him what the writing on it meant. I suppose that I did not put my
+question carelessly enough, for the shopkeeper leaned forward and peered
+closely into my face.
+
+"'Why do you ask?' he said, sharply.
+
+"'Because I do not understand,' I replied.
+
+"The man looked me over again. There was no mistake in my dress, and with
+my black beard and eyes I could well pass for an Arab. It seemed that he
+was content, for he continued: 'How should I know what the word means? I
+have heard a story, but whether it is true or not, who shall say?'"
+
+Hatch paused for a moment and lighted his cigar again.
+
+"Well, the account which he gave me was this. Among the pilgrims who come
+up to Mecca, there are at times Hottentots from South Africa who speak no
+language intelligible to anyone in Mecca; but they speak English, and it
+is for their benefit that the sign was hung up."
+
+"What a strange thing!" said Shere Ali.
+
+"The explanation," continued Hatch, "is not very important to my story,
+but what followed upon it is; for the very next day, as I was walking
+alone, I heard a voice in my ear, whispering: 'The Englishwoman would
+like to see you this evening at five.' I turned round in amazement, and
+there stood the shopkeeper of whom I had made the inquiries. I thought,
+of course, that he was laying a trap for me. But he repeated his
+statement, and, telling me that he would wait for me on this spot at ten
+minutes to five, he walked away.
+
+"I did not know what to do. One moment I feared treachery and proposed to
+stay away, the next I was curious and proposed to go. How in the world
+could there be an Englishwoman in Mecca--above all, an Englishwoman who
+was in a position to ask me to tea? Curiosity conquered in the end. I
+tucked a loaded revolver into my waist underneath my jellaba and kept the
+appointment."
+
+"Go on," said Shere Ali, who was leaning forward with a great perplexity
+upon his face.
+
+"The shopkeeper was already there. 'Follow me,' he said, 'but not too
+closely.' We passed in that way through two or three streets, and then my
+guide turned into a dead alley closed in at the end by a house. In the
+wall of the house there was a door. My guide looked cautiously round, but
+there was no one to oversee us. He rapped gently with his knuckles on the
+door, and immediately the door was opened. He beckoned to me, and went
+quickly in. I followed him no less quickly. At once the door was shut
+behind me, and I found myself in darkness. For a moment I was sure that I
+had fallen into a trap, but my guide laid a hand upon my arm and led me
+forward. I was brought into a small, bare room, where a woman sat upon
+cushions. She was dressed in white like a Mohammedan woman of the East,
+and over her face she wore a veil. But a sort of shrivelled aspect which
+she had told me that she was very old. She dismissed the guide who had
+brought me to her, and as soon as we were alone she said:
+
+"'You are English.'
+
+"And she spoke in English, though with a certain rustiness of speech, as
+though that language had been long unfamiliar to her tongue.
+
+"'No,' I replied, and I expressed my contempt of that infidel race in
+suitable words.
+
+"The old woman only laughed and removed her veil. She showed me an old
+wizened face in which there was not a remnant of good looks--a face worn
+and wrinkled with hard living and great sorrows.
+
+"'You are English,' she said, 'and since I am English too, I thought that
+I would like to speak once more with one of my own countrymen.'
+
+"I no longer doubted. I took the hand she held out to me and--
+
+"'But what are you doing here in Mecca?' I asked.
+
+"'I live in Mecca,' she replied quietly. 'I have lived here for
+twenty years.'
+
+"I looked round that bare and sordid little room with horror. What
+strange fate had cast her up there? I asked her, and she told me her
+story. Guess what it was!"
+
+Ralston shook his head.
+
+"I can't imagine."
+
+Hatch turned to Shere Ali.
+
+"Can you?" he asked, and even as he asked he saw that a change had come
+over the young Prince's mood. He was no longer oppressed with envy and
+discontent. He was leaning forward with parted lips and a look in his
+eyes which Hatch had not seen that evening--a look as if hope had somehow
+dared to lift its head within him. And there was more than a look of
+hope; there was savagery too.
+
+"No. I want to hear," replied Shere Ali. "Go on, please! How did the
+Englishwoman come to Mecca?"
+
+"She was a governess in the family of an officer at Cawnpore when the
+Mutiny broke out, more than forty years ago," said Hatch.
+
+Ralston leaned back in his chair with an exclamation of horror. Shere Ali
+said nothing. His eyes rested intently and brightly upon Hatch's face.
+Under the table, and out of sight, his fingers worked convulsively.
+
+"She was in that room," continued Hatch, "in that dark room with the
+other Englishwomen and children who were murdered. But she was spared.
+She was very pretty, she told me, in her youth, and she was only eighteen
+when the massacre took place. She was carried up to the hills and forced
+to become a Mohammedan. The man who had spared her married her. He died,
+and a small chieftain in the hills took her and married her, and finally
+brought her out with him when he made the pilgrimage to Mecca. While he
+was at Mecca, however, he fell ill, and in his turn he died. She was left
+alone. She had a little money, and she stayed. Indeed, she could not get
+away. A strange story, eh?"
+
+And Hatch leaned back in his chair, and once more lighted his cigar which
+for a second time had gone out.
+
+"You didn't bring her back?" exclaimed Ralston.
+
+"She wouldn't come," replied Hatch. "I offered to smuggle her out of
+Mecca, but she refused. She felt that she wouldn't and couldn't face her
+own people again. She should have died at Cawnpore, and she did not die.
+Besides, she was old; she had long since grown accustomed to her life,
+and in England she had long since been given up for dead. She would not
+even tell me her real name. Perhaps she ought to be fetched away. I
+don't know."
+
+Ralston and Hatch fell to debating that point with great earnestness.
+Neither of them paid heed to Shere Ali, and when he rose they easily let
+him go. Nor did their thoughts follow him upon his way. But he was
+thinking deeply as he went, and a queer and not very pleasant smile
+played about his lips.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+SYBIL LINFORTH'S LOYALTY
+
+
+A fortnight after Shere Ali had dined with Ralston in Calcutta, a
+telegram was handed to Linforth at Chatham. It was Friday, and a
+guest-night. The mess-room was full, and here and there amongst the
+scarlet and gold lace the sombre black of a civilian caught the eye.
+Dinner was just over, and at the ends of the long tables the mess-waiters
+stood ready to draw, with a single jerk, the strips of white tablecloth
+from the shining mahogany. The silver and the glasses had been removed,
+the word was given, and the strips of tablecloth vanished as though by
+some swift legerdemain. The port was passed round, and while the glasses
+were being filled the telegram was handed to Linforth by his servant.
+
+He opened it carelessly, but as he read the words his heart jumped within
+him. His importunities had succeeded, he thought. At all events, his
+opportunity had come; for the telegram informed him of his appointment to
+the Punjab Commission. He sat for a moment with his thoughts in a whirl.
+He could hardly believe the good news. He had longed so desperately for
+this one chance that it had seemed to him of late impossible that he
+should ever obtain it. Yet here it had come to him, and upon that his
+neighbour jogged him in the ribs and said:
+
+"Wake up!"
+
+He waked to see the Colonel at the centre of the top table standing on
+his feet with his glass in his hand.
+
+"Gentlemen, the Queen. God bless her!" and all that company arose and
+drank to the toast. The prayer, thus simply pronounced amongst the men
+who had pledged their lives in service to the Queen, had always been to
+Linforth a very moving thing. Some of those who drank to it had already
+run their risks and borne their sufferings in proof of their sincerity;
+the others all burned to do the like. It had always seemed to him, too,
+to link him up closely and inseparably with the soldiers of the regiment
+who had fallen years ago or had died quietly in their beds, their service
+ended. It gave continuity to the regiment of Sappers, so that what each
+man did increased or tarnished its fair fame. For years back that toast
+had been drunk, that prayer uttered in just those simple words, and
+Linforth was wont to gaze round the walls on the portraits of the famous
+generals who had looked to these barracks and to this mess-room as their
+home. They, too, had heard that prayer, and, carrying it in their hearts,
+without parade or needless speech had gone forth, each in his turn, and
+laboured unsparingly.
+
+But never had Linforth been so moved as he was tonight. He choked in his
+throat as he drank. For his turn to go forth had at the last come to him.
+And in all humility of spirit he sent up a prayer on his own account,
+that he might not fail--and again that he might not fail.
+
+He sat down and told his companions the good news, and rejoiced at their
+congratulations. But he slipped away to his own quarters very quietly as
+soon as the Colonel rose, and sat late by himself.
+
+There was one, he knew very well, to whom the glad tidings would be a
+heavy blow--but he could not--no, not even for her sake--stand aside.
+For this opportunity he had lived, training alike his body and mind
+against its coming. He could not relinquish it. There was too strong a
+constraint upon him.
+
+"Over the passes to the foot of the Hindu Kush," he murmured; and in his
+mind's eye he saw the road--a broad, white, graded road--snake across the
+valleys and climb the cliffs.
+
+Was Russia at work? he wondered. Was he to be sent to Chiltistan? What
+was Shere Ali doing? He turned the questions over in his mind without
+being at much pains to answer them. In such a very short time now he
+would know. He was to embark before a month had passed.
+
+He travelled down the very next day into Sussex, and came to the house
+under the Downs at twelve o'clock. It was early spring, and as yet there
+were no buds upon the trees, no daffodils upon the lawns. The house,
+standing apart in its bare garden of brown earth, black trees, and dull
+green turf, had a desolate aspect which somehow filled him with remorse.
+He might have done more, perhaps, to fill this house with happiness. He
+feared that, now that it was too late to do the things left undone. He
+had been so absorbed in his great plans, which for a moment lost in his
+eyes their magnitude.
+
+Dick Linforth found his mother in the study, through the window of which
+she had once looked from the garden in the company of Colonel Dewes. She
+was writing her letters, and when she saw him enter, she sprang up with a
+cry of joy.
+
+"Dick!" she cried, coming towards him with outstretched hands. But she
+stopped half-way. The happiness died out of her. She raised a hand to her
+heart, and her voice once more repeated his name; but her voice faltered
+as she spoke, and the hand was clasped tight upon her breast.
+
+"Dick," she said, and in his face she read the tidings he had brought.
+The blow so long dreaded had at last fallen.
+
+"Yes, mother, it's true," he said very gently; and leading her to a
+chair, he sat beside her, stroking her hand, almost as a lover might do.
+"It's true. The telegram came last night. I start within the month."
+
+"For Chiltistan?"
+
+Dick looked at her for a moment.
+
+"For the Punjab," he said, and added: "But it will mean Chiltistan. Else
+why should I be sent for? It has been always for Chiltistan that I have
+importuned them."
+
+Sybil Linforth bowed her head. The horror which had been present with her
+night and day for so long a while twenty-five years ago rushed upon her
+afresh, so that she could not speak. She sat living over again the bitter
+days when Luffe was shut up with his handful of men in the fort by
+Kohara. She remembered the morning when the postman came up the garden
+path with the official letter that her husband had been slain. And at
+last in a whisper she said:
+
+"The Road?"
+
+Dick, even in the presence of her pain, could not deny the implication of
+her words.
+
+"We Linforths belong to the Road," he answered gravely. The words struck
+upon a chord of memory. Sybil Linforth sat upright, turned to her sort
+and greatly surprised him. He had expected an appeal, a prayer. What he
+heard was something which raised her higher in his thoughts than ever she
+had been, high though he had always placed her.
+
+"Dick," she said, "I have never said a word to dissuade you, have I?
+Never a word? Never a single word?" and her tone besought him to
+assure her.
+
+"Never a word, mother," he replied.
+
+But still she was not content.
+
+"When you were a boy, when the Road began to take hold on you--when we
+were much together, playing cricket out there in the garden," and her
+voice broke upon the memory of those golden days, "when I might have been
+able, perhaps, to turn you to other thoughts, I never tried to, Dick? Own
+to that! I never tried to. When I came upon you up on the top of the Down
+behind the house, lying on the grass, looking out--always--always towards
+the sea--oh, I knew very well what it was that was drawing you; but I
+said nothing, Dick. Not a word--not a word!"
+
+Dick nodded his head.
+
+"That's true, mother. You never questioned me. You never tried to
+dissuade me."
+
+Sybil's face shone with a wan smile. She unlocked a drawer in her
+writing-table, and took out an envelope. From the envelope she drew a
+sheet of paper covered with a faded and yellow handwriting.
+
+"This is the last letter your father ever wrote to me," she said. "Harry
+wrote on the night that he--that he died. Oh, Dick, my boy, I have known
+for a long time that I would have one day to show it to you, and I wanted
+you to feel when that time came that I had not been disloyal."
+
+She had kept her face steady, even her voice calm, by a great effort.
+But now the tears filled her eyes and brimmed over, and her voice
+suddenly shook between a laugh and a sob. "But oh, Dick," she cried, "I
+have so often wanted to be disloyal. I was so often near to it--oh,
+very, very near."
+
+She handed him the faded letter, and, turning towards the window, stood
+with her back to him while he read. It was that letter, with its constant
+refrain of "I am very tired," which Linforth had written in his tent
+whilst his murderers crouched outside waiting for sleep to overcome him.
+
+"I am sitting writing this by the light of a candle," Dick read. "The
+tent door is open. In front of me I can see the great snow-mountains. All
+the ugliness of the shale-slopes is hidden. By such a moonlight, my dear,
+may you always look back upon my memory. For it is all over, Sybil."
+
+Then followed the advice about himself and his school; and after that
+advice the message which was now for the first time delivered:
+
+"Whether he will come out here, it is too early to think about. But the
+Road will not be finished--and I wonder. If he wants to, let him! We
+Linforths belong to the Road."
+
+Dick folded the letter reverently, and crossing to his mother's side, put
+his arm about her waist.
+
+"Yes," he said. "My father knew it as I know it. He used the words which
+I in my turn have used. We Linforths belong to the Road."
+
+His mother took the letter from his hand and locked it away.
+
+"Yes," she said bravely, and called a smile to her face. "So you must
+go."
+
+Dick nodded his head.
+
+"Yes. You see, the Road has not advanced since my father died. It almost
+seems, mother, that it waits for me."
+
+He stayed that day and that night with Sybil, and in the morning both
+brought haggard faces to the breakfast table. Sybil, indeed, had slept,
+but, with her memories crowding hard upon her, she had dreamed again one
+of those almost forgotten dreams which, in the time of her suspense, had
+so tortured her. The old vague terror had seized upon her again. She
+dreamed once more of a young Englishman who pursued a young Indian along
+the wooden galleries of the road above the torrents into the far mists.
+She could tell as of old the very dress of the native who fled. A thick
+sheepskin coat swung aside as he ran and gave her a glimpse of gay silk;
+soft high leather boots protected his feet; and upon his face there was a
+look of fury and wild fear. But this night there was a difference in the
+dream. Her present distress added a detail. The young Englishman who
+pursued turned his face to her as he disappeared amongst the mists, and
+she saw that it was the face of Dick.
+
+But of this she said nothing at all at the breakfast table, nor when she
+bade Dick good-bye at the stile on the further side of the field beyond
+the garden.
+
+"You will come down again, and I shall go to Marseilles to see you off,"
+she said, and so let him go.
+
+There was something, too, stirring in Dick's mind of which he said no
+word. In the letter of his father, certain sentences had caught his eye,
+and on his way up to London they recurred to his thoughts, as, indeed,
+they had more than once during the evening before.
+
+"May he meet," Harry Linforth had written to Sybil of his son Dick--"may
+he meet a woman like you, my dear, when his time comes, and love her as I
+love you."
+
+Dick Linforth fell to thinking of Violet Oliver. She was in India at this
+moment. She might still be there when he landed. Would he meet her, he
+wondered, somewhere on the way to Chiltistan?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+A GIFT MISUNDERSTOOD
+
+
+The month was over before Linforth at last steamed out of the harbour at
+Marseilles. He was as impatient to reach Bombay as a year before Shere
+Ali had been reluctant. To Shere Ali the boat had flown with wings of
+swiftness, to Linforth she was a laggard. The steamer passed Stromboli
+on a wild night of storm and moonlight. The wrack of clouds scurrying
+overhead, now obscured, now let the moonlight through, and the great
+cone rising sheer from a tempestuous sea glowed angrily. Linforth, in
+the shelter of a canvas screen, watched the glow suddenly expand, and a
+stream of bright sparkling red flow swiftly along the shoulder of the
+mountain, turn at a right angle, and plunge down towards the sea. The
+bright red would become dull, the dull red grow black, the glare of
+light above the cone contract for a little while and then burst out
+again. Yet men lived upon the slope of Stromboli, even as
+Englishmen--the thought flashed into his mind--lived in India,
+recognising the peril and going quietly about their work. There was
+always that glare of menacing light over the hill-districts of India as
+above the crater of Stromboli, now contracting, now expanding and
+casting its molten stream down towards the plains.
+
+At the moment when Linforth watched the crown of light above Stromboli,
+the glare was widening over the hill country of Chiltistan. Ralston so
+far away as Peshawur saw it reddening the sky and was the more troubled
+in that he could not discover why just at this moment the menace should
+glow red. The son of Abdulla Mohammed was apparently quiet and Shere Ali
+had not left Calcutta. The Resident at Kohara admitted the danger. Every
+despatch he sent to Peshawur pointed to the likelihood of trouble. But he
+too was at fault. Unrest was evident, the cause of it quite obscure. But
+what was hidden from Government House in Peshawur and the Old Mission
+House at Kohara was already whispered in the bazaars. There among the
+thatched booths which have their backs upon the brink of the
+water-channel in the great square, men knew very well that Shere Ali was
+the cause, though Shere Ali knew nothing of it himself. One of those
+queer little accidents possible in the East had happened within the last
+few weeks. A trifling gift had been magnified into a symbol and a
+message, and the message had run through Chiltistan like fire through a
+dry field of stubble. And then two events occurred in Peshawur which gave
+to Ralston the key of the mystery.
+
+The first was the arrival in that city of a Hindu lady from Gujerat who
+had lately come to the conclusion that she was a reincarnation of the
+Goddess Devi. She arrived in great pomp, and there was some trouble in
+the streets as the procession passed through to the temple which she had
+chosen as her residence. For the Hindus, on the one hand, firmly believed
+in her divinity. The lady came of a class which, held in dishonour in the
+West, had its social position and prestige in India. There was no reason
+in the eyes of the faithful why she should say she was the Goddess Devi
+if she were not. Therefore they lined the streets to acclaim her coming.
+The Mohammedans, on the other hand, Afghans from the far side of the
+Khyber, men of the Hassan and the Aka and the Adam Khel tribes, Afridis
+from Kohat and Tirah and the Araksai country, any who happened to be in
+that wild and crowded town, turned out, too--to keep order, as they
+pleasantly termed it, when their leaders were subsequently asked for
+explanations. In the end a good many heads were broken before the lady
+was safely lodged in her temple. Nor did the trouble end there. The
+presence of a reincarnated Devi at once kindled the Hindus to fervour and
+stimulated to hostility against them the fanatical Mohammedans. Futteh
+Ali Shah, a merchant, a municipal councillor and a landowner of some
+importance, headed a deputation of elderly gentlemen who begged Ralston
+to remove the danger from the city.
+
+Danger there was, as Ralston on his morning rides through the streets
+could not but understand. The temple was built in the corner of an open
+space, and upon that open space a noisy and excited crowd surged all day;
+while from the countryside around pilgrims in a mood of frenzied piety
+and Pathans spoiling for a fight trooped daily in through the gates of
+Peshawur. Ralston understood that the time had come for definite steps to
+be taken; and he took them with that unconcerned half-weary air which was
+at once natural to him and impressive to these particular people with
+whom he had to deal.
+
+He summoned two of his native levies and mounted his horse.
+
+"But you will take a guard," said Colonel Ward, of the Oxfordshires, who
+had been lunching with Ralston. "I'll send a company down with you."
+
+"No, thank you," said Ralston listlessly, "I think my two men will do."
+
+The Colonel stared and expostulated.
+
+"You know, Ralston, you are very rash. Your predecessor never rode into
+the City without an escort."
+
+"I do every morning."
+
+"I know," returned the Colonel, "and that's where you are wrong. Some day
+something will happen. To go down with two of your levies to-day is
+madness. I speak seriously. The place is in a ferment."
+
+"Oh, I think I'll be all right," said Ralston, and he rode at a trot
+down from Government House into the road which leads past the gaol and
+the Fort to the gate of Peshawur. At the gate he reduced the trot to a
+walk, and so, with his two levies behind him, passed up along the
+streets like a man utterly undisturbed. It was not bravado which had
+made him refuse an escort. On the contrary, it was policy. To assume
+that no one questioned his authority was in Ralston's view the best way
+and the quickest to establish it. He pushed forward through the crowd
+right up to the walls of the temple, seemingly indifferent to every cry
+or threat which was uttered as he passed. The throng closed in behind
+him, and he came to a halt in front of a low door set in the whitewashed
+wall which enclosed the temple and its precincts. Upon this door he beat
+with the butt of his crop and a little wicket in the door was opened. At
+the bars of the wicket an old man's face showed for a moment and then
+drew back in fear.
+
+"Open!" cried Ralston peremptorily.
+
+The face appeared again.
+
+"Your Excellency, the goddess is meditating. Besides, this is holy
+ground. Your Excellency would not wish to set foot on it. Moreover, the
+courtyard is full of worshippers. It would not be safe."
+
+Ralston broke in upon the old man's fluttering protestations. "Open the
+door, or my men will break it in."
+
+A murmur of indignation arose from the crowd which thronged about him.
+Ralston paid no heed to it. He called to his two levies:
+
+"Quick! Break that door in!"
+
+As they advanced the door was opened. Ralston dismounted, and bade one of
+his men do likewise and follow him. To the second man he said,
+
+"Hold the horses!"
+
+He strode into the courtyard and stood still.
+
+"It will be touch and go," he said to himself, as he looked about him.
+
+The courtyard was as thronged as the open space without, and four strong
+walls enclosed it. The worshippers were strangely silent. It seemed to
+Ralston that suspense had struck them dumb. They looked at the intruder
+with set faces and impassive eyes. At the far end of the courtyard there
+was a raised stone platform, and this part was roofed. At the back in the
+gloom he could see a great idol of the goddess, and in front, facing the
+courtyard, stood the lady from Gujerat. She was what Ralston expected to
+see--a dancing girl of Northern India, a girl with a good figure, small
+hands and feet, and a complexion of an olive tint. Her eyes were large
+and lustrous, with a line of black pencilled upon the edges of the
+eyelids, her eyebrows arched and regular, her face oval, her forehead
+high. The dress was richly embroidered with gold, and she had anklets
+with silver bells upon her feet.
+
+Ralston pushed his way through the courtyard until he reached the wall of
+the platform.
+
+"Come down and speak to me," he cried peremptorily to the lady, but she
+took no notice of his presence. She did not move so much as an eyelid.
+She gazed over his head as one lost in meditation. From the side an old
+priest advanced to the edge of the platform.
+
+"Go away," he cried insolently. "You have no place here. The goddess does
+not speak to any but her priests," and through the throng there ran a
+murmur of approval. There, was a movement, too--a movement towards
+Ralston. It was as yet a hesitating movement--those behind pushed, those
+in front and within Ralston's vision held back. But at any moment the
+movement might become a rush.
+
+Ralston spoke to the priest.
+
+"Come down, you dog!" he said quite quietly.
+
+The priest was silent. He hesitated. He looked for help to the crowd
+below, which in turn looked for leadership to him. "Come down," once more
+cried Ralston, and he moved towards the steps as though he would mount on
+to the platform and tear the fellow down.
+
+"I come, I come," said the priest, and he went down and stood
+before Ralston.
+
+Ralston turned to the Pathan who accompanied him. "Turn the fellow into
+the street."
+
+Protests rose from the crowd; the protests became cries of anger; the
+throng swayed and jostled. But the Pathan led the priest to the door and
+thrust him out.
+
+Again Ralston turned to the platform.
+
+"Listen to me," he called out to the lady from Gujerat. "You must leave
+Peshawur. You are a trouble to the town. I will not let you stay."
+
+But the lady paid no heed. Her mind floated above the earth, and with
+every moment the danger grew. Closer and closer the throng pressed in
+upon Ralston and his attendant. The clamour rose shrill and menacing.
+Ralston cried out to his Pathan in a voice which rang clear and audible
+even above the clamour:
+
+"Bring handcuffs!"
+
+The words were heard and silence fell upon all that crowd, the sudden
+silence of stupefaction. That such an outrage, such a defilement of a
+holy place, could be contemplated came upon the worshippers with a shock.
+But the Pathan levy was seen to be moving towards the door to obey the
+order, and as he went the cries and threats rose with redoubled ardour.
+For a moment it seemed to Ralston that the day would go against him, so
+fierce were the faces which shouted in his ears, so turbulent the
+movement of the crowd. It needed just one hand to be laid upon the
+Pathan's shoulder as he forced his way towards the door, just one blow to
+be struck, and the ugly rush would come. But the hand was not stretched
+out, nor the blow struck; and the Pathan was seen actually at the
+threshold of the door. Then the Goddess Devi came down to earth and spoke
+to another of her priests quickly and urgently. The priest went swiftly
+down the steps.
+
+"The goddess will leave Peshawur, since your Excellency so wills it," he
+said to Ralston. "She will shake the dust of this city from her feet. She
+will not bring trouble upon its people." So far he had got when the
+goddess became violently agitated. She beckoned to the priest and when he
+came to her side she spoke quickly to him in an undertone. For the last
+second or two the goddess had grown quite human and even feminine. She
+was rating the priest well and she did it spitefully. It was a
+crestfallen priest who returned to Ralston.
+
+"The goddess, however, makes a condition," said he. "If she goes there
+must be a procession."
+
+The goddess nodded her head emphatically. She was clearly adamant upon
+that point.
+
+Ralston smiled.
+
+"By all means. The lady shall have a show, since she wants one," said he,
+and turning towards the door, he signalled to the Pathan to stop.
+
+"But it must be this afternoon," said he. "For she must go this
+afternoon."
+
+And he made his way out of the courtyard into the street. The lady from
+Gujerat left Peshawur three hours later. The streets were lined with
+levies, although the Mohammedans assured his Excellency that there was no
+need for troops.
+
+"We ourselves will keep order," they urged. Ralston smiled, and ordered
+up a company of Regulars. He himself rode out from Government House, and
+at the bend of the road he met the procession, with the lady from Gujerat
+at its head in a litter with drawn curtains of tawdry gold.
+
+As the procession came abreast of him a little brown hand was thrust
+out from the curtains, and the bearers and the rabble behind came to a
+halt. A man in a rough brown homespun cloak, with a beggar's bowl
+attached to his girdle, came to the side of the litter, and thence went
+across to Ralston.
+
+"Your Highness, the Goddess Devi has a word for your ear alone."
+Ralston, with a shrug of his shoulders, walked his horse up to the side
+of the litter and bent down his head. The lady spoke through the
+curtains in a whisper.
+
+"Your Excellency has been very kind to me, and allowed me to leave
+Peshawur with a procession, guarding the streets so that I might pass in
+safety and with great honour. Therefore I make a return. There is a
+matter which troubles your Excellency. You ask yourself the why and the
+wherefore, and there is no answer. But the danger grows."
+
+Ralston's thoughts flew out towards Chiltistan. Was it of that country
+she was speaking?
+
+"Well?" he asked. "Why does the danger grow?"
+
+"Because bags of grain and melons were sent," she replied, "and the
+message was understood."
+
+She waved her hand again, and the bearers of the litter stepped forward
+on their march through the cantonment. Ralston rode up the hill to his
+home, wondering what in the world was the meaning of her oracular
+words. It might be that she had no meaning--that was certainly a
+possibility. She might merely be keeping up her pose as a divinity. On
+the other hand, she had been so careful to speak in a low whisper, lest
+any should overhear.
+
+"Some melons and bags of grain," he said to himself. "What message could
+they convey? And who sent them? And to whom?"
+
+He wrote that night to the Resident at Kohara, on the chance that he
+might be able to throw some light upon the problem.
+
+"Have you heard anything of a melon and a bag of grain?" he wrote. "It
+seems an absurd question, but please make inquiries. Find out what it
+all means."
+
+The messenger carried the letter over the Malakand Pass and up the road
+by Dir, and in due time an answer was returned. Ralston received the
+answer late one afternoon, when the light was failing, and, taking it
+over to the window, read it through. Its contents fairly startled him.
+
+"I have made inquiries," wrote Captain Phillips, the Resident, "as you
+wished, and I have found out that some melons and bags of grain were sent
+by Shere Ali's orders a few weeks ago as a present to one of the chief
+Mullahs in the town."
+
+Ralston was brought to a stop. So it was Shere Ali, after all, who was
+at the bottom of the trouble. It was Shere Ali who had sent the present,
+and had sent it to one of the Mullahs. Ralston looked back upon the
+little dinner party, whereby he had brought Hatch and Shere Ali
+together. Had that party been too successful, he wondered? Had it
+achieved more than he had wished to bring about? He turned in doubt to
+the letter which he held.
+
+"It seems," he read, "that there had been some trouble between this man
+and Shere Ali. There is a story that Shere Ali set him to work for a day
+upon a bridge just below Kohara. But I do not know whether there is any
+truth in the story. Nor can I find that any particular meaning is
+attached to the present. I imagine that Shere Ali realised that it would
+be wise--as undoubtedly it was--for him to make his peace with the
+Mullah, and sent him accordingly the melons and the bags of grain as an
+earnest of his good-will."
+
+There the letter ended, and Ralston stood by the window as the light
+failed more and more from off the earth, pondering with a heavy heart
+upon its contents. He had to make his choice between the Resident at
+Kohara and the lady of Gujerat. Captain Phillips held that the present
+was not interpreted in any symbolic sense. But the lady of Gujerat had
+known of the present. It was matter of talk, then, in the bazaars, and it
+would hardly have been that had it meant no more than an earnest of
+good-will. She had heard of the present; she knew what it was held to
+convey. It was a message. There was that glare broadening over
+Chiltistan. Surely the lady of Gujerat was right.
+
+So far his thoughts had carried him when across the window there fell a
+shadow, and a young officer of the Khyber Rifles passed by to the door.
+Captain Singleton was announced, and a boy--or so he looked--dark-haired
+and sunburnt, entered the office. For eighteen months he had been
+stationed in the fort at Landi Kotal, whence the road dips down between
+the bare brown cliffs towards the plains and mountains of Afghanistan.
+With two other English officers he had taken his share in the difficult
+task of ruling that regiment of wild tribesmen which, twice a week,
+perched in threes on some rocky promontory, or looking down from a
+machicolated tower, keeps open the Khyber Pass from dawn to dusk and
+protects the caravans. The eighteen months had written their history upon
+his face; he stood before Ralston, for all his youthful looks, a quiet,
+self-reliant man.
+
+"I have come down on leave, sir," he said. "On the way I fetched Rahat
+Mian out of his house and brought him in to Peshawur."
+
+Ralston looked up with interest.
+
+"Any trouble?" he asked.
+
+"I took care there should be none."
+
+Ralston nodded.
+
+"He had better be safely lodged. Where is he?"
+
+"I have him outside."
+
+Ralston rang for lights, and then said to Singleton: "Then, I'll
+see him now."
+
+And in a few minutes an elderly white-bearded man, dressed from head to
+foot in his best white robes, was shown into the room.
+
+"This is his Excellency," said Captain Singleton, and Rahat Mian bowed
+with dignity and stood waiting. But while he stood his eyes roamed
+inquisitively about the room.
+
+"All this is strange to you, Rahat Mian," said Ralston. "How long is it
+since you left your house in the Khyber Pass?"
+
+"Five years, your Highness," said Rahat Mian, quietly, as though there
+were nothing very strange in so long a confinement within his doors.
+
+"Have you never crossed your threshold for five years?" asked Ralston.
+
+"No, your Highness. I should not have stepped back over it again, had I
+been so foolish. Before, yes. There was a deep trench dug between my
+house and the road, and I used to crawl along the trench when no-one was
+about. But after a little my enemies saw me walking in the road, and
+watched the trench."
+
+Rahat Mian lived in one of the square mud windowless houses, each with a
+tower at a corner which dot the green wheat fields in the Khyber Pass
+wherever the hills fall back and leave a level space. His house was
+fifty yards from the road, and the trench stretched to it from his very
+door. But not two hundred yards away there were other houses, and one of
+these held Rahat Mian's enemies. The feud went back many years to the
+date when Rahat Mian, without asking anyone's leave or paying a single
+farthing of money, secretly married the widowed mother of Futteh Ali
+Shah. Now Futteh Ali Shah was a boy of fourteen who had the right to
+dispose of his mother in second marriage as he saw fit, and for the best
+price he could obtain. And this deprivation of his rights kindled in him
+a great anger against Rahat Mian. He nursed it until he became a man and
+was able to buy for a couple of hundred rupees a good pedigree rifle--a
+rifle which had belonged to a soldier killed in a hill-campaign and for
+which inquiries would not be made. Armed with his pedigree rifle, Futteh
+Ali Shah lay in wait vainly for Rahat Mian, until an unexpected bequest
+caused a revolution in his fortunes. He went down to Bombay, added to
+his bequest by becoming a money-lender, and finally returned to
+Peshawur, in the neighbourhood of which city he had become a landowner
+of some importance. Meanwhile, however, he had not been forgetful of
+Rahat Mian. He left relations behind to carry on the feud, and in
+addition he set a price on Rahat Mian's head. It was this feud which
+Ralston had it in his mind to settle.
+
+He turned to Rahat Mian.
+
+"You are willing to make peace?"
+
+"Yes," said the old man.
+
+"You will take your most solemn oath that the feud shall end. You will
+swear to divorce your wife, if you break your word?"
+
+For a moment Rahat Mian hesitated. There was no oath more binding, more
+sacred, than that which he was called upon to take. In the end he
+consented.
+
+"Then come here at eight to-morrow morning," said Ralston, and,
+dismissing the man, he gave instructions that he should be safely lodged.
+He sent word at the same time to Futteh Ali Shah, with whom, not for the
+first time, he had had trouble.
+
+Futteh Ali Shah arrived late the next morning in order to show his
+independence. But he was not so late as Ralston, who replied by keeping
+him waiting for an hour. When Ralston entered the room he saw that Futteh
+Ali Shah had dressed himself for the occasion. His tall high-shouldered
+frame was buttoned up in a grey frock coat, grey trousers clothed his
+legs, and he wore patent-leather shoes upon his feet.
+
+"I hope you have not been waiting very long. They should have told me you
+were here," said Ralston, and though he spoke politely, there was just a
+suggestion that it was not really of importance whether Futteh Ali Shah
+was kept waiting or not.
+
+"I have brought you here that together we may put an end to your dispute
+with Rahat Mian," said Ralston, and, taking no notice of the exclamation
+of surprise which broke from the Pathan's lips, he rang the bell and
+ordered Rahat Mian to be shown in.
+
+"Now let us see if we cannot come to an understanding," said Ralston, and
+he seated himself between the two antagonists.
+
+But though they talked for an hour, they came no nearer to a settlement.
+Futteh Ali Shah was obdurate; Rahat Mian's temper and pride rose in their
+turn. At the sight of each other the old grievance became fresh as a
+thing of yesterday in both their minds. Their dark faces, with the high
+cheek-bones and the beaked noses of the Afridi, became passionate and
+fierce. Finally Futteh Ali Shah forgot all his Bombay manners; he leaned
+across Ralston, and cried to Rahat Mian:
+
+"Do you know what I would like to do with you? I would like to string my
+bedstead with your skin and lie on it."
+
+And upon that Ralston arrived at the conclusion that the meeting might as
+well come to an end.
+
+He dismissed Rahat Mian, promising him a safe conveyance to his home. But
+he had not yet done with Futteh Ali Shah.
+
+"I am going out," he said suavely. "Shall we walk a little way together?"
+
+Futteh Ali Shah smiled. Landowner of importance that he was, the
+opportunity to ride side by side through Peshawur with the Chief
+Commissioner did not come every day. The two men went out into the porch.
+Ralston's horse was waiting, with a scarlet-clad syce at its head.
+Ralston walked on down the steps and took a step or two along the drive.
+Futteh Ali Shah lagged behind.
+
+"Your Excellency is forgetting your horse."
+
+"No," said Ralston. "The horse can follow. Let us walk a little. It is a
+good thing to walk."
+
+It was nine o'clock in the morning, and the weather was getting hot. And
+it is said that the heat of Peshawur is beyond the heat of any other city
+from the hills to Cape Comorin. Futteh Ali Shah, however, could not
+refuse. Regretfully he signalled to his own groom who stood apart in
+charge of a fine dark bay stallion from the Kirghiz Steppes. The two men
+walked out from the garden and down the road towards Peshawur city, with
+their horses following behind them.
+
+"We will go this way," said Ralston, and he turned to the left and walked
+along a mud-walled lane between rich orchards heavy with fruit. For a
+mile they thus walked, and then Futteh Ali Shah stopped and said:
+
+"I am very anxious to have your Excellency's opinion of my horse. I am
+very proud of it."
+
+"Later on," said Ralston, carelessly. "I want to walk for a little"; and,
+conversing upon indifferent topics, they skirted the city and came out
+upon the broad open road which runs to Jamrud and the Khyber Pass.
+
+It was here that Futteh Ali Shah once more pressingly invited Ralston to
+try the paces of his stallion. But Ralston again refused.
+
+"I will with pleasure later on," he said. "But a little exercise will be
+good for both of us; and they continued to walk along the road. The heat
+was overpowering; Futteh Ali Shah was soft from too much good living; his
+thin patent-leather shoes began to draw his feet and gall his heels; his
+frock coat was tight; the perspiration poured down his face. Ralston was
+hot, too. But he strode on with apparent unconcern, and talked with the
+utmost friendliness on the municipal affairs of Peshawur."
+
+"It is very hot," said Futteh Ali Shah, "and I am afraid for your
+Excellency's health. For myself, of course, I am not troubled, but so
+much walking will be dangerous to you"; and he halted and looked
+longingly back to his horse.
+
+"Thank you," said Ralston. "But my horse is fresh, and I should not be
+able to talk to you so well. I do not feel that I am in danger."
+
+Futteh Ali Shah mopped his face and walked on. His feet blistered; he
+began to limp, and he had nothing but a riding-switch in his hand. Now
+across the plain he saw in the distance the round fort of Jamrud, and he
+suddenly halted:
+
+"I must sit down," he said. "I cannot help it, your Excellency, I must
+stop and sit down."
+
+Ralston turned to him with a look of cold surprise.
+
+"Before me, Futteh Ali Shah? You will sit down in my presence before I
+sit down? I think you will not."
+
+Futteh Ali Shah gazed up the road and down the road, and saw no help
+anywhere. Only this devilish Chief Commissioner stood threateningly
+before him. With a gesture of despair he wiped his face and walked on.
+For a mile more he limped on by Ralston's side, the while Ralston
+discoursed upon the great question of Agricultural Banks. Then he stopped
+again and blurted out:
+
+"I will give you no more trouble. If your Excellency will let me go,
+never again will I give you trouble. I swear it."
+
+Ralston smiled. He had had enough of the walk himself.
+
+"And Rahat Mian?" he asked.
+
+There was a momentary struggle in the zemindar's mind. But his fatigue
+and exhaustion were too heavy upon him.
+
+"He, too, shall go his own way. Neither I nor mine shall molest him."
+
+Ralston turned at once and mounted his horse. With a sigh of relief
+Futteh Ali Shah followed his example.
+
+"Shall we ride back together?" said Ralston, pleasantly. And as on the
+way out he had made no mention of any trouble between the landowner and
+himself, so he did not refer to it by a single word on his way back.
+
+But close to the city their ways parted and Futteh Ali Shah, as he took
+his leave, said hesitatingly,
+
+"If this story goes abroad, your Excellency--this story of how we walked
+together towards Jamrud--there will be much laughter and ridicule."
+
+The fear of ridicule--there was the weak point of the Afridi, as Ralston
+very well knew. To be laughed at--Futteh Ali Shah, who was wont to lord
+it among his friends, writhed under the mere possibility. And how they
+would laugh in and round about Peshawur! A fine figure he would cut as he
+rode through the streets with every ragged bystander jeering at the man
+who was walked into docility and submission by his Excellency the Chief
+Commissioner.
+
+"My life would be intolerable," he said, "were the story to get about."
+
+Ralston shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"But why should it get about?"
+
+"I do not know, but it surely will. It may be that the trees have ears
+and eyes and a mouth to speak." He edged a little nearer to the
+Commissioner. "It may be, too," he said cunningly, "that your Excellency
+loves to tell a good story after dinner. Now there is one way to stop
+that story."
+
+Ralston laughed. "If I could hold my tongue, you mean," he replied.
+
+Futteh Ali Shah came nearer still. He rode up close and leaned a little
+over towards Ralston.
+
+"Your Excellency would lose the story," he said, "but on the other hand
+there would be a gain--a gain of many hours of sleep passed otherwise in
+guessing."
+
+He spoke in an insinuating fashion, which made Ralston disinclined to
+strike a bargain--and he nodded his head like one who wishes to convey
+that he could tell much if only he would. But Ralston paused before he
+answered, and when he answered it was only to put a question.
+
+"What do you mean?" he asked.
+
+And the reply came in a low quick voice.
+
+"There was a message sent through Chiltistan."
+
+Ralston started. Was it in this strange way the truth was to come to him?
+He sat his horse carelessly. "I know," he said. "Some melons and some
+bags of grain."
+
+Futteh Ali Shah was disappointed. This devilish Chief Commissioner knew
+everything. Yet the story of the walk must not get abroad in Peshawur,
+and surely it would unless the Chief Commissioner were pledged to
+silence. He drew a bow at a venture.
+
+"Can your Excellency interpret the message? As they interpret it in
+Chiltistan?" and it seemed to him that he had this time struck true. "It
+is a little thing I ask of your Excellency."
+
+"It is not a great thing, to be sure," Ralston admitted. He looked at the
+zemindar and laughed. "But I could tell the story rather well," he said
+doubtfully. "It would be an amusing story as I should tell it. Yet--well,
+we will see," and he changed his tone suddenly. "Interpret to me that
+present as it is interpreted in the villages of Chiltistan."
+
+Futteh Ali Shah looked about him fearfully, making sure that there was no
+one within earshot. Then in a whisper he said: "The grain is the army
+which will rise up from the hills and descend from the heavens to destroy
+the power of the Government. The melons are the forces of the Government;
+for as easily as melons they will be cut into pieces."
+
+He rode off quickly when he had ended, like a man who understands that he
+has said too much, and then halted and returned.
+
+"You will not tell that story?" he said.
+
+"No," answered Ralston abstractedly. "I shall never tell that story."
+
+He understood the truth at last. So that was the message which Shere Ali
+had sent. No wonder, he thought, that the glare broadened over
+Chiltistan.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+THE SOLDIER AND THE JEW
+
+
+These two events took place at Peshawur, while Linforth was still upon
+the waters of the Red Sea. To be quite exact, on that morning when
+Ralston was taking his long walk towards Jamrud with the zemindar Futteh
+Ali Shah, Linforth was watching impatiently from his deck-chair the high
+mosque towers, the white domes and great houses of Mocha, as they
+shimmered in the heat at the water's edge against a wide background of
+yellow sand. It seemed to him that the long narrow city so small and
+clear across the great level of calm sea would never slide past the
+taffrail. But it disappeared, and in due course the ship moved slowly
+through the narrows into Aden harbour. This was on a Thursday evening,
+and the steamer stopped in Aden for three hours to coal. The night came
+on hot, windless and dark. Linforth leaned over the side, looking out
+upon the short curve of lights and the black mass of hill rising dimly
+above them. Three and a half more days and he would be standing on Indian
+soil. A bright light flashed towards the ship across the water and a
+launch came alongside, bearing the agent of the company.
+
+He had the latest telegrams in his hand.
+
+"Any trouble on the Frontier?" Linforth asked.
+
+"None," the agent replied, and Linforth's fever of impatience was
+assuaged. If trouble were threatening he would surely be in time--since
+there were only three and a half more days.
+
+But he did not know why he had been brought out from England, and the
+three and a half days made him by just three and a half days too late.
+For on this very night when the steamer stopped to coal in Aden harbour
+Shere Ali made his choice.
+
+He was present that evening at a prize-fight which took place in a
+music-hall at Calcutta. The lightweight champion of Singapore and the
+East, a Jew, was pitted against a young soldier who had secured his
+discharge and had just taken to boxing as a profession. The soldier
+brought a great reputation as an amateur. This was his first appearance
+as a professional, and his friends had gathered in numbers to encourage
+him. The hall was crowded with soldiers from the barracks, sailors from
+the fleet, and patrons of the fancy in Calcutta. The heat was
+overpowering, the audience noisy, and overhead the electric fans, which
+hung downwards from the ceiling, whirled above the spectators with so
+swift a rotation that those looking up saw only a vague blur in the air.
+The ring had been roped off upon the stage, and about three sides of the
+ring chairs for the privileged had been placed. The fourth side was open
+to the spectators in the hall, and behind the ropes at the back there sat
+in the centre of the row of chairs a fat red-faced man in evening-dress
+who was greeted on all sides as Colonel Joe. "Colonel Joe" was the
+referee, and a person on these occasions of great importance.
+
+There were several preliminary contests and before each one Colonel Joe
+came to the front and introduced the combatants with a short history of
+their achievements. A Hindu boy was matched against a white one, a couple
+of wrestlers came next, and then two English sailors, with more spirit
+than skill, had a set-to which warmed the audience into enthusiasm and
+ended amid shouts, whistles, shrill cat-calls, and thunders of applause.
+Meanwhile the heat grew more and more intense, the faces shinier, the air
+more and more smoke-laden and heavy.
+
+Shere Ali came on to the stage while the sailors were at work. He
+exchanged a nod with "Colonel Joe," and took his seat in the front row of
+chairs behind the ropes.
+
+It was a rough gathering on the whole, though there were some men in
+evening-dress besides Colonel Joe, and of these two sat beside Shere Ali.
+They were talking together, and Shere Ali at the first paid no heed to
+them. The trainers, the backers, the pugilists themselves were the men
+who had become his associates in Calcutta. There were many of them
+present upon the stage, and in turn they approached Shere Ali and spoke
+to him with familiarity upon the chances of the fight. Yet in their
+familiarity there was a kind of deference. They were speaking to a
+patron. Moreover, there was some flattery in the attention with which
+they waited to catch his eye and the eagerness with which they came at
+once to his side.
+
+"We are all glad to see you, sir," said a small man who had been a jockey
+until he was warned off the turf.
+
+"Yes," said Shere Ali with a smile, "I am among friends."
+
+"Now who would you say was going to win this fight?" continued the
+jockey, cocking his head with an air of shrewdness, which said as plainly
+as words, "You are the one to tell if you will only say."
+
+Shere Ali expanded. Deference and flattery, however gross, so long as
+they came from white people were balm to his wounded vanity. The weeks in
+Calcutta had worked more harm than Ralston had suspected. Shy of meeting
+those who had once treated him as an equal, imagining when he did meet
+them that now they only admitted him to their company on sufferance and
+held him in their thoughts of no account, he had become avid for
+recognition among the riff-raff of the town.
+
+"I have backed the man from Singapore," he replied, "I know him. The
+soldier is a stranger to me"; and gradually as he talked the voices of
+his two neighbours forced themselves upon his consciousness. It was not
+what they said which caught his attention. But their accents and the
+pitch of their voices arrested him, and swept him back to his days at
+Eton and at Oxford. He turned his head and looked carelessly towards
+them. They were both young; both a year ago might have been his intimates
+and friends. As it was, he imagined bitterly, they probably resented his
+sitting even in the next chair to them.
+
+The stage was now clear; the two sailors had departed, the audience sat
+waiting for the heroes of the evening and calling for them with impatient
+outbursts of applause. Shere Ali waited too. But there was no impatience
+on his part, as there was no enthusiasm. He was just getting through the
+evening; and this hot and crowded den, with its glitter of lights,
+promised a thrill of excitement which would for a moment lift him from
+the torture of his thoughts.
+
+But the antagonists still lingered in their dressing-rooms while their
+trainers put the final touch to their preparations. And while the
+antagonists lingered, the two young men next to him began again to talk,
+and this time the words fell on Shere Ali's ears.
+
+"I think it ought to be stopped," said one. "It can't be good for us. Of
+course the fellow who runs the circus doesn't care, although he is an
+Englishman, and although he must have understood what was being shouted."
+
+"He is out for money, of course," replied the other.
+
+"Yes. But not half a mile away, just across the Maidan there, is
+Government House. Surely it ought to be stopped."
+
+The speaker was evidently serious. He spoke, indeed, with some heat.
+Shere Ali wondered indifferently what it was that went on in the circus
+in the Maidan half a mile from the Government House. Something which
+ought to be stopped, something which could not be "good for us." Shere
+Ali clenched his hands in a gust of passion. How well he knew the
+phrase! Good for us, good for the magic of British prestige! How often
+he had used the words himself in the days when he had been fool enough
+to believe that he belonged to the white people. He had used it in the
+company of just such youths as those who sat next to him now, and he
+writhed in his seat as he imagined how they must have laughed at him in
+their hearts. What was it that was not "good for us" in the circus on
+the Maidan?
+
+As he wondered there was a burst of applause, and on the opposite side of
+the ring the soldier, stripped to the waist, entered with his two
+assistants. Shere Ali was sitting close to the lower corner of the ring
+on the right-hand side of the stage; the soldier took his seat in the
+upper corner on the other side. He was a big, heavily-built man, but
+young, active, and upon his open face he had a look of confidence. It
+seemed to Shere Ali that he had been trained to the very perfection of
+his strength, and when he moved the muscles upon his shoulders and back
+worked under his skin as though they lived. Shouts greeted him, shouts in
+which his surname and his Christian name and his nicknames were mingled,
+and he smiled pleasantly back at his friends. Shere Ali looked at him.
+From his cheery, honest face to the firm set of his feet upon the floor,
+he was typical of his class and race.
+
+"Oh, I hope he'll be beaten!"
+
+Shere Ali found himself repeating the words in a whisper. The wish had
+suddenly sprung up within him, but it grew in intensity; it became a
+great longing. He looked anxiously for the appearance of the Jew from
+Singapore. He was glad that, knowing little of either man, he had laid
+his money against the soldier.
+
+Meanwhile the two youths beside him resumed their talk, and Shere Ali
+learned what it was that was not "good for us"!
+
+"There were four girls," said the youth who had been most indignant.
+"Four English girls dancing a _pas de quatre_ on the sand of the circus.
+The dance was all right, the dresses were all right. In an English
+theatre no one would have had a word to say. It was the audience that was
+wrong. The cheaper parts at the back of the tent were crowded with
+natives, tier above tier--and I tell you--I don't know much Hindustani,
+but the things they shouted made my blood boil. After all, if you are
+going to be the governing race it's not a good thing to let your women be
+insulted, eh?"
+
+Shere Ali laughed quietly. He could picture to himself the whole scene,
+the floor of the circus, the tiers of grinning faces rising up against
+the back walls of the tent.
+
+"Did the girls themselves mind?" asked the other of the youths.
+
+"They didn't understand." And again the angry utterance followed. "It
+ought to be stopped! It ought to be stopped!"
+
+Shere Ali turned suddenly upon the speaker.
+
+"Why?" he asked fiercely, and he thrust a savage face towards him.
+
+The young man was taken by surprise; for a second it warmed Shere Ali to
+think that he was afraid. And, indeed, there was very little of the
+civilised man in Shere Ali's look at this moment. His own people were
+claiming him. It was one of the keen grim tribesmen of the hills who
+challenged the young Englishman. The Englishman, however, was not afraid.
+He was merely disconcerted by the unexpected attack. He recovered his
+composure the next moment.
+
+"I don't think that I was speaking to you," he said quietly, and then
+turned away.
+
+Shere Ali half rose in his seat. But he was not yet quite emancipated
+from the traditions of his upbringing. To create a disturbance in a
+public place, to draw all eyes upon himself, to look a fool, eventually
+to be turned ignominiously into the street--all this he was within an
+ace of doing and suffering, but he refrained. He sat down again
+quickly, feeling hot and cold with shame, just as he remembered he had
+been wont to feel when he had committed some gaucherie in his early
+days in England.
+
+At that moment the light-weight champion from Singapore came out from his
+dressing-room and entered the ring. He was of a slighter build than his
+opponent, but very quick upon his feet. He was shorter, too. Colonel Joe
+introduced the antagonists to the audience, standing before the
+footlights as he did so. And it was at once evident who was the
+favourite. The shouts were nearly all for the soldier.
+
+The Jew took his seat in a chair down in the corner where Shere Ali
+was sitting, and Shere Ali leaned over the ropes and whispered to
+him fiercely,
+
+"Win! Win! I'll double the stake if you do!"
+
+The Jew turned and smiled at the young Prince.
+
+"I'll do my best."
+
+Shere Ali leaned back in his chair and the fight began. He followed it
+with an excitement and a suspense which were astonishing even to him.
+When the soldier brought his fist home upon the prominent nose of the
+Singapore champion and plaudits resounded through the house, his heart
+sank with bitter disappointment. When the Jew replied with a dull
+body-blow, his hopes rebounded. He soon began to understand that in the
+arts of prize-fighting the soldier was a child compared with the man from
+Singapore. The Champion of the East knew his trade. He was as hard as
+iron. The sounding blows upon his forehead and nose did no more than
+flush his face for a few moments. Meanwhile he struck for the body.
+Moreover, he had certain tricks which lured his antagonist to an
+imprudent confidence. For instance, he breathed heavily from the
+beginning of the second round, as though he were clean out of condition.
+But each round found him strong and quick to press an advantage. After
+one blow, which toppled his opponent through the ropes, Shere Ali clapped
+his hands.
+
+"Bravo!" he cried; and one of the youths at his side said to his
+companion:
+
+"This fellow's a Jew, too. Look at his face."
+
+For twelve rounds the combatants seemed still to be upon equal terms,
+though those in the audience who had knowledge began to shake their heads
+over the chances of the soldier. Shere Ali, however, was still racked by
+suspense. The fight had become a symbol, almost a message to him, even as
+his gift to the Mullah had become a message to the people of Chiltistan.
+All that he had once loved, and now furiously raged against, was
+represented by the soldier, the confident, big, heavily built soldier,
+while, on the other hand, by the victory of the Jew all the subject
+peoples would be vindicated. More and more as the fight fluctuated from
+round to round the people and the country of Chiltistan claimed its own.
+The soldier represented even those youths at his side, whose women must
+on no account be insulted.
+
+"Why should they be respected?" he cried to himself.
+
+For at the bottom of his heart lay the thought that he had been set aside
+as impossible by Violet Oliver. There was the real cause of his
+bitterness against the white people. He still longed for Violet Oliver,
+still greatly coveted her. But his own people and his own country were
+claiming him; and he longed for her in a different way. Chivalry--the
+chivalry of the young man who wants to guard and cherish--respect, the
+desire that the loved one should share ambitions, life work, all--what
+follies and illusions these things were!
+
+"I know," said Shere Ali to himself. "I know. I am myself the victim of
+them," and he lowered his head and clasped his hands tightly together
+between his knees. He forgot the prize-fight, the very sound of the
+pugilists' feet upon the bare boards of the stage ceased to be audible to
+his ears. He ached like a man bruised and beaten; he was possessed with a
+sense of loneliness, poignant as pain. "If I had only taken the easier
+way, bought and never cared!" he cried despairingly. "But at all events
+there's no need for respect. Why should one respect those who take and do
+not give?"
+
+As he asked himself the question, there came a roar from the audience. He
+looked up. The soldier was standing, but he was stooping and the fingers
+of one hand touched the boards. Over against the soldier the man from
+Singapore stood waiting with steady eyes, and behind the ropes Colonel
+Joe was counting in a loud voice:
+
+"One, two, three, four."
+
+Shere Ali's eyes lit up. Would the soldier rise? Would he take the tips
+of those fingers from the floor, stand up again and face his man? Or was
+he beaten?
+
+"Five, six, seven, eight"--the referee counted, his voice rising above
+the clamour of voices. The audience had risen, men stood upon their
+benches, cries of expostulation were shouted to the soldier.
+
+"Nine, ten," counted the referee, and the fight was over. The soldier had
+been counted out.
+
+Shere Ali was upon his feet like the rest of the enthusiasts.
+
+"Well done!" he cried. "Well done!" and as the Jew came back to his
+corner Shere Ali shook him excitedly by the hand. The sign had been
+given; the subject race had beaten the soldier. Shere Ali was livid with
+excitement. Perhaps, indeed, the young Englishmen had been right, and
+some dim racial sympathy stirred Shere Ali to his great enthusiasm.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+SHERE ALI IS CLAIMED BY CHILTISTAN
+
+
+While these thoughts were seething in his mind, while the excitement was
+still at its height, the cries still at their loudest, Shere All heard a
+quiet penetrating voice speak in his ear. And the voice spoke in Pushtu.
+
+The mere sound of the language struck upon Shere Ali's senses at that
+moment of exultation with a strange effect. He thrilled to it from head
+to foot. He heard it with a feeling of joy. And then he took note of the
+spoken words.
+
+"The man who wrote to your Highness from Calcutta waits outside the
+doors. As you stand under the gas lamps, take your handkerchief from your
+pocket if you wish to speak with him."
+
+Shere Ali turned back from the ropes. But the spectators were already
+moving from their chairs to the steps which led from the stage to the
+auditorium. There was a crowd about those steps, and Shere Ali could not
+distinguish among it the man who was likely to have whispered in his ear.
+All seemed bent upon their own business, and that business was to escape
+from the close heat-laden air of the building as quickly as might be.
+
+Shere Ali stood alone and pondered upon the words.
+
+The man who had written to him from Calcutta! That was the man who had
+sent the anonymous letter which had caused him one day to pass through
+the Delhi Gate of Lahore. A money-lender at Calcutta, but a countryman
+from Chiltistan. So he had gathered from Safdar Khan, while heaping scorn
+upon the message.
+
+But now, and on this night of all nights, Shere Ali was in a mood to
+listen. There were intrigues on foot--there were always intrigues on
+foot. But to-night he would weigh those intrigues. He went out from the
+music-hall, and under the white glare of the electric lamps above the
+door he stood for a moment in full view. Then he deliberately took his
+handkerchief from his pocket. From the opposite side of the road, a man
+in native dress, wearing a thick dark cloak over his white shirt and
+pyjamas, stepped forward. Shere Ali advanced to meet him.
+
+"Huzoor, huzoor," said the man, bending low, and he raised Shere Ali's
+hand and pressed his forehead upon it, in sign of loyalty.
+
+"You wish to speak to me?" said Shere Ali.
+
+"If your Highness will deign to follow. I am Ahmed Ismail. Your Highness
+has heard of me, no doubt."
+
+Shere Ali did not so much as smile, nor did he deny the statement. He
+nodded gravely. After all, vanity was not the prerogative of his people
+alone in all the world.
+
+"Yes," he said, "I will follow."
+
+Ahmed Ismail crossed the road once more out of the lights into the
+shadows, and walked on, keeping close to the lines of houses. Shere Ali
+followed upon his heels. But these two were not alone to take that road.
+A third man, a Bengali, bespectacled, and in appearance most respectable,
+came down the steps of the musichall, a second after Shere Ali had
+crossed the road. He, too, had been a witness of the prize-fight. He
+hurried after Shere Ali and caught him up.
+
+"Very good fight, sir," he said. "Would Prince of Chiltistan like to
+utter some few welcome words to great Indian public on extraordinary
+skill of respective pugilists? I am full-fledged reporter of _Bande
+Mataram_, great Nationalist paper."
+
+He drew out a note-book and a pencil as he spoke. Ahmed Ismail stopped
+and turned back towards the two men. The Babu looked once, and only once,
+at the money-lender. Then he stood waiting for Shere Ali's answer.
+
+"No, I have nothing to say," said Shere Ali civilly. "Good-night," and he
+walked on.
+
+"Great disappointment for Indian public," said the Bengali. "Prince of
+Chiltistan will say nothing. I make first-class leading article on
+reticence of Indian Prince in presence of high-class spectacular events.
+Good-night, sir," and the Babu shut up his book and fell back.
+
+Shere Ali followed upon the heels of Ahmed Ismail. The money-lender
+walked down the street to the Maidan, and then turned to the left. The
+Babu, on the other hand, hailed a third-class gharry and, ascending into
+it gave the driver some whispered instructions.
+
+The gharry drove on past the Bengal Club, and came, at length, to the
+native town. At the corner of a street the Babu descended, paid the
+driver, and dismissed him.
+
+"I will walk the rest of the way," he said. "My home is quite near and a
+little exercise is good. I have large varicose veins in the legs, or I
+should have tramped hand and foot all the way."
+
+He walked slowly until the driver had turned his gharry and was driving
+back. Then, for a man afflicted with varicose veins the Babu displayed
+amazing agility. He ran through the silent and deserted street until he
+came to a turning. The lane which ran into the main road was a blind
+alley. Mean hovels and shuttered booths flanked it, but at the end a tall
+house stood. The Babu looked about him and perceived a cart standing in
+the lane. He advanced to it and looked in.
+
+"This is obvious place for satisfactory concealment," he said, as with
+some difficulty he clambered in. Over the edge of the cart he kept watch.
+In a while he heard the sound of a man walking. The man was certainly at
+some distance from the turning, but the Babu's head went down at once.
+The man whose footsteps he heard was wearing boots, but there would be
+one walking in front of that man who was wearing slippers--Ahmed Ismail.
+
+Ahmed Ismail, indeed, turned an instant afterwards into the lane, passed
+the cart and walked up to the door of the big house. There he halted, and
+Shere Ali joined him.
+
+"The gift was understood, your Highness," he said. "The message was sent
+from end to end of Chiltistan."
+
+"What gift?" asked Shere Ali, in genuine surprise.
+
+"Your Highness has forgotten? The melons and the bags of grain."
+
+Shere Ali was silent for a few moments. Then he said:
+
+"And how was the gift interpreted?"
+
+Ahmed Ismail smiled in the darkness.
+
+"There are wise men in Chiltistan, and they found the riddle easy to
+read. The melons were the infidels which would be cut to pieces, even as
+a knife cuts a melon. The grain was the army of the faithful."
+
+Again Shere Ali was silent. He stood with his eyes upon his companion.
+
+"Thus they understand my gift to the Mullah?" he said at length.
+
+"Thus they understood it," said Ahmed Ismail. "Were they wrong?" and
+since Shere Ali paused before he answered, Ahmed repeated the question,
+holding the while the key of his door between his fingers.
+
+"Were they wrong, your Highness?"
+
+"No," said Shere Ali firmly. "They were right."
+
+Ahmed Ismail put the key into the lock. The bolt shot back with a grating
+sound, the door opened upon blackness.
+
+"Will your Highness deign to enter?" he said, standing aside.
+
+"Yes," said Shere Ali, and he passed in. His own people, his own country,
+had claimed and obtained him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+THE CASTING OF THE DIE
+
+
+Ahmed Ismail crossed the threshold behind Shere Ali. He closed the door
+quietly, bolted and locked it. Then for a space of time the two men stood
+silent in the darkness, and both listened intently--Ahmed Ismail for the
+sound of someone stirring in the house, Shere Ali for a quiet secret
+movement at his elbow. The blackness of the passage gaping as the door
+opened had roused him to suspicion even while he had been standing in the
+street. But he had not thought of drawing back. He had entered without
+fear, just as now he stood, without fear, drawn up against the wall.
+There was, indeed, a smile upon his face. Then he reached out his hand.
+Ahmed Ismail, who still stood afraid lest any of his family should have
+been disturbed, suddenly felt a light touch, like a caress, upon his
+face, and then before he could so much as turn his head, five strong lean
+fingers gripped him by the throat and tightened.
+
+"Ahmed, I have enemies in Chiltistan," said Shere Ali, between a whisper
+and a laugh. "The son of Abdulla Mohammed, for instance," and he loosened
+his grip a little upon Ahmed's throat, but held him still with a straight
+arm. Ahmed did not struggle. He whispered in reply:
+
+"I am not of your Highness's enemies. Long ago I gave your Highness a
+sign of friendship when I prayed you to pass by the Delhi Gate of
+Lahore."
+
+Shere Ali turned Ahmed Ismail towards the inner part of the house and
+loosed his neck.
+
+"Go forward, then. Light a lamp," he said, and Ahmed moved noiselessly
+along the passage. Shere Ali heard the sound of a door opening upstairs,
+and then a pale light gleamed from above. Shere Ali walked to the end of
+the passage, and mounting the stairs found Ahmed Ismail in the doorway of
+a little room with a lighted lamp in his hand.
+
+"I was this moment coming down," said Ahmed Ismail as he stood aside from
+the door. Shere Ali walked in. He crossed to the window, which was
+unglazed but had little wooden shutters. These shutters were closed.
+Shere Ali opened one and looked out. The room was on the first floor, and
+the window opened on to a small square courtyard. A movement of Ahmed
+Ismail's brought him swiftly round. He saw the money-lender on his knees
+with his forehead to the ground, grovelling before his Prince's feet.
+
+"The time has come, oh, my Lord," he cried in a low, eager voice, and
+again, "the time has come."
+
+Shere Ali looked down and pleasure glowed unwontedly within him. He did
+not answer, he did not give Ahmed Ismail leave to rise from the ground.
+He sated his eyes and his vanity with the spectacle of the man's
+abasement. Even his troubled heart ached with a duller pain.
+
+"I have been a fool," he murmured, "I have wasted my years. I have
+tortured myself for nothing. Yes, I have been a fool."
+
+A wave of anger swept over him, drowning his pride--anger against
+himself. He thought of the white people with whom he had lived.
+
+"I sought for a recognition of my equality with them," he went on. "I
+sought it from their men and from their women. I hungered for it like a
+dog for a bone. They would not give it--neither their men, nor their
+women. And all the while here were my own people willing at a sign to
+offer me their homage."
+
+He spoke in Pushtu, and Ahmed Ismail drank in every word.
+
+"They wanted a leader, Huzoor," he said.
+
+"I turned away from them like a fool," replied Shere Ali, "while I sought
+favours from the white women like a slave."
+
+"Your Highness shall take as a right what you sought for as a favour."
+
+"As a right?" cried Shere Ali, his heart leaping to the incense of Ahmed
+Ismail's flattery. "What right?" he asked, suddenly bending his eyes upon
+his companion.
+
+"The right of a conqueror," cried Ahmed Ismail, and he bowed himself
+again at his Prince's feet. He had spoken Shere Ali's wild and secret
+thought. But whereas Shere Ali had only whispered it to himself, Ahmed
+Ismail spoke it aloud, boldly and with a challenge in his voice, like one
+ready to make good his words. An interval of silence followed, a fateful
+interval as both men knew. Not a sound from without penetrated into that
+little shuttered room, but to Shere Ali it seemed that the air throbbed
+and was heavy with unknown things to come. Memories and fancies whirled
+in his disordered brain without relation to each other or consequence in
+his thoughts. Now it was the two Englishmen seated side by side behind
+the ropes and quietly talking of what was "not good for us," as though
+they had the whole of India, and the hill-districts, besides, in their
+pockets. He saw their faces, and, quietly though he stood and impassive
+as he looked, he was possessed with a longing to behold them within
+reach, so that he might strike them and disfigure them for ever. Now it
+was Violet Oliver as she descended the steps into the great courtyard of
+the Fort, dainty and provoking from the arched slipper upon her foot to
+the soft perfection of her hair. He saw her caught into the twilight
+swirl of pale white faces and so pass from his sight, thinking that at
+the same moment she passed from his life. Then it was the Viceroy in his
+box at the racecourse and all Calcutta upon the lawn which swept past his
+eyes. He saw the Eurasian girls prinked out in their best frocks to lure
+into marriage some unwary Englishman. And again it was Colonel Dewes, the
+man who had lost his place amongst his own people, even as he, Shere Ali,
+had himself. A half-contemptuous smile of pity for a moment softened the
+hard lines of his mouth as he thought upon that forlorn and elderly man
+taking his loneliness with him into Cashmere.
+
+"That shall not be my way," he said aloud, and the lines of his mouth
+hardened again. And once more before his eyes rose the vision of
+Violet Oliver.
+
+Ahmed Ismail had risen to his feet and stood watching his Prince with
+eager, anxious eyes. Shere Ali crossed to the table and turned down the
+lamp, which was smoking. Then he went to the window and thrust the
+shutters open. He turned round suddenly upon Ahmed.
+
+"Were you ever in Mecca?"
+
+"Yes, Huzoor," and Ahmed's eyes flashed at the question.
+
+"I met three men from Chiltistan on the Lowari Pass. They were going down
+to Kurachi. I, too, must make the pilgrimage to Mecca."
+
+He stood watching the flame of the lamp as he spoke, and spoke in a
+monotonous dull voice, as though what he said were of little importance.
+But Ahmed Ismail listened to the words, not the voice, and his joy was
+great. It was as though he heard a renegade acknowledge once more the
+true faith.
+
+"Afterwards, Huzoor," he said, significantly. "Afterwards." Shere Ali
+nodded his head.
+
+"Yes, afterwards. When we have driven the white people down from the
+hills into the plains."
+
+"And from the plains into the sea," cried Ahmed Ismail. "The angels will
+fight by our side--so the Mullahs have said---and no man who fights with
+faith will be hurt. All will be invulnerable. It is written, and the
+Mullahs have read the writing and translated it through Chiltistan."
+
+"Is that so?" said Shere Ali, and as he put the question there was an
+irony in his voice which Ahmed Ismail was quick to notice. But Shere Ali
+put it yet a second time, after a pause, and this time there was no
+trace of irony.
+
+"But I will not go alone," he said, suddenly raising his eyes from the
+flame of the lamp and looking towards Ahmed Ismail.
+
+Ahmed did not understand. But also he did not interrupt, and Shere Ali
+spoke again, with a smile slowly creeping over his face.
+
+"I will not go alone to Mecca. I will follow the example of Sirdar Khan."
+
+The saying was still a riddle to Ahmed Ismail.
+
+"Sirdar Khan, your Highness?" he said. "I do not know him."
+
+Shere Ali turned his eyes again upon the flame of the lamp, and the smile
+broadened upon his face, a thing not pleasant to see. He wetted his lips
+with the tip of his tongue and told his story.
+
+"Sirdar Khan is dead long since," he said, "but he was one of the five
+men of the bodyguard of Nana, who went into the Bibigarh at Cawnpore on
+July 12 of the year 1857. Have you heard of that year, Ahmed Ismail, and
+of the month and of the day? Do you know what was done that day in the
+Bibigarh at Cawnpore?"
+
+Ahmed Ismail watched the light grow in Shere Ali's eyes, and a smile
+crept into his face, too.
+
+"Huzoor, Huzoor," he said, in a whisper of delight. He knew very well
+what had happened in Cawnpore, though he knew nothing of the month or the
+day, and cared little in what year it had happened.
+
+"There were 206 women and children, English women, English children,
+shut up in the Bibigarh. At five o'clock--and it is well to remember the
+hour, Ahmed Ismail--at five o'clock in the evening the five men of the
+Nana's bodyguard went into the Bibigarh and the doors were closed upon
+them. It was dark when they came out again and shut the doors behind
+them, saying that all were dead. But it was not true. There was an
+Englishwoman alive in the Bibigarh, and Sirdar Khan came back in the
+night and took her away."
+
+"And she is in Mecca now?" cried Ahmed Ismail.
+
+"Yes. An old, old woman," said Shere Ali, dwelling upon the words with a
+quiet, cruel pleasure. He had the picture clear before his eyes, he saw
+it in the flame of the lamp at which he gazed so steadily--an old,
+wizened, shrunken woman, living in a bare room, friendless and solitary,
+so old that she had even ceased to be aware of her unhappiness, and so
+coarsened out of all likeness to the young, bright English girl who had
+once dwelt in Cawnpore, that even her own countryman had hardly believed
+she was of his race. He set another picture side by side with that--the
+picture of Violet Oliver as she turned to him on the steps and said,
+"This is really good-bye." And in his imagination, he saw the one picture
+merge and coarsen into the other, the dainty trappings of lace and
+ribbons change to a shapeless cloak, the young face wither from its
+beauty into a wrinkled and yellow mask. It would be a just punishment, he
+said to himself. Anger against her was as a lust at his heart. He had
+lost sight of her kindness, and her pity; he desired her and hated her in
+the same breath.
+
+"Are you married, Ahmed Ismail?" he asked.
+
+Ahmed Ismail smiled.
+
+"Truly, Huzoor."
+
+"Do you carry your troubles to your wife? Is she your companion as well
+as your wife? Your friend as well as your mistress?"
+
+Ahmed Ismail laughed.
+
+"Yet that is what the Englishwomen are," said Shere Ali.
+
+"Perhaps, Huzoor," replied Ahmed, cunningly, "it is for that reason that
+there are some who take and do not give."
+
+He came a little nearer to his Prince.
+
+"Where is she, Huzoor?"
+
+Shere Ali was startled by the question out of his dreams. For it had been
+a dream, this thought of capturing Violet Oliver and plucking her out of
+her life into his. He had played with it, knowing it to be a fancy. There
+had been no settled plan, no settled intention in his mind. But to-night
+he was carried away. It appeared to him there was a possibility his dream
+might come true. It seemed so not alone to him but to Ahmed Ismail too.
+He turned and gazed at the man, wondering whether Ahmed Ismail played
+with him or not. But Ahmed bore the scrutiny without a shadow of
+embarrassment.
+
+"Is she in India, Huzoor?"
+
+Shere Ali hesitated. Some memory of the lessons learned in England was
+still alive within him, bidding him guard his secret. But the memory was
+no longer strong enough. He bowed his head in assent.
+
+"In Calcutta?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Your Highness shall point her out to me one evening as she drives in the
+Maidan," said Ahmed Ismail, and again Shere Ali answered--
+
+"Yes."
+
+But he caught himself back the next moment. He flung away from Ahmed
+Ismail with a harsh outburst of laughter.
+
+"But this is all folly," he cried. "We are not in the days of the
+uprising," for thus he termed now what a month ago he would have called
+"The Mutiny." "Cawnpore is not Calcutta," and he turned in a gust of fury
+upon Ahmed Ismail. "Do you play with me, Ahmed Ismail?"
+
+"Upon my head, no! Light of my life, hope of my race, who would dare?"
+and he was on the ground at Shere Ali's feet. "Do I indeed speak follies?
+I pray your Highness to bethink you that the summer sets its foot upon
+the plains. She will go to the hills, Huzoor. She will go to the hills.
+And your people are not fools. They have cunning to direct their
+strength. See, your Highness, is there a regiment in Peshawur whose
+rifles are safe, guard them howsoever carefully they will? Every week
+they are brought over the hills into Chiltistan that we may be ready for
+the Great Day," and Ahmed Ismail chuckled to himself. "A month ago,
+Huzoor, so many rifles had been stolen that a regiment in camp locked
+their rifles to their tent poles, and so thought to sleep in peace. But
+on the first night the cords of the tents were cut, and while the men
+waked and struggled under the folds of canvas, the tent poles with the
+rifles chained to them were carried away. All those rifles are now in
+Kohara. Surely, Huzoor, if they can steal the rifles from the middle of a
+camp, they can steal a weak girl among the hills."
+
+Ahmed Ismail waited in suspense, with his forehead bowed to the ground,
+and when the answer came he smiled. He had made good use of this
+unexpected inducement which had been given to him. He knew very well that
+nothing but an unlikely chance would enable him to fulfil his promise.
+But that did not matter. The young Prince would point out the
+Englishwoman in the Maidan and, at a later time when all was ready in
+Chiltistan, a fine and obvious attempt should be made to carry her off.
+The pretence might, if occasion served, become a reality, to be sure, but
+the attempt must be as public as possible. There must be no doubt as to
+its author. Shere Ali, in a word, must be committed beyond any
+possibility of withdrawal. Ahmed Ismail himself would see to that.
+
+"Very well. I will point her out to you," said Shere Ali, and Ahmed
+Ismail rose to his feet. He waited before his master, silent and
+respectful. Shere Ali had no suspicion that he was being jockeyed by that
+respectful man into a hopeless rebellion. He had, indeed, lost sight of
+the fact that the rebellion must be hopeless.
+
+"When," he asked, "will Chiltistan be ready?"
+
+"As soon as the harvest is got in," replied Ahmed Ismail.
+
+Shere Ali nodded his head.
+
+"You and I will go northwards to-morrow," he said.
+
+"To Kohara?" asked Ahmed Ismail.
+
+"Yes."
+
+For a little while Ahmed Ismail was silent. Then he said: "If your
+Highness will allow his servant to offer a contemptible word of advice--"
+
+"Speak," said Shere Ali.
+
+"Then it might be wise, perhaps, to go slowly to Kohara. Your Highness
+has enemies in Chiltistan. The news of the melons and the bags of grain
+is spread abroad, and jealousy is aroused. For there are some who wish to
+lead when they should serve."
+
+"The son of Abdulla Mohammed," said Shere Ali.
+
+Ahmed Ismail shrugged his shoulders as though the son of Abdulla Mohammed
+were of little account. There was clearly another in his mind, and Shere
+Ali was quick to understand him.
+
+"My father," he said quietly. He remembered how his father had received
+him with his Snider rifle cocked and laid across his knees. This time the
+Snider would be fired if ever Shere Ali came within range of its bullet.
+But it was unlikely that he would get so far, unless he went quickly and
+secretly at an appointed time.
+
+"I had a poor foolish thought," said Ahmed Ismail, "not worthy a moment's
+consideration by my Prince."
+
+Shere Ali broke in impatiently upon his words.
+
+"Speak it."
+
+"If we travelled slowly to Ajmere, we should come to that town at the
+time of pilgrimage. There in secret the final arrangements can be made,
+so that the blow may fall upon an uncovered head."
+
+"The advice is good," said Shere Ali. But he spoke reluctantly. He wanted
+not to wait at all. He wanted to strike now while his anger was at its
+hottest. But undoubtedly the advice was good.
+
+Ahmed Ismail, carrying the light in his hand, went down the stairs before
+Shere Ali and along the passage to the door. There he extinguished the
+lamp and cautiously drew back the bolts. He looked out and saw that the
+street was empty.
+
+"There is no one," he said, and Shere Ali passed out to the mouth of the
+blind alley and turned to the left towards the Maidan. He walked
+thoughtfully and did not notice a head rise cautiously above the side of
+a cart in the mouth of the alley. It was the head of the reporter of
+Bande Mataram, whose copy would be assuredly too late for the press.
+
+Shere Ali walked on through the streets. It was late, and he met no one.
+There had come upon him during the last hours a great yearning for his
+own country. He ran over in his mind, with a sense of anger against
+himself, the miserable wasted weeks in Calcutta--the nights in the
+glaring bars and halls, the friends he had made, the depths in which he
+had wallowed. He came to the Maidan, and, standing upon that empty plain,
+gazed round on the great silent city. He hated it, with its statues of
+Viceroys and soldiers, its houses of rich merchants, its insolence. He
+would lead his own people against all that it symbolised. Perhaps, some
+day, when all the frontier was in flame, and the British power rolled
+back, he and his people might pour down from the hills and knock even
+against the gates of Calcutta. Men from the hills had come down to Tonk,
+and Bhopal, and Rohilcund, and Rampur, and founded kingdoms for
+themselves. Why should he and his not push on to Calcutta?
+
+He bared his head to the night wind. He was uplifted, and fired with mad,
+impossible dreams. All that he had learned was of little account to him
+now. It might be that the English, as Colonel Dewes had said, had
+something of an army. Let them come to Chiltistan and prove their boast.
+
+"I will go north to the hills," he cried, and with a shock he understood
+that, after all, he had recovered his own place. The longing at his heart
+was for his own country--for his own people. It might have been bred of
+disappointment and despair. Envy of the white people might have cradled
+it, desire for the white woman might have nursed it into strength. But it
+was alive now. That was all of which Shere Ali was conscious. The
+knowledge filled all his thoughts. He had his place in the world. Greatly
+he rejoiced.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+SHERE ALI'S PILGRIMAGE
+
+
+There were times when Ralston held aloft his hands and cursed the Indian
+administration by all his gods. But he never did so with a more
+whole-hearted conviction than on the day when he received word that
+Linforth had been diverted to Rawal Pindi, in order that he might take up
+purely military duties. It took Ralston just seven months to secure his
+release, and it was not until the early days of autumn had arrived that
+Linforth at last reached Peshawur. A landau, with a coachman and groom in
+scarlet liveries, was waiting for him at the station, and he drove along
+the broad road through the cantonment to Government House. As the
+carriage swung in at the gates, a tall, thin man came from the
+croquet-ground on the left. He joined Dick in the porch.
+
+"You are Mr. Linforth?" he said.
+
+"Yes."
+
+For a moment a pair of grey, tired eyes ran Dick over from head to foot
+in a careless scrutiny. Apparently, however, the scrutiny was favourable.
+
+"I am the Chief Commissioner. I am glad that you have come. My sister
+will give you some tea, and afterwards, if you are not tired, we might go
+for a ride together. You would like to see your room first."
+
+Ralston spoke with his usual indifference. There was no intonation in his
+voice which gave to any one sentence a particular meaning; and for a
+particular meaning Dick Linforth was listening with keen ears. He
+followed Ralston across the hall to his room, and disappointment gained
+upon him with every step. He had grown familiar with disappointment of
+late years, but he was still young enough in years and spirit to expect
+the end of disappointment with each change in his fortunes. He had
+expected it when the news of his appointment had reached him in Calcutta,
+and disappointment had awaited him in Bombay. He had expected it again
+when, at last, he was sent from Rawal Pindi to Peshawur. All the way up
+the line he had been watching the far hills of Cashmere, and repeating to
+himself, "At last! At last!"
+
+The words had been a song at his heart, tuned to the jolt and rhythm of
+the wheels. Ralston of Peshawur had asked for him. So much he had been
+told. His longing had explained to him why Ralston of Peshawur had asked
+for him, and easily he had believed the explanation. He was a Linforth,
+one of the Linforths of the Road. Great was his pride. He would not have
+bartered his position to be a General in command of a division. Ralston
+had sent for him because of his hereditary title to work upon the Road,
+the broad, permanent, graded Road which was to make India safe.
+
+And now he walked behind a tired and indifferent Commissioner, whose very
+voice officialdom had made phlegmatic, and on whose aspect was writ large
+the habit of routine. In this mood he sat, while Miss Ralston prattled to
+him about the social doings of Peshawur, the hunt, the golf; and in this
+mood he rode out with Ralston to the Gate of the City.
+
+They passed through the main street, and, turning to the right, ascended
+to an archway, above which rose a tower. At the archway they dismounted
+and climbed to the roof of the tower. Peshawur, with its crowded streets,
+its open bazaars, its balconied houses of mud bricks built into wooden
+frames, lay mapped beneath them. But Linforth's eyes travelled over the
+trees and the gardens northwards and eastwards, to where the foothills of
+the Himalayas were coloured with the violet light of evening.
+
+"Linforth," Ralston cried. He was leaning on the parapet at the opposite
+side of the tower, and Dick crossed and leaned at his side.
+
+"It was I who had you sent for," said Ralston in his dull voice. "When
+you were at Chatham, I mean. I worried them in Calcutta until they
+sent for you."
+
+Dick took his elbows from the parapet and stood up. His face took life
+and fire, there came a brightness as of joy into his eyes. After all,
+then, this time he was not to be disappointed.
+
+"I wanted you to come to Peshawur straight from Bombay six months ago,"
+Ralston went on. "But I counted without the Indian Government. They
+brought you out to India, at my special request, for a special purpose,
+and then, when they had got you, they turned you over to work which
+anyone else could have done. So six months have been wasted. But that's
+their little way."
+
+"You have special work for me?" said Linforth quietly enough, though his
+heart was beating quickly in his breast. An answer came which still
+quickened its beatings.
+
+"Work that you alone can do," Ralston replied gravely. But he was a man
+who had learned to hope for little, and to expect discouragements as his
+daily bread, and he added:
+
+"That is, if you can do it."
+
+Linforth did not answer at once. He was leaning with his elbows on the
+parapet, and he raised a hand to the side of his face, that side on which
+Ralston stood. And so he remained, shutting himself in with his thoughts,
+and trying to think soberly. But his head whirled. Below him lay the city
+of Peshawur. Behind him the plains came to an end, and straight up from
+them, like cliffs out of the sea, rose the dark hills, brown and grey and
+veined with white. Here on this tower of Northern India, the long dreams,
+dreamed for the first time on the Sussex Downs, and nursed since in every
+moment of leisure--in Alpine huts in days of storm, in his own quarters
+at Chatham--had come to their fulfilment.
+
+"I have lived for this work," he said in a low voice which shook ever so
+little, try as he might to quiet it. "Ever since I was a boy I have lived
+for it, and trained myself for it. It is the Road."
+
+Linforth's evident emotion came upon Ralston as an unexpected thing. He
+was carried back suddenly to his own youth, and was surprised to
+recollect that he, too, had once cherished great plans. He saw himself
+as he was to-day, and, side by side with that disillusioned figure, he
+saw himself as he had been in his youth. A smile of friendliness came
+over his face.
+
+"If I had shut my eyes," he said, "I should have thought it was your
+father who was speaking."
+
+Linforth turned quickly to Ralston.
+
+"My father. You knew him?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I never did," said Dick regretfully.
+
+Ralston nodded his head and continued:
+
+"Twenty-six years ago we were here in Peshawur together. We came up on
+to the top of this tower, as everyone does who comes to Peshawur. He was
+like you. He was dreaming night and day of the Great Road through
+Chiltistan to the foot of the Hindu Kush. Look!" and Ralston pointed
+down to the roof-tops of the city, whereon the women and children worked
+and played. For the most part they were enclosed within brick walls, and
+the two men looked down into them as you might look in the rooms of a
+doll's house by taking off the lid. Ralston pointed to one such open
+chamber just beneath their eyes. An awning supported on wooden pillars
+sheltered one end of it, and between two of these pillars a child
+swooped backwards and forwards in a swing. In the open, a woman, seated
+upon a string charpoy, rocked a cradle with her foot, while her hands
+were busy with a needle, and an old woman, with a black shawl upon her
+shoulders and head, sat near by, inactive. But she was talking. For at
+times the younger woman would raise her head, and, though at that
+distance no voice could be heard, it was evident that she was answering.
+"I remember noticing that roof when your father and I were talking up
+here all those years ago. There was just the same family group as you
+see now. I remember it quite clearly, for your father went away to
+Chiltistan the next day, and never came back. It was the last time I saw
+him, and we were both young and full of all the great changes we were to
+bring about." He smiled, half it seemed in amusement, half in regret.
+"We talked of the Road, of course. Well, there's just one change. The
+old woman, sitting there with the shawl upon her shoulders now, was in
+those days the young woman rocking the cradle and working with her
+needle. That's all. Troubles there have been, disturbances, an
+expedition or two--but there's no real change. Here are you talking of
+the Road just as your father did, not ambitious for yourself," he
+explained with a kindly smile which illumined his whole face, "but
+ambitious for the Road, and the Road still stops at Kohara."
+
+"But it will go on--now," cried Linforth.
+
+"Perhaps," said Ralston slowly. Then he stood up and confronted Linforth.
+
+"It was not that you might carry on the Road that I brought you out from
+England," he skid. "On the contrary."
+
+Once more disappointment seized upon Dick Linforth, and he found it all
+the more bitter in that he had believed a minute since that his dreams
+were to be fulfilled. He looked down upon Peshawur, and the words which
+Ralston had lately spoken, half in amusement, half with regret, suddenly
+took for him their full meaning. Was it true that there was no change
+but the change from the young woman to the old one, from enthusiasm to
+acquiescence? He was young, and the possibility chilled him and even
+inspired him with a kind of terror. Was he to carry the Road no further
+than his father had done? Would another Linforth in another generation
+come to the tower in Peshawur with hopes as high as his and with the
+like futility?
+
+"On the contrary?" he asked. "Then why?"
+
+"That you might stop the Road from going on," said Ralston quietly.
+
+In the very midst of his disappointment Linforth realised that he had
+misjudged his companion. Here was no official, here was a man. The
+attitude of indifference had gone, the air of lassitude with it. Here was
+a man quietly exacting the hardest service which it was in his power to
+exact, claiming it as a right, and yet making it clear by some subtle
+sympathy that he understood very well all that the service would cost to
+the man who served.
+
+"I am to hinder the making of that Road?" cried Linforth.
+
+"You are to do more. You are to prevent it."
+
+"I have lived so that it should be made."
+
+"So you have told me," said Ralston quietly, and Dick was silent. With
+each quiet sentence Ralston had become more and more the dominating
+figure. He was so certain, so assured. Linforth recognised him no longer
+as the man to argue with; but as the representative of Government which
+overrides predilections, sympathies, ambitions, and bends its servants to
+their duty.
+
+"I will tell you more," Ralston continued. "You alone can prevent the
+extension of the Road. I believe it--I know it. I sent to England for
+you, knowing it. Do your duty, and it may be that the Road will stop at
+Kohara--an unfinished, broken thing. Flinch, and the Road runs straight
+to the Hindu Kush. You will have your desire; but you will have failed."
+
+There was something implacable and relentless in the tone and the words.
+There was more, too. There was an intimation, subtly yet most clearly
+conveyed, that Ralston who spoke had in his day trampled his ambitions
+and desires beneath his feet in service to the Government, and asked no
+more now from Linforth than he himself had in his turn performed. "I,
+too, have lived in Arcady," he added. It twas this last intimation which
+subdued the protests in Linforth's mind. He looked at the worn face of
+the Commissioner, then he lifted his eyes and swept the horizon with his
+gaze. The violet light upon the hills had lost its brightness and its
+glamour. In the far distance the hills themselves were withdrawn.
+Somewhere in that great barrier to the east was the gap of the Malakand
+Pass, where the Road now began. Linforth turned away from the hills
+towards Peshawur.
+
+"What must I do?" he asked simply.
+
+Ralston nodded his head. His attitude relaxed, his voice lost its
+dominating note.
+
+"What you have to understand is this," he explained. "To drive the Road
+through Chiltistan means war. It would be the cause of war if we insisted
+upon it now, just as it was the cause of war when your father went up
+from Peshawur twenty-six years ago. Or it might be the consequence of
+war. If the Chiltis rose in arms, undoubtedly we should carry it on to
+secure control of the country in the future. Well, it is the last
+alternative that we are face to face with now."
+
+"The Chiltis might rise!" cried Linforth.
+
+"There is that possibility," Ralston returned. "We don't mean on our own
+account to carry on the Road; but the Chiltis might rise."
+
+"And how should I prevent them?" asked Dick Linforth in perplexity.
+
+"You know Shere Ali?" said Ralston
+
+"Yes."
+
+"You are a friend of his?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"A great friend. His chief friend?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"You have some control over him?"
+
+"I think so," said Linforth.
+
+"Very well," said Ralston. "You must use that control."
+
+Linforth's perplexity increased. That danger should come from Shere
+Ali--here was something quite incredible. He remembered their long talks,
+their joint ambition. A day passed in the hut in the Promontoire of the
+Meije stood out vividly in his memories. He saw the snow rising in a
+swirl of white over the Breche de la Meije, that gap in the rock-wall
+between the Meije and the Rateau, and driving down the glacier towards
+the hut. He remembered the eagerness, the enthusiasm of Shere Ali.
+
+"But he's loyal," Linforth cried. "There is no one in India more loyal."
+
+"He was loyal, no doubt," said Ralston, with a shrug of his shoulders,
+and, beginning with his first meeting with Shere Ali in Lahore, he told
+Linforth all that he knew of the history of the young Prince.
+
+"There can be no doubt," he said, "of his disloyalty," and he recounted
+the story of the melons and the bags of grain. "Since then he has been
+intriguing in Calcutta."
+
+"Is he in Calcutta now?" Linforth asked.
+
+"No," said Ralston. "He left Calcutta just about the time when you landed
+in Bombay. And there is something rather strange--something, I think,
+very disquieting in his movements since he left Calcutta. I have had him
+watched, of course. He came north with one of his own countrymen, and the
+pair of them have been seen at Cawnpore, at Lucknow, at Delhi."
+
+Ralston paused. His face had grown very grave, very troubled.
+
+"I am not sure," he said slowly. "It is difficult, however long you stay
+in India, to get behind these fellows' minds, to understand the thoughts
+and the motives which move them. And the longer you stay, the more
+difficult you realise it to be. But it looks to me as if Shere Ali had
+been taken by his companion on a sort of pilgrimage."
+
+Linforth started.
+
+"A pilgrimage!" and he added slowly, "I think I understand. A pilgrimage
+to all the places which could most inflame the passions of a native
+against the English race," and then he broke out in protest. "But it's
+impossible. I know Shere Ali. It's not reasonable--"
+
+Ralston interrupted him upon the utterance of the word.
+
+"Reasonable!" he cried. "You are in India. Do ever white men act
+reasonably in India?" and he turned with a smile. "There was a
+great-uncle of yours in the days of the John Company, wasn't there? Your
+father told me about him here on this tower. When his time was up, he
+sent his money home and took his passage, and then came back--came back
+to the mountains and disappeared. Very likely he may be sitting somewhere
+beyond that barrier of hills by a little shrine to this hour, an old, old
+man, reverenced as a saint, with a strip of cloth about his loins, and
+forgetful of the days when he ruled a district in the Plains. I should
+not wonder. It's not a reasonable country."
+
+Ralston, indeed, was not far out in his judgment. Ahmed Ismail had
+carried Shere Ali off from Calcutta. He had taken him first of all to
+Cawnpore, and had led him up to the gate of the enclosure, wherein are
+the Bibigarh, where the women and children were massacred, and the well
+into which their bodies were flung. An English soldier turned them back
+from that enclosure, refusing them admittance. Ahmed Ismail, knowing
+well that it would be so, smiled quietly under his moustache; but Shere
+Ali angrily pointed to some English tourists who were within the
+enclosure.
+
+"Why should we remain outside?" he asked.
+
+"They are Bilati," said Ahmed Ismail in a smooth voice as they moved
+away. "They are foreigners. The place is sacred to the foreigners. It is
+Indian soil; but the Indian may not walk on it; no, not though he were
+born next door. Yet why should we grumble or complain? We are the dirt
+beneath their feet. We are dogs and sons of dogs, and a hireling will
+turn our Princes from the gate lest the soles of our shoes should defile
+their sacred places. And are they not right, Huzoor?" he asked cunningly.
+"Since we submit to it, since we cringe at their indignities and fawn
+upon them for their insults, are they not right?"
+
+"Why, that's true, Ahmed Ismail," replied Shere Ali bitterly. He was in
+the mood to make much of any trifle. This reservation of the enclosure at
+Cawnpore was but one sign of the overbearing arrogance of the foreigners,
+the Bilati--the men from over the sea. He had fawned upon them himself in
+the days of his folly.
+
+"But turn a little, Huzoor," Ahmed whispered in his ear, and led him
+back. "Look! There is the Bibigarh where the women were imprisoned. That
+is the house. Through that opening Sirdar Khan and his four companions
+went--and shut the door behind them. In that room the women of Mecca
+knelt and prayed for mercy. Come away, Huzoor. We have seen. Those were
+days when there were men upon the plains of India."
+
+And Shere Ali broke out with a fierce oath.
+
+"Amongst the hills, at all events, there are men today. There is no
+sacred ground for them in Chiltistan."
+
+"Not even the Road?" asked Ahmed Ismail; and Shere Ali stopped dead,
+and stared at his companion with startled eyes. He walked away in
+silence after that; and for the rest of that day he said little to
+Ahmed Ismail, who watched him anxiously. At night, however, Ahmed was
+justified of his policy. For Shere Ali appeared before him in the white
+robes of a Mohammedan. Up till then he had retained the English dress.
+Now he had discarded it. Ahmed Ismail fell at his feet, and bowed
+himself to the ground.
+
+"My Lord! My Lord!" he cried, and there was no simulation in his outburst
+of joy. "Would that your people could behold you now! But we have much to
+see first. To-morrow we go to Lucknow."
+
+Accordingly the two men travelled the next day to Lucknow. Shere Ali was
+led up under the broken archway by Evans's Battery into the grounds of
+the Residency. He walked with Ahmed Ismail at his elbow on the green
+lawns where the golden-crested hoopoes flashed in the sunlight and the
+ruined buildings stood agape to the air. They looked peaceful enough, as
+they strolled from one battery to another, but all the while Ahmed Ismail
+preached his sermon into Shere Ali's ears. There Lawrence had died; here
+at the top of the narrow lane had stood Johannes's house whence Nebo the
+Nailer had watched day after day with his rifle in his hand. Hardly a
+man, be he never so swift, could cross that little lane from one quarter
+of the Residency to another, so long as daylight lasted and so long as
+Nebo the Nailer stood behind the shutters of Johannes's house. Shere Ali
+was fired by the story of that siege. By so little was the garrison
+saved. Ahmed Ismail led him down to a corner of the grounds and once more
+a sentry barred the way.
+
+"This is the graveyard," said Ahmed Ismail, and Shere Ali, looking up,
+stepped back with a look upon his face which Ahmed Ismail did not
+understand.
+
+"Huzoor!" he said anxiously, and Shere Ali turned upon him with an
+imperious word.
+
+"Silence, dog!" he cried. "Stand apart. I wish to be alone."
+
+His eyes were on the little church with the trees and the wall girding
+it in. At the side a green meadow with high trees, had the look of a
+playing-ground--the playing-ground of some great public school in
+England. Shere Ali's eyes took in the whole picture, and then saw it but
+dimly through a mist. For the little church, though he had never seen it
+before, was familiar and most moving. It was a model of the Royal Chapel
+at Eton, and, in spite of himself, as he gazed the tears filled his eyes
+and the memory of his schooldays ached at his heart. He yearned to be
+back once more in the shadow of that chapel with his comrades and his
+friends. Not yet had he wholly forgotten; he was softened out of his
+bitterness; the burden of his jealousy and his anger fell for awhile
+from his shoulders. When he rejoined Ahmed Ismail, he bade him follow
+and speak no word. He drove back to the town, and then only he spoke to
+Ahmed Ismail.
+
+"We will go from Lucknow to-day," he said. "I will not sleep in
+this town."
+
+"As your Highness wills," said Ahmed Ismail humbly, and he went into the
+station and bought tickets for Delhi. It was on a Thursday morning that
+the pair reached that town; and that day Ahmed Ismail had an unreceptive
+listener for his sermons. The monument before the Post Office, the
+tablets on the arch of the arsenal, even the barracks in the gardens of
+the Moghul Palace fired no antagonism in the Prince, who so short a time
+ago had been a boy at Eton. The memories evoked by the little church at
+Lucknow had borne him company all night and still clung to him that day.
+He was homesick for his school. Only twice was he really roused.
+
+The first instance took place when he was driving along the Chandni
+Chauk, the straight broad tree-fringed street which runs from the Lahore
+Gate to the Fort. Ahmed Ismail sat opposite to him, and, leaning forward,
+he pointed to a tree and to a tall house in front of the tree.
+
+"My Lord," said he, "could that tree speak, what groans would one hear!"
+
+"Why?" said Shere Ali listlessly.
+
+"Listen, your Highness," said Ahmed Ismail. Like the rest of his
+countrymen, he had a keen love for a story. And the love was the keener
+when he himself had the telling of it. He sat up alertly. "In that house
+lived an Englishman of high authority. He escaped when Delhi was seized
+by the faithful. He came back when Delhi was recaptured by the infidels.
+And there he sat with an English officer, at his window, every morning
+from eight to nine. And every morning from eight to nine every native who
+passed his door was stopped and hanged upon that tree, while he looked
+on. Huzoor, there was no inquiry. It might be some peaceable merchant,
+some poor man from the countryside. What did it matter? There was a
+lesson to be taught to this city. And so whoever walked down the Chandni
+Chauk during that hour dangled from those branches. Huzoor, for a week
+this went on--for a whole week."
+
+The story was current in Delhi. Ahmed Ismail found it to his hand, and
+Shere Ali did not question it. He sat up erect, and something of the
+fire which this last day had been extinct kindled again in his sombre
+eyes. Later on he drove along the sinuous road on the top of the ridge,
+and as he looked over Delhi, hidden amongst its foliage, he saw the
+great white dome of the Jumma Musjid rising above the tree-tops, like a
+balloon. "The Mosque," he said, standing up in his carriage. "To-morrow
+we will worship there."
+
+Before noon the next day he mounted the steep broad flight of steps and
+passed under the red sandstone arch into the vast enclosure. He performed
+his ablutions at the fountain, and, kneeling upon the marble tiles,
+waited for the priest to ascend the ladder on to the wooden platform. He
+knelt with Ahmed Ismail at his side, in the open, amongst the lowliest.
+In front of him rows of worshippers knelt and bowed their foreheads to
+the tiles--rows and rows covering the enclosure up to the arches of the
+mosque itself. There were others too--rows and rows within the arches, in
+the dusk of the mosque itself, and from man to man emotion passed like a
+spark upon the wind. The crowd grew denser, there came a suspense, a
+tension. It gained upon all, it laid its clutch upon Shere Ali. He ceased
+to think, even upon his injuries, he was possessed with expectancy. And
+then a man kneeling beside him interrupted his prayers and began to curse
+fiercely beneath his breath.
+
+"May they burn, they and their fathers and their children, to the last
+generation!" And he added epithets of a surprising ingenuity. The while
+he looked backwards over his shoulder.
+
+Shere Ali followed his example. He saw at the back of the enclosure, in
+the galleries which surmounted the archway and the wall, English men and
+English women waiting. Shere Ali's blood boiled at the sight. They were
+laughing, talking. Some of them had brought sandwiches and were eating
+their lunch. Others were taking photographs with their cameras. They were
+waiting for the show to begin.
+
+Shere Ali followed the example of his neighbour and cursed them. All his
+anger kindled again and quickened into hatred. They were so careful of
+themselves, so careless of others!
+
+"Not a Mohammedan," he cried to himself, "must set foot in their
+graveyard at Lucknow, but they come to our mosque as to a show."
+
+Suddenly he saw the priest climb the ladder on to the high wooden
+platform in front of the central arch of the mosque and bow his forehead
+to the floor. His voice rang out resonant and clear and confident over
+that vast assemblage.
+
+"There is only one God."
+
+And a shiver passed across the rows of kneeling men, as though
+unexpectedly a wind had blown across a ripe field of corn. Shere Ali was
+moved like the rest, but all the while at the back of his mind there was
+the thought of those white people in the galleries.
+
+"They are laughing at us, they are making a mock of us, they think we
+are of no account." And fiercely he called upon his God, the God of the
+Mohammedans, to root them out from the land and cast them as weeds in
+the flame.
+
+The priest stood up erect upon the platform, and with a vibrating voice,
+now plaintive and conveying some strange sense of loneliness, now loud in
+praise, now humble in submission, he intoned the prayers. His voice rose
+and sank, reverberating back over the crowded courtyard from the walls of
+the mosque. Shere Ali prayed too, but he prayed silently, with all the
+fervour of a fanatic, that it might be his hand which should drive the
+English to their ships upon the sea.
+
+When he rose and came out from the mosque he turned to Ahmed Ismail.
+
+"There are some of my people in Delhi?"
+
+Ahmed Ismail bowed.
+
+"Let us go to them," said Shere Ali; he sought refuge amongst them from
+the thought of those people in the galleries. Ahmed Ismail was well
+content with the results of his pilgrimage. Shere Ali, as he paced the
+streets of Delhi with a fierce rapt look in his eyes, had the very aspect
+of a Ghazi fresh from the hills and bent upon murder and immolation.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+NEWS FROM AJMERE
+
+
+Something of this pilgrimage Ralston understood; and what he understood
+he explained to Dick Linforth on the top of the tower at Peshawur.
+Linforth, however, was still perplexed, still unconvinced.
+
+"I can't believe it," he cried; "I know Shere Ali so well."
+
+Ralston shook his head.
+
+"England overlaid the real man with a pretty varnish," he said. "That's
+all it ever does. And the varnish peels off easily when the man comes
+back to an Indian sun. There's not one of these people from the hills but
+has in him the makings of a fanatic. It's a question of circumstances
+whether the fanaticism comes to the top or not. Given the circumstances,
+neither Eton, nor Oxford, nor all the schools and universities rolled
+into one would hinder the relapse."
+
+"But why?" exclaimed Linforth. "Why should Shere Ali have relapsed?"
+
+"Disappointment here, flattery in England--there are many reasons.
+Usually there's a particular reason."
+
+"And what is that?" asked Linforth.
+
+"The love of a white woman."
+
+Ralston was aware that Linforth at his side started. He started ever so
+slightly. But Ralston was on the alert. He made no sign, however, that he
+had noticed anything.
+
+"I know that reason held good in Shere Ali's case," Ralston went on;
+and there came a change in Linforth's voice. It grew rather stern,
+rather abrupt.
+
+"Why? Has he talked?"
+
+"Not that I know of. Nevertheless, I am sure that there was one who
+played a part in Shere Ali's life," said Ralston. "I have known it ever
+since I first met him--more than a year ago on his way northwards to
+Chiltistan. He stopped for a day at Lahore and rode out with me. I told
+him that the Government expected him to marry as soon as possible, and
+settle down in his own country. I gave him that advice deliberately. You
+see I wanted to find out. And I did find out. His consternation, his
+anger, answered me clearly enough. I have no doubt that there was someone
+over there in England--a woman, perhaps an innocent woman, who had been
+merely careless--perhaps--"
+
+But he did not finish the sentence. Linforth interrupted him before he
+had time to complete it. And he interrupted without flurry or any sign of
+agitation.
+
+"There was a woman," he said. "But I don't think she was thoughtless.
+I don't see how she could have known that there was any danger in her
+friendliness. For she was merely friendly to Shere Ali. I know her
+myself."
+
+The answer was given frankly and simply. For once Ralston was outwitted.
+Dick Linforth had Violet Oliver to defend, and the defence was well done.
+Ralston was left without a suspicion that Linforth had any reason beyond
+the mere truth of the facts to spur him to defend her.
+
+"Yes, that's the mistake," said Ralston. "The woman's friendly and means
+no more than she says or looks. But these fellows don't understand such
+friendship. Shere Ali is here dreaming of a woman he knows he can never
+marry--because of his race. And so he's ready to run amuck. That's what
+it comes to."
+
+He turned away from the city as he spoke and took a step or two towards
+the flight of stone stairs which led down from the tower.
+
+"Where is Shere Ali now?" Linforth asked, and Ralston stopped and came
+back again.
+
+"I don't know," he said. "But I shall know, and very soon. There may be a
+letter waiting for me at home. You see, when there's trouble brewing over
+there behind the hills, and I want to discover to what height it has
+grown and how high it's likely to grow, I select one of my police, a
+Pathan, of course, and I send him to find out."
+
+"You send him over the Malakand," said Linforth, with a glance
+towards the great hill-barrier. He was to be astonished by the answer
+Ralston gave.
+
+"No. On the contrary, I send him south. I send him to Ajmere, in
+Rajputana."
+
+"In Ajmere?" cried Linforth.
+
+"Yes. There is a great Mohammedan shrine. Pilgrims go there from all
+parts, but mostly from beyond the frontier. I get my fingers on the pulse
+of the frontier in Ajmere more surely than I should if I sent spies up
+into the hills. I have a man there now. But that's not all. There's a
+great feast in Ajmere this week. And I think I shall find out from there
+where Shere Ali is and what he's doing. As soon as I do find out, I want
+you to go to him."
+
+"I understand," said Linforth. "But if he has changed so much, he will
+have changed to me."
+
+"Yes," Ralston admitted. He turned again towards the steps, and the two
+men descended to their horses. "That's likely enough. They ought to have
+sent you to me six months ago. Anyway, you must do your best." He climbed
+into the saddle, and Linforth did the same.
+
+"Very well," said Dick, as they rode through the archway. "I will do my
+best," and he turned towards Ralston with a smile. "I'll do my best to
+hinder the Road from going on."
+
+It was a queer piece of irony that the first real demand made upon him in
+his life was that he should stop the very thing on the accomplishment of
+which his hopes were set. But there was his friend to save. He comforted
+himself with that thought. There was his friend rushing blindly upon
+ruin. Linforth could not doubt it. How in the world could Shere Ali, he
+wondered. He could not yet dissociate the Shere Ali of to-day from the
+boy and the youth who had been his chum.
+
+They passed out of the further gate of Peshawur and rode along the broad
+white road towards Government House. It was growing dark, and as they
+turned in at the gateway of the garden, lights shone in the windows ahead
+of them. The lights recalled to Ralston's mind a fact which he had
+forgotten to mention.
+
+"By the way," he said, turning towards Linforth, "we have a lady staying
+with us who knows you."
+
+Linforth leaned forward in his saddle and stooped as if to adjust a
+stirrup, and it was thus a second or two before he answered.
+
+"Indeed!" he said. "Who is she?"
+
+"A Mrs. Oliver," replied Ralston, "She was at Srinagar in Cashmere this
+summer, staying with the Resident. My sister met her there, I think she
+told Mrs. Oliver you were likely to come to us about this time."
+
+Dick's heart leaped within him suddenly. Had Violet Oliver arranged her
+visit so that it might coincide with his? It was at all events a pleasant
+fancy to play with. He looked up at the windows of the house. She was
+really there! After all these months he would see her. No wonder the
+windows were bright. As they rode up to the porch and the door was
+opened, he heard her voice. She was singing in the drawing-room, and the
+door of the drawing-room stood open. She sang in a low small voice, very
+pretty to the ear, and she was accompanying herself softly on the piano.
+Dick stood for a while listening in the lofty hall, while Ralston looked
+over his letters which were lying upon a small table. He opened one of
+them and uttered an exclamation.
+
+"This is from my man at Ajmere," he said, but Dick paid no attention.
+Ralston glanced through the letter.
+
+"He has found him," he cried. "Shere Ali is in Ajmere."
+
+It took a moment or two for the words to penetrate to Linforth's mind.
+Then he said slowly:
+
+"Oh! Shere Ali's in Ajmere. I must start for Ajmere to-morrow."
+
+Ralston looked up from his letters and glanced at Linforth. Something in
+the abstracted way in which Linforth had spoken attracted his attention.
+He smiled:
+
+"Yes, it's a pity," he said. But again it seemed that Linforth did not
+hear. And then the voice at the piano stopped abruptly as though the
+singer had just become aware that there were people talking in the hall.
+Linforth moved forward, and in the doorway of the drawing-room he came
+face to face with Violet Oliver. Ralston smiled again.
+
+"There's something between those two," he said to himself. But Linforth
+had kept his secrets better half an hour ago. For it did not occur to
+Ralston to suspect that there had been something also between Violet
+Oliver and Shere Ali.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+IN THE ROSE GARDEN
+
+
+"Let us go out," said Linforth.
+
+It was after dinner on the same evening, and he was standing with Violet
+Oliver at the window of the drawing-room. Behind them an officer and his
+wife from the cantonment were playing "Bridge" with Ralston and his
+sister. Violet Oliver hesitated. The window opened upon the garden.
+Already Linforth's hand was on the knob.
+
+"Very well," she said. But there was a note of reluctance in her voice.
+
+"You will need a cloak," he said.
+
+"No," said Violet Oliver. She had a scarf of lace in her hand, and she
+twisted it about her throat. Linforth opened the long window and they
+stepped out into the garden. It was a clear night of bright stars. The
+chill of sunset had passed, the air was warm. It was dark in spite of the
+stars. The path glimmered faintly in front of them.
+
+"I was hoping very much that I should meet you somewhere in India," said
+Dick. "Lately I had grown afraid that you would be going home before the
+chance came."
+
+"You left it to chance," said Violet.
+
+The reluctance had gone from her voice; but in its place there was
+audible a note of resentment. She had spoken abruptly and a little
+sharply, as though a grievance present in her mind had caught her
+unawares and forced her to give it utterance.
+
+"No," replied Linforth, turning to her earnestly. "That's not fair. I did
+not know where you were. I asked all who might be likely to know. No one
+could tell me. I could not get away from my station. So that I had to
+leave it to chance."
+
+They walked down the drive, and then turned off past the croquet lawn
+towards a garden of roses and jasmine and chrysanthemums.
+
+"And chance, after all, has been my friend," he said with a smile.
+
+Violet Oliver stopped suddenly. Linforth turned to her. They were walking
+along a narrow path between high bushes of rhododendrons. It was very
+dark, so that Linforth could only see dimly her face and eyes framed in
+the white scarf which she had draped over her hair. But even so he could
+see that she was very grave.
+
+"I was wondering whether I should tell you," she said quietly. "It was
+not chance which brought me here--which brought us together again."
+
+Dick came to her side.
+
+"No?" he asked, looking down into her face. He spoke very gently, and
+with a graver voice than he had used before.
+
+"No," she answered. Her eyes were raised to his frankly and simply. "I
+heard that you were to be here. I came on that account. I wanted to see
+you again."
+
+As she finished she walked forward again, and again Linforth walked at
+her side. Dick, though his settled aim had given to him a manner and an
+aspect beyond his age, was for the same reason younger than his years in
+other ways. Very early in his youth he had come by a great and definite
+ambition, he had been inspired by it, he had welcomed and clung to it
+with the simplicity and whole-heartedness which are of the essence of
+youth. It was always new to him, however long he pondered over it; his
+joy in it was always fresh. He had never doubted either the true gold of
+the thing he desired, or his capacity ultimately to attain it. But he had
+ordered his life towards its attainment with the method of a far older
+man, examining each opportunity which came his way with always the one
+question in his mind--"Does it help?"--and leaving or using that
+opportunity according to the answer. Youth, however, was the truth of
+him. The inspiration, the freshness, the simplicity of outlook--these
+were the dominating elements in his character, and they were altogether
+compact of youth. He looked upon the world with expectant eyes and an
+unfaltering faith. Nor did he go about to detect intrigues in men or
+deceits in women. Violet's words therefore moved him not merely to
+tenderness, but to self-reproach.
+
+"It is very kind of you to say that," he said, and he turned to her
+suddenly. "Because you mean it."
+
+"It is true," said Violet simply; and the next moment she was aware that
+someone very young was standing before her in that Indian garden beneath
+the starlit sky and faltering out statements as to his unworthiness. The
+statements were familiar to her ears, but there was this which was
+unfamiliar: they stirred her to passion.
+
+She stepped back, throwing out a hand as if to keep him from her.
+
+"Don't," she whispered. "Don't!"
+
+She spoke like one who is hurt. Amongst the feelings which had waked in
+her, dim and for the most part hardly understood, two at all events were
+clear. One a vague longing for something different from the banal path
+she daily trod, the other a poignant regret that she was as she was.
+
+But Linforth caught the hand which she held out to thrust him off, and,
+clasping it, drew her towards him.
+
+"I love you," he said; and she answered him in desperation:
+
+"But you don't know me."
+
+"I know that I want you. I know that I am not fit for you."
+
+And Violet Oliver laughed harshly.
+
+But Dick Linforth paid no attention to that laugh. His hesitation had
+gone. He found that for this occasion only he had the gift of tongues.
+There was nothing new and original in what he said. But, on the other
+hand, he said it over and over again, and the look upon his face and the
+tone of his voice were the things which mattered. At the opera it is the
+singer you listen to, and not the words of the song. So in this rose
+garden Violet Oliver listened to Dick Linforth rather than to what he
+said. There was audible in his voice from sentence to sentence, ringing
+through them, inspiring them, the reverence a young man's heart holds for
+the woman whom he loves.
+
+"You ought to marry, not me, but someone better," she cried. "There is
+someone I know--in--England--who--"
+
+But Linforth would not listen. He laughed to scorn the notion that there
+could be anyone better than Violet Oliver; and with each word he spoke he
+seemed to grow younger. It was as though a miracle had happened. He
+remained in her eyes what he really was, a man head and shoulders above
+her friends, and in fibre altogether different. Yet to her, and for her,
+he was young, and younger than the youngest. In spite of herself, the
+longing at her heart cried with a louder voice. She sought to stifle it.
+
+"There is the Road," she cried. "That is first with you. That is what you
+really care for."
+
+"No," he replied quietly. She had hoped to take him at a disadvantage.
+But he replied at once:
+
+"No. I have thought that out. I do not separate you from the Road. I put
+neither first. It is true that there was a time when the Road was
+everything to me. But that was before I met you--do you remember?--in the
+inn at La Grave."
+
+Violet Oliver looked curiously at Linforth--curiously, and rather
+quickly. But it seemed that he at all events did not remember that he had
+not come alone down to La Grave.
+
+"It isn't that I have come to care less for the Road," he went on. "Not
+by one jot. Rather, indeed, I care more. But I can't dissociate you from
+the Road. The Road's my life-work; but it will be the better done if it's
+done with your help. It will be done best of all if it's done for you."
+
+Violet Oliver turned away quickly, and stood with her head averted.
+Ardently she longed to take him at his word. A glimpse of a great life
+was vouchsafed to her, such as she had not dreamt of. That some time she
+would marry again, she had not doubted. But always she had thought of her
+husband to be, as a man very rich, with no ambition but to please her, no
+work to do which would thwart her. And here was another life offered, a
+life upon a higher, a more difficult plane; but a life much more worth
+living. That she saw clearly enough. But out of her self-knowledge sprang
+the insistent question:
+
+"Could I live it?"
+
+There would be sacrifices to be made by her. Could she make them? Would
+not dissatisfaction with herself follow very quickly upon her marriage?
+Out of her dissatisfaction would there not grow disappointment in her
+husband? Would not bitterness spring up between them and both their lives
+be marred?
+
+Dick was still holding her hand.
+
+"Let me see you," he said, drawing her towards him. "Let me see
+your face!"
+
+She turned and showed it. There was a great trouble in her eyes, her
+voice was piteous as she spoke.
+
+"Dick, I can't answer you. When I told you that I came here on purpose to
+meet you, that I wanted to see you again, it was true, all true. But oh,
+Dick, did I mean more?"
+
+"How should I know?" said Dick, with a quiet laugh--a laugh of happiness.
+
+"I suppose that I did. I wanted you to say just what you have said
+to-night. Yet now that you have said it--" she broke off with a cry.
+"Dick, I have met no one like you in my life. And I am very proud.
+Oh, Dick, my boy!" And she gave him her other hand. Tears glistened
+in her eyes.
+
+"But I am not sure," she went on. "Now that you have spoken, I am not
+sure. It would be all so different from what my life has been, from what
+I thought it would be. Dick, you make me ashamed."
+
+"Hush!" he said gently, as one might chide a child for talking nonsense.
+He put an arm about her, and she hid her face in his coat.
+
+"Yes, that's the truth, Dick. You make me ashamed."
+
+So she remained for a little while, and then she drew herself away.
+
+"I will think and tell you, Dick," she said.
+
+"Tell me now!"
+
+"No, not yet. It's all your life and my life, you know, Dick. Give me a
+little while."
+
+"I go away to-morrow."
+
+"To-morrow?" she cried.
+
+"Yes, I go to Ajmere. I go to find my friend. I must go."
+
+Violet started. Into her eyes there crept a look of fear, and she
+was silent.
+
+"The Prince?" she asked with a queer suspense in her voice.
+
+"Yes--Shere Ali," and Dick became perceptibly embarrassed. "He is not as
+friendly to us as he used to be. There is some trouble," he said lamely.
+
+Violet looked him frankly in the face. It was not her habit to
+flinch. She read and understood his embarrassment. Yet her eyes met
+his quite steadily.
+
+"I am afraid that I am the trouble," she said quietly.
+
+Dick did not deny the truth of what she said. On the other hand, he had
+as yet no thought or word of blame for her. There was more for her to
+tell. He waited to hear it.
+
+"I tried to avoid him here in India, as I told you I meant to do," she
+said. "I thought he was safe in Chiltistan. I did not let him know that I
+was coming out. I did not write to him after I had landed. But he came
+down to Agra--and we met. There he asked me to marry him."
+
+"He asked _you!_" cried Linforth. "He must have been mad to think that
+such a thing was possible."
+
+"He was very unhappy," Violet Oliver explained. "I told him that it was
+impossible. But he would not see. I am afraid that is the cause of his
+unfriendliness."
+
+"Yes," said Dick. Then he was silent for a little while.
+
+"But you are not to blame," he added at length, in a quiet but decisive
+voice; and he turned as though the subject were now closed.
+
+But Violet was not content. She stayed him with a gesture. She was driven
+that night to speak out all the truth. Certainly he deserved that she
+should make no concealment. Moreover, the truth would put him to the
+test, would show to her how deep his passion ran. It might change his
+thoughts towards her, and so she would escape by the easiest way the
+difficult problem she had to solve. And the easiest way was the way which
+Violet Oliver always chose to take.
+
+"I am to blame," she said. "I took jewels from him in London. Yes." She
+saw Dick standing in front of her, silent and with a face quite
+inscrutable, and she lowered her head and spoke with the submission of a
+penitent to her judge. "He offered me jewels. I love them," and she
+spread out her hands. "Yes, I cannot help it. I am a foolish lover of
+beautiful things. I took them. I made no promises, he asked for none.
+There were no conditions, he stipulated for none. He just offered me the
+pearls, and I took them. But very likely he thought that my taking them
+meant more than it did."
+
+"And where are they now?" asked Dick.
+
+She was silent for a perceptible time. Then she said:
+
+"I sent them back." She heard Dick draw a breath of relief, and she went
+on quickly, as though she had been in doubt what she should say and now
+was sure. "The same night--after he had asked me to marry him--I packed
+them up and sent them to him."
+
+"He has them now, then?" asked Linforth.
+
+"I don't know. I sent them to Kohara. I did not know in what camp he was
+staying. I thought it likely he would go home at once."
+
+"Yes," said Dick.
+
+They turned and walked back towards the house. Dick did not speak. Violet
+was afraid. She walked by his side, stealing every now and then a look at
+his set face. It was dark; she could see little but the profile. But she
+imagined it very stern, and she was afraid. She regretted now that she
+had spoken. She felt now that she could not lose him.
+
+"Dick," she whispered timidly, laying a hand upon his arm; but he made no
+answer. The lighted windows of the house blazed upon the night. Would he
+reach the door, pass in and be gone the next morning without another word
+to her except a formal goodnight in front of the others?
+
+"Oh, Dick," she said again, entreatingly; and at that reiteration of his
+name he stopped.
+
+"I am very sorry," he said gently. "But I know quite well--others have
+taken presents from these princes. It is a pity.... One rather hates it.
+But you sent yours back," and he turned to her with a smile. "The others
+have not always done as much. Yes, you sent yours back."
+
+Violet Oliver drew a breath of relief. She raised her face towards his.
+She spoke with pleading lips.
+
+"I am forgiven then?"
+
+"Hush!"
+
+And in a moment she was in his arms. Passion swept her away. It seemed to
+her that new worlds were opening before her eyes. There were heights to
+walk upon for her--even for her who had never dreamed that she would even
+see them near. Their lips touched.
+
+"Oh, Dick," she murmured. Her hands were clasped about his neck. She hid
+her face against his coat, and when he would raise it she would not
+suffer him. But in a little while she drew herself apart, and, holding
+his hands, looked at him with a great pride.
+
+"My Dick," she said, and she laughed--a low sweet laugh of happiness
+which thrilled to the heart of her lover.
+
+"I'll tell you something," she said. "When I said good-bye to him--to the
+Prince--he asked me if I was going to marry you."
+
+"And you answered?"
+
+"That you hadn't asked me."
+
+"Now I have. Violet!" he whispered.
+
+But now she held him off, and suddenly her face grew serious.
+
+"Dick, I will tell you something," she said, "now, so that I may never
+tell you it again. Remember it, Dick! For both our sakes remember it!"
+
+"Well?" he asked. "What is it?"
+
+"Don't forgive so easily," she said very gravely, "when we both know that
+there is something real to be forgiven." She let go of his hands before
+he could answer, and ran from him up the steps into the house. Linforth
+saw no more of her that night.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+THE BREAKING OF THE PITCHER
+
+
+It is a far cry from Peshawur to Ajmere, and Linforth travelled in the
+train for two nights and the greater part of two days before he came to
+it. A little State carved out of Rajputana and settled under English
+rule, it is the place of all places where East and West come nearest to
+meeting. Within the walls of the city the great Dargah Mosque, with its
+shrine of pilgrimage and its ancient rites, lies close against the foot
+of the Taragarh Hill. Behind it the mass of the mountain rises steeply to
+its white crown of fortress walls. In front, its high bright-blue
+archway, a thing of cupolas and porticoes, faces the narrow street of the
+grain-sellers and the locksmiths. Here is the East, with its memories of
+Akbar and Shah Jehan, its fiery superstitions and its crudities of
+decoration. Gaudy chandeliers of coloured glass hang from the roof of a
+marble mosque, and though the marble may crack and no one give heed to
+it, the glass chandeliers will be carefully swathed in holland bags. Here
+is the East, but outside the city walls the pile of Mayo College rises
+high above its playing-grounds and gives to the princes and the chiefs of
+Rajputana a modern public school for the education of their sons.
+
+From the roof top of the college tower Linforth looked to the city
+huddled under the Taragarh Hill, and dimly made out the high archway of
+the mosque. He turned back to the broad playing-fields at his feet where
+a cricket match was going on. There was the true solution of the great
+problem, he thought.
+
+"Here at Ajmere," he said to himself, "Shere Ali could have learned what
+the West had to teach him. Had he come here he would have been spared the
+disappointments, and the disillusions. He would not have fallen in with
+Violet Oliver. He would have married and ruled in his own country."
+
+As it was, he had gone instead to Eton and to Oxford, and Linforth must
+needs search for him over there in the huddled city under the Taragarh
+Hill. Ralston's Pathan was even then waiting for Linforth at the bottom
+of the tower.
+
+"Sir," he said, making a low salaam when Linforth had descended, "His
+Highness Shere Ali is now in Ajmere. Every morning between ten and eleven
+he is to be found in a balcony above the well at the back of the Dargah
+Mosque, and to-morrow I will lead you to him."
+
+"Every morning!" said Linforth. "What does he do upon this balcony?"
+
+"He watches the well below, and the water-carriers descending with their
+jars," said the Pathan, "and he talks with his friends. That is all."
+
+"Very well," said Linforth. "To-morrow we will go to him."
+
+He passed up the steps under the blue portico a little before the hour on
+the next morning, and entered a stone-flagged court which was thronged
+with pilgrims. On each side of the archway a great copper vat was raised
+upon stone steps, and it was about these two vats that the crowd
+thronged. Linforth and his guide could hardly force their way through. On
+the steps of the vats natives, wrapped to the eyes in cloths to save
+themselves from burns, stood emptying the caldrons of boiling ghee. And
+on every side Linforth heard the name of Shere Ali spoken in praise.
+
+"What does it mean?" he asked of his guide, and the Pathan replied:
+
+"His Highness the Prince has made an offering. He has filled those
+caldrons with rice and butter and spices, as pilgrims of great position
+and honour sometimes do. The rice is cooked in the vats, and so many jars
+are set aside for the strangers, while the people of Indrakot have
+hereditary rights to what is left. Sir, it is an act of great piety to
+make so rich an offering."
+
+Linforth looked at the swathed men scrambling, with cries of pain, for
+the burning rice. He remembered how lightly Shere Ali had been wont to
+speak of the superstitions of the Mohammedans and in what contempt he
+held the Mullahs of his country. Not in those days would he have
+celebrated his pilgrimage to the shrine of Khwajah Mueeyinudin Chisti by
+a public offering of ghee.
+
+Linforth looked back upon the Indrakotis struggling and scrambling and
+burning themselves on the steps about the vast caldrons, and the crowd
+waiting and clamouring below. It was a scene grotesque enough in all
+conscience, but Linforth was never further from smiling than at this
+moment. A strong intuition made him grave.
+
+"Does this mark Shere Ali's return to the ways of his fathers?" he asked
+himself. "Is this his renunciation of the White People?"
+
+He moved forward slowly towards the inner archway, and the Pathan at his
+side gave a new turn to his thoughts.
+
+"Sir, that will be talked of for many months," the Pathan said. "The
+Prince will gain many friends who up till now distrust him."
+
+"It will be taken as a sign of faith?" asked Linforth.
+
+"And more than that," said the guide significantly. "This one thing
+done here in Ajmere to-day will be spread abroad through Chiltistan
+and beyond."
+
+Linforth looked more closely at the crowd. Yes, there were many men there
+from the hills beyond the Frontier to carry the news of Shere Ali's
+munificence to their homes.
+
+"It costs a thousand rupees at the least to fill one of those caldrons,"
+said the Pathan. "In truth, his Highness has done a wise thing if--"
+And he left the sentence unfinished.
+
+But Linforth could fill in the gap.
+
+"If he means to make trouble."
+
+But he did not utter the explanation aloud.
+
+"Let us go in," he said; and they passed through the high inner archway
+into the great court where the saint's tomb, gilded and decked out with
+canopies and marble, stands in the middle.
+
+"Follow me closely," said the Pathan. "There may be bad men. Watch any
+who approach you, and should one spit, I beseech your Excellency to
+pay no heed."
+
+The huge paved square, indeed, was thronged like a bazaar. Along the wall
+on the left hand booths were erected, where food and sweetmeats were
+being sold. Stone tombs dotted the enclosure; and amongst them men walked
+up and down, shouting and talking. Here and there big mango and peepul
+trees threw a welcome shade.
+
+The Pathan led Linforth to the right between the Chisti's tomb and the
+raised marble court surrounded by its marble balustrade in front of the
+long mosque of Shah Jehan. Behind the tomb there were more trees, and the
+shrine of a dancing saint, before which dancers from Chitral were moving
+in and out with quick and flying steps. The Pathan led Linforth quickly
+through the groups, and though here and there a man stood in their way
+and screamed insults, and here and there one walked along beside them
+with a scowling face and muttered threats, no one molested them.
+
+The Pathan turned to the right, mounted a few steps, and passed under a
+low stone archway. Linforth found himself upon a balcony overhanging a
+great ditch between the Dargah and Taragarh Hill. He leaned forward over
+the balustrade, and from every direction, opposite to him, below him,
+and at the ends, steps ran down to the bottom of the gulf--twisting and
+turning at every sort of angle, now in long lines, now narrow as a
+stair. The place had the look of some ancient amphitheatre. And at the
+bottom, and a little to the right of the balcony, was the mouth of an
+open spring.
+
+"The Prince is here, your Excellency."
+
+Linforth looked along the balcony. There were only three men standing
+there, in white robes, with white turbans upon their heads. The turban of
+one was hemmed with gold. There was gold, too, upon his robe.
+
+"No," said Linforth. "He has not yet come," and even as he turned again
+to look down into that strange gulf of steps the man with the gold-hemmed
+turban changed his attitude and showed Linforth the profile of his face.
+
+Linforth was startled.
+
+"Is that the Prince?" he exclaimed. He saw a man, young to be sure, but
+older than Shere Ali, and surely taller too. He looked more closely. That
+small carefully trimmed black beard might give the look of age, the long
+robe add to his height. Yes, it was Shere Ali. Linforth walked along the
+balcony, and as he approached, Shere Ali turned quickly towards him. The
+blood rushed into his dark face; he stood staring at Linforth like a man
+transfixed.
+
+Linforth held out his hand with a smile.
+
+"I hardly knew you again," he said.
+
+Shere Ali did not take the hand outstretched to him; he did not move;
+neither did he speak. He just stood with his eyes fixed upon Linforth.
+But there was recognition in his eyes, and there was something more.
+Linforth recalled something that Violet Oliver had told to him in the
+garden at Peshawur--"Are you going to marry Linforth?" That had been
+Shere Ali's last question when he had parted from her upon the steps of
+the courtyard of the Fort. Linforth remembered it now as he looked into
+Shere Ali's face. "Here is a man who hates me," he said to himself. And
+thus, for the first time since they had dined together in the mess-room
+at Chatham, the two friends met.
+
+"Surely you have not forgotten me, Shere Ali?" said Linforth, trying to
+force his voice in to a note of cheery friendliness. But the attempt was
+not very successful. The look of hatred upon Shere Ali's face had died
+away, it is true. But mere impassivity had replaced it. He had aged
+greatly during those months. Linforth recognised that clearly now. His
+face was haggard, his eyes sunken. He was a man, moreover. He had been
+little more than a boy when he had dined with Linforth in the mess-room
+at Chatham.
+
+"After all," Linforth continued, and his voice now really had something
+of genuine friendliness, for he understood that Shere Ali had
+suffered--had suffered deeply; and he was inclined to forgive his
+temerity in proposing marriage to Violet Oliver--"after all, it is not so
+much more than a year ago when we last talked together of our plans."
+
+Shere Ali turned to the younger of the two who stood beside him and spoke
+a few words in a tongue which Linforth did not yet understand. The
+youth--he was a youth with a soft pleasant voice, a graceful manner and
+something of the exquisite in his person--stepped smoothly forward and
+repeated the words to Linforth's Pathan.
+
+"What does he say?" asked Linforth impatiently. The Pathan translated:
+
+"His Highness the Prince would be glad to know what your Excellency means
+by interrupting him."
+
+Linforth flushed with anger. But he had his mission to fulfil, if it
+could be fulfilled.
+
+"What's the use of making this pretence?" he said to Shere Ali. "You and
+I know one another well enough."
+
+And as he ended, Shere Ali suddenly leaned over the balustrade of the
+balcony. His two companions followed the direction of his eyes; and both
+their faces became alert with some expectancy. For a moment Linforth
+imagined that Shere Ali was merely pretending to be absorbed in what he
+saw. But he, too, looked, and it grew upon him that here was some matter
+of importance--all three were watching in so eager a suspense.
+
+Yet what they saw was a common enough sight in Ajmere, or in any other
+town of India. The balcony was built out from a brick wall which fell
+sheer to the bottom of the foss. But at some little distance from the end
+of the balcony and at the head of the foss, a road from the town broke
+the wall, and a flight of steep steps descended to the spring. The steps
+descended along the wall first of all towards the balcony, and then just
+below the end of it they turned, so that any man going down to the well
+would have his face towards the people on the balcony for half the
+descent and his back towards them during the second half.
+
+A water-carrier with an earthen jar upon his head had appeared at the top
+of the steps a second before Shere Ali had turned so abruptly away from
+Linforth. It was this man whom the three were watching. Slowly he
+descended. The steps were high and worn, smooth and slippery. He went
+down with his left hand against the wall, and the lizards basking in the
+sunlight scuttled into their crevices as he approached. On his right hand
+the ground fell in a precipice to the bottom of the gulf. The three men
+watched him, and, it seemed to Linforth, with a growing excitement as he
+neared the turn of the steps. It was almost as though they waited for him
+to slip just at that turn, where a slip was most likely to occur.
+
+Linforth laughed at the thought, but the thought suddenly gained
+strength, nay, conviction in his mind. For as the water-carrier reached
+the bend, turned in safety and went down towards the well, there was a
+simultaneous movement made by the three--a movement of disappointment.
+Shere Ali did more than merely move. He struck his hand upon the
+balustrade and spoke impatiently. But he did not finish the sentence, for
+one of his companions looked significantly towards Linforth and his
+Pathan. Linforth stepped forward again.
+
+"Shere Ali," he said, "I want to speak to you. It is important that
+I should."
+
+Shere Ali leaned his elbows on the balustrade, and gazing across the foss
+to the Taragarh Hill, hummed to himself a tune.
+
+"Have you forgotten everything?" Linforth went on. He found it difficult
+to say what was in his mind. He seemed to be speaking to a stranger--so
+great a gulf was between them now--a gulf as wide, as impassable, as this
+one at his feet between the balcony and the Taragarh Hill. "Have you
+forgotten that night when we sat in the doorway of the hut under the
+Aiguilles d'Arve? I remember it very clearly. You said to me, of your own
+accord, 'We will always be friends. No man, no woman, shall come between
+us. We will work together and we will always be friends.'"
+
+By not so much as the flicker of an eyelid did Shere Ali betray that he
+heard the words. Linforth sought to revive that night so vividly that he
+needs must turn, needs must respond to the call, and needs must renew
+the pledge.
+
+"We sat for a long while that night, smoking our pipes on the step of the
+door. It was a dark night. We watched a planet throw its light upwards
+from behind the amphitheatre of hills on the left, and then rise clear to
+view in a gap. There was a smell of hay, like an English meadow, from the
+hut behind us. You pledged your friendship that night. It's not so very
+long ago--two years, that's all."
+
+He came to a stop with a queer feeling of shame. He remembered the night
+himself, and always had remembered it. But he was not given to sentiment,
+and here he had been talking sentiment and to no purpose.
+
+Shere Ali spoke again to his courtier, and the courtier stepped forward
+more bland than ever.
+
+"His Highness would like to know if his Excellency is still talking, and
+if so, why?" he said to the Pathan, who translated it.
+
+Linforth gave up the attempt to renew his friendship with Shere Ali. He
+must go back to Peshawur and tell Ralston that he had failed. Ralston
+would merely shrug his shoulders and express neither disappointment nor
+surprise. But it was a moment of bitterness to Linforth. He looked at
+Shere Ali's indifferent face, he listened for a second or two to the tune
+he still hummed, and he turned away. But he had not taken more than a
+couple of steps towards the entrance of the balcony when his guide
+touched him cautiously upon the elbow.
+
+Linforth stopped and looked back. The three men were once more gazing at
+the steps which led down from the road to the well. And once more a
+water-carrier descended with his great earthen jar upon his head. He
+descended very cautiously, but as he came to the turn of the steps his
+foot slipped suddenly.
+
+Linforth uttered a cry, but the man had not fallen. He had tottered for a
+moment, then he had recovered himself. But the earthen jar which he
+carried on his head had fallen and been smashed to atoms.
+
+Again the three made a simultaneous movement, but this time it was a
+movement of joy. Again an exclamation burst from Shere Ali's lips, but
+now it was a cry of triumph.
+
+He stood erect, and at once he turned to go. As he turned he met
+Linforth's gaze. All expression died out of his face, but he spoke to his
+young courtier, who fluttered forward sniggering with amusement.
+
+"His Highness would like to know if his Excellency is interested in a
+Road. His Highness thinks it a damn-fool road. His Highness much regrets
+that he cannot even let it go beyond Kohara. His Highness wishes his
+Excellency good-morning."
+
+Linforth made no answer to the gibe. He passed out into the courtyard,
+and from the courtyard through the archway into the grain-market.
+Opposite to him at the end of the street, a grass hill, with the chalk
+showing at one bare spot on the side of it, ridged up against the sky
+curiously like a fragment of the Sussex Downs. Linforth wondered whether
+Shere Ali had ever noticed the resemblance, and whether some recollection
+of the summer which he had spent at Poynings had ever struck poignantly
+home as he had stood upon these steps. Or were all these memories quite
+dead within his breast?
+
+In one respect Shere Ali was wrong. The Road would go on--now. Linforth
+had done his best to hinder it, as Ralston had bidden him to do, but he
+had failed, and the Road would go on to the foot of the Hindu Kush. Old
+Andrew Linforth's words came back to his mind:
+
+"Governments will try to stop it; but the power of the Road will be
+greater than the power of any Government. It will wind through valleys so
+deep that the day's sunshine is gone within the hour. It will be carried
+in galleries along the faces of the mountains, and for eight months of
+the year sections of it will be buried deep in snow. Yet it will be
+finished."
+
+How rightly Andrew Linforth had judged! But Dick for once felt no joy in
+the accuracy of the old man's forecast. He walked back through the city
+silent and with a heavy heart. He had counted more than he had thought
+upon Shere Ali's co-operation. His friendship for Shere Ali had grown
+into a greater and a deeper force than he had ever imagined it until this
+moment to be. He stopped with a sense of weariness and disillusionment,
+and then walked on again. The Road would never again be quite the bright,
+inspiring thing which it had been. The dream had a shadow upon it. In the
+Eton and Oxford days he had given and given and given so much of himself
+to Shere Ali that he could not now lightly and easily lose him altogether
+out of his life. Yet he must so lose him, and even then that was not all
+the truth. For they would be enemies, Shere Ali would be ruined and cast
+out, and his ruin would be the opportunity of the Road.
+
+He turned quickly to his companion.
+
+"What was it that the Prince said," he asked, "when the first of those
+water-carriers came down the steps and did not slip? He beat his hands
+upon the balustrade of the balcony and cried out some words. It seemed to
+me that his companion warned him of your presence, and that he stopped
+with the sentence half spoken."
+
+"That is the truth," Linforth's guide replied. "The Prince cried out in
+anger, 'How long must we wait?'"
+
+Linforth nodded his head.
+
+"He looked for the pitcher to fall and it did not fall," he said. "The
+breaking of the pitcher was to be a sign."
+
+"And the sign was given. Do not forget that, your Excellency. The sign
+was given."
+
+But what did the sign portend? Linforth puzzled his brains vainly over
+that problem. He had not the knowledge by which a man might cipher out
+the intrigues of the hill-folk beyond the Frontier. Did the breaking of
+the pitcher mean that some definite thing had been done in Chiltistan,
+some breaking of the British power? They might look upon the _Raj_ as a
+heavy burden on their heads, like an earthen pitcher and as easily
+broken. Ralston would know.
+
+"You must travel back to Peshawur to-night," said Linforth. "Go
+straight to his Excellency the Chief Commissioner and tell him all that
+you saw upon the balcony and all that you heard. If any man can
+interpret it, it will be he. Meanwhile, show me where the Prince Shere
+Ali lodges in Ajmere."
+
+The policeman led Linforth to a tall house which closed in at one end a
+short and narrow street.
+
+"It is here," he said.
+
+"Very well," said Linforth, "I will seek out the Prince again. I will
+stay in Ajmere and try by some way or another to have talk with him."
+
+But again Linforth was to fail. He stayed for some days in Ajmere, but
+could never gain admittance to the house. He was put off with the
+politest of excuses, delivered with every appearance of deep regret. Now
+his Highness was unwell and could see no one but his physician. At
+another time he was better--so much better, indeed, that he was giving
+thanks to Allah for the restoration of his health in the Mosque of Shah
+Jehan. Linforth could not reach him, nor did he ever see him in the
+streets of Ajmere.
+
+He stayed for a week, and then coming to the house one morning he found
+it shuttered. He knocked upon the door, but no one answered his summons;
+all the reply he got was the melancholy echo of an empty house.
+
+A Babu from the Customs Office, who was passing at the moment, stopped
+and volunteered information.
+
+"There is no one there, Mister," he said gravely. "All have skedaddled to
+other places."
+
+"The Prince Shere Ali, too?" asked Linforth.
+
+The Babu laughed contemptuously at the title.
+
+"Oho, the Prince! The Prince went away a week ago."
+
+Linforth turned in surprise.
+
+"Are you sure?" he asked.
+
+The Babu told him the very day on which Shere Ali had gone from Ajmere.
+It was on the day when the pitcher had fallen on the steps which led down
+to the well. Linforth had been tricked by the smiling courtier like any
+schoolboy.
+
+"Whither did the Prince go?"
+
+The Babu shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"How should I know? They are not of my people, these poor ignorant
+hill-folk."
+
+He went on his way. Linforth was left with the assurance that now,
+indeed, he had really failed. He took the train that night back to
+Peshawur.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+AN ARRESTED CONFESSION
+
+
+Linforth related the history of his failure to Ralston in the office
+at Peshawur.
+
+"Shere Ali went away on the day the pitcher was broken," he said. "It was
+the breaking of the pitcher which gave him the notice to go; I am sure of
+it. If one only knew what message was conveyed--" and Ralston handed to
+him a letter.
+
+The letter had been sent by the Resident at Kohara and had only this day
+reached Peshawur. Linforth took it and read it through. It announced that
+the son of Abdulla Mahommed had been murdered.
+
+"You see?" said Ralston. "He was shot in the back by one of his
+attendants when he was out after Markhor. He was the leader of the rival
+faction, and was bidding for the throne against Shere Ali. His murder
+clears the way. I have no doubt your friend is over the Lowari Pass by
+this time. There will be trouble in Chiltistan. I would have stopped
+Shere Ali on his way up had I known."
+
+"But you don't think Shere Ali had this man murdered!" cried Linforth.
+
+Ralston shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"Why not? What else was he waiting for from ten to eleven in the balcony
+above the well, except just for this news?"
+
+He stopped for a moment, and went on again in a voice which was
+very grave.
+
+"That seems to you horrible. I am very much afraid that another thing,
+another murder much more horrible, will be announced down to me in the
+next few days. The son of Abdulla Mahommed stood in Shere Ali's way a
+week ago and he is gone. But the way is still not clear. There's still
+another in his path."
+
+Linforth interpreted the words according to the gravity with which they
+were uttered.
+
+"His father!" he said, and Ralston nodded his head.
+
+"What can we do?" he cried. "We can threaten--but what is the use of
+threatening without troops? And we mayn't use troops. Chiltistan is an
+independent kingdom. We can advise, but we can't force them to follow our
+advice. We accept the status quo. That's the policy. So long as
+Chiltistan keeps the peace with us we accept Chiltistan as it is and as
+it may be. We can protect if our protection is asked. But our protection
+has not been asked. Why has Shere Ali fled so quickly back to his
+country? Tell me that if you can."
+
+None the less, however, Ralston telegraphed at once to the authorities at
+Lahore. Linforth, though he had failed to renew his old comradeship with
+Shere Ali, had not altogether failed. He had brought back news which
+Ralston counted as of great importance. He had linked up the murder in
+Chiltistan with the intrigues of Shere Ali. That the glare was rapidly
+broadening over that country of hills and orchards Ralston was very well
+aware. But it was evident now that at any moment the eruption might take
+place, and fire pour down the hills. In these terms he telegraphed to
+Lahore. Quietly and quickly, once more after twenty-five years, troops
+were being concentrated at Nowshera for a rush over the passes into
+Chiltistan. But even so Ralston was urgent that the concentration should
+be hurried.
+
+He sent a letter in cipher to the Resident at Kohara, bidding him to
+expect Shere Ali, and with Shere Ali the beginning of the trouble.
+
+He could do no more for the moment. So far as he could see he had taken
+all the precautions which were possible. But that night an event occurred
+in his own house which led him to believe that he had not understood the
+whole extent of the danger.
+
+It was Mrs. Oliver who first aroused his suspicions. The four of
+them--Ralston and his sister, Linforth and Violet Oliver were sitting
+quietly at dinner when Violet suddenly said:
+
+"It's a strange thing. Of course there's nothing really in it, and I am
+not at all frightened, but the last two nights, on going to bed, I have
+found that one of my windows was no longer bolted."
+
+Linforth looked up in alarm. Ralston's face, however, did not change.
+
+"Are you sure that it was bolted before?"
+
+"Yes, quite sure," said Violet. "The room is on the ground floor, and
+outside one of the windows a flight of steps leads down from the verandah
+to the ground. So I have always taken care to bolt them myself."
+
+"When?" asked Ralston.
+
+"After dressing for dinner," she replied. "It is the last thing I do
+before leaving the room."
+
+Ralston leaned back in his chair, as though a momentary anxiety were
+quite relieved.
+
+"It is one of the servants, no doubt," he said. "I will speak about it
+afterwards"; and for the moment the matter dropped.
+
+But Ralston returned to the subject before dinner was finished.
+
+"I don't think you need be uneasy, Mrs. Oliver," he said. "The house is
+guarded by sentinels, as no doubt you know. They are native levies, of
+course, but they are quite reliable"; and in this he was quite sincere.
+So long as they wore the uniform they would be loyal. The time might
+come when they would ask to be allowed to go home. That permission would
+be granted, and it was possible that they would be found in arms against
+the loyal troops immediately afterwards. But they would ask to be
+allowed to go first.
+
+"Still," he resumed, "if you carry valuable jewellery about with you, it
+would be as well, I think, if you locked it up."
+
+"I have very little jewellery, and that not valuable," said Violet, and
+suddenly her face flushed and she looked across the table at Linforth
+with a smile. The smile was returned, and a minute later the ladies rose.
+
+The two men were left alone to smoke.
+
+"You know Mrs. Oliver better than I do," said Ralston. "I will tell you
+frankly what I think. It may be a mere nothing. There may be no cause for
+anxiety at all. In any case anxiety is not the word" he corrected
+himself, and went on. "There is a perfectly natural explanation. The
+servants may have opened the window to air the room when they were
+preparing it for the night, and may easily have forgotten to latch the
+bolt afterwards."
+
+"Yes, I suppose that is the natural explanation," said Linforth, as he
+lit a cigar. "It is hard to conceive any other."
+
+"Theft," replied Ralston, "is the other explanation. What I said about
+the levies is true. I can rely on them. But the servants--that is perhaps
+a different question. They are Mahommedans all of them, and we hear a
+good deal about the loyalty of Mahommedans, don't we?" he said, with a
+smile. "They wear, if not a uniform, a livery. All these things are true.
+But I tell you this, which is no less true. Not one of those Mahommedan
+servants would die wearing the livery, acknowledging their service. Every
+one of them, if he fell ill, if he thought that he was going to die,
+would leave my service to-morrow. So I don't count on them so much.
+However, I will make some inquiries, and to-morrow we will move Mrs.
+Oliver to another room."
+
+He went about the business forthwith, and cross-examined his servants one
+after another. But he obtained no admission from any one of them. No one
+had touched the window. Was a single thing missing of all that the
+honourable lady possessed? On their lives, no!
+
+Meanwhile Linforth sought out Violet Oliver in the drawing-room. He found
+her alone, and she came eagerly towards him and took his hands.
+
+"Oh, Dick," she said, "I am glad you have come back. I am nervous."
+
+"There's no need," said Dick with a laugh. "Let us go out."
+
+He opened the window, but Violet drew back.
+
+"No, let us stay here," she said, and passing her arm through his she
+stared for a few moments with a singular intentness into the darkness of
+the garden.
+
+"Did you see anything?" he asked.
+
+"No," she replied, and he felt the tension of her body relax. "No,
+there's nothing. And since you have come back, Dick, I am no longer
+afraid." She looked up at him with a smile, and tightened her clasp upon
+his arm with a pretty air of ownership. "My Dick!" she said, and laughed.
+
+The door-handle rattled, and Violet proved that she had lost her fear.
+
+"That's Miss Ralston," she said. "Let us go out," and she slipped out of
+the window quickly. As quickly Linforth followed her. She was waiting for
+him in the darkness.
+
+"Dick," she said in a whisper, and she caught him close to her.
+
+"Violet."
+
+He looked up to the dark, clear, starlit sky and down to the sweet and
+gentle face held up towards his. That night and in this Indian garden, it
+seemed to him that his faith was proven and made good. With the sense of
+failure heavy upon his soul, he yet found here a woman whose trust was
+not diminished by any failure, who still looked to him with confidence
+and drew comfort and strength from his presence, even as he did from
+hers. Alone in the drawing-room she had been afraid; outside here in the
+garden she had no fear, and no room in her mind for any thought of fear.
+
+"When you spoke about your window to-night, Violet," he said gently,
+"although I was alarmed for you, although I was troubled that you should
+have cause for alarm--"
+
+"I saw that," said Violet with a smile.
+
+"Yet I never spoke."
+
+"Your eyes, your face spoke. Oh, my dear, I watch you," and she drew in a
+breath. "I am a little afraid of you." She did not laugh. There was
+nothing provocative in her accent. She spoke with simplicity and truth,
+now as often, what was set down to her for a coquetry by those who
+disliked her. Linforth was in no doubt, however. Mistake her as he did,
+he judged her in this respect more truly than the worldly-wise. She had
+at the bottom of her heart a great fear of her lover, a fear that she
+might lose him, a fear that he might hold her in scorn, if he knew her
+only half as well as she knew herself.
+
+"I don't want you to be afraid of me," he said, quietly. "There is no
+reason for it."
+
+"You are hard to others if they come in your way," she replied, and
+Linforth stopped. Yes, that was true. There was his mother in the house
+under the Sussex Downs. He had got his way. He was on the Frontier. The
+Road now would surely go on. It would be a strange thing if he did not
+manage to get some portion of that work entrusted to his hands. He had
+got his way, but he had been hard, undoubtedly.
+
+"It is quite true," he answered. "But I have had my lesson. You need not
+fear that I shall be anything but very gentle towards you."
+
+"In your thoughts?" she asked quickly. "That you will be gentle in word
+and in deed--yes, of that I am sure. But will you think gently of
+me--always? That is a different thing."
+
+"Of course," he answered with a laugh.
+
+But Violet Oliver was in no mood lightly to be put off.
+
+"Promise me that!" she cried in a low and most passionate voice. Her lips
+trembled as she pleaded; her dark eyes besought him, shining starrily.
+"Oh, promise that you will think of me gently--that if ever you are
+inclined to be hard and to judge me harshly, you will remember these two
+nights in the dark garden at Peshawur."
+
+"I shall not forget them," said Linforth, and there was no longer any
+levity in his tones. He spoke gravely, and more than gravely. There was a
+note of anxiety, as though he were troubled.
+
+"I promise," he said.
+
+"Thank you," said Violet simply; "for I know that you will keep
+the promise."
+
+"Yes, but you speak"--and the note of trouble was still more audible in
+Linforth's voice--"you speak as if you and I were going to part to-morrow
+morning for the rest of our lives."
+
+"No," Violet cried quickly and rather sharply. Then she moved on a
+step or two.
+
+"I interrupted you," she said. "You were saying that when I spoke about
+my window, although you were troubled on my account--"
+
+"I felt at the same time some relief," Linforth continued.
+
+"Relief?" she asked.
+
+"Yes; for on my return from Ajmere this morning I noticed a change in
+you." He felt at once Violet's hand shake upon his arm as she started;
+but she did not interrupt him by a word.
+
+"I noticed it at once when we met for the first time since we had talked
+together in the garden, for the first time since your hands had lain in
+mine and your lips touched mine. And afterwards it was still there."
+
+"What change?" Violet asked. But she asked the question in a stifled
+voice and with her face averted from him.
+
+"There was a constraint, an embarrassment," he said. "How can I explain
+it? I felt it rather than noticed it by visible signs. It seemed to me
+that you avoided being alone with me. I had a dread that you regretted
+the evening in the garden, that you were sorry we had agreed to live our
+lives together."
+
+Violet did not protest. She did not turn to him with any denial in her
+eyes. She walked on by his side with her face still turned away from his,
+and for a little while she walked in silence. Then, as if compelled, she
+suddenly stopped and turned. She spoke, too, as if compelled, with a kind
+of desperation in her voice.
+
+"Yes, you were right," she cried. "Oh, Dick, you were right. There was
+constraint, there was embarrassment. I will tell you the reason--now."
+
+"I know it," said Dick with a smile.
+
+Violet stared at him for a moment. She perceived his contentment. He was
+now quite unharassed by fear. There was no disappointment, no anger
+against her. She shook her head and said slowly:
+
+"You can't know it."
+
+"I do."
+
+"Tell me the reason then."
+
+"You were frightened by this business of the window."
+
+Violet made a movement. She was in the mood to contradict him. But he
+went on, and so the mood passed.
+
+"It was only natural. Here were you in a frontier town, a wild town on
+the borders of a wild country. A window bolted at dinner-time and
+unlocked at bedtime--it was easy to find something sinister in that. You
+did not like to speak of it, lest it should trouble your hosts. Yet it
+weighed on you. It occupied your thoughts."
+
+"And to that you put down my embarrassment?" she asked quietly. They had
+come again to the window of the drawing-room.
+
+"Yes, I do," he answered.
+
+She looked at him strangely for a few moments. But the compulsion which
+she had felt upon her a moment ago to speak was gone. She no longer
+sought to contradict him. Without a word she slipped into the
+drawing-room.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+THE THIEF
+
+
+Violet Oliver was harassed that night as she had never before been
+harassed at any moment of her easy life. She fled to her room. She stood
+in front of her mirror gazing helplessly at the reflection of her
+troubled face.
+
+"What shall I do?" she cried piteously. "What shall I do?"
+
+And it was not until some minutes had passed that she gave a thought to
+whether her window on this night was bolted or not.
+
+She moved quickly across the room and drew the curtains apart. This time
+the bolt was shot. But she did not turn back to her room. She let the
+curtains fall behind her and leaned her forehead against the glass. There
+was a moon to-night, and the quiet garden stretched in front of her a
+place of black shadows and white light. Whether a thief lurked in those
+shadows and watched from them she did not now consider. The rattle of a
+rifle from a sentry near at hand gave her confidence; and all her trouble
+lay in the house behind her.
+
+She opened her window and stepped out. "I tried to speak, but he would
+not listen. Oh, why did I ever come here?" she cried. "It would have been
+so easy not to have come."
+
+But even while she cried out her regrets, they were not all the truth.
+There was still alive within her the longing to follow the difficult
+way--the way of fire and stones, as it would be for her--if only she
+could! She had made a beginning that night. Yes, she had made a beginning
+though nothing had come of it. That was not her fault, she assured
+herself. She had tried to speak. But could she keep it up? She turned and
+twisted; she was caught in a trap. Passion had trapped her unawares.
+
+She went back to the room and bolted the window. Then again she stood in
+front of her mirror and gazed at herself in thought.
+
+Suddenly her face changed. She looked up; an idea took shape in her mind.
+"Theft," Ralston had said. Thus had he explained the unbolted window. She
+must lock up what jewels she had. She must be sure to do that. Violet
+Oliver looked towards the window and shivered. It was very silent in the
+room. Fear seized hold of her. It was a big room, and furtively she
+peered into the corners lest already hidden behind some curtain the thief
+should be there.
+
+But always her eyes returned to the window. If she only dared! She ran to
+her trunks. From one of them she took out from its deep hiding-place a
+small jewel-case, a jewel-case very like to that one which a few months
+ago she had sealed up in her tent and addressed to Kohara. She left it on
+her dressing-table. She did not open it. Then she looked about her again.
+It would be the easy way--if only she dared! It would be an easier way
+than trying again to tell her lover what she would have told him
+to-night, had he only been willing to listen.
+
+She stood and listened, with parted lips. It seemed to her that even in
+this lighted room people, unseen people, breathed about her. Then, with a
+little sob in her throat, she ran to the window and shot back the bolt.
+She undressed hurriedly, placed a candle by her bedside and turned out
+the electric lights. As soon as she was in bed she blew out the candle.
+She lay in the darkness, shivering with fear, regretting what she had
+done. Every now and then a board cracked in the corridor outside the
+room, as though beneath a stealthy footstep. And once inside the room the
+door of a wardrobe sprang open. She would have cried out, but terror
+paralysed her throat; and the next moment she heard the tread of the
+sentry outside her window. The sound reassured her. There was safety in
+the heavy regularity of the steps. It was a soldier who was passing, a
+drilled, trustworthy soldier. "Trustworthy" was the word which the
+Commissioner had used. And lulled by the soldier's presence in the garden
+Violet Oliver fell asleep.
+
+But she waked before dawn. The room was still in darkness. The moon had
+sunk. Not a ray of light penetrated from behind the curtains. She lay for
+a little while in bed, listening, wondering whether that window had been
+opened. A queer longing came upon her--a longing to thrust back the
+curtains, so that--if anything happened--she might see. That would be
+better than lying here in the dark, knowing nothing, seeing nothing,
+fearing everything. If she pulled back the curtains, there would be a
+panel of dim light visible, however dark the night.
+
+The longing became a necessity. She could not lie there. She sprang out
+of bed, and hurried across towards the window. She had not stopped to
+light her candle and she held her hands outstretched in front of her.
+Suddenly, as she was half-way across the room, her hands touched
+something soft.
+
+She drew them back with a gasp of fright and stood stone-still,
+stone-cold. She had touched a human face. Already the thief was in the
+room. She stood without a cry, without a movement, while her heart leaped
+and fluttered within her bosom. She knew in that moment the extremity of
+mortal fear.
+
+A loud scratch sounded sharply in the room. A match spurted into flame,
+and above the match there sprang into view, framed in the blackness of
+the room, a wild and menacing dark face. The eyes glittered at her, and
+suddenly a hand was raised as if to strike. And at the gesture Violet
+Oliver found her voice.
+
+She screamed, a loud shrill scream of terror, and even as she screamed,
+in the very midst of her terror, she saw that the hand was lowered, and
+that the threatening face smiled. Then the match went out and darkness
+cloaked her and cloaked the thief again. She heard a quick stealthy
+movement, and once more her scream rang out. It seemed to her ages before
+any answer came, before she heard the sound of hurrying footsteps in the
+corridors. There was a loud rapping upon her door. She ran to it. She
+heard Ralston's voice.
+
+"What is it? Open! Open!" and then in the garden the report of a rifle
+rang loud.
+
+She turned up the lights, flung a dressing-gown about her shoulders and
+opened the door. Ralston was in the passage, behind him she saw lights
+strangely wavering and other faces. These too wavered strangely. From
+very far away, she heard Ralston's voice once more.
+
+"What is it? What is it?"
+
+And then she fell forward against him and sank in a swoon upon the floor.
+
+Ralston lifted her on to her bed and summoned her maid. He went out of
+the house and made inquiries of the guard. The sentry's story was
+explicit and not to be shaken by any cross-examination. He had patrolled
+that side of the house in which Mrs. Oliver's room lay, all night. He had
+seen nothing. At one o'clock in the morning the moon sank and the night
+became very dark. It was about three when a few minutes after passing
+beneath the verandah, and just as he had turned the corner of the house,
+he heard a shrill scream from Mrs. Oliver's room. He ran back at once,
+and as he ran he heard a second scream. He saw no one, but he heard a
+rustling and cracking in the bushes as though a fugitive plunged through.
+He fired in the direction of the noise and then ran with all speed to the
+spot. He found no one, but the bushes were broken.
+
+Ralston went back into the house and knocked at Mrs. Oliver's door. The
+maid opened it.
+
+"How is Mrs. Oliver?" he asked, and he heard Violet herself reply faintly
+from the room:
+
+"I am better, thank you. I was a little frightened, that's all."
+
+"No wonder," said Ralston, and he spoke again to the maid. "Has anything
+gone? Has anything been stolen? There was a jewel-case upon the
+dressing-table. I saw it."
+
+The maid looked at him curiously, before she answered. "Nothing has
+been touched."
+
+Then, with a glance towards the bed, the maid stooped quickly to a trunk
+which stood against the wall close by the door and then slipped out of
+the room, closing the door behind her. The corridors were now lighted up,
+as though it were still evening and the household had not yet gone to
+bed. Ralston saw that the maid held a bundle in her hands.
+
+"I do not think," she said in a whisper, "that the thief came to steal
+any thing." She laid some emphasis upon the word.
+
+Ralston took the bundle from her hands and stared at it.
+
+"Good God!" he muttered. He was astonished and more than astonished.
+There was something of horror in his low exclamation. He looked at the
+maid. She was a woman of forty. She had the look of a capable woman. She
+was certainly quite self-possessed.
+
+"Does your mistress know of this?" he asked.
+
+The maid shook her head.
+
+"No, sir. I saw it upon the floor before she came to. I hid it between
+the trunk and the wall." She spoke with an ear to the door of the room in
+which Violet lay, and in a low voice.
+
+"Good!" said Ralston. "You had better tell her nothing of it for the
+present. It would only frighten her"; as he ended he heard Violet
+Oliver call out:
+
+"Adela! Adela!"
+
+"Mrs. Oliver wants me," said the maid, as she slipped back into
+the bedroom.
+
+Ralston walked slowly back down the corridor into the great hall. He was
+carrying the bundle in his hands and his face was very grave. He saw Dick
+Linforth in the hall, and before he spoke he looked upwards to the
+gallery which ran round it. Even when he had assured himself that there
+was no one listening, he spoke in a low voice.
+
+"Do you see this, Linforth?"
+
+He held out the bundle. There was a thick cloth, a sort of pad of cotton,
+and some thin strong cords.
+
+"These were found in Mrs. Oliver's room."
+
+He laid the things upon the table and Linforth turned them over, startled
+as Ralston had been.
+
+"I don't understand," he said.
+
+"They were left behind," said Ralston.
+
+"By the thief?"
+
+"If he was a thief"; and again Linforth said:
+
+"I don't understand."
+
+But there was now more of anger, more of horror in his voice, than
+surprise; and as he spoke he took up the pad of cotton wool.
+
+"You do understand," said Ralston, quietly.
+
+Linforth's fingers worked. That pad of cotton seemed to him more sinister
+than even the cords.
+
+"For her!" he cried, in a quiet but dangerous voice. "For Violet," and at
+that moment neither noticed his utterance of her Christian name. "Let me
+only find the man who entered her room."
+
+Ralston looked steadily at Linforth.
+
+"Have you any suspicion as to who the man is?" he asked.
+
+There was a momentary silence in that quiet hall. Both men stood looking
+at each other.
+
+"It can't be," said Linforth, at length. But he spoke rather to himself
+than to Ralston. "It can't be."
+
+Ralston did not press the question.
+
+"It's the insolence of the attempt which angers me," he said. "We must
+wait until Mrs. Oliver can tell us what happened, what she saw.
+Meanwhile, she knows nothing of those things. There is no need that she
+should know."
+
+He left Linforth standing in the hall and went up the stairs. When he
+reached the gallery, he leaned over quietly and looked down.
+
+Linforth was still standing by the table, fingering the cotton-pad.
+
+Ralston heard him say again in a voice which was doubtful now rather than
+incredulous:
+
+"It can't be he! He would not dare!"
+
+But no name was uttered.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX
+
+MRS. OLIVER RIDES THROUGH PESHAWUR
+
+
+Violet Oliver told her story later during that day. But there was a
+certain hesitation in her manner which puzzled Ralston, at all events,
+amongst her audience.
+
+"When you went to your room," he asked, "did you find the window again
+unbolted?"
+
+"No," she replied. "It was really my fault last night. I felt the heat
+oppressive. I opened the window myself and went out on to the verandah.
+When I came back I think that I did not bolt it."
+
+"You forgot?" asked Ralston in surprise.
+
+But this was not the only surprising element in the story.
+
+"When you touched the man, he did not close with you, he made no effort
+to silence you," Ralston said. "That is strange enough. But that he
+should strike a match, that he should let you see his face quite
+clearly--that's what I don't understand. It looks, Mrs. Oliver, as if he
+almost wanted you to recognise him."
+
+Ralston turned in his chair sharply towards her. "Did you recognise
+him?" he asked.
+
+"Yes," Violet Oliver replied. "At least I think I did. I think that I had
+seen him before."
+
+Here at all events it was clear that she was concealing nothing. She was
+obviously as puzzled as Ralston was himself.
+
+"Where had you seen him?" he asked, and the answer increased his
+astonishment.
+
+"In Calcutta," she answered. "It was the same man or one very like
+him. I saw him on three successive evenings in the Maidan when I was
+driving there."
+
+"In Calcutta?" cried Ralston. "Some months ago, then?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"How did you come to notice him in the Maidan?" Mrs. Oliver shivered
+slightly as she answered:
+
+"He seemed to be watching me. I thought so at the time. It made me
+uncomfortable. Now I am sure. He _was_ watching me," and she suddenly
+came forward a step.
+
+"I should like to go away to-day if you and your sister won't mind,"
+she pleaded.
+
+Ralston's forehead clouded.
+
+"Of course, I quite understand," he said, "and if you wish to go we can't
+prevent you. But you leave us rather helpless, don't you?--as you alone
+can identify the man. Besides, you leave yourself too in danger."
+
+"But I shall go far away," she urged. "As it is I am going back to
+England in a month."
+
+"Yes," Ralston objected. "But you have not yet started, and if the man
+followed you from Calcutta to Peshawur, he may follow you from Peshawur
+to Bombay."
+
+Mrs. Oliver drew back with a start of terror and Ralston instantly took
+back his words.
+
+"Of course, we will take care of you on your way south. You may rely on
+that," he said with a smile. "But if you could bring yourself to stay
+here for a day or two I should be much obliged. You see, it is impossible
+to fix the man's identity from a description, and it is really important
+that he should be caught."
+
+"Yes, I understand," said Violet Oliver, and she reluctantly
+consented to stay.
+
+"Thank you," said Ralston, and he looked at her with a smile. "There is
+one more thing which I should like you to do. I should like you to ride
+out with me this afternoon through Peshawur. The story of last night will
+already be known in the bazaars. Of that you may be very sure. And it
+would be a good thing if you were seen to ride through the city quite
+unconcerned."
+
+Violet Oliver drew back from the ordeal which Ralston so calmly
+proposed to her.
+
+"I shall be with you," he said. "There will be no danger--or at
+all events no danger that Englishwomen are unprepared to face in
+this country."
+
+The appeal to her courage served Ralston's turn. Violet raised her head
+with a little jerk of pride.
+
+"Certainly I will ride with you this afternoon through Peshawur," she
+said; and she went out of the room and left Ralston alone.
+
+He sat at his desk trying to puzzle out the enigma of the night. The more
+he thought upon it, the further he seemed from any solution. There was
+the perplexing behaviour of Mrs. Oliver herself. She had been troubled,
+greatly troubled, to find her window unbolted on two successive nights
+after she had taken care to bolt it. Yet on the third night she actually
+unbolts it herself and leaving it unbolted puts out her light and goes to
+bed. It seemed incredible that she should so utterly have forgotten her
+fears. But still more bewildering even than her forgetfulness was the
+conduct of the intruder.
+
+Upon that point he took Linforth into his counsels.
+
+"I can't make head or tail of it," he cried. "Here the fellow is in the
+dark room with his cords and the thick cloth and the pad. Mrs. Oliver
+touches him. He knows that his presence is revealed to her. She is within
+reach. And she stands paralysed by fear, unable to cry out. Yet he does
+nothing, except light a match and give her a chance to recognise his
+face. He does not seize her, he does not stifle her voice, as he could
+have done--yes, as he could have done, before she could have uttered a
+cry. He strikes a match and shows her his face."
+
+"So that he might see hers," said Linforth. Ralston shook his head. He
+was not satisfied with that explanation. But Linforth had no other to
+offer. "Have you any clue to the man?"
+
+"None," said Ralston.
+
+He rode out with Mrs. Oliver that afternoon down from his house to the
+Gate of the City. Two men of his levies rode at a distance of twenty
+paces behind them. But these were his invariable escort. He took no
+unusual precautions. There were no extra police in the streets. He went
+out with his guest at his side for an afternoon ride as if nothing
+whatever had occurred. Mrs. Oliver played her part well. She rode with
+her head erect and her eyes glancing boldly over the crowded streets.
+Curious glances were directed at her, but she met them without agitation.
+Ralston observed her with a growing admiration.
+
+"Thank you," he said warmly. "I know this can hardly be a pleasant
+experience for you. But it is good for these people here to know that
+nothing they can do will make any difference--no not enough to alter the
+mere routine of our lives. Let us go forward."
+
+They turned to the left at the head of the main thoroughfare, and passed
+at a walk, now through the open spaces where the booths were erected, now
+through winding narrow streets between high houses. Violet Oliver, though
+she held her head high and her eyes were steady, rode with a fluttering
+heart. In front of them, about them, and behind them the crowd of people
+thronged, tribesmen from the hills, Mohammedans and Hindus of the city;
+from the upper windows the lawyers and merchants looked down upon them;
+and Violet held all of them in horror.
+
+The occurrence of last night had inflicted upon her a heavier shock than
+either Ralston imagined or she herself had been aware until she had
+ridden into the town. The dark wild face suddenly springing into view
+above the lighted match was as vivid and terrible to her still, as a
+nightmare to a child. She was afraid that at any moment she might see
+that face again in the throng of faces. Her heart sickened with dread at
+the thought, and even though she should not see him, at every step she
+looked upon twenty of his like--kinsmen, perhaps, brothers in blood and
+race. She shrank from them in repulsion and she shrank from them in fear.
+Every nerve of her body seemed to cry out against the folly of this ride.
+
+What were they two and the two levies behind them against the throng?
+Four at the most against thousands at the least.
+
+She touched Ralston timidly on the arm.
+
+"Might we go home now?" she asked in a voice which trembled; and he
+looked suddenly and anxiously into her face.
+
+"Certainly," he said, and he wheeled his horse round, keeping close to
+her as she wheeled hers.
+
+"It is all right," he said, and his voice took on an unusual
+friendliness. "We have not far to go. It was brave of you to have come,
+and I am very grateful. We ask much of the Englishwomen in India, and
+because they never fail us, we are apt to ask too much. I asked too much
+of you." Violet responded to the flick at her national pride. She drew
+herself up and straightened her back.
+
+"No," she said, and she actually counterfeited a smile. "No. It's
+all right."
+
+"I asked more than I had a right to ask," he continued remorsefully. "I
+am sorry. I have lived too much amongst men. That's my trouble. One
+becomes inconsiderate to women. It's ignorance, not want of good-will.
+Look!" To distract her thoughts he began to point her out houses and
+people which were of interest.
+
+"Do you see that sign there, 'Bahadur Gobind, Barrister-at-Law, Cambridge
+B.A.,' on the first floor over the cookshop? Yes, he is the genuine
+article. He went to Cambridge and took his degree and here he is back
+again. Take him for all in all, he is the most seditious man in the city.
+Meanly seditious. It only runs to writing letters over a pseudonym in the
+native papers. Now look up. Do you see that very respectable
+white-bearded gentleman on the balcony of his house? Well, his
+daughter-in-law disappeared one day when her husband was away from
+home--disappeared altogether. It had been a great grief to the old
+gentleman that she had borne no son to inherit the family fortune. So
+naturally people began to talk. She was found subsequently under the
+floor of the house, and it cost that respectable old gentleman twenty
+thousand rupees to get himself acquitted."
+
+Ralston pulled himself up with a jerk, realising that this was not the
+most appropriate story which he could have told to a lady with the
+overstrained nerves of Mrs. Oliver.
+
+He turned to her with a fresh apology upon his lips. But the apology was
+never spoken.
+
+"What's the matter, Mrs. Oliver?" he asked.
+
+She had not heard the story of the respectable old gentleman. That was
+clear. They were riding through an open oblong space of ground dotted
+with trees. There were shops down the middle, two rows backing upon a
+stream, and shops again at the sides. Mrs. Oliver was gazing with a
+concentrated look across the space and the people who crowded it towards
+an opening of an alley between two houses. But fixed though her gaze was,
+there was no longer any fear in her eyes. Rather they expressed a keen
+interest, a strong curiosity.
+
+Ralston's eyes followed the direction of her gaze. At the corner of the
+alley there was a shop wherein a man sat rounding a stick of wood with a
+primitive lathe. He made the lathe revolve by working a stringed bow with
+his right hand, while his left hand worked the chisel and his right foot
+directed it. His limbs were making three different motions with an
+absence of effort which needed much practice, and for a moment Ralston
+wondered whether it was the ingenuity of the workman which had attracted
+her. But in a moment he saw that he was wrong.
+
+There were two men standing in the mouth of the alley, both dressed in
+white from head to foot. One stood a little behind with the hood of his
+cloak drawn forward over his head, so that it was impossible to discern
+his face. The other stood forward, a tall slim man with the elegance and
+the grace of youth. It was at this man Violet Oliver was looking.
+
+Ralston looked again at her, and as he looked the colour rose into her
+cheeks; there came a look of sympathy, perhaps of pity, into her eyes.
+Almost her lips began to smile. Ralston turned his head again towards the
+alley, and he started in his saddle. The young man had raised his head.
+He was gazing fixedly towards them. His features were revealed and
+Ralston knew them well.
+
+He turned quickly to Mrs. Oliver.
+
+"You know that man?"
+
+The colour deepened upon her face.
+
+"It is the Prince of Chiltistan."
+
+"But you know him?" Ralston insisted.
+
+"I have met him in London," said Violet Oliver.
+
+So Shere Ali was in Peshawur, when he should have been in
+Chiltistan! "Why?"
+
+Ralston put the question to himself and looked to his companion for the
+answer. The colour upon her face, the interest, the sympathy of her eyes
+gave him the answer. This was the woman, then, whose image stood before
+Shere Ali's memories and hindered him from marrying one of his own race!
+Just with that sympathy and that keen interest does a woman look upon the
+man who loves her and whose love she does not return. Moreover, there was
+Linforth's hesitation. Linforth had admitted there was an Englishwoman
+for whom Shere Ali cared, had admitted it reluctantly, had extenuated her
+thoughtlessness, had pleaded for her. Oh, without a doubt Mrs. Oliver was
+the woman!
+
+There flashed before Ralston's eyes the picture of Linforth standing in
+the hall, turning over the cords and the cotton pad and the thick cloth.
+Ralston looked down again upon him from the gallery and heard his voice,
+saying in a whisper:
+
+"It can't be he! It can't be he!"
+
+What would Linforth say when he knew that Shere Ali was lurking in
+Peshawur?
+
+Ralston was still gazing at Shere Ali when the man behind the Prince made
+a movement. He flung back the hood from his face, and disclosing his
+features looked boldly towards the riders.
+
+A cry rang out at Ralston's side, a woman's cry. He turned in his saddle
+and saw Violet Oliver. The colour had suddenly fled from her cheeks. They
+were blanched. The sympathy had gone from her eyes, and in its place,
+stark terror looked out from them. She swayed in her saddle.
+
+"Do you see that man?" she cried, pointing with her hand. "The man behind
+the Prince. The man who has thrown back his cloak."
+
+"Yes, yes, I see him," answered Ralston impatiently.
+
+"It was he who crept into my room last night."
+
+"You are sure?"
+
+"Could I forget? Could I forget?" she cried; and at that moment, the man
+touched Shere Ali on the sleeve, and they both fled out of sight into
+the alley.
+
+There was no doubt left in Ralston's mind. It was Shere Ali who had
+planned the abduction of Mrs. Oliver. It was his companion who had failed
+to carry it out. Ralston turned to the levies behind him.
+
+"Quick! Into that valley! Fetch me those two men who were standing
+there!"
+
+The two levies pressed their horses through the crowd, but the alley was
+empty when they came to it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX
+
+THE NEEDED IMPLEMENT
+
+
+Ralston rode home with an uncomfortable recollection of the little
+dinner-party in Calcutta at which Hatch had told his story of the
+Englishwoman in Mecca. Had that story fired Shere Ali? The time for
+questions had passed; but none the less this particular one would force
+itself into the front of his mind.
+
+"I would have done better never to have meddled," he said to himself
+remorsefully--even while he gave his orders for the apprehension of
+Shere Ali and his companion. For he did not allow his remorse to hamper
+his action; he set a strong guard at the gates of the city, and gave
+orders that within the gates the city should be methodically searched
+quarter by quarter.
+
+"I want them both laid by the heels," he said; "but, above all, the
+Prince. Let there be no mistake. I want Shere Ali lodged in the gaol here
+before nightfall"; and Linforth's voice broke in rapidly upon his words.
+
+"Can I do anything to help? What can I do?"
+
+Ralston looked sharply up from his desk. There had been a noticeable
+eagerness, a noticeable anger in Linforth's voice.
+
+"You?" said Ralston quietly. "_You_ want to help? You were Shere
+Ali's friend."
+
+Ralston smiled as he spoke, but there was no hint of irony in either
+words or smile. It was a smile rather of tolerance, and almost of
+regret--the smile of a man who was well accustomed to seeing the flowers
+and decorative things of life wither over-quickly, and yet was still
+alert and not indifferent to the change. His work for the moment was
+done. He leaned back thoughtfully in his chair. He no longer looked at
+Linforth. His one quick glance had shown him enough.
+
+"So it's all over, eh?" he said, as he played with his paper-knife.
+"Summer mornings on the Cherwell. Travels in the Dauphiné. The Meije and
+the Aiguilles d'Arves. Oh, I know." Linforth moved as he stood at the
+side of Ralston's desk, but the set look upon his face did not change.
+And Ralston went on. There came a kind of gentle mockery into his voice.
+"The shared ambitions, the concerted plans--gone, and not even a regret
+for them left, eh? _Tempi passati!_ Pretty sad, too, when you come to
+think of it."
+
+But Linforth made no answer to Ralston's probings. Violet Oliver's
+instincts had taught her the truth, which Ralston was now learning.
+Linforth could be very hard. There was nothing left of the friendship
+which through many years had played so large a part in his life. A woman
+had intervened, and Linforth had shut the door upon it, had sealed his
+mind against its memories, and his heart against its claims. The evening
+at La Grave in the Dauphiné had borne its fruit. Linforth stood there
+white with anger against Shere Ali, hot to join in the chase. Ralston
+understood that if ever he should need a man to hunt down that quarry
+through peril and privations, here at his hand was the man on whom he
+could rely.
+
+Linforth's eager voice broke in again.
+
+"What can I do to help?"
+
+Ralston looked up once more.
+
+"Nothing--for the moment. If Shere Ali is captured in
+Peshawur--nothing at all."
+
+"But if he escapes."
+
+Ralston shrugged his shoulders. Then he filled his pipe and lit it.
+
+"If he escapes--why, then, your turn may come. I make no promises," he
+added quickly, as Linforth, by a movement, betrayed his satisfaction.
+"It is not, indeed, in my power to promise. But there may come work
+for you--difficult work, dangerous work, prolonged work. For this
+outrage can't go unpunished. In any case," he ended with a smile, "the
+Road goes on."
+
+He turned again to his office-table, and Linforth went out of the room.
+
+The task which Ralston had in view for Linforth came by a long step
+nearer that night. For all night the search went on throughout the
+city, and the searchers were still empty-handed in the morning. Ahmed
+Ismail had laid his plans too cunningly. Shere Ali was to be
+compromised, not captured. There was to be a price upon his head, but
+the head was not to fall. And while the search went on from quarter to
+quarter of Peshawur, the Prince and his attendant were already out in
+the darkness upon the hills.
+
+Ralston telegraphed to the station on the Malakand Pass, to the fort at
+Jamrud, even to Landi Khotal, at the far end of the Khyber Pass, but
+Shere Ali had not travelled along any one of the roads those positions
+commanded.
+
+"I had little hope indeed that he would," said Ralston with a shrug
+of the shoulders. "He has given us the slip. We shall not catch up
+with him now."
+
+He was standing with Linforth at the mouth of the well which irrigated
+his garden. The water was drawn up after the Persian plan. A wooden
+vertical wheel wound up the bucket, and this wheel was made to revolve by
+a horizontal wheel with the spokes projecting beyond the rim and fitting
+into similar spokes upon the vertical wheel. A bullock, with a bandage
+over its eyes, was harnessed to the horizontal wheel, and paced slowly
+round and round, turning it; while a boy sat on the bullock's back and
+beat it with a stick. Both men stood and listened to the groaning and
+creaking of the wheels for a few moments, and then Linforth said:
+
+"So, after all, you mean to let him go?"
+
+"No, indeed," answered Ralston. "Only now we shall have to fetch him out
+of Chiltistan."
+
+"Will they give him up?"
+
+Ralston shook his head.
+
+"No." He turned to Linforth with a smile. "I once heard the Political
+Officer described as the man who stands between the soldier and his
+medal. Well, I have tried to stand just in that spot as far as Chiltistan
+is concerned. But I have not succeeded. The soldier will get his medal in
+Chiltistan this year. I have had telegrams this morning from Lahore. A
+punitive force has been gathered at Nowshera. The preparations have been
+going on quietly for a few weeks. It will start in a few days. I shall go
+with it as Political Officer."
+
+"You will take me?" Linforth asked eagerly.
+
+"Yes," Ralston answered. "I mean to take you. I told you yesterday there
+might be service for you."
+
+"In Chiltistan?"
+
+"Or beyond," replied Ralston. "Shere Ali may give us the slip again."
+
+He was thinking of the arid rocky borders of Turkestan, where flight
+would be easy and where capture would be most difficult. It was to that
+work that Ralston, looking far ahead, had in his mind dedicated young
+Linforth, knowing well that he would count its difficulties light in the
+ardour of his pursuit. Anger would spur him, and the Road should be held
+out as his reward. Ralston listened again to the groaning of the
+water-wheel, and watched the hooded bullock circle round and round with
+patient unvarying pace, and the little boy on its back making no
+difference whatever with a long stick.
+
+"Look!" he said. "There's an emblem of the Indian administration. The
+wheels creak and groan, the bullock goes on round and round with a
+bandage over its eyes, and the little boy on its back cuts a fine
+important figure and looks as if he were doing ever so much, and somehow
+the water comes up--that's the great thing, the water is fetched up
+somehow and the land watered. When I am inclined to be despondent, I come
+and look at my water-wheel." He turned away and walked back to the house
+with his hands folded behind his back and his head bent forward.
+
+"You are despondent now?" Linforth asked.
+
+"Yes," replied Ralston, with a rare and sudden outburst of confession.
+"You, perhaps, will hardly understand. You are young. You have a career
+to make. You have particular ambitions. This trouble in Chiltistan is
+your opportunity. But it's my sorrow--it's almost my failure." He turned
+his face towards Linforth with a whimsical smile. "I have tried to stand
+between the soldier and his medal. I wanted to extend our political
+influence there--yes. Because that makes for peace, and it makes for good
+government. The tribes lose their fear that their independence will be
+assailed, they come in time to the Political Officer for advice, they lay
+their private quarrels and feuds before him for arbitration. That has
+happened in many valleys, and I had always a hope that though Chiltistan
+has a ruling Prince, the same sort of thing might in time happen there.
+Yes, even at the cost of the Road," and again his very taking smile
+illumined for a moment his worn face. "But that hope is gone now. A force
+will go up and demand Shere Ali. Shere Ali will not be given up. Even
+were the demand not made, it would make no difference. He will not be
+many days in Chiltistan before Chiltistan is in arms. Already I have sent
+a messenger up to the Resident, telling him to come down."
+
+"And then?" asked Linforth.
+
+Ralston shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"More or less fighting, more or less loss, a few villages burnt, and the
+only inevitable end. We shall either take over the country or set up
+another Prince."
+
+"Set up another Prince?" exclaimed Linforth in a startled voice. "In
+that case--"
+
+Ralston broke in upon him with a laugh.
+
+"Oh, man of one idea, in any case the Road will go on to the foot of
+the Hindu Kush. That's the price which Chiltistan must pay as security
+for future peace--the military road through Kohara to the foot of the
+Hindu Kush."
+
+Linforth's face cleared, and he said cheerfully:
+
+"It's strange that Shere Ali doesn't realise that himself."
+
+The cheerfulness of his voice, as much as his words, caused Ralston to
+stop and turn upon his companion in a moment of exasperation.
+
+"Perhaps he does." he exclaimed, and then he proceeded to pay a tribute
+to the young Prince of Chiltistan which took Linforth fairly by surprise.
+
+"Don't you understand--you who know him, you who grew up with him, you
+who were his friend? He's a man. I know these hill-people, and like every
+other Englishman who has served among them, I love them--knowing their
+faults. Shere Ali has the faults of the Pathan, or some of them. He has
+their vanity; he has, if you like, their fanaticism. But he's a man. He's
+flattered and petted like a lap-dog, he's played with like a toy. Well,
+he's neither a lap-dog nor a toy, and he takes the flattery and the
+petting seriously. He thinks it's _meant_, and he behaves accordingly.
+What, then? The toy is thrown down on the ground, the lap-dog is kicked
+into the corner. But he's not a lap-dog, he's not a toy. He's a man. He
+has a man's resentments, a man's wounded heart, a man's determination not
+to submit to flattery one moment and humiliation the next. So he strikes.
+He tries to take the white, soft, pretty thing which has been dangled
+before his eyes and snatched away--he tries to take her by force and
+fails. He goes back to his own people, and strikes. Do you blame him?
+Would you rather he sat down and grumbled and bragged of his successes,
+and took to drink, as more than one down south has done? Perhaps so. It
+would be more comfortable if he did. But which of the pictures do you
+admire? Which of the two is the better man? For me, the man who
+strikes--even if I have to go up into his country and exact the penalty
+afterwards. Shere Ali is one of the best of the Princes. But he has been
+badly treated and so he must suffer."
+
+Ralston repeated his conclusion with a savage irony. "That's the whole
+truth. He's one of the best of them. Therefore he doesn't take bad
+treatment with a servile gratitude. Therefore he must suffer still more.
+But the fault in the beginning was not his."
+
+Thus it fell to Ralston to explain, twenty-six years later, the saying
+of a long-forgotten Political Officer which had seemed so dark to
+Colonel Dewes when it was uttered in the little fort in Chiltistan.
+There was a special danger for the best in the upbringing of the Indian
+princes in England.
+
+Linforth flushed as he listened to the tirade, but he made no answer.
+Ralston looked at him keenly, wondering with a queer amusement whether he
+had not blunted the keen edge of that tool which he was keeping at his
+side because he foresaw the need of it. But there was no sign of any
+softening upon Linforth's face. He could be hard, but on the other hand,
+when he gave his faith he gave it without reserve. Almost every word
+which Ralston had spoken had seemed to him an aspersion upon Violet
+Oliver. He said nothing, for he had learned to keep silence. But his
+anger was hotter than ever against Shere Ali, since but for Shere Ali the
+aspersions would never have been cast.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI
+
+AN OLD TOMB AND A NEW SHRINE
+
+
+The messenger whom Ralston sent with a sealed letter to the Resident at
+Kohara left Peshawur in the afternoon and travelled up the road by way of
+Dir and the Lowari Pass. He travelled quickly, spending little of his
+time at the rest-houses on the way, and yet arrived no sooner on that
+account. It was not he at all who brought his news to Kohara. Neither
+letter nor messenger, indeed, ever reached the Resident's door, although
+Captain Phillips learned something of the letter's contents a day before
+the messenger was due. A queer, and to use his own epithet, a dramatic
+stroke of fortune aided him at a very critical moment.
+
+It happened in this way. While Captain Phillips was smoking a cheroot as
+he sat over his correspondence in the morning, a servant from the great
+Palace on the hill brought to him a letter in the Khan's own
+handwriting. It was a flowery letter and invoked many blessings upon the
+Khan's faithful friend and brother, and wound up with a single sentence,
+like a lady's postscript, in which the whole object of the letter was
+contained. Would his Excellency the Captain, in spite of his
+overwhelming duties, of which the Khan was well aware, since they all
+tended to the great benefit and prosperity of his State, be kind enough
+to pay a visit to the Khan that day?
+
+"What's the old rascal up to now?" thought Captain Phillips. He replied,
+with less ornament and fewer flourishes, that he would come after
+breakfast; and mounting his horse at the appointed time he rode down
+through the wide street of Kohara and up the hill at the end, on the
+terraced slopes of which climbed the gardens and mud walls of the Palace.
+He was led at once into the big reception-room with the painted walls and
+the silver-gilt chairs, where the Khan had once received his son with a
+loaded rifle across his knees. The Khan was now seated with his courtiers
+about him, and was carving the rind of a pomegranate into patterns, like
+a man with his thoughts far away. But he welcomed Captain Phillips with
+alacrity and at once dismissed his Court.
+
+Captain Phillips settled down patiently in his chair. He was well aware
+of the course the interview would take. The Khan would talk away without
+any apparent aim for an hour or two hours, passing carelessly from
+subject to subject, and then suddenly the important question would be
+asked, the important subject mooted. On this occasion, however, the Khan
+came with unusual rapidity to his point. A few inquiries as to the
+Colonel's health, a short oration on the backwardness of the crops, a
+lengthier one upon his fidelity to and friendship for the British
+Government and the miserable return ever made to him for it, and then
+came a question ludicrously inapposite and put with the solemn _naivet,_
+of a child.
+
+"I suppose you know," said the Khan, tugging at his great grey beard,
+"that my grandfather married a fairy for one of his wives?"
+
+It was on the strength of such abrupt questions that strangers were apt
+to think that the Khan had fallen into his second childhood before his
+time. But the Resident knew his man. He was aware that the Khan was
+watching for his answer. He sat up in his chair and answered politely:
+
+"So, your Highness, I have heard."
+
+"Yes, it is true," continued the Khan. "Moreover, the fairy bore him a
+daughter who is still alive, though very old."
+
+"So there is still a fairy in the family," replied Captain Phillips
+pleasantly, while he wondered what in the world the Khan was driving at.
+"Yes, indeed, I know that. For only a week ago I was asked by a poor man
+up the valley to secure your Highness's intercession. It seems that he is
+much plagued by a fairy who has taken possession of his house, and since
+your Highness is related to the fairies, he would be very grateful if you
+would persuade his fairy to go away."
+
+"I know," said the Khan gravely. "The case has already been brought to
+me. The fellow _will_ open closed boxes in his house, and the fairy
+resents it."
+
+"Then your Highness has exorcised the fairy?"
+
+"No; I have forbidden him to open boxes in his house," said the Khan; and
+then, with a smile, "But it was not of him we were speaking, but of the
+fairy in my family."
+
+He leaned forward and his voice shook.
+
+"She sends me warnings, Captain Sahib. Two nights ago, by the flat stone
+where the fairies dance, she heard them--the voices of an innumerable
+multitude in the air talking the Chilti tongue--talking of trouble to
+come in the near days."
+
+He spoke with burning eyes fixed upon the Resident and with his fingers
+playing nervously in and out among the hairs of his beard. Whether the
+Khan really believed the story of the fairies--there is nothing more
+usual than a belief in fairies in the countries bordered by the
+snow-peaks of the Hindu Kush--or whether he used the story as a blind to
+conceal the real source of his fear, the Resident could not decide. But
+what he did know was this: The Khan of Chiltistan was desperately afraid.
+A whole programme of reform was sketched out for the Captain's hearing.
+
+"I have been a good friend to the English, Captain Sahib. I have kept my
+Mullahs and my people quiet all these years. There are things which might
+be better, as your Excellency has courteously pointed out to me, and the
+words have never been forgotten. The taxes no doubt are very burdensome,
+and it may be the caravans from Bokhara and Central Asia should pay less
+to the treasury as they pass through Chiltistan, and perhaps I do
+unjustly in buying what I want from them at my own price." Thus he
+delicately described the system of barefaced robbery which he practised
+on the traders who passed southwards to India through Chiltistan. "But
+these things can be altered. Moreover," and here he spoke with an air of
+distinguished virtue, "I propose to sell no more of my people into
+slavery--No, and to give none of them, not even the youngest, as presents
+to my friends. It is quite true of course that the wood which I sell to
+the merchants of Peshawur is cut and brought down by forced labour, but
+next year I am thinking of paying. I have been a good friend to the
+English all my life, Colonel Sahib."
+
+Captain Phillips had heard promises of the kind before and accounted them
+at their true value. But he had never heard them delivered with so
+earnest a protestation. And he rode away from the Palace with the
+disturbing conviction that there was something new in the wind of which
+he did not know.
+
+He rode up the valley, pondering what that something new might be.
+Hillside and plain were ablaze with autumn colours. The fruit in the
+orchards--peaches, apples, and grapes--was ripe, and on the river bank
+the gold of the willows glowed among thickets of red rose. High up on the
+hills, field rose above field, supported by stone walls. In the bosom of
+the valley groups of great walnut-trees marked where the villages stood.
+
+Captain Phillips rode through the villages. Everywhere he was met with
+smiling faces and courteous salutes; but he drew no comfort from them.
+The Chilti would smile pleasantly while he was fitting his knife in under
+your fifth rib. Only once did Phillips receive a hint that something was
+amiss, but the hint was so elusive that it did no more than quicken his
+uneasiness.
+
+He was riding over grass, and came silently upon a man whose back was
+turned to him.
+
+"So, Dadu," he said quietly, "you must not open closed boxes any more in
+your house."
+
+The man jumped round. He was not merely surprised, he was startled.
+
+"Your Excellency rides up the valley?" he cried, and almost he
+barred the way.
+
+"Why not, Dadu?"
+
+Dadu's face became impassive.
+
+"It is as your Excellency wills. It is a good day for a ride," said Dadu;
+and Captain Phillips rode on.
+
+It might of course have been that the man had been startled merely by the
+unexpected voice behind him; and the question which had leaped from his
+mouth might have meant nothing at all. Captain Phillips turned round in
+his saddle. Dadu was still standing where he had left him, and was
+following the rider with his eyes.
+
+"I wonder if there is anything up the valley which I ought to know
+about?" Captain Phillips said to himself, and he rode forward now with a
+watchful eye. The hills began to close in; the bosom of the valley to
+narrow. Nine miles from Kohara it became a defile through which the river
+roared between low precipitous cliffs. Above the cliffs on each side a
+level of stony ground, which here and there had been cleared and
+cultivated, stretched to the mountain walls. At one point a great fan of
+débris spread out from a side valley. Across this fan the track mounted,
+and then once more the valley widened out. On the river's edge a roofless
+ruin of a building, with a garden run wild at one end of it, stood apart.
+A few hundred yards beyond there was a village buried among bushes, and
+then a deep nullah cut clean across the valley. It was a lonely and a
+desolate spot. Yet Captain Phillips never rode across the fan of shale
+and came within sight of it but his imagination began to people it with
+living figures and a surge of wild events. He reined in his horse as he
+came to the brow of the hill, and sat for a moment looking downwards.
+Then he rode very quickly a few yards down the hill. Before, he and his
+horse had been standing out clear against the sky. Now, against the
+background of grey and brown he would be an unnoticeable figure.
+
+He halted again, but this time his eyes, instead of roving over the
+valley, were fixed intently upon one particular spot. Under the wall of
+the great ruined building he had seen something move. He made sure now of
+what the something was. There were half a dozen horses--no, seven--seven
+horses tethered apart from each other, and not a syce for any one of
+them. Captain Phillips felt his blood quicken. The Khan's protestations
+and Dadu's startled question, had primed him to expectation. Cautiously
+he rode down into the valley, and suspense grew upon him as he rode. It
+was a still, windless day, and noise carried far. The only sound he heard
+was the sound of the stones rattling under the hoofs of his horse. But in
+a little while he reached turf and level ground and so rode forward in
+silence. When he was within a couple of hundred yards of the ruin he
+halted and tied up his horse in a grove of trees. Thence he walked across
+an open space, passed beneath the remnant of a gateway into a court and,
+crossing the court, threaded his way through a network of narrow alleys
+between crumbling mud walls. As he advanced the sound of a voice reached
+his ears--a deep monotonous voice, which spoke with a kind of rhythm. The
+words Phillips could not distinguish, but there was no need that he
+should. The intonation, the flow of the sentences, told him clearly
+enough that somewhere beyond was a man praying. And then he stopped, for
+other voices broke suddenly in with loud and, as it seemed to Phillips,
+with fierce appeals. But the appeals died away, the one voice again took
+up the prayer, and again Phillips stepped forward.
+
+At the end of the alley he came to a doorway in a high wall. There was no
+door. He stood on the threshold of the doorway and looked in. He looked
+into a court open to the sky, and the seven horses and the monotonous
+voice were explained to him. There were seven young men--nobles of
+Chiltistan, as Phillips knew from their _chogas_ of velvet and Chinese
+silk--gathered in the court. They were kneeling with their backs towards
+him and the doorway, so that not one of them had noticed his approach.
+They were facing a small rough-hewn obelisk of stone which stood at the
+head of a low mound of earth at the far end of the court. Six of them
+were grouped in a sort of semi-circle, and the seventh, a man clad from
+head to foot in green robes, knelt a little in advance and alone. But
+from none of the seven nobles did the voice proceed. In front of them all
+knelt an old man in the brown homespun of the people. Phillips, from the
+doorway, could see his great beard wagging as he prayed, and knew him for
+one of the incendiary priests of Chiltistan.
+
+The prayer was one with which Phillips was familiar: The Day was at hand;
+the infidels would be scattered as chaff; the God of Mahommed was
+besought to send the innumerable company of his angels and to make his
+faithful people invulnerable to wounds. Phillips could have gone on with
+the prayer himself, had the Mullah failed. But it was not the prayer
+which held him rooted to the spot, but the setting of the prayer.
+
+The scene was in itself strange and significant enough. These seven gaily
+robed youths assembled secretly in a lonely and desolate ruin nine miles
+from Kohara had come thither not merely for prayer. The prayer would be
+but the seal upon a compact, the blessing upon an undertaking where life
+and death were the issues. But there was something more; and that
+something more gave to the scene in Phillips' eyes a very startling
+irony. He knew well how quickly in these countries the actual record of
+events is confused, and how quickly any tomb, or any monument becomes a
+shrine before which "the faithful" will bow and make their prayer. But
+that here of all places, and before this tomb of all tombs, the God of
+the Mahommedans should be invoked--this was life turning playwright with
+a vengeance. It needed just one more detail to complete the picture and
+the next moment that detail was provided. For Phillips moved.
+
+His boot rattled upon a loose stone. The prayer ceased, the worshippers
+rose abruptly to their feet and turned as one man towards the doorway.
+Phillips saw, face to face, the youth robed in green, who had knelt at
+the head of his companions. It was Shere Ali, the Prince of Chiltistan.
+
+Phillips advanced at once into the centre of the group. He was wise
+enough not to hold out his hand lest it should be refused. But he spoke
+as though he had taken leave of Shere Ali only yesterday.
+
+"So your Highness has returned?"
+
+"Yes," replied Shere Ali, and he spoke in the same indifferent tone.
+
+But both men knew, however unconcernedly they spoke, that Shere Ali's
+return was to be momentous in the history of Chiltistan. Shere Ali's
+father knew it too, that troubled man in the Palace above Kohara.
+
+"When did you reach Kohara?" Phillips asked.
+
+"I have not yet been to Kohara. I ride down from here this afternoon."
+
+Shere Ali smiled as he spoke, and the smile said more than the words.
+There was a challenge, a defiance in it, which were unmistakable. But
+Phillips chose to interpret the words quite simply.
+
+"Shall we go together?" he said, and then he looked towards the doorway.
+The others had gathered there, the six young men and the priest. They
+were armed and more than one had his hand ready upon his swordhilt. "But
+you have friends, I see," he added grimly. He began to wonder whether he
+would himself ride back to Kohara that afternoon.
+
+"Yes," replied Shere Ali quietly, "I have friends in Chiltistan," and he
+laid a stress upon the name of his country, as though he wished to show
+to Captain Phillips that he recognised no friends outside its borders.
+
+Again Phillips' thoughts were swept to the irony, the tragic irony of the
+scene in which he now was called to play a part.
+
+"Does your Highness know this spot?" he asked suddenly. Then he pointed
+to the tomb and the rude obelisk. "Does your Highness know whose bones
+are laid at the foot of that monument?"
+
+Shere Ali shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"Within these walls, in one of these roofless rooms, you were born," said
+Phillips, "and that grave before which you prayed is the grave of a man
+named Luffe, who defended this fort in those days."
+
+"It is not," replied Shere Ali. "It is the tomb of a saint," and he
+called to the mullah for corroboration of his words.
+
+"It is the tomb of Luffe. He fell in this courtyard, struck down not by a
+bullet, but by overwork and the strain of the siege. I know. I have the
+story from an old soldier whom I met in Cashmere this summer and who
+served here under Luffe. Luffe fell in this court, and when he died was
+buried here."
+
+Shere Ali, in spite of himself was beginning to listen to Captain
+Phillips' words.
+
+"Who was the soldier?" he asked.
+
+"Colonel Dewes."
+
+Shere Ali nodded his head as though he had expected the name. Then he
+said as he turned away:
+
+"What is Luffe to me? What should I know of Luffe?"
+
+"This," said Phillips, and he spoke in so arresting a voice that Shere
+Ali turned again to listen to him. "When Luffe was dying, he uttered an
+appeal--he bequeathed it to India, as his last service; and the appeal
+was that you should not be sent to England, that neither Eton nor Oxford
+should know you, that you should remain in your own country."
+
+The Resident had Shere Ali's attention now.
+
+"He said that?" cried the Prince in a startled voice. Then he pointed his
+finger to the grave. "The man lying there said that?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"And no one listened, I suppose?" said Shere Ali bitterly.
+
+"Or listened too late," said Phillips. "Like Dewes, who only since he met
+you in Calcutta one day upon the racecourse, seems dimly to have
+understood the words the dead man spoke."
+
+Shere Ali was silent. He stood looking at the grave and the obelisk with
+a gentler face than he had shown before.
+
+"Why did he not wish it?" he asked at length.
+
+"He said that it would mean unhappiness for you; that it might mean ruin
+for Chiltistan."
+
+"Did he say that?" said Shere Ali slowly, and there was something of awe
+in his voice. Then he recovered himself and cried defiantly. "Yet in one
+point he was wrong. It will not mean ruin for Chiltistan."
+
+So far he had spoken in English. Now he turned quickly towards his
+friends and spoke in his own tongue.
+
+"It is time. We will go," and to Captain Phillips he said, "You shall
+ride back with me to Kohara. I will leave you at the doorway of the
+Residency." And these words, too, he spoke in his own tongue.
+
+There rose a clamour among the seven who waited in the doorway, and
+loudest of all rose the voice of the mullah, protesting against Shere
+Ali's promise.
+
+"My word is given," said the Prince, and he turned with a smile to
+Captain Phillips. "In memory of my friend,"--he pointed to the
+grave--"For it seems I had a friend once amongst the white people. In
+memory of my friend, I give you your life."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXII
+
+SURPRISES FOR CAPTAIN PHILLIPS
+
+
+The young nobles ceased from their outcry. They went sullenly out and
+mounted their horses under the ruined wall of the old fort. But as they
+mounted they whispered together with quick glances towards Captain
+Phillips. The Resident intercepted the glance and had little doubt as to
+the subject of the whispering.
+
+"I am in the deuce of a tight place," he reflected; "it's seven to one
+against my ever reaching Kohara, and the one's a doubtful quantity."
+
+He looked at Shere Ali, who seemed quite undisturbed by the prospect
+of mutiny amongst his followers. His face had hardened a little.
+That was all.
+
+"And your horse?" Shere Ali asked.
+
+Captain Phillips pointed towards the clump of trees where he had
+tied it up.
+
+"Will you fetch it?" said Shere Ali, and as Phillips walked off, he
+turned towards the nobles and the old mullah who stood amongst them.
+Phillips heard his voice, as he began to speak, and was surprised by a
+masterful quiet ring in it. "The doubtful quantity seems to have grown
+into a man," he thought, and the thought gained strength when he rode
+his horse back from the clump of trees towards the group. Shere Ali met
+him gravely.
+
+"You will ride on my right hand," he said. "You need have no fear."
+
+The seven nobles clustered behind, and the party rode at a walk over the
+fan of shale and through the defile into the broad valley of Kohara.
+Shere Ali did not speak. He rode on with a set and brooding face, and the
+Resident fell once more to pondering the queer scene of which he had been
+the witness. Even at that moment when his life was in the balance his
+thoughts would play with it, so complete a piece of artistry it seemed.
+There was the tomb itself--an earth grave and a rough obelisk without so
+much as a name or a date upon it set up at its head by some past Resident
+at Kohara. It was appropriate and seemly to the man without friends, or
+family, or wife, but to whom the Frontier had been all these. He would
+have wished for no more himself, since vanity had played so small a part
+in his career. He had been the great Force upon the Frontier, keeping the
+Queen's peace by the strength of his character and the sagacity of his
+mind. Yet before his grave, invoking him as an unknown saint, the nobles
+of Chiltistan had knelt to pray for the destruction of such as he and the
+overthrow of the power which he had lived to represent. And all because
+his advice had been neglected.
+
+Captain Phillips was roused out of his reflections as the cavalcade
+approached a village. For out of that village and from the fields about
+it, the men, armed for the most part with good rifles, poured towards
+them with cries of homage. They joined the cavalcade, marched with it
+past their homes, and did not turn back. Only the women and the children
+were left behind. And at the next village and at the next the same thing
+happened. The cavalcade began to swell into a small army, an army of men
+well equipped for war; and at the head of the gathering force Shere Ali
+rode with an impassive face, never speaking but to check a man from time
+to time who brandished a weapon at the Resident.
+
+"Your Highness has counted the cost?" Captain Phillips asked. "There will
+be but the one end to it."
+
+Shere Ali turned to the Resident, and though his face did not change from
+its brooding calm, a fire burned darkly in his eyes.
+
+"From Afghanistan to Thibet the frontier will rise," he said proudly.
+
+Captain Phillips shook his head.
+
+"From Afghanistan to Thibet the Frontier will wait, as it always waits.
+It will wait to see what happens in Chiltistan."
+
+But though he spoke boldly, he had little comfort from his thoughts. The
+rising had been well concerted. Those who flocked to Shere Ali were not
+only the villagers of the Kohara valley. There were shepherds from the
+hills, wild men from the far corners of Chiltistan. Already the small
+army could be counted with the hundred for its unit. To-morrow the
+hundred would be a thousand. Moreover, for once in a way there was no
+divided counsel. Jealousy and intrigue were not, it seemed, to do their
+usual work in Chiltistan. There was only one master, and he of
+unquestioned authority. Else how came it that Captain Phillips rode
+amidst that great and frenzied throng, unhurt and almost unthreatened?
+
+Down the valley the roof-tops of Kohara began to show amongst the trees.
+The high palace on the hill with its latticed windows bulked against the
+evening sky. The sound of many drums was borne to the Resident's ears.
+The Residency stood a mile and a half from the town in a great garden. A
+high wall enclosed it, but it was a house, not a fortress; and Phillips
+had at his command but a few levies to defend it. One of them stood by
+the gate. He kept his ground as Shere Ali and his force approached. The
+only movement which he made was to stand at attention, and as Shere Ali
+halted at the entrance, he saluted. But it was Captain Phillips whom he
+saluted, and not the Prince of Chiltistan. Shere Ali spoke with the same
+quiet note of confident authority which had surprised Captain Phillips
+before, to the seven nobles at his back. Then he turned to the Resident.
+
+"I will ride with you to your door," he said.
+
+The two men passed alone through the gateway and along a broad path which
+divided the forecourt to the steps of the house. And not a man of all
+that crowd which followed Shere Ali to Kohara pressed in behind them.
+Captain Phillips looked back as much in surprise as in relief. But there
+was no surprise on the face of Shere Ali. He, it was plain, expected
+obedience.
+
+"Upon my word," cried Phillips in a burst of admiration, "you have got
+your fellows well in hand."
+
+"I?" said Shere Ali. "I am nothing. What could I do who a week ago was
+still a stranger to my people? I am a voice, nothing more. But the God of
+my people speaks through me"; and as he spoke these last words, his voice
+suddenly rose to a shrill trembling note, his face suddenly quivered with
+excitement.
+
+Captain Phillips stared. "The man's in earnest," he muttered to himself.
+"He actually believes it."
+
+It was the second time that Captain Phillips had been surprised within
+five minutes, and on this occasion the surprise came upon him with a
+shock. How it had come about--that was all dark to Captain Phillips. But
+the result was clear. The few words spoken as they had been spoken
+revealed the fact. The veneer of Shere Ali's English training had gone.
+Shere Ali had reverted. His own people had claimed him.
+
+"And I guessed nothing of this," the Resident reflected bitterly.
+Signs of trouble he had noticed in abundance, but this one crucial
+fact which made trouble a certain and unavoidable thing--that had
+utterly escaped him. His thoughts went back to the nameless tomb in
+the courtyard of the fort.
+
+"Luffe would have known," he thought in a very bitter humility. "Nay, he
+did know. He foresaw."
+
+There was yet a third surprise in store for Captain Phillips. As the two
+men rode up the broad path, he had noticed that the door of the house was
+standing open, as it usually did. Now, however, he saw it swing to--very
+slowly, very noiselessly. He was surprised, for he knew the door to be a
+strong heavy door of walnut wood, not likely to swing to even in a wind.
+And there was no wind. Besides, if it had swung to of its own accord, it
+would have slammed. Its weight would have made it slam. Whereas it was
+not quite closed. As he reined in his horse at the steps, he saw that
+there was a chink between the door and the door-post.
+
+"There's someone behind that door," he said to himself, and he glanced
+quietly at Shere Ali. It would be quite in keeping with the Chilti
+character for Shere Ali politely to escort him home knowing well that an
+assassin waited behind the door; and it was with a smile of some irony
+that he listened to Shere Ali taking his leave.
+
+"You will be safe, so long as you stay within your grounds. I will place
+a guard about the house. I do not make war against my country's guests.
+And in a few days I will send an escort and set you and your attendants
+free from hurt beyond our borders. But"--and his voice lost its
+courtesy--"take care you admit no one, and give shelter to no one."
+
+The menace of Shere Ali's tone roused Captain Phillips. "I take no orders
+from your Highness," he said firmly. "Your Highness may not have noticed
+that," and he pointed upwards to where on a high flagstaff in front of
+the house the English flag hung against the pole.
+
+"I give your Excellency no orders," replied Shere Ali. "But on the other
+hand I give you a warning. Shelter so much as one man and that flag will
+not save you. I should not be able to hold in my men."
+
+Shere Ali turned and rode back to the gates. Captain Phillips dismounted,
+and calling forward a reluctant groom, gave him his horse. Then he
+suddenly flung back the door. But there was no resistance. The door swung
+in and clattered against the wall. Phillips looked into the hall, but the
+dusk was gathering in the garden. He looked into a place of twilight and
+shadows. He grasped his riding-crop a little more firmly in his hand and
+strode through the doorway. In a dark corner something moved.
+
+"Ah! would you!" cried Captain Phillips, turning sharply on the instant.
+He raised his crop above his head and then a crouching figure fell at his
+feet and embraced his knees; and a trembling voice of fear cried:
+
+"Save me! Your Excellency will not give me up! I have been a good friend
+to the English!"
+
+For the second time the Khan of Chiltistan had sought refuge from his own
+people. Captain Phillips looked round.
+
+"Hush," he whispered in a startled voice. "Let me shut the door!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIII
+
+IN THE RESIDENCY
+
+
+Captain Phillips with a sharp gesture ordered the Khan back to the
+shadowy corner from which he had sprung out. Then he shut the door and,
+with the shutting of the door, the darkness deepened suddenly in the
+hall. He shot the bolt and put up the chain. It rattled in his ears with
+a startling loudness. Then he stood without speech or movement. Outside
+he heard Shere Ali's voice ring clear, and the army of tribesmen
+clattered past towards the town. The rattle of their weapons, the hum of
+their voices diminished. Captain Phillips took his handkerchief from his
+pocket and wiped his forehead. He had the sensations of a man reprieved.
+
+"But it's only a reprieve," he thought. "There will be no commutation."
+
+He turned again towards the dark corner.
+
+"How did you come?" he asked in a low voice.
+
+"By the orchard at the back of the house."
+
+"Did no one see you?"
+
+"I hid in the orchard until I saw the red coat of one of your servants. I
+called to him and he let me in secretly. But no one else saw me."
+
+"No one in the city?"
+
+"I came barefoot in a rough cloak with the hood drawn over my face," said
+the Khan. "No one paid any heed to me. There was much noise and running
+to and fro, and polishing of weapons. I crept out into the hill-side at
+the back and so came down into your orchard."
+
+Captain Phillips shrugged his shoulders. He opened a door and led the
+Khan into a room which looked out upon the orchard.
+
+"Well, we will do what we can," he said, "but it's very little. They will
+guess immediately that you are here of course."
+
+"Once before--" faltered the Khan, and Phillips broke in upon him
+impatiently.
+
+"Yes, once before. But it's not the same thing. This is a house, not a
+fort, and I have only a handful of men to defend it; and I am not Luffe."
+Then his voice sharpened. "Why didn't you listen to him? All this is your
+fault--yours and Dewes', who didn't understand, and held his tongue."
+
+The Khan was mystified by the words, but Phillips did not take the
+trouble to explain. He knew something of the Chilti character. They would
+have put up with the taxes, with the selling into slavery, with all the
+other abominations of the Khan's rule. They would have listened to the
+exhortations of the mullahs without anything coming of it, so long as no
+leader appeared. They were great accepters of facts as they were. Let the
+brother or son or nephew murder the ruling Khan and sit in his place,
+they accepted his rule without any struggles of conscience. But let a man
+rise to lead them, then they would bethink them of the exhortations of
+their priests and of their own particular sufferings and flock to his
+standard. And the man had risen--just because twenty-five years ago the
+Khan would not listen to Luffe.
+
+"It's too late, however, for explanations," he said, and he clapped his
+hands together for a servant. In a few moments the light of a lamp
+gleamed in the hall through the doorway. Phillips went quickly out of the
+room, closing the door behind him.
+
+"Fasten the shutters first," he said to the servant in the hall. "Then
+bring the lamp in."
+
+The servant obeyed, but when he brought the lamp into the room, and saw
+the Khan of Chiltistan standing at the table with no more dignity of
+dress or, indeed, of bearing than any beggar in the kingdom, he nearly
+let the lamp fall.
+
+"His Highness will stay in this house," said Phillips, "but his presence
+must not be spoken of. Will you tell Poulteney Sahib that I would like to
+speak to him?" The servant bowed his forehead to the palms of his hand
+and turned away upon his errand. But Poulteney Sahib was already at the
+door. He was the subaltern in command of the half company of Sikhs which
+served Captain Phillips for an escort and a guard.
+
+"You have heard the news I suppose," said Phillips.
+
+"Yes," replied Poulteney. He was a wiry dark youth, with a little black
+moustache and a brisk manner of speech. "I was out on the hill after
+chikkor when my shikari saw Shere Ali and his crowd coming down the
+valley. He knew all about it and gave me a general idea of the situation.
+It seems the whole country's rising. I should have been here before, but
+it seemed advisable to wait until it was dark. I crawled in between a
+couple of guard-posts. There is already a watch kept on the house," and
+then he stopped abruptly. He had caught sight of the Khan in the
+background. He had much ado not to whistle in his surprise. But he
+refrained and merely bowed.
+
+"It seems to be a complicated situation," he said to Captain Phillips.
+"Does Shere Ali know?" and he glanced towards the Khan.
+
+"Not yet," replied Phillips grimly. "But I don't think it will be long
+before he does."
+
+"And then there will be ructions," Poulteney remarked softly. "Yes, there
+will be ructions of a highly-coloured and interesting description."
+
+"We must do what we can," said Phillips with a shrug of his shoulders.
+"It isn't much, of course," and for the next two hours the twenty-five
+Sikhs were kept busy. The doors were barricaded, the shutters closed upon
+the windows and loopholed, and provisions were brought in from the
+outhouses.
+
+"It is lucky we had sense enough to lay in a store of food," said
+Phillips.
+
+The Sikhs were divided into watches and given their appointed places.
+Cartridges were doled out to them, and the rest of the ammunition was
+placed in a stone cellar.
+
+"That's all that we can do," said Phillips. "So we may as well dine."
+
+They dined with the Khan, speaking little and with ears on the alert,
+in a room at the back of the house. At any moment the summons might
+come to surrender the Khan. They waited for a blow upon the door, the
+sound of the firing of a rifle or a loud voice calling upon them from
+the darkness. But all they heard was the interminable babble of the
+Khan, as he sat at the table shivering with fear and unable to eat a
+morsel of his food.
+
+"You won't give me up!... I have been a good friend to the English....
+All my life I have been a good friend to the English."
+
+"We will do what we can," said Phillips, and he rose from the table and
+went up on to the roof. He lay down behind the low parapet and looked
+over towards the town. The house was a poor place to defend. At the back
+beyond the orchard the hill-side rose and commanded the roof. On the
+east of the house a stream ran by to the great river in the centre of
+the valley. But the bank of the stream was a steep slippery bank of
+clay, and less than a hundred yards down a small water-mill on the
+opposite side overlooked it. The Chiltis had only to station a few
+riflemen in the water-mill and not a man would be able to climb down
+that bank and fetch water for the Residency. On the west stood the
+stables and the storehouses, and the barracks of the Sikhs, a square of
+buildings which would afford fine cover for an attacking force. Only in
+front within the walls of the forecourt was there any open space which
+the house commanded. It was certainly a difficult--nay, a
+hopeless--place to defend.
+
+But Captain Phillips, as he lay behind the parapet, began to be puzzled.
+Why did not the attack begin? He looked over to the city. It was a place
+of tossing lights and wild clamours. The noise of it was carried on the
+night wind to Phillips' ears. But about the Residency there was quietude
+and darkness. Here and there a red fire glowed where the guards were
+posted; now and then a shower of sparks leaped up into the air as a fresh
+log was thrown upon the ashes; and a bright flame would glisten on the
+barrel of a rifle and make ruddy the dark faces of the watchmen. But
+there were no preparations for an attack.
+
+Phillips looked across the city. On the hill the Palace was alive with
+moving lights--lights that flashed from room to room as though men
+searched hurriedly.
+
+"Surely they must already have guessed," he murmured to himself. The
+moving lights in the high windows of the Palace held his eyes--so swiftly
+they flitted from room to room, so frenzied seemed the hurry of the
+search--and then to his astonishment one after another they began to die
+out. It could not be that the searchers were content with the failure of
+their search, that the Palace was composing itself to sleep. In the city
+the clamour had died down; little by little it sank to darkness. There
+came a freshness in the air. Though there were many hours still before
+daylight, the night drew on towards morning. What could it mean, he
+wondered? Why was the Residency left in peace?
+
+And as he wondered, he heard a scuffling noise upon the roof behind him.
+He turned his head and Poulteney crawled to his side.
+
+"Will you come down?" the subaltern asked; "I don't know what to do."
+
+Phillips at once crept back to the trap-door. The two men descended, and
+Poulteney led the way into the little room at the back of the house where
+they had dined. There was no longer a light in the room; and they stood
+for awhile in the darkness listening.
+
+"Where is the Khan?" whispered Phillips.
+
+"I fixed up one of the cellars for him," Poulteney replied in the same
+tone, and as he ended there came suddenly a rattle of gravel upon the
+shutter of the window. It was thrown cautiously, but even so it startled
+Phillips almost into a cry.
+
+"That's it," whispered Poulteney. "There is someone in the orchard.
+That's the third time the gravel has rattled on the shutter. What
+shall I do?"
+
+"Have you got your revolver?" asked Phillips.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Then stand by."
+
+Phillips carefully and noiselessly opened the shutter for an inch or two.
+
+"Who's that?" he asked in a low voice; he asked the question in Pushtu,
+and in Pushtu a voice no louder than his own replied:
+
+"I want to speak to Poulteney Sahib."
+
+A startled exclamation broke from the subaltern. "It's my shikari," he
+said, and thrusting open the shutter he leaned out.
+
+"Well, what news do you bring?" he asked; and at the answer Captain
+Phillips for the first time since he had entered into his twilit hall
+had a throb of hope. The expeditionary troops from Nowshera, advancing
+by forced marches, were already close to the borders of Chiltistan. News
+had been brought to the Palace that evening. Shere Ali had started with
+every man he could collect to take up the position where he meant to
+give battle.
+
+"I must hurry or I shall be late," said the shikari, and he crawled away
+through the orchard.
+
+Phillips closed the shutter again and lit the lamp. The news seemed too
+good to be true. But the morning broke over a city of women and old men.
+Only the watchmen remained at their posts about the Residency grounds.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIV
+
+ONE OF THE LITTLE WARS
+
+
+The campaign which Shere Ali directed on the borders of Chiltistan is now
+matter of history, and may be read of, by whoso wills, in the Blue-books
+and despatches of the time. Those documents, with their paragraphs and
+diaries and bare records of facts, have a dry-as-dust look about them
+which their contents very often belie. And the reader will not rise from
+the story of this little war without carrying away an impression of wild
+fury and reckless valour which will long retain its colours in his mind.
+Moreover, there was more than fury to distinguish it. Shere Ali turned
+against his enemies the lessons which they had taught him; and a military
+skill was displayed which delayed the result and thereby endangered the
+position of the British troops. For though at the first the neighbouring
+tribes and states, the little village republics which abound in those
+parts, waited upon the event as Phillips had foretold, nevertheless as
+the days passed, and the event still hung in the balance, they took heart
+of grace and gathered behind the troops to destroy their communications
+and cut off their supplies.
+
+Dick Linforth wrote three letters to his mother, who was living over
+again the suspense and terror which had fallen to her lot a quarter of a
+century ago. The first letter was brought to the house under the Sussex
+Downs at twilight on an evening of late autumn, and as she recognized the
+writing for her son's a sudden weakness overcame her, and her hand so
+shook that she could hardly tear off the envelope.
+
+"I am unhurt," he wrote at the beginning of the letter, and tears of
+gratitude ran down her cheeks as she read the words. "Shere Ali," he
+continued, "occupied a traditional position of defence in a narrow
+valley. The Kohara river ran between steep cliffs through the bed of the
+valley, and, as usual, above the cliffs on each side there were
+cultivated maidans or plateaus. Over the right-hand maidan, the
+road--_our_ road--ran to a fortified village. Behind the village, a deep
+gorge, or nullah, as we call them in these parts, descending from a side
+glacier high up at the back of the hills on our right, cut clean across
+the valley, like a great gash. The sides of the nullah were
+extraordinarily precipitous, and on the edge furthest from us stone
+sangars were already built as a second line of defence. Shere Ali
+occupied the village in front of the nullah, and we encamped six miles
+down the valley, meaning to attack in the morning. But the Chiltis
+abandoned their traditional method of fighting behind walls and standing
+on the defence. A shot rang out on the outskirts of our camp at three
+o'clock in the morning, and in a moment they were upon us. It was
+reckoned that there were fifteen thousand of them engaged from first to
+last in this battle, whereas we were under two thousand combatants. We
+had seven hundred of the Imperial Service troops, four companies of
+Gurkhas, three hundred men of the Punjab Infantry, three companies of the
+Oxfordshires, besides cavalry, mountain batteries and Irregulars. The
+attack was unexpected. We bestrode the road, but Shere Ali brought his
+men in by an old disused Buddhist road, running over the hills on our
+right hand, and in the darkness he forced his way through our lines into
+a little village in the heart of our position. He seized the bazaar and
+held it all that day, a few houses built of stone and with stones upon
+the roof which made them proof against our shells. Meanwhile the slopes
+on both sides of the valley were thronged with Chiltis. They were armed
+with jezails and good rifles stolen from our troops, and they had some
+old cannon--sher bachas as they are called. Altogether they caused us
+great loss, and towards evening things began to look critical. They had
+fortified and barricaded the bazaar, and kept up a constant fire from it.
+At last a sapper named Manders, with half a dozen Gurkhas behind him, ran
+across the open space, and while the Gurkhas shot through the loop holes
+and kept the fire down, Manders fixed his gun cotton at the bottom of the
+door and lighted the fuse. He was shot twice, once in the leg, once in
+the shoulder, but he managed to crawl along the wall of the houses out of
+reach of the explosion, and the door was blown in. We drove them out of
+that house and finally cleared the bazaar after some desperate fighting.
+Shere Ali was in the thick of it. He was dressed from head to foot in
+green, and was a conspicuous mark. But he escaped unhurt. The enemy drew
+off for the night, and we lay down as we were, dog-tired and with no
+fires to cook any food. They came on again in the morning, clouds of
+them, but we held them back with the gatlings and the maxims, and towards
+evening they again retired. To-day nothing has happened except the
+arrival of an envoy with an arrogant letter from Shere Ali, asking why we
+are straying inside the borders of his country 'like camels without
+nose-rings.' We shall show him why to-morrow. For to-morrow we attack the
+fort on the maidan. Good-night, mother. I am very tired." And the last
+sentence took away from Sybil Linforth all the comfort the letter had
+brought her. Dick had begun very well. He could have chosen no better
+words to meet her eyes at the commencement than those three, "I am
+unhurt." But he could have chosen no worse with which to end it. For they
+had ended the last letter which her husband had written to her, and her
+mind flew back to that day, and was filled with fore-bodings.
+
+But by the next mail came another letter in his hand, describing how the
+fort had been carried at the point of the bayonet, and Shere Ali driven
+back behind the nullah. This, however, was the strongest position of all,
+and the most difficult to force. The road which wound down behind the
+fort into the bed of the nullah and zigzagged up again on the far side
+had been broken away, the cliffs were unscaleable, and the stone sangars
+on the brow proof against shell and bullet. Shere Ali's force was
+disposed behind these stone breastworks right across the valley on both
+sides of the river. For three weeks the British force sat in front of
+this position, now trying to force it by the river-bed, now under cover
+of night trying to repair the broken road. But the Chiltis kept good
+watch, and at the least sound of a pick in the gulf below avalanches of
+rocks and stones would be hurled down the cliff-sides. Moreover, wherever
+the cliffs seemed likely to afford a means of ascent Shere Ali had
+directed the water-channels, and since the nights were frosty these
+points were draped with ice as smooth as glass. Finally, however, Mrs.
+Linforth received a third letter which set her heart beating with pride,
+and for the moment turned all her fears to joy.
+
+"The war is over," it began. "The position was turned this morning. The
+Chiltis are in full flight towards Kohara with the cavalry upon their
+heels. They are throwing away their arms as they run, so that they may
+be thought not to have taken part in the fight. We follow to-morrow. It
+is not yet known whether Shere Ali is alive or dead and, mother, it was
+I--yes, I your son, who found out the road by which the position could
+be turned. I had crept up the nullah time after time towards the glacier
+at its head, thinking that if ever the position was to be taken it must
+be turned at that end. At last I thought that I had made out a way up
+the cliffs. There were some gullies and a ledge and then some rocks
+which seemed practicable, and which would lead one out on the brow of
+the cliff just between the two last sangars on the enemy's left. I
+didn't write a word about it to you before. I was so afraid I might be
+wrong. I got leave and used to creep up the nullah in the darkness to
+the tongue of the glacier with a little telescope and lie hidden all day
+behind a boulder working out the way, until darkness came again and
+allowed me to get back to camp. At last I felt sure, and I suggested the
+plan to Ralston the Political Officer, who carried it to the
+General-in-Command. The General himself came out with me, and I pointed
+out to him that the cliffs were so steep just beneath the sangars that
+we might take the men who garrisoned them by surprise, and that in any
+case they could not fire upon us, while sharpshooters from the cliffs on
+our side of the nullah could hinder the enemy from leaving their sangars
+and rolling down stones. I was given permission to try and a hundred
+Gurkhas to try with. We left camp that night at half-past seven, and
+crept up the nullah with our blankets to the foot of the climb, and
+there we waited till the morning."
+
+The years of training to which Linforth had bent himself with a definite
+aim began, in a word, to produce their results. In the early morning he
+led the way up the steep face of cliffs, and the Gurkhas followed. One of
+the sharpshooters lying ready on the British side of the nullah said that
+they looked for all the world like a black train of ants. There were
+thirteen hundred feet of rock to be scaled, and for nine hundred of it
+they climbed undetected. Then from a sangar lower down the line where the
+cliffs of the nullah curved outwards they were seen and the alarm was
+given. But for awhile the defenders of the threatened position did not
+understand the danger, and when they did a hail of bullets kept them in
+their shelters. Linforth followed by his Gurkhas was seen to reach the
+top of the cliffs and charge the sangars from the rear. The defenders
+were driven out and bayoneted, the sangars seized, and the Chilti force
+enfolded while reinforcements clambered in support. "In three hours the
+position, which for eighteen days had resisted every attack and held the
+British force immobile, was in our hands. The way is clear in front of
+us. Manders is recommended for the Victoria Cross. I believe that I am
+for the D.S.O. And above all the Road goes on!"
+
+Thus characteristically the letter was concluded. Linforth wrote it with
+a flush of pride and a great joy. He had no doubt now that he would be
+appointed to the Road. Congratulations were showered upon him. Down upon
+the plains, Violet would hear of his achievement and perhaps claim
+proudly and joyfully some share in it herself. His heart leaped at the
+thought. The world was going very well for Dick Linforth that night. But
+that is only one side of the picture. Linforth had no thoughts to spare
+upon Shere Ali. If he had had a thought, it would not have been one of
+pity. Yet that unhappy Prince, with despair and humiliation gnawing at
+his heart, broken now beyond all hope, stricken in his fortune as sorely
+as in his love, was fleeing with a few devoted followers through the
+darkness. He passed through Kohara at daybreak of the second morning
+after the battle had been lost, and stopping only to change horses,
+galloped off to the north.
+
+Two hours later Captain Phillips mounted on to the roof of his house and
+saw that the guards were no longer at their posts.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXV
+
+A LETTER FROM VIOLET
+
+
+Within a week the Khan was back in his Palace, the smoke rose once more
+above the roof-tops of Kohara, and a smiling shikari presented himself
+before Poulteney Sahib in the grounds of the Residency.
+
+"It was a good fight, Sahib," he declared, grinning from ear to ear at
+the recollection of the battles. "A very good fight. We nearly won. I was
+in the bazaar all that day. Yes, it was a near thing. We made a mistake
+about those cliffs, we did not think they could be climbed. It was a good
+fight, but it is over. Now when will your Excellency go shooting? I have
+heard of some markhor on the hill."
+
+Poulteney Sahib stared, speechless with indignation. Then he burst
+out laughing:
+
+"You old rascal! You dare to come here and ask me to take you out when I
+go shooting, and only a week ago you were fighting against us."
+
+"But the fight is all over, Excellency," the Shikari explained. "Now all
+is as it was and we will go out after the markhor." The idea that any
+ill-feeling could remain after so good a fight was one quite beyond the
+shikari's conception. "Besides," he said, "it was I who threw the gravel
+at your Excellency's windows."
+
+"Why, that's true," said Poulteney, and a window was thrown up behind
+him. Ralston's head appeared at the window.
+
+"You had better take him," the Chief Commissioner said. "Go out with him
+for a couple of days," and when the shikari had retired, he explained the
+reason of his advice.
+
+"That fellow will talk to you, and you might find out which way Shere
+Ali went. He wasn't among the dead, so far as we can discover, and I
+think he has been headed off from Afghanistan. But it is important that
+we should know. So long as he is free, there will always be
+possibilities of trouble."
+
+In every direction, indeed, inquiries were being made. But for the moment
+Shere Ali had got clear away. Meanwhile the Khan waited anxiously in the
+Palace to know what was going to happen to him; and he waited in some
+anxiety. It fell to Ralston to inform him in durbar in the presence of
+his nobles and the chief officers of the British force that the
+Government of India had determined to grant him a pension and a residence
+rent-free at Jellundur.
+
+"The Government of India will rule Chiltistan," said Ralston. "The word
+has been spoken."
+
+He went out from the Palace and down the hill towards the place where the
+British forces were encamped just outside the city. When he came to the
+tents, he asked for Mr. Linforth, and was conducted through the lines. He
+found Linforth sitting alone within his tent on his camp chair, and knew
+from his attitude that some evil thing had befallen him. Linforth rose
+and offered Ralston his chair, and as he did so a letter fluttered from
+his lap to the ground. There were two sheets, and Linforth stooped
+quickly and picked them up.
+
+"Don't move," said Ralston. "This will do for me," and he sat down upon
+the edge of the camp bed. Linforth sat down again on his chair and, as
+though he were almost unaware of Ralston's presence, he smoothed out upon
+his knee the sheets of the letter. Ralston could not but observe that
+they were crumpled and creased, as though they had been clenched and
+twisted in Linforth's hand. Then Linforth raised his head, and suddenly
+thrust the letter into his pocket.
+
+"I beg your pardon," he said, and he spoke in a spiritless voice. "The
+post has just come in. I received a letter which--interested me. Is there
+anything I can do?"
+
+"Yes," said Ralston. "We have sure news at last. Shere Ali has fled to
+the north. The opportunity you asked for at Peshawur has come."
+
+Linforth was silent for a little while. Then he said slowly:
+
+"I see. I am to go in pursuit?"
+
+"Yes!"
+
+It seemed that Linforth's animosity against Shere Ali had died out.
+Ralston watched him keenly from the bed. Something had blunted the edge
+of the tool just when the time had come to use it. He threw an extra
+earnestness into his voice.
+
+"You have got to do more than go in pursuit of him. You have got to find
+him. You have got to bring him back as your prisoner."
+
+Linforth nodded his head.
+
+"He has gone north, you say?"
+
+"Yes. Somewhere in Central Asia you will find him," and as Linforth
+looked up startled, Ralston continued calmly, "Yes, it's a large order, I
+know, but it's not quite so large as it looks. The trade-routes, the only
+possible roads, are not so very many. No man can keep his comings and
+goings secret for very long in that country. You will soon get wind of
+him, and when you do you must never let him shake you off."
+
+"Very well," said Linforth, listlessly. "When do I start?"
+
+Ralston plunged into the details of the expedition and told him the
+number of men he was to take with him.
+
+"You had better go first into Chinese Turkestan," he said. "There are a
+number of Hindu merchants settled there--we will give you letters to
+them. Some of them will be able to put you on the track of Shere Ali. You
+will have to round him up into a corner, I expect. And whatever you do,
+head him off Russian territory. For we want him. We want him brought back
+into Kohara. It will have a great effect on this country. It will show
+them that the Sirkar can even pick a man out of the bazaars of Central
+Asia if he is rash enough to stand up against it in revolt."
+
+"That will be rather humiliating for Shere Ali," said Linforth, after a
+short pause; and Ralston sat up on the bed. What in the world, he
+wondered, could Linforth have read in his letter, so to change him? He
+was actually sympathising with Shere Ali--he who had been hottest in
+his anger.
+
+"Shere Ali should have thought of that before," Ralston said sharply,
+and he rose to his feet. "I rely upon you, Linforth. It may take you a
+year. It may take you only a few months. But I rely upon you to bring
+Shere Ali back. And when you do," he added, with a smile, "there's the
+road waiting for you."
+
+But for once even that promise failed to stir Dick Linforth into
+enthusiasm.
+
+"I will do my best," he said quietly; and with that Ralston left him.
+
+Linforth sat down in his chair and once more took out the crumpled
+letter. He had walked with the Gods of late, like one immune from earthly
+troubles. But his bad hour had been awaiting him. The letter was signed
+Violet. He read it through again, and this was what he read:
+
+"This is the most difficult letter I have ever written. For I don't feel
+that I can make you understand at all just how things are. But somehow or
+other I do feel that this is going to hurt you frightfully, and, oh,
+Dick, do forgive me. But if it will console or help at all, know this,"
+and the words were underlined--as indeed were many words in Violet
+Oliver's letters--"that I never was good enough for you and you are well
+rid of me. I told you what I was, didn't I, Dick?--a foolish lover of
+beautiful things. I tried to tell you the whole truth that last evening
+in the garden at Peshawur, but you wouldn't let me, Dick. And I must tell
+you now. I never sent the pearl necklace back, Dick, although I told you
+that I did. I meant to send it back the night when I parted from the
+Prince. I packed it up and put it ready. But--oh, Dick, how can I tell
+you?--I had had an imitation one made just like it for safety, and in the
+night I got up and changed them. I couldn't part with it--I sent back the
+false one. Now you know me, Dick! But even now perhaps you don't. You
+remember the night in Peshawur, the terrible night? Mr. Ralston wondered
+why, after complaining that my window was unbolted, I unbolted it myself.
+Let me tell you, Dick! Mr. Ralston said that 'theft' was the explanation.
+Well, after I tried to tell you in the garden and you would not listen, I
+thought of what he had said. I thought it would be such an easy way out
+of it, if the thief should come in when I was asleep and steal the
+necklace and go away again before I woke up. I don't know how I brought
+myself to do it. It was you, Dick! I had just left you, I was full of
+thoughts of you. So I slipped back the bolt myself. But you see, Dick,
+what I am. Although I wanted to send that necklace back, I couldn't, I
+_simply couldn't_, and it's the same with other things. I would be very,
+very glad to know that I could be happy with you, dear, and live your
+life. But I know that I couldn't, that it wouldn't last, that I should be
+longing for other things, foolish things and vanities. Again, Dick, you
+are well rid of a silly vain woman, and I wish you all happiness in that
+riddance. I never would have made you a good wife. Nor will I make any
+man a good wife. I have not the sense of a dog. I know it, too! That's
+the sad part of it all, Dick. Forgive me, and thanks, a thousand thanks,
+for the honour you ever did me in wanting me at all." Then followed--it
+seemed to Linforth--a cry. "Won't you forgive me, dear, dear Dick!" and
+after these words her name, "Violet."
+
+But even so the letter was not ended. A postscript was added:
+
+"I shall always think of the little dreams we had together of our future,
+and regret that I couldn't know them. That will always be in my mind.
+Remember that! Perhaps some day we will meet. Oh, Dick, good-bye!"
+
+Dick sat with that letter before his eyes for a long while. Violet had
+told him that he could be hard, but he was not hard to her. He could read
+between the lines, he understood the struggle which she had had with
+herself, he recognised the suffering which the letter had caused her. He
+was touched to pity, to a greater humanity. He had shown it in his
+forecasts of the humiliation which would befall Shere Ali when he was
+brought back a prisoner to Kohara. Linforth, in a word, had shed what was
+left of his boyhood. He had come to recognise that life was never all
+black and all white. He tore up the letter into tiny fragments. It
+required no answer.
+
+"Everything is just wrong," he said to himself, gently, as he thought
+over Shere Ali, Violet, himself. "Everything is just not what it might
+have been."
+
+And a few days later he started northwards for Turkestan.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVI
+
+"THE LITTLE LESS--"
+
+
+Three years passed before Linforth returned on leave to England. He
+landed at Marseilles towards the end of September, travelled to his home,
+and a fortnight later came up from Sussex for a few days to London. It
+was the beginning of the autumn season. People were returning to town.
+Theatres were re-opening with new plays; and a fellow-officer, who had a
+couple of stalls for the first production of a comedy about which public
+curiosity was whetted, meeting Linforth in the hall of his club,
+suggested that they should go together.
+
+"I shall be glad," said Linforth. "I always go to the play with the
+keenest of pleasure. The tuning-up of the orchestra and the rising of the
+curtain are events to me. And, to be honest, I have never been to a first
+night before. Let us do the thing handsomely and dine together before we
+go. It will be my last excitement in London for another three or four
+years, I expect."
+
+The two young men dined together accordingly at one of the great
+restaurants. Linforth, fresh from the deep valleys of Chiltistan, was
+elated by the lights, the neighbourhood of people delicately dressed, and
+the subdued throb of music from muted violins.
+
+"I am the little boy at the bright shop window," he said with a laugh,
+while his eyes wandered round the room. "I look in through the glass from
+the pavement outside, and--"
+
+His voice halted and stopped; and when he resumed he spoke without his
+former gaiety. Indeed, the change of note was more perceptible than the
+brief pause. His friend conjectured that the words which Linforth now
+used were not those which he had intended to speak a moment ago.
+
+"--and," he said slowly, "I wonder what sort of fairyland it is actually
+to live and breathe in?"
+
+While he spoke, his eyes were seeking an answer to his question, and
+seeking it in one particular quarter. A few tables away, and behind
+Linforth's friend and a little to his right, sat Violet Oliver. She was
+with a party of six or eight people, of whom Linforth took no note. He
+had eyes only for her. Bitterness had long since ceased to colour his
+thoughts of Violet Oliver. And though he had not forgotten, there was no
+longer any living pain in his memories. So much had intervened since he
+had walked with her in the rose-garden at Peshawur--so many new
+experiences, so much compulsion of hard endeavour. When his recollections
+went back to the rose-garden at Peshawur, as at rare times they would, he
+was only conscious at the worst that his life was rather dull when tested
+by the high aspirations of his youth. There was less music in it than he
+had thought to hear. Instead of swinging in a soldier's march to the
+sound of drums and bugles down the road, it walked sedately. To use his
+own phrase, everything was--_just not_. There was no more in it than
+that. And indeed at the first it was almost an effort for him to realise
+that between him and this woman whom he now actually saw, after three
+years, there had once existed a bond of passion. But, as he continued to
+look, the memories took substance, and he began to wonder whether in her
+fairyland it was "just not," too. She had what she had wanted--that was
+clear. A collar of pearls, fastened with a diamond bow, encircled her
+throat. A great diamond flashed upon her bosom. Was she satisfied? Did no
+memory of the short week during which she had longed to tread the road of
+fire and stones, the road of high endeavour, trouble her content?
+
+Linforth was curious. She was not paying much heed to the talk about the
+table. She took no part in it, but sat with her head a little raised, her
+eyes dreamily fixed upon nothing in particular. But Linforth remembered
+with a smile that there was no inference to be drawn from that not
+unusual attitude of hers. It did not follow that she was bored or filled
+with discontent. She might simply be oblivious. A remark made about her
+by some forgotten person who had asked a question and received no answer
+came back to Linforth and called a smile to his face. "You might imagine
+that Violet Oliver is thinking of the angels. She is probably considering
+whether she should run upstairs and powder her nose."
+
+Linforth began to look for other signs; and it seemed to him that the
+world had gone well with her. She had a kind of settled look, almost a
+sleekness, as though anxiety never came near to her pillow. She had
+married, surely, and married well. The jewels she wore were evidence, and
+Linforth began to speculate which of the party was her husband. They were
+young people who were gathered at the table. In her liking for young
+people about her she had not changed. Of the men no one was noticeable,
+but Violet Oliver, as he remembered, would hardly have chosen a
+noticeable man. She would have chosen someone with great wealth and no
+ambitions, one who was young enough to ask nothing more from the world
+than Violet Oliver, who would not, in a word, trouble her with a career.
+She might have chosen anyone of her companions. And then her eyes
+travelled round the room and met his.
+
+For a moment she gazed at him, not seeing him at all. In a moment or two
+consciousness came to her. Her brows went up in astonishment. Then she
+smiled and waved her hand to him across the room--gaily, without a trace
+of embarrassment, without even the colour rising to her cheeks. Thus
+might one greet a casual friend of yesterday. Linforth bethought him,
+with a sudden sting of bitterness which surprised him by its sharpness,
+of the postscript in the last of the few letters she had written to him.
+That letter was still vivid enough in his memories for him to be able to
+see the pages, to recognise the writing, and read the sentences.
+
+"I shall always think of the little dreams we had together of our future,
+and regret that I couldn't know them. That will always be in my mind.
+Remember that!"
+
+How much of that postscript remained true, he wondered, after these three
+years. Very little, it seemed. Linforth fell to speculating, with an
+increasing interest, as to which of the men at her table she had mated
+with. Was it the tall youth with the commonplace good looks opposite to
+her? Linforth detected now a certain flashiness in his well grooming
+which he had not noticed before. Or was it the fat insignificant young
+man three seats away from her?
+
+A rather gross young person, Linforth thought him--the offspring of some
+provincial tradesman who had retired with a fortune and made a gentleman
+of his son.
+
+"Well, no doubt he has the dibs," Linforth found himself saying with an
+unexpected irritation, as he contemplated the possible husband. And his
+friend broke in upon his thoughts.
+
+"If you are going to eat any dinner, Linforth, it might be as well to
+begin; we shall have to go very shortly."
+
+Linforth fell to accordingly. His appetite was not impaired, he was happy
+to notice, but, on the whole, he wished he had not seen Violet Oliver.
+This was his last night in London. She might so easily have come
+to-morrow instead, when he would already have departed from the town. It
+was a pity.
+
+He did not look towards her table any more, but the moment her party rose
+he was nevertheless aware of its movement. He was conscious that she
+passed through the restaurant towards the lobby at no great distance from
+himself. He was aware, though he did not raise his head, that she was
+looking at him.
+
+Five minutes afterwards the waiter brought to him a folded piece of
+paper. He opened it and read:
+
+"Dick, won't you speak to me at all? I am waiting.--VIOLET."
+
+Linforth looked up at his friend.
+
+"There is someone I must go and speak to," he said. "I won't be
+five minutes."
+
+He rose from the table and walked out of the restaurant. His heart was
+beating rather fast, but it was surely curiosity which produced that
+effect. Curiosity to know whether with her things were--just not, too. He
+passed across the hall and up the steps. On the top of the steps she was
+waiting for him. She had her cloak upon her shoulders, and in the
+background the gross young man waited for her without interposing--the
+very image of a docile husband.
+
+"Dick," she said quickly, as she held out her hand to him, "I did so want
+to talk to you. I have to rush off to a theatre. So I sent in for you.
+Why wouldn't you speak to me?"
+
+That he should have any reason to avoid her she seemed calmly and
+completely unconscious. And so unembarrassed was her manner that even
+with her voice in his ears and her face before him, delicate and pretty
+as of old, Dick almost believed that never had he spoken of love to her,
+and never had she answered him.
+
+"You are married?" he asked.
+
+Violet nodded her head. She did not, however, introduce her husband. She
+took no notice of him whatever. She did not mention her new name.
+
+"And you?" she asked.
+
+Linforth laughed rather harshly.
+
+"No."
+
+Perhaps the harshness of the laugh troubled her. Her forehead puckered.
+She dropped her eyes from his face.
+
+"But you will," she said in a low voice.
+
+Linforth did not answer, and in a moment or two she raised her head
+again. The trouble had gone from her face. She smiled brightly.
+
+"And the Road?" she asked. She had just remembered it. She had almost an
+air of triumph in remembering it. All these old memories were so dim. But
+at the awkward difficult moment, by an inspiration she had remembered the
+great long-cherished aim of Dick Linforth's life. The Road! Dick wondered
+whether she remembered too that there had been a time when for a few days
+she had thought to have a share herself in the making of that road which
+was to leave India safe.
+
+"It goes on," he said quietly. "It has passed Kohara. It has passed the
+fort where Luffe died. But I beg your pardon. Luffe belongs to the past,
+too, very much to the past--more even than I do."
+
+Violet paid no heed to the sarcasm. She had not heard it. She was
+thinking of something else. It seemed that she had something to say, but
+found the utterance difficult. Once or twice she looked up at Dick
+Linforth and looked down again and played with the fringe of her cloak.
+In the background the docile husband moved restlessly.
+
+"There's a question I should like to ask," she said quickly, and
+then stopped.
+
+Linforth helped her out.
+
+"Perhaps I can guess the question."
+
+"It's about--" she began, and Linforth nodded his head.
+
+"Shere Ali?" he said.
+
+"Yes," replied Violet.
+
+Linforth hesitated, looking at his companion. How much should he tell
+her, he asked himself? The whole truth? If he did, would it trouble her?
+He wondered. He had no wish to hurt her. He began warily:
+
+"After the campaign was over in Chiltistan I was sent after him."
+
+"Yes. I heard that before I left India," she replied.
+
+"I hunted him," and it seemed to Linforth that she flinched. "There's no
+other word, I am afraid. I hunted him--for months, from the borders of
+Tibet to the borders of Russia. In the end I caught him."
+
+"I heard that, too," she said.
+
+"I came up with him one morning, in a desert of stones. He was with three
+of his followers. The only three who had been loyal to him. They had
+camped as best they could under the shelter of a boulder. It was very
+cold. They had no coverings and little food. The place was as desolate as
+you could imagine--a wilderness of boulders and stones stretching away to
+the round of the sky, level as the palm of your hand, with a ragged tree
+growing up here and there. If we had not come up with them that day I
+think they would have died."
+
+He spoke with his eyes upon Violet, ready to modify his words at the
+first evidence of pain. She gave that evidence as he ended. She drew her
+cloak closer about her and shivered.
+
+"What did he say?" she asked.
+
+"To me? Nothing. We spoke only formally. All the way back to India we
+behaved as strangers. It was easier for both of us. I brought him down
+through Chiltistan and Kohara into India. I brought him down--along the
+Road which at Eton we had planned to carry on together. Down that road we
+came together--I the captor, he the prisoner."
+
+Again Violet flinched.
+
+"And where is he now?" she asked in a low voice.
+
+Suddenly Linforth turned round and looked down the steps, across the hall
+to the glass walls of the restaurant.
+
+"Did he ever come here with you?" he asked. "Did he ever dine with you
+there amongst the lights and the merry-makers and the music?"
+
+"Yes," she answered.
+
+Linforth laughed, and again there was a note of bitterness in the
+laughter.
+
+"How long ago it seems! Shere Ali will dine here no more. He is in Burma.
+He was deported to Burma."
+
+He told her no more than that. There was no need that she should know
+that Shere Ali, broken-hearted, ruined and despairing, was drinking
+himself to death with the riffraff of Rangoon, or with such of it as
+would listen to his abuse of the white women and his slanders upon their
+honesty. The contrast between Shere Ali's fate and the hopes with which
+he had set out was shocking enough. Yet even in his case so very little
+had turned the scale. Between the fulfilment of his hopes and the great
+failure what was there? If he had been sent to Ajmere instead of to
+England, if he and Linforth had not crossed the Meije to La Grave in
+Dauphiné, if a necklace of pearls he had offered had not been
+accepted--very likely at this very moment he might be reigning in
+Chiltistan, trusted and supported by the Indian Government, a helpful
+friend gratefully recognised. To Linforth's thinking it was only "just
+not" with Shere Ali, too.
+
+Linforth saw his companion coming towards him from the restaurant. He
+held out his hand.
+
+"I have got to go," he said.
+
+"I too," replied Violet. But she detained him. "I want to tell you," she
+said hurriedly. "Long ago--in Peshawur--do you remember? I told you there
+was someone else--a better mate for you than I was. I meant it, Dick, but
+you wouldn't listen. There is still the someone else. I am going to tell
+you her name. She has never said a word to me--but--but I am sure. It may
+sound mean of me to give her away--but I am not really doing that. I
+should be very happy, Dick, if it were possible. It's Phyllis Casson. She
+has never married. She is living with her father at Camberley." And
+before he could answer she had hurried away.
+
+But Linforth was to see her again that night. For when he had taken his
+seat in the stalls of the theatre he saw her and her husband in a box. He
+gathered from the remarks of those about him that her jewels were a
+regular feature upon the first nights of new plays. He looked at her now
+and then during the intervals of the acts. A few people entered her box
+and spoke to her for a little while. Linforth conjectured that she had
+dropped a little out of the world in which he had known her. Yet she was
+contented. On the whole that seemed certain. She was satisfied with her
+life. To attend the first productions of plays, to sit in the
+restaurants, to hear her jewels remarked upon--her life had narrowed
+sleekly down to that, and she was content. But there had been other
+possibilities for Violet Oliver.
+
+Linforth walked back from the theatre to his club. He looked into a room
+and saw an old gentleman dozing alone amongst his newspapers.
+
+"I suppose I shall come to that," he said grimly. "It doesn't look over
+cheerful as a way of spending the evening of one's days," and he was
+suddenly seized with the temptation to go home and take the first train
+in the morning for Camberley. He turned the plan over in his mind for a
+moment, and then swung away from it in self-disgust. He retained a
+general reverence for women, and to seek marriage without bringing love
+to light him in the search was not within his capacity.
+
+"That wouldn't be fair," he said to himself--"even if Violet's tale were
+true." For with his reverence he had retained his modesty. The next
+morning he took the train into Sussex instead, and was welcomed by Sybil
+Linforth to the house under the Downs. In the warmth of that welcome, at
+all events, there was nothing that was just not.
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 10755 ***
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #10755 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10755)
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Broken Road , by A. E. W. Mason
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Broken Road 
+
+Author: A. E. W. Mason
+
+Release Date: January 20, 2004  [eBook #10755]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BROKEN ROAD ***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Ted Garvin, Mary Meehan, and the Project Gutenberg
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+THE BROKEN ROAD
+
+BY A.E.W. MASON
+
+AUTHOR OF "FOUR FEATHERS," "THE TRUANTS," "RUNNING WATER," ETC.
+
+1907
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+CHAPTER
+
+     I.      THE BREAKING OF THE ROAD
+
+    II.      INSIDE THE FORT
+
+   III.      LINFORTH'S DEATH
+
+    IV.      LUFFE LOOKS FORWARD
+
+     V.      A MAGAZINE ARTICLE
+
+    VI.      A LONG WALK
+
+   VII.      IN THE DAUPHINÉ
+
+  VIII.      A STRING OF PEARLS
+
+    IX.      LUFFE IS REMEMBERED
+
+     X.      AN UNANSWERED QUESTION
+
+    XI.      AT THE GATE OF LAHORE
+
+   XII.      ON THE POLO-GROUND
+
+  XIII.      THE INVIDIOUS BAR
+
+   XIV.      IN THE COURTYARD
+
+    XV.      A QUESTION ANSWERED
+
+   XVI.      SHERE ALI MEETS AN OLD FRIEND
+
+  XVII.      NEWS FROM MECCA
+
+ XVIII.      SYBIL LINFORTH'S LOYALTY
+
+   XIX.      A GIFT MISUNDERSTOOD
+
+    XX.      THE SOLDIER AND THE JEW
+
+   XXI.      SHERE ALI IS CLAIMED BY CHILTISTAN
+
+  XXII.      THE CASTING OF THE DIE
+
+ XXIII.      SHERE ALI'S PILGRIMAGE
+
+  XXIV.      NEWS FROM AJMERE
+
+   XXV.      IN THE ROSE GARDEN
+
+  XXVI.      THE BREAKING OF THE PITCHER
+
+ XXVII.      AN ARRESTED CONFESSION
+
+XXVIII.      THE THIEF
+
+  XXIX.      MRS. OLIVER RIDES THROUGH PESHAWUR
+
+   XXX.      THE NEEDED IMPLEMENT
+
+  XXXI.      AN OLD TOMB AND A NEW SHRINE
+
+ XXXII.      SURPRISES FOR CAPTAIN PHILLIPS
+
+XXXIII.      IN THE RESIDENCY
+
+ XXXIV.      ONE OF THE LITTLE WARS
+
+  XXXV.      A LETTER FROM VIOLET
+
+ XXXVI.      "THE LITTLE LESS--"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+THE BREAKING OF THE ROAD
+
+
+It was the Road which caused the trouble. It usually is the road. That
+and a reigning prince who was declared by his uncle secretly to have sold
+his country to the British, and a half-crazed priest from out beyond the
+borders of Afghanistan, who sat on a slab of stone by the river-bank and
+preached a _djehad_. But above all it was the road--Linforth's road. It
+came winding down from the passes, over slopes of shale; it was built
+with wooden galleries along the precipitous sides of cliffs; it snaked
+treacherously further and further across the rich valley of Chiltistan
+towards the Hindu Kush, until the people of that valley could endure it
+no longer.
+
+Then suddenly from Peshawur the wires began to flash their quiet and
+ominous messages. The road had been cut behind Linforth and his coolies.
+No news had come from him. No supplies could reach him. Luffe, who was in
+the country to the east of Chiltistan, had been informed. He had gathered
+together what troops he could lay his hands on and had already started
+over the eastern passes to Linforth's relief. But it was believed that
+the whole province of Chiltistan had risen. Moreover it was winter-time
+and the passes were deep in snow. The news was telegraphed to England.
+Comfortable gentlemen read it in their first-class carriages as they
+travelled to the City and murmured to each other commonplaces about the
+price of empire. And in a house at the foot of the Sussex Downs
+Linforth's young wife leaned over the cot of her child with the tears
+streaming from her eyes, and thought of the road with no less horror than
+the people of Chiltistan. Meanwhile the great men in Calcutta began to
+mobilise a field force at Nowshera, and all official India said uneasily,
+"Thank Heaven, Luffe's on the spot."
+
+Charles Luffe had long since abandoned the army for the political
+service, and, indeed, he was fast approaching the time-limit of his
+career. He was a man of breadth and height, but rather heavy and dull of
+feature, with a worn face and a bald forehead. He had made enemies, and
+still made them, for he had not the art of suffering fools gladly; and,
+on the other hand, he made no friends. He had no sense of humour and no
+general information. He was, therefore, of no assistance at a
+dinner-party, but when there was trouble upon the Frontier, or beyond it,
+he was usually found to be the chief agent in the settlement.
+
+Luffe alone had foreseen and given warning of the danger. Even Linforth,
+who was actually superintending the making of the road, had been kept in
+ignorance. At times, indeed, some spokesman from among the merchants of
+Kohara, the city of Chiltistan where year by year the caravans from
+Central Asia met the caravans from Central India, would come to his tent
+and expostulate.
+
+"We are better without the road, your Excellency. Will you kindly stop
+it!" the merchant would say; and Linforth would then proceed to
+demonstrate how extremely valuable to the people of Chiltistan a better
+road would be:
+
+"Kohara is already a great mart. In your bazaars at summer-time you
+see traders from Turkestan and Tibet and Siberia, mingling with the
+Hindoo merchants from Delhi and Lahore. The road will bring you still
+more trade."
+
+The spokesman went back to the broad street of Kohara seemingly well
+content, and inch by inch the road crept nearer to the capital.
+
+But Luffe was better acquainted with the Chiltis, a soft-spoken race of
+men, with musical, smooth voices and polite and pretty ways. But
+treachery was a point of honour with them and cold-blooded cruelty a
+habit. There was one particular story which Luffe was accustomed to tell
+as illustrative of the Chilti character.
+
+"There was a young man who lived with his mother in a little hamlet close
+to Kohara. His mother continually urged him to marry, but for a long
+while he would not. He did not wish to marry. Finally, however, he fell
+in love with a pretty girl, made her his wife, and brought her home, to
+his mother's delight. But the mother's delight lasted for just five days.
+She began to complain, she began to quarrel; the young wife replied, and
+the din of their voices greatly distressed the young man, besides making
+him an object of ridicule to his neighbours. One evening, in a fit of
+passion, both women said they would stand it no longer. They ran out of
+the house and up the hillside, but as there was only one path they ran
+away together, quarrelling as they went. Then the young Chilti rose,
+followed them, caught them up, tied them in turn hand and foot, laid them
+side by side on a slab of stone, and quietly cut their throats.
+
+"'Women talk too much,' he said, as he came back to a house unfamiliarly
+quiet. 'One had really to put a stop to it.'"
+
+Knowing this and many similar stories, Luffe had been for some while on
+the alert. Whispers reached him of dangerous talk in the bazaars of
+Kohara, Peshawur, and even of Benares in India proper. He heard of the
+growing power of the old Mullah by the river-bank. He was aware of the
+accusations against the ruling Khan. He knew that after night had fallen
+Wafadar Nazim, the Khan's uncle, a restless, ambitious, disloyal man,
+crept down to the river-bank and held converse with the priest. Thus he
+was ready so far as he could be ready.
+
+The news that the road was broken was flashed to him from the nearest
+telegraph station, and within twenty-four hours he led out a small force
+from his Agency--a battalion of Sikhs, a couple of companies of Gurkhas,
+two guns of a mountain battery, and a troop of irregular levies--and
+disappeared over the pass, now deep in snow.
+
+"Would he be in time?"
+
+Not only in India was the question asked. It was asked in England, too,
+in the clubs of Pall Mall, but nowhere with so passionate an outcry as in
+the house at the foot of the Sussex Downs.
+
+To Sybil Linforth these days were a time of intolerable suspense. The
+horror of the Road was upon her. She dreamed of it when she slept, so
+that she came to dread sleep, and tried, as long as she might, to keep
+her heavy eyelids from closing over her eyes. The nights to her were
+terrible. Now it was she, with her child in her arms, who walked for
+ever and ever along that road, toiling through snow or over shale and
+finding no rest anywhere. Now it was her boy alone, who wandered along
+one of the wooden galleries high up above the river torrent, until a
+plank broke and he fell through with a piteous scream. Now it was her
+husband, who could go neither forward nor backward, since in front and
+behind a chasm gaped. But most often it was a man--a young Englishman,
+who pursued a young Indian along that road into the mists. Somehow,
+perhaps because it was inexplicable, perhaps because its details were so
+clear, this dream terrified her more than all the rest. She could tell
+the very dress of the Indian who fled--a young man--young as his
+pursuer. A thick sheepskin coat swung aside as he ran and gave her a
+glimpse of gay silk; soft leather boots protected his feet; and upon his
+face there was a look of fury and wild fear. She never woke from this
+dream but her heart was beating wildly. For a few moments after waking
+peace would descend upon her.
+
+"It is a dream--all a dream," she would whisper to herself with
+contentment, and then the truth would break upon her dissociated from the
+dream. Often she rose from her bed and, kneeling beside the boy's cot,
+prayed with a passionate heart that the curse of the Road--that road
+predicted by a Linforth years ago--might overpass this generation.
+
+Meanwhile rumours came--rumours of disaster. Finally a messenger broke
+through and brought sure tidings. Luffe had marched quickly, had come
+within thirty miles of Kohara before he was stopped. In a strong fort at
+a bend of the river the young Khan with his wife and a few adherents had
+taken refuge. Luffe joined the Khan, sought to push through to Kohara and
+rescue Linforth, but was driven back. He and his troops and the Khan were
+now closely besieged by Wafadar Nazim.
+
+The work of mobilisation was pressed on; a great force was gathered at
+Nowshera; Brigadier Appleton was appointed to command it.
+
+"Luffe will hold out," said official India, trying to be cheerful.
+
+Perhaps the only man who distrusted Luffe's ability to hold out was
+Brigadier Appleton, who had personal reasons for his views. Brigadier
+Appleton was no fool, and yet Luffe had not suffered him gladly. All the
+more, therefore, did he hurry on the preparations. The force marched out
+on the new road to Chiltistan. But meanwhile the weeks were passing, and
+up beyond the snow-encumbered hills the beleaguered troops stood
+cheerfully at bay behind the thick fort-walls.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+INSIDE THE FORT
+
+
+The six English officers made it a practice, so far as they could, to
+dine together; and during the third week of the siege the conversation
+happened one evening to take a particular turn. Ever afterwards, during
+this one hour of the twenty-four, it swerved regularly into the same
+channel. The restaurants of London were energetically discussed, and
+their merits urged by each particular partisan with an enthusiasm which
+would have delighted a shareholder. Where you got the best dinner, where
+the prettiest women were to be seen, whether a band was a drawback or an
+advantage--not a point was omitted, although every point had been
+debated yesterday or the day before. To-night the grave question of the
+proper number for a supper party was opened by Major Dewes of the 5th
+Gurkha Regiment.
+
+"Two," said the Political Officer promptly, and he chuckled under his
+grey moustache. "I remember the last time I was in London I took out to
+supper--none of the coryphées you boys are so proud of being seen about
+with, but"--and, pausing impressively, he named a reigning lady of the
+light-opera stage.
+
+"You did!" exclaimed a subaltern.
+
+"I did," he replied complacently.
+
+"What did you talk about?" asked Major Dewes, and the Political Officer
+suddenly grew serious.
+
+"I was very interested," he said quietly. "I got knowledge which it was
+good for me to have. I saw something which it was well for me to see. I
+wished--I wish now--that some of the rulers and the politicians could
+have seen what I saw that night."
+
+A brief silence followed upon his words, and during that silence certain
+sounds became audible--the beating of tom-toms and the cries of men. The
+dinner-table was set in the verandah of an inner courtyard open to the
+sky, and the sounds descended into that well quite distinctly, but
+faintly, as if they were made at a distance in the dark, open country.
+The six men seated about the table paid no heed to those sounds; they had
+had them in their ears too long. And five of the six were occupied in
+wondering what in the world Sir Charles Luffe, K.C.S.I., could have
+learnt of value to him at a solitary supper party with a lady of comic
+opera. For it was evident that he had spoken in deadly earnest.
+
+Captain Lynes of the Sikhs broke the silence:
+
+"What's this?" he asked, as an orderly offered to him a dish.
+
+"Let us not inquire too closely," said the Political Officer. "This is
+the fourth week of the siege."
+
+The rice-fields of the broad and fertile valley were trampled down and
+built upon with sangars. The siege had cut its scars upon the fort's
+rough walls of mud and projecting beams. But nowhere were its marks more
+visible than upon the faces of the Englishmen in the verandah of that
+courtyard.
+
+Dissimilar as they were in age and feature, sleepless nights and the
+unrelieved tension had given to their drawn faces almost a family
+likeness. They were men tired out, but as yet unaware of their
+exhaustion, so bright a flame burnt within each one of them. Somewhere
+amongst the snow-passes on the north-east a relieving force would surely
+be encamped that night, a day's march nearer than it was yesterday.
+Somewhere amongst the snow-passes in the south a second force would be
+surely advancing from Nowshera, probably short of rations, certainly
+short of baggage, that it might march the lighter. When one of those two
+forces deployed across the valley and the gates of the fort were again
+thrown open to the air the weeks of endurance would exact their toll. But
+that time was not yet come. Meanwhile the six men held on cheerily,
+inspiring the garrison with their own confidence, while day after day a
+province in arms flung itself in vain against their blood-stained walls.
+Luffe, indeed, the Political Officer, fought with disease as well as with
+the insurgents of Chiltistan; and though he remained the master-mind of
+the defence, the Doctor never passed him without an anxious glance. For
+there were the signs of death upon his face.
+
+"The fourth week!" said Lynes. "Is it, by George? Well, the siege won't
+last much longer now. The Sirkar don't leave its servants in the lurch.
+That's what these hill-tribes never seem to understand. How is Travers?"
+he asked of the Doctor.
+
+Travers, a subaltern of the North Surrey Light Infantry, had been shot
+through the thigh in the covered waterway to the river that morning.
+
+"He's going on all right," replied the Doctor. "Travers had bad luck. It
+must have been a stray bullet which slipped through that chink in the
+stones. For he could not have been seen--"
+
+As he spoke a cry rang clearly out. All six men looked upwards
+through the open roof to the clear dark sky, where the stars shone
+frostily bright.
+
+"What was that?" asked one of the six.
+
+"Hush," said Luffe, and for a moment they all listened in silence, with
+expectant faces and their bodies alert to spring from their chairs. Then
+the cry was heard again. It was a wail more than a cry, and it sounded
+strangely solitary, strangely sad, as it floated through the still air.
+There was the East in that cry trembling out of the infinite darkness
+above their heads. But the six men relaxed their limbs. They had
+expected the loud note of the Pathan war-cry to swell sonorously, and
+with intervals shorter and shorter until it became one menacing and
+continuous roar.
+
+"It is someone close under the walls," said Luffe, and as he ended a Sikh
+orderly appeared at the entrance of a passage into the courtyard, and,
+advancing to the table, saluted.
+
+"Sahib, there is a man who claims that he comes with a message from
+Wafadar Nazim."
+
+"Tell him that we receive no messages at night, as Wafadar Nazim knows
+well. Let him come in the morning and he shall be admitted. Tell him that
+if he does not go back at once the sentinels will fire." And Luffe nodded
+to one of the younger officers. "Do you see to it, Haslewood."
+
+Haslewood rose and went out from the courtyard with the orderly. He
+returned in a few minutes, saying that the man had returned to Wafadar
+Nazim's camp. The six men resumed their meal, and just as they ended it a
+Pathan glided in white flowing garments into the courtyard and bowed low.
+
+"Huzoor," he said, "His Highness the Khan sends you greeting. God has
+been very good to him. A son has been born to him this day, and he sends
+you this present, knowing that you will value it more than all that he
+has"; and carefully unfolding a napkin, he laid with reverence upon the
+table a little red cardboard box. The mere look of the box told the six
+men what the present was even before Luffe lifted the lid. It was a box
+of fifty gold-tipped cigarettes, and applause greeted their appearance.
+
+"If he could only have a son every day," said Lynes, and in the laugh
+which followed upon the words Luffe alone did not join. He leaned his
+forehead upon his hand and sat in a moody silence. Then he turned towards
+the servant and bade him thank his master.
+
+"I will come myself to offer our congratulations after dinner if his
+Highness will receive me," said Luffe.
+
+The box of cigarettes went round the table. Each man took one, lighted
+it, and inhaled the smoke silently and very slowly. The garrison had run
+out of tobacco a week before. Now it had come to them welcome as a gift
+from Heaven. The moment was one of which the perfect enjoyment was not to
+be marred by any speech. Only a grunt of satisfaction or a deep sigh of
+pleasure was now and then to be heard, as the smoke curled upwards from
+the little paper sticks. Each man competed with his neighbour in the
+slowness of his respiration, each man wanted to be the last to lay down
+his cigarette and go about his work. And then the Doctor said in a
+whisper to Major Dewes:
+
+"That's bad. Look!"
+
+Luffe, a mighty smoker in his days of health, had let his cigarette go
+out, had laid it half-consumed upon the edge of his plate. But it seemed
+that ill-health was not all to blame. He had the look of one who had
+forgotten his company. He was withdrawn amongst his own speculations, and
+his eyes looked out beyond that smoke-laden room in a fort amongst the
+Himalaya mountains into future years dim with peril and trouble.
+
+"There is no moon," he said at length. "We can get some exercise
+to-night"; and he rose from the table and ascended a little staircase on
+to the flat roof of the fort. Major Dewes and the three other officers
+got up and went about their business. Dr. Bodley, the surgeon, alone
+remained seated. He waited until the tramp of his companions' feet had
+died away, and then he drew from his pocket a briarwood pipe, which he
+polished lovingly. He walked round the table and, collecting the ends of
+the cigarettes, pressed them into the bowl of the pipe.
+
+"Thank Heavens I am not an executive officer," he said, as he lighted his
+pipe and settled himself again comfortably in his chair. It should be
+mentioned, perhaps, that he not only doctored and operated on the sick
+and wounded, but he kept the stores, and when any fighting was to be
+done, took a rifle and filled any place which might be vacant in the
+firing-line.
+
+"There are now forty-four cigarettes," he reflected. "At six a day they
+will last a week. In a week something will have happened. Either the
+relieving force will be here, or--yes, decidedly something will have
+happened." And as he blew the smoke out from between his lips he added
+solemnly: "If not to us, to the Political Officer."
+
+Meanwhile Luffe paced the roof of the fort in the darkness. The fort was
+built in the bend of a swift, wide river, and so far as three sides were
+concerned was securely placed. For on three the low precipitous cliffs
+overhung the tumbling water. On the fourth, however, the fertile plain of
+the valley stretched open and flat up to the very gates.
+
+In front of the forts a line of sangars extended, the position of each
+being marked even now by a glare of light above it, which struck up from
+the fire which the insurgents had lit behind the walls of stone. And from
+one and another of the sangars the monotonous beat of a tom-tom came to
+Luffe's ears.
+
+Luffe walked up and down for a time upon the roof. There was a new sangar
+to-night, close to the North Tower, which had not existed yesterday.
+Moreover, the almond trees in the garden just outside the western wall
+were in blossom, and the leaves upon the branches were as a screen, where
+only the bare trunks showed a fortnight ago.
+
+But with these matters Luffe was not at this moment concerned. They
+helped the enemy, they made the defence more arduous, but they were
+trivial in his thoughts. Indeed, the siege itself was to him an
+unimportant thing. Even if the fortress fell, even if every man within
+perished by the sword--why, as Lynes had said, the Sirkar does not forget
+its servants. The relieving force might march in too late, but it would
+march in. Men would die, a few families in England would wear mourning,
+the Government would lose a handful of faithful servants. England would
+thrill with pride and anger, and the rebellion would end as rebellions
+always ended.
+
+Luffe was troubled for quite another cause. He went down from the roof,
+walked by courtyard and winding passage to the quarters of the Khan. A
+white-robed servant waited for him at the bottom of a broad staircase in
+a room given up to lumber. A broken bicycle caught Luffe's eye. On the
+ledge of a window stood a photographic camera. Luffe mounted the stairs
+and was ushered into the Khan's presence. He bowed with deference and
+congratulated the Khan upon the birth of his heir.
+
+"I have been thinking," said the Khan--"ever since my son was born I have
+been thinking. I have been a good friend to the English. I am their
+friend and servant. News has come to me of their cities and colleges. I
+will send my son to England, that he may learn your wisdom, and so return
+to rule over his kingdom. Much good will come of it." Luffe had expected
+the words. The young Khan had a passion for things English. The bicycle
+and the camera were signs of it. Unwise men had applauded his
+enlightenment. Unwise at all events in Luffe's opinion. It was, indeed,
+greatly because of his enlightenment that he and a handful of English
+officers and troops were beleaguered in the fortress.
+
+"He shall go to Eton and to Oxford, and much good for my people will come
+of it," said the Khan. Luffe listened gravely and politely; but he was
+thinking of an evening when he had taken out to supper a reigning queen
+of comic opera. The recollection of that evening remained with him when
+he ascended once more to the roof of the fort and saw the light of the
+fires above the sangars. A voice spoke at his elbow. "There is a new
+sangar being built in the garden. We can hear them at work," said Dewes.
+
+Luffe walked cautiously along the roof to the western end. Quite clearly
+they could hear the spades at work, very near to the wall, amongst the
+almond and the mulberry trees.
+
+"Get a fireball," said Luffe in a whisper, "and send up a dozen Sikhs."
+
+On the parapet of the roof a rough palisade of planks had been erected to
+protect the defenders from the riflemen in the valley and across the
+river. Behind this palisade the Sikhs crept silently to their positions.
+A ball made of pinewood chips and straw, packed into a covering of
+canvas, was brought on to the roof and saturated with kerosene oil. "Are
+you ready?" said Luffe; "then now!" Upon the word the fireball was lit
+and thrown far out. It circled through the air, dropped, and lay blazing
+upon the ground. By its light under the branches of the garden trees
+could be seen the Pathans building a stone sangar, within thirty yards of
+the fort's walls.
+
+"Fire!" cried Luffe. "Choose your men and fire."
+
+All at once the silence of the night was torn by the rattle of musketry,
+and afar off the tom-toms beat yet more loudly.
+
+Luffe looked on with every faculty alert. He saw with a smile that the
+Doctor had joined them and lay behind a plank, firing rapidly and with a
+most accurate aim. But at the back of his mind all the while that he
+gave his orders was still the thought, "All this is nothing. The one
+fateful thing is the birth of a son to the Khan of Chiltistan." The
+little engagement lasted for about half an hour. The insurgents then
+drew back from the garden, leaving their dead upon the field. The rattle
+of the musketry ceased altogether. Behind the parapet one Sikh had been
+badly wounded by a bullet in the thigh. Already the Doctor was attending
+to his hurts.
+
+"It is a small thing, Huzoor," said the wounded soldier, looking upwards
+to Luffe, who stood above him; "a very small thing," but even as he spoke
+pain cut the words short.
+
+"Yes, a small thing"; Luffe did not speak the words, but he thought them.
+He turned away and walked back again across the roof. The new sangar
+would not be built that night. But it was a small thing compared with all
+that lay hidden in the future.
+
+As he paced that side of the fort which faced the plain there rose
+through the darkness, almost beneath his feet, once more the cry which
+had reached his ears while he sat at dinner in the courtyard.
+
+He heard a few paces from him the sharp order to retire given by a
+sentinel. But the voice rose again, claiming admission to the fort, and
+this time a name was uttered urgently, an English name.
+
+"Don't fire," cried Luffe to the sentinel, and he leaned over the wall.
+
+"You come from Wafadar Nazim, and alone?"
+
+"Huzoor, my life be on it."
+
+"With news of Sahib Linforth?"
+
+"Yes, news which his Highness Wafadar Nazim thinks it good for you to
+know"; and the voice in the darkness rose to insolence.
+
+Luffe strained his eyes downwards. He could see nothing. He listened, but
+he could hear no whispering voices. He hesitated. He was very anxious to
+hear news of Linforth.
+
+"I will let you in," he cried; "but if there be more than one the lives
+of all shall be the price."
+
+He went down into the fort. Under his orders Captain Lynes drew up inside
+the gate a strong guard of Sikhs with their rifles loaded and bayonets
+fixed. A few lanterns threw a dim light upon the scene, glistening here
+and there upon the polish of an accoutrement or a rifle-barrel.
+
+"Present," whispered Lynes, and the rifles were raised to the shoulder,
+with every muzzle pointing towards the gate.
+
+Then Lynes himself went forward, removed the bars, and turned the key in
+the lock. The gate swung open noiselessly a little way, and a tall man,
+clad in white flowing robes, with a deeply pock-marked face and a hooked
+nose, walked majestically in. He stood quite still while the gate was
+barred again behind him, and looked calmly about him with inquisitive
+bright eyes.
+
+"Will you follow me?" said Luffe, and he led the way through the
+rabbit-warren of narrow alleys into the centre of the fort.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+LINFORTH'S DEATH
+
+
+Luffe had taken a large bare low-roofed room supported upon pillars for
+his council-chamber. Thither he conducted his visitor. Camp chairs were
+placed for himself and Major Dewes and Captain Lynes. Cushions were
+placed upon the ground for his visitor. Luffe took his seat in the
+middle, with Dewes upon his right and Lynes upon his left. Dewes expected
+him at once to press for information as to Linforth. But Luffe knew very
+well that certain time must first be wasted in ceremonious preliminaries.
+The news would only be spoken after a time and in a roundabout fashion.
+
+"If we receive you without the distinction which is no doubt your due,"
+said Luffe politely, "you must remember that I make it a rule not to
+welcome visitors at night."
+
+The visitor smiled and bowed.
+
+"It is a great grief to his Highness Wafadar Nazim that you put so little
+faith in him," replied the Chilti. "See how he trusts you! He sends me,
+his Diwan, his Minister of Finance, in the night time to come up to your
+walls and into your fort, so great is his desire to learn that the
+Colonel Sahib is well."
+
+Luffe in his turn bowed with a smile of gratitude. It was not the time to
+point out that his Highness Wafadar Nazim was hardly taking the course
+which a genuine solicitude for the Colonel Sahib's health would
+recommend.
+
+"His Highness has but one desire in his heart. He desires peace--peace so
+that this country may prosper, and peace because of his great love for
+the Colonel Sahib."
+
+Again Luffe bowed.
+
+"But to all his letters the Colonel Sahib returns the same answer, and
+truly his Highness is at a loss what to do in order that he may ensure
+the safety of the Colonel Sahib and his followers," the Diwan continued
+pensively. "I will not repeat what has been already said," and at once he
+began at interminable length to contradict his words. He repeated the
+proposals of surrender made by Wafadar Nazim from beginning to end. The
+Colonel Sahib was to march out of the fort with his troops, and his
+Highness would himself conduct him into British territory.
+
+"If the Colonel Sahib dreads the censure of his own Government, his
+Highness will take all the responsibility for the Colonel Sahib's
+departure. But no blame will fall upon the Colonel Sahib. For the British
+Government, with whom Wafadar Nazim has always desired to live in amity,
+desires peace too, as it has always said. It is the British Government
+which has broken its treaties."
+
+"Not so," replied Luffe. "The road was undertaken with the consent of the
+Khan of Chiltistan, who is the ruler of this country, and Wafadar, his
+uncle, merely the rebel. Therefore take back my last word to Wafadar
+Nazim. Let him make submission to me as representative of the Sirkar, and
+lay down his arms. Then I will intercede for him with the Government, so
+that his punishment be light."
+
+The Diwan smiled and his voice changed once more to a note of insolence.
+
+"His Highness Wafadar Nazim is now the Khan of Chiltistan. The other,
+the deposed, lies cooped up in this fort, a prisoner of the British,
+whose willing slave he has always been. The British must retire from
+our country. His Highness Wafadar Nazim desires them no harm. But they
+must go now!"
+
+Luffe looked sternly at the Diwan.
+
+"Tell Wafadar Nazim to have a care lest they go never, but set their foot
+firmly upon the neck of this rebellious people."
+
+He rose to signify that the conference was at an end. But the Diwan did
+not stir. He smiled pensively and played with the tassels of his cushion.
+
+"And yet," he said, "how true it is that his Highness thinks only of the
+Colonel Sahib's safety."
+
+Some note of satisfaction, not quite perfectly concealed, some sly accent
+of triumph sounding through the gently modulated words, smote upon
+Luffe's ears, and warned him that the true meaning of the Diwan's visit
+was only now to be revealed. All that had gone before was nothing. The
+polite accusations, the wordy repetitions, the expressions of good
+will--these were the mere preliminaries, the long salute before the
+combat. Luffe steeled himself against a blow, controlling his face and
+his limbs lest a look or a gesture should betray the hurt. And it was
+well that he did, for the next moment the blow fell.
+
+"For bad news has come to us. Sahib Linforth met his death two days ago,
+fifty miles from here, in the camp of his Excellency Abdulla Mahommed,
+the Commander-in-Chief to his Highness. Abdulla Mahommed is greatly
+grieved, knowing well that this violent act will raise up a prejudice
+against him and his Highness. Moreover, he too would live in friendship
+with the British. But his soldiers are justly provoked by the violation
+of treaties by the British, and it is impossible to stay their hands.
+Therefore, before Abdulla Mahommed joins hands with my master, Wafadar
+Nazim, before this fort, it will be well for the Colonel Sahib and his
+troops to be safely out of reach."
+
+Luffe was doubtful whether to believe the words or no. The story might be
+a lie to frighten him and to discourage the garrison. On the other hand,
+it was likely enough to be true. And if true, it was the worst news which
+Luffe had heard for many a long day.
+
+"Let me hear how the accident--occurred," he said, smiling grimly at the
+euphemism he used.
+
+"Sahib Linforth was in the tent set apart for him by Abdulla Mahommed.
+There were guards to protect him, but it seems they did not watch well.
+Huzoor, all have been punished, but punishment will not bring Sahib
+Linforth to life again. Therefore hear the words of Wafadar Nazim, spoken
+now for the last time. He himself will escort you and your soldiers and
+officers to the borders of British territory, so that he may rejoice to
+know that you are safe. You will leave his Highness Mir Ali behind, who
+will resign his throne in favour of his uncle Wafadar, and so there will
+be peace."
+
+"And what will happen to Mir Ali, whom we have promised to protect?"
+
+The Diwan shrugged his shoulders in a gentle, deprecatory fashion and
+smiled his melancholy smile. His gesture and his attitude suggested that
+it was not in the best of taste to raise so unpleasant a question. But he
+did not reply in words.
+
+"You will tell Wafadar Nazim that we will know how to protect his
+Highness the Khan, and that we will teach Abdulla Mahommed a lesson in
+that respect before many moons have passed," Luffe said sternly. "As for
+this story of Sahib Linforth, I do not believe a word of it."
+
+The Diwan nodded his head.
+
+"It was believed that you would reply in this way.
+
+"Therefore here are proofs." He drew from his dress a silver watch upon a
+leather watch-guard, a letter-case, and to these he added a letter in
+Linforth's own hand. He handed them to Luffe.
+
+Luffe handed the watch and chain to Dewes, and opened the letter-case.
+There was a letter in it, written in a woman's handwriting, and besides
+the letter the portrait of a girl. He glanced at the letter and glanced
+at the portrait. Then he passed them on to Dewes.
+
+Dewes looked at the portrait with a greater care. The face was winning
+rather than pretty. It seemed to him that it was one of those faces which
+might become beautiful at many moments through the spirit of the woman,
+rather than from any grace of feature. If she loved, for instance, she
+would be really beautiful for the man she loved.
+
+"I wonder who she is," he said thoughtfully.
+
+"I know," replied Luffe, almost carelessly. He was immersed in the second
+letter which the Diwan had handed to him.
+
+"Who is it?" asked Dewes.
+
+"Linforth's wife."
+
+"His wife!" exclaimed Dewes, and, looking at the photograph again, he
+said in a low voice which was gentle with compassion, "Poor woman!"
+
+"Yes, yes. Poor woman!" said Luffe, and he went on reading his letter.
+
+It was characteristic of Luffe that he should feel so little concern in
+the domestic side of Linforth's life. He was not very human in his
+outlook on the world. Questions of high policy interested and engrossed
+his mind; he lived for the Frontier, not so much subduing a man's natural
+emotions as unaware of them. Men figured in his thoughts as the
+instruments of policy; their womenfolk as so many hindrances or aids to
+the fulfilment of their allotted tasks. Thus Linforth's death troubled
+him greatly, since Linforth was greatly concerned in one great
+undertaking. Moreover, the scheme had been very close to Linforth's
+heart, even as it was to Luffe's. But Linforth's wife was in England, and
+thus, as it seemed to him, neither aid nor impediment. But in that he was
+wrong. She had been the mainspring of Linforth's energy, and so much was
+evident in the letter which Luffe read slowly to the end.
+
+"Yes, Linforth's dead," said he, with a momentary discouragement. "There
+are many whom we could more easily have spared. Of course the thing will
+go on. That's certain," he said, nodding his head. A cold satisfaction
+shone in his eyes. "But Linforth was part of the Thing."
+
+He passed the second letter to Dewes, who read it; and for a while both
+men remained thoughtful and, as it seemed, unaware for the moment of the
+Diwan's presence. There was this difference, however. Luffe was thinking
+of "the Thing"; Dewes was pondering on the grim little tragedy which
+these letters revealed, and thanking Heaven in all simplicity of heart
+that there was no woman waiting in fear because of him and trembling at
+sight of each telegraph boy she met upon the road.
+
+The grim little tragedy was not altogether uncommon upon the Indian
+frontier, but it gained vividness from the brevity of the letters which
+related it. The first one, that in the woman's hand, written from a house
+under the Downs of Sussex, told of the birth of a boy in words at once
+sacred and simple. They were written for the eyes of one man, and Major
+Dewes had a feeling that his own, however respectfully, violated their
+sanctity. The second letter was an unfinished one written by the husband
+to the wife from his tent amongst the rabble of Abdulla Mahommed.
+Linforth clearly understood that this was the last letter he would write.
+"I am sitting writing this by the light of a candle. The tent door is
+open. In front of me I can see the great snow-mountains. All the ugliness
+of the lower shale slopes is hidden. By such a moonlight, my dear, may
+you always look back upon my memory. For it is over, Sybil. They are
+waiting until I fall asleep. I have been warned of it. But I shall fall
+asleep to-night. I have kept awake for two nights. I am very tired."
+
+He had fallen asleep even before the letter was completed. There was a
+message for the boy and a wish:
+
+"May he meet a woman like you, my dear, when his time comes, and love her
+as I love you," and again came the phrase, "I am very tired." It spoke of
+the boy's school, and continued: "Whether he will come out here it is too
+early to think about. But the road will not be finished--and I wonder. If
+he wants to, let him! We Linforths belong to the road," and for the third
+time the phrase recurred, "I am very tired," and upon the phrase the
+letter broke off.
+
+Dewes could imagine Linforth falling forward with his head upon his
+hands, his eyes heavy with sleep, while from without the tent the patient
+Chiltis watched until he slept.
+
+"How did it happen?" he asked.
+
+"They cast a noose over his head," replied the Diwan, "dragged him from
+the tent and stabbed him."
+
+Dewes nodded and turned to Luffe.
+
+"These letters and things must go home to his wife. It's hard on her,
+with a boy only a few months old."
+
+"A boy?" said Luffe, rousing himself from his thoughts. "Oh! there's a
+boy? I had not noticed that. I wonder how far the road will have gone
+when he comes out." There was no doubt in Luffe's mind, at all events, as
+to the boy's destiny. He turned to the Diwan.
+
+"Tell Wafadar Nazim that I will open the gates of this fort and march
+down to British territory after he has made submission," he said.
+
+The Diwan smiled in a melancholy way. He had done his best, but the
+British were, of course, all mad. He bowed himself out of the room and
+stalked through the alleys to the gates.
+
+"Wafadar Nazim must be very sure of victory," said Luffe. "He would
+hardly have given us that unfinished letter had he a fear we should
+escape him in the end."
+
+"He could not read what was written," said Dewes.
+
+"But he could fear what was written," replied Luffe.
+
+As he walked across the courtyard he heard the crack of a rifle. The
+sound came from across the river. The truce was over, the siege was
+already renewed.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+LUFFE LOOKS FORWARD
+
+
+It was the mine underneath the North Tower which brought the career of
+Luffe to an end. The garrison, indeed, had lived in fear of this peril
+ever since the siege began. But inasmuch as no attempt to mine had been
+made during the first month, the fear had grown dim. It was revived
+during the fifth week. The officers were at mess at nine o'clock in the
+evening, when a havildar of Sikhs burst into the courtyard with the news
+that the sound of a pick could be heard from the chamber of the tower.
+
+"At last!" cried Dewes, springing to his feet. The six men hurried to the
+tower. A long loophole had been fashioned in the thick wall on a downward
+slant, so that a marksman might command anyone who crept forward to fire
+the fort. Against this loophole Luffe leaned his ear.
+
+"Do you hear anything, sir?" asked a subaltern of the Sappers who was
+attached to the force.
+
+"Hush!" said Luffe.
+
+He listened, and he heard quite clearly underneath the ground below him
+the dull shock of a pickaxe. The noise came almost from beneath his feet;
+so near the mine had been already driven to the walls. The strokes fell
+with the regularity of the ticking of a clock. But at times the sound
+changed in character. The muffled thud of the pick upon earth became a
+clang as it struck upon stone.
+
+"Do you listen!" said Luffe, giving way to Dewes, and Dewes in his turn
+leaned his ear against the loophole.
+
+"What do you think?" asked Luffe.
+
+Dewes stood up straight again.
+
+"I'll tell you what I am thinking. I am thinking it sounds like the
+beating of a clock in a room where a man lies dying," he said.
+
+Luffe nodded his head. But images and romantic sayings struck no response
+from him. He turned to the young Sapper.
+
+"Can we countermine?"
+
+The young Engineer took the place of Major Dewes.
+
+"We can try, but we are late," said he.
+
+"It must be a sortie then," said Luffe.
+
+"Yes," exclaimed Lynes eagerly. "Let me go, Sir Charles!"
+
+Luffe smiled at his enthusiasm.
+
+"How many men will you require?" he asked. "Sixty?"
+
+"A hundred," replied Dewes promptly.
+
+All that night Luffe superintended the digging of the countermine, while
+Dewes made ready for the sortie. By daybreak the arrangements were
+completed. The gunpowder bags, with their fuses attached, were
+distributed, the gates were suddenly flung open, and Lynes raced out with
+a hundred Ghurkhas and Sikhs across the fifty yards of open ground to the
+sangar behind which the mine shaft had been opened. The work of the
+hundred men was quick and complete. Within half an hour, Lynes, himself
+wounded, had brought back his force, and left the mine destroyed. But
+during that half-hour disaster had fallen upon the garrison. Luffe had
+dropped as he was walking back across the courtyard to his office. For a
+few minutes he lay unnoticed in the empty square, his face upturned to
+the sky, and then a clamorous sound of lamentation was heard and an
+orderly came running through the alleys of the Fort, crying out that the
+Colonel Sahib was dead.
+
+He was not dead, however. He recovered conciousness that night, and early
+in the morning Dewes was roused from his sleep. He woke to find the
+Doctor shaking him by the shoulder.
+
+"Luffe wants you. He has not got very long now. He has something to say."
+
+Dewes slipped on his clothes, and hurried down the stairs. He followed
+the Doctor through the little winding alleys which gave to the Fort the
+appearance of a tiny village. It was broad daylight, but the fortress was
+strangely silent. The people whom he passed either spoke not at all or
+spoke only in low tones. They sat huddled in groups, waiting. Fear was
+abroad that morning. It was known that the brain of the defence was
+dying. It was known, too, what cruel fate awaited those within the Fort,
+if those without ever forced the gates and burst in upon their victims.
+
+Dewes found the Political Officer propped up on pillows on his camp-bed.
+The door from the courtyard was open, and the morning light poured
+brightly into the room.
+
+"Sit here, close to me, Dewes," said Luffe in a whisper, "and
+listen, for I am very tired." A smile came upon his face. "Do you
+remember Linforth's letters? How that phrase came again and again:
+'I am very tired.'"
+
+The Doctor arranged the pillows underneath his shoulders, and then
+Luffe said:
+
+"All right. I shall do now."
+
+He waited until the Doctor had gone from the room and continued:
+
+"I am not going to talk to you about the Fort. The defence is safe in
+your hands, so long as defence is possible. Besides, if it falls it's not
+a great thing. The troops will come up and trample down Wafadar Nazim and
+Abdulla Mahommed. They are not the danger. The road will go on again,
+even though Linforth's dead. No, the man whom I am afraid of is--the son
+of the Khan."
+
+Dewes stared, and then said in a soothing voice:
+
+"He will be looked after."
+
+"You think my mind's wandering," continued Luffe. "It never was clearer
+in my life. The Khan's son is a boy a week old. Nevertheless I tell you
+that boy is the danger in Chiltistan. The father--we know him. A good
+fellow who has lost all the confidence of his people. There is hardly an
+adherent of his who genuinely likes him; there's hardly a man in this
+Fort who doesn't believe that he wished to sell his country to the
+British. I should think he is impossible here in the future. And everyone
+in Government House knows it. We shall do the usual thing, I have no
+doubt--pension him off, settle him down comfortably outside the borders
+of Chiltistan, and rule the country as trustee for his son--until the son
+comes of age."
+
+Dewes realised surely enough that Luffe was in possession of his
+faculties, but he thought his anxiety exaggerated.
+
+"You are looking rather far ahead, aren't you, sir?" he asked.
+
+Luffe smiled.
+
+"Twenty-one years. What are twenty-one years to India? My dear Dewes!"
+
+He was silent. It seemed as though he were hesitating whether he would
+say a word more to this Major who in India talked of twenty-one years as
+a long span of time. But there was no one else to whom he could confide
+his fears. If Dewes was not brilliant, he was at all events all that
+there was.
+
+"I wish I was going to live," he cried in a low voice of exasperation. "I
+wish I could last just long enough to travel down to Calcutta and _make_
+them listen to me. But there's no hope of it. You must do what you can,
+Dewes, but very likely they won't pay any attention to you. Very likely
+you'll believe me wrong yourself, eh? Poor old Luffe, a man with a bee in
+his bonnet, eh?" he whispered savagely.
+
+"No, sir," replied Dewes. "You know the Frontier. I know that."
+
+"And even there you are wrong. No man knows the Frontier. We are all
+stumbling in the dark among these peoples, with their gentle voices and
+their cut-throat ways. The most that you can know is that you are
+stumbling in the dark. Well, let's get back to the boy here. This country
+will be kept for him, for twenty-one years. Where is he going to be
+during those twenty-one years?"
+
+Dewes caught at the question as an opportunity for reassuring the
+Political Officer.
+
+"Why, sir, the Khan told us. Have you forgotten? He is to go to Eton and
+Oxford. He'll see something of England. He will learn--" and Major Dewes
+stopped short, baffled by the look of hopelessness upon the Political
+Officer's face.
+
+"I think you are all mad," said Luffe, and he suddenly started up in his
+bed and cried with vehemence, "You take these boys to England. You train
+them in the ways of the West, the ideas of the West, and then you send
+them back again to the East, to rule over Eastern people, according to
+Eastern ideas, and you think all is well. I tell you, Dewes, it's sheer
+lunacy. Of course it's true--this boy won't perhaps suffer in esteem
+among his people quite as much as others have done. He belongs and his
+people belong to the Maulai sect. The laws of religion are not strict
+among them. They drink wine, they eat what they will, they do not lose
+caste so easily. But you have to look at the man as he will be, the
+hybrid mixture of East and West."
+
+He sank back among his pillows, exhausted by the violence of his outcry,
+and for a little while he was silent. Then he began again, but this time
+in a low, pleading voice, which was very unusual in him, and which kept
+the words he spoke vivid and fresh in Dewes' memory for many years to
+come. Indeed, Dewes would not have believed that Luffe could have spoken
+on any subject with so much wistfulness.
+
+"Listen to me, Dewes. I have lived for the Frontier. I have had no other
+interest, almost no other ties. I am not a man of friends. I believed at
+one time Linforth was my friend. I believed I liked him very much. But I
+think now that it was only because he was bound up with the Frontier. The
+Frontier has been my wife, my children, my home, my one long and lasting
+passion. And I am very well content that it has been so. I don't regret
+missed opportunities of happiness. What I regret is that I shall not be
+alive in twenty-one years to avert the danger I foresee, or to laugh at
+my fears if I am wrong. They can do what they like in Rajputana and
+Bengal and Bombay. But on the Frontier I want things to go well. Oh, how
+I want them to go well!"
+
+Luffe had grown very pale, and the sweat glistened upon his forehead.
+Dewes held to his lips a glass of brandy which stood upon a table
+beside the bed.
+
+"What danger do you foresee?" asked Dewes. "I will remember what you
+say."
+
+"Yes, remember it; write it out, so that you may remember it, and din it
+into their ears at Government House," said Luffe. "You take these boys,
+you give them Oxford, a season in London--did you ever have a season in
+London when you were twenty-one, Dewes? You show them Paris. You give
+them opportunities of enjoyment, such as no other age, no other place
+affords--has ever afforded. You give them, for a short while, a life of
+colour, of swift crowding hours of pleasure, and then you send them
+back--to settle down in their native States, and obey the orders of the
+Resident. Do you think they will be content? Do you think they will have
+their heart in their work, in their humdrum life, in their elaborate
+ceremonies? Oh, there are instances enough to convince if only people
+would listen. There's a youth now in the South, the heir of an Indian
+throne--he has six weeks' holiday. How does he use it, do you think? He
+travels hard to England, spends a week there, and travels back again. In
+England he is treated as an _equal_; here, in spite of his ceremonies, he
+is an _inferior_, and will and must be so. The best you can hope is that
+he will be merely unhappy. You pray that he won't take to drink and make
+his friends among the jockeys and the trainers. He has lost the taste for
+the native life, and nevertheless he has got to live it.
+Besides--besides--I haven't told you the worst of it."
+
+Dewes leaned forward. The sincerity of Luffe had gained upon him. "Let me
+hear all," he said.
+
+"There is the white woman," continued Luffe. "The English woman, the
+English girl, with her daintiness, her pretty frocks, her good looks,
+her delicate charm. Very likely she only thinks of him as a picturesque
+figure; she dances with him, but she does not take him seriously. Yes,
+but he may take her seriously, and often does. What then? When he is
+told to go back to his State and settle down, what then? Will he be
+content with a wife of his own people? He is already a stranger among
+his own folk. He will eat out his heart with bitterness and jealousy.
+And, mind you, I am speaking of the best--the best of the Princes and
+the best of the English women. What of the others? The English women who
+take his pearls, and the Princes who come back and boast of their
+success. Do you think that is good for British rule in India? Give me
+something to drink!"
+
+Luffe poured out his vehement convictions to his companion, wishing with
+all his heart that he had one of the great ones of the Viceroy's Council
+at his side, instead of this zealous but somewhat commonplace Major of a
+Sikh regiment. All the more, therefore, must he husband his strength, so
+that all that he had in mind might be remembered. There would be little
+chance, perhaps, of it bearing fruit. Still, even that little chance must
+be grasped. And so in that high castle beneath the Himalayas, besieged by
+insurgent tribes, a dying Political Officer discoursed upon this question
+of high policy.
+
+"I told you of a supper I had one night at the Savoy--do you
+remember? You all looked sufficiently astonished when I told you to
+bear it in mind."
+
+"Yes, I remember," said Dewes.
+
+"Very well. I told you I learned something from the lady who was with me
+which it was good for me to know. I saw something which it was good for
+me to see. Good--yes, but not pleasant either to know or see. There was a
+young Prince in England then. He dined in high places and afterwards
+supped at the Savoy with the _coryphées;_ and both in the high places and
+among the _coryphées_ his jewels had made him welcome. This is truth I am
+telling you. He was a boaster. Well, after supper that night he threw a
+girl down the stairs. Never mind what she was--she was of the white
+ruling race, she was of the race that rules in India, he comes back to
+India and insolently boasts. Do you approve? Do you think that good?"
+
+"I think it's horrible," exclaimed Dewes.
+
+"Well, I have done," said Luffe. "This youngster is to go to Oxford.
+Unhappiness and the distrust of his own people will be the best that can
+come of it, while ruin and disasters very well may. There are many ways
+of disaster. Suppose, for instance, this boy were to turn out a strong
+man. Do you see?"
+
+Dewes nodded his head.
+
+"Yes, I see," he answered, and he answered so because he saw that Luffe
+had come to the end of his strength. His voice had weakened, he lay with
+his eyes sunk deep in his head and a leaden pallor upon his face, and his
+breath laboured as he spoke.
+
+"I am glad," replied Luffe, "that you understand."
+
+But it was not until many years had passed that Dewes saw and understood
+the trouble which was then stirring in Luffe's mind. And even then, when
+he did see and understand, he wondered how much Luffe really had
+foreseen. Enough, at all events, to justify his reputation for sagacity.
+Dewes went out from the bedroom and climbed up on to the roof of the
+Fort. The sun was up, the day already hot, and would have been hotter,
+but that a light wind stirred among the almond trees in the garden. The
+leaves of those trees now actually brushed against the Fort walls. Five
+weeks ago there had been bare stems and branches. Suddenly a rifle
+cracked, a little puff of smoke rose close to a boulder on the far side
+of the river, a bullet sang in the air past Dewes' head. He ducked behind
+the palisade of boards. Another day had come. For another day the flag,
+manufactured out of some red cloth, a blue turban and some white cotton,
+floated overhead. Meanwhile, somewhere among the passes, the relieving
+force was already on the march.
+
+Late that afternoon Luffe died, and his body was buried in the Fort. He
+had done his work. For two days afterwards the sound of a battle was
+heard to the south, the siege was raised, and in the evening the
+Brigadier-General in Command rode up to the gates and found a tired and
+haggard group of officers awaiting him. They received him without cheers
+or indeed any outward sign of rejoicing. They waited in a dead silence,
+like beaten and dispirited men. They were beginning to pay the price of
+their five weeks' siege.
+
+The Brigadier looked at the group.
+
+"What of Luffe?" he asked.
+
+"Dead, sir," replied Dewes.
+
+"A great loss," said Brigadier Appleton solemnly. But he was paying his
+tribute rather to the class to which Luffe belonged than to the man
+himself. Luffe was a man of independent views, Brigadier Appleton a
+soldier clinging to tradition. Moreover, there had been an encounter
+between the two in which Luffe had prevailed.
+
+The Brigadier paid a ceremonious visit to the Khan on the following
+morning, and once more the Khan expounded his views as to the education
+of his son. But he expounded them now to sympathetic ears.
+
+"I think that his Excellency disapproved of my plan," said the Khan.
+
+"Did he?" cried Brigadier Appleton. "On some points I am inclined to
+think that Luffe's views were not always sound. Certainly let the boy go
+to Eton and Oxford. A fine idea, your Highness. The training will widen
+his mind, enlarge his ideas, and all that sort of thing. I will myself
+urge upon the Government's advisers the wisdom of your Highness'
+proposal."
+
+Moreover Dewes failed to carry Luffe's dying message to Calcutta. For on
+one point--a point of fact--Luffe was immediately proved wrong. Mir Ali,
+the Khan of Chiltistan, was retained upon his throne. Dewes turned the
+matter over in his slow mind. Wrong definitely, undeniably wrong on the
+point of fact, was it not likely that Luffe was wrong too on the point
+of theory? Dewes had six months furlong too, besides, and was anxious to
+go home. It would be a bore to travel to Bombay by way of Calcutta. "Let
+the boy go to Eton and Oxford!" he said. "Why not?" and the years
+answered him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+A MAGAZINE ARTICLE
+
+
+The little war of Chiltistan was soon forgotten by the world. But it
+lived vividly enough in the memories of a few people to whom it had
+brought either suffering or fresh honours. But most of all it was
+remembered by Sybil Linforth, so that even after fourteen years a chance
+word, or a trivial coincidence, would bring back to her the horror and
+the misery of that time as freshly as if only a single day had
+intervened. Such a coincidence happened on this morning of August.
+
+She was in the garden with her back to the Downs which rose high from
+close behind the house, and she was looking across the fields rich with
+orchards and yellow crops. She saw a small figure climb a stile and come
+towards the house along a footpath, increasing in stature as it
+approached. It was Colonel Dewes, and her thoughts went back to the day
+when first, with reluctant steps, he had walked along that path, carrying
+with him a battered silver watch and chain and a little black leather
+letter-case. Because of that memory she advanced slowly towards him now.
+
+"I did not know that you were home," she said, as they shook hands. "When
+did you land?"
+
+"Yesterday. I am home for good now. My time is up." Sybil Linforth looked
+quickly at his face and turned away.
+
+"You are sorry?" she said gently.
+
+"Yes. I don't feel old, you see. I feel as if I had many years' good work
+in me yet. But there! That's the trouble with the mediocre men. They are
+shelved before they are old. I am one of them."
+
+He laughed as he spoke, and looked at his companion.
+
+Sybil Linforth was now thirty-eight years old, but the fourteen years had
+not set upon her the marks of their passage as they had upon Dewes.
+Indeed, she still retained a look of youth, and all the slenderness of
+her figure.
+
+Dewes grumbled to her with a smile upon his face.
+
+"I wonder how in the world you do it. Here am I white-haired and creased
+like a dry pippin. There are you--" and he broke off. "I suppose it's the
+boy who keeps you young. How is he?"
+
+A look of anxiety troubled Mrs. Linforth's face; into her eyes there came
+a glint of fear. Colonel Dewes' voice became gentle with concern.
+
+"What's the matter, Sybil?" he said. "Is he ill?"
+
+"No, he is quite well."
+
+"Then what is it?"
+
+Sybil Linforth looked down for a moment at the gravel of the garden-path.
+Then, without raising her eyes, she said in a low voice:
+
+"I am afraid."
+
+"Ah," said Dewes, as he rubbed his chin, "I see."
+
+It was his usual remark when he came against anything which he did not
+understand.
+
+"You must let me have him for a week or two sometimes, Sybil. Boys will
+get into trouble, you know. It is their nature to. And sometimes a man
+may be of use in putting things straight."
+
+The hint of a smile glimmered about Sybil Linforth's mouth, but she
+repressed it. She would not for worlds have let her friend see it, lest
+he might be hurt.
+
+"No," she replied, "Dick is not in any trouble. But--" and she struggled
+for a moment with a feeling that she ought not to say what she greatly
+desired to say; that speech would be disloyal. But the need to speak was
+too strong within her, her heart too heavily charged with fear.
+
+"I will tell you," she said, and, with a glance towards the open windows
+of the house, she led Colonel Dewes to a corner of the garden where, upon
+a grass mound, there was a garden seat. From this seat one overlooked the
+garden hedge. To the left, the little village of Poynings with its grey
+church and tall tapering spire, lay at the foot of the gap in the Downs
+where runs the Brighton road. Behind them the Downs ran like a rampart to
+right and left, their steep green sides scarred here and there by
+landslips and showing the white chalk. Far away the high trees of
+Chanctonbury Ring stood out against the sky.
+
+"Dick has secrets," Sybil said, "secrets from me. It used not to be so. I
+have always known how a want of sympathy makes a child hide what he feels
+and thinks, and drives him in upon himself, to feed his thoughts with
+imaginings and dreams. I have seen it. I don't believe that anything but
+harm ever comes of it. It builds up a barrier which will last for life. I
+did not want that barrier to rise between Dick and me--I--" and her voice
+shook a little--"I should be very unhappy if it were to rise. So I have
+always tried to be his friend and comrade, rather than his mother."
+
+"Yes," said Colonel Dewes, wisely nodding his head. "I have seen you
+playing cricket with him."
+
+Colonel Dewes had frequently been puzzled by a peculiar change of manner
+in his friends. When he made a remark which showed how clearly he
+understood their point of view and how closely he was in agreement with
+it, they had a way of becoming reticent in the very moment of expansion.
+The current of sympathy was broken, and as often as not they turned the
+conversation altogether into a conventional and less interesting channel.
+That change of manner became apparent now. Sybil Linforth leaned back and
+abruptly ceased to speak.
+
+"Please go on," said Dewes, turning towards her.
+
+She hesitated, and then with a touch of reluctance continued:
+
+"I succeeded until a month or so ago. But a month or so ago the secrets
+came. Oh, I know him so well. He is trying to hide that there are any
+secrets lest his reticence should hurt me. But we have been so much
+together, so much to each other--how should I not know?" And again she
+leaned forward with her hands clasped tightly together upon her knees and
+a look of great distress lying like a shadow upon her face. "The first
+secrets," she continued, and her voice trembled, "I suppose they are
+always bitter to a mother. But since I have nothing but Dick they hurt me
+more deeply than is perhaps reasonable"; and she turned towards her
+companion with a poor attempt at a smile.
+
+"What sort of secrets?" asked Dewes. "What is he hiding?"
+
+"I don't know," she replied, and she repeated the words, adding to them
+slowly others. "I don't know--and I am a little afraid to guess. But I
+know that something is stirring in his mind, something is--" and she
+paused, and into her eyes there came a look of actual terror--"something
+is calling him. He goes alone up on to the top of the Downs, and stays
+there alone for hours. I have seen him. I have come upon him unawares
+lying on the grass with his face towards the sea, his lips parted, and
+his eyes strained, his face absorbed. He has been so lost in dreams that
+I have come close to him through the grass and stood beside him and
+spoken to him before he grew aware that anyone was near."
+
+"Perhaps he wants to be a sailor," suggested Dewes.
+
+"No, I do not think it is that," Sybil answered quietly. "If it were so,
+he would have told me."
+
+"Yes," Dewes admitted. "Yes, he would have told you. I was wrong."
+
+"You see," Mrs. Linforth continued, as though Dewes had not interrupted,
+"it is not natural for a boy at his age to want to be alone, is it? I
+don't think it is good either. It is not natural for a boy of his age to
+be thoughtful. I am not sure that that is good. I am, to tell you the
+truth, very troubled."
+
+Dewes looked at her sharply. Something, not so much in her words as in
+the careful, slow manner of her speech, warned him that she was not
+telling him all of the trouble which oppressed her. Her fears were more
+definite than she had given him as yet reason to understand. There was
+not enough in what she had said to account for the tense clasp of her
+hands, and the glint of terror in her eyes.
+
+"Anyhow, he's going to the big school next term," he said; "that is, if
+you haven't changed your mind since you last wrote to me, and I hope you
+haven't changed your mind. All that he wants really," the Colonel added
+with unconscious cruelty, "is companions of his own age. He passed in
+well, didn't he?"
+
+Sybil Linforth's face lost for the moment all its apprehension. A smile
+of pride made her face very tender, and as she turned to Dewes he thought
+to himself that really her eyes were beautiful.
+
+"Yes, he passed in very high," she said.
+
+"Eton, isn't it?" said Dewes. "Whose house?"
+
+She mentioned the name and added: "His father was there before him." Then
+she rose from her seat. "Would you like to see Dick? I will show you him.
+Come quietly."
+
+She led the way across the lawn towards an open window. It was a day of
+sunshine; the garden was bright with flowers, and about the windows
+rose-trees climbed the house-walls. It was a house of red brick, darkened
+by age, and with a roof of tiles. To Dewes' eyes, nestling as it did
+beneath the great grass Downs, it had a most homelike look of comfort.
+Sybil turned with a finger on her lips.
+
+"Keep this side of the window," she whispered, "or your shadow will fall
+across the floor."
+
+Standing aside as she bade him, he looked into the room. He saw a boy
+seated at a table with his head between his hands, immersed in a book
+which lay before him. He was seated with his side towards the window and
+his hands concealed his face. But in a moment he removed one hand and
+turned the page. Colonel Dewes could now see the profile of his face. A
+firm chin, a beauty of outline not very common, a certain delicacy of
+feature and colour gave to him a distinction of which Sybil Linforth
+might well be proud.
+
+"He'll be a dangerous fellow among the girls in a few years' time," said
+Dewes, turning to the mother. But Sybil did not hear the words. She was
+standing with her head thrust forward. Her face was white, her whole
+aspect one of dismay. Dewes could not understand the change in her. A
+moment ago she had been laughing playfully as she led him towards the
+window. Now it seemed as though a sudden disaster had turned her to
+stone. Yet there was nothing visible to suggest disaster. Dewes looked
+from Sybil to the boy and back again. Then he noticed that her eyes were
+riveted, not on Dick's face, but on the book which he was reading.
+
+"What is the matter?" he asked.
+
+"Hush!" said Sybil, but at that moment Dick lifted his head, recognised
+the visitor, and came forward to the window with a smile of welcome.
+There was no embarrassment in his manner, no air of being surprised. He
+had not the look of one who nurses secrets. A broad open forehead
+surmounted a pair of steady clear grey eyes.
+
+"Well, Dick, I hear you have done well in your examination," said the
+Colonel, as he shook hands. "If you keep it up I will leave you all I
+save out of my pension."
+
+"Thank you, sir," said Dick with a laugh. "How long have you been back,
+Colonel Dewes?"
+
+"I left India a fortnight ago."
+
+"A fortnight ago." Dick leaned his arms upon the sill and with his eyes
+on the Colonel's face asked quietly: "How far does the Road reach now?"
+
+At the side of Colonel Dewes Sybil Linforth flinched as though she had
+been struck. But it did not need that movement to explain to the Colonel
+the perplexing problem of her fears. He understood now. The Linforths
+belonged to the Road. The Road had slain her husband. No wonder she lived
+in terror lest it should claim her son. And apparently it did claim him.
+
+"The road through Chiltistan?" he said slowly.
+
+"Of course," answered Dick. "Of what other could I be thinking?"
+
+"They have stopped it," said the Colonel, and at his side he was aware
+that Sybil Linforth drew a deep breath. "The road reaches Kohara. It does
+not go beyond. It will not go beyond."
+
+Dick's eyes steadily looked into the Colonel's face; and the Colonel had
+some trouble to meet their look with the same frankness. He turned aside
+and Mrs. Linforth said,
+
+"Come and see my roses."
+
+Dick went back to his book. The man and woman passed on round the corner
+of the house to a little rose-garden with a stone sun-dial in the middle,
+surrounded by low red brick walls. Here it was very quiet. Only the bees
+among the flowers filled the air with a pleasant murmur.
+
+"They are doing well--your roses," said Dewes.
+
+"Yes. These Queen Mabs are good. Don't you think so? I am rather proud of
+them," said Sybil; and then she broke off suddenly and faced him.
+
+"Is it true?" she whispered in a low passionate voice. "Is the road
+stopped? Will it not go beyond Kohara?"
+
+Colonel Dewes attempted no evasion with Mrs. Linforth.
+
+"It is true that it is stopped. It is also true that for the moment there
+is no intention to carry it further. But--but--"
+
+And as he paused Sybil took up the sentence.
+
+"But it will go on, I know. Sooner or later." And there was almost a note
+of hopelessness in her voice. "The Power of the Road is beyond the Power
+of Governments," she added with the air of one quoting a sentence.
+
+They walked on between the alleys of rose-trees and she asked:
+
+"Did you notice the book which Dick was reading?"
+
+"It looked like a bound volume of magazines."
+
+Sybil nodded her head.
+
+"It was a volume of the 'Fortnightly.' He was reading an article
+written forty years ago by Andrew Linforth--" and she suddenly cried
+out, "Oh, how I wish he had never lived. He was an uncle of Harry's--my
+husband. He predicted it. He was in the old Company, then he became a
+servant of the Government, and he was the first to begin the road. You
+know his history?"
+
+"No."
+
+"It is a curious one. When it was his time to retire, he sent his money
+to England, he made all his arrangements to come home, and then one night
+he walked out of the hotel in Bombay, a couple of days before the ship
+sailed, and disappeared. He has never been heard of since."
+
+"Had he no wife?" asked Dewes.
+
+"No," replied Sybil. "Do you know what I think? I think he went back to
+the north, back to his Road. I think it called him. I think he could not
+keep away."
+
+"But we should have come across him," cried Dewes, "or across news of
+him. Surely we should!"
+
+Sybil shrugged her shoulders.
+
+"In that article which Dick was reading, the road was first proposed.
+Listen to this," and she began to recite:
+
+"The road will reach northwards, through Chiltistan, to the foot of the
+Baroghil Pass, in the mountains of the Hindu Kush. Not yet, but it will.
+Many men will die in the building of it from cold and dysentery, and
+even hunger--Englishmen and coolies from Baltistan. Many men will die
+fighting over it, Englishmen and Chiltis, and Gurkhas and Sikhs. It will
+cost millions of money, and from policy or economy successive
+Governments will try to stop it; but the power of the Road will be
+greater than the power of any Government. It will wind through valleys
+so deep that the day's sunshine is gone within the hour. It will be
+carried in galleries along the faces of mountains, and for eight months
+of the year sections of it will be buried deep in snow. Yet it will be
+finished. It will go on to the foot of the Hindu Kush, and then only the
+British rule in India will be safe."
+
+She finished the quotation.
+
+"That is what Andrew Linforth prophesied. Much of it has already been
+justified. I have no doubt the rest will be in time. I think he went
+north when he disappeared. I think the Road called him, as it is now
+calling Dick."
+
+She made the admission at last quite simply and quietly. Yet it was
+evident to Dewes that it cost her much to make it.
+
+"Yes," he said. "That is what you fear."
+
+She nodded her head and let him understand something of the terror with
+which the Road inspired her.
+
+"When the trouble began fourteen years ago, when the road was cut and day
+after day no news came of whether Harry lived or, if he died, how he
+died--I dreamed of it--I used to see horrible things happening on that
+road--night after night I saw them. Dreadful things happening to Dick and
+his father while I stood by and could do nothing. Oh, it seems to me a
+living thing greedy for blood--our blood."
+
+She turned to him a haggard face. Dewes sought to reassure her.
+
+"But there is peace now in Chiltistan. We keep a close watch on that
+country, I can tell you. I don't think we shall be caught napping
+there again."
+
+But these arguments had little weight with Sybil Linforth. The tragedy of
+fourteen years ago had beaten her down with too strong a hand. She could
+not reason about the road. She only felt, and she felt with all the
+passion of her nature.
+
+"What will you do, then?" asked Dewes.
+
+She walked a little further on before she answered.
+
+"I shall do nothing. If, when the time comes, Dick feels that work upon
+that road is his heritage, if he wants to follow in his father's steps, I
+shall say not a single word to dissuade him."
+
+Dewes stared at her. This half-hour of conversation had made real to him
+at all events the great strength of her hostility. Yet she would put the
+hostility aside and say not a word.
+
+"That's more than I could do," he said, "if I felt as you do. By
+George it is!"
+
+Sybil smiled at him with friendliness.
+
+"It's not bravery. Do you remember the unfinished letter which you
+brought home to me from Harry? There were three sentences in that which I
+cannot pretend to have forgotten," and she repeated the sentences:
+
+"'Whether he will come out here, it is too early to think about. But the
+road will not be finished--and I wonder. If he wants to, let him.' It is
+quite clear--isn't it?--that Harry wanted him to take up the work. You
+can read that in the words. I can imagine him speaking them and hear the
+tone he would use. Besides--I have still a greater fear than the one of
+which you know. I don't want Dick, when he grows up, ever to think that I
+have been cowardly, and, because I was cowardly, disloyal to his father."
+
+"Yes, I see," said Colonel Dewes.
+
+And this time he really did understand.
+
+"We will go in and lunch," said Sybil, and they walked back to the house.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+A LONG WALK
+
+
+The footsteps sounded overhead with a singular regularity. From the
+fireplace to the door, and back again from the door to the fireplace. At
+each turn there was a short pause, and each pause was of the same
+duration. The footsteps were very light; it was almost as though an
+animal, a caged animal, padded from the bars at one end to the bars at
+the other. There was something stealthy in the footsteps too.
+
+In the room below a man of forty-five sat writing at a desk--a very tall,
+broad-shouldered man, in clerical dress. Twenty-five years before he had
+rowed as number seven in the Oxford Eight, with an eye all the while upon
+a mastership at his old school. He had taken a first in Greats; he had
+obtained his mastership; for the last two years he had had a House. As he
+had been at the beginning, so he was now, a man without theories but with
+an instinctive comprehension of boys. In consequence there were no
+vacancies in his house, and the Headmaster had grown accustomed to
+recommend the Rev. Mr. Arthur Pollard when boys who needed any special
+care came to the school.
+
+He was now so engrossed with the preparations for the term which was to
+begin to-morrow that for some while the footsteps overhead did not
+attract his attention. When he did hear them he just lifted his head,
+listened for a moment or two, lit his pipe and went on with his work.
+
+But the sounds continued. Backwards and forwards from the fireplace to
+the door, the footsteps came and went--without haste and without
+cessation; stealthily regular; inhumanly light. Their very monotony
+helped them to pass as unnoticed as the ticking of a clock. Mr. Pollard
+continued the preparation of his class-work for a full hour, and only
+when the dusk was falling, and it was becoming difficult for him to see
+what he was writing, did he lean back in his chair and stretch his arms
+above his head with a sigh of relief.
+
+Then once more he became aware of the footsteps overhead. He rose and
+rang the bell.
+
+"Who is that walking up and down the drawingroom, Evans?" he asked of
+the butler.
+
+The butler threw back his head and listened.
+
+"I don't know, sir," he replied.
+
+"Those footsteps have been sounding like that for more than an hour."
+
+"For more than an hour?" Evans repeated. "Then I am afraid, sir, it's the
+new young gentleman from India."
+
+Arthur Pollard started.
+
+"Has he been waiting up there alone all this time?" he exclaimed. "Why in
+the world wasn't I told?"
+
+"You were told, sir," said Evans firmly but respectfully. "I came into
+the study here and told you, and you answered 'All right, Evans.' But I
+had my doubts, sir, whether you really heard or not."
+
+Mr. Pollard hardly waited for the end of the explanation. He hurried out
+of the room and sprang up the stairs. He had arranged purposely for the
+young Prince to come to the house a day before term began. He was likely
+to be shy, ill-at-ease and homesick, among so many strange faces and
+unfamiliar ways. Moreover, Mr. Pollard wished to become better acquainted
+with the boy than would be easily possible once the term was in full
+swing. For he was something more of an experiment than the ordinary
+Indian princeling from a State well under the thumb of the Viceroy and
+the Indian Council. This boy came of the fighting stock in the north. To
+leave him tramping about a strange drawing-room alone for over an hour
+was not the best possible introduction to English ways and English life.
+Mr. Pollard opened the door and saw a slim, tall boy, with his hands
+behind his back and his eyes fixed on the floor, walking up and down in
+the gloom.
+
+"Shere Ali," he said, and he held out his hand. The boy took it shyly.
+
+"You have been waiting here for some time," Mr. Pollard continued, "I am
+sorry. I did not know that you had come. You should have rung the bell."
+
+"I was not lonely," Shere Ali replied. "I was taking a walk."
+
+"Yes, so I gathered," said the master with a smile. "Rather a long walk."
+
+"Yes, sir," the boy answered seriously. "I was walking from Kohara up the
+valley, and remembering the landmarks as I went. I had walked a long way.
+I had come to the fort where my father was besieged."
+
+"Yes, that reminds me," said Pollard, "you won't feel so lonely to-morrow
+as you do to-day. There is a new boy joining whose father was a great
+friend of your father's. Richard Linforth is his name. Very likely your
+father has mentioned that name to you."
+
+Mr. Pollard switched on the light as he spoke and saw Shere All's face
+flash with eagerness.
+
+"Oh yes!" he answered, "I know. He was killed upon the road by my
+uncle's people."
+
+"I have put you into the next room to his. If you will come with me I
+will show you."
+
+Mr. Pollard led the way along a passage into the boys' quarters.
+
+"This is your room. There's your bed. Here's your 'burry,'" pointing to a
+bureau with a bookcase on the top. He threw open the next door. "This is
+Linforth's room. By the way, you speak English very well."
+
+"Yes," said Shere Ali. "I was taught it in Lahore first of all. My father
+is very fond of the English."
+
+"Well, come along," said Mr. Pollard. "I expect my wife has come back and
+she shall give us some tea. You will dine with us to-night, and we will
+try to make you as fond of the English as your father is."
+
+The next day the rest of the boys arrived, and Mr. Pollard took the
+occasion to speak a word or two to young Linforth.
+
+"You are both new boys," he said, "but you will fit into the scheme of
+things quickly enough. He won't. He's in a strange land, among strange
+people. So just do what you can to help him."
+
+Dick Linforth was curious enough to see the son of the Khan of
+Chiltistan. But not for anything would he have talked to him of his
+father who had died upon the road, or of the road itself. These things
+were sacred. He greeted his companion in quite another way.
+
+"What's your name?" he asked.
+
+"Shere Ali," replied the young Prince.
+
+"That won't do," said Linforth, and he contemplated the boy solemnly. "I
+shall call you Sherry-Face," he said.
+
+And "Sherry-Face" the heir to Chiltistan remained; and in due time the
+name followed him to College.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+IN THE DAUPHINÉ
+
+
+The day broke tardily among the mountains of Dauphiné. At half-past three
+on a morning of early August light should be already stealing through the
+little window and the chinks into the hut upon the Meije. But the four
+men who lay wrapped in blankets on the long broad shelf still slept in
+darkness. And when the darkness was broken it was by the sudden spit of a
+match. The tiny blue flame spluttered for a few seconds and then burned
+bright and yellow. It lit up the face of a man bending over the dial of a
+watch and above him and about him the wooden rafters and walls came dimly
+into view. The face was stout and burned by the sun to the colour of a
+ripe apple, and in spite of a black heavy moustache had a merry and
+good-humoured look. Little gold earrings twinkled in his ears by the
+light of the match. Annoyance clouded his face as he remarked the time.
+
+"Verdammt! Verdammt!" he muttered.
+
+The match burned out, and for a while he listened to the wind wailing
+about the hut, plucking at the door and the shutters of the window. He
+climbed down from the shelf with a rustle of straw, walked lightly for a
+moment or two about the hut, and then pulled open the door quickly. As
+quickly he shut it again.
+
+From the shelf Linforth spoke:
+
+"It is bad, Peter?"
+
+"It is impossible," replied Peter in English with a strong German accent.
+For the last three years he and his brother had acted as guides to the
+same two men who were now in the Meije hut. "We are a strong party, but
+it is impossible. Before I could walk a yard from the door, I would have
+to lend a lantern. And it is after four o'clock! The water is frozen in
+the pail, and I have never known that before in August."
+
+"Very well," said Linforth, turning over in his blankets. It was warm
+among the blankets and the straw, and he spoke with contentment. Later in
+the day he might rail against the weather. But for the moment he was very
+clear that there were worse things in the world than to lie snug and hear
+the wind tearing about the cliffs and know that there was no chance of
+facing it.
+
+"We will not go back to La Bérarde," he said. "The storm may clear. We
+will wait in the hut until tomorrow."
+
+And from a third figure on the shelf there came in guttural English:
+
+"Yes, yes. Of course."
+
+The fourth man had not wakened from his sleep, and it was not until he
+was shaken by the shoulder at ten o'clock in the morning that he sat up
+and rubbed his eyes.
+
+The fourth man was Shere Ali.
+
+"Get up and come outside," said Linforth.
+
+Ten years had passed since Shere Ali had taken his long walk from Kohara
+up the valley in the drawing-room of his house-master at Eton. And those
+ten years had had their due effect. He betrayed his race nowadays by
+little more than his colour, a certain high-pitched intonation of his
+voice and an extraordinary skill in the game of polo. There had been a
+time of revolt against discipline, of inability to understand the points
+of view of his masters and their companions, and of difficulty to
+discover much sense in their institutions.
+
+It is to be remembered that he came from the hill-country, not from the
+plains of India. That honour was a principle, not a matter of
+circumstance, and that treachery was in itself disgraceful, whether it
+was profitable or not--here were hard sayings for a native of Chiltistan.
+He could look back upon the day when he had thought a public-house with a
+great gilt sign or the picture of an animal over the door a temple for
+some particular sect of worshippers.
+
+"And, indeed, you are far from wrong," his tutor had replied to him. "But
+since we do not worship at that fiery shrine such holy places are
+forbidden us."
+
+Gradually, however, his own character was overlaid; he was quick to
+learn, and in games quick to excel. He made friends amongst his
+schoolmates, he carried with him to Oxford the charm of manner which is
+Eton's particular gift, and from Oxford he passed to London. He was rich,
+he was liked, and he found a ready welcome, which did not spoil him.
+Luffe would undoubtedly have classed him amongst the best of the native
+Princes who go to England for their training, and on that very account,
+would have feared the more for his future. Shere Ali was now just
+twenty-four, he was tall, spare of body and wonderfully supple of limbs,
+and but for a fulness of the lower lip, which was characteristic of his
+family, would have been reckoned more than usually handsome.
+
+He came out of the door of the hut and stood by the side of Linforth.
+They looked up towards the Meije, but little of that majestic mass of
+rock was visible. The clouds hung low; the glacier below them upon their
+left had a dull and unillumined look, and over the top of the Breche de
+la Meije, the pass to the left of their mountain, the snow whirled up
+from the further side like smoke. The hut is built upon a great spur of
+the mountain which runs down into the desolate valley des Étançons, and
+at its upper end melts into the great precipitous rock-wall which forms
+one of the main difficulties of the ascent. Against this wall the clouds
+were massed. Snow lay where yesterday the rocks had shone grey and ruddy
+brown in the sunlight, and against the great wall here and there icicles
+were hung.
+
+"It looks unpromising," said Linforth. "But Peter says that the
+mountain is in good condition. To-morrow it may be possible. It is
+worth while waiting. We shall get down to La Grave to-morrow instead of
+to-day. That is all."
+
+"Yes. It will make no difference to our plans," said Shere Ali; and so
+far as their immediate plans were concerned Shere Ali was right. But
+these two men had other and wider plans which embraced not a summer's
+holiday but a lifetime, plans which they jealously kept secret; and these
+plans, as it happened, the delay of a day in the hut upon the Meije was
+deeply to affect.
+
+They turned back into the room and breakfasted. Then Linforth lit his
+pipe and once more curled himself up in his rug upon the straw. Shere Ali
+followed his example. And it was of the wider plans that they at once
+began to talk.
+
+"But heaven only knows when I shall get out to India," cried Linforth
+after a while. "There am I at Chatham and not a chance, so far as I can
+see, of getting away. You will go back first."
+
+It was significant that Linforth, who had never been in India, none the
+less spoke habitually of going back to it, as though that country in
+truth was his native soil. Shere Ali shook his head.
+
+"I shall wait for you," he said. "You will come out there." He raised
+himself upon his elbow and glanced at his friend's face. Linforth had
+retained the delicacy of feature, the fineness of outline which ten years
+before had called forth the admiration of Colonel Dewes. But the ten
+years had also added a look of quiet strength. A man can hardly live with
+a definite purpose very near to his heart without gaining some reward
+from the labour of his thoughts. Though he speak never so little, people
+will be aware of him as they are not aware of the loudest chatterer in
+the room. Thus it was with Linforth. He talked with no greater wit than
+his companions, he made no greater display of ability, he never outshone,
+and yet not a few men were conscious of a force underlying his quietude
+of manner. Those men were the old and the experienced; the unobservant
+overlooked him altogether.
+
+"Yes," said Shere Ali, "since you want to come you will come."
+
+"I shall try to come," said Linforth, simply. "We belong to the Road,"
+and for a little while he lay silent. Then in a low voice he spoke,
+quoting from that page which was as a picture in his thoughts.
+
+"Over the passes! Over the snow passes to the foot of the Hindu Kush!"
+
+"Then and then only India will be safe," the young Prince of Chiltistan
+added, speaking solemnly, so that the words seemed a kind of ritual.
+
+And to both they were no less. Long before, when Shere Ali was first
+brought into his room, on his first day at Eton, Linforth had seen his
+opportunity, and seized it. Shere Ali's father retained his kingdom with
+an English Resident at his elbow. Shere Ali would in due time succeed.
+Linforth had quietly put forth his powers to make Shere Ali his friend,
+to force him to see with his eyes, and to believe what he believed. And
+Shere Ali had been easily persuaded. He had become one of the white men,
+he proudly told himself. Here was a proof, the surest of proofs. The
+belief in the Road--that was one of the beliefs of the white men, one of
+the beliefs which marked him off from the native, not merely in
+Chiltistan, but throughout the East. To the white man, the Road was the
+beginning of things, to the Oriental the shadow of the end. Shere Ali
+sided with the white men. He too had faith in the Road and he was proud
+of his faith because he shared it with the white men.
+
+"We shall be very glad of these expeditions, some day, in Chiltistan,"
+said Linforth.
+
+Shere Ali stared.
+
+"It was for that reason--?" he asked.
+
+"Yes."
+
+Shere Ali was silent for a while. Then he said, and with some regret:
+
+"There is a great difference between us. You can wait and wait. I want
+everything done within the year."
+
+Linforth laughed. He knew very well the impulsiveness of his friend.
+
+"If a few miles, or even a few furlongs, stand to my credit at the end, I
+shall not think that I have failed."
+
+They were both young, and they talked with the bright and simple faith in
+their ideals which is the great gift of youth. An older man might have
+laughed if he had heard, but had there been an older man in the hut to
+overhear them, he would have heard nothing. They were alone, save for
+their guides, and the single purpose for which--as they then
+thought--their lives were to be lived out made that long day short as a
+summer's night.
+
+"The Government will thank us when the work is done," said Shere Ali
+enthusiastically.
+
+"The Government will be in no hurry to let us begin," replied Linforth
+drily. "There is a Resident at your father's court. Your father is
+willing, and yet there's not a coolie on the road."
+
+"Yes, but you will get your way," and again confidence rang in the voice
+of the Chilti prince.
+
+"It will not be I," answered Linforth. "It will be the Road. The power of
+the Road is beyond the power of any Government."
+
+"Yes, I remember and I understand." Shere Ali lit his pipe and lay back
+among the straw. "At first I did not understand what the words meant. Now
+I know. The power of the Road is great, because it inspires men to strive
+for its completion."
+
+"Or its mastery," said Linforth slowly. "Perhaps one day on the other
+side of the Hindu Kush, the Russians may covet it--and then the Road will
+go on to meet them."
+
+"Something will happen," said Shere Ali. "At all events something
+will happen."
+
+The shadows of the evening found them still debating what complication
+might force the hand of those in authority. But always they came back to
+the Russians and a movement of troops in the Pamirs. Yet unknown to both
+of them the something else had already happened, though its consequences
+were not yet to be foreseen. A storm had delayed them for a day in a hut
+upon the Meije. They went out of the hut. The sky had cleared; and in
+the sunset the steep buttress of the Promontoire ran sharply up to the
+Great Wall; above the wall the small square patch of ice sloped to the
+base of the Grand Pic and beyond the deep gap behind that pinnacle the
+long serrated ridge ran out to the right, rising and falling, to the
+Doight de Dieu.
+
+There were some heavy icicles overhanging the Great Wall, and
+Linforth looked at them anxiously. There was also still a little snow
+upon the rocks.
+
+"It will be possible," said Peter, cheerily. "Tomorrow night we shall
+sleep in La Grave."
+
+"Yes, yes, of course," said his brother.
+
+They walked round the hut, looked for a little while down the stony
+valley des Étançons, with its one green patch up which they had toiled
+from La Bérarde the day before, and returned to watch the purple flush of
+the sunset die off the crags of the Meije. But the future they had
+planned was as a vision before their eyes, and even along the high cliffs
+of the Dauphiné the road they were to make seemed to wind and climb.
+
+"It would be strange," said Linforth, "if old Andrew Linforth were still
+alive. Somewhere in your country, perhaps in Kohara, waiting for the
+thing he dreamed to come to pass. He would be an old man now, but he
+might still be alive."
+
+"I wonder," said Shere Ali absently, and he suddenly turned to Linforth.
+"Nothing must come between us," he cried almost fiercely. "Nothing to
+hinder what we shall do together."
+
+He was the more emotional of the two. The dreams to which they had given
+utterance had uplifted him.
+
+"That's all right," said Linforth, and he turned back into the hut. But
+he remembered afterwards that it was Shere Ali who had protested against
+the possibility of their association being broken.
+
+They came out from the hut again at half-past three in the morning and
+looked up to a cloudless starlit sky which faded in the east to the
+colour of pearl. Above their heads some knobs of rock stood out upon the
+thin crest of the buttress against the sky. In the darkness of a small
+couloir underneath the knobs Peter was already ascending. The traverse of
+the Meije even for an experienced mountaineer is a long day's climb. They
+reached the summit of the Grand Pic in seven hours, descended into the
+Brèche Zsigmondy, climbed up the precipice on the further side of that
+gap, and reached the Pic Central by two o'clock in the afternoon. There
+they rested for an hour, and looked far down to the village of La Grave
+among the cornfields of the valley. There was no reason for any hurry.
+
+"We shall reach La Grave by eight," said Peter, but he was wrong, as they
+soon discovered. A slope which should have been soft snow down which they
+could plunge was hard ice, in which a ladder of steps must be cut before
+the glacier could be reached. The glacier itself was crevassed so that
+many a devour was necessary, and occasionally a jump; and evening came
+upon them while they were on the Rocher de L'Aigle. It was quite dark
+when at last they reached the grass slopes, and still far below them the
+lights were gleaming in La Grave. To both men those grass slopes seemed
+interminable. The lights of La Grave seemed never to come nearer, never
+to grow larger. Little points of fire very far away--as they had been at
+first, so they remained. But for the slope of ground beneath his feet and
+the aching of his knees, Linforth could almost have believed that they
+were not descending at all. He struck a match and looked at his watch and
+saw that it was after nine; and a little while after they had come to
+water and taken their fill of it, that it was nearly ten, but now the low
+thunder of the river in the valley was louder in his ears, and then
+suddenly he saw that the lights of La Grave were bright and near at hand.
+
+Linforth flung himself down upon the grass, and clasping his hands
+behind his head, gave himself up to the cool of the night and the
+stars overhead.
+
+"I could sleep here," he said. "Why should we go down to La Grave
+to-night?"
+
+"There is a dew falling. It will be cold when the morning breaks. And La
+Grave is very near. It is better to go," said Peter.
+
+The question was still in debate when above the roar of the river there
+came to their ears a faint throbbing sound from across the valley. It
+grew louder and suddenly two blinding lights flashed along the
+hill-side opposite.
+
+"A motor-car," said Shere Ali, and as he spoke the lights ceased
+to travel.
+
+"It's stopping at the hotel," said Linforth carelessly.
+
+"No," said Peter. "It has not reached the hotel. Look, not by a hundred
+yards. It has broken down."
+
+Linforth discussed the point at length, not because he was at all
+interested at the moment in the movements of that or of any other
+motor-car, but because he wished to stay where he was. Peter, however,
+was obdurate. It was his pride to get his patron indoors each night.
+
+"Let us go on," he said, and Linforth wearily rose to his feet.
+
+"We are making a big mistake," he grumbled, and he spoke with more truth
+than he was aware.
+
+They reached the hotel at eleven, ordered their supper and bathed. It was
+half-past eleven before Linforth and Shere Ali entered the long
+dining-room, and they found another party already supping there. Linforth
+heard himself greeted by name, and turned in surprise. It was a party of
+four--two ladies and two men. One of the men had called to him, an
+elderly man with a bald forehead, a grizzled moustache, and a shrewd
+kindly face.
+
+"I remember you, though you can't say as much of me," he said. "I
+came down to Chatham a year ago and dined at your mess as the guest
+of your Colonel."
+
+Linforth came forward with a smile of recognition.
+
+"I beg your pardon for not recognising you at once. I remember you, of
+course, quite well," he said.
+
+"Who am I, then?"
+
+"Sir John Casson, late Lieutenant-Governor of the United Provinces," said
+Linforth promptly.
+
+"And now nothing but a bore at my club," replied Sir John cheerfully. "We
+were motoring through to Grenoble, but the car has broken down. You are
+mountain-climbing, I suppose. Phyllis," and he turned to the younger of
+the two ladies, "this is Mr. Linforth of the Royal Engineers. My
+daughter, Linforth!" He introduced the second lady.
+
+"Mrs. Oliver," he said, and Linforth turning, saw that the eyes of Mrs.
+Oliver were already fixed upon him. He returned the look, and his eyes
+frankly showed her that he thought her beautiful.
+
+"And what are you going to do with yourself?" said Sir John.
+
+"Go to the country from which you have just come, as soon as I can," said
+Linforth with a smile. At this moment the fourth of the party, a stout,
+red-faced, plethoric gentleman, broke in.
+
+"India!" he exclaimed indignantly. "Bless my soul, what on earth sends
+all you young fellows racing out to India? A great mistake! I once went
+to India myself--to shoot a tiger. I stayed there for months and never
+saw one. Not a tiger, sir!"
+
+But Linforth was paying very little attention to the plethoric gentleman.
+Sir John introduced him as Colonel Fitzwarren, and Linforth bowed
+politely. Then he asked of Sir John:
+
+"Your car was not seriously damaged, I suppose?"
+
+"Keep us here two days," said Sir John. "The chauffeur will have to go on
+by diligence to-morrow to get a new sparking plug. Perhaps we shall see
+more of you in consequence."
+
+Linforth's eyes travelled back to Mrs. Oliver.
+
+"We are in no hurry," he said slowly. "We shall rest here probably for a
+day or so. May I introduce my friend?"
+
+He introduced him as the son of the Khan of Chiltistan, and Mrs. Oliver's
+eyes, which had been quietly resting upon Linforth's face, turned towards
+Shere Ali, and as quietly rested upon his.
+
+"Then, perhaps, you can tell me," said Colonel Fitzwarren, "how it was I
+never saw a tiger in India, though I stayed there four months. A most
+disappointing country, I call it. I looked for a tiger everywhere and I
+never saw one--no, not one."
+
+The Colonel's one idea of the Indian Peninsula was a huge tiger waiting
+somewhere in a jungle to be shot.
+
+But Shere Ali was paying no more attention to the Colonel's
+disparagements than Linforth had done.
+
+"Will you join us at supper?" said Sir John, and both young men replied
+simultaneously, "We shall be very pleased."
+
+Sir John Casson smiled. He could never quite be sure whether it was or
+was not to Mrs. Oliver's credit that her looks made so powerful an appeal
+to the chivalry of young men. "All young men immediately want to protect
+her," he was wont to say, "and their trouble is that they can't find
+anyone to protect her from."
+
+He watched Shere Ali and Dick Linforth with a sly amusement, and as a
+result of his watching promised himself yet more amusement during the
+next two days. He was roused from this pleasing anticipation by his
+irascible friend, Colonel Fitzwarren, who, without the slightest warning,
+flung a loud and defiant challenge across the table to Shere All.
+
+"I don't believe there is one," he cried, and breathed heavily.
+
+Shere Ali interrupted his conversation with Mrs. Oliver. "One what?" he
+asked with a smile.
+
+"Tiger, sir, tiger," said the Colonel, rapping with his knuckles upon the
+table. "Of what else should I be speaking? I don't believe there's a
+tiger in India outside the Zoo. Otherwise, why didn't I see one?"
+
+Colonel Fitzwarren glared at Shere Ali as though he held him personally
+responsible for that unhappy omission. Sir John, however, intervened with
+smooth speeches and for the rest of supper the conversation was kept to
+less painful topics. But the Colonel had not said his last word. As they
+went upstairs to their rooms he turned to Shere Ali, who was just behind
+him, and sighed heavily.
+
+"If I had shot a tiger in India," he said, with an indescribable look
+of pathos upon his big red face, "it would have made a great difference
+to my life."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+A STRING OF PEARLS
+
+
+"So you go to parties nowadays," said Mrs. Linforth, and Sir John Casson,
+leaning his back against the wall of the ball-room, puzzled his brains
+for the name of the lady with the pleasant winning face to whom he had
+just been introduced. At first it had seemed to him merely that her
+hearing was better than his. The "nowadays," however, showed that it was
+her memory which had the advantage. They were apparently old
+acquaintances; and Sir John belonged to an old-fashioned school which
+thought it discourtesy to forget even the least memorable of his
+acquaintances.
+
+"You were not so easily persuaded to decorate a ball-room at Mussoorie,"
+Mrs. Linforth continued.
+
+Sir John smiled, and there was a little bitterness in the smile.
+
+"Ah!" he said, and there was a hint, too, of bitterness in his voice, "I
+was wanted to decorate ball-rooms then. So I didn't go. Now I am not
+wanted. So I do."
+
+"That's not the true explanation," Mrs. Linforth said gently, and she
+shook her head. She spoke so gently and with so clear a note of sympathy
+and comprehension that Sir John was at more pains than ever to discover
+who she was. To hardly anyone would it naturally have occurred that Sir
+John Casson, with a tail of letters to his name, and a handsome pension,
+enjoyed at an age when his faculties were alert and his bodily strength
+not yet diminished, could stand in need of sympathy. But that precisely
+was the fact, as the woman at his side understood. A great ruler
+yesterday, with a council and an organized Government, subordinated to
+his leadership, he now merely lived at Camberley, and as he had
+confessed, was a bore at his club. And life at Camberley was dull.
+
+He looked closely at Mrs. Linforth. She was a woman of forty, or perhaps
+a year or two more. On the other hand, she might be a year or two less.
+She had the figure of a young woman, and though her dark hair was flecked
+with grey, he knew that was not to be accounted as a sign of either age
+or trouble. Yet she looked as if trouble had been no stranger to her.
+There were little lines about the eyes which told their tale to a shrewd
+observer, though the face smiled never so pleasantly. In what summer, he
+wondered, had she come up to the hill station of Mussoorie.
+
+"No," he said. "I did not give you the real explanation. Now I will."
+
+He nodded towards a girl who was at that moment crossing the ball-room
+towards the door, upon the arm of a young man.
+
+"That's the explanation."
+
+Mrs. Linforth looked at the girl and smiled.
+
+"The explanation seems to be enjoying itself," she said. "Yours?"
+
+"Mine," replied Sir John with evident pride.
+
+"She is very pretty," said Mrs. Linforth, and the sincerity of her
+admiration made the father glow with satisfaction. Phyllis Casson was a
+girl of eighteen, with the fresh looks and the clear eyes of her years. A
+bright colour graced her cheeks, where, when she laughed, the dimples
+played, and the white dress she wore was matched by the whiteness of her
+throat. She was talking gaily with the youth on whose arm her hand
+lightly rested.
+
+"Who is he?" asked Mrs. Linforth.
+
+Sir John raised his shoulders.
+
+"I am not concerned," he replied. "The explanation is amusing itself, as
+it ought to do, being only eighteen. The explanation wants everyone to
+love her at the present moment. When she wants only one, then it will be
+time for me to begin to get flurried." He turned abruptly to his
+companion. "I would like you to know her."
+
+"Thank you," said Mrs. Linforth, as she bowed to an acquaintance.
+
+"Would you like to dance?" asked Sir John. "If so, I'll stand aside."
+
+"No. I came here to look on," she explained.
+
+"Lady Marfield," and she nodded towards their hostess, "is my cousin,
+and--well, I don't want to grow rusty. You see I have an explanation
+too--oh, not here! He's at Chatham, and it's as well to keep up with the
+world--" She broke off abruptly, and with a perceptible start of
+surprise. She was looking towards the door. Casson followed the direction
+of her eyes, and saw young Linforth in the doorway.
+
+At last he remembered. There had been one hot weather, years ago, when
+this boy's father and his newly-married wife had come up to the
+hill-station of Mussoorie. He remembered that Linforth had sent his wife
+back to England, when he went North into Chiltistan on that work from
+which he was never to return. It was the wife who was now at his side.
+
+"I thought you said he was at Chatham," said Sir John, as Dick Linforth
+advanced into the room.
+
+"So I believed he was. He must have changed his mind at the last moment."
+Then she looked with a little surprise at her companion. "You know him?"
+
+"Yes," said Sir John, "I will tell you how it happened. I was dining
+eighteen months ago at the Sappers' mess at Chatham. And that boy's face
+came out of the crowd and took my eyes and my imagination too. You know,
+perhaps, how that happens at times. There seems to be no particular
+reason why it should happen at the moment. Afterwards you realise that
+there was very good reason. A great career, perhaps, perhaps only some
+one signal act, an act typical of a whole unknown life, leaps to light
+and justifies the claim the young face made upon your sympathy. Anyhow, I
+noticed young Linforth. It was not his good looks which attracted me.
+There was something else. I made inquiries. The Colonel was not a very
+observant man. Linforth was one of the subalterns--a good bat and a good
+change bowler. That was all. Only I happened to look round the walls of
+the Sappers' mess. There are portraits hung there of famous members of
+that mess who were thought of no particular account when they were
+subalterns at Chatham. There's one alive to-day. Another died at
+Khartoum."
+
+"Yes," said Mrs. Linforth.
+
+"Well, I made the acquaintance of your son that night," said Sir John.
+
+Mrs. Linforth stood for a moment silent, her face for the moment quite
+beautiful. Then she broke into a laugh.
+
+"I am glad I scratched your back first," she said. "And as for the
+cricket, it's quite true. I taught him to keep a straight bat myself."
+
+Meanwhile, Dick Linforth was walking across the floor of the ball-room,
+quite unconscious of the two who talked of him. He was not, indeed,
+looking about him at all. It seemed to both his mother and Sir John, as
+they watched him steadily moving in and out amongst the throng--for it
+was the height of the season, and Lady Marfield's big drawing-room in
+Chesterfield Gardens was crowded--that he was making his way to a
+definite spot, as though just at this moment he had a definite
+appointment.
+
+"He changed his mind at the last moment," said Sir John with a laugh,
+which gave to him the look of a boy. "Let us see who it is that has
+brought him up from Chatham to London at the last moment!"
+
+"Would it be fair?" asked Mrs. Linforth reluctantly. She was, indeed, no
+less curious upon the point than her companion, and while she asked the
+question, her eyes followed her son's movements. He was tall, and though
+he moved quickly and easily, it was possible to keep him in view.
+
+A gap in the crowd opened before them, making a lane--and at the end of
+the lane they saw Linforth approach a lady and receive the welcome of
+her smile. For a moment the gap remained open, and then the bright
+frocks and black coats swept across the space. But both had seen, and
+Mrs. Linforth, in addition, was aware of a barely perceptible start made
+by Sir John at her side.
+
+She looked at him sharply. His face had grown grave.
+
+"You know her?" asked Mrs. Linforth. There was anxiety in her voice.
+There was also a note of jealousy.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Who is she?"
+
+"Mrs. Oliver. Violet Oliver."
+
+"Married!"
+
+"A widow. I introduced her to your son at La Grave in the Dauphiné
+country last summer. Our motor-car had broken down. We all stayed for a
+couple of days together in the same hotel. Mrs. Oliver is a friend of my
+daughter's. Phyllis admires her very much, and in most instances I am
+prepared to trust Phyllis' instincts."
+
+"But not in this instance," said Mrs. Linforth quietly. She had been
+quick to note a very slight embarrassment in Sir John Casson's manner.
+
+"I don't say that," he replied quickly--a little too quickly.
+
+"Will you find me a chair?" said Mrs. Linforth, looking about her. "There
+are two over here." She led the way to the chairs which were placed in a
+nook of the room not very far from the door by which Linforth had
+entered. She took her seat, and when Sir John had seated himself beside
+her, she said:
+
+"Please tell me what you know of her."
+
+Sir John spread out his hands in protest.
+
+"Certainly, I will. But there is nothing to her discredit, so far as I
+know, Mrs. Linforth--nothing at all. Beyond that she is beautiful--really
+beautiful, as few women are. That, no doubt, will be looked upon as a
+crime by many, though you and I will not be of that number."
+
+Sybil Linforth maintained a determined silence--not for anything would
+she admit, even to herself, that Violet Oliver was beautiful.
+
+"You are telling me nothing," she said.
+
+"There is so little to tell," replied Sir John. "Violet Oliver comes of a
+family which is known, though it is not rich. She studied music with a
+view to making her living as a singer. For she has a very sweet voice,
+though its want of power forbade grand opera. Her studies were
+interrupted by the appearance of a cavalry captain, who made love to her.
+She liked it, whereas she did not like studying music. Very naturally she
+married the cavalry officer. Captain Oliver took her with him abroad,
+and, I believe, brought her to India. At all events she knows something
+of India, and has friends there. She is going back there this winter.
+Captain Oliver was killed in a hill campaign two years ago. Mrs. Oliver
+is now twenty-three years old. That is all."
+
+Mrs. Linforth, however, was not satisfied.
+
+"Was Captain Oliver rich?" she asked.
+
+"Not that I know of," said Sir John. "His widow lives in a little house
+at the wrong end of Curzon Street."
+
+"But she is wearing to-night very beautiful pearls," said Sybil
+Linforth quietly.
+
+Sir John Casson moved suddenly in his chair. Moreover, Sybil Linforth's
+eyes were at that moment resting with a quiet scrutiny upon his face.
+
+"It was difficult to see exactly what she was wearing," he said. "The gap
+in the crowd filled up so quickly."
+
+"There was time enough for any woman," said Mrs. Linforth with a smile.
+"And more than time enough for any mother."
+
+"Mrs. Oliver is always, I believe, exquisitely dressed," said Sir John
+with an assumption of carelessness. "I am not much of a judge myself."
+
+But his carelessness did not deceive his companion. Sybil Linforth was
+certain, absolutely certain, that the cause of the constraint and
+embarrassment which had been audible in Sir John's voice, and noticeable
+in his very manner, was that double string of big pearls of perfect
+colour which adorned Violet Oliver's white throat.
+
+She looked Sir John straight in the face.
+
+"Would you introduce Dick to Mrs. Oliver now, if you had not done it
+before?" she asked.
+
+"My dear lady," protested Sir John, "if I met Dick at a little hotel in
+the Dauphiné, and did not introduce him to the ladies who were travelling
+with me, it would surely reflect upon Dick, not upon the ladies"; and
+with that subtle evasion Sir John escaped from the fire of questions. He
+turned the conversation into another channel, pluming himself upon his
+cleverness. But he forgot that the subtlest evasions of the male mind are
+clumsy and obvious to a woman, especially if the woman be on the alert.
+Sybil Linforth did not think Sir John had showed any cleverness whatever.
+She let him turn the conversation, because she knew what she had set out
+to know. That string of pearls had made the difference between Sir John's
+estimate of Violet Oliver last year and his estimate of her this season.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+LUFFE IS REMEMBERED
+
+
+Violet Oliver took a quick step forward when she caught sight of
+Linforth's tall and well-knit figure coming towards her; and the smile
+with which she welcomed him was a warm smile of genuine pleasure. There
+were people who called Violet Oliver affected--chiefly ladies. But
+Phyllis Casson was not one of them.
+
+"There is no one more natural in the room," she was in the habit of
+stoutly declaring when she heard the gossips at work, and we know, on her
+father's authority, that Phyllis Casson's judgments were in most
+instances to be respected. Certainly it was not Violet Oliver's fault
+that her face in repose took on a wistful and pathetic look, and that her
+dark quiet eyes, even when her thoughts were absent--and her thoughts
+were often absent--rested pensively upon you with an unconscious
+flattery. It appeared that she was pondering deeply who and what you
+were; whereas she was probably debating whether she should or should not
+powder her nose before she went in to supper. Nor was she to blame
+because at the approach of a friend that sweet and thoughtful face would
+twinkle suddenly into mischief and amusement. "She is as God made her,"
+Phyllis Casson protested, "and He made her beautiful."
+
+It will be recognised, therefore, that there was truth in Sir John's
+observation that young men wanted to protect her. But the bald statement
+is not sufficient. Whether that quick transition from pensiveness to a
+dancing gaiety was the cause, or whether it only helped her beauty, this
+is certain. Young men went down before her like ninepins in a bowling
+alley. There was something singularly virginal about her. She had, too,
+quite naturally, an affectionate manner which it was difficult to resist;
+and above all she made no effort ever. What she said and what she did
+seemed always purely spontaneous. For the rest, she was a little over the
+general height of women, and even looked a little taller. For she was
+very fragile, and dainty, like an exquisite piece of china. Her head was
+small, and, poised as it was upon a slender throat, looked almost
+overweighted by the wealth of her dark hair. Her features were finely
+chiselled from the nose to the oval of her chin, and the red bow of her
+lips; and, with all her fragility, a delicate colour in her cheeks spoke
+of health.
+
+"You have come!" she said.
+
+Linforth took her little white-gloved hand in his.
+
+"You knew I should," he answered.
+
+"Yes, I knew that. But I didn't know that I should have to wait," she
+replied reproachfully. "I was here, in this corner, at the moment."
+
+"I couldn't catch an earlier train. I only got your telegram saying you
+would be at the dance late in the afternoon."
+
+"I did not know that I should be coming until this morning," she said.
+
+"Then it was very kind of you to send the telegram at all."
+
+"Yes, it was," said Violet Oliver simply, and Linforth laughed.
+
+"Shall we dance?" he asked.
+
+Mrs. Oliver nodded.
+
+"Round the room as far as the door. I am hungry. We will go downstairs
+and have supper."
+
+Linforth could have wished for nothing better. But the moment that his
+arm was about her waist and they had started for the door, Violet Oliver
+realised that her partner was the lightest dancer in the room. She
+herself loved dancing, and for once in a way to be steered in and out
+amongst the couples without a bump or even a single entanglement of her
+satin train was a pleasure not to be foregone. She gave herself up to it.
+
+"Let us go on," she said. "I did not know. You see, we have never danced
+together before. I had not thought of you in that way."
+
+She ceased to speak, being content to dance. Linforth for his part was
+content to watch her, to hold her as something very precious, and to
+evoke a smile upon her lips when her eyes met his. "I had not thought of
+you in that way!" she had said. Did not that mean that she had at all
+events been thinking of him in some way? And with that flattery still
+sweet in his thoughts, he was aware that her feet suddenly faltered. He
+looked at her face. It had changed. Yet so swiftly did it recover its
+composure that Linforth had not even the time to understand what the
+change implied. Annoyance, surprise, fear! One of these feelings,
+certainly, or perhaps a trifle of each. Linforth could not make sure.
+There had been a flash of some sudden emotion. That at all events was
+certain. But in guessing fear, he argued, his wits must surely have gone
+far astray; though fear was the first guess which he had made.
+
+"What was the matter?"
+
+Violet Oliver answered readily.
+
+"A big man was jigging down upon us. I saw him over your shoulder. I
+dislike being bumped by big men," she said, with a little easy laugh.
+"And still more I hate having a new frock torn."
+
+Dick Linforth was content with the answer. But it happened that Sybil
+Linforth was looking on from her chair in the corner, and the corner was
+very close to the spot where for a moment Violet Oliver had lost
+countenance. She looked sharply at Sir John Casson, who might have
+noticed or might not. His face betrayed nothing whatever. He went on
+talking placidly, but Mrs. Linforth ceased to listen to him.
+
+Violet Oliver waltzed with her partner once more round the room.
+Then she said:
+
+"Let us stop!" and in almost the same breath she added, "Oh, there's
+your friend."
+
+Linforth turned and saw standing just within the doorway his friend
+Shere Ali.
+
+"You could hardly tell that he was not English," she went on; and indeed,
+with his straight features, his supple figure, and a colour no darker
+than many a sunburnt Englishman wears every August, Shere Ali might have
+passed unnoticed by a stranger. It seemed that he had been watching for
+the couple to stop dancing. For no sooner had they stopped than he
+advanced quickly towards them.
+
+Linforth, however, had not as yet noticed him.
+
+"It can't be Shere Ali," he said. "He is in the country. I heard from him
+only to-day."
+
+"Yet it is he," said Mrs. Oliver, and then Linforth saw him.
+
+"Hallo!" he said softly to himself, and as Shere Ali joined them he added
+aloud, "something has happened."
+
+"Yes, I have news," said Shere Ali. But he was looking at Mrs. Oliver,
+and spoke as though the news had been pushed for a moment into the back
+of his mind.
+
+"What is it?" asked Linforth.
+
+Shere Ali turned to Linforth.
+
+"I go back to Chiltistan."
+
+"When?" asked Linforth, and a note of envy was audible in his voice. Mrs.
+Oliver heard it and understood it. She shrugged her shoulders
+impatiently.
+
+"By the first boat to Bombay."
+
+"In a week's time, then?" said Mrs. Oliver, quickly.
+
+Shere Ali glanced swiftly at her, seeking the meaning of that question.
+Did regret prompt it? Or, on the other hand, was she glad?
+
+"Yes, in a week's time," he replied slowly.
+
+"Why?" asked Linforth. "Is there trouble in Chiltistan?" He spoke
+regretfully. It would be hard luck if that uneasy State were to wake
+again into turmoil while he was kept kicking his heels at Chatham.
+
+"Yes, there is trouble," Shere Ali replied. "But it is not the kind of
+trouble which will help you forward with the Road."
+
+The trouble, indeed, was of quite another kind. The Russians were not
+stirring behind the Hindu Kush or on the Pamirs. The turbulent people of
+Chiltistan were making trouble, and profit out of the trouble, it is
+true. That they would be sure to do somewhere, and, moreover, they would
+do it with a sense of humour more common upon the Frontier than in the
+Provinces of India. But they were not at the moment making trouble in
+their own country. They were heard of in Masulipatam and other cities of
+Madras, where they were badly wanted by the police and not often caught.
+The quarrel in Chiltistan lay between the British Raj, as represented by
+the Resident, and the Khan, who was spending the revenue of his State
+chiefly upon his own amusements. It was claimed that the Resident should
+henceforth supervise the disposition of the revenue, and it had been
+suggested to the Khan that unless he consented to the proposal he would
+have to retire into private life in some other quarter of the Indian
+Peninsula. To give to the suggestion the necessary persuasive power, the
+young Prince was to be brought back at once, so that he might be ready at
+a moment's notice to succeed. This reason, however, was not given to
+Shere Ali. He was merely informed by the Indian Government that he must
+return to his country at once.
+
+Shere Ali stood before Mrs. Oliver.
+
+"You will give me a dance?" he said.
+
+"After supper," she replied, and she laid her hand within Linforth's arm.
+But Shere Ali did not give way.
+
+"Where shall I find you?" he asked.
+
+"By the door, here."
+
+And upon that Shere Ali's voice changed to one of appeal. There came a
+note of longing into his voice. He looked at Violet Oliver with burning
+eyes. He seemed unaware Linforth was standing by.
+
+"You will not fail me?" he said; and Linforth moved impatiently.
+
+"No. I shall be there," said Violet Oliver, and she spoke hurriedly and
+moved by through the doorway. Beneath her eyelids she stole a glance at
+her companion. His face was clouded. The scene which he had witnessed had
+jarred upon him, and still jarred. When he spoke to her his voice had a
+sternness which Violet Oliver had not heard before. But she had always
+been aware that it might be heard, if at any time he disapproved.
+
+"'Your friend,' you called him, speaking to me," he said. "It seems that
+he is your friend too."
+
+"He was with you at La Grave. I met him there."
+
+"He comes to your house?"
+
+"He has called once or twice," said Mrs. Oliver submissively. It was by
+no wish of hers that Shere Ali had appeared at this dance. She had, on
+the contrary, been at some pains to assure herself that he would not be
+there. And while she answered Linforth she was turning over in her mind a
+difficulty which had freshly arisen. Shere Ali was returning to India. In
+some respects that was awkward. But Linforth's ill-humour promised her a
+way of escape. He was rather silent during the earlier part of their
+supper. They had a little table to themselves, and while she talked, and
+talked with now and then an anxious glance at Linforth, he was content to
+listen or to answer shortly. Finally she said:
+
+"I suppose you will not see your friend again before he starts?"
+
+"Yes, I shall," replied Linforth, and the frown gathered afresh upon his
+forehead. "He dines to-morrow night with me at Chatham."
+
+"Then I want to ask you something," she continued. "I want you not to
+mention to him that I am paying a visit to India in the cold weather."
+
+Linforth's face cleared in an instant.
+
+"I am glad that you have made that request," he said frankly. "I have no
+right to say it, perhaps. But I think you are wise."
+
+"Things are possible here," she agreed, "which are impossible there."
+
+"Friendship, for instance."
+
+"Some friendships," said Mrs. Oliver; and the rest of their supper they
+ate cheerily enough. Violet Oliver was genuinely interested in her
+partner. She was not very familiar with the large view and the definite
+purpose. Those who gathered within her tiny drawing-room, who sought her
+out at balls and parties, were, as a rule, the younger men of the day,
+and Linforth, though like them in age and like them, too, in his capacity
+for enjoyment, was different in most other ways. For the large view and
+the definite purpose coloured all his life, and, though he spoke little
+of either, set him apart.
+
+Mrs. Oliver did not cultivate many illusions about herself. She saw very
+clearly what manner of men they were to whom her beauty made its chief
+appeal--lean-minded youths for the most part not remarkable for
+brains--and she was sincerely proud that Linforth sought her out no less
+than they did. She could imagine herself afraid of Linforth, and that
+fancy gave her a little thrill of pleasure. She understood that he could
+easily be lost altogether, that if once he went away he would not return;
+and that knowledge made her careful not to lose him. Moreover, she had
+brains herself. She led him on that evening, and he spoke with greater
+freedom than he had used with her before--greater freedom, she hoped,
+than he had used with anyone. The lighted supper-room grew dim before his
+eyes, the noise and the laughter and the passing figures of the other
+guests ceased to be noticed. He talked in a low voice, and with his keen
+face pushed a trifle forward as though, while he spoke, he listened. He
+was listening to the call of the Road.
+
+He stopped abruptly and looked anxiously at Violet.
+
+"Have I bored you?" he asked. "Generally I watch you," he added with a
+smile, "lest I should bore you. To-night I haven't watched."
+
+"For that reason I have been interested to-night more than I have
+been before."
+
+She gathered up her fan with a little sigh. "I must go upstairs
+again," she said, and she rose from her chair. "I am sorry. But I have
+promised dances."
+
+"I will take you up. Then I shall go."
+
+"You will dance no more?"
+
+"No," he said with a smile. "I'll not spoil a perfect evening." Violet
+Oliver was not given to tricks or any play of the eyelids. She looked at
+him directly, and she said simply "Thank you."
+
+He took her up to the landing, and came down stairs again for his hat and
+coat. But, as he passed with them along the passage door he turned, and
+looking up the stairs, saw Violet Oliver watching him. She waved her hand
+lightly and smiled. As the door closed behind him she returned to the
+ball-room. Linforth went away with no suspicion in his mind that she had
+stayed her feet upon the landing merely to make very sure that he went.
+He had left his mother behind, however, and she was all suspicion. She
+had remarked the little scene when Shere Ali had unexpectedly appeared.
+She had noticed the embarrassment of Violet Oliver and the anger of Shere
+Ali. It was possible that Sir John Casson had also not been blind to it.
+For, a little time afterwards, he nodded towards Shere Ali.
+
+"Do you know that boy?" he asked.
+
+"Yes. He is Dick's great friend. They have much in common. His father was
+my husband's friend."
+
+"And both believed in the new Road, I know," said Sir John. He pulled at
+his grey moustache thoughtfully, and asked: "Have the sons the Road in
+common, too?" A shadow darkened Sybil Linforth's face. She sat silent for
+some seconds, and when she answered, it was with a great reluctance.
+
+"I believe so," she said in a low voice, and she shivered. She turned her
+face towards Casson. It was troubled, fear-stricken, and in that assembly
+of laughing and light-hearted people it roused him with a shock. "I wish,
+with all my heart, that they had not," she added, and her voice shook and
+trembled as she spoke.
+
+The terrible story of Linforth's end, long since dim in Sir John Casson's
+recollections, came back in vivid detail. He said no more upon that
+point. He took Mrs. Linforth down to supper, and bringing her back again,
+led her round the ball-room. An open archway upon one side led into a
+conservatory, where only fairy lights glowed amongst the plants and
+flowers. As the couple passed this archway, Sir John looked in. He did
+not stop, but, after they had walked a few yards further, he said:
+
+"Was it pale blue that Violet Oliver was wearing? I am not clever at
+noticing these things."
+
+"Yes, pale blue and--pearls," said Sybil Linforth.
+
+"There is no need that we should walk any further. Here are two chairs,"
+said Sir John. There was in truth no need. He had ascertained something
+about which, in spite of his outward placidity, he had been very curious.
+
+"Did you ever hear of a man named Luffe?" he asked.
+
+Sybil Linforth started. It had been Luffe whose continual arguments,
+entreaties, threats, and persuasions had caused the Road long ago to be
+carried forward. But she answered quietly, "Yes."
+
+"Of course you and I remember him," said Sir John. "But how many others?
+That's the penalty of Indian service. You are soon forgotten, in India as
+quickly as here. In most cases, no doubt, it doesn't matter. Men just as
+good and younger stand waiting at the milestones to carry on the torch.
+But in some cases I think it's a pity."
+
+"In Mr. Luffe's case?" asked Sybil Linforth.
+
+"Particularly in Luffe's case," said Sir John.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+AN UNANSWERED QUESTION
+
+
+Sir John had guessed aright. Shere Ali was in the conservatory, and
+Violet Oliver sat by his side.
+
+"I did not expect you to-night," she said lightly, as she opened and
+shut her fan.
+
+"Nor did I mean to come," he answered. "I had arranged to stay in the
+country until to-morrow. But I got my letter from the India Office this
+morning. It left me--restless." He uttered the word with reluctance, and
+almost with an air of shame. Then he clasped his hands together, and
+blurted out violently: "It left me miserable. I could not stay away," and
+he turned to his companion. "I wanted to see you, if only for five
+minutes." It was Violet Oliver's instinct to be kind. She fitted herself
+naturally to the words of her companions, sympathised with them in their
+troubles, laughed with them when they were at the top of their spirits.
+So now her natural kindness made her eyes gentle. She leaned forward.
+
+"Did you?" she asked softly. "And yet you are going home!"
+
+"I am going back to Chiltistan," said Shere Ali.
+
+"Home!" Violet Oliver repeated, dwelling upon the word with a friendly
+insistence.
+
+But the young prince did not assent; he remained silent--so long silent
+that Violet Oliver moved uneasily. She was conscious of suspense; she
+began to dread his answer. He turned to her quickly as she moved.
+
+"You say that I am going home. That's the whole question," he said. "I am
+trying to answer it--and I can't. Listen!"
+
+Into the quiet and dimly lit place of flowers the music of the violins
+floated with a note of wistfulness in the melody they played--a
+suggestion of regret. Through a doorway at the end of the conservatory
+Shere Ali could see the dancers swing by in the lighted ball-room, the
+women in their bright frocks and glancing jewels, some of whom had
+flattered him, a few of whom had been his friends, and all of whom had
+treated him as one of their own folk and their equal.
+
+"I have heard the tune, which they are playing, before," he said slowly.
+"I heard it one summer night in Geneva. Linforth and I had come down from
+the mountains. We were dining with a party on the balcony of a restaurant
+over the lake. A boat passed hidden by the darkness. We could hear the
+splash of the oars. There were musicians in the boat playing this melody.
+We were all very happy that night. And I hear it again now--when I am
+with you. I think that I shall remember it very often in Chiltistan."
+
+There was so unmistakable a misery in his manner, in his voice, in his
+dejected looks, that Violet was moved to a deep sympathy. He was only a
+boy, of course, but he was a boy sunk in distress.
+
+"But there are your plans," she urged. "Have you forgotten them? You were
+going to do so much. There was so much to do. So many changes, so many
+reforms which must be made. You used to talk to me so eagerly. No more of
+your people were to be sold into slavery. You were going to stop all
+that. You were going to silence the mullahs when they preached sedition
+and to free Chiltistan from their tyranny."
+
+Violet remembered with a whimsical little smile how Shere All's
+enthusiasm had wearied her, but she checked the smile and continued:
+
+"Are all those plans mere dreams and fancies?"
+
+"No," replied Shere Ali, lifting his head. "No," he said again with
+something of violence in the emphasis; and for a moment he sat erect,
+with his shoulders squared, fronting his destiny. Almost for a moment he
+recaptured that for which he had been seeking--his identity with his own
+race. But the moment passed. His attitude relaxed. He turned to Violet
+with troubled eyes. "No, they are not dreams; they are things which need
+to be done. But I can't realise them now, with you sitting here, any more
+than I can realise, with this music in my ears, that it is my home to
+which I am going back."
+
+"Oh, but you will!" cried Violet. "When you are out there you will.
+There's the road, too, the road which you and Mr. Linforth--"
+
+She did not complete the sentence. With a low cry Shere All broke in upon
+her words. He leaned forward, with his hands covering his face.
+
+"Yes," he whispered, "there's the road--there's the road." A passion of
+self-reproach shook him. Not for nothing had Linforth been his friend. "I
+feel a traitor," he cried. "For ten years we have talked of that road,
+planned it, and made it in thought, poring over the maps. Yes, for even
+at the beginning, in our first term at Eton, we began. Over the passes to
+the foot of the Hindu Kush! Only a year ago I was eager, really, honestly
+eager," and he paused for a moment, wondering at that picture of himself
+which his words evoked, wondering whether it was indeed he--he who sat in
+the conservatory--who had cherished those bright dreams of a great life
+in Chiltistan. "Yes, it is true. I was honestly eager to go back."
+
+"Less than a year ago," said Violet Oliver quickly. "Less than a week
+ago. When did I see you last? On Sunday, wasn't it?"
+
+"But was I honest then?" exclaimed Shere Ali. "I don't know. I thought I
+was--right up to to-day, right up to this morning when the letter came.
+And then--" He made a despairing gesture, as of a man crumbling dust
+between his fingers.
+
+"I will tell you," he said, turning towards her. "I believe that the last
+time I was really honest was in August of last year. Linforth and I
+talked of the Road through a long day in the hut upon the Meije. I was
+keen then--honestly keen. But the next evening we came down to La Grave,
+and--I met you."
+
+"No," Violet Oliver protested. "That's not the reason."
+
+"I think it is," said Shere Ali quietly; and Violet was silent.
+
+In spite of her pity, which was genuine enough, her thoughts went out
+towards Shere Ali's friend. With what words and in what spirit would he
+have received Shere Ali's summons to Chiltistan? She asked herself the
+question, knowing well the answer. There would have been no
+lamentations--a little regret, perhaps, perhaps indeed a longing to take
+her with him. But there would have been not a thought of abandoning the
+work. She recognised that truth with a sudden spasm of anger, but yet
+admiration strove with the anger and mastered it.
+
+"If what you say is true," she said to Shere Ali gently, "I am very
+sorry. But I hope it is not true. You have been ten years here; you have
+made many friends. Just for the moment the thought of leaving them behind
+troubles you. But that will pass."
+
+"Will it?" he asked quietly. Then a smile came upon his face. "There's
+one thing of which I am glad," he whispered.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"You are wearing my pearls to-night."
+
+Violet Oliver smiled, and with a tender caressing movement her fingers
+touched and felt the rope of pearls about her neck. Both the smile and
+the movement revealed Violet Oliver. She had a love of beautiful things,
+but, above all, of jewels. It was a passion with her deeper than any she
+had ever known. Beautiful stones, and pearls more than any other stones,
+made an appeal to her which she could not resist.
+
+"They are very lovely," she said softly.
+
+"I shall be glad to remember that you wore them to-night," said Shere
+Ali; "for, as you know, I love you."
+
+"Hush!" said Mrs. Oliver; and she rose with a start from her chair. Shere
+Ali did the same.
+
+"It's true," he said sullenly; and then, with a swift step, he placed
+himself in her way. Violet Oliver drew back quietly. Her heart beat
+quickly. She looked into Shere Ali's face and was afraid. He was quite
+still; even the expression of his face was set, but his eyes burned upon
+her. There was a fierceness in his manner which was new to her.
+
+His hand darted out quickly towards her. But Violet Oliver was no less
+quick. She drew back yet another step. "I didn't understand," she said,
+and her lips shook, so that the words were blurred. She raised her hands
+to her neck and loosened the coils of pearls about it as though she meant
+to lift them off and return them to the giver.
+
+"Oh, don't do that, please," said Shere Ali; and already his voice and
+his manner had changed. The sullenness had gone. Now he besought. His
+English training came to his aid. He had learned reverence for women,
+acquiring it gradually and almost unconsciously rather than from any
+direct teaching. He had spent one summer's holidays with Mrs. Linforth
+for his hostess in the house under the Sussex Downs, and from her and
+from Dick's manner towards her he had begun to acquire it. He had become
+conscious of that reverence, and proudly conscious. He had fostered it.
+It was one of the qualities, one of the essential qualities, of the white
+people. It marked the sahibs off from the Eastern races. To possess that
+reverence, to be influenced and moved and guided by it--that made him one
+with them. He called upon it to help him now. Almost he had forgotten it.
+
+"Please don't take them off," he implored. "There was nothing to
+understand."
+
+And perhaps there was not, except this--that Violet Oliver was of those
+who take but do not give. She removed her hands from her throat. The
+moment of danger had passed, as she very well knew.
+
+"There is one thing I should be very grateful for," he said humbly. "It
+would not cause you very much trouble, and it would mean a great deal to
+me. I would like you to write to me now and then."
+
+"Why, of course I will," said Mrs. Oliver, with a smile.
+
+"You promise?"
+
+"Yes. But you will come back to England."
+
+"I shall try to come next summer, if it's only for a week," said Shere
+Ali; and he made way for Violet.
+
+She moved a few yards across the conservatory, and then stopped for Shere
+Ali to come level with her. "I shall write, of course, to Chiltistan,"
+she said carelessly.
+
+"Yes," he replied, "I go northwards from Bombay. I travel straight
+to Kohara."
+
+"Very well. I will write to you there," said Violet Oliver; but it seemed
+that she was not satisfied. She walked slowly towards the door, with
+Shere Ali at her side.
+
+"And you will stay in Chiltistan until you come back to us?" she asked.
+"You won't go down to Calcutta at Christmas, for instance? Calcutta is
+the place to which people go at Christmas, isn't it? I think you are
+right. You have a career in your own country, amongst your own people."
+
+She spoke urgently. And Shere Ali, thinking that thus she spoke in
+concern for his future, drew some pride from her encouragement. He
+also drew some shame; for she might have been speaking, too, in pity
+for his distress.
+
+"Mrs. Oliver," he said, with hesitation; and she stopped and turned to
+him. "Perhaps I said more than I meant to say a few minutes ago. I have
+not forgotten really that there is much for me to do in my own country; I
+have not forgotten that I can thank all of you here who have shown me so
+much kindness by more than mere words. For I can help in Chiltistan--I
+can really help."
+
+Then came a smile upon Violet Oliver's face, and her eyes shone.
+
+"That is how I would have you speak," she cried. "I am glad. Oh, I am
+glad!" and her voice rang with the fulness of her pleasure. She had been
+greatly distressed by the unhappiness of her friend, and in that distress
+compunction had played its part. There was no hardness in Violet Oliver's
+character. To give pain flattered no vanity in her. She understood that
+Shere Ali would suffer because of her, and she longed that he should find
+his compensation in the opportunities of rulership.
+
+"Let us say good-bye here," he said. "We may not be alone again
+before I go."
+
+She gave him her hand, and he held it for a little while, and then
+reluctantly let it go.
+
+"That must last me until the summer of next year," he said with a smile.
+
+"Until the summer," said Violet Oliver; and she passed out from the
+doorway into the ball-room. But as she entered the room and came once
+more amongst the lights and the noise, and the familiar groups of her
+friends, she uttered a little sigh of relief. The summer of next year
+was a long way off; and meanwhile here was an episode in her life ended
+as she wished it to end; for in these last minutes it had begun to
+disquiet her.
+
+Shere Ali remained behind in the conservatory. His eyes wandered about
+it. He was impressing upon his memory every detail of the place, the
+colours of the flowers and their very perfumes. He looked through the
+doorway into the ball-room whence the music swelled. The note of regret
+was louder than ever in his ears, and dominated the melody. To-morrow the
+lights, the delicate frocks, the laughing voices and bright eyes would be
+gone. The violins spoke to him of that morrow of blank emptiness softly
+and languorously like one making a luxury of grief. In a week's time he
+would be setting his face towards Chiltistan; and, in spite of the brave
+words he had used to Violet Oliver, once more the question forced itself
+into his mind.
+
+"Do I belong here?" he asked. "Or do I belong to Chiltistan?"
+
+On the one side was all that during ten years he had gradually learned to
+love and enjoy; on the other side was his race and the land of his birth.
+He could not answer the question; for there was a third possibility which
+had not yet entered into his speculations, and in that third possibility
+alone was the answer to be found.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+AT THE GATE OF LAHORE
+
+
+Shere Ali, accordingly, travelled with reluctance to Bombay, and at that
+port an anonymous letter with the postmark of Calcutta was brought to him
+on board the steamer. Shere Ali glanced through it, and laughed, knowing
+well his countrymen's passion for mysteries and intrigues. He put the
+letter in his pocket and took the northward mail. These were the days
+before the North-West Province had been severed from the Punjab, and
+instructions had been given to Shere Ali to break his journey at Lahore.
+He left the train, therefore, at that station, on a morning when the
+thermometer stood at over a hundred in the shade, and was carried in a
+barouche drawn by camels to Government House. There a haggard and
+heat-worn Commissioner received him, and in the cool of the evening took
+him for a ride, giving him sage advice with the accent of authority.
+
+"His Excellency would have liked to have seen you himself," said the
+Commissioner. "But he is in the Hills and he did not think it necessary
+to take you so far out of your way. It is as well that you should get to
+Kohara as soon as possible, and on particular subjects the Resident,
+Captain Phillips, will be able and glad to advise you."
+
+The Commissioner spoke politely enough, but the accent of authority was
+there. Shere Ali's ears were quick to notice and resent it. Some years
+had passed since commands had been laid upon him.
+
+"I shall always be glad to hear what Captain Phillips has to say," he
+replied stiffly.
+
+"Yes, yes, of course," said the Commissioner, taking that for granted.
+"Captain Phillips has our views."
+
+He did not seem to notice the stiffness of Shere Ali's tone. He was tired
+with the strain of the hot weather, as his drawn face and hollow eyes
+showed clearly.
+
+"On general lines," he continued, "his Excellency would like you to
+understand that the Government has no intention and no wish to interfere
+with the customs and laws of Chiltistan. In fact it is at this moment
+particularly desirable that you should throw your influence on the side
+of the native observances."
+
+"Indeed," said Shere Ali, as he rode along the Mall by the Commissioner's
+side. "Then why was I sent to Oxford?"
+
+The Commissioner was not surprised by the question, though it was
+abruptly put.
+
+"Surely that is a question to ask of his Highness, your father," he
+replied. "No doubt all you learnt and saw there will be extremely
+valuable. What I am saying now is that the Government wishes to give no
+pretext whatever to those who would disturb Chiltistan, and it looks to
+you with every confidence for help and support."
+
+"And the road?" asked Shere Ali.
+
+"It is not proposed to carry on the road. The merchants in Kohara think
+that by bringing more trade, their profits would become less, while the
+country people look upon it as a deliberate attack upon their
+independence. The Government has no desire to force it upon the people
+against their wish."
+
+Shere Ali made no reply, but his heart grew bitter within him. He had
+come out to India sore and distressed at parting from his friends, from
+the life he had grown to love. All the way down the Red Sea and across
+the Indian Ocean, the pangs of regret had been growing keener with each
+new mile which was gathered in behind the screw. He had lain awake
+listening to the throb of the engine with an aching heart, and with every
+longing for the country he had left behind growing stronger, every
+recollection growing more vivid and intense. There was just one
+consolation which he had. Violet Oliver had enheartened him to make the
+most of it, and calling up the image of her face before him, he had
+striven so to do. There were his plans for the regeneration of his
+country. And lo! here at Lahore, three days after he had set foot on
+land, they were shattered--before they were begun. He had been trained
+and educated in the West according to Western notions and he was now
+bidden to go and rule in the East according to the ideals of the East.
+Bidden! For the quiet accent of authority in the words of the unobservant
+man who rode beside him rankled deeply. He had it in his thoughts to cry
+out: "Then what place have I in Chiltistan?"
+
+But though he never uttered the question, it was none the less answered.
+
+"Economy and quiet are the two things which Chiltistan needs," said the
+Commissioner. Then he looked carelessly at Shere Ali.
+
+"It is hoped that you will marry and settle down as soon as possible,"
+he said.
+
+Shere Ali reined in his horse, stared for a moment at his companion and
+then began quietly to laugh. The laughter was not pleasant to listen to,
+and it grew harsher and louder. But it brought no change to the tired
+face of the Commissioner, who had stopped his horse beside Shere Ali's
+and was busy with the buckle of his stirrup leather. He raised his head
+when the laughter stopped. And it stopped as abruptly as it had begun.
+
+"You were saying--" he remarked politely.
+
+"That I would like, if there is time, to ride through the Bazaar."
+
+"Certainly," said the Commissioner. "This way," and he turned at right
+angles out of the Mall and its avenue of great trees and led the way
+towards the native city. Short of it, however, he stopped.
+
+"You won't mind if I leave you here," he said. "There is some work to be
+done. You can make no mistake. You can see the Gate from here."
+
+"Is that the Delhi Gate?" asked Shere Ali.
+
+"Yes. You can find your own way back, no doubt"; and the unobservant
+Commissioner rode away at a trot.
+
+Shere Ali went forward alone down the narrowing street towards the Gate.
+He was aflame with indignation. So he was to be nothing, he was to do
+nothing, except to practice economy and marry--a _nigger_. The
+contemptuous word rose to his mind. Long ago it had been applied to him
+more than once during his early school-days, until desperate battles and
+black eyes had won him immunity. Now he used it savagely himself to
+stigmatise his own people. He was of the White People, he declared. He
+felt it, he looked it. Even at that moment a portly gentleman of Lahore
+in a coloured turban and patent-leather shoes salaamed to him as he
+passed upon his horse. "Surely," he thought, "I am one of the Sahibs.
+This fool of a Commissioner does not understand."
+
+A woman passed him carrying a babe poised upon her head, with silver
+anklets upon her bare ankles and heavy silver rings upon her toes. She
+turned her face, which was overshadowed by a hood, to look at Shere Ali
+as he rode by. He saw the heavy stud of silver and enamel in her nostril,
+the withered brown face. He turned and looked at her, as she walked
+flat-footed and ungainly, her pyjamas of pink cotton showing beneath her
+cloak. He had no part or lot with any of these people of the East. The
+face of Violet Oliver shone before his eyes. There was his mate. He
+recalled the exquisite daintiness of her appearance, her ruffles of lace,
+the winning sweetness of her eyes. Not in Chiltistan would he find a
+woman to drive that image from his thoughts.
+
+Meanwhile he drew nearer to the Delhi Gate. A stream of people flowed out
+from it towards him. Over their heads he looked through the archway down
+the narrow street, where between the booths and under the carved
+overhanging balconies the brown people robed and turbaned, in saffron and
+blue, pink and white, thronged and chattered and jostled, a kaleidoscope
+of colour. Shere Ali turned his eyes to the right and the left as he
+went. It was not merely to rid himself of the Commissioner that he had
+proposed to ride on to the bazaars by way of the Delhi Gate. The
+anonymous letter bearing the postmark of Calcutta, which had been placed
+in his hand when the steamer reached Bombay, besought him to pass by the
+Delhi Gate at Lahore and do certain things by which means he would hear
+much to his advantage. He had no thought at the moment to do the
+particular things, but he was sufficiently curious to pass by the Delhi
+Gate. Some intrigue was on hand into which it was sought to lure him. He
+had not forgotten that his countrymen were born intriguers.
+
+Slowly he rode along. Here and there a group of people were squatting on
+the ground, talking noisily. Here and there a beggar stretched out a
+maimed limb and sought for alms. Then close to the gate he saw that for
+which he searched: a man sitting apart with a blanket over his head. No
+one spoke to the man, and for his part he never moved. He sat erect with
+his legs crossed in front of him and his hands resting idly on his knees,
+a strange and rather grim figure; so motionless, so utterly lifeless he
+seemed. The blanket reached almost to the ground behind and hung down
+to his lap in front, and Shere Ali noticed that a leathern begging-bowl
+at his side was well filled with coins. So he must have sat just in that
+attitude, with that thick covering stifling him, all through the fiery
+heat of that long day. As Shere Ali looked, he saw a poor bent man in
+rags, with yellow caste marks on his forehead, add a copper pi to the
+collection in the bowl. Shere Ali stopped the giver.
+
+"Who is he?" he asked, pointing to the draped figure.
+
+The old Hindu raised his hand and bowed his forehead into the palm.
+
+"Huzoor, he is a holy man, a stranger who has lately come to Lahore, but
+the holiest of all the holy men who have ever sat by the Delhi Gate. His
+fame is already great."
+
+"But why does he sit covered with the blanket?" asked Shere Ali.
+
+"Huzoor, because of his holiness. He is so holy that his face must
+not be seen."
+
+Shere Ali laughed.
+
+"He told you that himself, I suppose," he said.
+
+"Huzoor, it is well known," said the old man. "He sits by the road all
+day until the darkness comes--"
+
+"Yes," said Shere Ali, bethinking him of the recommendations in his
+letter, "until the darkness comes--and then?"
+
+"Then he goes away into the city and no one sees him until the morning";
+and the old man passed on.
+
+Shere Ali chuckled and rode by the hooded man. His curiosity increased.
+It was quite likely that the blanket hid a Mohammedan Pathan from beyond
+the hills. To come down into the plains and mulct the pious Hindu by some
+such ingenious practice would appeal to the Pathan's sense of humour
+almost as much as to his pocket. Shere Ali drew the letter from his
+pocket, and in the waning light read it through again. True, the postmark
+showed that the letter had been posted in Calcutta, but more than one
+native of Chiltistan had come south and set up as a money-lender in that
+city on the proceeds of a successful burglary. He replaced the letter in
+his pocket, and rode on at a walk through the throng. The darkness came
+quickly; oil lamps were lighted in the booths and shone though the
+unglazed window-spaces overhead. A refreshing coolness fell upon the
+town, the short, welcome interval between the heat of the day and the
+suffocating heat of the night. Shere Ali turned his horse and rode back
+again to the gate. The hooded beggar still sat upon the ground, but he
+was alone. The others, the blind and the maimed, had crawled away to
+their dens. Except this grim motionless man, there was no one squatting
+upon the ground.
+
+Shere Ali reined in beside him, and bending forward in his saddle spoke
+in a low voice a few words of Pushtu. The hooded figure did not move, but
+from behind the blanket there issued a muffled voice.
+
+"If your Highness will ride slowly on, your servant will follow and come
+to his side."
+
+Shere Ali went on, and in a few moments he heard the soft patter of a man
+running barefoot along the dusty road. He stopped his horse and the
+patter of feet ceased, but a moment after, silent as a shadow, the man
+was at his side.
+
+"You are of my country?" said Shere Ali.
+
+"I am of Kohara," returned the man. "Safdar Khan of Kohara. May God keep
+your Highness in health. We have waited long for your presence."
+
+"What are you doing in Lahore?" asked Shere Ali.
+
+In the darkness he saw a flash of white as Safdar Khan smiled.
+
+"There was a little trouble, your Highness, with one Ishak Mohammed
+and--Ishak Mohammed's son is still alive. He is a boy of eight, it is
+true, and could not hold a rifle to his shoulder. But the trouble took
+place near the road."
+
+Shere Ali nodded his head in comprehension. Safdar Khan had shot his
+enemy on the road, which is a holy place, and therefore he came
+within the law.
+
+"Blood-money was offered," continued Safdar Khan, "but the boy would not
+consent, and claims my life. His mother would hold the rifle for him
+while he pulled the trigger. So I am better in Lahore. Moreover, your
+Highness, for a poor man life is difficult in Kohara. Taxes are high. So
+I came down to this gate and sat with a cloak over my head."
+
+"And you have found it profitable," said Shere Ali.
+
+Again the teeth flashed in the darkness and Safdar Khan laughed.
+
+"For two days I sat by the Delhi Gate and no one spoke to me or dropped a
+single coin in my bowl. But on the third day a good man, may God preserve
+him, passed by when I was nearly stifled and asked me why I sat in the
+heat of the sun under a blanket. Thereupon I told him, what doubtless
+your Highness knows, that my face is much too holy to be looked upon, and
+since then your Highness' servant has prospered exceedingly. The device
+is a good one."
+
+Suddenly Safdar Khan stumbled as he walked and lurched against the
+horse and its rider. He recovered himself in a moment, with prayers
+for forgiveness and curses upon his stupidity for setting his foot
+upon a sharp stone. But he had put out his hand as he stumbled and
+that hand had run lightly down Shere Ali's coat and had felt the
+texture of his clothes.
+
+"I had a letter from Calcutta," said the Prince, "which besought me to
+speak to you, for you had something for my ear. Therefore speak, and
+speak quickly."
+
+But a change had come over Safdar Khan. Certainly Shere Ali was wearing
+the dress of one of the Sahibs. A man passed carrying a lantern, and the
+light, feeble though it was, threw into outline against the darkness a
+pith helmet and a very English figure. Certainly, too, Shere Ali spoke
+the Pushtu tongue with a slight hesitation, and an unfamiliar accent. He
+seemed to grope for words.
+
+"A letter?" he cried. "From Calcutta? Nay, how can that be? Some foolish
+fellow has dared to play a trick," and in a few short, effective
+sentences Safdar Khan expressed his opinion of the foolish fellow and of
+his ancestry distant and immediate.
+
+"Yet the letter bade me seek you by the Delhi Gate of Lahore," continued
+Shere Ali calmly, "and by the Delhi Gate of Lahore I found you."
+
+"My fame is great," replied Safdar Khan bombastically. "Far and wide it
+has spread like the boughs of a gigantic tree."
+
+"Rubbish," said Shere Ali curtly, breaking in upon Safdar's vehemence.
+"I am not one of the Hindu fools who fill your begging-bowl," and he
+laughed.
+
+In the darkness he heard Safdar Khan laugh too.
+
+"You expected me," continued Shere Ali. "You looked for my coming. Your
+ears were listening for the few words of Pushtu. Why else should you say,
+'Ride forward and I will follow'?"
+
+Safdar Khan walked for a little while in silence. Then in a voice of
+humility, he said:
+
+"I will tell my lord the truth. Yes, some foolish talk has passed from
+one man to another, and has been thrown back again like a ball. I too,"
+he admitted, "have been without wisdom. But I have seen how vain such
+talk is. The Mullahs in the Hills speak only ignorance and folly."
+
+"Ah!" said Shere Ali. He took the letter from his pocket and tore it into
+fragments and scattered the fragments upon the Road. "So I thought. The
+letter is of their prompting."
+
+"My lord, it may be so," replied Safdar Khan. "For my part I have no lot
+or share in any of these things. For I am now of Lahore."
+
+"Aye," said Shere Ali. "The begging-bowl is filled to overflowing at the
+Delhi Gate. So you are of Lahore, though your name is Safdar Khan and you
+were born at Kohara," and suddenly he leaned down and asked in a wistful
+voice with a great curiosity, "Are you content? Have you forgotten the
+hills and valleys? Is Lahore more to you than Chiltistan?"
+
+So perpetually had Shere All's mind run of late upon his isolation that
+it crept into all his thoughts. So now it seemed to him that there was
+some vague parallel between his mental state and that of Safdar Khan. But
+Safdar Khan's next words disabused him:
+
+"Nay, nay," he said. "But the widow of a rich merchant in the city here,
+a devout and holy woman, has been greatly moved by my piety. She seeks my
+hand in marriage and--" here Safdar Khan laughed pleasantly--"I shall
+marry her. Already she has given me a necklace of price which I have had
+weighed and tested to prove that she does not play me false. She is very
+rich, and it is too hot to sit in the sun under a blanket. So I will be a
+merchant of Lahore instead, and live at my ease on the upper balcony of
+my house."
+
+Shere Ali laughed and answered, "It is well." Then he added shrewdly:
+"But it is possible that you may yet at some time meet the man in
+Calcutta who wrote the letter to me. If so, tell him what I did with it,"
+and Shere Ali's voice became hard and stern. "Tell him that I tore it up
+and scattered it in the dust. And let him send the news to the Mullahs in
+the Hills. I know that soft-handed brood with their well-fed bodies and
+their treacherous mouths. If only they would let me carry on the road!"
+he cried passionately, "I would drag them out of the houses where they
+batten on poor men's families and set them to work till the palms of
+their hands were honestly blistered. Let the Mullahs have a care, Safdar
+Khan. I go North to-morrow to Kohara."
+
+He spoke with a greater vehemence than perhaps he had meant to show. But
+he was carried along by his own words, and sought always a stronger
+epithet than that which he had used. He was sore and indignant, and he
+vented his anger on the first object which served him as an opportunity.
+Safdar Khan bowed his head in the darkness. Safe though he might be in
+Lahore, he was still afraid of the Mullahs, afraid of their curses, and
+mindful of their power to ruin the venturesome man who dared to stand
+against them.
+
+"It shall be as your Highness wishes," he said in a low voice, and he
+hurried away from Shere Ali's side. Abuse of the Mullahs was
+dangerous--as dangerous to listen to as to speak. Who knew but what the
+very leaves of the neem trees might whisper the words and bear witness
+against him? Moreover, it was clear that the Prince of Chiltistan was a
+Sahib. Shere Ali rode back to Government House. He understood clearly why
+Safdar Khan had so unceremoniously fled; and he was glad. If the fool of
+a Commissioner did not know him for what he was, at all events Safdar
+Khan did. He was one of the White People. For who else would dare to
+speak as he had spoken of the Mullahs? The Mullahs would hear what he had
+said. That was certain. They would hear it with additions. They would try
+to make things unpleasant for him in Chiltistan in consequence. But Shere
+Ali was glad. For their very opposition--in so loverlike a way did every
+thought somehow reach out to Violet Oliver--brought him a little nearer
+to the lady who held his heart. He found the Commissioner sealing up his
+letters in his office.
+
+That unobservant man had just written at length, privately and
+confidentially, both to the Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab at the
+hill-station and to the Resident at Kohara. And to both he had written to
+the one effect:
+
+"We must expect trouble in Chiltistan."
+
+He based his conclusions upon the glimpse which he had obtained into the
+troubled feelings of Shere Ali. The next morning Shere Ali travelled
+northwards and forty-eight hours later from the top of the Malakand Pass
+he saw winding across the Swat valley past Chakdara the road which
+reached to Kohara and there stopped.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+ON THE POLO-GROUND
+
+
+Violet Oliver travelled to India in the late autumn of that year, free
+from apprehension. Somewhere beyond the high snow-passes Shere Ali would
+be working out his destiny among his own people. She was not of those who
+seek publicity either for themselves or for their gowns in the daily
+papers. Shere Ali would never hear of her visit; she was safe. She spent
+her Christmas in Calcutta, saw the race for the Viceroy's Cup run without
+a fear that on that crowded racecourse the importunate figure of the
+young Prince of Chiltistan might emerge to reproach her, and a week later
+went northwards into the United Provinces. It was a year, now some while
+past, when a royal visitor came from a neighbouring country into India.
+And in his honour at one great city in those Provinces the troops
+gathered and the tents went up. Little towns of canvas, gay with bordered
+walks and flowers, were dotted on the dusty plains about and within the
+city. Great ministers and functionaries came with their retinues and
+their guests. Native princes from Rajputana brought their elephants and
+their escorts. Thither also came Violet Oliver. It was, indeed, to attend
+this Durbar that she had been invited out from England. She stayed in a
+small camp on the great Parade Ground where the tents faced one another
+in a single street, each with its little garden of grass and flowers
+before the door. The ends of the street were closed in by posts, and
+outside the posts sentries were placed.
+
+It was a week of bright, sunlit, rainless days, and of starry nights. It
+was a week of reviews and State functions. But it was also a week during
+which the best polo to be seen in India drew the visitors each afternoon
+to the club-ground. There was no more constant attendant than Violet
+Oliver. She understood the game and followed it with a nice appreciation
+of the player's skill. The first round of the competition had been played
+off on the third day, but a native team organised by the ruler of a
+Mohammedan State in Central India had drawn a by and did not appear in
+the contest until the fourth day. Mrs. Oliver took her seat in the front
+row of the stand, as the opposing teams cantered into the field upon
+their ponies. A programme was handed to her, but she did not open it. For
+already one of the umpires had tossed the ball into the middle of the
+ground. The game had begun.
+
+The native team was matched against a regiment of Dragoons, and from the
+beginning it was plain that the four English players were the stronger
+team. But on the other side there was one who in point of skill
+outstripped them all. He was stationed on the outside of the field
+farthest away from Violet Oliver. He was a young man, almost a boy, she
+judged; he was beautifully mounted, and he sat his pony as though he and
+it were one. He was quick to turn, quick to pass the ball; and he never
+played a dangerous game. A desire that the native team should win woke in
+her and grew strong just because of that slim youth's extraordinary
+skill. Time after time he relieved his side, and once, as it seemed to
+her, he picked the ball out of the very goalposts. The bugle, she
+remembered afterwards, had just sounded. He drove the ball out from the
+press, leaned over until it seemed he must fall to resist an opponent who
+tried to ride him off, and then somehow he shook himself free from the
+tangle of polo-sticks and ponies.
+
+"Oh, well done! well done!" cried Violet Oliver, clenching her hands in
+her enthusiasm. A roar of applause went up. He came racing down the very
+centre of the ground, the long ends of his white turban streaming out
+behind him like a pennant. The seven other players followed upon his
+heels outpaced and outplayed. He rode swinging his polo-stick for the
+stroke, and then with clean hard blows sent the ball skimming through
+the air like a bird. Violet Oliver watched him in suspense, dreading
+lest he should override the ball, or that his stroke should glance. But
+he made no mistake. The sound of the strokes rose clear and sharp; the
+ball flew straight. He drove it between the posts, and the players
+streamed in behind as though through the gateway of a beleaguered town.
+He had scored the first goal of the game at the end of the first
+chukkur. He cantered back to change his pony. But this time he rode
+along the edge of the stand, since on this side the ponies waited with
+their blankets thrown over their saddles and the syces at their heads.
+He ran his eyes along the row of onlookers as he cantered by, and
+suddenly Violet Oliver leaned forward. She had been interested merely in
+the player. Now she was interested in the man who played. She was more
+than interested. For she felt a tightening of the heart and she caught
+her breath. "It could not be," she said to herself. She could see his
+face clearly, however, now; and as suddenly as she had leaned forward
+she drew back. She lowered her head, until her broad hat-brim hid her
+face. She opened her programme, looked for and found the names of the
+players. Shere Ali's stared her in the face.
+
+"He has broken his word," she said angrily to herself, quite forgetting
+that he had given no word, and that she had asked for none. Then she fell
+to wondering whether or no he had recognised her as he rode past the
+stand. She stole a glance as he cantered back, but Shere Ali was not
+looking towards her. She debated whether she should make an excuse and go
+back to her camp. But if he had thought he had seen her, he would look
+again, and her empty place would be convincing evidence. Moreover, the
+teams had changed goals. Shere Ali would be playing on this side of the
+ground during the next chukkur unless the Dragoons scored quickly. Violet
+Oliver kept her place, but she saw little of the game. She watched Shere
+Ali's play furtively, however, hoping thereby to learn whether he had
+noticed her. And in a little while she knew. He played wildly, his
+strokes had lost their precision, he was less quick to follow the twists
+of the ball. Shere Ali had seen her. At the end of the game he galloped
+quickly to the corner, and when Violet Oliver came out of the enclosure
+she saw him standing, with his long overcoat already on his shoulders,
+waiting for her.
+
+Violet Oliver separated herself from her friends and went forward towards
+him. She held out her hand. Shere Ali hesitated and then took it. All
+through the game, pride had been urging him to hold his head high and
+seek not so much as a single word with her. But he had been alone for six
+months in Chiltistan and he was young.
+
+"You might have let me know," he said, in a troubled voice.
+
+Violet Oliver faltered out some beginnings of an excuse. She did not want
+to bring him away from his work in Chiltistan. But Shere Ali was not
+listening to the excuses.
+
+"I must see you again," he said. "I must."
+
+"No doubt we shall meet," replied Violet Oliver.
+
+"To-morrow," continued Shere Ali. "To-morrow evening. You will be going
+to the Fort."
+
+There was to be an investiture, and after the investiture a great
+reception in the Fort on the evening of the next day. It would be as good
+a place as any, thought Violet Oliver--nay, a better place. There would
+be crowds of people wandering about the Fort. Since they must meet, let
+it be there and soon.
+
+"Very well," she said. "To-morrow evening," and she passed on and
+rejoined her friends.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+THE INVIDIOUS BAR
+
+
+Violet Oliver drove back to her camp in the company of her friends and
+they remarked upon her silence.
+
+"You are tired, Violet?" her hostess asked of her.
+
+"A little, perhaps," Violet admitted, and, urging fatigue as her excuse,
+she escaped to her tent. There she took counsel of her looking-glass.
+
+"I couldn't possibly have foreseen that he would be here," she pleaded to
+her reflection. "He was to have stayed in Chiltistan. I asked him and he
+told me that he meant to stay. If he had stayed there, he would never
+have known that I was in India," and she added and repeated, "It's really
+not my fault."
+
+In a word she was distressed and sincerely distressed. But it was not
+upon her own account. She was not thinking of the awkwardness to her of
+this unexpected encounter. But she realised that she had given pain where
+she had meant not to give pain. Shere Ali had seen her. He had been
+assured that she sought to avoid him. And this was not the end. She must
+go on and give more pain.
+
+Violet Oliver had hoped and believed that her friendship with the young
+Prince was something which had gone quite out of her life. She had closed
+it and put it away, as you put away upon an upper shelf a book which you
+do not mean to read again. The last word had been spoken eight months ago
+in the conservatory of Lady Marfield's house. And behold they had met
+again. There must be yet another meeting, yet another last interview. And
+from that last interview nothing but pain could come to Shere Ali.
+Therefore she anticipated it with a great reluctance. Violet Oliver did
+not live among illusions. She was no sentimentalist. She never made up
+and rehearsed in imagination little scenes of a melting pathos where
+eternal adieux were spoken amid tears. She had no appreciation of the
+woeful luxury of last interviews. On the contrary, she hated to confront
+distress or pain. It was in her character always to take the easier way
+when trouble threatened. She would have avoided altogether this meeting
+with Shere Ali, had it been possible.
+
+"It's a pity," she said, and that was all. She was reluctant, but she had
+no misgiving. Shere Ali was to her still the youth to whom she had said
+good-bye in Lady Marfield's conservatory. She had seen him in the flush
+of victory after a close-fought game, and thus she had seen him often
+enough before. It was not to be wondered at that she noted no difference
+at that moment.
+
+But the difference was there for the few who had eyes to see. He had
+journeyed up the broken road into Chiltistan. At the Fort of Chakdara, in
+the rice fields on the banks of the Swat river, he had taken his luncheon
+one day with the English commandant and the English doctor, and there he
+had parted with the ways of life which had become to him the only ways.
+He had travelled thence for a few hundred yards along a straight strip of
+road running over level ground, and so with the levies of Dir to escort
+him he swung round to the left. A screen of hillside and grey rock moved
+across the face of the country behind him. The last outpost was left
+behind. The Fort and the Signal Tower on the pinnacle opposite and the
+English flag flying over all were hidden from his sight. Wretched as any
+exile from his native land, Shere All went up into the lower passes of
+the Himalayas. Days were to pass and still the high snow-peaks which
+glittered in the sky, gold in the noonday, silver in the night time,
+above the valleys of Chiltistan were to be hidden in the far North. But
+already the words began to be spoken and the little incidents to occur
+which were to ripen him for his destiny. They were garnered into his
+memories as separate and unrelated events. It was not until afterwards
+that he came to know how deeply they had left their marks, or that he set
+them in an ordered sequence and gave to them a particular significance.
+Even at the Fort of Chakdara a beginning had been made.
+
+Shere Ali was standing in the little battery on the very summit of the
+Fort. Below him was the oblong enclosure of the men's barracks, the stone
+landings and steps, the iron railings, the numbered doors. He looked down
+into the enclosure as into a well. It might almost have been a section of
+the barracks at Chatham. But Shere Ali raised his head, and, over against
+him, on the opposite side of a natural gateway in the hills, rose the
+steep slope and the Signal Tower.
+
+"I was here," said the Doctor, who stood behind him, "during the Malakand
+campaign. You remember it, no doubt?"
+
+"I was at Oxford. I remember it well," said Shere Ali.
+
+"We were hard pressed here, but the handful of men in the Signal Tower
+had the worst of it," continued the Doctor in a matter-of-fact voice. "It
+was reckoned that there were fourteen thousand men from the Swat Valley
+besieging us, and as they did not mind how many they lost, even with the
+Maxims and our wire defences it was difficult to keep them off. We had to
+hold on to the Signal Tower because we could communicate with the people
+on the Malakand from there, while we couldn't from the Fort itself. The
+Amandara ridge, on the other side of the valley, as you can see, just
+hides the Pass from us. Well, the handful of men in the tower managed to
+keep in communication with the main force, and this is how it was done. A
+Sepoy called Prem Singh used to come out into full view of the enemy
+through a porthole of the tower, deliberately set up his apparatus, and
+heliograph away to the main force in the Malakand Camp, with the Swatis
+firing at him from short range. How it was he was not hit, I could never
+understand. He did it day after day. It was the bravest and coolest thing
+I ever saw done or ever heard of, with one exception, perhaps. Prem Singh
+would have got the Victoria Cross--" and the Doctor stopped suddenly
+and his face flushed.
+
+Shere Ali, however, was too keenly interested in the incident itself to
+take any note of the narrator's confusion. Baldly though it was told,
+there was the square, strong tower with its door six feet from the
+ground, its machicoulis, its narrow portholes over against him, to give
+life and vividness to the story. Here that brave deed had been done and
+daily repeated. Shere Ali peopled the empty slopes which ran down from
+the tower to the river and the high crags beyond the tower with the
+hordes of white-clad Swatis, all in their finest robes, like men who have
+just reached the goal of a holy pilgrimage, as indeed they had. He saw
+their standards, he heard the din of their firearms, and high above them
+on the wall of the tower he saw the khaki-clad figure of a single Sepoy
+calmly flashing across the valley news of the defenders' plight.
+
+"Didn't he get the Victoria Cross?" he asked.
+
+"No," returned the Doctor with a certain awkwardness. But still Shere Ali
+did not notice.
+
+"And what was the exception?" he asked eagerly. "What was the other brave
+deed you have seen fit to rank with this?"
+
+"That, too, happened over there," said the Doctor, seizing upon the
+question with relief. "During the early days of the siege we were able to
+send in to the tower water and food. But when the first of August came we
+could help them no more. The enemy thronged too closely round us, we were
+attacked by night and by day, and stone sangars, in which the Swatis lay
+after dark, were built between us and the tower. We sent up water to the
+tower for the last time at half-past nine on a Saturday morning, and it
+was not until half-past four on the Monday afternoon that the relieving
+force marched across the bridge down there and set us free."
+
+"They were without water for all that time--and in August?" cried
+Shere Ali.
+
+"No," the Doctor answered. "But they would have been had the Sepoy not
+found his equal. A bheestie"--and he nodded his head to emphasise the
+word--"not a soldier at all, but a mere water-carrier, a mere
+camp-follower, volunteered to go down to the river. He crept out of the
+tower after nightfall with his water-skins, crawled down between the
+sangars--and I can tell you the hill-side was thick with them--to the
+brink of the Swat river below there, filled his skins, and returned
+with them."
+
+"That man, too, earned the Victoria Cross," said Shere Ali.
+
+"Yes," said the Doctor, "no doubt, no doubt."
+
+Something of flurry was again audible in his voice, and this time Shere
+Ali noticed it.
+
+"Earned--but did not get it?" he went on slowly; and turning to the
+Doctor he waited quietly for an answer. The answer was given reluctantly,
+after a pause.
+
+"Well! That is so."
+
+"Why?"
+
+The question was uttered sharply, close upon the words which had preceded
+it. The Doctor looked upon the ground, shifted his feet, and looked up
+again. He was a young man, and inexperienced. The question was repeated.
+
+"Why?"
+
+The Doctor's confusion increased. He recognised that his delay in
+answering only made the answer more difficult to give. It could not be
+evaded. He blurted out the truth apologetically.
+
+"Well, you see, we don't give the Victoria Cross to natives."
+
+Shere Ali was silent for a while. He stood with his eyes fixed upon the
+tower, his face quite inscrutable.
+
+"Yes, I guessed that would be the reason," he said quietly.
+
+"Well," said his companion uncomfortably, "I expect some day that will
+be altered."
+
+Shere Ali shrugged his shoulders, and turned to go down. At the gateway
+of the Fort, by the wire bridge, his escort, mounted upon their horses,
+waited for him. He climbed into the saddle without a word. He had been
+labouring for these last days under a sense of injury, and his thoughts
+had narrowed in upon himself. He was thinking. "I, too, then, could never
+win that prize." His conviction that he was really one of the White
+People, bolstered up as it had been by so many vain arguments, was put to
+the test of fact. The truth shone in upon his mind. For here was a
+coveted privilege of the White People from which he was debarred, he and
+the bheestie and the Sepoy. They were all one, he thought bitterly, to
+the White People. The invidious bar of his colour was not to be broken.
+
+"Good-bye," he said, leaning down from his saddle and holding out his
+hand. "Thank you very much."
+
+He shook hands with the Doctor and cantered down the road, with a smile
+upon his face. But the consciousness of the invidious bar was rankling
+cruelly at his heart, and it continued to rankle long after he had swung
+round the bend of the road and had lost sight of Chakdara and the
+English flag.
+
+He passed through Jandol and climbed the Lowari Pass among the fir trees
+and the pines, and on the very summit he met three men clothed in brown
+homespun with their hair clubbed at the sides of their heads. Each man
+carried a rifle on his back and two of them carried swords besides, and
+they wore sandals of grass upon their feet. They were talking as they
+went, and they were talking in the Chilti tongue. Shere Ali hailed them
+and bade them stop.
+
+"On what journey are you going?" he asked, and one of the three bowed low
+and answered him.
+
+"Sir, we are going to Mecca."
+
+"To Mecca!" exclaimed Shere Ali. "How will you ever get to Mecca? Have
+you money?"
+
+"Sir, we have each six rupees, and with six rupees a man may reach Mecca
+from Kurrachee. Till we reach Kurrachee, there is no fear that we shall
+starve. Dwellers in the villages will befriend us."
+
+"Why, that is true," said Shere Ali, "but since you are countrymen of my
+own and my father's subjects, you shall not tax too heavily your friends
+upon the road."
+
+He added to their scanty store of rupees, and one after another they
+thanked him and so went cheerily down the Pass. Shere Ali watched them as
+they went, wondering that men should take such a journey and endure so
+much discomfort for their faith. He watched their dwindling figures and
+understood how far he was set apart from them. He was of their faith
+himself, nominally at all events, but Mecca--? He shrugged his
+shoulders at the name. It meant no more to him than it did to the White
+People who had cast him out. But that chance meeting lingered in his
+memory, and as he travelled northwards, he would wonder at times by night
+at what village his three countrymen slept and by day whether their faith
+still cheered them on their road.
+
+He came at last to the borders of Chiltistan, and travelled thenceforward
+through a country rich with orchards and green rice and golden amaranth.
+The terraced slopes of the mountains, ablaze with wild indigo, closed in
+upon him and widened out. Above the terraces great dark forests of pines
+and deodars, maples and horse chestnuts clung to the hill sides; and
+above the forests grass slopes stretched up to bare rock and the
+snowfields. From the villages the people came out to meet him, and here
+and there from some castle of a greater importance a chieftain would ride
+out with his bodyguard, gay in velvets, and silks from Bokhara and chogas
+of gold kinkob, and offer to him gold dust twisted up in the petal of a
+flower, which he touched and remitted. He was escorted to polo-grounds
+and sat for hours witnessing sports and trials of skill, and at night to
+the music of kettledrums and pipes men and boys danced interminably
+before him. There was one evening which he particularly remembered. He
+had set up his camp outside a large village and was sitting alone by his
+fire in the open air. The night was very still, the sky dark but studded
+with stars extraordinarily bright--so bright, indeed, that Shere Ali
+could see upon the water of the river below the low cliff on which his
+camp fire was lit a trembling golden path made by the rays of a planet.
+And as he sat, unexpectedly in the hush a boy with a clear, sweet voice
+began to sing from the darkness behind him. The melody was plaintive and
+sweet; a few notes of a pipe accompanied him; and as Shere Ali listened
+in this high valley of the Himalayas on a summer's night, the music took
+hold upon him and wrung his heart. The yearning for all that he had left
+behind became a pain almost beyond endurance. The days of his boyhood and
+his youth went by before his eyes in a glittering procession. His school
+life, his first summer term at Oxford, the Cherwell with the shadows of
+the branches overhead dappling the water, the strenuous week of the
+Eights, his climbs with Linforth, and, above all, London in June, a
+London bright with lilac and sunshine and the fair faces of women,
+crowded in upon his memory. He had been steadily of late refusing to
+remember, but the sweet voice and the plaintive melody had caught him
+unawares. The ghosts of his dead pleasures trooped out and took life and
+substance. Particular hours were lived through again--a motor ride alone
+with Violet Oliver to Pangbourne, a dinner on the lawn outside the inn,
+the drive back to London in the cool of the evening. It all seemed very
+far away to-night. Shere Ali sat late beside his fire, nor when he went
+into his tent did he close his eyes.
+
+The next morning he rode among orchards bright with apricots and
+mulberries, peaches and white grapes, and in another day he looked down
+from a high cliff, across which the road was carried on a scaffolding,
+upon the town of Kohara and the castle of his father rising in terraces
+upon a hill behind. The nobles and their followers came out to meet him
+with courteous words and protestations of good will. But they looked him
+over with curious and not too friendly eyes. News had gone before Shere
+Ali that the young Prince of Chiltistan was coming to Kohara wearing the
+dress of the White People. They saw that the news was true, but no word
+or comment was uttered in his hearing. Joking and laughing they escorted
+him to the gates of his father's palace. Thus Shere Ali at the last had
+come home to Kohara. Of the life which he lived there he was to tell
+something to Violet Oliver.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+IN THE COURTYARD
+
+
+The investiture was over, and the guests, thronging from the Hall of
+Audience, came out beneath arches and saw the whole length of the great
+marble court spread before them. A vast canopy roofed it in, and a soft
+dim light pervaded it. To those who came from the glitter of the
+ceremonies it brought a sense of coolness and of peace. From the arches a
+broad flight of steps led downwards to the floor, where water gleamed
+darkly in a marble basin. Lilies floated upon its surface, and marble
+paths crossed it to the steps at the far end; and here and there, in its
+depth, the reflection of a lamp burned steadily. At the far end steps
+rose again to a great platform and to gilded arches through which lights
+poured in a blaze, and gave to that end almost the appearance of a
+lighted stage, and made of the courtyard a darkened auditorium. From one
+flight of steps to the other, in the dim cool light, the guests passed
+across the floor of the court, soldiers in uniforms, civilians in their
+dress of state, jewelled princes of the native kingdoms, ladies in their
+bravest array. But now and again one or two would slip from the throng,
+and, leaving the procession, take their own way about the Fort. Among
+those who slipped away was Violet Oliver. She went to the side of the
+courtyard where a couch stood empty. There she seated herself and waited.
+In front of her the stream of people passed by talking and laughing,
+within view, within earshot if only one raised one's voice a trifle above
+the ordinary note. Yet there was no other couch near. One might talk at
+will and not be overheard. It was, to Violet Oliver's thinking, a good
+strategic position, and there she proposed to remain till Shere Ali found
+her, and after he had found her, until he went away.
+
+She wondered in what guise he would come to her: a picturesque figure
+with a turban of some delicate shade upon his head and pearls about his
+throat, or--as she wondered, a young man in the evening dress of an
+Englishman stepped aside from the press of visitors and came towards her.
+Before she could, in that dim light, distinguish his face, she recognised
+him by the lightness of his step and the suppleness of his figure. She
+raised herself into a position a little more upright, and held out her
+hand. She made room for him on the couch beside her, and when he had
+taken his seat, she turned at once to speak.
+
+But Shere Ali raised his hand in a gesture of entreaty.
+
+"Hush!" he said with a smile; and the smile pleaded with her as much as
+did his words. "Just for a moment! We can argue afterwards. Just for a
+moment, let us pretend."
+
+Violet Oliver had expected anger, accusations, prayers. Even for some
+threat, some act of violence, she had come prepared. But the quiet
+wistfulness of his manner, as of a man too tired greatly to long for
+anything, took her at a disadvantage. But the one thing which she surely
+understood was the danger of pretence. There had been too much of
+pretence already.
+
+"No," she said.
+
+"Just for a moment," he insisted. He sat beside her, watching the clear
+profile of her face, the slender throat, the heavy masses of hair so
+daintily coiled upon her head. "The last eight months have not
+been--could not be. Yesterday we were at Richmond, just you and I. It was
+Sunday--you remember. I called on you in the afternoon, and for a wonder
+you were alone. We drove down together to Richmond, and dined together in
+the little room at the end of the passage--the room with the big windows,
+and the name of the woman who was murdered in France scratched upon the
+glass. That was yesterday."
+
+"It was last year," said Violet.
+
+"Yesterday," Shere Ali persisted. "I dreamt last night that I had gone
+back to Chiltistan; but it was only a dream."
+
+"It was the truth," and the quiet assurance of her voice dispelled Shere
+Ali's own effort at pretence. He leaned forward suddenly, clasping his
+hands upon his knees in an attitude familiar to her as characteristic of
+the man. There was a tenseness which gave to him even in repose a look
+of activity.
+
+"Well, it's the truth, then," he said, and his voice took on an accent of
+bitterness. "And here's more truth. I never thought to see you here
+to-night."
+
+"Did you think that I should be afraid?" asked Violet Oliver in a low,
+steady voice.
+
+"Afraid!" Shere Ali turned towards her in surprise and met her
+gaze. "No."
+
+"Why, then, should I break my word? Have I done it so often?"
+
+Shere Ali did not answer her directly.
+
+"You promised to write to me," he said, and Violet Oliver replied at
+once:
+
+"Yes. And I did write."
+
+"You wrote twice," he cried bitterly. "Oh, yes, you kept your word.
+There's a post every day, winter and summer, into Chiltistan. Sometimes
+an avalanche or a snowstorm delays it; but on most days it comes. If you
+could only have guessed how eagerly I looked forward to your letters,
+you would have written, I think, more often. There's a path over a high
+ridge by which the courier must come. I could see it from the casement
+of the tower. I used to watch it through a pair of field-glasses, that I
+might catch the first glimpse of the man as he rose against the sky.
+Each day I thought 'Perhaps there's a letter in your handwriting.' And
+you wrote twice, and in neither letter was there a hint that you were
+coming out to India."
+
+He was speaking in a low, passionate voice. In spite of herself, Violet
+Oliver was moved. The picture of him watching from his window in the
+tower for the black speck against the skyline was clear before her mind,
+and troubled her. Her voice grew gentle.
+
+"I did not write more often on purpose," she said.
+
+"It was on purpose, too, that you left out all mention of your visit
+to India?"
+
+Violet nodded her head.
+
+"Yes," she said.
+
+"You did not want to see me again."
+
+Violet turned her face towards him, and leaned forward a little.
+
+"I don't say that," she said softly. "But I thought it would be better
+that we two should not meet again, if meeting could be avoided. I saw
+that you cared--I may say that, mayn't I?" and for a second she laid her
+hand gently upon his sleeve. "I saw that you cared too much. It seemed to
+me best that it should end altogether."
+
+Shere Ali lifted his head, and turned quickly towards her.
+
+"Why should it end at all?" he cried. His eyes kindled and sought hers.
+"Violet, why should it end at all?"
+
+Violet Oliver drew back. She cast a glance to the courtyard. Only a few
+paces away the stream of people passed up and down.
+
+"It must end," she answered. "You know that as well as I."
+
+"I don't know it. I won't know it," he replied. He reached out his hand
+towards hers, but she was too quick for him. He bent nearer to her.
+
+"Violet," he whispered, "marry me!"
+
+Violet Oliver glanced again to the courtyard. But it was no longer to
+assure herself that friends of her own race were comfortably near at
+hand. Now she was anxious that they should not be near enough to listen
+and overhear.
+
+"That's impossible!" she answered in a startled voice.
+
+"It's not impossible! It's not!" And the desperation in his voice
+betrayed him. In the depths of his heart he knew that, for this woman, at
+all events, it was impossible. But he would not listen to that knowledge.
+
+"Other women, here in India, have had the courage."
+
+"And what have their lives been afterwards?" she asked. She had not
+herself any very strong feeling on the subject of colour. She was not
+repelled, as men are repelled. But she was aware, nevertheless, how
+strong the feeling was in others. She had not lived in India for nothing.
+Marriage with Shere Ali was impossible, even had she wished for it. It
+meant ostracism and social suicide.
+
+"Where should I live?" she went on. "In Chiltistan? What life would there
+be there for me?"
+
+"No," he replied. "I would not ask it. I never thought of it. In
+England. We could live there!" and, ceasing to insist, he began
+wistfully to plead. "Oh, if you knew how I have hated these past months.
+I used to sit at night, alone, alone, alone, eating my heart for want of
+you; for want of everything I care for. I could not sleep. I used to see
+the morning break. Perhaps here and there a drum would begin to beat,
+the cries of children would rise up from the streets, and I would lie in
+my bed with my hands clenched, thinking of the jingle of a hansom cab
+along the streets of London, and the gas lamps paling as the grey light
+spread. Violet!"
+
+Violet twisted her hands one within the other. This was just what she had
+thought to avoid, to shut out from her mind--the knowledge that he had
+suffered. But the evidence of his pain was too indisputable. There was no
+shutting it out. It sounded loud in his voice, it showed in his looks.
+His face had grown white and haggard, the face of a tortured man; his
+hands trembled, his eyes were fierce with longing.
+
+"Oh, don't," she cried, and so great was her trouble that for once she
+did not choose her words. "You know that it's impossible. We can't alter
+these things."
+
+She meant by "these things" the natural law that white shall mate with
+white, and brown with brown; and so Shere Ali understood her. He ceased
+to plead. There came a dreadful look upon his face.
+
+"Oh, I know," he exclaimed brutally. "You would be marrying a nigger."
+
+"I never said that," Violet interrupted hastily.
+
+"But you meant it," and he began to laugh bitterly and very quietly. To
+Violet that laughter was horrible. It frightened her. "Oh, yes, yes," he
+said. "When we come over to England we are very fine people. Women
+welcome us and are kind, men make us their friends. But out here! We
+quickly learn out here that we are the inferior people. Suppose that I
+wanted to be a soldier, not an officer of my levies, but a soldier in
+your army with a soldier's chances of promotion and high rank! Do you
+know what would happen? I might serve for twenty years, and at the end of
+it the youngest subaltern out of Sandhurst, with a moustache he can't
+feel upon his lip, would in case of war step over my head and command me.
+Why, I couldn't win the Victoria Cross, even though I had earned it ten
+times over. We are the subject races," and he turned to her abruptly. "I
+am in disfavour to-night. Do you know why? Because I am not dressed in a
+silk jacket; because I am not wearing jewels like a woman, as those
+Princes are," and he waved his hand contemptuously towards a group of
+them. "They are content," he cried. "But I was brought up in England, and
+I am not."
+
+He buried his face in his hands and was silent; and as he sat thus,
+Violet Oliver said to him with a gentle reproach:
+
+"When we parted in London last year you spoke in a different way--a
+better way. I remember very well what you said. For I was glad to hear
+it. You said: 'I have not forgotten really that there is much to do in my
+own country. I have not forgotten that I can thank all of you here who
+have shown me so much kindness by more than mere words. For I can help in
+Chiltistan--I can really help.'"
+
+Shere All raised his face from his hands with the air of a man listening
+to strange and curious words.
+
+"I said that?"
+
+"Yes," and in her turn Violet Oliver began to plead. "I wish that
+to-night you could recapture that fine spirit. I should be very glad of
+it. For I am troubled by your unhappiness."
+
+But Shere Ali shook his head.
+
+"I have been in Chiltistan since I spoke those words. And they will not
+let me help."
+
+"There's the road."
+
+"It must not be continued."
+
+"There is, at all events, your father," Violet suggested. "You can
+help him."
+
+And again Shere Ali laughed. But this time the bitterness had gone from
+his voice. He laughed with a sense of humour, almost, it seemed to
+Violet, with enjoyment.
+
+"My father!" he said. "I'll tell you about my father," and his face
+cleared for a moment of its distress as he turned towards her. "He
+received me in the audience chamber of his palace at Kohara. I had not
+seen him for ten years. How do you think he received me? He was sitting
+on a chair of brocade with silver legs in great magnificence, and across
+his knees he held a loaded rifle at full cock. It was a Snider, so that I
+could be quite sure it was cocked."
+
+Violet stared at him, not understanding.
+
+"But why?" she asked.
+
+"Well, he knew quite well that I was brought back to Kohara in order to
+replace him, if he didn't mend his ways and spend less money. And he
+didn't mean to be replaced." The smile broke out again on Shere Ali's
+face as he remembered the scene. "He sat there with his great beard, dyed
+red, spreading across his chest, a long velvet coat covering his knees,
+and the loaded rifle laid over the coat. His eyes watched me, while his
+fingers played about the trigger."
+
+Violet Oliver was horrified.
+
+"You mean--that he meant to kill you!" she cried incredulously.
+
+"Yes," said Shere Ali calmly. "I think he meant to do that. It's not so
+very unusual in our family. He probably thought that I might try to kill
+him. However, he didn't do it. You see, my father's very fond of the
+English, so I at once began to talk to him about England. It was evening
+when I went into the reception chamber; but it was broad daylight when I
+came out. I talked for my life that night--and won. He became so
+interested that he forgot to shoot me; and at the end I was wise enough
+to assure him that there was a great deal more to tell."
+
+The ways of the Princes in the States beyond the Frontier were unknown to
+Violet Oliver. The ruling family of Chiltistan was no exception to the
+general rule. In its annals there was hardly a page which was not stained
+with blood. When the son succeeded to the throne, it was, as often as
+not, after murdering his brothers, and if he omitted that precaution, as
+often as not he paid the penalty. Shere Ali was fortunate in that he had
+no brothers. But, on the other hand, he had a father, and there was no
+great security. Violet was startled, and almost as much bewildered as she
+was startled. She could not understand Shere Ali's composure. He spoke in
+so matter-of-fact a tone.
+
+"However," she said, grasping at the fact, "he has not killed you. He has
+not since tried to kill you."
+
+"No. I don't think he has," said Shere Ali slowly. But he spoke like one
+in doubt. "You see he realised very soon that I was not after all
+acceptable to the English. I wouldn't quite do what they wanted," and the
+humour died out of his face.
+
+"What did they want?"
+
+Shere Ali looked at her in hesitation.
+
+"Shall I tell you? I will. They wanted me to marry--one of my own people.
+They wanted me to forget," and he broke out in a passionate scorn. "As if
+I could do either--after I had known you."
+
+"Hush!" said she.
+
+But he was not to be checked.
+
+"You said it was impossible that you should marry me. It's no less
+impossible that I should marry now one of my own race. You know that. You
+can't deny it."
+
+Violet did not try to. He was speaking truth then, she was well aware. A
+great pity swelled up in her heart for him. She turned to him with a
+smile, in which there was much tenderness. His life was all awry; and
+both were quite helpless to set it right.
+
+"I am very sorry," she said in a whisper of remorse. "I did not think. I
+have done you grave harm."
+
+"Not you," he said quietly. "You may be quite sure of that. Those who
+have done me harm are those who sent me, ten years ago, to England."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+A QUESTION ANSWERED
+
+
+Thereafter both sat silent for a little while. The stream of people
+across the courtyard had diminished. High up on the great platform by the
+lighted arches the throng still pressed and shifted. But here there was
+quietude. The clatter of voices had died down. A band playing somewhere
+near at hand could be heard. Violet Oliver for the first time in her life
+had been brought face to face with a real tragedy. She was conscious of
+it as something irremediable and terribly sad. And for her own share in
+bringing it about she was full of remorse. She looked at Shere Ali as he
+sat beside her, his eyes gazing into the courtyard, his face tired and
+hopeless. There was nothing to be done. Her thoughts told her so no less
+clearly than his face. Here was a life spoilt at the beginning. But that
+was all that she saw. That the spoilt life might become an instrument of
+evil--she was blind to that possibility: she thought merely of the youth
+who suffered and still must suffer; who was crippled by the very means
+which were meant to strengthen him: and pity inclined her towards him
+with an ever-increasing strength.
+
+"I couldn't do it," she repeated silently to herself. "I couldn't do it.
+It would be madness."
+
+Shere Ali raised his head and said with a smile, "I am glad they are not
+playing the tune which I once heard on the Lake of Geneva, and again in
+London when I said good-bye to you."
+
+And then Violet sought to comfort him, her mind still working on what he
+had told her of his life in Chiltistan.
+
+"But it will become easier," she said, beginning in that general way. "In
+time you will rule in Chiltistan. That is certain." But he checked her
+with a shake of the head.
+
+"Certain? There is the son of Abdulla Mohammed, who fought against my
+father when Linforth's father was killed. It is likely enough that those
+old days will be revived. And I should have the priests against me."
+
+"The Mullahs!" she exclaimed, remembering in what terms he was wont to
+speak of them to her.
+
+"Yes," he answered, "I have set them against me already. They laid their
+traps for me while I was on the sea, and I would not fall into them. They
+would have liked to raise the country against my father and the English,
+just as they raised it twenty-five years ago. And they would have liked
+me to join in with them."
+
+He related to Violet the story of his meeting with Safdar Khan at the
+Gate of Lahore, and he repeated the words which he had used in Safdar
+Khan's hearing.
+
+"It did not take long for my threats to be repeated in the bazaar of
+Kohara, and from the bazaar they were quickly carried to the ears of the
+Mullahs. I had proof of it," he said with a laugh.
+
+Violet asked him anxiously for the proof.
+
+"I can tell to a day when the words were repeated in Kohara. For a
+fortnight after my coming the Mullahs still had hopes. They had heard
+nothing, and they met me always with salutations and greetings. Then
+came the day when I rode up the valley and a Mullah who had smiled the
+day before passed me as though he had not noticed me at all. The news
+had come. I was sure of it at the time. I reined in my horse and called
+sharply to one of the servants riding behind me, 'Who is that?' The
+Mullah heard the question, and he turned and up went the palm of his
+hand to his forehead in a flash. But I was not inclined to let him off
+so easily."
+
+"What did you do?" Violet asked uneasily.
+
+"I said to him, 'My friend, I will take care that you know me the next
+time we meet upon the road. Show me your hands!' He held them out, and
+they were soft as a woman's. I was close to a bridge which some workmen
+were repairing. So I had my friend brought along to the bridge. Then I
+said to one of the workmen, 'Would you like to earn your day's wage and
+yet do no work?' He laughed, thinking that I was joking. But I was not. I
+said to him, 'Very well, then, see that this soft-handed creature does
+your day's work. You will bring him to me at the Palace this evening, and
+if I find that he has not done the work, or that you have helped him, you
+will forfeit your wages and I will whip you both into the bargain.' The
+Mullah was brought to me in the evening," said Shere Ali, smiling grimly.
+"He was so stiff he could hardly walk. I made him show me his hands
+again, and this time they were blistered. So I told him to remember his
+manners in the future, and I let him go. But he was a man of prominence
+in the country, and when the story got known he became rather
+ridiculous." He turned with a smile to Violet Oliver.
+
+"My people don't like being made ridiculous--least of all Mullahs."
+
+But there was no answering smile on Violet's face. Rather she was
+troubled and alarmed.
+
+"But surely that was unwise?"
+
+Shere Ali shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"What does it matter?" he said. He did not tell her all of that story.
+There was an episode which had occurred two days later when Shere Ali was
+stalking an ibex on the hillside. A bullet had whistled close by his ear,
+and it had been fired from behind him. He was never quite sure whether
+his father or the Mullah was responsible for that bullet, but he inclined
+to attribute it to the Mullah.
+
+"Yes, I have the priests against me," he said. "They call me the
+Englishman." Then he laughed. "A curious piece of irony, isn't it?"
+
+He stood up suddenly and said: "When I left England I was in doubt. I
+could not be sure whether my home, my true home, was there or in
+Chiltistan."
+
+"Yes, I remember," said Violet.
+
+"I am no longer in doubt. It is neither in England nor in Chiltistan. I
+am a citizen of no country. I have no place anywhere at all."
+
+Violet Oliver stood up and faced him.
+
+"I must be going. I must find my friends," she said, and as he took her
+hand, she added, "I am so very sorry."
+
+The words, she felt, were utterly inadequate, but no others would come to
+her lips, and so with a trembling smile she repeated them. She drew her
+hand from his clasp and moved a step or two away. But he followed her,
+and she stopped and shook her head.
+
+"This is really good-bye," she said simply and very gravely.
+
+"I want to ask you a question," he explained. "Will you answer it?"
+
+"How can I tell you until you ask it?"
+
+He looked at her for a moment as though in doubt whether he should speak
+or not. Then he said, "Are you going to marry--Linforth?"
+
+The blood slowly mounted into her face and flushed her forehead
+and cheeks.
+
+"He has not even asked me to marry him," she said, and moved down into
+the courtyard.
+
+Shere Ali watched her as she went. That was the last time he should see
+her, he told himself. The last time in all his life. His eyes followed
+her, noting the grace of her movements, the whiteness of her skin, all
+her daintiness of dress and person. A madness kindled in his blood. He
+had a wild thought of springing down, of capturing her. She mounted the
+steps and disappeared among the throng.
+
+And they wanted him to marry--to marry one of his own people. Shere Ali
+suddenly saw the face of the Deputy Commissioner at Lahore calmly
+suggesting the arrangement, almost ordering it. He sat down again upon
+the couch and once more began to laugh. But the laughter ceased very
+quickly, and folding his arms upon the high end of the couch, he bowed
+his head upon them and was still.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+SHERE ALI MEETS AN OLD FRIEND
+
+
+The carriage which was to take Violet Oliver and her friends back to
+their camp had been parked amongst those farthest from the door. Violet
+stood for a long while under the awning, waiting while the interminable
+procession went by. The generals in their scarlet coats, the ladies in
+their satin gowns, the great officers of state attended by their escorts,
+the native princes, mounted into their carriages and were driven away.
+The ceremony and the reception which followed it had been markedly
+successful even in that land of ceremonies and magnificence. The voices
+about her told her so as they spoke of this or that splendour and
+recalled the picturesque figures which had given colour to the scene. But
+the laughter, the praise, the very tones of enjoyment had to her a
+heartless ring. She watched the pageantry of the great Indian
+Administration dissolve, and was blind to its glitter and conscious only
+of its ruthlessness. For ruthless she found it to-night. She had been
+face to face with a victim of the system--a youth broken by it,
+needlessly broken, and as helpless to recover from his hurt as a wounded
+animal. The harm had been done no doubt with the very best intention, but
+the harm had been done. She was conscious of her own share in the blame
+and she drove miserably home, with the picture of Shere Ali's face as she
+had last seen it to bear her company, and with his cry, that he had no
+place anywhere at all, sounding in her ears.
+
+When she reached the privacy of her own tent, and had dismissed her maid,
+she unlocked one of her trunks and took out from it her jewel case. She
+had been careful not to wear her necklace of pearls that night, and she
+took it out of the case now and laid it upon her knees. She was very
+sorry to part with it. She touched and caressed the pearls with loving
+fingers, and once she lifted it as though she would place it about her
+neck. But she checked her hands, fearing that if she put it on she would
+never bring herself to let it go. Already as she watched and fingered it
+and bent her head now and again to scrutinise a stone, small insidious
+voices began to whisper at her heart.
+
+"He asked for nothing when he gave it you."
+
+"You made no promise when you took it."
+
+"It was a gift without conditions hinted or implied."
+
+Violet Oliver took the world lightly on the whole. Only this one passion
+for jewels and precious stones had touched her deeply as yet. Of love
+she knew little beyond the name and its aspect in others. She was
+familiar enough with that, so familiar that she gave little heed to what
+lay behind the aspect--or had given little heed until to-night. Her
+husband she had accepted rather than actively welcomed. She had lived
+with him in a mood of placid and unquestioning good-humour, and she had
+greatly missed him when he died. But it was the presence in the house
+that she missed, rather than the lover. To-night, almost for the first
+time, she had really looked under the surface. Insight had been
+vouchsafed to her; and in remorse she was minded to put the thing she
+greatly valued away from her.
+
+She rose suddenly, and, lest the temptation to keep the necklace should
+prove too strong, laid it away in its case.
+
+A post went every day over the passes into Chiltistan. She wrapped up the
+case in brown paper, tied it, sealed it, and addressed it. There was need
+to send it off, she well knew, before the picture of Shere Ali, now so
+vivid in her mind, lost its aspect of poignant suffering and faded out of
+her thoughts.
+
+But she slept ill and in the middle of the night she rose from her bed.
+The tent was pitch dark. She lit her candle; and it was the light of the
+candle which awoke her maid. The tent was a double one; the maid slept in
+the smaller portion of it and a canvas doorway gave entrance into her
+mistress' room. Over this doorway hung the usual screen of green matting.
+Now these screens act as screens, are as impenetrable to the eye as a
+door--so long as there is no light behind them. But place a light behind
+them and they become transparent. This was what Violet Oliver had done.
+She had lit her candle and at once a part of the interior of her tent was
+visible to her maid as she lay in bed.
+
+The maid saw the table and the sealed parcel upon it. Then she saw Mrs.
+Oliver come to the table, break the seals, open the parcel, take out a
+jewel case--a jewel case which the maid knew well--and carry it and the
+parcel out of sight. Mrs. Oliver crossed to a corner of the room where
+her trunks lay; and the next moment the maid heard a key grate in a lock.
+For a little while the candle still burned, and every now and then a
+distorted shadow was flung upon the wall of the tent within the maid's
+vision. It seemed to her that Mrs. Oliver was sitting at a little writing
+table which stood close by the trunk. Then the light went out again. The
+maid would have thought no more of this incident, but on entering the
+room next morning with a cup of tea, she was surprised to see the packet
+once more sealed and fastened on the centre table.
+
+"Adela," said Mrs. Oliver, "I want you to take that parcel to the Post
+Office yourself and send it off."
+
+The maid took the parcel away.
+
+Violet Oliver, with a sigh of relief, drank her tea. At last, she
+thought, the end was reached. Now, indeed, her life and Shere Ali's life
+would touch no more. But she was to see him again. For two days later, as
+the train which was carrying her northwards to Lahore moved out of the
+station, she saw from the window of her carriage the young Prince of
+Chiltistan standing upon the platform. She drew back quickly, fearing
+that he would see her. But he was watching the train with indifferent
+eyes; and the spectacle of his indifference struck her as something
+incongruous and strange. She had been thinking of him with remorse as a
+man twisting like Hamlet in the coils of tragedy, and wearing like Hamlet
+the tragic mien. Yet here he was on the platform of a railway station,
+waiting, like any commonplace traveller, with an uninterested patience
+for his train. The aspect of Shere Ali diminished Violet Oliver's
+remorse. She wondered for a moment why he was not travelling upon the
+same train as herself, for his destination must be northwards too. And
+then she lost sight of him. She was glad that after all the last vision
+of him which she was to carry away was not the vision of a youth helpless
+and despairing with a trouble-tortured face.
+
+Shere Ali was following out the destiny to which his character bound
+him. He had been made and moulded and fashioned, and though he knew he
+had been fashioned awry, he could no more change and rebuild himself
+than the hunchback can will away his hump. He was driven down the ways
+of circumstance. At present he saw and knew that he was so driven. He
+knew, too, that he could not resist. This half-year in Chiltistan had
+taught him that.
+
+So he went southwards to Calcutta. The mere thought of Chiltistan was
+unendurable. He had to forget. There was no possibility of forgetfulness
+amongst his own hills and the foreign race that once had been his own
+people. Southwards he went to Calcutta, and in that city for a time was
+lost to sight. He emerged one afternoon upon the racecourse, and while
+standing on the grass in front of the Club stand, before the horses
+cantered down to the starting post, he saw an elderly man, heavy of build
+but still erect, approach him with a smile.
+
+Shere Ali would have avoided that man if he could. He hesitated,
+unwilling to recognise and unable quite to ignore. And while he
+hesitated, the elderly man held out his hand.
+
+"We know each other, surely. I used to see you at Eton, didn't I? I used
+to run down to see a young friend of mine and a friend of yours, Dick
+Linforth. I am Colonel Dewes."
+
+"Yes, I remember," said Shere Ali with some embarrassment; and he took
+the Colonel's outstretched hand. "I thought that you had left India
+for good."
+
+"So did I," said Dewes. "But I was wrong." He turned and walked along by
+the side of Shere Ali. "I don't know why exactly, but I did not find life
+in London so very interesting."
+
+Shere Ali looked quickly at the Colonel.
+
+"Yet you had looked forward to retiring and going home?" he asked with a
+keen interest. Colonel Dewes gave himself up to reflection. He sounded
+the obscurities of his mind. It was a practice to which he was not
+accustomed. He drew himself erect, his eyes became fixed, and with a
+puckered forehead he thought.
+
+"I suppose so," he said. "Yes, certainly. I remember. One used to buck at
+mess of the good time one would have, the comfort of one's club and one's
+rooms, and the rest of it. It isn't comfortable in India, is it? Not
+compared with England. Your furniture, your house, and all that sort of
+thing. You live as if you were a lodger, don't you know, and it didn't
+matter for a little while whether you were comfortable or not. The little
+while slips on and on, and suddenly you find you have been in the country
+twenty or thirty years, and you have never taken the trouble to be
+comfortable. It's like living in a dak-bungalow."
+
+The Colonel halted and pulled at his moustache. He had made a discovery.
+He had reflected not without result. "By George!" he said, "that's
+right. Let me put it properly now, as a fellow would put it in a book,
+if he hit upon anything as good." He framed his aphorism in different
+phrases before he was satisfied with it. Then he delivered himself of it
+with pride.
+
+"At the bottom of the Englishman's conception of life in India, there is
+always the idea of a dak-bungalow," and he repeated the sentence to
+commit it surely to memory. "But don't you use it," he said, turning to
+Shere Ali suddenly. "I thought of that--not you. It's mine."
+
+"I won't use it," said Shere Ali.
+
+"Life in India is based upon the dak-bungalow," said Dewes. "Yes, yes";
+and so great was his pride that he relented towards Shere Ali. "You may
+use it if you like," he conceded. "Only you would naturally add that it
+was I who thought of it."
+
+Shere Ali smiled and replied:
+
+"I won't fail to do that, Colonel Dewes."
+
+"No? Then use it as much as you like, for it's true. Out here one
+remembers the comfort of England and looks forward to it. But back there,
+one forgets the discomfort of India. By George! that's pretty good, too.
+Shall we look at the horses?"
+
+Shere Ali did not answer that question. With a quiet persistence he kept
+Colonel Dewes to the conversation. Colonel Dewes for his part was not
+reluctant to continue it, in spite of the mental wear and tear which it
+involved. He felt that he was clearly in the vein. There was no knowing
+what brilliant thing he might not say next. He wished that some of those
+clever fellows on the India Council were listening to him.
+
+"Why?" asked Shere Ali. "Why back there does one forget the discomfort
+of India?"
+
+He asked the question less in search of information than to discover
+whether the feelings of which he was conscious were shared too by his
+companion.
+
+"Why?" answered Dewes wrinkling his forehead again. "Because one misses
+more than one thought to miss and one doesn't find half what one thought
+to find. Come along here!"
+
+He led Shere Ali up to the top of the stand.
+
+"We can see the race quite well from here," he said, "although that is
+not the reason why I brought you up. This is what I wanted to show you."
+
+He waved his hand over towards the great space which the racecourse
+enclosed. It was thronged with natives robed in saffron and pink, in blue
+and white, in scarlet and delicate shades of mauve and violet. The whole
+enclosure was ablaze with colour, and the colours perpetually moved and
+grouped themselves afresh as the throng shifted. A great noise of cries
+rose up into the clear air.
+
+"I suppose that is what I missed," said Dewes, "not the noise, not the
+mere crowd--you can get both on an English racecourse--but the colour."
+
+And suddenly before Shere Ali's eyes there rose a vision of the Paddock
+at Newmarket during a July meeting. The sleek horses paced within the
+cool grove of trees; the bright sunlight, piercing the screen of leaves
+overhead, dappled their backs with flecks of gold. Nothing of the
+sunburnt grass before his eyes was visible to him. He saw the green turf
+of the Jockey Club enclosure, the seats, the luncheon room behind with
+its open doors and windows.
+
+"Yes, I understand," he said. "But you have come back," and a note of
+envy sounded in his voice. Here was one point in which the parallel
+between his case and that of Colonel Dewes was not complete. Dewes had
+missed India as he had missed England. But Dewes was a free man. He
+could go whither he would. "Yes, you were able to come back. How long do
+you stay?"
+
+And the answer to that question startled Shere Ali.
+
+"I have come back for good."
+
+"You are going to live here?" cried Shere Ali.
+
+"Not here, exactly. In Cashmere. I go up to Cashmere in a week's time. I
+shall live there and die there."
+
+Colonel Dewes spoke without any note of anticipation, and without any
+regret. It was difficult for Shere Ali to understand how deeply he felt.
+Yet the feeling must be deep. He had cut himself off from his own people,
+from his own country. Shere Ali was stirred to yet more questions. He was
+anxious to understand thoroughly all that had moved this commonplace
+matter-of-fact man at his side.
+
+"You found life in England so dull?" he asked.
+
+"Well, one felt a stranger," said Dewes. "One had lost one's
+associations. I know there are men who throw themselves into public life
+and the rest of it. But I couldn't. I hadn't the heart for it even if I
+had the ability. There was Lawrence, of course. He governed India and
+then he went on the School Board," and Dewes thumped his fist upon the
+rail in front of him. "How he was able to do it beats me altogether. I
+read his life with amazement. He was just as keen about the School Board
+as he had been about India when he was Viceroy here. He threw himself
+into it with just as much vigour. That beats me. He was a big man, of
+course, and I am not. I suppose that's the explanation. Anyway, the
+School Board was not for me. I put in my winters for some years at Corfu
+shooting woodcock. And in the summer I met a man or two back on leave at
+my club. But on the whole it was pretty dull. Yes," and he nodded his
+head, and for the first time a note of despondency sounded in his voice.
+"Yes, on the whole it was pretty dull. It will be better in Cashmere."
+
+"It would have been still better if you had never seen India at all,"
+said Shere Ali.
+
+"No; I don't say that. I had my good time in India--twenty-five years of
+it, the prime of my life. No; I have nothing to complain of," said Dewes.
+
+Here was another difference brought to Shere Ali's eyes. He himself was
+still young; the prime years were before him, not behind. He looked down,
+even as Dewes had done, over that wide space gay with colours as a garden
+of flowers; but in the one man's eyes there was a light of satisfaction,
+in the other's a gleam almost of hatred.
+
+"You are not sorry you came out to India," he said. "Well, for my part,"
+and his voice suddenly shook with passion, "I wish to heaven I had never
+seen England."
+
+Dewes turned about, a vacant stare of perplexity upon his face.
+
+"Oh, come, I say!" he protested.
+
+"I mean it!" cried Shere Ali. "It was the worst thing that could have
+happened. I shall know no peace of mind again, no contentment, no
+happiness, not until I am dead. I wish I were dead!"
+
+And though he spoke in a low voice, he spoke with so much violence that
+Colonel Dewes was quite astounded. He was aware of no similiarity between
+his own case and that of Shere Ali. He had long since forgotten the
+exhortations of Luffe.
+
+"Oh, come now," he repeated. "Isn't that a little ungrateful--what?"
+
+He could hardly have chosen a word less likely to soothe the exasperated
+nerves of his companion. Shere Ali laughed harshly.
+
+"I ought to be grateful?" said he.
+
+"Well," said Dewes, "you have been to Eton and Oxford, you have seen
+London. All that is bound to have broadened your mind. Don't you feel
+that your mind has broadened?"
+
+"Tell me the use of a broad mind in Chiltistan," said Shere Ali. And
+Colonel Dewes, who had last seen the valleys of that remote country more
+than twenty years before, was baffled by the challenge.
+
+"To tell the truth, I am a little out of touch with Indian problems," he
+said. "But it's surely good in every way that there should be a man up
+there who knows we have something in the way of an army. When I was
+there, there was trouble which would have been quite prevented by
+knowledge of that kind."
+
+"Are you sure?" said Shere Ali quietly; and the two men turned and went
+down from the roof of the stand.
+
+The words which Dewes had just used rankled in Shere Ali's mind, quietly
+though he had received them. Here was the one definite advantage of his
+education in England on which Dewes could lay his finger. He knew enough
+of the strength of the British army to know also the wisdom of keeping
+his people quiet. For that he had been sacrificed. It was an
+advantage--yes. But an advantage to whom? he asked. Why, to those
+governing people here who had to find the money and the troops to
+suppress a rising, and to confront at the same time an outcry at home
+from the opponents of the forward movement. It was to their advantage
+certainly that he should have been sent to England. And then he was told
+to be grateful!
+
+As they came out again from the winding staircase and turned towards the
+paddock Colonel Dewes took Shere Ali by the arm, and said in a voice of
+kindliness:
+
+"And what has become of all the fine ambitions you and Dick Linforth used
+to have in common?"
+
+"Linforth's still at Chatham," replied Shere Ali shortly.
+
+"Yes, but you are here. You might make a beginning by yourself."
+
+"They won't let me."
+
+"There's the road," suggested Dewes.
+
+"They won't let me add an inch to it. They will let me do nothing, and
+they won't let Linforth come out. I wish they would," he added in a
+softer voice. "If Linforth were to come out to Chiltistan it might make a
+difference."
+
+They had walked round to the rails in front of the stand, and Shere Ali
+looked up the steps to the Viceroy's box. The Viceroy was present that
+afternoon. Shere Ali saw his tall figure, with the stoop of the shoulders
+characteristic of him, as he stood dressed in a grey frock-coat, with the
+ladies of his family and one or two of his _aides-de-camp_ about him.
+Shere Ali suddenly stopped and nodded towards the box.
+
+"Have you any influence there?" he asked of Colonel Dewes; and he spoke
+with a great longing, a great eagerness, and he waited for the answer in
+a great suspense.
+
+Dewes shook his head.
+
+"None," he replied; "I am nobody at all."
+
+The hope died out of Shere Ali's face.
+
+"I am sorry," he said; and the eagerness had changed into despair. There
+was just a chance, he thought, of salvation for himself if only Linforth
+could be fetched out to India. He might resume with Linforth his old
+companionship, and so recapture something of his old faith and of his
+bright ideals. There was sore need that he should recapture them. Shere
+Ali was well aware of it. More and more frequently sure warnings came to
+him. Now it was some dim recollection of beliefs once strongly clung to,
+which came back to him with a shock. He would awaken through some chance
+word to the glory of the English rule in India, the lessening poverty of
+the Indian nations, the incorruptibility of the English officials and
+their justice.
+
+"Yes, yes," he would say with astonishment, "I was sure of these things;
+I knew them as familiar truths," even as a man gradually going blind
+might one day see clearly and become aware of his narrowing vision. Or
+perhaps it would be some sudden unsuspected revulsion of feeling in his
+heart. Such a revulsion had come to him this afternoon as he had gazed up
+to the Viceroy's box. A wild and unreasoning wrath had flashed up within
+him, not against the system, but against that tall stooping man, worn
+with work, who was at once its representative and its flower. Up there
+the great man stood--so his thoughts ran--complacent, self-satisfied,
+careless of the harm which his system wrought. Down here upon the grass
+walked a man warped and perverted out of his natural course. He had been
+sent to Eton and to Oxford, and had been filled with longings and desires
+which could have no fruition; he had been trained to delicate thoughts
+and habits which must daily be offended and daily be a cause of offence
+to his countrymen. But what did the tall stooping man care? Shere Ali now
+knew that the English had something in the way of an army. What did it
+matter whether he lived in unhappiness so long as that knowledge was the
+price of his unhappiness? A cruel, careless, warping business, this
+English rule.
+
+Thus Shere Ali felt rather than thought, and realised the while the
+danger of his bitter heart. Once more he appealed to Colonel Dewes,
+standing before him with burning eyes.
+
+"Bring Linforth out to India! If you have any influence, use it; if you
+have none, obtain it. Only bring Linforth out to India, and bring him
+very quickly!"
+
+Once before a passionate appeal had been made to Colonel Dewes by a man
+in straits, and Colonel Dewes had not understood and had not obeyed. Now,
+a quarter of a century later another appeal was made by a man sinking, as
+surely as Luffe had been sinking before, and once again Dewes did not
+understand.
+
+He took Shere Ali by the arm, and said in a kindly voice:
+
+"I tell you what it is, my lad. You have been going the pace a bit, eh?
+Calcutta's no good. You'll only collect debts and a lot of things you are
+better without. Better get out of it."
+
+Shere Ali's face closed as his lips had done. All expression died from it
+in a moment. There was no help for him in Colonel Dewes. He said good-bye
+with a smile, and walked out past the stand. His syce was waiting for him
+outside the railings.
+
+Shere Ali had come to the races wearing a sun-helmet, and, as the fashion
+is amongst the Europeans in Calcutta, his syce carried a silk hat for
+Shere Ali to take in exchange for his helmet when the sun went down.
+Shere Ali, like most of the Europeanised Indians, was more scrupulous
+than any Englishman in adhering to the European custom. But to-day, with
+an angry gesture, he repelled his syce.
+
+"I am going," he said. "You can take that thing away."
+
+His sense of humour failed him altogether. He would have liked furiously
+to kick and trample upon that glossy emblem of the civilised world; he
+had much ado to refrain. The syce carried back the silk hat to Shere
+Ali's smart trap, and Shere Ali drove home in his helmet. Thus he began
+publicly to renounce the cherished illusion that he was of the white
+people, and must do as the white people did.
+
+But Colonel Dewes pointed unwittingly the significance of that trivial
+matter on the same night. He dined at the house of an old friend, and
+after the ladies had gone he moved up into the next chair, and so sat
+beside a weary-looking official from the Punjab named Ralston, who had
+come down to Calcutta on leave. Colonel Dewes began to talk of his
+meeting with Shere Ali that afternoon. At the mention of Shere Ali's name
+the official sat up and asked for more.
+
+"He looked pretty bad," said Colonel Dewes. "Jumpy and feverish, and with
+the air of a man who has been sitting up all night for a week or two. But
+this is what interested me most," and Dewes told how the lad had implored
+him to bring Linforth out to India.
+
+"Who's Linforth?" asked the official quickly. "Not the son of that
+Linforth who--"
+
+"Yes, that's the man," said the Colonel testily. "But you interrupt me.
+What interested me was this--when I refused to help, Shere Ali's face
+changed in a most extraordinary way. All the fire went from his eyes, all
+the agitation from his face. It was like looking at an open box full of
+interesting things, and then--bang! someone slaps down the lid, and you
+are staring at a flat piece of wood. It was as if--as if--well, I can't
+find a better comparison."
+
+"It was as if a European suddenly changed before your eyes into an
+Oriental."
+
+Dewes was not pleased with Ralston's success in supplying the simile he
+could not hit upon himself.
+
+"That's a little fanciful," he said grudgingly; and then recognised
+frankly the justness of its application. "Yet it's true--a European
+changing into an Oriental! Yes, it just looked like that."
+
+"It may actually have been that," said the official quietly. And he
+added: "I met Shere Ali last year at Lahore on his way north to
+Chiltistan. I was interested then; I am all the more interested now, for
+I have just been appointed to Peshawur."
+
+He spoke in a voice which was grave--so grave that Colonel Dewes looked
+quickly towards him.
+
+"Do you think there will be trouble up there in Chiltistan?" he asked.
+
+The Deputy-Commissioner, who was now Chief Commissioner, smiled wearily.
+
+"There is always trouble up there in Chiltistan," he said. "That I know.
+What I think is this--Shere Ali should have gone to the Mayo College at
+Ajmere. That would have been a compromise which would have satisfied his
+father and done him no harm. But since he didn't--since he went to Eton,
+and to Oxford, and ran loose in London for a year or two--why, I think he
+is right."
+
+"How do you mean--right?" asked the Colonel.
+
+"I mean that the sooner Linforth is fetched out to India and sent up to
+Chiltistan, the better it will be," said the Commissioner.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+NEWS FROM MECCA
+
+
+Mr. Charles Ralston, being a bachelor and of an economical mind even when
+on leave in Calcutta, had taken up his quarters in a grass hut in the
+garden of his Club. He awoke the next morning with an uncomfortable
+feeling that there was work to be done. The feeling changed into sure
+knowledge as he reflected upon the conversation which he had had with
+Colonel Dewes, and he accordingly arose and went about it. For ten days
+he went to and fro between the Club and Government House, where he held
+long and vigorous interviews with officials who did not wish to see him.
+Moreover, other people came to see him privately--people of no social
+importance for the most part, although there were one or two officers of
+the police service amongst them. With these he again held long
+interviews, asking many inquisitive questions. Then he would go out by
+himself into those parts of the city where the men of broken fortunes,
+the jockeys run to seed, and the prize-fighters chiefly preferred to
+congregate. In the low quarters he sought his information of the waifs
+and strays who are cast up into the drinking-bars of any Oriental port,
+and he did not come back empty-handed.
+
+For ten days he thus toiled for the good of the Indian Government,
+and, above all, of that part of it which had its headquarters at
+Lahore. And on the morning of the eleventh day, as he was just
+preparing to leave for Government House, where his persistence had
+prevailed, a tall, black-bearded and very sunburnt man noiselessly
+opened the door of the hut and as noiselessly stepped inside. Ralston,
+indeed, did not at once notice him, nor did the stranger call attention
+to his presence. He waited, motionless and patient, until Ralston
+happened to turn and see him.
+
+"Hatch!" cried Ralston with a smile of welcome stealing over his startled
+face, and making it very pleasant to look upon. "You?"
+
+"Yes," answered the tall man; "I reached Calcutta last night. I went into
+the Club for breakfast. They told me you were here."
+
+Robert Hatch was of the same age as Ralston. But there was little else
+which they had in common. The two men had met some fifteen years ago for
+the first time, in Peshawur, and on that first meeting some subtle chord
+of sympathy had drawn them together; and so securely that even though
+they met but seldom nowadays, their friendship had easily survived the
+long intervals. The story of Hatch's life was a simple one. He had
+married in his twenty-second year a wife a year younger than himself, and
+together the couple had settled down upon an estate which Hatch owned in
+Devonshire. Only a year after the marriage, however, Hatch's wife died,
+and he, disliking his home, had gone restlessly abroad. The restlessness
+had grown, a certain taste for Oriental literature and thought had been
+fostered by his travels. He had become a wanderer upon the face of the
+earth--a man of many clubs in different quarters of the world, and of
+many friends, who had come to look upon his unexpected appearance and no
+less sudden departure as part of the ordinary tenour of their lives. Thus
+it was not the appearance of Hatch which had startled Ralston, but rather
+the silence of it.
+
+"Why didn't you speak?" he asked. "Why did you stand waiting there for me
+to look your way?"
+
+Hatch laughed as he sat down in a chair.
+
+"I have got into the habit of waiting, I suppose," he said. "For the last
+five months I have been a servant in the train of the Sultan of the
+Maldive Islands."
+
+Ralston was not as a rule to be surprised by any strange thing which
+Hatch might have chosen to do. He merely glanced at his companion
+and asked:
+
+"What in the world were you doing in the Maldive Islands?"
+
+"Nothing at all," replied Hatch. "I did not go to them. I joined the
+Sultan at Suez."
+
+This time Ralston, who had been moving about the room in search of some
+papers which he had mislaid, came to a stop. His attention was arrested.
+He sat down in a chair and prepared to listen.
+
+"Go on," he said.
+
+"I wanted to go to Mecca," said Hatch, and Ralston nodded his head as
+though he had expected just those words.
+
+"I did not see how I was going to get there by myself," Hatch continued,
+"however carefully I managed my disguise."
+
+"Yet you speak Arabic," said Ralston.
+
+"Yes, the language wasn't the difficulty. Indeed, a great many of the
+pilgrims--the people from Central Asia, for instance--don't speak Arabic
+at all. But I felt sure that if I went down the Red Sea alone on a
+pilgrim steamer, landed alone at Jeddah, and went up with a crowd of
+others to Mecca, living with them, sleeping with them, day after day,
+sooner or later I should make some fatal slip and never reach Mecca at
+all. If Burton made one mistake, how many should I? So I put the journey
+off year after year. But this autumn I heard that the Sultan of the
+Maldive Islands intended to make the pilgrimage. He was a friend of mine.
+I waited for him at Suez, and he reluctantly consented to take me."
+
+"So you went to Mecca," exclaimed Ralston.
+
+"Yes; I have just come from Mecca. As I told you, I only landed at
+Calcutta last night."
+
+Ralston was silent for a few moments.
+
+"I think you may be able to help me," he said at length. "There's a man
+here in Calcutta," and Ralston related what he knew of the history of
+Shere Ali, dwelling less upon the unhappiness and isolation of the Prince
+than upon the political consequences of his isolation.
+
+"He has come to grief in Chiltistan," he continued. "He won't
+marry--there may be a reason for that. I don't know. English women are
+not always wise in their attitude towards these boys. But it seems to me
+quite a natural result of his education and his life. He is suspected by
+his people. When he goes back, he will probably be murdered. At present
+he is consorting with the lowest Europeans here, drinking with them,
+playing cards with them, and going to ruin as fast as he can. I am not
+sure that there's a chance for him at all. A few minutes ago I would
+certainly have said that there was none. Now, however, I am wondering.
+You see, I don't know the lad well enough. I don't know how many of the
+old instincts and traditions of his race and his faith are still alive in
+him, underneath all the Western ideas and the Western feelings to which
+he has been trained. But if they are dead, there is no chance for him. If
+they are alive--well, couldn't they be evoked? That's the problem."
+
+Hatch nodded his head.
+
+"He might be turned again into a genuine Mohammedan," he said. "I
+wonder too."
+
+"At all events, it's worth trying," said Ralston. "For it's the only
+chance left to try. If we could sweep away the effects of the last few
+years, if we could obliterate his years in England--oh, I know it's
+improbable. But help me and let us see."
+
+"How?" asked Hatch.
+
+"Come and dine with me to-morrow night. I'll make Shere Ali come. I _can_
+make him. For I can threaten to send him back to Chiltistan. Then talk to
+him of Mecca, talk to him of the city, and the shrine, and the pilgrims.
+Perhaps something of their devotion may strike a spark in him, perhaps he
+may have some remnant of faith still dormant in him. Make Mecca a symbol
+to him, make it live for him as a place of pilgrimage. You could,
+perhaps, because you have seen with your own eyes, and you know."
+
+"I can try, of course," said Hatch with a shrug of his shoulders. "But
+isn't there a danger--if I succeed? I might try to kindle faith, I might
+only succeed in kindling fanaticism. Are the Mohammedans beyond the
+frontier such a very quiet people that you are anxious to add another to
+their number?"
+
+Ralston was prepared for the objection. Already, indeed, Shere Ali
+might be seething with hatred against the English rule. It would be no
+more than natural if he were. Ralston had pondered the question with an
+uncomfortable vision before his eyes, evoked by certain words of
+Colonel Dewes--a youth appealing for help, for the only help which
+could be of service to him, and then, as the appeal was rejected,
+composing his face to a complete and stolid inexpressiveness, no longer
+showing either his pain or his desire--reverting, as it were, from the
+European to the Oriental.
+
+"Yes, there is that danger," he admitted. "Seeking to restore a friend,
+we might kindle an enemy." And then he rose up and suddenly burst out:
+"But upon my word, were that to come to pass, we should deserve it. For
+we are to blame--we who took him from Chiltistan and sent him to be
+petted by the fine people in England." And once more it was evident from
+his words that he was thinking not of Shere Ali--not of the human being
+who had just his one life to live, just his few years with their
+opportunities of happiness, and their certain irrevocable periods of
+distress--but of the Prince of Chiltistan who might or might not be a
+cause of great trouble to the Government of the Punjab.
+
+"We must take the risk," he cried as one arguing almost against himself.
+"It's the only chance. So we must take the risk. Besides, I have been at
+some pains already to minimise it. Shere Ali has a friend in England. We
+are asking for that friend. A telegram goes to-day. So come to-morrow
+night and do your best."
+
+"Very well, I will," said Hatch, and, taking up his hat, he went away. He
+had no great hopes that any good would come of the dinner. But at the
+worst, he thought, it would leave matters where they were.
+
+In that, however, he was wrong. For there were important moments in the
+history of the young Prince of Chiltistan of which both Hatch and Ralston
+were quite unaware. And because they were unaware the dinner which was to
+help in straightening out the tangle of Shere Ali's life became a
+veritable catastrophe. Shere Ali was brought reluctantly to the table in
+the corner of the great balcony upon the first floor. He had little to
+say, and it was as evident to the two men who entertained him as it had
+been to Colonel Dewes that the last few weeks had taken their toll of
+him. There were dark, heavy pouches beneath his eyes, his manner was
+feverish, and when he talked at all it was with a boisterous and a
+somewhat braggart voice.
+
+Ralston turned the conversation on to the journey which Hatch had taken,
+and for a little while the dinner promised well. At the mere mention of
+Mecca, Shere Ali looked up with a swift interest. "Mecca!" he cried, "you
+have been there! Tell me of Mecca. On my way up to Chiltistan I met three
+of my own countrymen on the summit of the Lowari Pass. They had a few
+rupees apiece--just enough, they told me, to carry them to Mecca. I
+remember watching them as they went laughing and talking down the snow on
+their long journey. And I wondered--" He broke off abruptly and sat
+looking out from the balcony. The night was coming on. In front stretched
+the great grass plain of the Maidan with its big trees and the wide
+carriage-road bisecting it. The carriages had driven home; the road and
+the plain were empty. Beyond them the high chimney-stacks of the steamers
+on the river could still be seen, some with a wisp of smoke curling
+upwards into the still air; and at times the long, melancholy hoot of a
+steam-syren broke the stillness of the evening.
+
+Shere Ali turned to Hatch again and said in a quiet voice which had some
+note of rather pathetic appeal: "Will you tell me what you thought of
+Mecca? I should like to know."
+
+The vision of the three men descending the Lowari Pass was present to him
+as he listened. And he listened, wondering what strange, real power that
+sacred place possessed to draw men cheerfully on so long and hazardous a
+pilgrimage. But the secret was not yet to be revealed to him. Hatch
+talked well. He told Shere Ali of the journey down the Red Sea, and the
+crowded deck at the last sunset before Jeddah was reached, when every one
+of the pilgrims robed himself in spotless white and stood facing the east
+and uttering his prayers in his own tongue. He described the journey
+across the desert, the great shrine of the Prophet in Mecca, the great
+gathering for prayer upon the plain two miles away. Something of the
+fervour of the pilgrims he managed to make real by his words, but Shere
+Ali listened with the picture of the three men in his thoughts, and with
+a deep envy of their contentment.
+
+Then Hatch made his mistake. He turned suddenly towards Ralston and said:
+
+"But something curious happened--something very strange and
+curious--which I think you ought to know, for the matter can hardly be
+left where it is."
+
+Ralston leaned forward.
+
+"Wait a moment," he said, and he called to the waiter. "Light a cigar
+before you begin, Hatch," he continued.
+
+The cigars were brought, and Hatch lighted one.
+
+"In what way am I concerned?" asked Ralston.
+
+"My story has to do with India," Hatch replied, and in his turn he looked
+out across the Maidan. Darkness had come and lights gleamed upon the
+carriage-way; the funnels of the ships had disappeared, and above, in a
+clear, dark sky, glittered a great host of stars.
+
+"With India, but not with the India of to-day," Hatch continued.
+"Listen"; and over his coffee he told his story. "I was walking down a
+narrow street of Mecca towards the big tank, when to my amazement I saw
+written up on a signboard above a door the single word 'Lodgings.' It was
+the English word, written, too, in the English character. I could hardly
+believe my eyes when I saw it. I stood amazed. What was an English
+announcement, that lodgings were to be had within, doing in a town where
+no Englishman, were he known to be such, would live for a single hour? I
+had half a mind to knock at the door and ask. But I noticed opposite to
+the door a little shop in which a man sat with an array of heavy
+country-made bolts and locks hung upon the walls and spread about him as
+he squatted on the floor. I crossed over to the booth, and sitting down
+upon the edge of the floor, which was raised a couple of feet or so from
+the ground, I made some small purchase. Then, looking across to the sign,
+I asked him what the writing on it meant. I suppose that I did not put my
+question carelessly enough, for the shopkeeper leaned forward and peered
+closely into my face.
+
+"'Why do you ask?' he said, sharply.
+
+"'Because I do not understand,' I replied.
+
+"The man looked me over again. There was no mistake in my dress, and with
+my black beard and eyes I could well pass for an Arab. It seemed that he
+was content, for he continued: 'How should I know what the word means? I
+have heard a story, but whether it is true or not, who shall say?'"
+
+Hatch paused for a moment and lighted his cigar again.
+
+"Well, the account which he gave me was this. Among the pilgrims who come
+up to Mecca, there are at times Hottentots from South Africa who speak no
+language intelligible to anyone in Mecca; but they speak English, and it
+is for their benefit that the sign was hung up."
+
+"What a strange thing!" said Shere Ali.
+
+"The explanation," continued Hatch, "is not very important to my story,
+but what followed upon it is; for the very next day, as I was walking
+alone, I heard a voice in my ear, whispering: 'The Englishwoman would
+like to see you this evening at five.' I turned round in amazement, and
+there stood the shopkeeper of whom I had made the inquiries. I thought,
+of course, that he was laying a trap for me. But he repeated his
+statement, and, telling me that he would wait for me on this spot at ten
+minutes to five, he walked away.
+
+"I did not know what to do. One moment I feared treachery and proposed to
+stay away, the next I was curious and proposed to go. How in the world
+could there be an Englishwoman in Mecca--above all, an Englishwoman who
+was in a position to ask me to tea? Curiosity conquered in the end. I
+tucked a loaded revolver into my waist underneath my jellaba and kept the
+appointment."
+
+"Go on," said Shere Ali, who was leaning forward with a great perplexity
+upon his face.
+
+"The shopkeeper was already there. 'Follow me,' he said, 'but not too
+closely.' We passed in that way through two or three streets, and then my
+guide turned into a dead alley closed in at the end by a house. In the
+wall of the house there was a door. My guide looked cautiously round, but
+there was no one to oversee us. He rapped gently with his knuckles on the
+door, and immediately the door was opened. He beckoned to me, and went
+quickly in. I followed him no less quickly. At once the door was shut
+behind me, and I found myself in darkness. For a moment I was sure that I
+had fallen into a trap, but my guide laid a hand upon my arm and led me
+forward. I was brought into a small, bare room, where a woman sat upon
+cushions. She was dressed in white like a Mohammedan woman of the East,
+and over her face she wore a veil. But a sort of shrivelled aspect which
+she had told me that she was very old. She dismissed the guide who had
+brought me to her, and as soon as we were alone she said:
+
+"'You are English.'
+
+"And she spoke in English, though with a certain rustiness of speech, as
+though that language had been long unfamiliar to her tongue.
+
+"'No,' I replied, and I expressed my contempt of that infidel race in
+suitable words.
+
+"The old woman only laughed and removed her veil. She showed me an old
+wizened face in which there was not a remnant of good looks--a face worn
+and wrinkled with hard living and great sorrows.
+
+"'You are English,' she said, 'and since I am English too, I thought that
+I would like to speak once more with one of my own countrymen.'
+
+"I no longer doubted. I took the hand she held out to me and--
+
+"'But what are you doing here in Mecca?' I asked.
+
+"'I live in Mecca,' she replied quietly. 'I have lived here for
+twenty years.'
+
+"I looked round that bare and sordid little room with horror. What
+strange fate had cast her up there? I asked her, and she told me her
+story. Guess what it was!"
+
+Ralston shook his head.
+
+"I can't imagine."
+
+Hatch turned to Shere Ali.
+
+"Can you?" he asked, and even as he asked he saw that a change had come
+over the young Prince's mood. He was no longer oppressed with envy and
+discontent. He was leaning forward with parted lips and a look in his
+eyes which Hatch had not seen that evening--a look as if hope had somehow
+dared to lift its head within him. And there was more than a look of
+hope; there was savagery too.
+
+"No. I want to hear," replied Shere Ali. "Go on, please! How did the
+Englishwoman come to Mecca?"
+
+"She was a governess in the family of an officer at Cawnpore when the
+Mutiny broke out, more than forty years ago," said Hatch.
+
+Ralston leaned back in his chair with an exclamation of horror. Shere Ali
+said nothing. His eyes rested intently and brightly upon Hatch's face.
+Under the table, and out of sight, his fingers worked convulsively.
+
+"She was in that room," continued Hatch, "in that dark room with the
+other Englishwomen and children who were murdered. But she was spared.
+She was very pretty, she told me, in her youth, and she was only eighteen
+when the massacre took place. She was carried up to the hills and forced
+to become a Mohammedan. The man who had spared her married her. He died,
+and a small chieftain in the hills took her and married her, and finally
+brought her out with him when he made the pilgrimage to Mecca. While he
+was at Mecca, however, he fell ill, and in his turn he died. She was left
+alone. She had a little money, and she stayed. Indeed, she could not get
+away. A strange story, eh?"
+
+And Hatch leaned back in his chair, and once more lighted his cigar which
+for a second time had gone out.
+
+"You didn't bring her back?" exclaimed Ralston.
+
+"She wouldn't come," replied Hatch. "I offered to smuggle her out of
+Mecca, but she refused. She felt that she wouldn't and couldn't face her
+own people again. She should have died at Cawnpore, and she did not die.
+Besides, she was old; she had long since grown accustomed to her life,
+and in England she had long since been given up for dead. She would not
+even tell me her real name. Perhaps she ought to be fetched away. I
+don't know."
+
+Ralston and Hatch fell to debating that point with great earnestness.
+Neither of them paid heed to Shere Ali, and when he rose they easily let
+him go. Nor did their thoughts follow him upon his way. But he was
+thinking deeply as he went, and a queer and not very pleasant smile
+played about his lips.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+SYBIL LINFORTH'S LOYALTY
+
+
+A fortnight after Shere Ali had dined with Ralston in Calcutta, a
+telegram was handed to Linforth at Chatham. It was Friday, and a
+guest-night. The mess-room was full, and here and there amongst the
+scarlet and gold lace the sombre black of a civilian caught the eye.
+Dinner was just over, and at the ends of the long tables the mess-waiters
+stood ready to draw, with a single jerk, the strips of white tablecloth
+from the shining mahogany. The silver and the glasses had been removed,
+the word was given, and the strips of tablecloth vanished as though by
+some swift legerdemain. The port was passed round, and while the glasses
+were being filled the telegram was handed to Linforth by his servant.
+
+He opened it carelessly, but as he read the words his heart jumped within
+him. His importunities had succeeded, he thought. At all events, his
+opportunity had come; for the telegram informed him of his appointment to
+the Punjab Commission. He sat for a moment with his thoughts in a whirl.
+He could hardly believe the good news. He had longed so desperately for
+this one chance that it had seemed to him of late impossible that he
+should ever obtain it. Yet here it had come to him, and upon that his
+neighbour jogged him in the ribs and said:
+
+"Wake up!"
+
+He waked to see the Colonel at the centre of the top table standing on
+his feet with his glass in his hand.
+
+"Gentlemen, the Queen. God bless her!" and all that company arose and
+drank to the toast. The prayer, thus simply pronounced amongst the men
+who had pledged their lives in service to the Queen, had always been to
+Linforth a very moving thing. Some of those who drank to it had already
+run their risks and borne their sufferings in proof of their sincerity;
+the others all burned to do the like. It had always seemed to him, too,
+to link him up closely and inseparably with the soldiers of the regiment
+who had fallen years ago or had died quietly in their beds, their service
+ended. It gave continuity to the regiment of Sappers, so that what each
+man did increased or tarnished its fair fame. For years back that toast
+had been drunk, that prayer uttered in just those simple words, and
+Linforth was wont to gaze round the walls on the portraits of the famous
+generals who had looked to these barracks and to this mess-room as their
+home. They, too, had heard that prayer, and, carrying it in their hearts,
+without parade or needless speech had gone forth, each in his turn, and
+laboured unsparingly.
+
+But never had Linforth been so moved as he was tonight. He choked in his
+throat as he drank. For his turn to go forth had at the last come to him.
+And in all humility of spirit he sent up a prayer on his own account,
+that he might not fail--and again that he might not fail.
+
+He sat down and told his companions the good news, and rejoiced at their
+congratulations. But he slipped away to his own quarters very quietly as
+soon as the Colonel rose, and sat late by himself.
+
+There was one, he knew very well, to whom the glad tidings would be a
+heavy blow--but he could not--no, not even for her sake--stand aside.
+For this opportunity he had lived, training alike his body and mind
+against its coming. He could not relinquish it. There was too strong a
+constraint upon him.
+
+"Over the passes to the foot of the Hindu Kush," he murmured; and in his
+mind's eye he saw the road--a broad, white, graded road--snake across the
+valleys and climb the cliffs.
+
+Was Russia at work? he wondered. Was he to be sent to Chiltistan? What
+was Shere Ali doing? He turned the questions over in his mind without
+being at much pains to answer them. In such a very short time now he
+would know. He was to embark before a month had passed.
+
+He travelled down the very next day into Sussex, and came to the house
+under the Downs at twelve o'clock. It was early spring, and as yet there
+were no buds upon the trees, no daffodils upon the lawns. The house,
+standing apart in its bare garden of brown earth, black trees, and dull
+green turf, had a desolate aspect which somehow filled him with remorse.
+He might have done more, perhaps, to fill this house with happiness. He
+feared that, now that it was too late to do the things left undone. He
+had been so absorbed in his great plans, which for a moment lost in his
+eyes their magnitude.
+
+Dick Linforth found his mother in the study, through the window of which
+she had once looked from the garden in the company of Colonel Dewes. She
+was writing her letters, and when she saw him enter, she sprang up with a
+cry of joy.
+
+"Dick!" she cried, coming towards him with outstretched hands. But she
+stopped half-way. The happiness died out of her. She raised a hand to her
+heart, and her voice once more repeated his name; but her voice faltered
+as she spoke, and the hand was clasped tight upon her breast.
+
+"Dick," she said, and in his face she read the tidings he had brought.
+The blow so long dreaded had at last fallen.
+
+"Yes, mother, it's true," he said very gently; and leading her to a
+chair, he sat beside her, stroking her hand, almost as a lover might do.
+"It's true. The telegram came last night. I start within the month."
+
+"For Chiltistan?"
+
+Dick looked at her for a moment.
+
+"For the Punjab," he said, and added: "But it will mean Chiltistan. Else
+why should I be sent for? It has been always for Chiltistan that I have
+importuned them."
+
+Sybil Linforth bowed her head. The horror which had been present with her
+night and day for so long a while twenty-five years ago rushed upon her
+afresh, so that she could not speak. She sat living over again the bitter
+days when Luffe was shut up with his handful of men in the fort by
+Kohara. She remembered the morning when the postman came up the garden
+path with the official letter that her husband had been slain. And at
+last in a whisper she said:
+
+"The Road?"
+
+Dick, even in the presence of her pain, could not deny the implication of
+her words.
+
+"We Linforths belong to the Road," he answered gravely. The words struck
+upon a chord of memory. Sybil Linforth sat upright, turned to her sort
+and greatly surprised him. He had expected an appeal, a prayer. What he
+heard was something which raised her higher in his thoughts than ever she
+had been, high though he had always placed her.
+
+"Dick," she said, "I have never said a word to dissuade you, have I?
+Never a word? Never a single word?" and her tone besought him to
+assure her.
+
+"Never a word, mother," he replied.
+
+But still she was not content.
+
+"When you were a boy, when the Road began to take hold on you--when we
+were much together, playing cricket out there in the garden," and her
+voice broke upon the memory of those golden days, "when I might have been
+able, perhaps, to turn you to other thoughts, I never tried to, Dick? Own
+to that! I never tried to. When I came upon you up on the top of the Down
+behind the house, lying on the grass, looking out--always--always towards
+the sea--oh, I knew very well what it was that was drawing you; but I
+said nothing, Dick. Not a word--not a word!"
+
+Dick nodded his head.
+
+"That's true, mother. You never questioned me. You never tried to
+dissuade me."
+
+Sybil's face shone with a wan smile. She unlocked a drawer in her
+writing-table, and took out an envelope. From the envelope she drew a
+sheet of paper covered with a faded and yellow handwriting.
+
+"This is the last letter your father ever wrote to me," she said. "Harry
+wrote on the night that he--that he died. Oh, Dick, my boy, I have known
+for a long time that I would have one day to show it to you, and I wanted
+you to feel when that time came that I had not been disloyal."
+
+She had kept her face steady, even her voice calm, by a great effort.
+But now the tears filled her eyes and brimmed over, and her voice
+suddenly shook between a laugh and a sob. "But oh, Dick," she cried, "I
+have so often wanted to be disloyal. I was so often near to it--oh,
+very, very near."
+
+She handed him the faded letter, and, turning towards the window, stood
+with her back to him while he read. It was that letter, with its constant
+refrain of "I am very tired," which Linforth had written in his tent
+whilst his murderers crouched outside waiting for sleep to overcome him.
+
+"I am sitting writing this by the light of a candle," Dick read. "The
+tent door is open. In front of me I can see the great snow-mountains. All
+the ugliness of the shale-slopes is hidden. By such a moonlight, my dear,
+may you always look back upon my memory. For it is all over, Sybil."
+
+Then followed the advice about himself and his school; and after that
+advice the message which was now for the first time delivered:
+
+"Whether he will come out here, it is too early to think about. But the
+Road will not be finished--and I wonder. If he wants to, let him! We
+Linforths belong to the Road."
+
+Dick folded the letter reverently, and crossing to his mother's side, put
+his arm about her waist.
+
+"Yes," he said. "My father knew it as I know it. He used the words which
+I in my turn have used. We Linforths belong to the Road."
+
+His mother took the letter from his hand and locked it away.
+
+"Yes," she said bravely, and called a smile to her face. "So you must
+go."
+
+Dick nodded his head.
+
+"Yes. You see, the Road has not advanced since my father died. It almost
+seems, mother, that it waits for me."
+
+He stayed that day and that night with Sybil, and in the morning both
+brought haggard faces to the breakfast table. Sybil, indeed, had slept,
+but, with her memories crowding hard upon her, she had dreamed again one
+of those almost forgotten dreams which, in the time of her suspense, had
+so tortured her. The old vague terror had seized upon her again. She
+dreamed once more of a young Englishman who pursued a young Indian along
+the wooden galleries of the road above the torrents into the far mists.
+She could tell as of old the very dress of the native who fled. A thick
+sheepskin coat swung aside as he ran and gave her a glimpse of gay silk;
+soft high leather boots protected his feet; and upon his face there was a
+look of fury and wild fear. But this night there was a difference in the
+dream. Her present distress added a detail. The young Englishman who
+pursued turned his face to her as he disappeared amongst the mists, and
+she saw that it was the face of Dick.
+
+But of this she said nothing at all at the breakfast table, nor when she
+bade Dick good-bye at the stile on the further side of the field beyond
+the garden.
+
+"You will come down again, and I shall go to Marseilles to see you off,"
+she said, and so let him go.
+
+There was something, too, stirring in Dick's mind of which he said no
+word. In the letter of his father, certain sentences had caught his eye,
+and on his way up to London they recurred to his thoughts, as, indeed,
+they had more than once during the evening before.
+
+"May he meet," Harry Linforth had written to Sybil of his son Dick--"may
+he meet a woman like you, my dear, when his time comes, and love her as I
+love you."
+
+Dick Linforth fell to thinking of Violet Oliver. She was in India at this
+moment. She might still be there when he landed. Would he meet her, he
+wondered, somewhere on the way to Chiltistan?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+A GIFT MISUNDERSTOOD
+
+
+The month was over before Linforth at last steamed out of the harbour at
+Marseilles. He was as impatient to reach Bombay as a year before Shere
+Ali had been reluctant. To Shere Ali the boat had flown with wings of
+swiftness, to Linforth she was a laggard. The steamer passed Stromboli
+on a wild night of storm and moonlight. The wrack of clouds scurrying
+overhead, now obscured, now let the moonlight through, and the great
+cone rising sheer from a tempestuous sea glowed angrily. Linforth, in
+the shelter of a canvas screen, watched the glow suddenly expand, and a
+stream of bright sparkling red flow swiftly along the shoulder of the
+mountain, turn at a right angle, and plunge down towards the sea. The
+bright red would become dull, the dull red grow black, the glare of
+light above the cone contract for a little while and then burst out
+again. Yet men lived upon the slope of Stromboli, even as
+Englishmen--the thought flashed into his mind--lived in India,
+recognising the peril and going quietly about their work. There was
+always that glare of menacing light over the hill-districts of India as
+above the crater of Stromboli, now contracting, now expanding and
+casting its molten stream down towards the plains.
+
+At the moment when Linforth watched the crown of light above Stromboli,
+the glare was widening over the hill country of Chiltistan. Ralston so
+far away as Peshawur saw it reddening the sky and was the more troubled
+in that he could not discover why just at this moment the menace should
+glow red. The son of Abdulla Mohammed was apparently quiet and Shere Ali
+had not left Calcutta. The Resident at Kohara admitted the danger. Every
+despatch he sent to Peshawur pointed to the likelihood of trouble. But he
+too was at fault. Unrest was evident, the cause of it quite obscure. But
+what was hidden from Government House in Peshawur and the Old Mission
+House at Kohara was already whispered in the bazaars. There among the
+thatched booths which have their backs upon the brink of the
+water-channel in the great square, men knew very well that Shere Ali was
+the cause, though Shere Ali knew nothing of it himself. One of those
+queer little accidents possible in the East had happened within the last
+few weeks. A trifling gift had been magnified into a symbol and a
+message, and the message had run through Chiltistan like fire through a
+dry field of stubble. And then two events occurred in Peshawur which gave
+to Ralston the key of the mystery.
+
+The first was the arrival in that city of a Hindu lady from Gujerat who
+had lately come to the conclusion that she was a reincarnation of the
+Goddess Devi. She arrived in great pomp, and there was some trouble in
+the streets as the procession passed through to the temple which she had
+chosen as her residence. For the Hindus, on the one hand, firmly believed
+in her divinity. The lady came of a class which, held in dishonour in the
+West, had its social position and prestige in India. There was no reason
+in the eyes of the faithful why she should say she was the Goddess Devi
+if she were not. Therefore they lined the streets to acclaim her coming.
+The Mohammedans, on the other hand, Afghans from the far side of the
+Khyber, men of the Hassan and the Aka and the Adam Khel tribes, Afridis
+from Kohat and Tirah and the Araksai country, any who happened to be in
+that wild and crowded town, turned out, too--to keep order, as they
+pleasantly termed it, when their leaders were subsequently asked for
+explanations. In the end a good many heads were broken before the lady
+was safely lodged in her temple. Nor did the trouble end there. The
+presence of a reincarnated Devi at once kindled the Hindus to fervour and
+stimulated to hostility against them the fanatical Mohammedans. Futteh
+Ali Shah, a merchant, a municipal councillor and a landowner of some
+importance, headed a deputation of elderly gentlemen who begged Ralston
+to remove the danger from the city.
+
+Danger there was, as Ralston on his morning rides through the streets
+could not but understand. The temple was built in the corner of an open
+space, and upon that open space a noisy and excited crowd surged all day;
+while from the countryside around pilgrims in a mood of frenzied piety
+and Pathans spoiling for a fight trooped daily in through the gates of
+Peshawur. Ralston understood that the time had come for definite steps to
+be taken; and he took them with that unconcerned half-weary air which was
+at once natural to him and impressive to these particular people with
+whom he had to deal.
+
+He summoned two of his native levies and mounted his horse.
+
+"But you will take a guard," said Colonel Ward, of the Oxfordshires, who
+had been lunching with Ralston. "I'll send a company down with you."
+
+"No, thank you," said Ralston listlessly, "I think my two men will do."
+
+The Colonel stared and expostulated.
+
+"You know, Ralston, you are very rash. Your predecessor never rode into
+the City without an escort."
+
+"I do every morning."
+
+"I know," returned the Colonel, "and that's where you are wrong. Some day
+something will happen. To go down with two of your levies to-day is
+madness. I speak seriously. The place is in a ferment."
+
+"Oh, I think I'll be all right," said Ralston, and he rode at a trot
+down from Government House into the road which leads past the gaol and
+the Fort to the gate of Peshawur. At the gate he reduced the trot to a
+walk, and so, with his two levies behind him, passed up along the
+streets like a man utterly undisturbed. It was not bravado which had
+made him refuse an escort. On the contrary, it was policy. To assume
+that no one questioned his authority was in Ralston's view the best way
+and the quickest to establish it. He pushed forward through the crowd
+right up to the walls of the temple, seemingly indifferent to every cry
+or threat which was uttered as he passed. The throng closed in behind
+him, and he came to a halt in front of a low door set in the whitewashed
+wall which enclosed the temple and its precincts. Upon this door he beat
+with the butt of his crop and a little wicket in the door was opened. At
+the bars of the wicket an old man's face showed for a moment and then
+drew back in fear.
+
+"Open!" cried Ralston peremptorily.
+
+The face appeared again.
+
+"Your Excellency, the goddess is meditating. Besides, this is holy
+ground. Your Excellency would not wish to set foot on it. Moreover, the
+courtyard is full of worshippers. It would not be safe."
+
+Ralston broke in upon the old man's fluttering protestations. "Open the
+door, or my men will break it in."
+
+A murmur of indignation arose from the crowd which thronged about him.
+Ralston paid no heed to it. He called to his two levies:
+
+"Quick! Break that door in!"
+
+As they advanced the door was opened. Ralston dismounted, and bade one of
+his men do likewise and follow him. To the second man he said,
+
+"Hold the horses!"
+
+He strode into the courtyard and stood still.
+
+"It will be touch and go," he said to himself, as he looked about him.
+
+The courtyard was as thronged as the open space without, and four strong
+walls enclosed it. The worshippers were strangely silent. It seemed to
+Ralston that suspense had struck them dumb. They looked at the intruder
+with set faces and impassive eyes. At the far end of the courtyard there
+was a raised stone platform, and this part was roofed. At the back in the
+gloom he could see a great idol of the goddess, and in front, facing the
+courtyard, stood the lady from Gujerat. She was what Ralston expected to
+see--a dancing girl of Northern India, a girl with a good figure, small
+hands and feet, and a complexion of an olive tint. Her eyes were large
+and lustrous, with a line of black pencilled upon the edges of the
+eyelids, her eyebrows arched and regular, her face oval, her forehead
+high. The dress was richly embroidered with gold, and she had anklets
+with silver bells upon her feet.
+
+Ralston pushed his way through the courtyard until he reached the wall of
+the platform.
+
+"Come down and speak to me," he cried peremptorily to the lady, but she
+took no notice of his presence. She did not move so much as an eyelid.
+She gazed over his head as one lost in meditation. From the side an old
+priest advanced to the edge of the platform.
+
+"Go away," he cried insolently. "You have no place here. The goddess does
+not speak to any but her priests," and through the throng there ran a
+murmur of approval. There, was a movement, too--a movement towards
+Ralston. It was as yet a hesitating movement--those behind pushed, those
+in front and within Ralston's vision held back. But at any moment the
+movement might become a rush.
+
+Ralston spoke to the priest.
+
+"Come down, you dog!" he said quite quietly.
+
+The priest was silent. He hesitated. He looked for help to the crowd
+below, which in turn looked for leadership to him. "Come down," once more
+cried Ralston, and he moved towards the steps as though he would mount on
+to the platform and tear the fellow down.
+
+"I come, I come," said the priest, and he went down and stood
+before Ralston.
+
+Ralston turned to the Pathan who accompanied him. "Turn the fellow into
+the street."
+
+Protests rose from the crowd; the protests became cries of anger; the
+throng swayed and jostled. But the Pathan led the priest to the door and
+thrust him out.
+
+Again Ralston turned to the platform.
+
+"Listen to me," he called out to the lady from Gujerat. "You must leave
+Peshawur. You are a trouble to the town. I will not let you stay."
+
+But the lady paid no heed. Her mind floated above the earth, and with
+every moment the danger grew. Closer and closer the throng pressed in
+upon Ralston and his attendant. The clamour rose shrill and menacing.
+Ralston cried out to his Pathan in a voice which rang clear and audible
+even above the clamour:
+
+"Bring handcuffs!"
+
+The words were heard and silence fell upon all that crowd, the sudden
+silence of stupefaction. That such an outrage, such a defilement of a
+holy place, could be contemplated came upon the worshippers with a shock.
+But the Pathan levy was seen to be moving towards the door to obey the
+order, and as he went the cries and threats rose with redoubled ardour.
+For a moment it seemed to Ralston that the day would go against him, so
+fierce were the faces which shouted in his ears, so turbulent the
+movement of the crowd. It needed just one hand to be laid upon the
+Pathan's shoulder as he forced his way towards the door, just one blow to
+be struck, and the ugly rush would come. But the hand was not stretched
+out, nor the blow struck; and the Pathan was seen actually at the
+threshold of the door. Then the Goddess Devi came down to earth and spoke
+to another of her priests quickly and urgently. The priest went swiftly
+down the steps.
+
+"The goddess will leave Peshawur, since your Excellency so wills it," he
+said to Ralston. "She will shake the dust of this city from her feet. She
+will not bring trouble upon its people." So far he had got when the
+goddess became violently agitated. She beckoned to the priest and when he
+came to her side she spoke quickly to him in an undertone. For the last
+second or two the goddess had grown quite human and even feminine. She
+was rating the priest well and she did it spitefully. It was a
+crestfallen priest who returned to Ralston.
+
+"The goddess, however, makes a condition," said he. "If she goes there
+must be a procession."
+
+The goddess nodded her head emphatically. She was clearly adamant upon
+that point.
+
+Ralston smiled.
+
+"By all means. The lady shall have a show, since she wants one," said he,
+and turning towards the door, he signalled to the Pathan to stop.
+
+"But it must be this afternoon," said he. "For she must go this
+afternoon."
+
+And he made his way out of the courtyard into the street. The lady from
+Gujerat left Peshawur three hours later. The streets were lined with
+levies, although the Mohammedans assured his Excellency that there was no
+need for troops.
+
+"We ourselves will keep order," they urged. Ralston smiled, and ordered
+up a company of Regulars. He himself rode out from Government House, and
+at the bend of the road he met the procession, with the lady from Gujerat
+at its head in a litter with drawn curtains of tawdry gold.
+
+As the procession came abreast of him a little brown hand was thrust
+out from the curtains, and the bearers and the rabble behind came to a
+halt. A man in a rough brown homespun cloak, with a beggar's bowl
+attached to his girdle, came to the side of the litter, and thence went
+across to Ralston.
+
+"Your Highness, the Goddess Devi has a word for your ear alone."
+Ralston, with a shrug of his shoulders, walked his horse up to the side
+of the litter and bent down his head. The lady spoke through the
+curtains in a whisper.
+
+"Your Excellency has been very kind to me, and allowed me to leave
+Peshawur with a procession, guarding the streets so that I might pass in
+safety and with great honour. Therefore I make a return. There is a
+matter which troubles your Excellency. You ask yourself the why and the
+wherefore, and there is no answer. But the danger grows."
+
+Ralston's thoughts flew out towards Chiltistan. Was it of that country
+she was speaking?
+
+"Well?" he asked. "Why does the danger grow?"
+
+"Because bags of grain and melons were sent," she replied, "and the
+message was understood."
+
+She waved her hand again, and the bearers of the litter stepped forward
+on their march through the cantonment. Ralston rode up the hill to his
+home, wondering what in the world was the meaning of her oracular
+words. It might be that she had no meaning--that was certainly a
+possibility. She might merely be keeping up her pose as a divinity. On
+the other hand, she had been so careful to speak in a low whisper, lest
+any should overhear.
+
+"Some melons and bags of grain," he said to himself. "What message could
+they convey? And who sent them? And to whom?"
+
+He wrote that night to the Resident at Kohara, on the chance that he
+might be able to throw some light upon the problem.
+
+"Have you heard anything of a melon and a bag of grain?" he wrote. "It
+seems an absurd question, but please make inquiries. Find out what it
+all means."
+
+The messenger carried the letter over the Malakand Pass and up the road
+by Dir, and in due time an answer was returned. Ralston received the
+answer late one afternoon, when the light was failing, and, taking it
+over to the window, read it through. Its contents fairly startled him.
+
+"I have made inquiries," wrote Captain Phillips, the Resident, "as you
+wished, and I have found out that some melons and bags of grain were sent
+by Shere Ali's orders a few weeks ago as a present to one of the chief
+Mullahs in the town."
+
+Ralston was brought to a stop. So it was Shere Ali, after all, who was
+at the bottom of the trouble. It was Shere Ali who had sent the present,
+and had sent it to one of the Mullahs. Ralston looked back upon the
+little dinner party, whereby he had brought Hatch and Shere Ali
+together. Had that party been too successful, he wondered? Had it
+achieved more than he had wished to bring about? He turned in doubt to
+the letter which he held.
+
+"It seems," he read, "that there had been some trouble between this man
+and Shere Ali. There is a story that Shere Ali set him to work for a day
+upon a bridge just below Kohara. But I do not know whether there is any
+truth in the story. Nor can I find that any particular meaning is
+attached to the present. I imagine that Shere Ali realised that it would
+be wise--as undoubtedly it was--for him to make his peace with the
+Mullah, and sent him accordingly the melons and the bags of grain as an
+earnest of his good-will."
+
+There the letter ended, and Ralston stood by the window as the light
+failed more and more from off the earth, pondering with a heavy heart
+upon its contents. He had to make his choice between the Resident at
+Kohara and the lady of Gujerat. Captain Phillips held that the present
+was not interpreted in any symbolic sense. But the lady of Gujerat had
+known of the present. It was matter of talk, then, in the bazaars, and it
+would hardly have been that had it meant no more than an earnest of
+good-will. She had heard of the present; she knew what it was held to
+convey. It was a message. There was that glare broadening over
+Chiltistan. Surely the lady of Gujerat was right.
+
+So far his thoughts had carried him when across the window there fell a
+shadow, and a young officer of the Khyber Rifles passed by to the door.
+Captain Singleton was announced, and a boy--or so he looked--dark-haired
+and sunburnt, entered the office. For eighteen months he had been
+stationed in the fort at Landi Kotal, whence the road dips down between
+the bare brown cliffs towards the plains and mountains of Afghanistan.
+With two other English officers he had taken his share in the difficult
+task of ruling that regiment of wild tribesmen which, twice a week,
+perched in threes on some rocky promontory, or looking down from a
+machicolated tower, keeps open the Khyber Pass from dawn to dusk and
+protects the caravans. The eighteen months had written their history upon
+his face; he stood before Ralston, for all his youthful looks, a quiet,
+self-reliant man.
+
+"I have come down on leave, sir," he said. "On the way I fetched Rahat
+Mian out of his house and brought him in to Peshawur."
+
+Ralston looked up with interest.
+
+"Any trouble?" he asked.
+
+"I took care there should be none."
+
+Ralston nodded.
+
+"He had better be safely lodged. Where is he?"
+
+"I have him outside."
+
+Ralston rang for lights, and then said to Singleton: "Then, I'll
+see him now."
+
+And in a few minutes an elderly white-bearded man, dressed from head to
+foot in his best white robes, was shown into the room.
+
+"This is his Excellency," said Captain Singleton, and Rahat Mian bowed
+with dignity and stood waiting. But while he stood his eyes roamed
+inquisitively about the room.
+
+"All this is strange to you, Rahat Mian," said Ralston. "How long is it
+since you left your house in the Khyber Pass?"
+
+"Five years, your Highness," said Rahat Mian, quietly, as though there
+were nothing very strange in so long a confinement within his doors.
+
+"Have you never crossed your threshold for five years?" asked Ralston.
+
+"No, your Highness. I should not have stepped back over it again, had I
+been so foolish. Before, yes. There was a deep trench dug between my
+house and the road, and I used to crawl along the trench when no-one was
+about. But after a little my enemies saw me walking in the road, and
+watched the trench."
+
+Rahat Mian lived in one of the square mud windowless houses, each with a
+tower at a corner which dot the green wheat fields in the Khyber Pass
+wherever the hills fall back and leave a level space. His house was
+fifty yards from the road, and the trench stretched to it from his very
+door. But not two hundred yards away there were other houses, and one of
+these held Rahat Mian's enemies. The feud went back many years to the
+date when Rahat Mian, without asking anyone's leave or paying a single
+farthing of money, secretly married the widowed mother of Futteh Ali
+Shah. Now Futteh Ali Shah was a boy of fourteen who had the right to
+dispose of his mother in second marriage as he saw fit, and for the best
+price he could obtain. And this deprivation of his rights kindled in him
+a great anger against Rahat Mian. He nursed it until he became a man and
+was able to buy for a couple of hundred rupees a good pedigree rifle--a
+rifle which had belonged to a soldier killed in a hill-campaign and for
+which inquiries would not be made. Armed with his pedigree rifle, Futteh
+Ali Shah lay in wait vainly for Rahat Mian, until an unexpected bequest
+caused a revolution in his fortunes. He went down to Bombay, added to
+his bequest by becoming a money-lender, and finally returned to
+Peshawur, in the neighbourhood of which city he had become a landowner
+of some importance. Meanwhile, however, he had not been forgetful of
+Rahat Mian. He left relations behind to carry on the feud, and in
+addition he set a price on Rahat Mian's head. It was this feud which
+Ralston had it in his mind to settle.
+
+He turned to Rahat Mian.
+
+"You are willing to make peace?"
+
+"Yes," said the old man.
+
+"You will take your most solemn oath that the feud shall end. You will
+swear to divorce your wife, if you break your word?"
+
+For a moment Rahat Mian hesitated. There was no oath more binding, more
+sacred, than that which he was called upon to take. In the end he
+consented.
+
+"Then come here at eight to-morrow morning," said Ralston, and,
+dismissing the man, he gave instructions that he should be safely lodged.
+He sent word at the same time to Futteh Ali Shah, with whom, not for the
+first time, he had had trouble.
+
+Futteh Ali Shah arrived late the next morning in order to show his
+independence. But he was not so late as Ralston, who replied by keeping
+him waiting for an hour. When Ralston entered the room he saw that Futteh
+Ali Shah had dressed himself for the occasion. His tall high-shouldered
+frame was buttoned up in a grey frock coat, grey trousers clothed his
+legs, and he wore patent-leather shoes upon his feet.
+
+"I hope you have not been waiting very long. They should have told me you
+were here," said Ralston, and though he spoke politely, there was just a
+suggestion that it was not really of importance whether Futteh Ali Shah
+was kept waiting or not.
+
+"I have brought you here that together we may put an end to your dispute
+with Rahat Mian," said Ralston, and, taking no notice of the exclamation
+of surprise which broke from the Pathan's lips, he rang the bell and
+ordered Rahat Mian to be shown in.
+
+"Now let us see if we cannot come to an understanding," said Ralston, and
+he seated himself between the two antagonists.
+
+But though they talked for an hour, they came no nearer to a settlement.
+Futteh Ali Shah was obdurate; Rahat Mian's temper and pride rose in their
+turn. At the sight of each other the old grievance became fresh as a
+thing of yesterday in both their minds. Their dark faces, with the high
+cheek-bones and the beaked noses of the Afridi, became passionate and
+fierce. Finally Futteh Ali Shah forgot all his Bombay manners; he leaned
+across Ralston, and cried to Rahat Mian:
+
+"Do you know what I would like to do with you? I would like to string my
+bedstead with your skin and lie on it."
+
+And upon that Ralston arrived at the conclusion that the meeting might as
+well come to an end.
+
+He dismissed Rahat Mian, promising him a safe conveyance to his home. But
+he had not yet done with Futteh Ali Shah.
+
+"I am going out," he said suavely. "Shall we walk a little way together?"
+
+Futteh Ali Shah smiled. Landowner of importance that he was, the
+opportunity to ride side by side through Peshawur with the Chief
+Commissioner did not come every day. The two men went out into the porch.
+Ralston's horse was waiting, with a scarlet-clad syce at its head.
+Ralston walked on down the steps and took a step or two along the drive.
+Futteh Ali Shah lagged behind.
+
+"Your Excellency is forgetting your horse."
+
+"No," said Ralston. "The horse can follow. Let us walk a little. It is a
+good thing to walk."
+
+It was nine o'clock in the morning, and the weather was getting hot. And
+it is said that the heat of Peshawur is beyond the heat of any other city
+from the hills to Cape Comorin. Futteh Ali Shah, however, could not
+refuse. Regretfully he signalled to his own groom who stood apart in
+charge of a fine dark bay stallion from the Kirghiz Steppes. The two men
+walked out from the garden and down the road towards Peshawur city, with
+their horses following behind them.
+
+"We will go this way," said Ralston, and he turned to the left and walked
+along a mud-walled lane between rich orchards heavy with fruit. For a
+mile they thus walked, and then Futteh Ali Shah stopped and said:
+
+"I am very anxious to have your Excellency's opinion of my horse. I am
+very proud of it."
+
+"Later on," said Ralston, carelessly. "I want to walk for a little"; and,
+conversing upon indifferent topics, they skirted the city and came out
+upon the broad open road which runs to Jamrud and the Khyber Pass.
+
+It was here that Futteh Ali Shah once more pressingly invited Ralston to
+try the paces of his stallion. But Ralston again refused.
+
+"I will with pleasure later on," he said. "But a little exercise will be
+good for both of us; and they continued to walk along the road. The heat
+was overpowering; Futteh Ali Shah was soft from too much good living; his
+thin patent-leather shoes began to draw his feet and gall his heels; his
+frock coat was tight; the perspiration poured down his face. Ralston was
+hot, too. But he strode on with apparent unconcern, and talked with the
+utmost friendliness on the municipal affairs of Peshawur."
+
+"It is very hot," said Futteh Ali Shah, "and I am afraid for your
+Excellency's health. For myself, of course, I am not troubled, but so
+much walking will be dangerous to you"; and he halted and looked
+longingly back to his horse.
+
+"Thank you," said Ralston. "But my horse is fresh, and I should not be
+able to talk to you so well. I do not feel that I am in danger."
+
+Futteh Ali Shah mopped his face and walked on. His feet blistered; he
+began to limp, and he had nothing but a riding-switch in his hand. Now
+across the plain he saw in the distance the round fort of Jamrud, and he
+suddenly halted:
+
+"I must sit down," he said. "I cannot help it, your Excellency, I must
+stop and sit down."
+
+Ralston turned to him with a look of cold surprise.
+
+"Before me, Futteh Ali Shah? You will sit down in my presence before I
+sit down? I think you will not."
+
+Futteh Ali Shah gazed up the road and down the road, and saw no help
+anywhere. Only this devilish Chief Commissioner stood threateningly
+before him. With a gesture of despair he wiped his face and walked on.
+For a mile more he limped on by Ralston's side, the while Ralston
+discoursed upon the great question of Agricultural Banks. Then he stopped
+again and blurted out:
+
+"I will give you no more trouble. If your Excellency will let me go,
+never again will I give you trouble. I swear it."
+
+Ralston smiled. He had had enough of the walk himself.
+
+"And Rahat Mian?" he asked.
+
+There was a momentary struggle in the zemindar's mind. But his fatigue
+and exhaustion were too heavy upon him.
+
+"He, too, shall go his own way. Neither I nor mine shall molest him."
+
+Ralston turned at once and mounted his horse. With a sigh of relief
+Futteh Ali Shah followed his example.
+
+"Shall we ride back together?" said Ralston, pleasantly. And as on the
+way out he had made no mention of any trouble between the landowner and
+himself, so he did not refer to it by a single word on his way back.
+
+But close to the city their ways parted and Futteh Ali Shah, as he took
+his leave, said hesitatingly,
+
+"If this story goes abroad, your Excellency--this story of how we walked
+together towards Jamrud--there will be much laughter and ridicule."
+
+The fear of ridicule--there was the weak point of the Afridi, as Ralston
+very well knew. To be laughed at--Futteh Ali Shah, who was wont to lord
+it among his friends, writhed under the mere possibility. And how they
+would laugh in and round about Peshawur! A fine figure he would cut as he
+rode through the streets with every ragged bystander jeering at the man
+who was walked into docility and submission by his Excellency the Chief
+Commissioner.
+
+"My life would be intolerable," he said, "were the story to get about."
+
+Ralston shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"But why should it get about?"
+
+"I do not know, but it surely will. It may be that the trees have ears
+and eyes and a mouth to speak." He edged a little nearer to the
+Commissioner. "It may be, too," he said cunningly, "that your Excellency
+loves to tell a good story after dinner. Now there is one way to stop
+that story."
+
+Ralston laughed. "If I could hold my tongue, you mean," he replied.
+
+Futteh Ali Shah came nearer still. He rode up close and leaned a little
+over towards Ralston.
+
+"Your Excellency would lose the story," he said, "but on the other hand
+there would be a gain--a gain of many hours of sleep passed otherwise in
+guessing."
+
+He spoke in an insinuating fashion, which made Ralston disinclined to
+strike a bargain--and he nodded his head like one who wishes to convey
+that he could tell much if only he would. But Ralston paused before he
+answered, and when he answered it was only to put a question.
+
+"What do you mean?" he asked.
+
+And the reply came in a low quick voice.
+
+"There was a message sent through Chiltistan."
+
+Ralston started. Was it in this strange way the truth was to come to him?
+He sat his horse carelessly. "I know," he said. "Some melons and some
+bags of grain."
+
+Futteh Ali Shah was disappointed. This devilish Chief Commissioner knew
+everything. Yet the story of the walk must not get abroad in Peshawur,
+and surely it would unless the Chief Commissioner were pledged to
+silence. He drew a bow at a venture.
+
+"Can your Excellency interpret the message? As they interpret it in
+Chiltistan?" and it seemed to him that he had this time struck true. "It
+is a little thing I ask of your Excellency."
+
+"It is not a great thing, to be sure," Ralston admitted. He looked at the
+zemindar and laughed. "But I could tell the story rather well," he said
+doubtfully. "It would be an amusing story as I should tell it. Yet--well,
+we will see," and he changed his tone suddenly. "Interpret to me that
+present as it is interpreted in the villages of Chiltistan."
+
+Futteh Ali Shah looked about him fearfully, making sure that there was no
+one within earshot. Then in a whisper he said: "The grain is the army
+which will rise up from the hills and descend from the heavens to destroy
+the power of the Government. The melons are the forces of the Government;
+for as easily as melons they will be cut into pieces."
+
+He rode off quickly when he had ended, like a man who understands that he
+has said too much, and then halted and returned.
+
+"You will not tell that story?" he said.
+
+"No," answered Ralston abstractedly. "I shall never tell that story."
+
+He understood the truth at last. So that was the message which Shere Ali
+had sent. No wonder, he thought, that the glare broadened over
+Chiltistan.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+THE SOLDIER AND THE JEW
+
+
+These two events took place at Peshawur, while Linforth was still upon
+the waters of the Red Sea. To be quite exact, on that morning when
+Ralston was taking his long walk towards Jamrud with the zemindar Futteh
+Ali Shah, Linforth was watching impatiently from his deck-chair the high
+mosque towers, the white domes and great houses of Mocha, as they
+shimmered in the heat at the water's edge against a wide background of
+yellow sand. It seemed to him that the long narrow city so small and
+clear across the great level of calm sea would never slide past the
+taffrail. But it disappeared, and in due course the ship moved slowly
+through the narrows into Aden harbour. This was on a Thursday evening,
+and the steamer stopped in Aden for three hours to coal. The night came
+on hot, windless and dark. Linforth leaned over the side, looking out
+upon the short curve of lights and the black mass of hill rising dimly
+above them. Three and a half more days and he would be standing on Indian
+soil. A bright light flashed towards the ship across the water and a
+launch came alongside, bearing the agent of the company.
+
+He had the latest telegrams in his hand.
+
+"Any trouble on the Frontier?" Linforth asked.
+
+"None," the agent replied, and Linforth's fever of impatience was
+assuaged. If trouble were threatening he would surely be in time--since
+there were only three and a half more days.
+
+But he did not know why he had been brought out from England, and the
+three and a half days made him by just three and a half days too late.
+For on this very night when the steamer stopped to coal in Aden harbour
+Shere Ali made his choice.
+
+He was present that evening at a prize-fight which took place in a
+music-hall at Calcutta. The lightweight champion of Singapore and the
+East, a Jew, was pitted against a young soldier who had secured his
+discharge and had just taken to boxing as a profession. The soldier
+brought a great reputation as an amateur. This was his first appearance
+as a professional, and his friends had gathered in numbers to encourage
+him. The hall was crowded with soldiers from the barracks, sailors from
+the fleet, and patrons of the fancy in Calcutta. The heat was
+overpowering, the audience noisy, and overhead the electric fans, which
+hung downwards from the ceiling, whirled above the spectators with so
+swift a rotation that those looking up saw only a vague blur in the air.
+The ring had been roped off upon the stage, and about three sides of the
+ring chairs for the privileged had been placed. The fourth side was open
+to the spectators in the hall, and behind the ropes at the back there sat
+in the centre of the row of chairs a fat red-faced man in evening-dress
+who was greeted on all sides as Colonel Joe. "Colonel Joe" was the
+referee, and a person on these occasions of great importance.
+
+There were several preliminary contests and before each one Colonel Joe
+came to the front and introduced the combatants with a short history of
+their achievements. A Hindu boy was matched against a white one, a couple
+of wrestlers came next, and then two English sailors, with more spirit
+than skill, had a set-to which warmed the audience into enthusiasm and
+ended amid shouts, whistles, shrill cat-calls, and thunders of applause.
+Meanwhile the heat grew more and more intense, the faces shinier, the air
+more and more smoke-laden and heavy.
+
+Shere Ali came on to the stage while the sailors were at work. He
+exchanged a nod with "Colonel Joe," and took his seat in the front row of
+chairs behind the ropes.
+
+It was a rough gathering on the whole, though there were some men in
+evening-dress besides Colonel Joe, and of these two sat beside Shere Ali.
+They were talking together, and Shere Ali at the first paid no heed to
+them. The trainers, the backers, the pugilists themselves were the men
+who had become his associates in Calcutta. There were many of them
+present upon the stage, and in turn they approached Shere Ali and spoke
+to him with familiarity upon the chances of the fight. Yet in their
+familiarity there was a kind of deference. They were speaking to a
+patron. Moreover, there was some flattery in the attention with which
+they waited to catch his eye and the eagerness with which they came at
+once to his side.
+
+"We are all glad to see you, sir," said a small man who had been a jockey
+until he was warned off the turf.
+
+"Yes," said Shere Ali with a smile, "I am among friends."
+
+"Now who would you say was going to win this fight?" continued the
+jockey, cocking his head with an air of shrewdness, which said as plainly
+as words, "You are the one to tell if you will only say."
+
+Shere Ali expanded. Deference and flattery, however gross, so long as
+they came from white people were balm to his wounded vanity. The weeks in
+Calcutta had worked more harm than Ralston had suspected. Shy of meeting
+those who had once treated him as an equal, imagining when he did meet
+them that now they only admitted him to their company on sufferance and
+held him in their thoughts of no account, he had become avid for
+recognition among the riff-raff of the town.
+
+"I have backed the man from Singapore," he replied, "I know him. The
+soldier is a stranger to me"; and gradually as he talked the voices of
+his two neighbours forced themselves upon his consciousness. It was not
+what they said which caught his attention. But their accents and the
+pitch of their voices arrested him, and swept him back to his days at
+Eton and at Oxford. He turned his head and looked carelessly towards
+them. They were both young; both a year ago might have been his intimates
+and friends. As it was, he imagined bitterly, they probably resented his
+sitting even in the next chair to them.
+
+The stage was now clear; the two sailors had departed, the audience sat
+waiting for the heroes of the evening and calling for them with impatient
+outbursts of applause. Shere Ali waited too. But there was no impatience
+on his part, as there was no enthusiasm. He was just getting through the
+evening; and this hot and crowded den, with its glitter of lights,
+promised a thrill of excitement which would for a moment lift him from
+the torture of his thoughts.
+
+But the antagonists still lingered in their dressing-rooms while their
+trainers put the final touch to their preparations. And while the
+antagonists lingered, the two young men next to him began again to talk,
+and this time the words fell on Shere Ali's ears.
+
+"I think it ought to be stopped," said one. "It can't be good for us. Of
+course the fellow who runs the circus doesn't care, although he is an
+Englishman, and although he must have understood what was being shouted."
+
+"He is out for money, of course," replied the other.
+
+"Yes. But not half a mile away, just across the Maidan there, is
+Government House. Surely it ought to be stopped."
+
+The speaker was evidently serious. He spoke, indeed, with some heat.
+Shere Ali wondered indifferently what it was that went on in the circus
+in the Maidan half a mile from the Government House. Something which
+ought to be stopped, something which could not be "good for us." Shere
+Ali clenched his hands in a gust of passion. How well he knew the
+phrase! Good for us, good for the magic of British prestige! How often
+he had used the words himself in the days when he had been fool enough
+to believe that he belonged to the white people. He had used it in the
+company of just such youths as those who sat next to him now, and he
+writhed in his seat as he imagined how they must have laughed at him in
+their hearts. What was it that was not "good for us" in the circus on
+the Maidan?
+
+As he wondered there was a burst of applause, and on the opposite side of
+the ring the soldier, stripped to the waist, entered with his two
+assistants. Shere Ali was sitting close to the lower corner of the ring
+on the right-hand side of the stage; the soldier took his seat in the
+upper corner on the other side. He was a big, heavily-built man, but
+young, active, and upon his open face he had a look of confidence. It
+seemed to Shere Ali that he had been trained to the very perfection of
+his strength, and when he moved the muscles upon his shoulders and back
+worked under his skin as though they lived. Shouts greeted him, shouts in
+which his surname and his Christian name and his nicknames were mingled,
+and he smiled pleasantly back at his friends. Shere Ali looked at him.
+From his cheery, honest face to the firm set of his feet upon the floor,
+he was typical of his class and race.
+
+"Oh, I hope he'll be beaten!"
+
+Shere Ali found himself repeating the words in a whisper. The wish had
+suddenly sprung up within him, but it grew in intensity; it became a
+great longing. He looked anxiously for the appearance of the Jew from
+Singapore. He was glad that, knowing little of either man, he had laid
+his money against the soldier.
+
+Meanwhile the two youths beside him resumed their talk, and Shere Ali
+learned what it was that was not "good for us"!
+
+"There were four girls," said the youth who had been most indignant.
+"Four English girls dancing a _pas de quatre_ on the sand of the circus.
+The dance was all right, the dresses were all right. In an English
+theatre no one would have had a word to say. It was the audience that was
+wrong. The cheaper parts at the back of the tent were crowded with
+natives, tier above tier--and I tell you--I don't know much Hindustani,
+but the things they shouted made my blood boil. After all, if you are
+going to be the governing race it's not a good thing to let your women be
+insulted, eh?"
+
+Shere Ali laughed quietly. He could picture to himself the whole scene,
+the floor of the circus, the tiers of grinning faces rising up against
+the back walls of the tent.
+
+"Did the girls themselves mind?" asked the other of the youths.
+
+"They didn't understand." And again the angry utterance followed. "It
+ought to be stopped! It ought to be stopped!"
+
+Shere Ali turned suddenly upon the speaker.
+
+"Why?" he asked fiercely, and he thrust a savage face towards him.
+
+The young man was taken by surprise; for a second it warmed Shere Ali to
+think that he was afraid. And, indeed, there was very little of the
+civilised man in Shere Ali's look at this moment. His own people were
+claiming him. It was one of the keen grim tribesmen of the hills who
+challenged the young Englishman. The Englishman, however, was not afraid.
+He was merely disconcerted by the unexpected attack. He recovered his
+composure the next moment.
+
+"I don't think that I was speaking to you," he said quietly, and then
+turned away.
+
+Shere Ali half rose in his seat. But he was not yet quite emancipated
+from the traditions of his upbringing. To create a disturbance in a
+public place, to draw all eyes upon himself, to look a fool, eventually
+to be turned ignominiously into the street--all this he was within an
+ace of doing and suffering, but he refrained. He sat down again
+quickly, feeling hot and cold with shame, just as he remembered he had
+been wont to feel when he had committed some gaucherie in his early
+days in England.
+
+At that moment the light-weight champion from Singapore came out from his
+dressing-room and entered the ring. He was of a slighter build than his
+opponent, but very quick upon his feet. He was shorter, too. Colonel Joe
+introduced the antagonists to the audience, standing before the
+footlights as he did so. And it was at once evident who was the
+favourite. The shouts were nearly all for the soldier.
+
+The Jew took his seat in a chair down in the corner where Shere Ali
+was sitting, and Shere Ali leaned over the ropes and whispered to
+him fiercely,
+
+"Win! Win! I'll double the stake if you do!"
+
+The Jew turned and smiled at the young Prince.
+
+"I'll do my best."
+
+Shere Ali leaned back in his chair and the fight began. He followed it
+with an excitement and a suspense which were astonishing even to him.
+When the soldier brought his fist home upon the prominent nose of the
+Singapore champion and plaudits resounded through the house, his heart
+sank with bitter disappointment. When the Jew replied with a dull
+body-blow, his hopes rebounded. He soon began to understand that in the
+arts of prize-fighting the soldier was a child compared with the man from
+Singapore. The Champion of the East knew his trade. He was as hard as
+iron. The sounding blows upon his forehead and nose did no more than
+flush his face for a few moments. Meanwhile he struck for the body.
+Moreover, he had certain tricks which lured his antagonist to an
+imprudent confidence. For instance, he breathed heavily from the
+beginning of the second round, as though he were clean out of condition.
+But each round found him strong and quick to press an advantage. After
+one blow, which toppled his opponent through the ropes, Shere Ali clapped
+his hands.
+
+"Bravo!" he cried; and one of the youths at his side said to his
+companion:
+
+"This fellow's a Jew, too. Look at his face."
+
+For twelve rounds the combatants seemed still to be upon equal terms,
+though those in the audience who had knowledge began to shake their heads
+over the chances of the soldier. Shere Ali, however, was still racked by
+suspense. The fight had become a symbol, almost a message to him, even as
+his gift to the Mullah had become a message to the people of Chiltistan.
+All that he had once loved, and now furiously raged against, was
+represented by the soldier, the confident, big, heavily built soldier,
+while, on the other hand, by the victory of the Jew all the subject
+peoples would be vindicated. More and more as the fight fluctuated from
+round to round the people and the country of Chiltistan claimed its own.
+The soldier represented even those youths at his side, whose women must
+on no account be insulted.
+
+"Why should they be respected?" he cried to himself.
+
+For at the bottom of his heart lay the thought that he had been set aside
+as impossible by Violet Oliver. There was the real cause of his
+bitterness against the white people. He still longed for Violet Oliver,
+still greatly coveted her. But his own people and his own country were
+claiming him; and he longed for her in a different way. Chivalry--the
+chivalry of the young man who wants to guard and cherish--respect, the
+desire that the loved one should share ambitions, life work, all--what
+follies and illusions these things were!
+
+"I know," said Shere Ali to himself. "I know. I am myself the victim of
+them," and he lowered his head and clasped his hands tightly together
+between his knees. He forgot the prize-fight, the very sound of the
+pugilists' feet upon the bare boards of the stage ceased to be audible to
+his ears. He ached like a man bruised and beaten; he was possessed with a
+sense of loneliness, poignant as pain. "If I had only taken the easier
+way, bought and never cared!" he cried despairingly. "But at all events
+there's no need for respect. Why should one respect those who take and do
+not give?"
+
+As he asked himself the question, there came a roar from the audience. He
+looked up. The soldier was standing, but he was stooping and the fingers
+of one hand touched the boards. Over against the soldier the man from
+Singapore stood waiting with steady eyes, and behind the ropes Colonel
+Joe was counting in a loud voice:
+
+"One, two, three, four."
+
+Shere Ali's eyes lit up. Would the soldier rise? Would he take the tips
+of those fingers from the floor, stand up again and face his man? Or was
+he beaten?
+
+"Five, six, seven, eight"--the referee counted, his voice rising above
+the clamour of voices. The audience had risen, men stood upon their
+benches, cries of expostulation were shouted to the soldier.
+
+"Nine, ten," counted the referee, and the fight was over. The soldier had
+been counted out.
+
+Shere Ali was upon his feet like the rest of the enthusiasts.
+
+"Well done!" he cried. "Well done!" and as the Jew came back to his
+corner Shere Ali shook him excitedly by the hand. The sign had been
+given; the subject race had beaten the soldier. Shere Ali was livid with
+excitement. Perhaps, indeed, the young Englishmen had been right, and
+some dim racial sympathy stirred Shere Ali to his great enthusiasm.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+SHERE ALI IS CLAIMED BY CHILTISTAN
+
+
+While these thoughts were seething in his mind, while the excitement was
+still at its height, the cries still at their loudest, Shere All heard a
+quiet penetrating voice speak in his ear. And the voice spoke in Pushtu.
+
+The mere sound of the language struck upon Shere Ali's senses at that
+moment of exultation with a strange effect. He thrilled to it from head
+to foot. He heard it with a feeling of joy. And then he took note of the
+spoken words.
+
+"The man who wrote to your Highness from Calcutta waits outside the
+doors. As you stand under the gas lamps, take your handkerchief from your
+pocket if you wish to speak with him."
+
+Shere Ali turned back from the ropes. But the spectators were already
+moving from their chairs to the steps which led from the stage to the
+auditorium. There was a crowd about those steps, and Shere Ali could not
+distinguish among it the man who was likely to have whispered in his ear.
+All seemed bent upon their own business, and that business was to escape
+from the close heat-laden air of the building as quickly as might be.
+
+Shere Ali stood alone and pondered upon the words.
+
+The man who had written to him from Calcutta! That was the man who had
+sent the anonymous letter which had caused him one day to pass through
+the Delhi Gate of Lahore. A money-lender at Calcutta, but a countryman
+from Chiltistan. So he had gathered from Safdar Khan, while heaping scorn
+upon the message.
+
+But now, and on this night of all nights, Shere Ali was in a mood to
+listen. There were intrigues on foot--there were always intrigues on
+foot. But to-night he would weigh those intrigues. He went out from the
+music-hall, and under the white glare of the electric lamps above the
+door he stood for a moment in full view. Then he deliberately took his
+handkerchief from his pocket. From the opposite side of the road, a man
+in native dress, wearing a thick dark cloak over his white shirt and
+pyjamas, stepped forward. Shere Ali advanced to meet him.
+
+"Huzoor, huzoor," said the man, bending low, and he raised Shere Ali's
+hand and pressed his forehead upon it, in sign of loyalty.
+
+"You wish to speak to me?" said Shere Ali.
+
+"If your Highness will deign to follow. I am Ahmed Ismail. Your Highness
+has heard of me, no doubt."
+
+Shere Ali did not so much as smile, nor did he deny the statement. He
+nodded gravely. After all, vanity was not the prerogative of his people
+alone in all the world.
+
+"Yes," he said, "I will follow."
+
+Ahmed Ismail crossed the road once more out of the lights into the
+shadows, and walked on, keeping close to the lines of houses. Shere Ali
+followed upon his heels. But these two were not alone to take that road.
+A third man, a Bengali, bespectacled, and in appearance most respectable,
+came down the steps of the musichall, a second after Shere Ali had
+crossed the road. He, too, had been a witness of the prize-fight. He
+hurried after Shere Ali and caught him up.
+
+"Very good fight, sir," he said. "Would Prince of Chiltistan like to
+utter some few welcome words to great Indian public on extraordinary
+skill of respective pugilists? I am full-fledged reporter of _Bande
+Mataram_, great Nationalist paper."
+
+He drew out a note-book and a pencil as he spoke. Ahmed Ismail stopped
+and turned back towards the two men. The Babu looked once, and only once,
+at the money-lender. Then he stood waiting for Shere Ali's answer.
+
+"No, I have nothing to say," said Shere Ali civilly. "Good-night," and he
+walked on.
+
+"Great disappointment for Indian public," said the Bengali. "Prince of
+Chiltistan will say nothing. I make first-class leading article on
+reticence of Indian Prince in presence of high-class spectacular events.
+Good-night, sir," and the Babu shut up his book and fell back.
+
+Shere Ali followed upon the heels of Ahmed Ismail. The money-lender
+walked down the street to the Maidan, and then turned to the left. The
+Babu, on the other hand, hailed a third-class gharry and, ascending into
+it gave the driver some whispered instructions.
+
+The gharry drove on past the Bengal Club, and came, at length, to the
+native town. At the corner of a street the Babu descended, paid the
+driver, and dismissed him.
+
+"I will walk the rest of the way," he said. "My home is quite near and a
+little exercise is good. I have large varicose veins in the legs, or I
+should have tramped hand and foot all the way."
+
+He walked slowly until the driver had turned his gharry and was driving
+back. Then, for a man afflicted with varicose veins the Babu displayed
+amazing agility. He ran through the silent and deserted street until he
+came to a turning. The lane which ran into the main road was a blind
+alley. Mean hovels and shuttered booths flanked it, but at the end a tall
+house stood. The Babu looked about him and perceived a cart standing in
+the lane. He advanced to it and looked in.
+
+"This is obvious place for satisfactory concealment," he said, as with
+some difficulty he clambered in. Over the edge of the cart he kept watch.
+In a while he heard the sound of a man walking. The man was certainly at
+some distance from the turning, but the Babu's head went down at once.
+The man whose footsteps he heard was wearing boots, but there would be
+one walking in front of that man who was wearing slippers--Ahmed Ismail.
+
+Ahmed Ismail, indeed, turned an instant afterwards into the lane, passed
+the cart and walked up to the door of the big house. There he halted, and
+Shere Ali joined him.
+
+"The gift was understood, your Highness," he said. "The message was sent
+from end to end of Chiltistan."
+
+"What gift?" asked Shere Ali, in genuine surprise.
+
+"Your Highness has forgotten? The melons and the bags of grain."
+
+Shere Ali was silent for a few moments. Then he said:
+
+"And how was the gift interpreted?"
+
+Ahmed Ismail smiled in the darkness.
+
+"There are wise men in Chiltistan, and they found the riddle easy to
+read. The melons were the infidels which would be cut to pieces, even as
+a knife cuts a melon. The grain was the army of the faithful."
+
+Again Shere Ali was silent. He stood with his eyes upon his companion.
+
+"Thus they understand my gift to the Mullah?" he said at length.
+
+"Thus they understood it," said Ahmed Ismail. "Were they wrong?" and
+since Shere Ali paused before he answered, Ahmed repeated the question,
+holding the while the key of his door between his fingers.
+
+"Were they wrong, your Highness?"
+
+"No," said Shere Ali firmly. "They were right."
+
+Ahmed Ismail put the key into the lock. The bolt shot back with a grating
+sound, the door opened upon blackness.
+
+"Will your Highness deign to enter?" he said, standing aside.
+
+"Yes," said Shere Ali, and he passed in. His own people, his own country,
+had claimed and obtained him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+THE CASTING OF THE DIE
+
+
+Ahmed Ismail crossed the threshold behind Shere Ali. He closed the door
+quietly, bolted and locked it. Then for a space of time the two men stood
+silent in the darkness, and both listened intently--Ahmed Ismail for the
+sound of someone stirring in the house, Shere Ali for a quiet secret
+movement at his elbow. The blackness of the passage gaping as the door
+opened had roused him to suspicion even while he had been standing in the
+street. But he had not thought of drawing back. He had entered without
+fear, just as now he stood, without fear, drawn up against the wall.
+There was, indeed, a smile upon his face. Then he reached out his hand.
+Ahmed Ismail, who still stood afraid lest any of his family should have
+been disturbed, suddenly felt a light touch, like a caress, upon his
+face, and then before he could so much as turn his head, five strong lean
+fingers gripped him by the throat and tightened.
+
+"Ahmed, I have enemies in Chiltistan," said Shere Ali, between a whisper
+and a laugh. "The son of Abdulla Mohammed, for instance," and he loosened
+his grip a little upon Ahmed's throat, but held him still with a straight
+arm. Ahmed did not struggle. He whispered in reply:
+
+"I am not of your Highness's enemies. Long ago I gave your Highness a
+sign of friendship when I prayed you to pass by the Delhi Gate of
+Lahore."
+
+Shere Ali turned Ahmed Ismail towards the inner part of the house and
+loosed his neck.
+
+"Go forward, then. Light a lamp," he said, and Ahmed moved noiselessly
+along the passage. Shere Ali heard the sound of a door opening upstairs,
+and then a pale light gleamed from above. Shere Ali walked to the end of
+the passage, and mounting the stairs found Ahmed Ismail in the doorway of
+a little room with a lighted lamp in his hand.
+
+"I was this moment coming down," said Ahmed Ismail as he stood aside from
+the door. Shere Ali walked in. He crossed to the window, which was
+unglazed but had little wooden shutters. These shutters were closed.
+Shere Ali opened one and looked out. The room was on the first floor, and
+the window opened on to a small square courtyard. A movement of Ahmed
+Ismail's brought him swiftly round. He saw the money-lender on his knees
+with his forehead to the ground, grovelling before his Prince's feet.
+
+"The time has come, oh, my Lord," he cried in a low, eager voice, and
+again, "the time has come."
+
+Shere Ali looked down and pleasure glowed unwontedly within him. He did
+not answer, he did not give Ahmed Ismail leave to rise from the ground.
+He sated his eyes and his vanity with the spectacle of the man's
+abasement. Even his troubled heart ached with a duller pain.
+
+"I have been a fool," he murmured, "I have wasted my years. I have
+tortured myself for nothing. Yes, I have been a fool."
+
+A wave of anger swept over him, drowning his pride--anger against
+himself. He thought of the white people with whom he had lived.
+
+"I sought for a recognition of my equality with them," he went on. "I
+sought it from their men and from their women. I hungered for it like a
+dog for a bone. They would not give it--neither their men, nor their
+women. And all the while here were my own people willing at a sign to
+offer me their homage."
+
+He spoke in Pushtu, and Ahmed Ismail drank in every word.
+
+"They wanted a leader, Huzoor," he said.
+
+"I turned away from them like a fool," replied Shere Ali, "while I sought
+favours from the white women like a slave."
+
+"Your Highness shall take as a right what you sought for as a favour."
+
+"As a right?" cried Shere Ali, his heart leaping to the incense of Ahmed
+Ismail's flattery. "What right?" he asked, suddenly bending his eyes upon
+his companion.
+
+"The right of a conqueror," cried Ahmed Ismail, and he bowed himself
+again at his Prince's feet. He had spoken Shere Ali's wild and secret
+thought. But whereas Shere Ali had only whispered it to himself, Ahmed
+Ismail spoke it aloud, boldly and with a challenge in his voice, like one
+ready to make good his words. An interval of silence followed, a fateful
+interval as both men knew. Not a sound from without penetrated into that
+little shuttered room, but to Shere Ali it seemed that the air throbbed
+and was heavy with unknown things to come. Memories and fancies whirled
+in his disordered brain without relation to each other or consequence in
+his thoughts. Now it was the two Englishmen seated side by side behind
+the ropes and quietly talking of what was "not good for us," as though
+they had the whole of India, and the hill-districts, besides, in their
+pockets. He saw their faces, and, quietly though he stood and impassive
+as he looked, he was possessed with a longing to behold them within
+reach, so that he might strike them and disfigure them for ever. Now it
+was Violet Oliver as she descended the steps into the great courtyard of
+the Fort, dainty and provoking from the arched slipper upon her foot to
+the soft perfection of her hair. He saw her caught into the twilight
+swirl of pale white faces and so pass from his sight, thinking that at
+the same moment she passed from his life. Then it was the Viceroy in his
+box at the racecourse and all Calcutta upon the lawn which swept past his
+eyes. He saw the Eurasian girls prinked out in their best frocks to lure
+into marriage some unwary Englishman. And again it was Colonel Dewes, the
+man who had lost his place amongst his own people, even as he, Shere Ali,
+had himself. A half-contemptuous smile of pity for a moment softened the
+hard lines of his mouth as he thought upon that forlorn and elderly man
+taking his loneliness with him into Cashmere.
+
+"That shall not be my way," he said aloud, and the lines of his mouth
+hardened again. And once more before his eyes rose the vision of
+Violet Oliver.
+
+Ahmed Ismail had risen to his feet and stood watching his Prince with
+eager, anxious eyes. Shere Ali crossed to the table and turned down the
+lamp, which was smoking. Then he went to the window and thrust the
+shutters open. He turned round suddenly upon Ahmed.
+
+"Were you ever in Mecca?"
+
+"Yes, Huzoor," and Ahmed's eyes flashed at the question.
+
+"I met three men from Chiltistan on the Lowari Pass. They were going down
+to Kurachi. I, too, must make the pilgrimage to Mecca."
+
+He stood watching the flame of the lamp as he spoke, and spoke in a
+monotonous dull voice, as though what he said were of little importance.
+But Ahmed Ismail listened to the words, not the voice, and his joy was
+great. It was as though he heard a renegade acknowledge once more the
+true faith.
+
+"Afterwards, Huzoor," he said, significantly. "Afterwards." Shere Ali
+nodded his head.
+
+"Yes, afterwards. When we have driven the white people down from the
+hills into the plains."
+
+"And from the plains into the sea," cried Ahmed Ismail. "The angels will
+fight by our side--so the Mullahs have said---and no man who fights with
+faith will be hurt. All will be invulnerable. It is written, and the
+Mullahs have read the writing and translated it through Chiltistan."
+
+"Is that so?" said Shere Ali, and as he put the question there was an
+irony in his voice which Ahmed Ismail was quick to notice. But Shere Ali
+put it yet a second time, after a pause, and this time there was no
+trace of irony.
+
+"But I will not go alone," he said, suddenly raising his eyes from the
+flame of the lamp and looking towards Ahmed Ismail.
+
+Ahmed did not understand. But also he did not interrupt, and Shere Ali
+spoke again, with a smile slowly creeping over his face.
+
+"I will not go alone to Mecca. I will follow the example of Sirdar Khan."
+
+The saying was still a riddle to Ahmed Ismail.
+
+"Sirdar Khan, your Highness?" he said. "I do not know him."
+
+Shere Ali turned his eyes again upon the flame of the lamp, and the smile
+broadened upon his face, a thing not pleasant to see. He wetted his lips
+with the tip of his tongue and told his story.
+
+"Sirdar Khan is dead long since," he said, "but he was one of the five
+men of the bodyguard of Nana, who went into the Bibigarh at Cawnpore on
+July 12 of the year 1857. Have you heard of that year, Ahmed Ismail, and
+of the month and of the day? Do you know what was done that day in the
+Bibigarh at Cawnpore?"
+
+Ahmed Ismail watched the light grow in Shere Ali's eyes, and a smile
+crept into his face, too.
+
+"Huzoor, Huzoor," he said, in a whisper of delight. He knew very well
+what had happened in Cawnpore, though he knew nothing of the month or the
+day, and cared little in what year it had happened.
+
+"There were 206 women and children, English women, English children,
+shut up in the Bibigarh. At five o'clock--and it is well to remember the
+hour, Ahmed Ismail--at five o'clock in the evening the five men of the
+Nana's bodyguard went into the Bibigarh and the doors were closed upon
+them. It was dark when they came out again and shut the doors behind
+them, saying that all were dead. But it was not true. There was an
+Englishwoman alive in the Bibigarh, and Sirdar Khan came back in the
+night and took her away."
+
+"And she is in Mecca now?" cried Ahmed Ismail.
+
+"Yes. An old, old woman," said Shere Ali, dwelling upon the words with a
+quiet, cruel pleasure. He had the picture clear before his eyes, he saw
+it in the flame of the lamp at which he gazed so steadily--an old,
+wizened, shrunken woman, living in a bare room, friendless and solitary,
+so old that she had even ceased to be aware of her unhappiness, and so
+coarsened out of all likeness to the young, bright English girl who had
+once dwelt in Cawnpore, that even her own countryman had hardly believed
+she was of his race. He set another picture side by side with that--the
+picture of Violet Oliver as she turned to him on the steps and said,
+"This is really good-bye." And in his imagination, he saw the one picture
+merge and coarsen into the other, the dainty trappings of lace and
+ribbons change to a shapeless cloak, the young face wither from its
+beauty into a wrinkled and yellow mask. It would be a just punishment, he
+said to himself. Anger against her was as a lust at his heart. He had
+lost sight of her kindness, and her pity; he desired her and hated her in
+the same breath.
+
+"Are you married, Ahmed Ismail?" he asked.
+
+Ahmed Ismail smiled.
+
+"Truly, Huzoor."
+
+"Do you carry your troubles to your wife? Is she your companion as well
+as your wife? Your friend as well as your mistress?"
+
+Ahmed Ismail laughed.
+
+"Yet that is what the Englishwomen are," said Shere Ali.
+
+"Perhaps, Huzoor," replied Ahmed, cunningly, "it is for that reason that
+there are some who take and do not give."
+
+He came a little nearer to his Prince.
+
+"Where is she, Huzoor?"
+
+Shere Ali was startled by the question out of his dreams. For it had been
+a dream, this thought of capturing Violet Oliver and plucking her out of
+her life into his. He had played with it, knowing it to be a fancy. There
+had been no settled plan, no settled intention in his mind. But to-night
+he was carried away. It appeared to him there was a possibility his dream
+might come true. It seemed so not alone to him but to Ahmed Ismail too.
+He turned and gazed at the man, wondering whether Ahmed Ismail played
+with him or not. But Ahmed bore the scrutiny without a shadow of
+embarrassment.
+
+"Is she in India, Huzoor?"
+
+Shere Ali hesitated. Some memory of the lessons learned in England was
+still alive within him, bidding him guard his secret. But the memory was
+no longer strong enough. He bowed his head in assent.
+
+"In Calcutta?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Your Highness shall point her out to me one evening as she drives in the
+Maidan," said Ahmed Ismail, and again Shere Ali answered--
+
+"Yes."
+
+But he caught himself back the next moment. He flung away from Ahmed
+Ismail with a harsh outburst of laughter.
+
+"But this is all folly," he cried. "We are not in the days of the
+uprising," for thus he termed now what a month ago he would have called
+"The Mutiny." "Cawnpore is not Calcutta," and he turned in a gust of fury
+upon Ahmed Ismail. "Do you play with me, Ahmed Ismail?"
+
+"Upon my head, no! Light of my life, hope of my race, who would dare?"
+and he was on the ground at Shere Ali's feet. "Do I indeed speak follies?
+I pray your Highness to bethink you that the summer sets its foot upon
+the plains. She will go to the hills, Huzoor. She will go to the hills.
+And your people are not fools. They have cunning to direct their
+strength. See, your Highness, is there a regiment in Peshawur whose
+rifles are safe, guard them howsoever carefully they will? Every week
+they are brought over the hills into Chiltistan that we may be ready for
+the Great Day," and Ahmed Ismail chuckled to himself. "A month ago,
+Huzoor, so many rifles had been stolen that a regiment in camp locked
+their rifles to their tent poles, and so thought to sleep in peace. But
+on the first night the cords of the tents were cut, and while the men
+waked and struggled under the folds of canvas, the tent poles with the
+rifles chained to them were carried away. All those rifles are now in
+Kohara. Surely, Huzoor, if they can steal the rifles from the middle of a
+camp, they can steal a weak girl among the hills."
+
+Ahmed Ismail waited in suspense, with his forehead bowed to the ground,
+and when the answer came he smiled. He had made good use of this
+unexpected inducement which had been given to him. He knew very well that
+nothing but an unlikely chance would enable him to fulfil his promise.
+But that did not matter. The young Prince would point out the
+Englishwoman in the Maidan and, at a later time when all was ready in
+Chiltistan, a fine and obvious attempt should be made to carry her off.
+The pretence might, if occasion served, become a reality, to be sure, but
+the attempt must be as public as possible. There must be no doubt as to
+its author. Shere Ali, in a word, must be committed beyond any
+possibility of withdrawal. Ahmed Ismail himself would see to that.
+
+"Very well. I will point her out to you," said Shere Ali, and Ahmed
+Ismail rose to his feet. He waited before his master, silent and
+respectful. Shere Ali had no suspicion that he was being jockeyed by that
+respectful man into a hopeless rebellion. He had, indeed, lost sight of
+the fact that the rebellion must be hopeless.
+
+"When," he asked, "will Chiltistan be ready?"
+
+"As soon as the harvest is got in," replied Ahmed Ismail.
+
+Shere Ali nodded his head.
+
+"You and I will go northwards to-morrow," he said.
+
+"To Kohara?" asked Ahmed Ismail.
+
+"Yes."
+
+For a little while Ahmed Ismail was silent. Then he said: "If your
+Highness will allow his servant to offer a contemptible word of advice--"
+
+"Speak," said Shere Ali.
+
+"Then it might be wise, perhaps, to go slowly to Kohara. Your Highness
+has enemies in Chiltistan. The news of the melons and the bags of grain
+is spread abroad, and jealousy is aroused. For there are some who wish to
+lead when they should serve."
+
+"The son of Abdulla Mohammed," said Shere Ali.
+
+Ahmed Ismail shrugged his shoulders as though the son of Abdulla Mohammed
+were of little account. There was clearly another in his mind, and Shere
+Ali was quick to understand him.
+
+"My father," he said quietly. He remembered how his father had received
+him with his Snider rifle cocked and laid across his knees. This time the
+Snider would be fired if ever Shere Ali came within range of its bullet.
+But it was unlikely that he would get so far, unless he went quickly and
+secretly at an appointed time.
+
+"I had a poor foolish thought," said Ahmed Ismail, "not worthy a moment's
+consideration by my Prince."
+
+Shere Ali broke in impatiently upon his words.
+
+"Speak it."
+
+"If we travelled slowly to Ajmere, we should come to that town at the
+time of pilgrimage. There in secret the final arrangements can be made,
+so that the blow may fall upon an uncovered head."
+
+"The advice is good," said Shere Ali. But he spoke reluctantly. He wanted
+not to wait at all. He wanted to strike now while his anger was at its
+hottest. But undoubtedly the advice was good.
+
+Ahmed Ismail, carrying the light in his hand, went down the stairs before
+Shere Ali and along the passage to the door. There he extinguished the
+lamp and cautiously drew back the bolts. He looked out and saw that the
+street was empty.
+
+"There is no one," he said, and Shere Ali passed out to the mouth of the
+blind alley and turned to the left towards the Maidan. He walked
+thoughtfully and did not notice a head rise cautiously above the side of
+a cart in the mouth of the alley. It was the head of the reporter of
+Bande Mataram, whose copy would be assuredly too late for the press.
+
+Shere Ali walked on through the streets. It was late, and he met no one.
+There had come upon him during the last hours a great yearning for his
+own country. He ran over in his mind, with a sense of anger against
+himself, the miserable wasted weeks in Calcutta--the nights in the
+glaring bars and halls, the friends he had made, the depths in which he
+had wallowed. He came to the Maidan, and, standing upon that empty plain,
+gazed round on the great silent city. He hated it, with its statues of
+Viceroys and soldiers, its houses of rich merchants, its insolence. He
+would lead his own people against all that it symbolised. Perhaps, some
+day, when all the frontier was in flame, and the British power rolled
+back, he and his people might pour down from the hills and knock even
+against the gates of Calcutta. Men from the hills had come down to Tonk,
+and Bhopal, and Rohilcund, and Rampur, and founded kingdoms for
+themselves. Why should he and his not push on to Calcutta?
+
+He bared his head to the night wind. He was uplifted, and fired with mad,
+impossible dreams. All that he had learned was of little account to him
+now. It might be that the English, as Colonel Dewes had said, had
+something of an army. Let them come to Chiltistan and prove their boast.
+
+"I will go north to the hills," he cried, and with a shock he understood
+that, after all, he had recovered his own place. The longing at his heart
+was for his own country--for his own people. It might have been bred of
+disappointment and despair. Envy of the white people might have cradled
+it, desire for the white woman might have nursed it into strength. But it
+was alive now. That was all of which Shere Ali was conscious. The
+knowledge filled all his thoughts. He had his place in the world. Greatly
+he rejoiced.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+SHERE ALI'S PILGRIMAGE
+
+
+There were times when Ralston held aloft his hands and cursed the Indian
+administration by all his gods. But he never did so with a more
+whole-hearted conviction than on the day when he received word that
+Linforth had been diverted to Rawal Pindi, in order that he might take up
+purely military duties. It took Ralston just seven months to secure his
+release, and it was not until the early days of autumn had arrived that
+Linforth at last reached Peshawur. A landau, with a coachman and groom in
+scarlet liveries, was waiting for him at the station, and he drove along
+the broad road through the cantonment to Government House. As the
+carriage swung in at the gates, a tall, thin man came from the
+croquet-ground on the left. He joined Dick in the porch.
+
+"You are Mr. Linforth?" he said.
+
+"Yes."
+
+For a moment a pair of grey, tired eyes ran Dick over from head to foot
+in a careless scrutiny. Apparently, however, the scrutiny was favourable.
+
+"I am the Chief Commissioner. I am glad that you have come. My sister
+will give you some tea, and afterwards, if you are not tired, we might go
+for a ride together. You would like to see your room first."
+
+Ralston spoke with his usual indifference. There was no intonation in his
+voice which gave to any one sentence a particular meaning; and for a
+particular meaning Dick Linforth was listening with keen ears. He
+followed Ralston across the hall to his room, and disappointment gained
+upon him with every step. He had grown familiar with disappointment of
+late years, but he was still young enough in years and spirit to expect
+the end of disappointment with each change in his fortunes. He had
+expected it when the news of his appointment had reached him in Calcutta,
+and disappointment had awaited him in Bombay. He had expected it again
+when, at last, he was sent from Rawal Pindi to Peshawur. All the way up
+the line he had been watching the far hills of Cashmere, and repeating to
+himself, "At last! At last!"
+
+The words had been a song at his heart, tuned to the jolt and rhythm of
+the wheels. Ralston of Peshawur had asked for him. So much he had been
+told. His longing had explained to him why Ralston of Peshawur had asked
+for him, and easily he had believed the explanation. He was a Linforth,
+one of the Linforths of the Road. Great was his pride. He would not have
+bartered his position to be a General in command of a division. Ralston
+had sent for him because of his hereditary title to work upon the Road,
+the broad, permanent, graded Road which was to make India safe.
+
+And now he walked behind a tired and indifferent Commissioner, whose very
+voice officialdom had made phlegmatic, and on whose aspect was writ large
+the habit of routine. In this mood he sat, while Miss Ralston prattled to
+him about the social doings of Peshawur, the hunt, the golf; and in this
+mood he rode out with Ralston to the Gate of the City.
+
+They passed through the main street, and, turning to the right, ascended
+to an archway, above which rose a tower. At the archway they dismounted
+and climbed to the roof of the tower. Peshawur, with its crowded streets,
+its open bazaars, its balconied houses of mud bricks built into wooden
+frames, lay mapped beneath them. But Linforth's eyes travelled over the
+trees and the gardens northwards and eastwards, to where the foothills of
+the Himalayas were coloured with the violet light of evening.
+
+"Linforth," Ralston cried. He was leaning on the parapet at the opposite
+side of the tower, and Dick crossed and leaned at his side.
+
+"It was I who had you sent for," said Ralston in his dull voice. "When
+you were at Chatham, I mean. I worried them in Calcutta until they
+sent for you."
+
+Dick took his elbows from the parapet and stood up. His face took life
+and fire, there came a brightness as of joy into his eyes. After all,
+then, this time he was not to be disappointed.
+
+"I wanted you to come to Peshawur straight from Bombay six months ago,"
+Ralston went on. "But I counted without the Indian Government. They
+brought you out to India, at my special request, for a special purpose,
+and then, when they had got you, they turned you over to work which
+anyone else could have done. So six months have been wasted. But that's
+their little way."
+
+"You have special work for me?" said Linforth quietly enough, though his
+heart was beating quickly in his breast. An answer came which still
+quickened its beatings.
+
+"Work that you alone can do," Ralston replied gravely. But he was a man
+who had learned to hope for little, and to expect discouragements as his
+daily bread, and he added:
+
+"That is, if you can do it."
+
+Linforth did not answer at once. He was leaning with his elbows on the
+parapet, and he raised a hand to the side of his face, that side on which
+Ralston stood. And so he remained, shutting himself in with his thoughts,
+and trying to think soberly. But his head whirled. Below him lay the city
+of Peshawur. Behind him the plains came to an end, and straight up from
+them, like cliffs out of the sea, rose the dark hills, brown and grey and
+veined with white. Here on this tower of Northern India, the long dreams,
+dreamed for the first time on the Sussex Downs, and nursed since in every
+moment of leisure--in Alpine huts in days of storm, in his own quarters
+at Chatham--had come to their fulfilment.
+
+"I have lived for this work," he said in a low voice which shook ever so
+little, try as he might to quiet it. "Ever since I was a boy I have lived
+for it, and trained myself for it. It is the Road."
+
+Linforth's evident emotion came upon Ralston as an unexpected thing. He
+was carried back suddenly to his own youth, and was surprised to
+recollect that he, too, had once cherished great plans. He saw himself
+as he was to-day, and, side by side with that disillusioned figure, he
+saw himself as he had been in his youth. A smile of friendliness came
+over his face.
+
+"If I had shut my eyes," he said, "I should have thought it was your
+father who was speaking."
+
+Linforth turned quickly to Ralston.
+
+"My father. You knew him?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I never did," said Dick regretfully.
+
+Ralston nodded his head and continued:
+
+"Twenty-six years ago we were here in Peshawur together. We came up on
+to the top of this tower, as everyone does who comes to Peshawur. He was
+like you. He was dreaming night and day of the Great Road through
+Chiltistan to the foot of the Hindu Kush. Look!" and Ralston pointed
+down to the roof-tops of the city, whereon the women and children worked
+and played. For the most part they were enclosed within brick walls, and
+the two men looked down into them as you might look in the rooms of a
+doll's house by taking off the lid. Ralston pointed to one such open
+chamber just beneath their eyes. An awning supported on wooden pillars
+sheltered one end of it, and between two of these pillars a child
+swooped backwards and forwards in a swing. In the open, a woman, seated
+upon a string charpoy, rocked a cradle with her foot, while her hands
+were busy with a needle, and an old woman, with a black shawl upon her
+shoulders and head, sat near by, inactive. But she was talking. For at
+times the younger woman would raise her head, and, though at that
+distance no voice could be heard, it was evident that she was answering.
+"I remember noticing that roof when your father and I were talking up
+here all those years ago. There was just the same family group as you
+see now. I remember it quite clearly, for your father went away to
+Chiltistan the next day, and never came back. It was the last time I saw
+him, and we were both young and full of all the great changes we were to
+bring about." He smiled, half it seemed in amusement, half in regret.
+"We talked of the Road, of course. Well, there's just one change. The
+old woman, sitting there with the shawl upon her shoulders now, was in
+those days the young woman rocking the cradle and working with her
+needle. That's all. Troubles there have been, disturbances, an
+expedition or two--but there's no real change. Here are you talking of
+the Road just as your father did, not ambitious for yourself," he
+explained with a kindly smile which illumined his whole face, "but
+ambitious for the Road, and the Road still stops at Kohara."
+
+"But it will go on--now," cried Linforth.
+
+"Perhaps," said Ralston slowly. Then he stood up and confronted Linforth.
+
+"It was not that you might carry on the Road that I brought you out from
+England," he skid. "On the contrary."
+
+Once more disappointment seized upon Dick Linforth, and he found it all
+the more bitter in that he had believed a minute since that his dreams
+were to be fulfilled. He looked down upon Peshawur, and the words which
+Ralston had lately spoken, half in amusement, half with regret, suddenly
+took for him their full meaning. Was it true that there was no change
+but the change from the young woman to the old one, from enthusiasm to
+acquiescence? He was young, and the possibility chilled him and even
+inspired him with a kind of terror. Was he to carry the Road no further
+than his father had done? Would another Linforth in another generation
+come to the tower in Peshawur with hopes as high as his and with the
+like futility?
+
+"On the contrary?" he asked. "Then why?"
+
+"That you might stop the Road from going on," said Ralston quietly.
+
+In the very midst of his disappointment Linforth realised that he had
+misjudged his companion. Here was no official, here was a man. The
+attitude of indifference had gone, the air of lassitude with it. Here was
+a man quietly exacting the hardest service which it was in his power to
+exact, claiming it as a right, and yet making it clear by some subtle
+sympathy that he understood very well all that the service would cost to
+the man who served.
+
+"I am to hinder the making of that Road?" cried Linforth.
+
+"You are to do more. You are to prevent it."
+
+"I have lived so that it should be made."
+
+"So you have told me," said Ralston quietly, and Dick was silent. With
+each quiet sentence Ralston had become more and more the dominating
+figure. He was so certain, so assured. Linforth recognised him no longer
+as the man to argue with; but as the representative of Government which
+overrides predilections, sympathies, ambitions, and bends its servants to
+their duty.
+
+"I will tell you more," Ralston continued. "You alone can prevent the
+extension of the Road. I believe it--I know it. I sent to England for
+you, knowing it. Do your duty, and it may be that the Road will stop at
+Kohara--an unfinished, broken thing. Flinch, and the Road runs straight
+to the Hindu Kush. You will have your desire; but you will have failed."
+
+There was something implacable and relentless in the tone and the words.
+There was more, too. There was an intimation, subtly yet most clearly
+conveyed, that Ralston who spoke had in his day trampled his ambitions
+and desires beneath his feet in service to the Government, and asked no
+more now from Linforth than he himself had in his turn performed. "I,
+too, have lived in Arcady," he added. It twas this last intimation which
+subdued the protests in Linforth's mind. He looked at the worn face of
+the Commissioner, then he lifted his eyes and swept the horizon with his
+gaze. The violet light upon the hills had lost its brightness and its
+glamour. In the far distance the hills themselves were withdrawn.
+Somewhere in that great barrier to the east was the gap of the Malakand
+Pass, where the Road now began. Linforth turned away from the hills
+towards Peshawur.
+
+"What must I do?" he asked simply.
+
+Ralston nodded his head. His attitude relaxed, his voice lost its
+dominating note.
+
+"What you have to understand is this," he explained. "To drive the Road
+through Chiltistan means war. It would be the cause of war if we insisted
+upon it now, just as it was the cause of war when your father went up
+from Peshawur twenty-six years ago. Or it might be the consequence of
+war. If the Chiltis rose in arms, undoubtedly we should carry it on to
+secure control of the country in the future. Well, it is the last
+alternative that we are face to face with now."
+
+"The Chiltis might rise!" cried Linforth.
+
+"There is that possibility," Ralston returned. "We don't mean on our own
+account to carry on the Road; but the Chiltis might rise."
+
+"And how should I prevent them?" asked Dick Linforth in perplexity.
+
+"You know Shere Ali?" said Ralston
+
+"Yes."
+
+"You are a friend of his?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"A great friend. His chief friend?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"You have some control over him?"
+
+"I think so," said Linforth.
+
+"Very well," said Ralston. "You must use that control."
+
+Linforth's perplexity increased. That danger should come from Shere
+Ali--here was something quite incredible. He remembered their long talks,
+their joint ambition. A day passed in the hut in the Promontoire of the
+Meije stood out vividly in his memories. He saw the snow rising in a
+swirl of white over the Breche de la Meije, that gap in the rock-wall
+between the Meije and the Rateau, and driving down the glacier towards
+the hut. He remembered the eagerness, the enthusiasm of Shere Ali.
+
+"But he's loyal," Linforth cried. "There is no one in India more loyal."
+
+"He was loyal, no doubt," said Ralston, with a shrug of his shoulders,
+and, beginning with his first meeting with Shere Ali in Lahore, he told
+Linforth all that he knew of the history of the young Prince.
+
+"There can be no doubt," he said, "of his disloyalty," and he recounted
+the story of the melons and the bags of grain. "Since then he has been
+intriguing in Calcutta."
+
+"Is he in Calcutta now?" Linforth asked.
+
+"No," said Ralston. "He left Calcutta just about the time when you landed
+in Bombay. And there is something rather strange--something, I think,
+very disquieting in his movements since he left Calcutta. I have had him
+watched, of course. He came north with one of his own countrymen, and the
+pair of them have been seen at Cawnpore, at Lucknow, at Delhi."
+
+Ralston paused. His face had grown very grave, very troubled.
+
+"I am not sure," he said slowly. "It is difficult, however long you stay
+in India, to get behind these fellows' minds, to understand the thoughts
+and the motives which move them. And the longer you stay, the more
+difficult you realise it to be. But it looks to me as if Shere Ali had
+been taken by his companion on a sort of pilgrimage."
+
+Linforth started.
+
+"A pilgrimage!" and he added slowly, "I think I understand. A pilgrimage
+to all the places which could most inflame the passions of a native
+against the English race," and then he broke out in protest. "But it's
+impossible. I know Shere Ali. It's not reasonable--"
+
+Ralston interrupted him upon the utterance of the word.
+
+"Reasonable!" he cried. "You are in India. Do ever white men act
+reasonably in India?" and he turned with a smile. "There was a
+great-uncle of yours in the days of the John Company, wasn't there? Your
+father told me about him here on this tower. When his time was up, he
+sent his money home and took his passage, and then came back--came back
+to the mountains and disappeared. Very likely he may be sitting somewhere
+beyond that barrier of hills by a little shrine to this hour, an old, old
+man, reverenced as a saint, with a strip of cloth about his loins, and
+forgetful of the days when he ruled a district in the Plains. I should
+not wonder. It's not a reasonable country."
+
+Ralston, indeed, was not far out in his judgment. Ahmed Ismail had
+carried Shere Ali off from Calcutta. He had taken him first of all to
+Cawnpore, and had led him up to the gate of the enclosure, wherein are
+the Bibigarh, where the women and children were massacred, and the well
+into which their bodies were flung. An English soldier turned them back
+from that enclosure, refusing them admittance. Ahmed Ismail, knowing
+well that it would be so, smiled quietly under his moustache; but Shere
+Ali angrily pointed to some English tourists who were within the
+enclosure.
+
+"Why should we remain outside?" he asked.
+
+"They are Bilati," said Ahmed Ismail in a smooth voice as they moved
+away. "They are foreigners. The place is sacred to the foreigners. It is
+Indian soil; but the Indian may not walk on it; no, not though he were
+born next door. Yet why should we grumble or complain? We are the dirt
+beneath their feet. We are dogs and sons of dogs, and a hireling will
+turn our Princes from the gate lest the soles of our shoes should defile
+their sacred places. And are they not right, Huzoor?" he asked cunningly.
+"Since we submit to it, since we cringe at their indignities and fawn
+upon them for their insults, are they not right?"
+
+"Why, that's true, Ahmed Ismail," replied Shere Ali bitterly. He was in
+the mood to make much of any trifle. This reservation of the enclosure at
+Cawnpore was but one sign of the overbearing arrogance of the foreigners,
+the Bilati--the men from over the sea. He had fawned upon them himself in
+the days of his folly.
+
+"But turn a little, Huzoor," Ahmed whispered in his ear, and led him
+back. "Look! There is the Bibigarh where the women were imprisoned. That
+is the house. Through that opening Sirdar Khan and his four companions
+went--and shut the door behind them. In that room the women of Mecca
+knelt and prayed for mercy. Come away, Huzoor. We have seen. Those were
+days when there were men upon the plains of India."
+
+And Shere Ali broke out with a fierce oath.
+
+"Amongst the hills, at all events, there are men today. There is no
+sacred ground for them in Chiltistan."
+
+"Not even the Road?" asked Ahmed Ismail; and Shere Ali stopped dead,
+and stared at his companion with startled eyes. He walked away in
+silence after that; and for the rest of that day he said little to
+Ahmed Ismail, who watched him anxiously. At night, however, Ahmed was
+justified of his policy. For Shere Ali appeared before him in the white
+robes of a Mohammedan. Up till then he had retained the English dress.
+Now he had discarded it. Ahmed Ismail fell at his feet, and bowed
+himself to the ground.
+
+"My Lord! My Lord!" he cried, and there was no simulation in his outburst
+of joy. "Would that your people could behold you now! But we have much to
+see first. To-morrow we go to Lucknow."
+
+Accordingly the two men travelled the next day to Lucknow. Shere Ali was
+led up under the broken archway by Evans's Battery into the grounds of
+the Residency. He walked with Ahmed Ismail at his elbow on the green
+lawns where the golden-crested hoopoes flashed in the sunlight and the
+ruined buildings stood agape to the air. They looked peaceful enough, as
+they strolled from one battery to another, but all the while Ahmed Ismail
+preached his sermon into Shere Ali's ears. There Lawrence had died; here
+at the top of the narrow lane had stood Johannes's house whence Nebo the
+Nailer had watched day after day with his rifle in his hand. Hardly a
+man, be he never so swift, could cross that little lane from one quarter
+of the Residency to another, so long as daylight lasted and so long as
+Nebo the Nailer stood behind the shutters of Johannes's house. Shere Ali
+was fired by the story of that siege. By so little was the garrison
+saved. Ahmed Ismail led him down to a corner of the grounds and once more
+a sentry barred the way.
+
+"This is the graveyard," said Ahmed Ismail, and Shere Ali, looking up,
+stepped back with a look upon his face which Ahmed Ismail did not
+understand.
+
+"Huzoor!" he said anxiously, and Shere Ali turned upon him with an
+imperious word.
+
+"Silence, dog!" he cried. "Stand apart. I wish to be alone."
+
+His eyes were on the little church with the trees and the wall girding
+it in. At the side a green meadow with high trees, had the look of a
+playing-ground--the playing-ground of some great public school in
+England. Shere Ali's eyes took in the whole picture, and then saw it but
+dimly through a mist. For the little church, though he had never seen it
+before, was familiar and most moving. It was a model of the Royal Chapel
+at Eton, and, in spite of himself, as he gazed the tears filled his eyes
+and the memory of his schooldays ached at his heart. He yearned to be
+back once more in the shadow of that chapel with his comrades and his
+friends. Not yet had he wholly forgotten; he was softened out of his
+bitterness; the burden of his jealousy and his anger fell for awhile
+from his shoulders. When he rejoined Ahmed Ismail, he bade him follow
+and speak no word. He drove back to the town, and then only he spoke to
+Ahmed Ismail.
+
+"We will go from Lucknow to-day," he said. "I will not sleep in
+this town."
+
+"As your Highness wills," said Ahmed Ismail humbly, and he went into the
+station and bought tickets for Delhi. It was on a Thursday morning that
+the pair reached that town; and that day Ahmed Ismail had an unreceptive
+listener for his sermons. The monument before the Post Office, the
+tablets on the arch of the arsenal, even the barracks in the gardens of
+the Moghul Palace fired no antagonism in the Prince, who so short a time
+ago had been a boy at Eton. The memories evoked by the little church at
+Lucknow had borne him company all night and still clung to him that day.
+He was homesick for his school. Only twice was he really roused.
+
+The first instance took place when he was driving along the Chandni
+Chauk, the straight broad tree-fringed street which runs from the Lahore
+Gate to the Fort. Ahmed Ismail sat opposite to him, and, leaning forward,
+he pointed to a tree and to a tall house in front of the tree.
+
+"My Lord," said he, "could that tree speak, what groans would one hear!"
+
+"Why?" said Shere Ali listlessly.
+
+"Listen, your Highness," said Ahmed Ismail. Like the rest of his
+countrymen, he had a keen love for a story. And the love was the keener
+when he himself had the telling of it. He sat up alertly. "In that house
+lived an Englishman of high authority. He escaped when Delhi was seized
+by the faithful. He came back when Delhi was recaptured by the infidels.
+And there he sat with an English officer, at his window, every morning
+from eight to nine. And every morning from eight to nine every native who
+passed his door was stopped and hanged upon that tree, while he looked
+on. Huzoor, there was no inquiry. It might be some peaceable merchant,
+some poor man from the countryside. What did it matter? There was a
+lesson to be taught to this city. And so whoever walked down the Chandni
+Chauk during that hour dangled from those branches. Huzoor, for a week
+this went on--for a whole week."
+
+The story was current in Delhi. Ahmed Ismail found it to his hand, and
+Shere Ali did not question it. He sat up erect, and something of the
+fire which this last day had been extinct kindled again in his sombre
+eyes. Later on he drove along the sinuous road on the top of the ridge,
+and as he looked over Delhi, hidden amongst its foliage, he saw the
+great white dome of the Jumma Musjid rising above the tree-tops, like a
+balloon. "The Mosque," he said, standing up in his carriage. "To-morrow
+we will worship there."
+
+Before noon the next day he mounted the steep broad flight of steps and
+passed under the red sandstone arch into the vast enclosure. He performed
+his ablutions at the fountain, and, kneeling upon the marble tiles,
+waited for the priest to ascend the ladder on to the wooden platform. He
+knelt with Ahmed Ismail at his side, in the open, amongst the lowliest.
+In front of him rows of worshippers knelt and bowed their foreheads to
+the tiles--rows and rows covering the enclosure up to the arches of the
+mosque itself. There were others too--rows and rows within the arches, in
+the dusk of the mosque itself, and from man to man emotion passed like a
+spark upon the wind. The crowd grew denser, there came a suspense, a
+tension. It gained upon all, it laid its clutch upon Shere Ali. He ceased
+to think, even upon his injuries, he was possessed with expectancy. And
+then a man kneeling beside him interrupted his prayers and began to curse
+fiercely beneath his breath.
+
+"May they burn, they and their fathers and their children, to the last
+generation!" And he added epithets of a surprising ingenuity. The while
+he looked backwards over his shoulder.
+
+Shere Ali followed his example. He saw at the back of the enclosure, in
+the galleries which surmounted the archway and the wall, English men and
+English women waiting. Shere Ali's blood boiled at the sight. They were
+laughing, talking. Some of them had brought sandwiches and were eating
+their lunch. Others were taking photographs with their cameras. They were
+waiting for the show to begin.
+
+Shere Ali followed the example of his neighbour and cursed them. All his
+anger kindled again and quickened into hatred. They were so careful of
+themselves, so careless of others!
+
+"Not a Mohammedan," he cried to himself, "must set foot in their
+graveyard at Lucknow, but they come to our mosque as to a show."
+
+Suddenly he saw the priest climb the ladder on to the high wooden
+platform in front of the central arch of the mosque and bow his forehead
+to the floor. His voice rang out resonant and clear and confident over
+that vast assemblage.
+
+"There is only one God."
+
+And a shiver passed across the rows of kneeling men, as though
+unexpectedly a wind had blown across a ripe field of corn. Shere Ali was
+moved like the rest, but all the while at the back of his mind there was
+the thought of those white people in the galleries.
+
+"They are laughing at us, they are making a mock of us, they think we
+are of no account." And fiercely he called upon his God, the God of the
+Mohammedans, to root them out from the land and cast them as weeds in
+the flame.
+
+The priest stood up erect upon the platform, and with a vibrating voice,
+now plaintive and conveying some strange sense of loneliness, now loud in
+praise, now humble in submission, he intoned the prayers. His voice rose
+and sank, reverberating back over the crowded courtyard from the walls of
+the mosque. Shere Ali prayed too, but he prayed silently, with all the
+fervour of a fanatic, that it might be his hand which should drive the
+English to their ships upon the sea.
+
+When he rose and came out from the mosque he turned to Ahmed Ismail.
+
+"There are some of my people in Delhi?"
+
+Ahmed Ismail bowed.
+
+"Let us go to them," said Shere Ali; he sought refuge amongst them from
+the thought of those people in the galleries. Ahmed Ismail was well
+content with the results of his pilgrimage. Shere Ali, as he paced the
+streets of Delhi with a fierce rapt look in his eyes, had the very aspect
+of a Ghazi fresh from the hills and bent upon murder and immolation.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+NEWS FROM AJMERE
+
+
+Something of this pilgrimage Ralston understood; and what he understood
+he explained to Dick Linforth on the top of the tower at Peshawur.
+Linforth, however, was still perplexed, still unconvinced.
+
+"I can't believe it," he cried; "I know Shere Ali so well."
+
+Ralston shook his head.
+
+"England overlaid the real man with a pretty varnish," he said. "That's
+all it ever does. And the varnish peels off easily when the man comes
+back to an Indian sun. There's not one of these people from the hills but
+has in him the makings of a fanatic. It's a question of circumstances
+whether the fanaticism comes to the top or not. Given the circumstances,
+neither Eton, nor Oxford, nor all the schools and universities rolled
+into one would hinder the relapse."
+
+"But why?" exclaimed Linforth. "Why should Shere Ali have relapsed?"
+
+"Disappointment here, flattery in England--there are many reasons.
+Usually there's a particular reason."
+
+"And what is that?" asked Linforth.
+
+"The love of a white woman."
+
+Ralston was aware that Linforth at his side started. He started ever so
+slightly. But Ralston was on the alert. He made no sign, however, that he
+had noticed anything.
+
+"I know that reason held good in Shere Ali's case," Ralston went on;
+and there came a change in Linforth's voice. It grew rather stern,
+rather abrupt.
+
+"Why? Has he talked?"
+
+"Not that I know of. Nevertheless, I am sure that there was one who
+played a part in Shere Ali's life," said Ralston. "I have known it ever
+since I first met him--more than a year ago on his way northwards to
+Chiltistan. He stopped for a day at Lahore and rode out with me. I told
+him that the Government expected him to marry as soon as possible, and
+settle down in his own country. I gave him that advice deliberately. You
+see I wanted to find out. And I did find out. His consternation, his
+anger, answered me clearly enough. I have no doubt that there was someone
+over there in England--a woman, perhaps an innocent woman, who had been
+merely careless--perhaps--"
+
+But he did not finish the sentence. Linforth interrupted him before he
+had time to complete it. And he interrupted without flurry or any sign of
+agitation.
+
+"There was a woman," he said. "But I don't think she was thoughtless.
+I don't see how she could have known that there was any danger in her
+friendliness. For she was merely friendly to Shere Ali. I know her
+myself."
+
+The answer was given frankly and simply. For once Ralston was outwitted.
+Dick Linforth had Violet Oliver to defend, and the defence was well done.
+Ralston was left without a suspicion that Linforth had any reason beyond
+the mere truth of the facts to spur him to defend her.
+
+"Yes, that's the mistake," said Ralston. "The woman's friendly and means
+no more than she says or looks. But these fellows don't understand such
+friendship. Shere Ali is here dreaming of a woman he knows he can never
+marry--because of his race. And so he's ready to run amuck. That's what
+it comes to."
+
+He turned away from the city as he spoke and took a step or two towards
+the flight of stone stairs which led down from the tower.
+
+"Where is Shere Ali now?" Linforth asked, and Ralston stopped and came
+back again.
+
+"I don't know," he said. "But I shall know, and very soon. There may be a
+letter waiting for me at home. You see, when there's trouble brewing over
+there behind the hills, and I want to discover to what height it has
+grown and how high it's likely to grow, I select one of my police, a
+Pathan, of course, and I send him to find out."
+
+"You send him over the Malakand," said Linforth, with a glance
+towards the great hill-barrier. He was to be astonished by the answer
+Ralston gave.
+
+"No. On the contrary, I send him south. I send him to Ajmere, in
+Rajputana."
+
+"In Ajmere?" cried Linforth.
+
+"Yes. There is a great Mohammedan shrine. Pilgrims go there from all
+parts, but mostly from beyond the frontier. I get my fingers on the pulse
+of the frontier in Ajmere more surely than I should if I sent spies up
+into the hills. I have a man there now. But that's not all. There's a
+great feast in Ajmere this week. And I think I shall find out from there
+where Shere Ali is and what he's doing. As soon as I do find out, I want
+you to go to him."
+
+"I understand," said Linforth. "But if he has changed so much, he will
+have changed to me."
+
+"Yes," Ralston admitted. He turned again towards the steps, and the two
+men descended to their horses. "That's likely enough. They ought to have
+sent you to me six months ago. Anyway, you must do your best." He climbed
+into the saddle, and Linforth did the same.
+
+"Very well," said Dick, as they rode through the archway. "I will do my
+best," and he turned towards Ralston with a smile. "I'll do my best to
+hinder the Road from going on."
+
+It was a queer piece of irony that the first real demand made upon him in
+his life was that he should stop the very thing on the accomplishment of
+which his hopes were set. But there was his friend to save. He comforted
+himself with that thought. There was his friend rushing blindly upon
+ruin. Linforth could not doubt it. How in the world could Shere Ali, he
+wondered. He could not yet dissociate the Shere Ali of to-day from the
+boy and the youth who had been his chum.
+
+They passed out of the further gate of Peshawur and rode along the broad
+white road towards Government House. It was growing dark, and as they
+turned in at the gateway of the garden, lights shone in the windows ahead
+of them. The lights recalled to Ralston's mind a fact which he had
+forgotten to mention.
+
+"By the way," he said, turning towards Linforth, "we have a lady staying
+with us who knows you."
+
+Linforth leaned forward in his saddle and stooped as if to adjust a
+stirrup, and it was thus a second or two before he answered.
+
+"Indeed!" he said. "Who is she?"
+
+"A Mrs. Oliver," replied Ralston, "She was at Srinagar in Cashmere this
+summer, staying with the Resident. My sister met her there, I think she
+told Mrs. Oliver you were likely to come to us about this time."
+
+Dick's heart leaped within him suddenly. Had Violet Oliver arranged her
+visit so that it might coincide with his? It was at all events a pleasant
+fancy to play with. He looked up at the windows of the house. She was
+really there! After all these months he would see her. No wonder the
+windows were bright. As they rode up to the porch and the door was
+opened, he heard her voice. She was singing in the drawing-room, and the
+door of the drawing-room stood open. She sang in a low small voice, very
+pretty to the ear, and she was accompanying herself softly on the piano.
+Dick stood for a while listening in the lofty hall, while Ralston looked
+over his letters which were lying upon a small table. He opened one of
+them and uttered an exclamation.
+
+"This is from my man at Ajmere," he said, but Dick paid no attention.
+Ralston glanced through the letter.
+
+"He has found him," he cried. "Shere Ali is in Ajmere."
+
+It took a moment or two for the words to penetrate to Linforth's mind.
+Then he said slowly:
+
+"Oh! Shere Ali's in Ajmere. I must start for Ajmere to-morrow."
+
+Ralston looked up from his letters and glanced at Linforth. Something in
+the abstracted way in which Linforth had spoken attracted his attention.
+He smiled:
+
+"Yes, it's a pity," he said. But again it seemed that Linforth did not
+hear. And then the voice at the piano stopped abruptly as though the
+singer had just become aware that there were people talking in the hall.
+Linforth moved forward, and in the doorway of the drawing-room he came
+face to face with Violet Oliver. Ralston smiled again.
+
+"There's something between those two," he said to himself. But Linforth
+had kept his secrets better half an hour ago. For it did not occur to
+Ralston to suspect that there had been something also between Violet
+Oliver and Shere Ali.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+IN THE ROSE GARDEN
+
+
+"Let us go out," said Linforth.
+
+It was after dinner on the same evening, and he was standing with Violet
+Oliver at the window of the drawing-room. Behind them an officer and his
+wife from the cantonment were playing "Bridge" with Ralston and his
+sister. Violet Oliver hesitated. The window opened upon the garden.
+Already Linforth's hand was on the knob.
+
+"Very well," she said. But there was a note of reluctance in her voice.
+
+"You will need a cloak," he said.
+
+"No," said Violet Oliver. She had a scarf of lace in her hand, and she
+twisted it about her throat. Linforth opened the long window and they
+stepped out into the garden. It was a clear night of bright stars. The
+chill of sunset had passed, the air was warm. It was dark in spite of the
+stars. The path glimmered faintly in front of them.
+
+"I was hoping very much that I should meet you somewhere in India," said
+Dick. "Lately I had grown afraid that you would be going home before the
+chance came."
+
+"You left it to chance," said Violet.
+
+The reluctance had gone from her voice; but in its place there was
+audible a note of resentment. She had spoken abruptly and a little
+sharply, as though a grievance present in her mind had caught her
+unawares and forced her to give it utterance.
+
+"No," replied Linforth, turning to her earnestly. "That's not fair. I did
+not know where you were. I asked all who might be likely to know. No one
+could tell me. I could not get away from my station. So that I had to
+leave it to chance."
+
+They walked down the drive, and then turned off past the croquet lawn
+towards a garden of roses and jasmine and chrysanthemums.
+
+"And chance, after all, has been my friend," he said with a smile.
+
+Violet Oliver stopped suddenly. Linforth turned to her. They were walking
+along a narrow path between high bushes of rhododendrons. It was very
+dark, so that Linforth could only see dimly her face and eyes framed in
+the white scarf which she had draped over her hair. But even so he could
+see that she was very grave.
+
+"I was wondering whether I should tell you," she said quietly. "It was
+not chance which brought me here--which brought us together again."
+
+Dick came to her side.
+
+"No?" he asked, looking down into her face. He spoke very gently, and
+with a graver voice than he had used before.
+
+"No," she answered. Her eyes were raised to his frankly and simply. "I
+heard that you were to be here. I came on that account. I wanted to see
+you again."
+
+As she finished she walked forward again, and again Linforth walked at
+her side. Dick, though his settled aim had given to him a manner and an
+aspect beyond his age, was for the same reason younger than his years in
+other ways. Very early in his youth he had come by a great and definite
+ambition, he had been inspired by it, he had welcomed and clung to it
+with the simplicity and whole-heartedness which are of the essence of
+youth. It was always new to him, however long he pondered over it; his
+joy in it was always fresh. He had never doubted either the true gold of
+the thing he desired, or his capacity ultimately to attain it. But he had
+ordered his life towards its attainment with the method of a far older
+man, examining each opportunity which came his way with always the one
+question in his mind--"Does it help?"--and leaving or using that
+opportunity according to the answer. Youth, however, was the truth of
+him. The inspiration, the freshness, the simplicity of outlook--these
+were the dominating elements in his character, and they were altogether
+compact of youth. He looked upon the world with expectant eyes and an
+unfaltering faith. Nor did he go about to detect intrigues in men or
+deceits in women. Violet's words therefore moved him not merely to
+tenderness, but to self-reproach.
+
+"It is very kind of you to say that," he said, and he turned to her
+suddenly. "Because you mean it."
+
+"It is true," said Violet simply; and the next moment she was aware that
+someone very young was standing before her in that Indian garden beneath
+the starlit sky and faltering out statements as to his unworthiness. The
+statements were familiar to her ears, but there was this which was
+unfamiliar: they stirred her to passion.
+
+She stepped back, throwing out a hand as if to keep him from her.
+
+"Don't," she whispered. "Don't!"
+
+She spoke like one who is hurt. Amongst the feelings which had waked in
+her, dim and for the most part hardly understood, two at all events were
+clear. One a vague longing for something different from the banal path
+she daily trod, the other a poignant regret that she was as she was.
+
+But Linforth caught the hand which she held out to thrust him off, and,
+clasping it, drew her towards him.
+
+"I love you," he said; and she answered him in desperation:
+
+"But you don't know me."
+
+"I know that I want you. I know that I am not fit for you."
+
+And Violet Oliver laughed harshly.
+
+But Dick Linforth paid no attention to that laugh. His hesitation had
+gone. He found that for this occasion only he had the gift of tongues.
+There was nothing new and original in what he said. But, on the other
+hand, he said it over and over again, and the look upon his face and the
+tone of his voice were the things which mattered. At the opera it is the
+singer you listen to, and not the words of the song. So in this rose
+garden Violet Oliver listened to Dick Linforth rather than to what he
+said. There was audible in his voice from sentence to sentence, ringing
+through them, inspiring them, the reverence a young man's heart holds for
+the woman whom he loves.
+
+"You ought to marry, not me, but someone better," she cried. "There is
+someone I know--in--England--who--"
+
+But Linforth would not listen. He laughed to scorn the notion that there
+could be anyone better than Violet Oliver; and with each word he spoke he
+seemed to grow younger. It was as though a miracle had happened. He
+remained in her eyes what he really was, a man head and shoulders above
+her friends, and in fibre altogether different. Yet to her, and for her,
+he was young, and younger than the youngest. In spite of herself, the
+longing at her heart cried with a louder voice. She sought to stifle it.
+
+"There is the Road," she cried. "That is first with you. That is what you
+really care for."
+
+"No," he replied quietly. She had hoped to take him at a disadvantage.
+But he replied at once:
+
+"No. I have thought that out. I do not separate you from the Road. I put
+neither first. It is true that there was a time when the Road was
+everything to me. But that was before I met you--do you remember?--in the
+inn at La Grave."
+
+Violet Oliver looked curiously at Linforth--curiously, and rather
+quickly. But it seemed that he at all events did not remember that he had
+not come alone down to La Grave.
+
+"It isn't that I have come to care less for the Road," he went on. "Not
+by one jot. Rather, indeed, I care more. But I can't dissociate you from
+the Road. The Road's my life-work; but it will be the better done if it's
+done with your help. It will be done best of all if it's done for you."
+
+Violet Oliver turned away quickly, and stood with her head averted.
+Ardently she longed to take him at his word. A glimpse of a great life
+was vouchsafed to her, such as she had not dreamt of. That some time she
+would marry again, she had not doubted. But always she had thought of her
+husband to be, as a man very rich, with no ambition but to please her, no
+work to do which would thwart her. And here was another life offered, a
+life upon a higher, a more difficult plane; but a life much more worth
+living. That she saw clearly enough. But out of her self-knowledge sprang
+the insistent question:
+
+"Could I live it?"
+
+There would be sacrifices to be made by her. Could she make them? Would
+not dissatisfaction with herself follow very quickly upon her marriage?
+Out of her dissatisfaction would there not grow disappointment in her
+husband? Would not bitterness spring up between them and both their lives
+be marred?
+
+Dick was still holding her hand.
+
+"Let me see you," he said, drawing her towards him. "Let me see
+your face!"
+
+She turned and showed it. There was a great trouble in her eyes, her
+voice was piteous as she spoke.
+
+"Dick, I can't answer you. When I told you that I came here on purpose to
+meet you, that I wanted to see you again, it was true, all true. But oh,
+Dick, did I mean more?"
+
+"How should I know?" said Dick, with a quiet laugh--a laugh of happiness.
+
+"I suppose that I did. I wanted you to say just what you have said
+to-night. Yet now that you have said it--" she broke off with a cry.
+"Dick, I have met no one like you in my life. And I am very proud.
+Oh, Dick, my boy!" And she gave him her other hand. Tears glistened
+in her eyes.
+
+"But I am not sure," she went on. "Now that you have spoken, I am not
+sure. It would be all so different from what my life has been, from what
+I thought it would be. Dick, you make me ashamed."
+
+"Hush!" he said gently, as one might chide a child for talking nonsense.
+He put an arm about her, and she hid her face in his coat.
+
+"Yes, that's the truth, Dick. You make me ashamed."
+
+So she remained for a little while, and then she drew herself away.
+
+"I will think and tell you, Dick," she said.
+
+"Tell me now!"
+
+"No, not yet. It's all your life and my life, you know, Dick. Give me a
+little while."
+
+"I go away to-morrow."
+
+"To-morrow?" she cried.
+
+"Yes, I go to Ajmere. I go to find my friend. I must go."
+
+Violet started. Into her eyes there crept a look of fear, and she
+was silent.
+
+"The Prince?" she asked with a queer suspense in her voice.
+
+"Yes--Shere Ali," and Dick became perceptibly embarrassed. "He is not as
+friendly to us as he used to be. There is some trouble," he said lamely.
+
+Violet looked him frankly in the face. It was not her habit to
+flinch. She read and understood his embarrassment. Yet her eyes met
+his quite steadily.
+
+"I am afraid that I am the trouble," she said quietly.
+
+Dick did not deny the truth of what she said. On the other hand, he had
+as yet no thought or word of blame for her. There was more for her to
+tell. He waited to hear it.
+
+"I tried to avoid him here in India, as I told you I meant to do," she
+said. "I thought he was safe in Chiltistan. I did not let him know that I
+was coming out. I did not write to him after I had landed. But he came
+down to Agra--and we met. There he asked me to marry him."
+
+"He asked _you!_" cried Linforth. "He must have been mad to think that
+such a thing was possible."
+
+"He was very unhappy," Violet Oliver explained. "I told him that it was
+impossible. But he would not see. I am afraid that is the cause of his
+unfriendliness."
+
+"Yes," said Dick. Then he was silent for a little while.
+
+"But you are not to blame," he added at length, in a quiet but decisive
+voice; and he turned as though the subject were now closed.
+
+But Violet was not content. She stayed him with a gesture. She was driven
+that night to speak out all the truth. Certainly he deserved that she
+should make no concealment. Moreover, the truth would put him to the
+test, would show to her how deep his passion ran. It might change his
+thoughts towards her, and so she would escape by the easiest way the
+difficult problem she had to solve. And the easiest way was the way which
+Violet Oliver always chose to take.
+
+"I am to blame," she said. "I took jewels from him in London. Yes." She
+saw Dick standing in front of her, silent and with a face quite
+inscrutable, and she lowered her head and spoke with the submission of a
+penitent to her judge. "He offered me jewels. I love them," and she
+spread out her hands. "Yes, I cannot help it. I am a foolish lover of
+beautiful things. I took them. I made no promises, he asked for none.
+There were no conditions, he stipulated for none. He just offered me the
+pearls, and I took them. But very likely he thought that my taking them
+meant more than it did."
+
+"And where are they now?" asked Dick.
+
+She was silent for a perceptible time. Then she said:
+
+"I sent them back." She heard Dick draw a breath of relief, and she went
+on quickly, as though she had been in doubt what she should say and now
+was sure. "The same night--after he had asked me to marry him--I packed
+them up and sent them to him."
+
+"He has them now, then?" asked Linforth.
+
+"I don't know. I sent them to Kohara. I did not know in what camp he was
+staying. I thought it likely he would go home at once."
+
+"Yes," said Dick.
+
+They turned and walked back towards the house. Dick did not speak. Violet
+was afraid. She walked by his side, stealing every now and then a look at
+his set face. It was dark; she could see little but the profile. But she
+imagined it very stern, and she was afraid. She regretted now that she
+had spoken. She felt now that she could not lose him.
+
+"Dick," she whispered timidly, laying a hand upon his arm; but he made no
+answer. The lighted windows of the house blazed upon the night. Would he
+reach the door, pass in and be gone the next morning without another word
+to her except a formal goodnight in front of the others?
+
+"Oh, Dick," she said again, entreatingly; and at that reiteration of his
+name he stopped.
+
+"I am very sorry," he said gently. "But I know quite well--others have
+taken presents from these princes. It is a pity.... One rather hates it.
+But you sent yours back," and he turned to her with a smile. "The others
+have not always done as much. Yes, you sent yours back."
+
+Violet Oliver drew a breath of relief. She raised her face towards his.
+She spoke with pleading lips.
+
+"I am forgiven then?"
+
+"Hush!"
+
+And in a moment she was in his arms. Passion swept her away. It seemed to
+her that new worlds were opening before her eyes. There were heights to
+walk upon for her--even for her who had never dreamed that she would even
+see them near. Their lips touched.
+
+"Oh, Dick," she murmured. Her hands were clasped about his neck. She hid
+her face against his coat, and when he would raise it she would not
+suffer him. But in a little while she drew herself apart, and, holding
+his hands, looked at him with a great pride.
+
+"My Dick," she said, and she laughed--a low sweet laugh of happiness
+which thrilled to the heart of her lover.
+
+"I'll tell you something," she said. "When I said good-bye to him--to the
+Prince--he asked me if I was going to marry you."
+
+"And you answered?"
+
+"That you hadn't asked me."
+
+"Now I have. Violet!" he whispered.
+
+But now she held him off, and suddenly her face grew serious.
+
+"Dick, I will tell you something," she said, "now, so that I may never
+tell you it again. Remember it, Dick! For both our sakes remember it!"
+
+"Well?" he asked. "What is it?"
+
+"Don't forgive so easily," she said very gravely, "when we both know that
+there is something real to be forgiven." She let go of his hands before
+he could answer, and ran from him up the steps into the house. Linforth
+saw no more of her that night.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+THE BREAKING OF THE PITCHER
+
+
+It is a far cry from Peshawur to Ajmere, and Linforth travelled in the
+train for two nights and the greater part of two days before he came to
+it. A little State carved out of Rajputana and settled under English
+rule, it is the place of all places where East and West come nearest to
+meeting. Within the walls of the city the great Dargah Mosque, with its
+shrine of pilgrimage and its ancient rites, lies close against the foot
+of the Taragarh Hill. Behind it the mass of the mountain rises steeply to
+its white crown of fortress walls. In front, its high bright-blue
+archway, a thing of cupolas and porticoes, faces the narrow street of the
+grain-sellers and the locksmiths. Here is the East, with its memories of
+Akbar and Shah Jehan, its fiery superstitions and its crudities of
+decoration. Gaudy chandeliers of coloured glass hang from the roof of a
+marble mosque, and though the marble may crack and no one give heed to
+it, the glass chandeliers will be carefully swathed in holland bags. Here
+is the East, but outside the city walls the pile of Mayo College rises
+high above its playing-grounds and gives to the princes and the chiefs of
+Rajputana a modern public school for the education of their sons.
+
+From the roof top of the college tower Linforth looked to the city
+huddled under the Taragarh Hill, and dimly made out the high archway of
+the mosque. He turned back to the broad playing-fields at his feet where
+a cricket match was going on. There was the true solution of the great
+problem, he thought.
+
+"Here at Ajmere," he said to himself, "Shere Ali could have learned what
+the West had to teach him. Had he come here he would have been spared the
+disappointments, and the disillusions. He would not have fallen in with
+Violet Oliver. He would have married and ruled in his own country."
+
+As it was, he had gone instead to Eton and to Oxford, and Linforth must
+needs search for him over there in the huddled city under the Taragarh
+Hill. Ralston's Pathan was even then waiting for Linforth at the bottom
+of the tower.
+
+"Sir," he said, making a low salaam when Linforth had descended, "His
+Highness Shere Ali is now in Ajmere. Every morning between ten and eleven
+he is to be found in a balcony above the well at the back of the Dargah
+Mosque, and to-morrow I will lead you to him."
+
+"Every morning!" said Linforth. "What does he do upon this balcony?"
+
+"He watches the well below, and the water-carriers descending with their
+jars," said the Pathan, "and he talks with his friends. That is all."
+
+"Very well," said Linforth. "To-morrow we will go to him."
+
+He passed up the steps under the blue portico a little before the hour on
+the next morning, and entered a stone-flagged court which was thronged
+with pilgrims. On each side of the archway a great copper vat was raised
+upon stone steps, and it was about these two vats that the crowd
+thronged. Linforth and his guide could hardly force their way through. On
+the steps of the vats natives, wrapped to the eyes in cloths to save
+themselves from burns, stood emptying the caldrons of boiling ghee. And
+on every side Linforth heard the name of Shere Ali spoken in praise.
+
+"What does it mean?" he asked of his guide, and the Pathan replied:
+
+"His Highness the Prince has made an offering. He has filled those
+caldrons with rice and butter and spices, as pilgrims of great position
+and honour sometimes do. The rice is cooked in the vats, and so many jars
+are set aside for the strangers, while the people of Indrakot have
+hereditary rights to what is left. Sir, it is an act of great piety to
+make so rich an offering."
+
+Linforth looked at the swathed men scrambling, with cries of pain, for
+the burning rice. He remembered how lightly Shere Ali had been wont to
+speak of the superstitions of the Mohammedans and in what contempt he
+held the Mullahs of his country. Not in those days would he have
+celebrated his pilgrimage to the shrine of Khwajah Mueeyinudin Chisti by
+a public offering of ghee.
+
+Linforth looked back upon the Indrakotis struggling and scrambling and
+burning themselves on the steps about the vast caldrons, and the crowd
+waiting and clamouring below. It was a scene grotesque enough in all
+conscience, but Linforth was never further from smiling than at this
+moment. A strong intuition made him grave.
+
+"Does this mark Shere Ali's return to the ways of his fathers?" he asked
+himself. "Is this his renunciation of the White People?"
+
+He moved forward slowly towards the inner archway, and the Pathan at his
+side gave a new turn to his thoughts.
+
+"Sir, that will be talked of for many months," the Pathan said. "The
+Prince will gain many friends who up till now distrust him."
+
+"It will be taken as a sign of faith?" asked Linforth.
+
+"And more than that," said the guide significantly. "This one thing
+done here in Ajmere to-day will be spread abroad through Chiltistan
+and beyond."
+
+Linforth looked more closely at the crowd. Yes, there were many men there
+from the hills beyond the Frontier to carry the news of Shere Ali's
+munificence to their homes.
+
+"It costs a thousand rupees at the least to fill one of those caldrons,"
+said the Pathan. "In truth, his Highness has done a wise thing if--"
+And he left the sentence unfinished.
+
+But Linforth could fill in the gap.
+
+"If he means to make trouble."
+
+But he did not utter the explanation aloud.
+
+"Let us go in," he said; and they passed through the high inner archway
+into the great court where the saint's tomb, gilded and decked out with
+canopies and marble, stands in the middle.
+
+"Follow me closely," said the Pathan. "There may be bad men. Watch any
+who approach you, and should one spit, I beseech your Excellency to
+pay no heed."
+
+The huge paved square, indeed, was thronged like a bazaar. Along the wall
+on the left hand booths were erected, where food and sweetmeats were
+being sold. Stone tombs dotted the enclosure; and amongst them men walked
+up and down, shouting and talking. Here and there big mango and peepul
+trees threw a welcome shade.
+
+The Pathan led Linforth to the right between the Chisti's tomb and the
+raised marble court surrounded by its marble balustrade in front of the
+long mosque of Shah Jehan. Behind the tomb there were more trees, and the
+shrine of a dancing saint, before which dancers from Chitral were moving
+in and out with quick and flying steps. The Pathan led Linforth quickly
+through the groups, and though here and there a man stood in their way
+and screamed insults, and here and there one walked along beside them
+with a scowling face and muttered threats, no one molested them.
+
+The Pathan turned to the right, mounted a few steps, and passed under a
+low stone archway. Linforth found himself upon a balcony overhanging a
+great ditch between the Dargah and Taragarh Hill. He leaned forward over
+the balustrade, and from every direction, opposite to him, below him,
+and at the ends, steps ran down to the bottom of the gulf--twisting and
+turning at every sort of angle, now in long lines, now narrow as a
+stair. The place had the look of some ancient amphitheatre. And at the
+bottom, and a little to the right of the balcony, was the mouth of an
+open spring.
+
+"The Prince is here, your Excellency."
+
+Linforth looked along the balcony. There were only three men standing
+there, in white robes, with white turbans upon their heads. The turban of
+one was hemmed with gold. There was gold, too, upon his robe.
+
+"No," said Linforth. "He has not yet come," and even as he turned again
+to look down into that strange gulf of steps the man with the gold-hemmed
+turban changed his attitude and showed Linforth the profile of his face.
+
+Linforth was startled.
+
+"Is that the Prince?" he exclaimed. He saw a man, young to be sure, but
+older than Shere Ali, and surely taller too. He looked more closely. That
+small carefully trimmed black beard might give the look of age, the long
+robe add to his height. Yes, it was Shere Ali. Linforth walked along the
+balcony, and as he approached, Shere Ali turned quickly towards him. The
+blood rushed into his dark face; he stood staring at Linforth like a man
+transfixed.
+
+Linforth held out his hand with a smile.
+
+"I hardly knew you again," he said.
+
+Shere Ali did not take the hand outstretched to him; he did not move;
+neither did he speak. He just stood with his eyes fixed upon Linforth.
+But there was recognition in his eyes, and there was something more.
+Linforth recalled something that Violet Oliver had told to him in the
+garden at Peshawur--"Are you going to marry Linforth?" That had been
+Shere Ali's last question when he had parted from her upon the steps of
+the courtyard of the Fort. Linforth remembered it now as he looked into
+Shere Ali's face. "Here is a man who hates me," he said to himself. And
+thus, for the first time since they had dined together in the mess-room
+at Chatham, the two friends met.
+
+"Surely you have not forgotten me, Shere Ali?" said Linforth, trying to
+force his voice in to a note of cheery friendliness. But the attempt was
+not very successful. The look of hatred upon Shere Ali's face had died
+away, it is true. But mere impassivity had replaced it. He had aged
+greatly during those months. Linforth recognised that clearly now. His
+face was haggard, his eyes sunken. He was a man, moreover. He had been
+little more than a boy when he had dined with Linforth in the mess-room
+at Chatham.
+
+"After all," Linforth continued, and his voice now really had something
+of genuine friendliness, for he understood that Shere Ali had
+suffered--had suffered deeply; and he was inclined to forgive his
+temerity in proposing marriage to Violet Oliver--"after all, it is not so
+much more than a year ago when we last talked together of our plans."
+
+Shere Ali turned to the younger of the two who stood beside him and spoke
+a few words in a tongue which Linforth did not yet understand. The
+youth--he was a youth with a soft pleasant voice, a graceful manner and
+something of the exquisite in his person--stepped smoothly forward and
+repeated the words to Linforth's Pathan.
+
+"What does he say?" asked Linforth impatiently. The Pathan translated:
+
+"His Highness the Prince would be glad to know what your Excellency means
+by interrupting him."
+
+Linforth flushed with anger. But he had his mission to fulfil, if it
+could be fulfilled.
+
+"What's the use of making this pretence?" he said to Shere Ali. "You and
+I know one another well enough."
+
+And as he ended, Shere Ali suddenly leaned over the balustrade of the
+balcony. His two companions followed the direction of his eyes; and both
+their faces became alert with some expectancy. For a moment Linforth
+imagined that Shere Ali was merely pretending to be absorbed in what he
+saw. But he, too, looked, and it grew upon him that here was some matter
+of importance--all three were watching in so eager a suspense.
+
+Yet what they saw was a common enough sight in Ajmere, or in any other
+town of India. The balcony was built out from a brick wall which fell
+sheer to the bottom of the foss. But at some little distance from the end
+of the balcony and at the head of the foss, a road from the town broke
+the wall, and a flight of steep steps descended to the spring. The steps
+descended along the wall first of all towards the balcony, and then just
+below the end of it they turned, so that any man going down to the well
+would have his face towards the people on the balcony for half the
+descent and his back towards them during the second half.
+
+A water-carrier with an earthen jar upon his head had appeared at the top
+of the steps a second before Shere Ali had turned so abruptly away from
+Linforth. It was this man whom the three were watching. Slowly he
+descended. The steps were high and worn, smooth and slippery. He went
+down with his left hand against the wall, and the lizards basking in the
+sunlight scuttled into their crevices as he approached. On his right hand
+the ground fell in a precipice to the bottom of the gulf. The three men
+watched him, and, it seemed to Linforth, with a growing excitement as he
+neared the turn of the steps. It was almost as though they waited for him
+to slip just at that turn, where a slip was most likely to occur.
+
+Linforth laughed at the thought, but the thought suddenly gained
+strength, nay, conviction in his mind. For as the water-carrier reached
+the bend, turned in safety and went down towards the well, there was a
+simultaneous movement made by the three--a movement of disappointment.
+Shere Ali did more than merely move. He struck his hand upon the
+balustrade and spoke impatiently. But he did not finish the sentence, for
+one of his companions looked significantly towards Linforth and his
+Pathan. Linforth stepped forward again.
+
+"Shere Ali," he said, "I want to speak to you. It is important that
+I should."
+
+Shere Ali leaned his elbows on the balustrade, and gazing across the foss
+to the Taragarh Hill, hummed to himself a tune.
+
+"Have you forgotten everything?" Linforth went on. He found it difficult
+to say what was in his mind. He seemed to be speaking to a stranger--so
+great a gulf was between them now--a gulf as wide, as impassable, as this
+one at his feet between the balcony and the Taragarh Hill. "Have you
+forgotten that night when we sat in the doorway of the hut under the
+Aiguilles d'Arve? I remember it very clearly. You said to me, of your own
+accord, 'We will always be friends. No man, no woman, shall come between
+us. We will work together and we will always be friends.'"
+
+By not so much as the flicker of an eyelid did Shere Ali betray that he
+heard the words. Linforth sought to revive that night so vividly that he
+needs must turn, needs must respond to the call, and needs must renew
+the pledge.
+
+"We sat for a long while that night, smoking our pipes on the step of the
+door. It was a dark night. We watched a planet throw its light upwards
+from behind the amphitheatre of hills on the left, and then rise clear to
+view in a gap. There was a smell of hay, like an English meadow, from the
+hut behind us. You pledged your friendship that night. It's not so very
+long ago--two years, that's all."
+
+He came to a stop with a queer feeling of shame. He remembered the night
+himself, and always had remembered it. But he was not given to sentiment,
+and here he had been talking sentiment and to no purpose.
+
+Shere Ali spoke again to his courtier, and the courtier stepped forward
+more bland than ever.
+
+"His Highness would like to know if his Excellency is still talking, and
+if so, why?" he said to the Pathan, who translated it.
+
+Linforth gave up the attempt to renew his friendship with Shere Ali. He
+must go back to Peshawur and tell Ralston that he had failed. Ralston
+would merely shrug his shoulders and express neither disappointment nor
+surprise. But it was a moment of bitterness to Linforth. He looked at
+Shere Ali's indifferent face, he listened for a second or two to the tune
+he still hummed, and he turned away. But he had not taken more than a
+couple of steps towards the entrance of the balcony when his guide
+touched him cautiously upon the elbow.
+
+Linforth stopped and looked back. The three men were once more gazing at
+the steps which led down from the road to the well. And once more a
+water-carrier descended with his great earthen jar upon his head. He
+descended very cautiously, but as he came to the turn of the steps his
+foot slipped suddenly.
+
+Linforth uttered a cry, but the man had not fallen. He had tottered for a
+moment, then he had recovered himself. But the earthen jar which he
+carried on his head had fallen and been smashed to atoms.
+
+Again the three made a simultaneous movement, but this time it was a
+movement of joy. Again an exclamation burst from Shere Ali's lips, but
+now it was a cry of triumph.
+
+He stood erect, and at once he turned to go. As he turned he met
+Linforth's gaze. All expression died out of his face, but he spoke to his
+young courtier, who fluttered forward sniggering with amusement.
+
+"His Highness would like to know if his Excellency is interested in a
+Road. His Highness thinks it a damn-fool road. His Highness much regrets
+that he cannot even let it go beyond Kohara. His Highness wishes his
+Excellency good-morning."
+
+Linforth made no answer to the gibe. He passed out into the courtyard,
+and from the courtyard through the archway into the grain-market.
+Opposite to him at the end of the street, a grass hill, with the chalk
+showing at one bare spot on the side of it, ridged up against the sky
+curiously like a fragment of the Sussex Downs. Linforth wondered whether
+Shere Ali had ever noticed the resemblance, and whether some recollection
+of the summer which he had spent at Poynings had ever struck poignantly
+home as he had stood upon these steps. Or were all these memories quite
+dead within his breast?
+
+In one respect Shere Ali was wrong. The Road would go on--now. Linforth
+had done his best to hinder it, as Ralston had bidden him to do, but he
+had failed, and the Road would go on to the foot of the Hindu Kush. Old
+Andrew Linforth's words came back to his mind:
+
+"Governments will try to stop it; but the power of the Road will be
+greater than the power of any Government. It will wind through valleys so
+deep that the day's sunshine is gone within the hour. It will be carried
+in galleries along the faces of the mountains, and for eight months of
+the year sections of it will be buried deep in snow. Yet it will be
+finished."
+
+How rightly Andrew Linforth had judged! But Dick for once felt no joy in
+the accuracy of the old man's forecast. He walked back through the city
+silent and with a heavy heart. He had counted more than he had thought
+upon Shere Ali's co-operation. His friendship for Shere Ali had grown
+into a greater and a deeper force than he had ever imagined it until this
+moment to be. He stopped with a sense of weariness and disillusionment,
+and then walked on again. The Road would never again be quite the bright,
+inspiring thing which it had been. The dream had a shadow upon it. In the
+Eton and Oxford days he had given and given and given so much of himself
+to Shere Ali that he could not now lightly and easily lose him altogether
+out of his life. Yet he must so lose him, and even then that was not all
+the truth. For they would be enemies, Shere Ali would be ruined and cast
+out, and his ruin would be the opportunity of the Road.
+
+He turned quickly to his companion.
+
+"What was it that the Prince said," he asked, "when the first of those
+water-carriers came down the steps and did not slip? He beat his hands
+upon the balustrade of the balcony and cried out some words. It seemed to
+me that his companion warned him of your presence, and that he stopped
+with the sentence half spoken."
+
+"That is the truth," Linforth's guide replied. "The Prince cried out in
+anger, 'How long must we wait?'"
+
+Linforth nodded his head.
+
+"He looked for the pitcher to fall and it did not fall," he said. "The
+breaking of the pitcher was to be a sign."
+
+"And the sign was given. Do not forget that, your Excellency. The sign
+was given."
+
+But what did the sign portend? Linforth puzzled his brains vainly over
+that problem. He had not the knowledge by which a man might cipher out
+the intrigues of the hill-folk beyond the Frontier. Did the breaking of
+the pitcher mean that some definite thing had been done in Chiltistan,
+some breaking of the British power? They might look upon the _Raj_ as a
+heavy burden on their heads, like an earthen pitcher and as easily
+broken. Ralston would know.
+
+"You must travel back to Peshawur to-night," said Linforth. "Go
+straight to his Excellency the Chief Commissioner and tell him all that
+you saw upon the balcony and all that you heard. If any man can
+interpret it, it will be he. Meanwhile, show me where the Prince Shere
+Ali lodges in Ajmere."
+
+The policeman led Linforth to a tall house which closed in at one end a
+short and narrow street.
+
+"It is here," he said.
+
+"Very well," said Linforth, "I will seek out the Prince again. I will
+stay in Ajmere and try by some way or another to have talk with him."
+
+But again Linforth was to fail. He stayed for some days in Ajmere, but
+could never gain admittance to the house. He was put off with the
+politest of excuses, delivered with every appearance of deep regret. Now
+his Highness was unwell and could see no one but his physician. At
+another time he was better--so much better, indeed, that he was giving
+thanks to Allah for the restoration of his health in the Mosque of Shah
+Jehan. Linforth could not reach him, nor did he ever see him in the
+streets of Ajmere.
+
+He stayed for a week, and then coming to the house one morning he found
+it shuttered. He knocked upon the door, but no one answered his summons;
+all the reply he got was the melancholy echo of an empty house.
+
+A Babu from the Customs Office, who was passing at the moment, stopped
+and volunteered information.
+
+"There is no one there, Mister," he said gravely. "All have skedaddled to
+other places."
+
+"The Prince Shere Ali, too?" asked Linforth.
+
+The Babu laughed contemptuously at the title.
+
+"Oho, the Prince! The Prince went away a week ago."
+
+Linforth turned in surprise.
+
+"Are you sure?" he asked.
+
+The Babu told him the very day on which Shere Ali had gone from Ajmere.
+It was on the day when the pitcher had fallen on the steps which led down
+to the well. Linforth had been tricked by the smiling courtier like any
+schoolboy.
+
+"Whither did the Prince go?"
+
+The Babu shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"How should I know? They are not of my people, these poor ignorant
+hill-folk."
+
+He went on his way. Linforth was left with the assurance that now,
+indeed, he had really failed. He took the train that night back to
+Peshawur.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+AN ARRESTED CONFESSION
+
+
+Linforth related the history of his failure to Ralston in the office
+at Peshawur.
+
+"Shere Ali went away on the day the pitcher was broken," he said. "It was
+the breaking of the pitcher which gave him the notice to go; I am sure of
+it. If one only knew what message was conveyed--" and Ralston handed to
+him a letter.
+
+The letter had been sent by the Resident at Kohara and had only this day
+reached Peshawur. Linforth took it and read it through. It announced that
+the son of Abdulla Mahommed had been murdered.
+
+"You see?" said Ralston. "He was shot in the back by one of his
+attendants when he was out after Markhor. He was the leader of the rival
+faction, and was bidding for the throne against Shere Ali. His murder
+clears the way. I have no doubt your friend is over the Lowari Pass by
+this time. There will be trouble in Chiltistan. I would have stopped
+Shere Ali on his way up had I known."
+
+"But you don't think Shere Ali had this man murdered!" cried Linforth.
+
+Ralston shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"Why not? What else was he waiting for from ten to eleven in the balcony
+above the well, except just for this news?"
+
+He stopped for a moment, and went on again in a voice which was
+very grave.
+
+"That seems to you horrible. I am very much afraid that another thing,
+another murder much more horrible, will be announced down to me in the
+next few days. The son of Abdulla Mahommed stood in Shere Ali's way a
+week ago and he is gone. But the way is still not clear. There's still
+another in his path."
+
+Linforth interpreted the words according to the gravity with which they
+were uttered.
+
+"His father!" he said, and Ralston nodded his head.
+
+"What can we do?" he cried. "We can threaten--but what is the use of
+threatening without troops? And we mayn't use troops. Chiltistan is an
+independent kingdom. We can advise, but we can't force them to follow our
+advice. We accept the status quo. That's the policy. So long as
+Chiltistan keeps the peace with us we accept Chiltistan as it is and as
+it may be. We can protect if our protection is asked. But our protection
+has not been asked. Why has Shere Ali fled so quickly back to his
+country? Tell me that if you can."
+
+None the less, however, Ralston telegraphed at once to the authorities at
+Lahore. Linforth, though he had failed to renew his old comradeship with
+Shere Ali, had not altogether failed. He had brought back news which
+Ralston counted as of great importance. He had linked up the murder in
+Chiltistan with the intrigues of Shere Ali. That the glare was rapidly
+broadening over that country of hills and orchards Ralston was very well
+aware. But it was evident now that at any moment the eruption might take
+place, and fire pour down the hills. In these terms he telegraphed to
+Lahore. Quietly and quickly, once more after twenty-five years, troops
+were being concentrated at Nowshera for a rush over the passes into
+Chiltistan. But even so Ralston was urgent that the concentration should
+be hurried.
+
+He sent a letter in cipher to the Resident at Kohara, bidding him to
+expect Shere Ali, and with Shere Ali the beginning of the trouble.
+
+He could do no more for the moment. So far as he could see he had taken
+all the precautions which were possible. But that night an event occurred
+in his own house which led him to believe that he had not understood the
+whole extent of the danger.
+
+It was Mrs. Oliver who first aroused his suspicions. The four of
+them--Ralston and his sister, Linforth and Violet Oliver were sitting
+quietly at dinner when Violet suddenly said:
+
+"It's a strange thing. Of course there's nothing really in it, and I am
+not at all frightened, but the last two nights, on going to bed, I have
+found that one of my windows was no longer bolted."
+
+Linforth looked up in alarm. Ralston's face, however, did not change.
+
+"Are you sure that it was bolted before?"
+
+"Yes, quite sure," said Violet. "The room is on the ground floor, and
+outside one of the windows a flight of steps leads down from the verandah
+to the ground. So I have always taken care to bolt them myself."
+
+"When?" asked Ralston.
+
+"After dressing for dinner," she replied. "It is the last thing I do
+before leaving the room."
+
+Ralston leaned back in his chair, as though a momentary anxiety were
+quite relieved.
+
+"It is one of the servants, no doubt," he said. "I will speak about it
+afterwards"; and for the moment the matter dropped.
+
+But Ralston returned to the subject before dinner was finished.
+
+"I don't think you need be uneasy, Mrs. Oliver," he said. "The house is
+guarded by sentinels, as no doubt you know. They are native levies, of
+course, but they are quite reliable"; and in this he was quite sincere.
+So long as they wore the uniform they would be loyal. The time might
+come when they would ask to be allowed to go home. That permission would
+be granted, and it was possible that they would be found in arms against
+the loyal troops immediately afterwards. But they would ask to be
+allowed to go first.
+
+"Still," he resumed, "if you carry valuable jewellery about with you, it
+would be as well, I think, if you locked it up."
+
+"I have very little jewellery, and that not valuable," said Violet, and
+suddenly her face flushed and she looked across the table at Linforth
+with a smile. The smile was returned, and a minute later the ladies rose.
+
+The two men were left alone to smoke.
+
+"You know Mrs. Oliver better than I do," said Ralston. "I will tell you
+frankly what I think. It may be a mere nothing. There may be no cause for
+anxiety at all. In any case anxiety is not the word" he corrected
+himself, and went on. "There is a perfectly natural explanation. The
+servants may have opened the window to air the room when they were
+preparing it for the night, and may easily have forgotten to latch the
+bolt afterwards."
+
+"Yes, I suppose that is the natural explanation," said Linforth, as he
+lit a cigar. "It is hard to conceive any other."
+
+"Theft," replied Ralston, "is the other explanation. What I said about
+the levies is true. I can rely on them. But the servants--that is perhaps
+a different question. They are Mahommedans all of them, and we hear a
+good deal about the loyalty of Mahommedans, don't we?" he said, with a
+smile. "They wear, if not a uniform, a livery. All these things are true.
+But I tell you this, which is no less true. Not one of those Mahommedan
+servants would die wearing the livery, acknowledging their service. Every
+one of them, if he fell ill, if he thought that he was going to die,
+would leave my service to-morrow. So I don't count on them so much.
+However, I will make some inquiries, and to-morrow we will move Mrs.
+Oliver to another room."
+
+He went about the business forthwith, and cross-examined his servants one
+after another. But he obtained no admission from any one of them. No one
+had touched the window. Was a single thing missing of all that the
+honourable lady possessed? On their lives, no!
+
+Meanwhile Linforth sought out Violet Oliver in the drawing-room. He found
+her alone, and she came eagerly towards him and took his hands.
+
+"Oh, Dick," she said, "I am glad you have come back. I am nervous."
+
+"There's no need," said Dick with a laugh. "Let us go out."
+
+He opened the window, but Violet drew back.
+
+"No, let us stay here," she said, and passing her arm through his she
+stared for a few moments with a singular intentness into the darkness of
+the garden.
+
+"Did you see anything?" he asked.
+
+"No," she replied, and he felt the tension of her body relax. "No,
+there's nothing. And since you have come back, Dick, I am no longer
+afraid." She looked up at him with a smile, and tightened her clasp upon
+his arm with a pretty air of ownership. "My Dick!" she said, and laughed.
+
+The door-handle rattled, and Violet proved that she had lost her fear.
+
+"That's Miss Ralston," she said. "Let us go out," and she slipped out of
+the window quickly. As quickly Linforth followed her. She was waiting for
+him in the darkness.
+
+"Dick," she said in a whisper, and she caught him close to her.
+
+"Violet."
+
+He looked up to the dark, clear, starlit sky and down to the sweet and
+gentle face held up towards his. That night and in this Indian garden, it
+seemed to him that his faith was proven and made good. With the sense of
+failure heavy upon his soul, he yet found here a woman whose trust was
+not diminished by any failure, who still looked to him with confidence
+and drew comfort and strength from his presence, even as he did from
+hers. Alone in the drawing-room she had been afraid; outside here in the
+garden she had no fear, and no room in her mind for any thought of fear.
+
+"When you spoke about your window to-night, Violet," he said gently,
+"although I was alarmed for you, although I was troubled that you should
+have cause for alarm--"
+
+"I saw that," said Violet with a smile.
+
+"Yet I never spoke."
+
+"Your eyes, your face spoke. Oh, my dear, I watch you," and she drew in a
+breath. "I am a little afraid of you." She did not laugh. There was
+nothing provocative in her accent. She spoke with simplicity and truth,
+now as often, what was set down to her for a coquetry by those who
+disliked her. Linforth was in no doubt, however. Mistake her as he did,
+he judged her in this respect more truly than the worldly-wise. She had
+at the bottom of her heart a great fear of her lover, a fear that she
+might lose him, a fear that he might hold her in scorn, if he knew her
+only half as well as she knew herself.
+
+"I don't want you to be afraid of me," he said, quietly. "There is no
+reason for it."
+
+"You are hard to others if they come in your way," she replied, and
+Linforth stopped. Yes, that was true. There was his mother in the house
+under the Sussex Downs. He had got his way. He was on the Frontier. The
+Road now would surely go on. It would be a strange thing if he did not
+manage to get some portion of that work entrusted to his hands. He had
+got his way, but he had been hard, undoubtedly.
+
+"It is quite true," he answered. "But I have had my lesson. You need not
+fear that I shall be anything but very gentle towards you."
+
+"In your thoughts?" she asked quickly. "That you will be gentle in word
+and in deed--yes, of that I am sure. But will you think gently of
+me--always? That is a different thing."
+
+"Of course," he answered with a laugh.
+
+But Violet Oliver was in no mood lightly to be put off.
+
+"Promise me that!" she cried in a low and most passionate voice. Her lips
+trembled as she pleaded; her dark eyes besought him, shining starrily.
+"Oh, promise that you will think of me gently--that if ever you are
+inclined to be hard and to judge me harshly, you will remember these two
+nights in the dark garden at Peshawur."
+
+"I shall not forget them," said Linforth, and there was no longer any
+levity in his tones. He spoke gravely, and more than gravely. There was a
+note of anxiety, as though he were troubled.
+
+"I promise," he said.
+
+"Thank you," said Violet simply; "for I know that you will keep
+the promise."
+
+"Yes, but you speak"--and the note of trouble was still more audible in
+Linforth's voice--"you speak as if you and I were going to part to-morrow
+morning for the rest of our lives."
+
+"No," Violet cried quickly and rather sharply. Then she moved on a
+step or two.
+
+"I interrupted you," she said. "You were saying that when I spoke about
+my window, although you were troubled on my account--"
+
+"I felt at the same time some relief," Linforth continued.
+
+"Relief?" she asked.
+
+"Yes; for on my return from Ajmere this morning I noticed a change in
+you." He felt at once Violet's hand shake upon his arm as she started;
+but she did not interrupt him by a word.
+
+"I noticed it at once when we met for the first time since we had talked
+together in the garden, for the first time since your hands had lain in
+mine and your lips touched mine. And afterwards it was still there."
+
+"What change?" Violet asked. But she asked the question in a stifled
+voice and with her face averted from him.
+
+"There was a constraint, an embarrassment," he said. "How can I explain
+it? I felt it rather than noticed it by visible signs. It seemed to me
+that you avoided being alone with me. I had a dread that you regretted
+the evening in the garden, that you were sorry we had agreed to live our
+lives together."
+
+Violet did not protest. She did not turn to him with any denial in her
+eyes. She walked on by his side with her face still turned away from his,
+and for a little while she walked in silence. Then, as if compelled, she
+suddenly stopped and turned. She spoke, too, as if compelled, with a kind
+of desperation in her voice.
+
+"Yes, you were right," she cried. "Oh, Dick, you were right. There was
+constraint, there was embarrassment. I will tell you the reason--now."
+
+"I know it," said Dick with a smile.
+
+Violet stared at him for a moment. She perceived his contentment. He was
+now quite unharassed by fear. There was no disappointment, no anger
+against her. She shook her head and said slowly:
+
+"You can't know it."
+
+"I do."
+
+"Tell me the reason then."
+
+"You were frightened by this business of the window."
+
+Violet made a movement. She was in the mood to contradict him. But he
+went on, and so the mood passed.
+
+"It was only natural. Here were you in a frontier town, a wild town on
+the borders of a wild country. A window bolted at dinner-time and
+unlocked at bedtime--it was easy to find something sinister in that. You
+did not like to speak of it, lest it should trouble your hosts. Yet it
+weighed on you. It occupied your thoughts."
+
+"And to that you put down my embarrassment?" she asked quietly. They had
+come again to the window of the drawing-room.
+
+"Yes, I do," he answered.
+
+She looked at him strangely for a few moments. But the compulsion which
+she had felt upon her a moment ago to speak was gone. She no longer
+sought to contradict him. Without a word she slipped into the
+drawing-room.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+THE THIEF
+
+
+Violet Oliver was harassed that night as she had never before been
+harassed at any moment of her easy life. She fled to her room. She stood
+in front of her mirror gazing helplessly at the reflection of her
+troubled face.
+
+"What shall I do?" she cried piteously. "What shall I do?"
+
+And it was not until some minutes had passed that she gave a thought to
+whether her window on this night was bolted or not.
+
+She moved quickly across the room and drew the curtains apart. This time
+the bolt was shot. But she did not turn back to her room. She let the
+curtains fall behind her and leaned her forehead against the glass. There
+was a moon to-night, and the quiet garden stretched in front of her a
+place of black shadows and white light. Whether a thief lurked in those
+shadows and watched from them she did not now consider. The rattle of a
+rifle from a sentry near at hand gave her confidence; and all her trouble
+lay in the house behind her.
+
+She opened her window and stepped out. "I tried to speak, but he would
+not listen. Oh, why did I ever come here?" she cried. "It would have been
+so easy not to have come."
+
+But even while she cried out her regrets, they were not all the truth.
+There was still alive within her the longing to follow the difficult
+way--the way of fire and stones, as it would be for her--if only she
+could! She had made a beginning that night. Yes, she had made a beginning
+though nothing had come of it. That was not her fault, she assured
+herself. She had tried to speak. But could she keep it up? She turned and
+twisted; she was caught in a trap. Passion had trapped her unawares.
+
+She went back to the room and bolted the window. Then again she stood in
+front of her mirror and gazed at herself in thought.
+
+Suddenly her face changed. She looked up; an idea took shape in her mind.
+"Theft," Ralston had said. Thus had he explained the unbolted window. She
+must lock up what jewels she had. She must be sure to do that. Violet
+Oliver looked towards the window and shivered. It was very silent in the
+room. Fear seized hold of her. It was a big room, and furtively she
+peered into the corners lest already hidden behind some curtain the thief
+should be there.
+
+But always her eyes returned to the window. If she only dared! She ran to
+her trunks. From one of them she took out from its deep hiding-place a
+small jewel-case, a jewel-case very like to that one which a few months
+ago she had sealed up in her tent and addressed to Kohara. She left it on
+her dressing-table. She did not open it. Then she looked about her again.
+It would be the easy way--if only she dared! It would be an easier way
+than trying again to tell her lover what she would have told him
+to-night, had he only been willing to listen.
+
+She stood and listened, with parted lips. It seemed to her that even in
+this lighted room people, unseen people, breathed about her. Then, with a
+little sob in her throat, she ran to the window and shot back the bolt.
+She undressed hurriedly, placed a candle by her bedside and turned out
+the electric lights. As soon as she was in bed she blew out the candle.
+She lay in the darkness, shivering with fear, regretting what she had
+done. Every now and then a board cracked in the corridor outside the
+room, as though beneath a stealthy footstep. And once inside the room the
+door of a wardrobe sprang open. She would have cried out, but terror
+paralysed her throat; and the next moment she heard the tread of the
+sentry outside her window. The sound reassured her. There was safety in
+the heavy regularity of the steps. It was a soldier who was passing, a
+drilled, trustworthy soldier. "Trustworthy" was the word which the
+Commissioner had used. And lulled by the soldier's presence in the garden
+Violet Oliver fell asleep.
+
+But she waked before dawn. The room was still in darkness. The moon had
+sunk. Not a ray of light penetrated from behind the curtains. She lay for
+a little while in bed, listening, wondering whether that window had been
+opened. A queer longing came upon her--a longing to thrust back the
+curtains, so that--if anything happened--she might see. That would be
+better than lying here in the dark, knowing nothing, seeing nothing,
+fearing everything. If she pulled back the curtains, there would be a
+panel of dim light visible, however dark the night.
+
+The longing became a necessity. She could not lie there. She sprang out
+of bed, and hurried across towards the window. She had not stopped to
+light her candle and she held her hands outstretched in front of her.
+Suddenly, as she was half-way across the room, her hands touched
+something soft.
+
+She drew them back with a gasp of fright and stood stone-still,
+stone-cold. She had touched a human face. Already the thief was in the
+room. She stood without a cry, without a movement, while her heart leaped
+and fluttered within her bosom. She knew in that moment the extremity of
+mortal fear.
+
+A loud scratch sounded sharply in the room. A match spurted into flame,
+and above the match there sprang into view, framed in the blackness of
+the room, a wild and menacing dark face. The eyes glittered at her, and
+suddenly a hand was raised as if to strike. And at the gesture Violet
+Oliver found her voice.
+
+She screamed, a loud shrill scream of terror, and even as she screamed,
+in the very midst of her terror, she saw that the hand was lowered, and
+that the threatening face smiled. Then the match went out and darkness
+cloaked her and cloaked the thief again. She heard a quick stealthy
+movement, and once more her scream rang out. It seemed to her ages before
+any answer came, before she heard the sound of hurrying footsteps in the
+corridors. There was a loud rapping upon her door. She ran to it. She
+heard Ralston's voice.
+
+"What is it? Open! Open!" and then in the garden the report of a rifle
+rang loud.
+
+She turned up the lights, flung a dressing-gown about her shoulders and
+opened the door. Ralston was in the passage, behind him she saw lights
+strangely wavering and other faces. These too wavered strangely. From
+very far away, she heard Ralston's voice once more.
+
+"What is it? What is it?"
+
+And then she fell forward against him and sank in a swoon upon the floor.
+
+Ralston lifted her on to her bed and summoned her maid. He went out of
+the house and made inquiries of the guard. The sentry's story was
+explicit and not to be shaken by any cross-examination. He had patrolled
+that side of the house in which Mrs. Oliver's room lay, all night. He had
+seen nothing. At one o'clock in the morning the moon sank and the night
+became very dark. It was about three when a few minutes after passing
+beneath the verandah, and just as he had turned the corner of the house,
+he heard a shrill scream from Mrs. Oliver's room. He ran back at once,
+and as he ran he heard a second scream. He saw no one, but he heard a
+rustling and cracking in the bushes as though a fugitive plunged through.
+He fired in the direction of the noise and then ran with all speed to the
+spot. He found no one, but the bushes were broken.
+
+Ralston went back into the house and knocked at Mrs. Oliver's door. The
+maid opened it.
+
+"How is Mrs. Oliver?" he asked, and he heard Violet herself reply faintly
+from the room:
+
+"I am better, thank you. I was a little frightened, that's all."
+
+"No wonder," said Ralston, and he spoke again to the maid. "Has anything
+gone? Has anything been stolen? There was a jewel-case upon the
+dressing-table. I saw it."
+
+The maid looked at him curiously, before she answered. "Nothing has
+been touched."
+
+Then, with a glance towards the bed, the maid stooped quickly to a trunk
+which stood against the wall close by the door and then slipped out of
+the room, closing the door behind her. The corridors were now lighted up,
+as though it were still evening and the household had not yet gone to
+bed. Ralston saw that the maid held a bundle in her hands.
+
+"I do not think," she said in a whisper, "that the thief came to steal
+any thing." She laid some emphasis upon the word.
+
+Ralston took the bundle from her hands and stared at it.
+
+"Good God!" he muttered. He was astonished and more than astonished.
+There was something of horror in his low exclamation. He looked at the
+maid. She was a woman of forty. She had the look of a capable woman. She
+was certainly quite self-possessed.
+
+"Does your mistress know of this?" he asked.
+
+The maid shook her head.
+
+"No, sir. I saw it upon the floor before she came to. I hid it between
+the trunk and the wall." She spoke with an ear to the door of the room in
+which Violet lay, and in a low voice.
+
+"Good!" said Ralston. "You had better tell her nothing of it for the
+present. It would only frighten her"; as he ended he heard Violet
+Oliver call out:
+
+"Adela! Adela!"
+
+"Mrs. Oliver wants me," said the maid, as she slipped back into
+the bedroom.
+
+Ralston walked slowly back down the corridor into the great hall. He was
+carrying the bundle in his hands and his face was very grave. He saw Dick
+Linforth in the hall, and before he spoke he looked upwards to the
+gallery which ran round it. Even when he had assured himself that there
+was no one listening, he spoke in a low voice.
+
+"Do you see this, Linforth?"
+
+He held out the bundle. There was a thick cloth, a sort of pad of cotton,
+and some thin strong cords.
+
+"These were found in Mrs. Oliver's room."
+
+He laid the things upon the table and Linforth turned them over, startled
+as Ralston had been.
+
+"I don't understand," he said.
+
+"They were left behind," said Ralston.
+
+"By the thief?"
+
+"If he was a thief"; and again Linforth said:
+
+"I don't understand."
+
+But there was now more of anger, more of horror in his voice, than
+surprise; and as he spoke he took up the pad of cotton wool.
+
+"You do understand," said Ralston, quietly.
+
+Linforth's fingers worked. That pad of cotton seemed to him more sinister
+than even the cords.
+
+"For her!" he cried, in a quiet but dangerous voice. "For Violet," and at
+that moment neither noticed his utterance of her Christian name. "Let me
+only find the man who entered her room."
+
+Ralston looked steadily at Linforth.
+
+"Have you any suspicion as to who the man is?" he asked.
+
+There was a momentary silence in that quiet hall. Both men stood looking
+at each other.
+
+"It can't be," said Linforth, at length. But he spoke rather to himself
+than to Ralston. "It can't be."
+
+Ralston did not press the question.
+
+"It's the insolence of the attempt which angers me," he said. "We must
+wait until Mrs. Oliver can tell us what happened, what she saw.
+Meanwhile, she knows nothing of those things. There is no need that she
+should know."
+
+He left Linforth standing in the hall and went up the stairs. When he
+reached the gallery, he leaned over quietly and looked down.
+
+Linforth was still standing by the table, fingering the cotton-pad.
+
+Ralston heard him say again in a voice which was doubtful now rather than
+incredulous:
+
+"It can't be he! He would not dare!"
+
+But no name was uttered.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX
+
+MRS. OLIVER RIDES THROUGH PESHAWUR
+
+
+Violet Oliver told her story later during that day. But there was a
+certain hesitation in her manner which puzzled Ralston, at all events,
+amongst her audience.
+
+"When you went to your room," he asked, "did you find the window again
+unbolted?"
+
+"No," she replied. "It was really my fault last night. I felt the heat
+oppressive. I opened the window myself and went out on to the verandah.
+When I came back I think that I did not bolt it."
+
+"You forgot?" asked Ralston in surprise.
+
+But this was not the only surprising element in the story.
+
+"When you touched the man, he did not close with you, he made no effort
+to silence you," Ralston said. "That is strange enough. But that he
+should strike a match, that he should let you see his face quite
+clearly--that's what I don't understand. It looks, Mrs. Oliver, as if he
+almost wanted you to recognise him."
+
+Ralston turned in his chair sharply towards her. "Did you recognise
+him?" he asked.
+
+"Yes," Violet Oliver replied. "At least I think I did. I think that I had
+seen him before."
+
+Here at all events it was clear that she was concealing nothing. She was
+obviously as puzzled as Ralston was himself.
+
+"Where had you seen him?" he asked, and the answer increased his
+astonishment.
+
+"In Calcutta," she answered. "It was the same man or one very like
+him. I saw him on three successive evenings in the Maidan when I was
+driving there."
+
+"In Calcutta?" cried Ralston. "Some months ago, then?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"How did you come to notice him in the Maidan?" Mrs. Oliver shivered
+slightly as she answered:
+
+"He seemed to be watching me. I thought so at the time. It made me
+uncomfortable. Now I am sure. He _was_ watching me," and she suddenly
+came forward a step.
+
+"I should like to go away to-day if you and your sister won't mind,"
+she pleaded.
+
+Ralston's forehead clouded.
+
+"Of course, I quite understand," he said, "and if you wish to go we can't
+prevent you. But you leave us rather helpless, don't you?--as you alone
+can identify the man. Besides, you leave yourself too in danger."
+
+"But I shall go far away," she urged. "As it is I am going back to
+England in a month."
+
+"Yes," Ralston objected. "But you have not yet started, and if the man
+followed you from Calcutta to Peshawur, he may follow you from Peshawur
+to Bombay."
+
+Mrs. Oliver drew back with a start of terror and Ralston instantly took
+back his words.
+
+"Of course, we will take care of you on your way south. You may rely on
+that," he said with a smile. "But if you could bring yourself to stay
+here for a day or two I should be much obliged. You see, it is impossible
+to fix the man's identity from a description, and it is really important
+that he should be caught."
+
+"Yes, I understand," said Violet Oliver, and she reluctantly
+consented to stay.
+
+"Thank you," said Ralston, and he looked at her with a smile. "There is
+one more thing which I should like you to do. I should like you to ride
+out with me this afternoon through Peshawur. The story of last night will
+already be known in the bazaars. Of that you may be very sure. And it
+would be a good thing if you were seen to ride through the city quite
+unconcerned."
+
+Violet Oliver drew back from the ordeal which Ralston so calmly
+proposed to her.
+
+"I shall be with you," he said. "There will be no danger--or at
+all events no danger that Englishwomen are unprepared to face in
+this country."
+
+The appeal to her courage served Ralston's turn. Violet raised her head
+with a little jerk of pride.
+
+"Certainly I will ride with you this afternoon through Peshawur," she
+said; and she went out of the room and left Ralston alone.
+
+He sat at his desk trying to puzzle out the enigma of the night. The more
+he thought upon it, the further he seemed from any solution. There was
+the perplexing behaviour of Mrs. Oliver herself. She had been troubled,
+greatly troubled, to find her window unbolted on two successive nights
+after she had taken care to bolt it. Yet on the third night she actually
+unbolts it herself and leaving it unbolted puts out her light and goes to
+bed. It seemed incredible that she should so utterly have forgotten her
+fears. But still more bewildering even than her forgetfulness was the
+conduct of the intruder.
+
+Upon that point he took Linforth into his counsels.
+
+"I can't make head or tail of it," he cried. "Here the fellow is in the
+dark room with his cords and the thick cloth and the pad. Mrs. Oliver
+touches him. He knows that his presence is revealed to her. She is within
+reach. And she stands paralysed by fear, unable to cry out. Yet he does
+nothing, except light a match and give her a chance to recognise his
+face. He does not seize her, he does not stifle her voice, as he could
+have done--yes, as he could have done, before she could have uttered a
+cry. He strikes a match and shows her his face."
+
+"So that he might see hers," said Linforth. Ralston shook his head. He
+was not satisfied with that explanation. But Linforth had no other to
+offer. "Have you any clue to the man?"
+
+"None," said Ralston.
+
+He rode out with Mrs. Oliver that afternoon down from his house to the
+Gate of the City. Two men of his levies rode at a distance of twenty
+paces behind them. But these were his invariable escort. He took no
+unusual precautions. There were no extra police in the streets. He went
+out with his guest at his side for an afternoon ride as if nothing
+whatever had occurred. Mrs. Oliver played her part well. She rode with
+her head erect and her eyes glancing boldly over the crowded streets.
+Curious glances were directed at her, but she met them without agitation.
+Ralston observed her with a growing admiration.
+
+"Thank you," he said warmly. "I know this can hardly be a pleasant
+experience for you. But it is good for these people here to know that
+nothing they can do will make any difference--no not enough to alter the
+mere routine of our lives. Let us go forward."
+
+They turned to the left at the head of the main thoroughfare, and passed
+at a walk, now through the open spaces where the booths were erected, now
+through winding narrow streets between high houses. Violet Oliver, though
+she held her head high and her eyes were steady, rode with a fluttering
+heart. In front of them, about them, and behind them the crowd of people
+thronged, tribesmen from the hills, Mohammedans and Hindus of the city;
+from the upper windows the lawyers and merchants looked down upon them;
+and Violet held all of them in horror.
+
+The occurrence of last night had inflicted upon her a heavier shock than
+either Ralston imagined or she herself had been aware until she had
+ridden into the town. The dark wild face suddenly springing into view
+above the lighted match was as vivid and terrible to her still, as a
+nightmare to a child. She was afraid that at any moment she might see
+that face again in the throng of faces. Her heart sickened with dread at
+the thought, and even though she should not see him, at every step she
+looked upon twenty of his like--kinsmen, perhaps, brothers in blood and
+race. She shrank from them in repulsion and she shrank from them in fear.
+Every nerve of her body seemed to cry out against the folly of this ride.
+
+What were they two and the two levies behind them against the throng?
+Four at the most against thousands at the least.
+
+She touched Ralston timidly on the arm.
+
+"Might we go home now?" she asked in a voice which trembled; and he
+looked suddenly and anxiously into her face.
+
+"Certainly," he said, and he wheeled his horse round, keeping close to
+her as she wheeled hers.
+
+"It is all right," he said, and his voice took on an unusual
+friendliness. "We have not far to go. It was brave of you to have come,
+and I am very grateful. We ask much of the Englishwomen in India, and
+because they never fail us, we are apt to ask too much. I asked too much
+of you." Violet responded to the flick at her national pride. She drew
+herself up and straightened her back.
+
+"No," she said, and she actually counterfeited a smile. "No. It's
+all right."
+
+"I asked more than I had a right to ask," he continued remorsefully. "I
+am sorry. I have lived too much amongst men. That's my trouble. One
+becomes inconsiderate to women. It's ignorance, not want of good-will.
+Look!" To distract her thoughts he began to point her out houses and
+people which were of interest.
+
+"Do you see that sign there, 'Bahadur Gobind, Barrister-at-Law, Cambridge
+B.A.,' on the first floor over the cookshop? Yes, he is the genuine
+article. He went to Cambridge and took his degree and here he is back
+again. Take him for all in all, he is the most seditious man in the city.
+Meanly seditious. It only runs to writing letters over a pseudonym in the
+native papers. Now look up. Do you see that very respectable
+white-bearded gentleman on the balcony of his house? Well, his
+daughter-in-law disappeared one day when her husband was away from
+home--disappeared altogether. It had been a great grief to the old
+gentleman that she had borne no son to inherit the family fortune. So
+naturally people began to talk. She was found subsequently under the
+floor of the house, and it cost that respectable old gentleman twenty
+thousand rupees to get himself acquitted."
+
+Ralston pulled himself up with a jerk, realising that this was not the
+most appropriate story which he could have told to a lady with the
+overstrained nerves of Mrs. Oliver.
+
+He turned to her with a fresh apology upon his lips. But the apology was
+never spoken.
+
+"What's the matter, Mrs. Oliver?" he asked.
+
+She had not heard the story of the respectable old gentleman. That was
+clear. They were riding through an open oblong space of ground dotted
+with trees. There were shops down the middle, two rows backing upon a
+stream, and shops again at the sides. Mrs. Oliver was gazing with a
+concentrated look across the space and the people who crowded it towards
+an opening of an alley between two houses. But fixed though her gaze was,
+there was no longer any fear in her eyes. Rather they expressed a keen
+interest, a strong curiosity.
+
+Ralston's eyes followed the direction of her gaze. At the corner of the
+alley there was a shop wherein a man sat rounding a stick of wood with a
+primitive lathe. He made the lathe revolve by working a stringed bow with
+his right hand, while his left hand worked the chisel and his right foot
+directed it. His limbs were making three different motions with an
+absence of effort which needed much practice, and for a moment Ralston
+wondered whether it was the ingenuity of the workman which had attracted
+her. But in a moment he saw that he was wrong.
+
+There were two men standing in the mouth of the alley, both dressed in
+white from head to foot. One stood a little behind with the hood of his
+cloak drawn forward over his head, so that it was impossible to discern
+his face. The other stood forward, a tall slim man with the elegance and
+the grace of youth. It was at this man Violet Oliver was looking.
+
+Ralston looked again at her, and as he looked the colour rose into her
+cheeks; there came a look of sympathy, perhaps of pity, into her eyes.
+Almost her lips began to smile. Ralston turned his head again towards the
+alley, and he started in his saddle. The young man had raised his head.
+He was gazing fixedly towards them. His features were revealed and
+Ralston knew them well.
+
+He turned quickly to Mrs. Oliver.
+
+"You know that man?"
+
+The colour deepened upon her face.
+
+"It is the Prince of Chiltistan."
+
+"But you know him?" Ralston insisted.
+
+"I have met him in London," said Violet Oliver.
+
+So Shere Ali was in Peshawur, when he should have been in
+Chiltistan! "Why?"
+
+Ralston put the question to himself and looked to his companion for the
+answer. The colour upon her face, the interest, the sympathy of her eyes
+gave him the answer. This was the woman, then, whose image stood before
+Shere Ali's memories and hindered him from marrying one of his own race!
+Just with that sympathy and that keen interest does a woman look upon the
+man who loves her and whose love she does not return. Moreover, there was
+Linforth's hesitation. Linforth had admitted there was an Englishwoman
+for whom Shere Ali cared, had admitted it reluctantly, had extenuated her
+thoughtlessness, had pleaded for her. Oh, without a doubt Mrs. Oliver was
+the woman!
+
+There flashed before Ralston's eyes the picture of Linforth standing in
+the hall, turning over the cords and the cotton pad and the thick cloth.
+Ralston looked down again upon him from the gallery and heard his voice,
+saying in a whisper:
+
+"It can't be he! It can't be he!"
+
+What would Linforth say when he knew that Shere Ali was lurking in
+Peshawur?
+
+Ralston was still gazing at Shere Ali when the man behind the Prince made
+a movement. He flung back the hood from his face, and disclosing his
+features looked boldly towards the riders.
+
+A cry rang out at Ralston's side, a woman's cry. He turned in his saddle
+and saw Violet Oliver. The colour had suddenly fled from her cheeks. They
+were blanched. The sympathy had gone from her eyes, and in its place,
+stark terror looked out from them. She swayed in her saddle.
+
+"Do you see that man?" she cried, pointing with her hand. "The man behind
+the Prince. The man who has thrown back his cloak."
+
+"Yes, yes, I see him," answered Ralston impatiently.
+
+"It was he who crept into my room last night."
+
+"You are sure?"
+
+"Could I forget? Could I forget?" she cried; and at that moment, the man
+touched Shere Ali on the sleeve, and they both fled out of sight into
+the alley.
+
+There was no doubt left in Ralston's mind. It was Shere Ali who had
+planned the abduction of Mrs. Oliver. It was his companion who had failed
+to carry it out. Ralston turned to the levies behind him.
+
+"Quick! Into that valley! Fetch me those two men who were standing
+there!"
+
+The two levies pressed their horses through the crowd, but the alley was
+empty when they came to it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX
+
+THE NEEDED IMPLEMENT
+
+
+Ralston rode home with an uncomfortable recollection of the little
+dinner-party in Calcutta at which Hatch had told his story of the
+Englishwoman in Mecca. Had that story fired Shere Ali? The time for
+questions had passed; but none the less this particular one would force
+itself into the front of his mind.
+
+"I would have done better never to have meddled," he said to himself
+remorsefully--even while he gave his orders for the apprehension of
+Shere Ali and his companion. For he did not allow his remorse to hamper
+his action; he set a strong guard at the gates of the city, and gave
+orders that within the gates the city should be methodically searched
+quarter by quarter.
+
+"I want them both laid by the heels," he said; "but, above all, the
+Prince. Let there be no mistake. I want Shere Ali lodged in the gaol here
+before nightfall"; and Linforth's voice broke in rapidly upon his words.
+
+"Can I do anything to help? What can I do?"
+
+Ralston looked sharply up from his desk. There had been a noticeable
+eagerness, a noticeable anger in Linforth's voice.
+
+"You?" said Ralston quietly. "_You_ want to help? You were Shere
+Ali's friend."
+
+Ralston smiled as he spoke, but there was no hint of irony in either
+words or smile. It was a smile rather of tolerance, and almost of
+regret--the smile of a man who was well accustomed to seeing the flowers
+and decorative things of life wither over-quickly, and yet was still
+alert and not indifferent to the change. His work for the moment was
+done. He leaned back thoughtfully in his chair. He no longer looked at
+Linforth. His one quick glance had shown him enough.
+
+"So it's all over, eh?" he said, as he played with his paper-knife.
+"Summer mornings on the Cherwell. Travels in the Dauphiné. The Meije and
+the Aiguilles d'Arves. Oh, I know." Linforth moved as he stood at the
+side of Ralston's desk, but the set look upon his face did not change.
+And Ralston went on. There came a kind of gentle mockery into his voice.
+"The shared ambitions, the concerted plans--gone, and not even a regret
+for them left, eh? _Tempi passati!_ Pretty sad, too, when you come to
+think of it."
+
+But Linforth made no answer to Ralston's probings. Violet Oliver's
+instincts had taught her the truth, which Ralston was now learning.
+Linforth could be very hard. There was nothing left of the friendship
+which through many years had played so large a part in his life. A woman
+had intervened, and Linforth had shut the door upon it, had sealed his
+mind against its memories, and his heart against its claims. The evening
+at La Grave in the Dauphiné had borne its fruit. Linforth stood there
+white with anger against Shere Ali, hot to join in the chase. Ralston
+understood that if ever he should need a man to hunt down that quarry
+through peril and privations, here at his hand was the man on whom he
+could rely.
+
+Linforth's eager voice broke in again.
+
+"What can I do to help?"
+
+Ralston looked up once more.
+
+"Nothing--for the moment. If Shere Ali is captured in
+Peshawur--nothing at all."
+
+"But if he escapes."
+
+Ralston shrugged his shoulders. Then he filled his pipe and lit it.
+
+"If he escapes--why, then, your turn may come. I make no promises," he
+added quickly, as Linforth, by a movement, betrayed his satisfaction.
+"It is not, indeed, in my power to promise. But there may come work
+for you--difficult work, dangerous work, prolonged work. For this
+outrage can't go unpunished. In any case," he ended with a smile, "the
+Road goes on."
+
+He turned again to his office-table, and Linforth went out of the room.
+
+The task which Ralston had in view for Linforth came by a long step
+nearer that night. For all night the search went on throughout the
+city, and the searchers were still empty-handed in the morning. Ahmed
+Ismail had laid his plans too cunningly. Shere Ali was to be
+compromised, not captured. There was to be a price upon his head, but
+the head was not to fall. And while the search went on from quarter to
+quarter of Peshawur, the Prince and his attendant were already out in
+the darkness upon the hills.
+
+Ralston telegraphed to the station on the Malakand Pass, to the fort at
+Jamrud, even to Landi Khotal, at the far end of the Khyber Pass, but
+Shere Ali had not travelled along any one of the roads those positions
+commanded.
+
+"I had little hope indeed that he would," said Ralston with a shrug
+of the shoulders. "He has given us the slip. We shall not catch up
+with him now."
+
+He was standing with Linforth at the mouth of the well which irrigated
+his garden. The water was drawn up after the Persian plan. A wooden
+vertical wheel wound up the bucket, and this wheel was made to revolve by
+a horizontal wheel with the spokes projecting beyond the rim and fitting
+into similar spokes upon the vertical wheel. A bullock, with a bandage
+over its eyes, was harnessed to the horizontal wheel, and paced slowly
+round and round, turning it; while a boy sat on the bullock's back and
+beat it with a stick. Both men stood and listened to the groaning and
+creaking of the wheels for a few moments, and then Linforth said:
+
+"So, after all, you mean to let him go?"
+
+"No, indeed," answered Ralston. "Only now we shall have to fetch him out
+of Chiltistan."
+
+"Will they give him up?"
+
+Ralston shook his head.
+
+"No." He turned to Linforth with a smile. "I once heard the Political
+Officer described as the man who stands between the soldier and his
+medal. Well, I have tried to stand just in that spot as far as Chiltistan
+is concerned. But I have not succeeded. The soldier will get his medal in
+Chiltistan this year. I have had telegrams this morning from Lahore. A
+punitive force has been gathered at Nowshera. The preparations have been
+going on quietly for a few weeks. It will start in a few days. I shall go
+with it as Political Officer."
+
+"You will take me?" Linforth asked eagerly.
+
+"Yes," Ralston answered. "I mean to take you. I told you yesterday there
+might be service for you."
+
+"In Chiltistan?"
+
+"Or beyond," replied Ralston. "Shere Ali may give us the slip again."
+
+He was thinking of the arid rocky borders of Turkestan, where flight
+would be easy and where capture would be most difficult. It was to that
+work that Ralston, looking far ahead, had in his mind dedicated young
+Linforth, knowing well that he would count its difficulties light in the
+ardour of his pursuit. Anger would spur him, and the Road should be held
+out as his reward. Ralston listened again to the groaning of the
+water-wheel, and watched the hooded bullock circle round and round with
+patient unvarying pace, and the little boy on its back making no
+difference whatever with a long stick.
+
+"Look!" he said. "There's an emblem of the Indian administration. The
+wheels creak and groan, the bullock goes on round and round with a
+bandage over its eyes, and the little boy on its back cuts a fine
+important figure and looks as if he were doing ever so much, and somehow
+the water comes up--that's the great thing, the water is fetched up
+somehow and the land watered. When I am inclined to be despondent, I come
+and look at my water-wheel." He turned away and walked back to the house
+with his hands folded behind his back and his head bent forward.
+
+"You are despondent now?" Linforth asked.
+
+"Yes," replied Ralston, with a rare and sudden outburst of confession.
+"You, perhaps, will hardly understand. You are young. You have a career
+to make. You have particular ambitions. This trouble in Chiltistan is
+your opportunity. But it's my sorrow--it's almost my failure." He turned
+his face towards Linforth with a whimsical smile. "I have tried to stand
+between the soldier and his medal. I wanted to extend our political
+influence there--yes. Because that makes for peace, and it makes for good
+government. The tribes lose their fear that their independence will be
+assailed, they come in time to the Political Officer for advice, they lay
+their private quarrels and feuds before him for arbitration. That has
+happened in many valleys, and I had always a hope that though Chiltistan
+has a ruling Prince, the same sort of thing might in time happen there.
+Yes, even at the cost of the Road," and again his very taking smile
+illumined for a moment his worn face. "But that hope is gone now. A force
+will go up and demand Shere Ali. Shere Ali will not be given up. Even
+were the demand not made, it would make no difference. He will not be
+many days in Chiltistan before Chiltistan is in arms. Already I have sent
+a messenger up to the Resident, telling him to come down."
+
+"And then?" asked Linforth.
+
+Ralston shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"More or less fighting, more or less loss, a few villages burnt, and the
+only inevitable end. We shall either take over the country or set up
+another Prince."
+
+"Set up another Prince?" exclaimed Linforth in a startled voice. "In
+that case--"
+
+Ralston broke in upon him with a laugh.
+
+"Oh, man of one idea, in any case the Road will go on to the foot of
+the Hindu Kush. That's the price which Chiltistan must pay as security
+for future peace--the military road through Kohara to the foot of the
+Hindu Kush."
+
+Linforth's face cleared, and he said cheerfully:
+
+"It's strange that Shere Ali doesn't realise that himself."
+
+The cheerfulness of his voice, as much as his words, caused Ralston to
+stop and turn upon his companion in a moment of exasperation.
+
+"Perhaps he does." he exclaimed, and then he proceeded to pay a tribute
+to the young Prince of Chiltistan which took Linforth fairly by surprise.
+
+"Don't you understand--you who know him, you who grew up with him, you
+who were his friend? He's a man. I know these hill-people, and like every
+other Englishman who has served among them, I love them--knowing their
+faults. Shere Ali has the faults of the Pathan, or some of them. He has
+their vanity; he has, if you like, their fanaticism. But he's a man. He's
+flattered and petted like a lap-dog, he's played with like a toy. Well,
+he's neither a lap-dog nor a toy, and he takes the flattery and the
+petting seriously. He thinks it's _meant_, and he behaves accordingly.
+What, then? The toy is thrown down on the ground, the lap-dog is kicked
+into the corner. But he's not a lap-dog, he's not a toy. He's a man. He
+has a man's resentments, a man's wounded heart, a man's determination not
+to submit to flattery one moment and humiliation the next. So he strikes.
+He tries to take the white, soft, pretty thing which has been dangled
+before his eyes and snatched away--he tries to take her by force and
+fails. He goes back to his own people, and strikes. Do you blame him?
+Would you rather he sat down and grumbled and bragged of his successes,
+and took to drink, as more than one down south has done? Perhaps so. It
+would be more comfortable if he did. But which of the pictures do you
+admire? Which of the two is the better man? For me, the man who
+strikes--even if I have to go up into his country and exact the penalty
+afterwards. Shere Ali is one of the best of the Princes. But he has been
+badly treated and so he must suffer."
+
+Ralston repeated his conclusion with a savage irony. "That's the whole
+truth. He's one of the best of them. Therefore he doesn't take bad
+treatment with a servile gratitude. Therefore he must suffer still more.
+But the fault in the beginning was not his."
+
+Thus it fell to Ralston to explain, twenty-six years later, the saying
+of a long-forgotten Political Officer which had seemed so dark to
+Colonel Dewes when it was uttered in the little fort in Chiltistan.
+There was a special danger for the best in the upbringing of the Indian
+princes in England.
+
+Linforth flushed as he listened to the tirade, but he made no answer.
+Ralston looked at him keenly, wondering with a queer amusement whether he
+had not blunted the keen edge of that tool which he was keeping at his
+side because he foresaw the need of it. But there was no sign of any
+softening upon Linforth's face. He could be hard, but on the other hand,
+when he gave his faith he gave it without reserve. Almost every word
+which Ralston had spoken had seemed to him an aspersion upon Violet
+Oliver. He said nothing, for he had learned to keep silence. But his
+anger was hotter than ever against Shere Ali, since but for Shere Ali the
+aspersions would never have been cast.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI
+
+AN OLD TOMB AND A NEW SHRINE
+
+
+The messenger whom Ralston sent with a sealed letter to the Resident at
+Kohara left Peshawur in the afternoon and travelled up the road by way of
+Dir and the Lowari Pass. He travelled quickly, spending little of his
+time at the rest-houses on the way, and yet arrived no sooner on that
+account. It was not he at all who brought his news to Kohara. Neither
+letter nor messenger, indeed, ever reached the Resident's door, although
+Captain Phillips learned something of the letter's contents a day before
+the messenger was due. A queer, and to use his own epithet, a dramatic
+stroke of fortune aided him at a very critical moment.
+
+It happened in this way. While Captain Phillips was smoking a cheroot as
+he sat over his correspondence in the morning, a servant from the great
+Palace on the hill brought to him a letter in the Khan's own
+handwriting. It was a flowery letter and invoked many blessings upon the
+Khan's faithful friend and brother, and wound up with a single sentence,
+like a lady's postscript, in which the whole object of the letter was
+contained. Would his Excellency the Captain, in spite of his
+overwhelming duties, of which the Khan was well aware, since they all
+tended to the great benefit and prosperity of his State, be kind enough
+to pay a visit to the Khan that day?
+
+"What's the old rascal up to now?" thought Captain Phillips. He replied,
+with less ornament and fewer flourishes, that he would come after
+breakfast; and mounting his horse at the appointed time he rode down
+through the wide street of Kohara and up the hill at the end, on the
+terraced slopes of which climbed the gardens and mud walls of the Palace.
+He was led at once into the big reception-room with the painted walls and
+the silver-gilt chairs, where the Khan had once received his son with a
+loaded rifle across his knees. The Khan was now seated with his courtiers
+about him, and was carving the rind of a pomegranate into patterns, like
+a man with his thoughts far away. But he welcomed Captain Phillips with
+alacrity and at once dismissed his Court.
+
+Captain Phillips settled down patiently in his chair. He was well aware
+of the course the interview would take. The Khan would talk away without
+any apparent aim for an hour or two hours, passing carelessly from
+subject to subject, and then suddenly the important question would be
+asked, the important subject mooted. On this occasion, however, the Khan
+came with unusual rapidity to his point. A few inquiries as to the
+Colonel's health, a short oration on the backwardness of the crops, a
+lengthier one upon his fidelity to and friendship for the British
+Government and the miserable return ever made to him for it, and then
+came a question ludicrously inapposite and put with the solemn _naivet,_
+of a child.
+
+"I suppose you know," said the Khan, tugging at his great grey beard,
+"that my grandfather married a fairy for one of his wives?"
+
+It was on the strength of such abrupt questions that strangers were apt
+to think that the Khan had fallen into his second childhood before his
+time. But the Resident knew his man. He was aware that the Khan was
+watching for his answer. He sat up in his chair and answered politely:
+
+"So, your Highness, I have heard."
+
+"Yes, it is true," continued the Khan. "Moreover, the fairy bore him a
+daughter who is still alive, though very old."
+
+"So there is still a fairy in the family," replied Captain Phillips
+pleasantly, while he wondered what in the world the Khan was driving at.
+"Yes, indeed, I know that. For only a week ago I was asked by a poor man
+up the valley to secure your Highness's intercession. It seems that he is
+much plagued by a fairy who has taken possession of his house, and since
+your Highness is related to the fairies, he would be very grateful if you
+would persuade his fairy to go away."
+
+"I know," said the Khan gravely. "The case has already been brought to
+me. The fellow _will_ open closed boxes in his house, and the fairy
+resents it."
+
+"Then your Highness has exorcised the fairy?"
+
+"No; I have forbidden him to open boxes in his house," said the Khan; and
+then, with a smile, "But it was not of him we were speaking, but of the
+fairy in my family."
+
+He leaned forward and his voice shook.
+
+"She sends me warnings, Captain Sahib. Two nights ago, by the flat stone
+where the fairies dance, she heard them--the voices of an innumerable
+multitude in the air talking the Chilti tongue--talking of trouble to
+come in the near days."
+
+He spoke with burning eyes fixed upon the Resident and with his fingers
+playing nervously in and out among the hairs of his beard. Whether the
+Khan really believed the story of the fairies--there is nothing more
+usual than a belief in fairies in the countries bordered by the
+snow-peaks of the Hindu Kush--or whether he used the story as a blind to
+conceal the real source of his fear, the Resident could not decide. But
+what he did know was this: The Khan of Chiltistan was desperately afraid.
+A whole programme of reform was sketched out for the Captain's hearing.
+
+"I have been a good friend to the English, Captain Sahib. I have kept my
+Mullahs and my people quiet all these years. There are things which might
+be better, as your Excellency has courteously pointed out to me, and the
+words have never been forgotten. The taxes no doubt are very burdensome,
+and it may be the caravans from Bokhara and Central Asia should pay less
+to the treasury as they pass through Chiltistan, and perhaps I do
+unjustly in buying what I want from them at my own price." Thus he
+delicately described the system of barefaced robbery which he practised
+on the traders who passed southwards to India through Chiltistan. "But
+these things can be altered. Moreover," and here he spoke with an air of
+distinguished virtue, "I propose to sell no more of my people into
+slavery--No, and to give none of them, not even the youngest, as presents
+to my friends. It is quite true of course that the wood which I sell to
+the merchants of Peshawur is cut and brought down by forced labour, but
+next year I am thinking of paying. I have been a good friend to the
+English all my life, Colonel Sahib."
+
+Captain Phillips had heard promises of the kind before and accounted them
+at their true value. But he had never heard them delivered with so
+earnest a protestation. And he rode away from the Palace with the
+disturbing conviction that there was something new in the wind of which
+he did not know.
+
+He rode up the valley, pondering what that something new might be.
+Hillside and plain were ablaze with autumn colours. The fruit in the
+orchards--peaches, apples, and grapes--was ripe, and on the river bank
+the gold of the willows glowed among thickets of red rose. High up on the
+hills, field rose above field, supported by stone walls. In the bosom of
+the valley groups of great walnut-trees marked where the villages stood.
+
+Captain Phillips rode through the villages. Everywhere he was met with
+smiling faces and courteous salutes; but he drew no comfort from them.
+The Chilti would smile pleasantly while he was fitting his knife in under
+your fifth rib. Only once did Phillips receive a hint that something was
+amiss, but the hint was so elusive that it did no more than quicken his
+uneasiness.
+
+He was riding over grass, and came silently upon a man whose back was
+turned to him.
+
+"So, Dadu," he said quietly, "you must not open closed boxes any more in
+your house."
+
+The man jumped round. He was not merely surprised, he was startled.
+
+"Your Excellency rides up the valley?" he cried, and almost he
+barred the way.
+
+"Why not, Dadu?"
+
+Dadu's face became impassive.
+
+"It is as your Excellency wills. It is a good day for a ride," said Dadu;
+and Captain Phillips rode on.
+
+It might of course have been that the man had been startled merely by the
+unexpected voice behind him; and the question which had leaped from his
+mouth might have meant nothing at all. Captain Phillips turned round in
+his saddle. Dadu was still standing where he had left him, and was
+following the rider with his eyes.
+
+"I wonder if there is anything up the valley which I ought to know
+about?" Captain Phillips said to himself, and he rode forward now with a
+watchful eye. The hills began to close in; the bosom of the valley to
+narrow. Nine miles from Kohara it became a defile through which the river
+roared between low precipitous cliffs. Above the cliffs on each side a
+level of stony ground, which here and there had been cleared and
+cultivated, stretched to the mountain walls. At one point a great fan of
+débris spread out from a side valley. Across this fan the track mounted,
+and then once more the valley widened out. On the river's edge a roofless
+ruin of a building, with a garden run wild at one end of it, stood apart.
+A few hundred yards beyond there was a village buried among bushes, and
+then a deep nullah cut clean across the valley. It was a lonely and a
+desolate spot. Yet Captain Phillips never rode across the fan of shale
+and came within sight of it but his imagination began to people it with
+living figures and a surge of wild events. He reined in his horse as he
+came to the brow of the hill, and sat for a moment looking downwards.
+Then he rode very quickly a few yards down the hill. Before, he and his
+horse had been standing out clear against the sky. Now, against the
+background of grey and brown he would be an unnoticeable figure.
+
+He halted again, but this time his eyes, instead of roving over the
+valley, were fixed intently upon one particular spot. Under the wall of
+the great ruined building he had seen something move. He made sure now of
+what the something was. There were half a dozen horses--no, seven--seven
+horses tethered apart from each other, and not a syce for any one of
+them. Captain Phillips felt his blood quicken. The Khan's protestations
+and Dadu's startled question, had primed him to expectation. Cautiously
+he rode down into the valley, and suspense grew upon him as he rode. It
+was a still, windless day, and noise carried far. The only sound he heard
+was the sound of the stones rattling under the hoofs of his horse. But in
+a little while he reached turf and level ground and so rode forward in
+silence. When he was within a couple of hundred yards of the ruin he
+halted and tied up his horse in a grove of trees. Thence he walked across
+an open space, passed beneath the remnant of a gateway into a court and,
+crossing the court, threaded his way through a network of narrow alleys
+between crumbling mud walls. As he advanced the sound of a voice reached
+his ears--a deep monotonous voice, which spoke with a kind of rhythm. The
+words Phillips could not distinguish, but there was no need that he
+should. The intonation, the flow of the sentences, told him clearly
+enough that somewhere beyond was a man praying. And then he stopped, for
+other voices broke suddenly in with loud and, as it seemed to Phillips,
+with fierce appeals. But the appeals died away, the one voice again took
+up the prayer, and again Phillips stepped forward.
+
+At the end of the alley he came to a doorway in a high wall. There was no
+door. He stood on the threshold of the doorway and looked in. He looked
+into a court open to the sky, and the seven horses and the monotonous
+voice were explained to him. There were seven young men--nobles of
+Chiltistan, as Phillips knew from their _chogas_ of velvet and Chinese
+silk--gathered in the court. They were kneeling with their backs towards
+him and the doorway, so that not one of them had noticed his approach.
+They were facing a small rough-hewn obelisk of stone which stood at the
+head of a low mound of earth at the far end of the court. Six of them
+were grouped in a sort of semi-circle, and the seventh, a man clad from
+head to foot in green robes, knelt a little in advance and alone. But
+from none of the seven nobles did the voice proceed. In front of them all
+knelt an old man in the brown homespun of the people. Phillips, from the
+doorway, could see his great beard wagging as he prayed, and knew him for
+one of the incendiary priests of Chiltistan.
+
+The prayer was one with which Phillips was familiar: The Day was at hand;
+the infidels would be scattered as chaff; the God of Mahommed was
+besought to send the innumerable company of his angels and to make his
+faithful people invulnerable to wounds. Phillips could have gone on with
+the prayer himself, had the Mullah failed. But it was not the prayer
+which held him rooted to the spot, but the setting of the prayer.
+
+The scene was in itself strange and significant enough. These seven gaily
+robed youths assembled secretly in a lonely and desolate ruin nine miles
+from Kohara had come thither not merely for prayer. The prayer would be
+but the seal upon a compact, the blessing upon an undertaking where life
+and death were the issues. But there was something more; and that
+something more gave to the scene in Phillips' eyes a very startling
+irony. He knew well how quickly in these countries the actual record of
+events is confused, and how quickly any tomb, or any monument becomes a
+shrine before which "the faithful" will bow and make their prayer. But
+that here of all places, and before this tomb of all tombs, the God of
+the Mahommedans should be invoked--this was life turning playwright with
+a vengeance. It needed just one more detail to complete the picture and
+the next moment that detail was provided. For Phillips moved.
+
+His boot rattled upon a loose stone. The prayer ceased, the worshippers
+rose abruptly to their feet and turned as one man towards the doorway.
+Phillips saw, face to face, the youth robed in green, who had knelt at
+the head of his companions. It was Shere Ali, the Prince of Chiltistan.
+
+Phillips advanced at once into the centre of the group. He was wise
+enough not to hold out his hand lest it should be refused. But he spoke
+as though he had taken leave of Shere Ali only yesterday.
+
+"So your Highness has returned?"
+
+"Yes," replied Shere Ali, and he spoke in the same indifferent tone.
+
+But both men knew, however unconcernedly they spoke, that Shere Ali's
+return was to be momentous in the history of Chiltistan. Shere Ali's
+father knew it too, that troubled man in the Palace above Kohara.
+
+"When did you reach Kohara?" Phillips asked.
+
+"I have not yet been to Kohara. I ride down from here this afternoon."
+
+Shere Ali smiled as he spoke, and the smile said more than the words.
+There was a challenge, a defiance in it, which were unmistakable. But
+Phillips chose to interpret the words quite simply.
+
+"Shall we go together?" he said, and then he looked towards the doorway.
+The others had gathered there, the six young men and the priest. They
+were armed and more than one had his hand ready upon his swordhilt. "But
+you have friends, I see," he added grimly. He began to wonder whether he
+would himself ride back to Kohara that afternoon.
+
+"Yes," replied Shere Ali quietly, "I have friends in Chiltistan," and he
+laid a stress upon the name of his country, as though he wished to show
+to Captain Phillips that he recognised no friends outside its borders.
+
+Again Phillips' thoughts were swept to the irony, the tragic irony of the
+scene in which he now was called to play a part.
+
+"Does your Highness know this spot?" he asked suddenly. Then he pointed
+to the tomb and the rude obelisk. "Does your Highness know whose bones
+are laid at the foot of that monument?"
+
+Shere Ali shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"Within these walls, in one of these roofless rooms, you were born," said
+Phillips, "and that grave before which you prayed is the grave of a man
+named Luffe, who defended this fort in those days."
+
+"It is not," replied Shere Ali. "It is the tomb of a saint," and he
+called to the mullah for corroboration of his words.
+
+"It is the tomb of Luffe. He fell in this courtyard, struck down not by a
+bullet, but by overwork and the strain of the siege. I know. I have the
+story from an old soldier whom I met in Cashmere this summer and who
+served here under Luffe. Luffe fell in this court, and when he died was
+buried here."
+
+Shere Ali, in spite of himself was beginning to listen to Captain
+Phillips' words.
+
+"Who was the soldier?" he asked.
+
+"Colonel Dewes."
+
+Shere Ali nodded his head as though he had expected the name. Then he
+said as he turned away:
+
+"What is Luffe to me? What should I know of Luffe?"
+
+"This," said Phillips, and he spoke in so arresting a voice that Shere
+Ali turned again to listen to him. "When Luffe was dying, he uttered an
+appeal--he bequeathed it to India, as his last service; and the appeal
+was that you should not be sent to England, that neither Eton nor Oxford
+should know you, that you should remain in your own country."
+
+The Resident had Shere Ali's attention now.
+
+"He said that?" cried the Prince in a startled voice. Then he pointed his
+finger to the grave. "The man lying there said that?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"And no one listened, I suppose?" said Shere Ali bitterly.
+
+"Or listened too late," said Phillips. "Like Dewes, who only since he met
+you in Calcutta one day upon the racecourse, seems dimly to have
+understood the words the dead man spoke."
+
+Shere Ali was silent. He stood looking at the grave and the obelisk with
+a gentler face than he had shown before.
+
+"Why did he not wish it?" he asked at length.
+
+"He said that it would mean unhappiness for you; that it might mean ruin
+for Chiltistan."
+
+"Did he say that?" said Shere Ali slowly, and there was something of awe
+in his voice. Then he recovered himself and cried defiantly. "Yet in one
+point he was wrong. It will not mean ruin for Chiltistan."
+
+So far he had spoken in English. Now he turned quickly towards his
+friends and spoke in his own tongue.
+
+"It is time. We will go," and to Captain Phillips he said, "You shall
+ride back with me to Kohara. I will leave you at the doorway of the
+Residency." And these words, too, he spoke in his own tongue.
+
+There rose a clamour among the seven who waited in the doorway, and
+loudest of all rose the voice of the mullah, protesting against Shere
+Ali's promise.
+
+"My word is given," said the Prince, and he turned with a smile to
+Captain Phillips. "In memory of my friend,"--he pointed to the
+grave--"For it seems I had a friend once amongst the white people. In
+memory of my friend, I give you your life."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXII
+
+SURPRISES FOR CAPTAIN PHILLIPS
+
+
+The young nobles ceased from their outcry. They went sullenly out and
+mounted their horses under the ruined wall of the old fort. But as they
+mounted they whispered together with quick glances towards Captain
+Phillips. The Resident intercepted the glance and had little doubt as to
+the subject of the whispering.
+
+"I am in the deuce of a tight place," he reflected; "it's seven to one
+against my ever reaching Kohara, and the one's a doubtful quantity."
+
+He looked at Shere Ali, who seemed quite undisturbed by the prospect
+of mutiny amongst his followers. His face had hardened a little.
+That was all.
+
+"And your horse?" Shere Ali asked.
+
+Captain Phillips pointed towards the clump of trees where he had
+tied it up.
+
+"Will you fetch it?" said Shere Ali, and as Phillips walked off, he
+turned towards the nobles and the old mullah who stood amongst them.
+Phillips heard his voice, as he began to speak, and was surprised by a
+masterful quiet ring in it. "The doubtful quantity seems to have grown
+into a man," he thought, and the thought gained strength when he rode
+his horse back from the clump of trees towards the group. Shere Ali met
+him gravely.
+
+"You will ride on my right hand," he said. "You need have no fear."
+
+The seven nobles clustered behind, and the party rode at a walk over the
+fan of shale and through the defile into the broad valley of Kohara.
+Shere Ali did not speak. He rode on with a set and brooding face, and the
+Resident fell once more to pondering the queer scene of which he had been
+the witness. Even at that moment when his life was in the balance his
+thoughts would play with it, so complete a piece of artistry it seemed.
+There was the tomb itself--an earth grave and a rough obelisk without so
+much as a name or a date upon it set up at its head by some past Resident
+at Kohara. It was appropriate and seemly to the man without friends, or
+family, or wife, but to whom the Frontier had been all these. He would
+have wished for no more himself, since vanity had played so small a part
+in his career. He had been the great Force upon the Frontier, keeping the
+Queen's peace by the strength of his character and the sagacity of his
+mind. Yet before his grave, invoking him as an unknown saint, the nobles
+of Chiltistan had knelt to pray for the destruction of such as he and the
+overthrow of the power which he had lived to represent. And all because
+his advice had been neglected.
+
+Captain Phillips was roused out of his reflections as the cavalcade
+approached a village. For out of that village and from the fields about
+it, the men, armed for the most part with good rifles, poured towards
+them with cries of homage. They joined the cavalcade, marched with it
+past their homes, and did not turn back. Only the women and the children
+were left behind. And at the next village and at the next the same thing
+happened. The cavalcade began to swell into a small army, an army of men
+well equipped for war; and at the head of the gathering force Shere Ali
+rode with an impassive face, never speaking but to check a man from time
+to time who brandished a weapon at the Resident.
+
+"Your Highness has counted the cost?" Captain Phillips asked. "There will
+be but the one end to it."
+
+Shere Ali turned to the Resident, and though his face did not change from
+its brooding calm, a fire burned darkly in his eyes.
+
+"From Afghanistan to Thibet the frontier will rise," he said proudly.
+
+Captain Phillips shook his head.
+
+"From Afghanistan to Thibet the Frontier will wait, as it always waits.
+It will wait to see what happens in Chiltistan."
+
+But though he spoke boldly, he had little comfort from his thoughts. The
+rising had been well concerted. Those who flocked to Shere Ali were not
+only the villagers of the Kohara valley. There were shepherds from the
+hills, wild men from the far corners of Chiltistan. Already the small
+army could be counted with the hundred for its unit. To-morrow the
+hundred would be a thousand. Moreover, for once in a way there was no
+divided counsel. Jealousy and intrigue were not, it seemed, to do their
+usual work in Chiltistan. There was only one master, and he of
+unquestioned authority. Else how came it that Captain Phillips rode
+amidst that great and frenzied throng, unhurt and almost unthreatened?
+
+Down the valley the roof-tops of Kohara began to show amongst the trees.
+The high palace on the hill with its latticed windows bulked against the
+evening sky. The sound of many drums was borne to the Resident's ears.
+The Residency stood a mile and a half from the town in a great garden. A
+high wall enclosed it, but it was a house, not a fortress; and Phillips
+had at his command but a few levies to defend it. One of them stood by
+the gate. He kept his ground as Shere Ali and his force approached. The
+only movement which he made was to stand at attention, and as Shere Ali
+halted at the entrance, he saluted. But it was Captain Phillips whom he
+saluted, and not the Prince of Chiltistan. Shere Ali spoke with the same
+quiet note of confident authority which had surprised Captain Phillips
+before, to the seven nobles at his back. Then he turned to the Resident.
+
+"I will ride with you to your door," he said.
+
+The two men passed alone through the gateway and along a broad path which
+divided the forecourt to the steps of the house. And not a man of all
+that crowd which followed Shere Ali to Kohara pressed in behind them.
+Captain Phillips looked back as much in surprise as in relief. But there
+was no surprise on the face of Shere Ali. He, it was plain, expected
+obedience.
+
+"Upon my word," cried Phillips in a burst of admiration, "you have got
+your fellows well in hand."
+
+"I?" said Shere Ali. "I am nothing. What could I do who a week ago was
+still a stranger to my people? I am a voice, nothing more. But the God of
+my people speaks through me"; and as he spoke these last words, his voice
+suddenly rose to a shrill trembling note, his face suddenly quivered with
+excitement.
+
+Captain Phillips stared. "The man's in earnest," he muttered to himself.
+"He actually believes it."
+
+It was the second time that Captain Phillips had been surprised within
+five minutes, and on this occasion the surprise came upon him with a
+shock. How it had come about--that was all dark to Captain Phillips. But
+the result was clear. The few words spoken as they had been spoken
+revealed the fact. The veneer of Shere Ali's English training had gone.
+Shere Ali had reverted. His own people had claimed him.
+
+"And I guessed nothing of this," the Resident reflected bitterly.
+Signs of trouble he had noticed in abundance, but this one crucial
+fact which made trouble a certain and unavoidable thing--that had
+utterly escaped him. His thoughts went back to the nameless tomb in
+the courtyard of the fort.
+
+"Luffe would have known," he thought in a very bitter humility. "Nay, he
+did know. He foresaw."
+
+There was yet a third surprise in store for Captain Phillips. As the two
+men rode up the broad path, he had noticed that the door of the house was
+standing open, as it usually did. Now, however, he saw it swing to--very
+slowly, very noiselessly. He was surprised, for he knew the door to be a
+strong heavy door of walnut wood, not likely to swing to even in a wind.
+And there was no wind. Besides, if it had swung to of its own accord, it
+would have slammed. Its weight would have made it slam. Whereas it was
+not quite closed. As he reined in his horse at the steps, he saw that
+there was a chink between the door and the door-post.
+
+"There's someone behind that door," he said to himself, and he glanced
+quietly at Shere Ali. It would be quite in keeping with the Chilti
+character for Shere Ali politely to escort him home knowing well that an
+assassin waited behind the door; and it was with a smile of some irony
+that he listened to Shere Ali taking his leave.
+
+"You will be safe, so long as you stay within your grounds. I will place
+a guard about the house. I do not make war against my country's guests.
+And in a few days I will send an escort and set you and your attendants
+free from hurt beyond our borders. But"--and his voice lost its
+courtesy--"take care you admit no one, and give shelter to no one."
+
+The menace of Shere Ali's tone roused Captain Phillips. "I take no orders
+from your Highness," he said firmly. "Your Highness may not have noticed
+that," and he pointed upwards to where on a high flagstaff in front of
+the house the English flag hung against the pole.
+
+"I give your Excellency no orders," replied Shere Ali. "But on the other
+hand I give you a warning. Shelter so much as one man and that flag will
+not save you. I should not be able to hold in my men."
+
+Shere Ali turned and rode back to the gates. Captain Phillips dismounted,
+and calling forward a reluctant groom, gave him his horse. Then he
+suddenly flung back the door. But there was no resistance. The door swung
+in and clattered against the wall. Phillips looked into the hall, but the
+dusk was gathering in the garden. He looked into a place of twilight and
+shadows. He grasped his riding-crop a little more firmly in his hand and
+strode through the doorway. In a dark corner something moved.
+
+"Ah! would you!" cried Captain Phillips, turning sharply on the instant.
+He raised his crop above his head and then a crouching figure fell at his
+feet and embraced his knees; and a trembling voice of fear cried:
+
+"Save me! Your Excellency will not give me up! I have been a good friend
+to the English!"
+
+For the second time the Khan of Chiltistan had sought refuge from his own
+people. Captain Phillips looked round.
+
+"Hush," he whispered in a startled voice. "Let me shut the door!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIII
+
+IN THE RESIDENCY
+
+
+Captain Phillips with a sharp gesture ordered the Khan back to the
+shadowy corner from which he had sprung out. Then he shut the door and,
+with the shutting of the door, the darkness deepened suddenly in the
+hall. He shot the bolt and put up the chain. It rattled in his ears with
+a startling loudness. Then he stood without speech or movement. Outside
+he heard Shere Ali's voice ring clear, and the army of tribesmen
+clattered past towards the town. The rattle of their weapons, the hum of
+their voices diminished. Captain Phillips took his handkerchief from his
+pocket and wiped his forehead. He had the sensations of a man reprieved.
+
+"But it's only a reprieve," he thought. "There will be no commutation."
+
+He turned again towards the dark corner.
+
+"How did you come?" he asked in a low voice.
+
+"By the orchard at the back of the house."
+
+"Did no one see you?"
+
+"I hid in the orchard until I saw the red coat of one of your servants. I
+called to him and he let me in secretly. But no one else saw me."
+
+"No one in the city?"
+
+"I came barefoot in a rough cloak with the hood drawn over my face," said
+the Khan. "No one paid any heed to me. There was much noise and running
+to and fro, and polishing of weapons. I crept out into the hill-side at
+the back and so came down into your orchard."
+
+Captain Phillips shrugged his shoulders. He opened a door and led the
+Khan into a room which looked out upon the orchard.
+
+"Well, we will do what we can," he said, "but it's very little. They will
+guess immediately that you are here of course."
+
+"Once before--" faltered the Khan, and Phillips broke in upon him
+impatiently.
+
+"Yes, once before. But it's not the same thing. This is a house, not a
+fort, and I have only a handful of men to defend it; and I am not Luffe."
+Then his voice sharpened. "Why didn't you listen to him? All this is your
+fault--yours and Dewes', who didn't understand, and held his tongue."
+
+The Khan was mystified by the words, but Phillips did not take the
+trouble to explain. He knew something of the Chilti character. They would
+have put up with the taxes, with the selling into slavery, with all the
+other abominations of the Khan's rule. They would have listened to the
+exhortations of the mullahs without anything coming of it, so long as no
+leader appeared. They were great accepters of facts as they were. Let the
+brother or son or nephew murder the ruling Khan and sit in his place,
+they accepted his rule without any struggles of conscience. But let a man
+rise to lead them, then they would bethink them of the exhortations of
+their priests and of their own particular sufferings and flock to his
+standard. And the man had risen--just because twenty-five years ago the
+Khan would not listen to Luffe.
+
+"It's too late, however, for explanations," he said, and he clapped his
+hands together for a servant. In a few moments the light of a lamp
+gleamed in the hall through the doorway. Phillips went quickly out of the
+room, closing the door behind him.
+
+"Fasten the shutters first," he said to the servant in the hall. "Then
+bring the lamp in."
+
+The servant obeyed, but when he brought the lamp into the room, and saw
+the Khan of Chiltistan standing at the table with no more dignity of
+dress or, indeed, of bearing than any beggar in the kingdom, he nearly
+let the lamp fall.
+
+"His Highness will stay in this house," said Phillips, "but his presence
+must not be spoken of. Will you tell Poulteney Sahib that I would like to
+speak to him?" The servant bowed his forehead to the palms of his hand
+and turned away upon his errand. But Poulteney Sahib was already at the
+door. He was the subaltern in command of the half company of Sikhs which
+served Captain Phillips for an escort and a guard.
+
+"You have heard the news I suppose," said Phillips.
+
+"Yes," replied Poulteney. He was a wiry dark youth, with a little black
+moustache and a brisk manner of speech. "I was out on the hill after
+chikkor when my shikari saw Shere Ali and his crowd coming down the
+valley. He knew all about it and gave me a general idea of the situation.
+It seems the whole country's rising. I should have been here before, but
+it seemed advisable to wait until it was dark. I crawled in between a
+couple of guard-posts. There is already a watch kept on the house," and
+then he stopped abruptly. He had caught sight of the Khan in the
+background. He had much ado not to whistle in his surprise. But he
+refrained and merely bowed.
+
+"It seems to be a complicated situation," he said to Captain Phillips.
+"Does Shere Ali know?" and he glanced towards the Khan.
+
+"Not yet," replied Phillips grimly. "But I don't think it will be long
+before he does."
+
+"And then there will be ructions," Poulteney remarked softly. "Yes, there
+will be ructions of a highly-coloured and interesting description."
+
+"We must do what we can," said Phillips with a shrug of his shoulders.
+"It isn't much, of course," and for the next two hours the twenty-five
+Sikhs were kept busy. The doors were barricaded, the shutters closed upon
+the windows and loopholed, and provisions were brought in from the
+outhouses.
+
+"It is lucky we had sense enough to lay in a store of food," said
+Phillips.
+
+The Sikhs were divided into watches and given their appointed places.
+Cartridges were doled out to them, and the rest of the ammunition was
+placed in a stone cellar.
+
+"That's all that we can do," said Phillips. "So we may as well dine."
+
+They dined with the Khan, speaking little and with ears on the alert,
+in a room at the back of the house. At any moment the summons might
+come to surrender the Khan. They waited for a blow upon the door, the
+sound of the firing of a rifle or a loud voice calling upon them from
+the darkness. But all they heard was the interminable babble of the
+Khan, as he sat at the table shivering with fear and unable to eat a
+morsel of his food.
+
+"You won't give me up!... I have been a good friend to the English....
+All my life I have been a good friend to the English."
+
+"We will do what we can," said Phillips, and he rose from the table and
+went up on to the roof. He lay down behind the low parapet and looked
+over towards the town. The house was a poor place to defend. At the back
+beyond the orchard the hill-side rose and commanded the roof. On the
+east of the house a stream ran by to the great river in the centre of
+the valley. But the bank of the stream was a steep slippery bank of
+clay, and less than a hundred yards down a small water-mill on the
+opposite side overlooked it. The Chiltis had only to station a few
+riflemen in the water-mill and not a man would be able to climb down
+that bank and fetch water for the Residency. On the west stood the
+stables and the storehouses, and the barracks of the Sikhs, a square of
+buildings which would afford fine cover for an attacking force. Only in
+front within the walls of the forecourt was there any open space which
+the house commanded. It was certainly a difficult--nay, a
+hopeless--place to defend.
+
+But Captain Phillips, as he lay behind the parapet, began to be puzzled.
+Why did not the attack begin? He looked over to the city. It was a place
+of tossing lights and wild clamours. The noise of it was carried on the
+night wind to Phillips' ears. But about the Residency there was quietude
+and darkness. Here and there a red fire glowed where the guards were
+posted; now and then a shower of sparks leaped up into the air as a fresh
+log was thrown upon the ashes; and a bright flame would glisten on the
+barrel of a rifle and make ruddy the dark faces of the watchmen. But
+there were no preparations for an attack.
+
+Phillips looked across the city. On the hill the Palace was alive with
+moving lights--lights that flashed from room to room as though men
+searched hurriedly.
+
+"Surely they must already have guessed," he murmured to himself. The
+moving lights in the high windows of the Palace held his eyes--so swiftly
+they flitted from room to room, so frenzied seemed the hurry of the
+search--and then to his astonishment one after another they began to die
+out. It could not be that the searchers were content with the failure of
+their search, that the Palace was composing itself to sleep. In the city
+the clamour had died down; little by little it sank to darkness. There
+came a freshness in the air. Though there were many hours still before
+daylight, the night drew on towards morning. What could it mean, he
+wondered? Why was the Residency left in peace?
+
+And as he wondered, he heard a scuffling noise upon the roof behind him.
+He turned his head and Poulteney crawled to his side.
+
+"Will you come down?" the subaltern asked; "I don't know what to do."
+
+Phillips at once crept back to the trap-door. The two men descended, and
+Poulteney led the way into the little room at the back of the house where
+they had dined. There was no longer a light in the room; and they stood
+for awhile in the darkness listening.
+
+"Where is the Khan?" whispered Phillips.
+
+"I fixed up one of the cellars for him," Poulteney replied in the same
+tone, and as he ended there came suddenly a rattle of gravel upon the
+shutter of the window. It was thrown cautiously, but even so it startled
+Phillips almost into a cry.
+
+"That's it," whispered Poulteney. "There is someone in the orchard.
+That's the third time the gravel has rattled on the shutter. What
+shall I do?"
+
+"Have you got your revolver?" asked Phillips.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Then stand by."
+
+Phillips carefully and noiselessly opened the shutter for an inch or two.
+
+"Who's that?" he asked in a low voice; he asked the question in Pushtu,
+and in Pushtu a voice no louder than his own replied:
+
+"I want to speak to Poulteney Sahib."
+
+A startled exclamation broke from the subaltern. "It's my shikari," he
+said, and thrusting open the shutter he leaned out.
+
+"Well, what news do you bring?" he asked; and at the answer Captain
+Phillips for the first time since he had entered into his twilit hall
+had a throb of hope. The expeditionary troops from Nowshera, advancing
+by forced marches, were already close to the borders of Chiltistan. News
+had been brought to the Palace that evening. Shere Ali had started with
+every man he could collect to take up the position where he meant to
+give battle.
+
+"I must hurry or I shall be late," said the shikari, and he crawled away
+through the orchard.
+
+Phillips closed the shutter again and lit the lamp. The news seemed too
+good to be true. But the morning broke over a city of women and old men.
+Only the watchmen remained at their posts about the Residency grounds.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIV
+
+ONE OF THE LITTLE WARS
+
+
+The campaign which Shere Ali directed on the borders of Chiltistan is now
+matter of history, and may be read of, by whoso wills, in the Blue-books
+and despatches of the time. Those documents, with their paragraphs and
+diaries and bare records of facts, have a dry-as-dust look about them
+which their contents very often belie. And the reader will not rise from
+the story of this little war without carrying away an impression of wild
+fury and reckless valour which will long retain its colours in his mind.
+Moreover, there was more than fury to distinguish it. Shere Ali turned
+against his enemies the lessons which they had taught him; and a military
+skill was displayed which delayed the result and thereby endangered the
+position of the British troops. For though at the first the neighbouring
+tribes and states, the little village republics which abound in those
+parts, waited upon the event as Phillips had foretold, nevertheless as
+the days passed, and the event still hung in the balance, they took heart
+of grace and gathered behind the troops to destroy their communications
+and cut off their supplies.
+
+Dick Linforth wrote three letters to his mother, who was living over
+again the suspense and terror which had fallen to her lot a quarter of a
+century ago. The first letter was brought to the house under the Sussex
+Downs at twilight on an evening of late autumn, and as she recognized the
+writing for her son's a sudden weakness overcame her, and her hand so
+shook that she could hardly tear off the envelope.
+
+"I am unhurt," he wrote at the beginning of the letter, and tears of
+gratitude ran down her cheeks as she read the words. "Shere Ali," he
+continued, "occupied a traditional position of defence in a narrow
+valley. The Kohara river ran between steep cliffs through the bed of the
+valley, and, as usual, above the cliffs on each side there were
+cultivated maidans or plateaus. Over the right-hand maidan, the
+road--_our_ road--ran to a fortified village. Behind the village, a deep
+gorge, or nullah, as we call them in these parts, descending from a side
+glacier high up at the back of the hills on our right, cut clean across
+the valley, like a great gash. The sides of the nullah were
+extraordinarily precipitous, and on the edge furthest from us stone
+sangars were already built as a second line of defence. Shere Ali
+occupied the village in front of the nullah, and we encamped six miles
+down the valley, meaning to attack in the morning. But the Chiltis
+abandoned their traditional method of fighting behind walls and standing
+on the defence. A shot rang out on the outskirts of our camp at three
+o'clock in the morning, and in a moment they were upon us. It was
+reckoned that there were fifteen thousand of them engaged from first to
+last in this battle, whereas we were under two thousand combatants. We
+had seven hundred of the Imperial Service troops, four companies of
+Gurkhas, three hundred men of the Punjab Infantry, three companies of the
+Oxfordshires, besides cavalry, mountain batteries and Irregulars. The
+attack was unexpected. We bestrode the road, but Shere Ali brought his
+men in by an old disused Buddhist road, running over the hills on our
+right hand, and in the darkness he forced his way through our lines into
+a little village in the heart of our position. He seized the bazaar and
+held it all that day, a few houses built of stone and with stones upon
+the roof which made them proof against our shells. Meanwhile the slopes
+on both sides of the valley were thronged with Chiltis. They were armed
+with jezails and good rifles stolen from our troops, and they had some
+old cannon--sher bachas as they are called. Altogether they caused us
+great loss, and towards evening things began to look critical. They had
+fortified and barricaded the bazaar, and kept up a constant fire from it.
+At last a sapper named Manders, with half a dozen Gurkhas behind him, ran
+across the open space, and while the Gurkhas shot through the loop holes
+and kept the fire down, Manders fixed his gun cotton at the bottom of the
+door and lighted the fuse. He was shot twice, once in the leg, once in
+the shoulder, but he managed to crawl along the wall of the houses out of
+reach of the explosion, and the door was blown in. We drove them out of
+that house and finally cleared the bazaar after some desperate fighting.
+Shere Ali was in the thick of it. He was dressed from head to foot in
+green, and was a conspicuous mark. But he escaped unhurt. The enemy drew
+off for the night, and we lay down as we were, dog-tired and with no
+fires to cook any food. They came on again in the morning, clouds of
+them, but we held them back with the gatlings and the maxims, and towards
+evening they again retired. To-day nothing has happened except the
+arrival of an envoy with an arrogant letter from Shere Ali, asking why we
+are straying inside the borders of his country 'like camels without
+nose-rings.' We shall show him why to-morrow. For to-morrow we attack the
+fort on the maidan. Good-night, mother. I am very tired." And the last
+sentence took away from Sybil Linforth all the comfort the letter had
+brought her. Dick had begun very well. He could have chosen no better
+words to meet her eyes at the commencement than those three, "I am
+unhurt." But he could have chosen no worse with which to end it. For they
+had ended the last letter which her husband had written to her, and her
+mind flew back to that day, and was filled with fore-bodings.
+
+But by the next mail came another letter in his hand, describing how the
+fort had been carried at the point of the bayonet, and Shere Ali driven
+back behind the nullah. This, however, was the strongest position of all,
+and the most difficult to force. The road which wound down behind the
+fort into the bed of the nullah and zigzagged up again on the far side
+had been broken away, the cliffs were unscaleable, and the stone sangars
+on the brow proof against shell and bullet. Shere Ali's force was
+disposed behind these stone breastworks right across the valley on both
+sides of the river. For three weeks the British force sat in front of
+this position, now trying to force it by the river-bed, now under cover
+of night trying to repair the broken road. But the Chiltis kept good
+watch, and at the least sound of a pick in the gulf below avalanches of
+rocks and stones would be hurled down the cliff-sides. Moreover, wherever
+the cliffs seemed likely to afford a means of ascent Shere Ali had
+directed the water-channels, and since the nights were frosty these
+points were draped with ice as smooth as glass. Finally, however, Mrs.
+Linforth received a third letter which set her heart beating with pride,
+and for the moment turned all her fears to joy.
+
+"The war is over," it began. "The position was turned this morning. The
+Chiltis are in full flight towards Kohara with the cavalry upon their
+heels. They are throwing away their arms as they run, so that they may
+be thought not to have taken part in the fight. We follow to-morrow. It
+is not yet known whether Shere Ali is alive or dead and, mother, it was
+I--yes, I your son, who found out the road by which the position could
+be turned. I had crept up the nullah time after time towards the glacier
+at its head, thinking that if ever the position was to be taken it must
+be turned at that end. At last I thought that I had made out a way up
+the cliffs. There were some gullies and a ledge and then some rocks
+which seemed practicable, and which would lead one out on the brow of
+the cliff just between the two last sangars on the enemy's left. I
+didn't write a word about it to you before. I was so afraid I might be
+wrong. I got leave and used to creep up the nullah in the darkness to
+the tongue of the glacier with a little telescope and lie hidden all day
+behind a boulder working out the way, until darkness came again and
+allowed me to get back to camp. At last I felt sure, and I suggested the
+plan to Ralston the Political Officer, who carried it to the
+General-in-Command. The General himself came out with me, and I pointed
+out to him that the cliffs were so steep just beneath the sangars that
+we might take the men who garrisoned them by surprise, and that in any
+case they could not fire upon us, while sharpshooters from the cliffs on
+our side of the nullah could hinder the enemy from leaving their sangars
+and rolling down stones. I was given permission to try and a hundred
+Gurkhas to try with. We left camp that night at half-past seven, and
+crept up the nullah with our blankets to the foot of the climb, and
+there we waited till the morning."
+
+The years of training to which Linforth had bent himself with a definite
+aim began, in a word, to produce their results. In the early morning he
+led the way up the steep face of cliffs, and the Gurkhas followed. One of
+the sharpshooters lying ready on the British side of the nullah said that
+they looked for all the world like a black train of ants. There were
+thirteen hundred feet of rock to be scaled, and for nine hundred of it
+they climbed undetected. Then from a sangar lower down the line where the
+cliffs of the nullah curved outwards they were seen and the alarm was
+given. But for awhile the defenders of the threatened position did not
+understand the danger, and when they did a hail of bullets kept them in
+their shelters. Linforth followed by his Gurkhas was seen to reach the
+top of the cliffs and charge the sangars from the rear. The defenders
+were driven out and bayoneted, the sangars seized, and the Chilti force
+enfolded while reinforcements clambered in support. "In three hours the
+position, which for eighteen days had resisted every attack and held the
+British force immobile, was in our hands. The way is clear in front of
+us. Manders is recommended for the Victoria Cross. I believe that I am
+for the D.S.O. And above all the Road goes on!"
+
+Thus characteristically the letter was concluded. Linforth wrote it with
+a flush of pride and a great joy. He had no doubt now that he would be
+appointed to the Road. Congratulations were showered upon him. Down upon
+the plains, Violet would hear of his achievement and perhaps claim
+proudly and joyfully some share in it herself. His heart leaped at the
+thought. The world was going very well for Dick Linforth that night. But
+that is only one side of the picture. Linforth had no thoughts to spare
+upon Shere Ali. If he had had a thought, it would not have been one of
+pity. Yet that unhappy Prince, with despair and humiliation gnawing at
+his heart, broken now beyond all hope, stricken in his fortune as sorely
+as in his love, was fleeing with a few devoted followers through the
+darkness. He passed through Kohara at daybreak of the second morning
+after the battle had been lost, and stopping only to change horses,
+galloped off to the north.
+
+Two hours later Captain Phillips mounted on to the roof of his house and
+saw that the guards were no longer at their posts.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXV
+
+A LETTER FROM VIOLET
+
+
+Within a week the Khan was back in his Palace, the smoke rose once more
+above the roof-tops of Kohara, and a smiling shikari presented himself
+before Poulteney Sahib in the grounds of the Residency.
+
+"It was a good fight, Sahib," he declared, grinning from ear to ear at
+the recollection of the battles. "A very good fight. We nearly won. I was
+in the bazaar all that day. Yes, it was a near thing. We made a mistake
+about those cliffs, we did not think they could be climbed. It was a good
+fight, but it is over. Now when will your Excellency go shooting? I have
+heard of some markhor on the hill."
+
+Poulteney Sahib stared, speechless with indignation. Then he burst
+out laughing:
+
+"You old rascal! You dare to come here and ask me to take you out when I
+go shooting, and only a week ago you were fighting against us."
+
+"But the fight is all over, Excellency," the Shikari explained. "Now all
+is as it was and we will go out after the markhor." The idea that any
+ill-feeling could remain after so good a fight was one quite beyond the
+shikari's conception. "Besides," he said, "it was I who threw the gravel
+at your Excellency's windows."
+
+"Why, that's true," said Poulteney, and a window was thrown up behind
+him. Ralston's head appeared at the window.
+
+"You had better take him," the Chief Commissioner said. "Go out with him
+for a couple of days," and when the shikari had retired, he explained the
+reason of his advice.
+
+"That fellow will talk to you, and you might find out which way Shere
+Ali went. He wasn't among the dead, so far as we can discover, and I
+think he has been headed off from Afghanistan. But it is important that
+we should know. So long as he is free, there will always be
+possibilities of trouble."
+
+In every direction, indeed, inquiries were being made. But for the moment
+Shere Ali had got clear away. Meanwhile the Khan waited anxiously in the
+Palace to know what was going to happen to him; and he waited in some
+anxiety. It fell to Ralston to inform him in durbar in the presence of
+his nobles and the chief officers of the British force that the
+Government of India had determined to grant him a pension and a residence
+rent-free at Jellundur.
+
+"The Government of India will rule Chiltistan," said Ralston. "The word
+has been spoken."
+
+He went out from the Palace and down the hill towards the place where the
+British forces were encamped just outside the city. When he came to the
+tents, he asked for Mr. Linforth, and was conducted through the lines. He
+found Linforth sitting alone within his tent on his camp chair, and knew
+from his attitude that some evil thing had befallen him. Linforth rose
+and offered Ralston his chair, and as he did so a letter fluttered from
+his lap to the ground. There were two sheets, and Linforth stooped
+quickly and picked them up.
+
+"Don't move," said Ralston. "This will do for me," and he sat down upon
+the edge of the camp bed. Linforth sat down again on his chair and, as
+though he were almost unaware of Ralston's presence, he smoothed out upon
+his knee the sheets of the letter. Ralston could not but observe that
+they were crumpled and creased, as though they had been clenched and
+twisted in Linforth's hand. Then Linforth raised his head, and suddenly
+thrust the letter into his pocket.
+
+"I beg your pardon," he said, and he spoke in a spiritless voice. "The
+post has just come in. I received a letter which--interested me. Is there
+anything I can do?"
+
+"Yes," said Ralston. "We have sure news at last. Shere Ali has fled to
+the north. The opportunity you asked for at Peshawur has come."
+
+Linforth was silent for a little while. Then he said slowly:
+
+"I see. I am to go in pursuit?"
+
+"Yes!"
+
+It seemed that Linforth's animosity against Shere Ali had died out.
+Ralston watched him keenly from the bed. Something had blunted the edge
+of the tool just when the time had come to use it. He threw an extra
+earnestness into his voice.
+
+"You have got to do more than go in pursuit of him. You have got to find
+him. You have got to bring him back as your prisoner."
+
+Linforth nodded his head.
+
+"He has gone north, you say?"
+
+"Yes. Somewhere in Central Asia you will find him," and as Linforth
+looked up startled, Ralston continued calmly, "Yes, it's a large order, I
+know, but it's not quite so large as it looks. The trade-routes, the only
+possible roads, are not so very many. No man can keep his comings and
+goings secret for very long in that country. You will soon get wind of
+him, and when you do you must never let him shake you off."
+
+"Very well," said Linforth, listlessly. "When do I start?"
+
+Ralston plunged into the details of the expedition and told him the
+number of men he was to take with him.
+
+"You had better go first into Chinese Turkestan," he said. "There are a
+number of Hindu merchants settled there--we will give you letters to
+them. Some of them will be able to put you on the track of Shere Ali. You
+will have to round him up into a corner, I expect. And whatever you do,
+head him off Russian territory. For we want him. We want him brought back
+into Kohara. It will have a great effect on this country. It will show
+them that the Sirkar can even pick a man out of the bazaars of Central
+Asia if he is rash enough to stand up against it in revolt."
+
+"That will be rather humiliating for Shere Ali," said Linforth, after a
+short pause; and Ralston sat up on the bed. What in the world, he
+wondered, could Linforth have read in his letter, so to change him? He
+was actually sympathising with Shere Ali--he who had been hottest in
+his anger.
+
+"Shere Ali should have thought of that before," Ralston said sharply,
+and he rose to his feet. "I rely upon you, Linforth. It may take you a
+year. It may take you only a few months. But I rely upon you to bring
+Shere Ali back. And when you do," he added, with a smile, "there's the
+road waiting for you."
+
+But for once even that promise failed to stir Dick Linforth into
+enthusiasm.
+
+"I will do my best," he said quietly; and with that Ralston left him.
+
+Linforth sat down in his chair and once more took out the crumpled
+letter. He had walked with the Gods of late, like one immune from earthly
+troubles. But his bad hour had been awaiting him. The letter was signed
+Violet. He read it through again, and this was what he read:
+
+"This is the most difficult letter I have ever written. For I don't feel
+that I can make you understand at all just how things are. But somehow or
+other I do feel that this is going to hurt you frightfully, and, oh,
+Dick, do forgive me. But if it will console or help at all, know this,"
+and the words were underlined--as indeed were many words in Violet
+Oliver's letters--"that I never was good enough for you and you are well
+rid of me. I told you what I was, didn't I, Dick?--a foolish lover of
+beautiful things. I tried to tell you the whole truth that last evening
+in the garden at Peshawur, but you wouldn't let me, Dick. And I must tell
+you now. I never sent the pearl necklace back, Dick, although I told you
+that I did. I meant to send it back the night when I parted from the
+Prince. I packed it up and put it ready. But--oh, Dick, how can I tell
+you?--I had had an imitation one made just like it for safety, and in the
+night I got up and changed them. I couldn't part with it--I sent back the
+false one. Now you know me, Dick! But even now perhaps you don't. You
+remember the night in Peshawur, the terrible night? Mr. Ralston wondered
+why, after complaining that my window was unbolted, I unbolted it myself.
+Let me tell you, Dick! Mr. Ralston said that 'theft' was the explanation.
+Well, after I tried to tell you in the garden and you would not listen, I
+thought of what he had said. I thought it would be such an easy way out
+of it, if the thief should come in when I was asleep and steal the
+necklace and go away again before I woke up. I don't know how I brought
+myself to do it. It was you, Dick! I had just left you, I was full of
+thoughts of you. So I slipped back the bolt myself. But you see, Dick,
+what I am. Although I wanted to send that necklace back, I couldn't, I
+_simply couldn't_, and it's the same with other things. I would be very,
+very glad to know that I could be happy with you, dear, and live your
+life. But I know that I couldn't, that it wouldn't last, that I should be
+longing for other things, foolish things and vanities. Again, Dick, you
+are well rid of a silly vain woman, and I wish you all happiness in that
+riddance. I never would have made you a good wife. Nor will I make any
+man a good wife. I have not the sense of a dog. I know it, too! That's
+the sad part of it all, Dick. Forgive me, and thanks, a thousand thanks,
+for the honour you ever did me in wanting me at all." Then followed--it
+seemed to Linforth--a cry. "Won't you forgive me, dear, dear Dick!" and
+after these words her name, "Violet."
+
+But even so the letter was not ended. A postscript was added:
+
+"I shall always think of the little dreams we had together of our future,
+and regret that I couldn't know them. That will always be in my mind.
+Remember that! Perhaps some day we will meet. Oh, Dick, good-bye!"
+
+Dick sat with that letter before his eyes for a long while. Violet had
+told him that he could be hard, but he was not hard to her. He could read
+between the lines, he understood the struggle which she had had with
+herself, he recognised the suffering which the letter had caused her. He
+was touched to pity, to a greater humanity. He had shown it in his
+forecasts of the humiliation which would befall Shere Ali when he was
+brought back a prisoner to Kohara. Linforth, in a word, had shed what was
+left of his boyhood. He had come to recognise that life was never all
+black and all white. He tore up the letter into tiny fragments. It
+required no answer.
+
+"Everything is just wrong," he said to himself, gently, as he thought
+over Shere Ali, Violet, himself. "Everything is just not what it might
+have been."
+
+And a few days later he started northwards for Turkestan.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVI
+
+"THE LITTLE LESS--"
+
+
+Three years passed before Linforth returned on leave to England. He
+landed at Marseilles towards the end of September, travelled to his home,
+and a fortnight later came up from Sussex for a few days to London. It
+was the beginning of the autumn season. People were returning to town.
+Theatres were re-opening with new plays; and a fellow-officer, who had a
+couple of stalls for the first production of a comedy about which public
+curiosity was whetted, meeting Linforth in the hall of his club,
+suggested that they should go together.
+
+"I shall be glad," said Linforth. "I always go to the play with the
+keenest of pleasure. The tuning-up of the orchestra and the rising of the
+curtain are events to me. And, to be honest, I have never been to a first
+night before. Let us do the thing handsomely and dine together before we
+go. It will be my last excitement in London for another three or four
+years, I expect."
+
+The two young men dined together accordingly at one of the great
+restaurants. Linforth, fresh from the deep valleys of Chiltistan, was
+elated by the lights, the neighbourhood of people delicately dressed, and
+the subdued throb of music from muted violins.
+
+"I am the little boy at the bright shop window," he said with a laugh,
+while his eyes wandered round the room. "I look in through the glass from
+the pavement outside, and--"
+
+His voice halted and stopped; and when he resumed he spoke without his
+former gaiety. Indeed, the change of note was more perceptible than the
+brief pause. His friend conjectured that the words which Linforth now
+used were not those which he had intended to speak a moment ago.
+
+"--and," he said slowly, "I wonder what sort of fairyland it is actually
+to live and breathe in?"
+
+While he spoke, his eyes were seeking an answer to his question, and
+seeking it in one particular quarter. A few tables away, and behind
+Linforth's friend and a little to his right, sat Violet Oliver. She was
+with a party of six or eight people, of whom Linforth took no note. He
+had eyes only for her. Bitterness had long since ceased to colour his
+thoughts of Violet Oliver. And though he had not forgotten, there was no
+longer any living pain in his memories. So much had intervened since he
+had walked with her in the rose-garden at Peshawur--so many new
+experiences, so much compulsion of hard endeavour. When his recollections
+went back to the rose-garden at Peshawur, as at rare times they would, he
+was only conscious at the worst that his life was rather dull when tested
+by the high aspirations of his youth. There was less music in it than he
+had thought to hear. Instead of swinging in a soldier's march to the
+sound of drums and bugles down the road, it walked sedately. To use his
+own phrase, everything was--_just not_. There was no more in it than
+that. And indeed at the first it was almost an effort for him to realise
+that between him and this woman whom he now actually saw, after three
+years, there had once existed a bond of passion. But, as he continued to
+look, the memories took substance, and he began to wonder whether in her
+fairyland it was "just not," too. She had what she had wanted--that was
+clear. A collar of pearls, fastened with a diamond bow, encircled her
+throat. A great diamond flashed upon her bosom. Was she satisfied? Did no
+memory of the short week during which she had longed to tread the road of
+fire and stones, the road of high endeavour, trouble her content?
+
+Linforth was curious. She was not paying much heed to the talk about the
+table. She took no part in it, but sat with her head a little raised, her
+eyes dreamily fixed upon nothing in particular. But Linforth remembered
+with a smile that there was no inference to be drawn from that not
+unusual attitude of hers. It did not follow that she was bored or filled
+with discontent. She might simply be oblivious. A remark made about her
+by some forgotten person who had asked a question and received no answer
+came back to Linforth and called a smile to his face. "You might imagine
+that Violet Oliver is thinking of the angels. She is probably considering
+whether she should run upstairs and powder her nose."
+
+Linforth began to look for other signs; and it seemed to him that the
+world had gone well with her. She had a kind of settled look, almost a
+sleekness, as though anxiety never came near to her pillow. She had
+married, surely, and married well. The jewels she wore were evidence, and
+Linforth began to speculate which of the party was her husband. They were
+young people who were gathered at the table. In her liking for young
+people about her she had not changed. Of the men no one was noticeable,
+but Violet Oliver, as he remembered, would hardly have chosen a
+noticeable man. She would have chosen someone with great wealth and no
+ambitions, one who was young enough to ask nothing more from the world
+than Violet Oliver, who would not, in a word, trouble her with a career.
+She might have chosen anyone of her companions. And then her eyes
+travelled round the room and met his.
+
+For a moment she gazed at him, not seeing him at all. In a moment or two
+consciousness came to her. Her brows went up in astonishment. Then she
+smiled and waved her hand to him across the room--gaily, without a trace
+of embarrassment, without even the colour rising to her cheeks. Thus
+might one greet a casual friend of yesterday. Linforth bethought him,
+with a sudden sting of bitterness which surprised him by its sharpness,
+of the postscript in the last of the few letters she had written to him.
+That letter was still vivid enough in his memories for him to be able to
+see the pages, to recognise the writing, and read the sentences.
+
+"I shall always think of the little dreams we had together of our future,
+and regret that I couldn't know them. That will always be in my mind.
+Remember that!"
+
+How much of that postscript remained true, he wondered, after these three
+years. Very little, it seemed. Linforth fell to speculating, with an
+increasing interest, as to which of the men at her table she had mated
+with. Was it the tall youth with the commonplace good looks opposite to
+her? Linforth detected now a certain flashiness in his well grooming
+which he had not noticed before. Or was it the fat insignificant young
+man three seats away from her?
+
+A rather gross young person, Linforth thought him--the offspring of some
+provincial tradesman who had retired with a fortune and made a gentleman
+of his son.
+
+"Well, no doubt he has the dibs," Linforth found himself saying with an
+unexpected irritation, as he contemplated the possible husband. And his
+friend broke in upon his thoughts.
+
+"If you are going to eat any dinner, Linforth, it might be as well to
+begin; we shall have to go very shortly."
+
+Linforth fell to accordingly. His appetite was not impaired, he was happy
+to notice, but, on the whole, he wished he had not seen Violet Oliver.
+This was his last night in London. She might so easily have come
+to-morrow instead, when he would already have departed from the town. It
+was a pity.
+
+He did not look towards her table any more, but the moment her party rose
+he was nevertheless aware of its movement. He was conscious that she
+passed through the restaurant towards the lobby at no great distance from
+himself. He was aware, though he did not raise his head, that she was
+looking at him.
+
+Five minutes afterwards the waiter brought to him a folded piece of
+paper. He opened it and read:
+
+"Dick, won't you speak to me at all? I am waiting.--VIOLET."
+
+Linforth looked up at his friend.
+
+"There is someone I must go and speak to," he said. "I won't be
+five minutes."
+
+He rose from the table and walked out of the restaurant. His heart was
+beating rather fast, but it was surely curiosity which produced that
+effect. Curiosity to know whether with her things were--just not, too. He
+passed across the hall and up the steps. On the top of the steps she was
+waiting for him. She had her cloak upon her shoulders, and in the
+background the gross young man waited for her without interposing--the
+very image of a docile husband.
+
+"Dick," she said quickly, as she held out her hand to him, "I did so want
+to talk to you. I have to rush off to a theatre. So I sent in for you.
+Why wouldn't you speak to me?"
+
+That he should have any reason to avoid her she seemed calmly and
+completely unconscious. And so unembarrassed was her manner that even
+with her voice in his ears and her face before him, delicate and pretty
+as of old, Dick almost believed that never had he spoken of love to her,
+and never had she answered him.
+
+"You are married?" he asked.
+
+Violet nodded her head. She did not, however, introduce her husband. She
+took no notice of him whatever. She did not mention her new name.
+
+"And you?" she asked.
+
+Linforth laughed rather harshly.
+
+"No."
+
+Perhaps the harshness of the laugh troubled her. Her forehead puckered.
+She dropped her eyes from his face.
+
+"But you will," she said in a low voice.
+
+Linforth did not answer, and in a moment or two she raised her head
+again. The trouble had gone from her face. She smiled brightly.
+
+"And the Road?" she asked. She had just remembered it. She had almost an
+air of triumph in remembering it. All these old memories were so dim. But
+at the awkward difficult moment, by an inspiration she had remembered the
+great long-cherished aim of Dick Linforth's life. The Road! Dick wondered
+whether she remembered too that there had been a time when for a few days
+she had thought to have a share herself in the making of that road which
+was to leave India safe.
+
+"It goes on," he said quietly. "It has passed Kohara. It has passed the
+fort where Luffe died. But I beg your pardon. Luffe belongs to the past,
+too, very much to the past--more even than I do."
+
+Violet paid no heed to the sarcasm. She had not heard it. She was
+thinking of something else. It seemed that she had something to say, but
+found the utterance difficult. Once or twice she looked up at Dick
+Linforth and looked down again and played with the fringe of her cloak.
+In the background the docile husband moved restlessly.
+
+"There's a question I should like to ask," she said quickly, and
+then stopped.
+
+Linforth helped her out.
+
+"Perhaps I can guess the question."
+
+"It's about--" she began, and Linforth nodded his head.
+
+"Shere Ali?" he said.
+
+"Yes," replied Violet.
+
+Linforth hesitated, looking at his companion. How much should he tell
+her, he asked himself? The whole truth? If he did, would it trouble her?
+He wondered. He had no wish to hurt her. He began warily:
+
+"After the campaign was over in Chiltistan I was sent after him."
+
+"Yes. I heard that before I left India," she replied.
+
+"I hunted him," and it seemed to Linforth that she flinched. "There's no
+other word, I am afraid. I hunted him--for months, from the borders of
+Tibet to the borders of Russia. In the end I caught him."
+
+"I heard that, too," she said.
+
+"I came up with him one morning, in a desert of stones. He was with three
+of his followers. The only three who had been loyal to him. They had
+camped as best they could under the shelter of a boulder. It was very
+cold. They had no coverings and little food. The place was as desolate as
+you could imagine--a wilderness of boulders and stones stretching away to
+the round of the sky, level as the palm of your hand, with a ragged tree
+growing up here and there. If we had not come up with them that day I
+think they would have died."
+
+He spoke with his eyes upon Violet, ready to modify his words at the
+first evidence of pain. She gave that evidence as he ended. She drew her
+cloak closer about her and shivered.
+
+"What did he say?" she asked.
+
+"To me? Nothing. We spoke only formally. All the way back to India we
+behaved as strangers. It was easier for both of us. I brought him down
+through Chiltistan and Kohara into India. I brought him down--along the
+Road which at Eton we had planned to carry on together. Down that road we
+came together--I the captor, he the prisoner."
+
+Again Violet flinched.
+
+"And where is he now?" she asked in a low voice.
+
+Suddenly Linforth turned round and looked down the steps, across the hall
+to the glass walls of the restaurant.
+
+"Did he ever come here with you?" he asked. "Did he ever dine with you
+there amongst the lights and the merry-makers and the music?"
+
+"Yes," she answered.
+
+Linforth laughed, and again there was a note of bitterness in the
+laughter.
+
+"How long ago it seems! Shere Ali will dine here no more. He is in Burma.
+He was deported to Burma."
+
+He told her no more than that. There was no need that she should know
+that Shere Ali, broken-hearted, ruined and despairing, was drinking
+himself to death with the riffraff of Rangoon, or with such of it as
+would listen to his abuse of the white women and his slanders upon their
+honesty. The contrast between Shere Ali's fate and the hopes with which
+he had set out was shocking enough. Yet even in his case so very little
+had turned the scale. Between the fulfilment of his hopes and the great
+failure what was there? If he had been sent to Ajmere instead of to
+England, if he and Linforth had not crossed the Meije to La Grave in
+Dauphiné, if a necklace of pearls he had offered had not been
+accepted--very likely at this very moment he might be reigning in
+Chiltistan, trusted and supported by the Indian Government, a helpful
+friend gratefully recognised. To Linforth's thinking it was only "just
+not" with Shere Ali, too.
+
+Linforth saw his companion coming towards him from the restaurant. He
+held out his hand.
+
+"I have got to go," he said.
+
+"I too," replied Violet. But she detained him. "I want to tell you," she
+said hurriedly. "Long ago--in Peshawur--do you remember? I told you there
+was someone else--a better mate for you than I was. I meant it, Dick, but
+you wouldn't listen. There is still the someone else. I am going to tell
+you her name. She has never said a word to me--but--but I am sure. It may
+sound mean of me to give her away--but I am not really doing that. I
+should be very happy, Dick, if it were possible. It's Phyllis Casson. She
+has never married. She is living with her father at Camberley." And
+before he could answer she had hurried away.
+
+But Linforth was to see her again that night. For when he had taken his
+seat in the stalls of the theatre he saw her and her husband in a box. He
+gathered from the remarks of those about him that her jewels were a
+regular feature upon the first nights of new plays. He looked at her now
+and then during the intervals of the acts. A few people entered her box
+and spoke to her for a little while. Linforth conjectured that she had
+dropped a little out of the world in which he had known her. Yet she was
+contented. On the whole that seemed certain. She was satisfied with her
+life. To attend the first productions of plays, to sit in the
+restaurants, to hear her jewels remarked upon--her life had narrowed
+sleekly down to that, and she was content. But there had been other
+possibilities for Violet Oliver.
+
+Linforth walked back from the theatre to his club. He looked into a room
+and saw an old gentleman dozing alone amongst his newspapers.
+
+"I suppose I shall come to that," he said grimly. "It doesn't look over
+cheerful as a way of spending the evening of one's days," and he was
+suddenly seized with the temptation to go home and take the first train
+in the morning for Camberley. He turned the plan over in his mind for a
+moment, and then swung away from it in self-disgust. He retained a
+general reverence for women, and to seek marriage without bringing love
+to light him in the search was not within his capacity.
+
+"That wouldn't be fair," he said to himself--"even if Violet's tale were
+true." For with his reverence he had retained his modesty. The next
+morning he took the train into Sussex instead, and was welcomed by Sybil
+Linforth to the house under the Downs. In the warmth of that welcome, at
+all events, there was nothing that was just not.
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BROKEN ROAD ***
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Broken Road , by A. E. W. Mason
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Broken Road 
+
+Author: A. E. W. Mason
+
+Release Date: January 20, 2004  [eBook #10755]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: US-ASCII
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BROKEN ROAD ***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Ted Garvin, Mary Meehan, and the Project Gutenberg
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+THE BROKEN ROAD
+
+BY A.E.W. MASON
+
+AUTHOR OF "FOUR FEATHERS," "THE TRUANTS," "RUNNING WATER," ETC.
+
+1907
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+CHAPTER
+
+     I.      THE BREAKING OF THE ROAD
+
+    II.      INSIDE THE FORT
+
+   III.      LINFORTH'S DEATH
+
+    IV.      LUFFE LOOKS FORWARD
+
+     V.      A MAGAZINE ARTICLE
+
+    VI.      A LONG WALK
+
+   VII.      IN THE DAUPHINE
+
+  VIII.      A STRING OF PEARLS
+
+    IX.      LUFFE IS REMEMBERED
+
+     X.      AN UNANSWERED QUESTION
+
+    XI.      AT THE GATE OF LAHORE
+
+   XII.      ON THE POLO-GROUND
+
+  XIII.      THE INVIDIOUS BAR
+
+   XIV.      IN THE COURTYARD
+
+    XV.      A QUESTION ANSWERED
+
+   XVI.      SHERE ALI MEETS AN OLD FRIEND
+
+  XVII.      NEWS FROM MECCA
+
+ XVIII.      SYBIL LINFORTH'S LOYALTY
+
+   XIX.      A GIFT MISUNDERSTOOD
+
+    XX.      THE SOLDIER AND THE JEW
+
+   XXI.      SHERE ALI IS CLAIMED BY CHILTISTAN
+
+  XXII.      THE CASTING OF THE DIE
+
+ XXIII.      SHERE ALI'S PILGRIMAGE
+
+  XXIV.      NEWS FROM AJMERE
+
+   XXV.      IN THE ROSE GARDEN
+
+  XXVI.      THE BREAKING OF THE PITCHER
+
+ XXVII.      AN ARRESTED CONFESSION
+
+XXVIII.      THE THIEF
+
+  XXIX.      MRS. OLIVER RIDES THROUGH PESHAWUR
+
+   XXX.      THE NEEDED IMPLEMENT
+
+  XXXI.      AN OLD TOMB AND A NEW SHRINE
+
+ XXXII.      SURPRISES FOR CAPTAIN PHILLIPS
+
+XXXIII.      IN THE RESIDENCY
+
+ XXXIV.      ONE OF THE LITTLE WARS
+
+  XXXV.      A LETTER FROM VIOLET
+
+ XXXVI.      "THE LITTLE LESS--"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+THE BREAKING OF THE ROAD
+
+
+It was the Road which caused the trouble. It usually is the road. That
+and a reigning prince who was declared by his uncle secretly to have sold
+his country to the British, and a half-crazed priest from out beyond the
+borders of Afghanistan, who sat on a slab of stone by the river-bank and
+preached a _djehad_. But above all it was the road--Linforth's road. It
+came winding down from the passes, over slopes of shale; it was built
+with wooden galleries along the precipitous sides of cliffs; it snaked
+treacherously further and further across the rich valley of Chiltistan
+towards the Hindu Kush, until the people of that valley could endure it
+no longer.
+
+Then suddenly from Peshawur the wires began to flash their quiet and
+ominous messages. The road had been cut behind Linforth and his coolies.
+No news had come from him. No supplies could reach him. Luffe, who was in
+the country to the east of Chiltistan, had been informed. He had gathered
+together what troops he could lay his hands on and had already started
+over the eastern passes to Linforth's relief. But it was believed that
+the whole province of Chiltistan had risen. Moreover it was winter-time
+and the passes were deep in snow. The news was telegraphed to England.
+Comfortable gentlemen read it in their first-class carriages as they
+travelled to the City and murmured to each other commonplaces about the
+price of empire. And in a house at the foot of the Sussex Downs
+Linforth's young wife leaned over the cot of her child with the tears
+streaming from her eyes, and thought of the road with no less horror than
+the people of Chiltistan. Meanwhile the great men in Calcutta began to
+mobilise a field force at Nowshera, and all official India said uneasily,
+"Thank Heaven, Luffe's on the spot."
+
+Charles Luffe had long since abandoned the army for the political
+service, and, indeed, he was fast approaching the time-limit of his
+career. He was a man of breadth and height, but rather heavy and dull of
+feature, with a worn face and a bald forehead. He had made enemies, and
+still made them, for he had not the art of suffering fools gladly; and,
+on the other hand, he made no friends. He had no sense of humour and no
+general information. He was, therefore, of no assistance at a
+dinner-party, but when there was trouble upon the Frontier, or beyond it,
+he was usually found to be the chief agent in the settlement.
+
+Luffe alone had foreseen and given warning of the danger. Even Linforth,
+who was actually superintending the making of the road, had been kept in
+ignorance. At times, indeed, some spokesman from among the merchants of
+Kohara, the city of Chiltistan where year by year the caravans from
+Central Asia met the caravans from Central India, would come to his tent
+and expostulate.
+
+"We are better without the road, your Excellency. Will you kindly stop
+it!" the merchant would say; and Linforth would then proceed to
+demonstrate how extremely valuable to the people of Chiltistan a better
+road would be:
+
+"Kohara is already a great mart. In your bazaars at summer-time you
+see traders from Turkestan and Tibet and Siberia, mingling with the
+Hindoo merchants from Delhi and Lahore. The road will bring you still
+more trade."
+
+The spokesman went back to the broad street of Kohara seemingly well
+content, and inch by inch the road crept nearer to the capital.
+
+But Luffe was better acquainted with the Chiltis, a soft-spoken race of
+men, with musical, smooth voices and polite and pretty ways. But
+treachery was a point of honour with them and cold-blooded cruelty a
+habit. There was one particular story which Luffe was accustomed to tell
+as illustrative of the Chilti character.
+
+"There was a young man who lived with his mother in a little hamlet close
+to Kohara. His mother continually urged him to marry, but for a long
+while he would not. He did not wish to marry. Finally, however, he fell
+in love with a pretty girl, made her his wife, and brought her home, to
+his mother's delight. But the mother's delight lasted for just five days.
+She began to complain, she began to quarrel; the young wife replied, and
+the din of their voices greatly distressed the young man, besides making
+him an object of ridicule to his neighbours. One evening, in a fit of
+passion, both women said they would stand it no longer. They ran out of
+the house and up the hillside, but as there was only one path they ran
+away together, quarrelling as they went. Then the young Chilti rose,
+followed them, caught them up, tied them in turn hand and foot, laid them
+side by side on a slab of stone, and quietly cut their throats.
+
+"'Women talk too much,' he said, as he came back to a house unfamiliarly
+quiet. 'One had really to put a stop to it.'"
+
+Knowing this and many similar stories, Luffe had been for some while on
+the alert. Whispers reached him of dangerous talk in the bazaars of
+Kohara, Peshawur, and even of Benares in India proper. He heard of the
+growing power of the old Mullah by the river-bank. He was aware of the
+accusations against the ruling Khan. He knew that after night had fallen
+Wafadar Nazim, the Khan's uncle, a restless, ambitious, disloyal man,
+crept down to the river-bank and held converse with the priest. Thus he
+was ready so far as he could be ready.
+
+The news that the road was broken was flashed to him from the nearest
+telegraph station, and within twenty-four hours he led out a small force
+from his Agency--a battalion of Sikhs, a couple of companies of Gurkhas,
+two guns of a mountain battery, and a troop of irregular levies--and
+disappeared over the pass, now deep in snow.
+
+"Would he be in time?"
+
+Not only in India was the question asked. It was asked in England, too,
+in the clubs of Pall Mall, but nowhere with so passionate an outcry as in
+the house at the foot of the Sussex Downs.
+
+To Sybil Linforth these days were a time of intolerable suspense. The
+horror of the Road was upon her. She dreamed of it when she slept, so
+that she came to dread sleep, and tried, as long as she might, to keep
+her heavy eyelids from closing over her eyes. The nights to her were
+terrible. Now it was she, with her child in her arms, who walked for
+ever and ever along that road, toiling through snow or over shale and
+finding no rest anywhere. Now it was her boy alone, who wandered along
+one of the wooden galleries high up above the river torrent, until a
+plank broke and he fell through with a piteous scream. Now it was her
+husband, who could go neither forward nor backward, since in front and
+behind a chasm gaped. But most often it was a man--a young Englishman,
+who pursued a young Indian along that road into the mists. Somehow,
+perhaps because it was inexplicable, perhaps because its details were so
+clear, this dream terrified her more than all the rest. She could tell
+the very dress of the Indian who fled--a young man--young as his
+pursuer. A thick sheepskin coat swung aside as he ran and gave her a
+glimpse of gay silk; soft leather boots protected his feet; and upon his
+face there was a look of fury and wild fear. She never woke from this
+dream but her heart was beating wildly. For a few moments after waking
+peace would descend upon her.
+
+"It is a dream--all a dream," she would whisper to herself with
+contentment, and then the truth would break upon her dissociated from the
+dream. Often she rose from her bed and, kneeling beside the boy's cot,
+prayed with a passionate heart that the curse of the Road--that road
+predicted by a Linforth years ago--might overpass this generation.
+
+Meanwhile rumours came--rumours of disaster. Finally a messenger broke
+through and brought sure tidings. Luffe had marched quickly, had come
+within thirty miles of Kohara before he was stopped. In a strong fort at
+a bend of the river the young Khan with his wife and a few adherents had
+taken refuge. Luffe joined the Khan, sought to push through to Kohara and
+rescue Linforth, but was driven back. He and his troops and the Khan were
+now closely besieged by Wafadar Nazim.
+
+The work of mobilisation was pressed on; a great force was gathered at
+Nowshera; Brigadier Appleton was appointed to command it.
+
+"Luffe will hold out," said official India, trying to be cheerful.
+
+Perhaps the only man who distrusted Luffe's ability to hold out was
+Brigadier Appleton, who had personal reasons for his views. Brigadier
+Appleton was no fool, and yet Luffe had not suffered him gladly. All the
+more, therefore, did he hurry on the preparations. The force marched out
+on the new road to Chiltistan. But meanwhile the weeks were passing, and
+up beyond the snow-encumbered hills the beleaguered troops stood
+cheerfully at bay behind the thick fort-walls.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+INSIDE THE FORT
+
+
+The six English officers made it a practice, so far as they could, to
+dine together; and during the third week of the siege the conversation
+happened one evening to take a particular turn. Ever afterwards, during
+this one hour of the twenty-four, it swerved regularly into the same
+channel. The restaurants of London were energetically discussed, and
+their merits urged by each particular partisan with an enthusiasm which
+would have delighted a shareholder. Where you got the best dinner, where
+the prettiest women were to be seen, whether a band was a drawback or an
+advantage--not a point was omitted, although every point had been
+debated yesterday or the day before. To-night the grave question of the
+proper number for a supper party was opened by Major Dewes of the 5th
+Gurkha Regiment.
+
+"Two," said the Political Officer promptly, and he chuckled under his
+grey moustache. "I remember the last time I was in London I took out to
+supper--none of the coryphees you boys are so proud of being seen about
+with, but"--and, pausing impressively, he named a reigning lady of the
+light-opera stage.
+
+"You did!" exclaimed a subaltern.
+
+"I did," he replied complacently.
+
+"What did you talk about?" asked Major Dewes, and the Political Officer
+suddenly grew serious.
+
+"I was very interested," he said quietly. "I got knowledge which it was
+good for me to have. I saw something which it was well for me to see. I
+wished--I wish now--that some of the rulers and the politicians could
+have seen what I saw that night."
+
+A brief silence followed upon his words, and during that silence certain
+sounds became audible--the beating of tom-toms and the cries of men. The
+dinner-table was set in the verandah of an inner courtyard open to the
+sky, and the sounds descended into that well quite distinctly, but
+faintly, as if they were made at a distance in the dark, open country.
+The six men seated about the table paid no heed to those sounds; they had
+had them in their ears too long. And five of the six were occupied in
+wondering what in the world Sir Charles Luffe, K.C.S.I., could have
+learnt of value to him at a solitary supper party with a lady of comic
+opera. For it was evident that he had spoken in deadly earnest.
+
+Captain Lynes of the Sikhs broke the silence:
+
+"What's this?" he asked, as an orderly offered to him a dish.
+
+"Let us not inquire too closely," said the Political Officer. "This is
+the fourth week of the siege."
+
+The rice-fields of the broad and fertile valley were trampled down and
+built upon with sangars. The siege had cut its scars upon the fort's
+rough walls of mud and projecting beams. But nowhere were its marks more
+visible than upon the faces of the Englishmen in the verandah of that
+courtyard.
+
+Dissimilar as they were in age and feature, sleepless nights and the
+unrelieved tension had given to their drawn faces almost a family
+likeness. They were men tired out, but as yet unaware of their
+exhaustion, so bright a flame burnt within each one of them. Somewhere
+amongst the snow-passes on the north-east a relieving force would surely
+be encamped that night, a day's march nearer than it was yesterday.
+Somewhere amongst the snow-passes in the south a second force would be
+surely advancing from Nowshera, probably short of rations, certainly
+short of baggage, that it might march the lighter. When one of those two
+forces deployed across the valley and the gates of the fort were again
+thrown open to the air the weeks of endurance would exact their toll. But
+that time was not yet come. Meanwhile the six men held on cheerily,
+inspiring the garrison with their own confidence, while day after day a
+province in arms flung itself in vain against their blood-stained walls.
+Luffe, indeed, the Political Officer, fought with disease as well as with
+the insurgents of Chiltistan; and though he remained the master-mind of
+the defence, the Doctor never passed him without an anxious glance. For
+there were the signs of death upon his face.
+
+"The fourth week!" said Lynes. "Is it, by George? Well, the siege won't
+last much longer now. The Sirkar don't leave its servants in the lurch.
+That's what these hill-tribes never seem to understand. How is Travers?"
+he asked of the Doctor.
+
+Travers, a subaltern of the North Surrey Light Infantry, had been shot
+through the thigh in the covered waterway to the river that morning.
+
+"He's going on all right," replied the Doctor. "Travers had bad luck. It
+must have been a stray bullet which slipped through that chink in the
+stones. For he could not have been seen--"
+
+As he spoke a cry rang clearly out. All six men looked upwards
+through the open roof to the clear dark sky, where the stars shone
+frostily bright.
+
+"What was that?" asked one of the six.
+
+"Hush," said Luffe, and for a moment they all listened in silence, with
+expectant faces and their bodies alert to spring from their chairs. Then
+the cry was heard again. It was a wail more than a cry, and it sounded
+strangely solitary, strangely sad, as it floated through the still air.
+There was the East in that cry trembling out of the infinite darkness
+above their heads. But the six men relaxed their limbs. They had
+expected the loud note of the Pathan war-cry to swell sonorously, and
+with intervals shorter and shorter until it became one menacing and
+continuous roar.
+
+"It is someone close under the walls," said Luffe, and as he ended a Sikh
+orderly appeared at the entrance of a passage into the courtyard, and,
+advancing to the table, saluted.
+
+"Sahib, there is a man who claims that he comes with a message from
+Wafadar Nazim."
+
+"Tell him that we receive no messages at night, as Wafadar Nazim knows
+well. Let him come in the morning and he shall be admitted. Tell him that
+if he does not go back at once the sentinels will fire." And Luffe nodded
+to one of the younger officers. "Do you see to it, Haslewood."
+
+Haslewood rose and went out from the courtyard with the orderly. He
+returned in a few minutes, saying that the man had returned to Wafadar
+Nazim's camp. The six men resumed their meal, and just as they ended it a
+Pathan glided in white flowing garments into the courtyard and bowed low.
+
+"Huzoor," he said, "His Highness the Khan sends you greeting. God has
+been very good to him. A son has been born to him this day, and he sends
+you this present, knowing that you will value it more than all that he
+has"; and carefully unfolding a napkin, he laid with reverence upon the
+table a little red cardboard box. The mere look of the box told the six
+men what the present was even before Luffe lifted the lid. It was a box
+of fifty gold-tipped cigarettes, and applause greeted their appearance.
+
+"If he could only have a son every day," said Lynes, and in the laugh
+which followed upon the words Luffe alone did not join. He leaned his
+forehead upon his hand and sat in a moody silence. Then he turned towards
+the servant and bade him thank his master.
+
+"I will come myself to offer our congratulations after dinner if his
+Highness will receive me," said Luffe.
+
+The box of cigarettes went round the table. Each man took one, lighted
+it, and inhaled the smoke silently and very slowly. The garrison had run
+out of tobacco a week before. Now it had come to them welcome as a gift
+from Heaven. The moment was one of which the perfect enjoyment was not to
+be marred by any speech. Only a grunt of satisfaction or a deep sigh of
+pleasure was now and then to be heard, as the smoke curled upwards from
+the little paper sticks. Each man competed with his neighbour in the
+slowness of his respiration, each man wanted to be the last to lay down
+his cigarette and go about his work. And then the Doctor said in a
+whisper to Major Dewes:
+
+"That's bad. Look!"
+
+Luffe, a mighty smoker in his days of health, had let his cigarette go
+out, had laid it half-consumed upon the edge of his plate. But it seemed
+that ill-health was not all to blame. He had the look of one who had
+forgotten his company. He was withdrawn amongst his own speculations, and
+his eyes looked out beyond that smoke-laden room in a fort amongst the
+Himalaya mountains into future years dim with peril and trouble.
+
+"There is no moon," he said at length. "We can get some exercise
+to-night"; and he rose from the table and ascended a little staircase on
+to the flat roof of the fort. Major Dewes and the three other officers
+got up and went about their business. Dr. Bodley, the surgeon, alone
+remained seated. He waited until the tramp of his companions' feet had
+died away, and then he drew from his pocket a briarwood pipe, which he
+polished lovingly. He walked round the table and, collecting the ends of
+the cigarettes, pressed them into the bowl of the pipe.
+
+"Thank Heavens I am not an executive officer," he said, as he lighted his
+pipe and settled himself again comfortably in his chair. It should be
+mentioned, perhaps, that he not only doctored and operated on the sick
+and wounded, but he kept the stores, and when any fighting was to be
+done, took a rifle and filled any place which might be vacant in the
+firing-line.
+
+"There are now forty-four cigarettes," he reflected. "At six a day they
+will last a week. In a week something will have happened. Either the
+relieving force will be here, or--yes, decidedly something will have
+happened." And as he blew the smoke out from between his lips he added
+solemnly: "If not to us, to the Political Officer."
+
+Meanwhile Luffe paced the roof of the fort in the darkness. The fort was
+built in the bend of a swift, wide river, and so far as three sides were
+concerned was securely placed. For on three the low precipitous cliffs
+overhung the tumbling water. On the fourth, however, the fertile plain of
+the valley stretched open and flat up to the very gates.
+
+In front of the forts a line of sangars extended, the position of each
+being marked even now by a glare of light above it, which struck up from
+the fire which the insurgents had lit behind the walls of stone. And from
+one and another of the sangars the monotonous beat of a tom-tom came to
+Luffe's ears.
+
+Luffe walked up and down for a time upon the roof. There was a new sangar
+to-night, close to the North Tower, which had not existed yesterday.
+Moreover, the almond trees in the garden just outside the western wall
+were in blossom, and the leaves upon the branches were as a screen, where
+only the bare trunks showed a fortnight ago.
+
+But with these matters Luffe was not at this moment concerned. They
+helped the enemy, they made the defence more arduous, but they were
+trivial in his thoughts. Indeed, the siege itself was to him an
+unimportant thing. Even if the fortress fell, even if every man within
+perished by the sword--why, as Lynes had said, the Sirkar does not forget
+its servants. The relieving force might march in too late, but it would
+march in. Men would die, a few families in England would wear mourning,
+the Government would lose a handful of faithful servants. England would
+thrill with pride and anger, and the rebellion would end as rebellions
+always ended.
+
+Luffe was troubled for quite another cause. He went down from the roof,
+walked by courtyard and winding passage to the quarters of the Khan. A
+white-robed servant waited for him at the bottom of a broad staircase in
+a room given up to lumber. A broken bicycle caught Luffe's eye. On the
+ledge of a window stood a photographic camera. Luffe mounted the stairs
+and was ushered into the Khan's presence. He bowed with deference and
+congratulated the Khan upon the birth of his heir.
+
+"I have been thinking," said the Khan--"ever since my son was born I have
+been thinking. I have been a good friend to the English. I am their
+friend and servant. News has come to me of their cities and colleges. I
+will send my son to England, that he may learn your wisdom, and so return
+to rule over his kingdom. Much good will come of it." Luffe had expected
+the words. The young Khan had a passion for things English. The bicycle
+and the camera were signs of it. Unwise men had applauded his
+enlightenment. Unwise at all events in Luffe's opinion. It was, indeed,
+greatly because of his enlightenment that he and a handful of English
+officers and troops were beleaguered in the fortress.
+
+"He shall go to Eton and to Oxford, and much good for my people will come
+of it," said the Khan. Luffe listened gravely and politely; but he was
+thinking of an evening when he had taken out to supper a reigning queen
+of comic opera. The recollection of that evening remained with him when
+he ascended once more to the roof of the fort and saw the light of the
+fires above the sangars. A voice spoke at his elbow. "There is a new
+sangar being built in the garden. We can hear them at work," said Dewes.
+
+Luffe walked cautiously along the roof to the western end. Quite clearly
+they could hear the spades at work, very near to the wall, amongst the
+almond and the mulberry trees.
+
+"Get a fireball," said Luffe in a whisper, "and send up a dozen Sikhs."
+
+On the parapet of the roof a rough palisade of planks had been erected to
+protect the defenders from the riflemen in the valley and across the
+river. Behind this palisade the Sikhs crept silently to their positions.
+A ball made of pinewood chips and straw, packed into a covering of
+canvas, was brought on to the roof and saturated with kerosene oil. "Are
+you ready?" said Luffe; "then now!" Upon the word the fireball was lit
+and thrown far out. It circled through the air, dropped, and lay blazing
+upon the ground. By its light under the branches of the garden trees
+could be seen the Pathans building a stone sangar, within thirty yards of
+the fort's walls.
+
+"Fire!" cried Luffe. "Choose your men and fire."
+
+All at once the silence of the night was torn by the rattle of musketry,
+and afar off the tom-toms beat yet more loudly.
+
+Luffe looked on with every faculty alert. He saw with a smile that the
+Doctor had joined them and lay behind a plank, firing rapidly and with a
+most accurate aim. But at the back of his mind all the while that he
+gave his orders was still the thought, "All this is nothing. The one
+fateful thing is the birth of a son to the Khan of Chiltistan." The
+little engagement lasted for about half an hour. The insurgents then
+drew back from the garden, leaving their dead upon the field. The rattle
+of the musketry ceased altogether. Behind the parapet one Sikh had been
+badly wounded by a bullet in the thigh. Already the Doctor was attending
+to his hurts.
+
+"It is a small thing, Huzoor," said the wounded soldier, looking upwards
+to Luffe, who stood above him; "a very small thing," but even as he spoke
+pain cut the words short.
+
+"Yes, a small thing"; Luffe did not speak the words, but he thought them.
+He turned away and walked back again across the roof. The new sangar
+would not be built that night. But it was a small thing compared with all
+that lay hidden in the future.
+
+As he paced that side of the fort which faced the plain there rose
+through the darkness, almost beneath his feet, once more the cry which
+had reached his ears while he sat at dinner in the courtyard.
+
+He heard a few paces from him the sharp order to retire given by a
+sentinel. But the voice rose again, claiming admission to the fort, and
+this time a name was uttered urgently, an English name.
+
+"Don't fire," cried Luffe to the sentinel, and he leaned over the wall.
+
+"You come from Wafadar Nazim, and alone?"
+
+"Huzoor, my life be on it."
+
+"With news of Sahib Linforth?"
+
+"Yes, news which his Highness Wafadar Nazim thinks it good for you to
+know"; and the voice in the darkness rose to insolence.
+
+Luffe strained his eyes downwards. He could see nothing. He listened, but
+he could hear no whispering voices. He hesitated. He was very anxious to
+hear news of Linforth.
+
+"I will let you in," he cried; "but if there be more than one the lives
+of all shall be the price."
+
+He went down into the fort. Under his orders Captain Lynes drew up inside
+the gate a strong guard of Sikhs with their rifles loaded and bayonets
+fixed. A few lanterns threw a dim light upon the scene, glistening here
+and there upon the polish of an accoutrement or a rifle-barrel.
+
+"Present," whispered Lynes, and the rifles were raised to the shoulder,
+with every muzzle pointing towards the gate.
+
+Then Lynes himself went forward, removed the bars, and turned the key in
+the lock. The gate swung open noiselessly a little way, and a tall man,
+clad in white flowing robes, with a deeply pock-marked face and a hooked
+nose, walked majestically in. He stood quite still while the gate was
+barred again behind him, and looked calmly about him with inquisitive
+bright eyes.
+
+"Will you follow me?" said Luffe, and he led the way through the
+rabbit-warren of narrow alleys into the centre of the fort.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+LINFORTH'S DEATH
+
+
+Luffe had taken a large bare low-roofed room supported upon pillars for
+his council-chamber. Thither he conducted his visitor. Camp chairs were
+placed for himself and Major Dewes and Captain Lynes. Cushions were
+placed upon the ground for his visitor. Luffe took his seat in the
+middle, with Dewes upon his right and Lynes upon his left. Dewes expected
+him at once to press for information as to Linforth. But Luffe knew very
+well that certain time must first be wasted in ceremonious preliminaries.
+The news would only be spoken after a time and in a roundabout fashion.
+
+"If we receive you without the distinction which is no doubt your due,"
+said Luffe politely, "you must remember that I make it a rule not to
+welcome visitors at night."
+
+The visitor smiled and bowed.
+
+"It is a great grief to his Highness Wafadar Nazim that you put so little
+faith in him," replied the Chilti. "See how he trusts you! He sends me,
+his Diwan, his Minister of Finance, in the night time to come up to your
+walls and into your fort, so great is his desire to learn that the
+Colonel Sahib is well."
+
+Luffe in his turn bowed with a smile of gratitude. It was not the time to
+point out that his Highness Wafadar Nazim was hardly taking the course
+which a genuine solicitude for the Colonel Sahib's health would
+recommend.
+
+"His Highness has but one desire in his heart. He desires peace--peace so
+that this country may prosper, and peace because of his great love for
+the Colonel Sahib."
+
+Again Luffe bowed.
+
+"But to all his letters the Colonel Sahib returns the same answer, and
+truly his Highness is at a loss what to do in order that he may ensure
+the safety of the Colonel Sahib and his followers," the Diwan continued
+pensively. "I will not repeat what has been already said," and at once he
+began at interminable length to contradict his words. He repeated the
+proposals of surrender made by Wafadar Nazim from beginning to end. The
+Colonel Sahib was to march out of the fort with his troops, and his
+Highness would himself conduct him into British territory.
+
+"If the Colonel Sahib dreads the censure of his own Government, his
+Highness will take all the responsibility for the Colonel Sahib's
+departure. But no blame will fall upon the Colonel Sahib. For the British
+Government, with whom Wafadar Nazim has always desired to live in amity,
+desires peace too, as it has always said. It is the British Government
+which has broken its treaties."
+
+"Not so," replied Luffe. "The road was undertaken with the consent of the
+Khan of Chiltistan, who is the ruler of this country, and Wafadar, his
+uncle, merely the rebel. Therefore take back my last word to Wafadar
+Nazim. Let him make submission to me as representative of the Sirkar, and
+lay down his arms. Then I will intercede for him with the Government, so
+that his punishment be light."
+
+The Diwan smiled and his voice changed once more to a note of insolence.
+
+"His Highness Wafadar Nazim is now the Khan of Chiltistan. The other,
+the deposed, lies cooped up in this fort, a prisoner of the British,
+whose willing slave he has always been. The British must retire from
+our country. His Highness Wafadar Nazim desires them no harm. But they
+must go now!"
+
+Luffe looked sternly at the Diwan.
+
+"Tell Wafadar Nazim to have a care lest they go never, but set their foot
+firmly upon the neck of this rebellious people."
+
+He rose to signify that the conference was at an end. But the Diwan did
+not stir. He smiled pensively and played with the tassels of his cushion.
+
+"And yet," he said, "how true it is that his Highness thinks only of the
+Colonel Sahib's safety."
+
+Some note of satisfaction, not quite perfectly concealed, some sly accent
+of triumph sounding through the gently modulated words, smote upon
+Luffe's ears, and warned him that the true meaning of the Diwan's visit
+was only now to be revealed. All that had gone before was nothing. The
+polite accusations, the wordy repetitions, the expressions of good
+will--these were the mere preliminaries, the long salute before the
+combat. Luffe steeled himself against a blow, controlling his face and
+his limbs lest a look or a gesture should betray the hurt. And it was
+well that he did, for the next moment the blow fell.
+
+"For bad news has come to us. Sahib Linforth met his death two days ago,
+fifty miles from here, in the camp of his Excellency Abdulla Mahommed,
+the Commander-in-Chief to his Highness. Abdulla Mahommed is greatly
+grieved, knowing well that this violent act will raise up a prejudice
+against him and his Highness. Moreover, he too would live in friendship
+with the British. But his soldiers are justly provoked by the violation
+of treaties by the British, and it is impossible to stay their hands.
+Therefore, before Abdulla Mahommed joins hands with my master, Wafadar
+Nazim, before this fort, it will be well for the Colonel Sahib and his
+troops to be safely out of reach."
+
+Luffe was doubtful whether to believe the words or no. The story might be
+a lie to frighten him and to discourage the garrison. On the other hand,
+it was likely enough to be true. And if true, it was the worst news which
+Luffe had heard for many a long day.
+
+"Let me hear how the accident--occurred," he said, smiling grimly at the
+euphemism he used.
+
+"Sahib Linforth was in the tent set apart for him by Abdulla Mahommed.
+There were guards to protect him, but it seems they did not watch well.
+Huzoor, all have been punished, but punishment will not bring Sahib
+Linforth to life again. Therefore hear the words of Wafadar Nazim, spoken
+now for the last time. He himself will escort you and your soldiers and
+officers to the borders of British territory, so that he may rejoice to
+know that you are safe. You will leave his Highness Mir Ali behind, who
+will resign his throne in favour of his uncle Wafadar, and so there will
+be peace."
+
+"And what will happen to Mir Ali, whom we have promised to protect?"
+
+The Diwan shrugged his shoulders in a gentle, deprecatory fashion and
+smiled his melancholy smile. His gesture and his attitude suggested that
+it was not in the best of taste to raise so unpleasant a question. But he
+did not reply in words.
+
+"You will tell Wafadar Nazim that we will know how to protect his
+Highness the Khan, and that we will teach Abdulla Mahommed a lesson in
+that respect before many moons have passed," Luffe said sternly. "As for
+this story of Sahib Linforth, I do not believe a word of it."
+
+The Diwan nodded his head.
+
+"It was believed that you would reply in this way.
+
+"Therefore here are proofs." He drew from his dress a silver watch upon a
+leather watch-guard, a letter-case, and to these he added a letter in
+Linforth's own hand. He handed them to Luffe.
+
+Luffe handed the watch and chain to Dewes, and opened the letter-case.
+There was a letter in it, written in a woman's handwriting, and besides
+the letter the portrait of a girl. He glanced at the letter and glanced
+at the portrait. Then he passed them on to Dewes.
+
+Dewes looked at the portrait with a greater care. The face was winning
+rather than pretty. It seemed to him that it was one of those faces which
+might become beautiful at many moments through the spirit of the woman,
+rather than from any grace of feature. If she loved, for instance, she
+would be really beautiful for the man she loved.
+
+"I wonder who she is," he said thoughtfully.
+
+"I know," replied Luffe, almost carelessly. He was immersed in the second
+letter which the Diwan had handed to him.
+
+"Who is it?" asked Dewes.
+
+"Linforth's wife."
+
+"His wife!" exclaimed Dewes, and, looking at the photograph again, he
+said in a low voice which was gentle with compassion, "Poor woman!"
+
+"Yes, yes. Poor woman!" said Luffe, and he went on reading his letter.
+
+It was characteristic of Luffe that he should feel so little concern in
+the domestic side of Linforth's life. He was not very human in his
+outlook on the world. Questions of high policy interested and engrossed
+his mind; he lived for the Frontier, not so much subduing a man's natural
+emotions as unaware of them. Men figured in his thoughts as the
+instruments of policy; their womenfolk as so many hindrances or aids to
+the fulfilment of their allotted tasks. Thus Linforth's death troubled
+him greatly, since Linforth was greatly concerned in one great
+undertaking. Moreover, the scheme had been very close to Linforth's
+heart, even as it was to Luffe's. But Linforth's wife was in England, and
+thus, as it seemed to him, neither aid nor impediment. But in that he was
+wrong. She had been the mainspring of Linforth's energy, and so much was
+evident in the letter which Luffe read slowly to the end.
+
+"Yes, Linforth's dead," said he, with a momentary discouragement. "There
+are many whom we could more easily have spared. Of course the thing will
+go on. That's certain," he said, nodding his head. A cold satisfaction
+shone in his eyes. "But Linforth was part of the Thing."
+
+He passed the second letter to Dewes, who read it; and for a while both
+men remained thoughtful and, as it seemed, unaware for the moment of the
+Diwan's presence. There was this difference, however. Luffe was thinking
+of "the Thing"; Dewes was pondering on the grim little tragedy which
+these letters revealed, and thanking Heaven in all simplicity of heart
+that there was no woman waiting in fear because of him and trembling at
+sight of each telegraph boy she met upon the road.
+
+The grim little tragedy was not altogether uncommon upon the Indian
+frontier, but it gained vividness from the brevity of the letters which
+related it. The first one, that in the woman's hand, written from a house
+under the Downs of Sussex, told of the birth of a boy in words at once
+sacred and simple. They were written for the eyes of one man, and Major
+Dewes had a feeling that his own, however respectfully, violated their
+sanctity. The second letter was an unfinished one written by the husband
+to the wife from his tent amongst the rabble of Abdulla Mahommed.
+Linforth clearly understood that this was the last letter he would write.
+"I am sitting writing this by the light of a candle. The tent door is
+open. In front of me I can see the great snow-mountains. All the ugliness
+of the lower shale slopes is hidden. By such a moonlight, my dear, may
+you always look back upon my memory. For it is over, Sybil. They are
+waiting until I fall asleep. I have been warned of it. But I shall fall
+asleep to-night. I have kept awake for two nights. I am very tired."
+
+He had fallen asleep even before the letter was completed. There was a
+message for the boy and a wish:
+
+"May he meet a woman like you, my dear, when his time comes, and love her
+as I love you," and again came the phrase, "I am very tired." It spoke of
+the boy's school, and continued: "Whether he will come out here it is too
+early to think about. But the road will not be finished--and I wonder. If
+he wants to, let him! We Linforths belong to the road," and for the third
+time the phrase recurred, "I am very tired," and upon the phrase the
+letter broke off.
+
+Dewes could imagine Linforth falling forward with his head upon his
+hands, his eyes heavy with sleep, while from without the tent the patient
+Chiltis watched until he slept.
+
+"How did it happen?" he asked.
+
+"They cast a noose over his head," replied the Diwan, "dragged him from
+the tent and stabbed him."
+
+Dewes nodded and turned to Luffe.
+
+"These letters and things must go home to his wife. It's hard on her,
+with a boy only a few months old."
+
+"A boy?" said Luffe, rousing himself from his thoughts. "Oh! there's a
+boy? I had not noticed that. I wonder how far the road will have gone
+when he comes out." There was no doubt in Luffe's mind, at all events, as
+to the boy's destiny. He turned to the Diwan.
+
+"Tell Wafadar Nazim that I will open the gates of this fort and march
+down to British territory after he has made submission," he said.
+
+The Diwan smiled in a melancholy way. He had done his best, but the
+British were, of course, all mad. He bowed himself out of the room and
+stalked through the alleys to the gates.
+
+"Wafadar Nazim must be very sure of victory," said Luffe. "He would
+hardly have given us that unfinished letter had he a fear we should
+escape him in the end."
+
+"He could not read what was written," said Dewes.
+
+"But he could fear what was written," replied Luffe.
+
+As he walked across the courtyard he heard the crack of a rifle. The
+sound came from across the river. The truce was over, the siege was
+already renewed.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+LUFFE LOOKS FORWARD
+
+
+It was the mine underneath the North Tower which brought the career of
+Luffe to an end. The garrison, indeed, had lived in fear of this peril
+ever since the siege began. But inasmuch as no attempt to mine had been
+made during the first month, the fear had grown dim. It was revived
+during the fifth week. The officers were at mess at nine o'clock in the
+evening, when a havildar of Sikhs burst into the courtyard with the news
+that the sound of a pick could be heard from the chamber of the tower.
+
+"At last!" cried Dewes, springing to his feet. The six men hurried to the
+tower. A long loophole had been fashioned in the thick wall on a downward
+slant, so that a marksman might command anyone who crept forward to fire
+the fort. Against this loophole Luffe leaned his ear.
+
+"Do you hear anything, sir?" asked a subaltern of the Sappers who was
+attached to the force.
+
+"Hush!" said Luffe.
+
+He listened, and he heard quite clearly underneath the ground below him
+the dull shock of a pickaxe. The noise came almost from beneath his feet;
+so near the mine had been already driven to the walls. The strokes fell
+with the regularity of the ticking of a clock. But at times the sound
+changed in character. The muffled thud of the pick upon earth became a
+clang as it struck upon stone.
+
+"Do you listen!" said Luffe, giving way to Dewes, and Dewes in his turn
+leaned his ear against the loophole.
+
+"What do you think?" asked Luffe.
+
+Dewes stood up straight again.
+
+"I'll tell you what I am thinking. I am thinking it sounds like the
+beating of a clock in a room where a man lies dying," he said.
+
+Luffe nodded his head. But images and romantic sayings struck no response
+from him. He turned to the young Sapper.
+
+"Can we countermine?"
+
+The young Engineer took the place of Major Dewes.
+
+"We can try, but we are late," said he.
+
+"It must be a sortie then," said Luffe.
+
+"Yes," exclaimed Lynes eagerly. "Let me go, Sir Charles!"
+
+Luffe smiled at his enthusiasm.
+
+"How many men will you require?" he asked. "Sixty?"
+
+"A hundred," replied Dewes promptly.
+
+All that night Luffe superintended the digging of the countermine, while
+Dewes made ready for the sortie. By daybreak the arrangements were
+completed. The gunpowder bags, with their fuses attached, were
+distributed, the gates were suddenly flung open, and Lynes raced out with
+a hundred Ghurkhas and Sikhs across the fifty yards of open ground to the
+sangar behind which the mine shaft had been opened. The work of the
+hundred men was quick and complete. Within half an hour, Lynes, himself
+wounded, had brought back his force, and left the mine destroyed. But
+during that half-hour disaster had fallen upon the garrison. Luffe had
+dropped as he was walking back across the courtyard to his office. For a
+few minutes he lay unnoticed in the empty square, his face upturned to
+the sky, and then a clamorous sound of lamentation was heard and an
+orderly came running through the alleys of the Fort, crying out that the
+Colonel Sahib was dead.
+
+He was not dead, however. He recovered conciousness that night, and early
+in the morning Dewes was roused from his sleep. He woke to find the
+Doctor shaking him by the shoulder.
+
+"Luffe wants you. He has not got very long now. He has something to say."
+
+Dewes slipped on his clothes, and hurried down the stairs. He followed
+the Doctor through the little winding alleys which gave to the Fort the
+appearance of a tiny village. It was broad daylight, but the fortress was
+strangely silent. The people whom he passed either spoke not at all or
+spoke only in low tones. They sat huddled in groups, waiting. Fear was
+abroad that morning. It was known that the brain of the defence was
+dying. It was known, too, what cruel fate awaited those within the Fort,
+if those without ever forced the gates and burst in upon their victims.
+
+Dewes found the Political Officer propped up on pillows on his camp-bed.
+The door from the courtyard was open, and the morning light poured
+brightly into the room.
+
+"Sit here, close to me, Dewes," said Luffe in a whisper, "and
+listen, for I am very tired." A smile came upon his face. "Do you
+remember Linforth's letters? How that phrase came again and again:
+'I am very tired.'"
+
+The Doctor arranged the pillows underneath his shoulders, and then
+Luffe said:
+
+"All right. I shall do now."
+
+He waited until the Doctor had gone from the room and continued:
+
+"I am not going to talk to you about the Fort. The defence is safe in
+your hands, so long as defence is possible. Besides, if it falls it's not
+a great thing. The troops will come up and trample down Wafadar Nazim and
+Abdulla Mahommed. They are not the danger. The road will go on again,
+even though Linforth's dead. No, the man whom I am afraid of is--the son
+of the Khan."
+
+Dewes stared, and then said in a soothing voice:
+
+"He will be looked after."
+
+"You think my mind's wandering," continued Luffe. "It never was clearer
+in my life. The Khan's son is a boy a week old. Nevertheless I tell you
+that boy is the danger in Chiltistan. The father--we know him. A good
+fellow who has lost all the confidence of his people. There is hardly an
+adherent of his who genuinely likes him; there's hardly a man in this
+Fort who doesn't believe that he wished to sell his country to the
+British. I should think he is impossible here in the future. And everyone
+in Government House knows it. We shall do the usual thing, I have no
+doubt--pension him off, settle him down comfortably outside the borders
+of Chiltistan, and rule the country as trustee for his son--until the son
+comes of age."
+
+Dewes realised surely enough that Luffe was in possession of his
+faculties, but he thought his anxiety exaggerated.
+
+"You are looking rather far ahead, aren't you, sir?" he asked.
+
+Luffe smiled.
+
+"Twenty-one years. What are twenty-one years to India? My dear Dewes!"
+
+He was silent. It seemed as though he were hesitating whether he would
+say a word more to this Major who in India talked of twenty-one years as
+a long span of time. But there was no one else to whom he could confide
+his fears. If Dewes was not brilliant, he was at all events all that
+there was.
+
+"I wish I was going to live," he cried in a low voice of exasperation. "I
+wish I could last just long enough to travel down to Calcutta and _make_
+them listen to me. But there's no hope of it. You must do what you can,
+Dewes, but very likely they won't pay any attention to you. Very likely
+you'll believe me wrong yourself, eh? Poor old Luffe, a man with a bee in
+his bonnet, eh?" he whispered savagely.
+
+"No, sir," replied Dewes. "You know the Frontier. I know that."
+
+"And even there you are wrong. No man knows the Frontier. We are all
+stumbling in the dark among these peoples, with their gentle voices and
+their cut-throat ways. The most that you can know is that you are
+stumbling in the dark. Well, let's get back to the boy here. This country
+will be kept for him, for twenty-one years. Where is he going to be
+during those twenty-one years?"
+
+Dewes caught at the question as an opportunity for reassuring the
+Political Officer.
+
+"Why, sir, the Khan told us. Have you forgotten? He is to go to Eton and
+Oxford. He'll see something of England. He will learn--" and Major Dewes
+stopped short, baffled by the look of hopelessness upon the Political
+Officer's face.
+
+"I think you are all mad," said Luffe, and he suddenly started up in his
+bed and cried with vehemence, "You take these boys to England. You train
+them in the ways of the West, the ideas of the West, and then you send
+them back again to the East, to rule over Eastern people, according to
+Eastern ideas, and you think all is well. I tell you, Dewes, it's sheer
+lunacy. Of course it's true--this boy won't perhaps suffer in esteem
+among his people quite as much as others have done. He belongs and his
+people belong to the Maulai sect. The laws of religion are not strict
+among them. They drink wine, they eat what they will, they do not lose
+caste so easily. But you have to look at the man as he will be, the
+hybrid mixture of East and West."
+
+He sank back among his pillows, exhausted by the violence of his outcry,
+and for a little while he was silent. Then he began again, but this time
+in a low, pleading voice, which was very unusual in him, and which kept
+the words he spoke vivid and fresh in Dewes' memory for many years to
+come. Indeed, Dewes would not have believed that Luffe could have spoken
+on any subject with so much wistfulness.
+
+"Listen to me, Dewes. I have lived for the Frontier. I have had no other
+interest, almost no other ties. I am not a man of friends. I believed at
+one time Linforth was my friend. I believed I liked him very much. But I
+think now that it was only because he was bound up with the Frontier. The
+Frontier has been my wife, my children, my home, my one long and lasting
+passion. And I am very well content that it has been so. I don't regret
+missed opportunities of happiness. What I regret is that I shall not be
+alive in twenty-one years to avert the danger I foresee, or to laugh at
+my fears if I am wrong. They can do what they like in Rajputana and
+Bengal and Bombay. But on the Frontier I want things to go well. Oh, how
+I want them to go well!"
+
+Luffe had grown very pale, and the sweat glistened upon his forehead.
+Dewes held to his lips a glass of brandy which stood upon a table
+beside the bed.
+
+"What danger do you foresee?" asked Dewes. "I will remember what you
+say."
+
+"Yes, remember it; write it out, so that you may remember it, and din it
+into their ears at Government House," said Luffe. "You take these boys,
+you give them Oxford, a season in London--did you ever have a season in
+London when you were twenty-one, Dewes? You show them Paris. You give
+them opportunities of enjoyment, such as no other age, no other place
+affords--has ever afforded. You give them, for a short while, a life of
+colour, of swift crowding hours of pleasure, and then you send them
+back--to settle down in their native States, and obey the orders of the
+Resident. Do you think they will be content? Do you think they will have
+their heart in their work, in their humdrum life, in their elaborate
+ceremonies? Oh, there are instances enough to convince if only people
+would listen. There's a youth now in the South, the heir of an Indian
+throne--he has six weeks' holiday. How does he use it, do you think? He
+travels hard to England, spends a week there, and travels back again. In
+England he is treated as an _equal_; here, in spite of his ceremonies, he
+is an _inferior_, and will and must be so. The best you can hope is that
+he will be merely unhappy. You pray that he won't take to drink and make
+his friends among the jockeys and the trainers. He has lost the taste for
+the native life, and nevertheless he has got to live it.
+Besides--besides--I haven't told you the worst of it."
+
+Dewes leaned forward. The sincerity of Luffe had gained upon him. "Let me
+hear all," he said.
+
+"There is the white woman," continued Luffe. "The English woman, the
+English girl, with her daintiness, her pretty frocks, her good looks,
+her delicate charm. Very likely she only thinks of him as a picturesque
+figure; she dances with him, but she does not take him seriously. Yes,
+but he may take her seriously, and often does. What then? When he is
+told to go back to his State and settle down, what then? Will he be
+content with a wife of his own people? He is already a stranger among
+his own folk. He will eat out his heart with bitterness and jealousy.
+And, mind you, I am speaking of the best--the best of the Princes and
+the best of the English women. What of the others? The English women who
+take his pearls, and the Princes who come back and boast of their
+success. Do you think that is good for British rule in India? Give me
+something to drink!"
+
+Luffe poured out his vehement convictions to his companion, wishing with
+all his heart that he had one of the great ones of the Viceroy's Council
+at his side, instead of this zealous but somewhat commonplace Major of a
+Sikh regiment. All the more, therefore, must he husband his strength, so
+that all that he had in mind might be remembered. There would be little
+chance, perhaps, of it bearing fruit. Still, even that little chance must
+be grasped. And so in that high castle beneath the Himalayas, besieged by
+insurgent tribes, a dying Political Officer discoursed upon this question
+of high policy.
+
+"I told you of a supper I had one night at the Savoy--do you
+remember? You all looked sufficiently astonished when I told you to
+bear it in mind."
+
+"Yes, I remember," said Dewes.
+
+"Very well. I told you I learned something from the lady who was with me
+which it was good for me to know. I saw something which it was good for
+me to see. Good--yes, but not pleasant either to know or see. There was a
+young Prince in England then. He dined in high places and afterwards
+supped at the Savoy with the _coryphees;_ and both in the high places and
+among the _coryphees_ his jewels had made him welcome. This is truth I am
+telling you. He was a boaster. Well, after supper that night he threw a
+girl down the stairs. Never mind what she was--she was of the white
+ruling race, she was of the race that rules in India, he comes back to
+India and insolently boasts. Do you approve? Do you think that good?"
+
+"I think it's horrible," exclaimed Dewes.
+
+"Well, I have done," said Luffe. "This youngster is to go to Oxford.
+Unhappiness and the distrust of his own people will be the best that can
+come of it, while ruin and disasters very well may. There are many ways
+of disaster. Suppose, for instance, this boy were to turn out a strong
+man. Do you see?"
+
+Dewes nodded his head.
+
+"Yes, I see," he answered, and he answered so because he saw that Luffe
+had come to the end of his strength. His voice had weakened, he lay with
+his eyes sunk deep in his head and a leaden pallor upon his face, and his
+breath laboured as he spoke.
+
+"I am glad," replied Luffe, "that you understand."
+
+But it was not until many years had passed that Dewes saw and understood
+the trouble which was then stirring in Luffe's mind. And even then, when
+he did see and understand, he wondered how much Luffe really had
+foreseen. Enough, at all events, to justify his reputation for sagacity.
+Dewes went out from the bedroom and climbed up on to the roof of the
+Fort. The sun was up, the day already hot, and would have been hotter,
+but that a light wind stirred among the almond trees in the garden. The
+leaves of those trees now actually brushed against the Fort walls. Five
+weeks ago there had been bare stems and branches. Suddenly a rifle
+cracked, a little puff of smoke rose close to a boulder on the far side
+of the river, a bullet sang in the air past Dewes' head. He ducked behind
+the palisade of boards. Another day had come. For another day the flag,
+manufactured out of some red cloth, a blue turban and some white cotton,
+floated overhead. Meanwhile, somewhere among the passes, the relieving
+force was already on the march.
+
+Late that afternoon Luffe died, and his body was buried in the Fort. He
+had done his work. For two days afterwards the sound of a battle was
+heard to the south, the siege was raised, and in the evening the
+Brigadier-General in Command rode up to the gates and found a tired and
+haggard group of officers awaiting him. They received him without cheers
+or indeed any outward sign of rejoicing. They waited in a dead silence,
+like beaten and dispirited men. They were beginning to pay the price of
+their five weeks' siege.
+
+The Brigadier looked at the group.
+
+"What of Luffe?" he asked.
+
+"Dead, sir," replied Dewes.
+
+"A great loss," said Brigadier Appleton solemnly. But he was paying his
+tribute rather to the class to which Luffe belonged than to the man
+himself. Luffe was a man of independent views, Brigadier Appleton a
+soldier clinging to tradition. Moreover, there had been an encounter
+between the two in which Luffe had prevailed.
+
+The Brigadier paid a ceremonious visit to the Khan on the following
+morning, and once more the Khan expounded his views as to the education
+of his son. But he expounded them now to sympathetic ears.
+
+"I think that his Excellency disapproved of my plan," said the Khan.
+
+"Did he?" cried Brigadier Appleton. "On some points I am inclined to
+think that Luffe's views were not always sound. Certainly let the boy go
+to Eton and Oxford. A fine idea, your Highness. The training will widen
+his mind, enlarge his ideas, and all that sort of thing. I will myself
+urge upon the Government's advisers the wisdom of your Highness'
+proposal."
+
+Moreover Dewes failed to carry Luffe's dying message to Calcutta. For on
+one point--a point of fact--Luffe was immediately proved wrong. Mir Ali,
+the Khan of Chiltistan, was retained upon his throne. Dewes turned the
+matter over in his slow mind. Wrong definitely, undeniably wrong on the
+point of fact, was it not likely that Luffe was wrong too on the point
+of theory? Dewes had six months furlong too, besides, and was anxious to
+go home. It would be a bore to travel to Bombay by way of Calcutta. "Let
+the boy go to Eton and Oxford!" he said. "Why not?" and the years
+answered him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+A MAGAZINE ARTICLE
+
+
+The little war of Chiltistan was soon forgotten by the world. But it
+lived vividly enough in the memories of a few people to whom it had
+brought either suffering or fresh honours. But most of all it was
+remembered by Sybil Linforth, so that even after fourteen years a chance
+word, or a trivial coincidence, would bring back to her the horror and
+the misery of that time as freshly as if only a single day had
+intervened. Such a coincidence happened on this morning of August.
+
+She was in the garden with her back to the Downs which rose high from
+close behind the house, and she was looking across the fields rich with
+orchards and yellow crops. She saw a small figure climb a stile and come
+towards the house along a footpath, increasing in stature as it
+approached. It was Colonel Dewes, and her thoughts went back to the day
+when first, with reluctant steps, he had walked along that path, carrying
+with him a battered silver watch and chain and a little black leather
+letter-case. Because of that memory she advanced slowly towards him now.
+
+"I did not know that you were home," she said, as they shook hands. "When
+did you land?"
+
+"Yesterday. I am home for good now. My time is up." Sybil Linforth looked
+quickly at his face and turned away.
+
+"You are sorry?" she said gently.
+
+"Yes. I don't feel old, you see. I feel as if I had many years' good work
+in me yet. But there! That's the trouble with the mediocre men. They are
+shelved before they are old. I am one of them."
+
+He laughed as he spoke, and looked at his companion.
+
+Sybil Linforth was now thirty-eight years old, but the fourteen years had
+not set upon her the marks of their passage as they had upon Dewes.
+Indeed, she still retained a look of youth, and all the slenderness of
+her figure.
+
+Dewes grumbled to her with a smile upon his face.
+
+"I wonder how in the world you do it. Here am I white-haired and creased
+like a dry pippin. There are you--" and he broke off. "I suppose it's the
+boy who keeps you young. How is he?"
+
+A look of anxiety troubled Mrs. Linforth's face; into her eyes there came
+a glint of fear. Colonel Dewes' voice became gentle with concern.
+
+"What's the matter, Sybil?" he said. "Is he ill?"
+
+"No, he is quite well."
+
+"Then what is it?"
+
+Sybil Linforth looked down for a moment at the gravel of the garden-path.
+Then, without raising her eyes, she said in a low voice:
+
+"I am afraid."
+
+"Ah," said Dewes, as he rubbed his chin, "I see."
+
+It was his usual remark when he came against anything which he did not
+understand.
+
+"You must let me have him for a week or two sometimes, Sybil. Boys will
+get into trouble, you know. It is their nature to. And sometimes a man
+may be of use in putting things straight."
+
+The hint of a smile glimmered about Sybil Linforth's mouth, but she
+repressed it. She would not for worlds have let her friend see it, lest
+he might be hurt.
+
+"No," she replied, "Dick is not in any trouble. But--" and she struggled
+for a moment with a feeling that she ought not to say what she greatly
+desired to say; that speech would be disloyal. But the need to speak was
+too strong within her, her heart too heavily charged with fear.
+
+"I will tell you," she said, and, with a glance towards the open windows
+of the house, she led Colonel Dewes to a corner of the garden where, upon
+a grass mound, there was a garden seat. From this seat one overlooked the
+garden hedge. To the left, the little village of Poynings with its grey
+church and tall tapering spire, lay at the foot of the gap in the Downs
+where runs the Brighton road. Behind them the Downs ran like a rampart to
+right and left, their steep green sides scarred here and there by
+landslips and showing the white chalk. Far away the high trees of
+Chanctonbury Ring stood out against the sky.
+
+"Dick has secrets," Sybil said, "secrets from me. It used not to be so. I
+have always known how a want of sympathy makes a child hide what he feels
+and thinks, and drives him in upon himself, to feed his thoughts with
+imaginings and dreams. I have seen it. I don't believe that anything but
+harm ever comes of it. It builds up a barrier which will last for life. I
+did not want that barrier to rise between Dick and me--I--" and her voice
+shook a little--"I should be very unhappy if it were to rise. So I have
+always tried to be his friend and comrade, rather than his mother."
+
+"Yes," said Colonel Dewes, wisely nodding his head. "I have seen you
+playing cricket with him."
+
+Colonel Dewes had frequently been puzzled by a peculiar change of manner
+in his friends. When he made a remark which showed how clearly he
+understood their point of view and how closely he was in agreement with
+it, they had a way of becoming reticent in the very moment of expansion.
+The current of sympathy was broken, and as often as not they turned the
+conversation altogether into a conventional and less interesting channel.
+That change of manner became apparent now. Sybil Linforth leaned back and
+abruptly ceased to speak.
+
+"Please go on," said Dewes, turning towards her.
+
+She hesitated, and then with a touch of reluctance continued:
+
+"I succeeded until a month or so ago. But a month or so ago the secrets
+came. Oh, I know him so well. He is trying to hide that there are any
+secrets lest his reticence should hurt me. But we have been so much
+together, so much to each other--how should I not know?" And again she
+leaned forward with her hands clasped tightly together upon her knees and
+a look of great distress lying like a shadow upon her face. "The first
+secrets," she continued, and her voice trembled, "I suppose they are
+always bitter to a mother. But since I have nothing but Dick they hurt me
+more deeply than is perhaps reasonable"; and she turned towards her
+companion with a poor attempt at a smile.
+
+"What sort of secrets?" asked Dewes. "What is he hiding?"
+
+"I don't know," she replied, and she repeated the words, adding to them
+slowly others. "I don't know--and I am a little afraid to guess. But I
+know that something is stirring in his mind, something is--" and she
+paused, and into her eyes there came a look of actual terror--"something
+is calling him. He goes alone up on to the top of the Downs, and stays
+there alone for hours. I have seen him. I have come upon him unawares
+lying on the grass with his face towards the sea, his lips parted, and
+his eyes strained, his face absorbed. He has been so lost in dreams that
+I have come close to him through the grass and stood beside him and
+spoken to him before he grew aware that anyone was near."
+
+"Perhaps he wants to be a sailor," suggested Dewes.
+
+"No, I do not think it is that," Sybil answered quietly. "If it were so,
+he would have told me."
+
+"Yes," Dewes admitted. "Yes, he would have told you. I was wrong."
+
+"You see," Mrs. Linforth continued, as though Dewes had not interrupted,
+"it is not natural for a boy at his age to want to be alone, is it? I
+don't think it is good either. It is not natural for a boy of his age to
+be thoughtful. I am not sure that that is good. I am, to tell you the
+truth, very troubled."
+
+Dewes looked at her sharply. Something, not so much in her words as in
+the careful, slow manner of her speech, warned him that she was not
+telling him all of the trouble which oppressed her. Her fears were more
+definite than she had given him as yet reason to understand. There was
+not enough in what she had said to account for the tense clasp of her
+hands, and the glint of terror in her eyes.
+
+"Anyhow, he's going to the big school next term," he said; "that is, if
+you haven't changed your mind since you last wrote to me, and I hope you
+haven't changed your mind. All that he wants really," the Colonel added
+with unconscious cruelty, "is companions of his own age. He passed in
+well, didn't he?"
+
+Sybil Linforth's face lost for the moment all its apprehension. A smile
+of pride made her face very tender, and as she turned to Dewes he thought
+to himself that really her eyes were beautiful.
+
+"Yes, he passed in very high," she said.
+
+"Eton, isn't it?" said Dewes. "Whose house?"
+
+She mentioned the name and added: "His father was there before him." Then
+she rose from her seat. "Would you like to see Dick? I will show you him.
+Come quietly."
+
+She led the way across the lawn towards an open window. It was a day of
+sunshine; the garden was bright with flowers, and about the windows
+rose-trees climbed the house-walls. It was a house of red brick, darkened
+by age, and with a roof of tiles. To Dewes' eyes, nestling as it did
+beneath the great grass Downs, it had a most homelike look of comfort.
+Sybil turned with a finger on her lips.
+
+"Keep this side of the window," she whispered, "or your shadow will fall
+across the floor."
+
+Standing aside as she bade him, he looked into the room. He saw a boy
+seated at a table with his head between his hands, immersed in a book
+which lay before him. He was seated with his side towards the window and
+his hands concealed his face. But in a moment he removed one hand and
+turned the page. Colonel Dewes could now see the profile of his face. A
+firm chin, a beauty of outline not very common, a certain delicacy of
+feature and colour gave to him a distinction of which Sybil Linforth
+might well be proud.
+
+"He'll be a dangerous fellow among the girls in a few years' time," said
+Dewes, turning to the mother. But Sybil did not hear the words. She was
+standing with her head thrust forward. Her face was white, her whole
+aspect one of dismay. Dewes could not understand the change in her. A
+moment ago she had been laughing playfully as she led him towards the
+window. Now it seemed as though a sudden disaster had turned her to
+stone. Yet there was nothing visible to suggest disaster. Dewes looked
+from Sybil to the boy and back again. Then he noticed that her eyes were
+riveted, not on Dick's face, but on the book which he was reading.
+
+"What is the matter?" he asked.
+
+"Hush!" said Sybil, but at that moment Dick lifted his head, recognised
+the visitor, and came forward to the window with a smile of welcome.
+There was no embarrassment in his manner, no air of being surprised. He
+had not the look of one who nurses secrets. A broad open forehead
+surmounted a pair of steady clear grey eyes.
+
+"Well, Dick, I hear you have done well in your examination," said the
+Colonel, as he shook hands. "If you keep it up I will leave you all I
+save out of my pension."
+
+"Thank you, sir," said Dick with a laugh. "How long have you been back,
+Colonel Dewes?"
+
+"I left India a fortnight ago."
+
+"A fortnight ago." Dick leaned his arms upon the sill and with his eyes
+on the Colonel's face asked quietly: "How far does the Road reach now?"
+
+At the side of Colonel Dewes Sybil Linforth flinched as though she had
+been struck. But it did not need that movement to explain to the Colonel
+the perplexing problem of her fears. He understood now. The Linforths
+belonged to the Road. The Road had slain her husband. No wonder she lived
+in terror lest it should claim her son. And apparently it did claim him.
+
+"The road through Chiltistan?" he said slowly.
+
+"Of course," answered Dick. "Of what other could I be thinking?"
+
+"They have stopped it," said the Colonel, and at his side he was aware
+that Sybil Linforth drew a deep breath. "The road reaches Kohara. It does
+not go beyond. It will not go beyond."
+
+Dick's eyes steadily looked into the Colonel's face; and the Colonel had
+some trouble to meet their look with the same frankness. He turned aside
+and Mrs. Linforth said,
+
+"Come and see my roses."
+
+Dick went back to his book. The man and woman passed on round the corner
+of the house to a little rose-garden with a stone sun-dial in the middle,
+surrounded by low red brick walls. Here it was very quiet. Only the bees
+among the flowers filled the air with a pleasant murmur.
+
+"They are doing well--your roses," said Dewes.
+
+"Yes. These Queen Mabs are good. Don't you think so? I am rather proud of
+them," said Sybil; and then she broke off suddenly and faced him.
+
+"Is it true?" she whispered in a low passionate voice. "Is the road
+stopped? Will it not go beyond Kohara?"
+
+Colonel Dewes attempted no evasion with Mrs. Linforth.
+
+"It is true that it is stopped. It is also true that for the moment there
+is no intention to carry it further. But--but--"
+
+And as he paused Sybil took up the sentence.
+
+"But it will go on, I know. Sooner or later." And there was almost a note
+of hopelessness in her voice. "The Power of the Road is beyond the Power
+of Governments," she added with the air of one quoting a sentence.
+
+They walked on between the alleys of rose-trees and she asked:
+
+"Did you notice the book which Dick was reading?"
+
+"It looked like a bound volume of magazines."
+
+Sybil nodded her head.
+
+"It was a volume of the 'Fortnightly.' He was reading an article
+written forty years ago by Andrew Linforth--" and she suddenly cried
+out, "Oh, how I wish he had never lived. He was an uncle of Harry's--my
+husband. He predicted it. He was in the old Company, then he became a
+servant of the Government, and he was the first to begin the road. You
+know his history?"
+
+"No."
+
+"It is a curious one. When it was his time to retire, he sent his money
+to England, he made all his arrangements to come home, and then one night
+he walked out of the hotel in Bombay, a couple of days before the ship
+sailed, and disappeared. He has never been heard of since."
+
+"Had he no wife?" asked Dewes.
+
+"No," replied Sybil. "Do you know what I think? I think he went back to
+the north, back to his Road. I think it called him. I think he could not
+keep away."
+
+"But we should have come across him," cried Dewes, "or across news of
+him. Surely we should!"
+
+Sybil shrugged her shoulders.
+
+"In that article which Dick was reading, the road was first proposed.
+Listen to this," and she began to recite:
+
+"The road will reach northwards, through Chiltistan, to the foot of the
+Baroghil Pass, in the mountains of the Hindu Kush. Not yet, but it will.
+Many men will die in the building of it from cold and dysentery, and
+even hunger--Englishmen and coolies from Baltistan. Many men will die
+fighting over it, Englishmen and Chiltis, and Gurkhas and Sikhs. It will
+cost millions of money, and from policy or economy successive
+Governments will try to stop it; but the power of the Road will be
+greater than the power of any Government. It will wind through valleys
+so deep that the day's sunshine is gone within the hour. It will be
+carried in galleries along the faces of mountains, and for eight months
+of the year sections of it will be buried deep in snow. Yet it will be
+finished. It will go on to the foot of the Hindu Kush, and then only the
+British rule in India will be safe."
+
+She finished the quotation.
+
+"That is what Andrew Linforth prophesied. Much of it has already been
+justified. I have no doubt the rest will be in time. I think he went
+north when he disappeared. I think the Road called him, as it is now
+calling Dick."
+
+She made the admission at last quite simply and quietly. Yet it was
+evident to Dewes that it cost her much to make it.
+
+"Yes," he said. "That is what you fear."
+
+She nodded her head and let him understand something of the terror with
+which the Road inspired her.
+
+"When the trouble began fourteen years ago, when the road was cut and day
+after day no news came of whether Harry lived or, if he died, how he
+died--I dreamed of it--I used to see horrible things happening on that
+road--night after night I saw them. Dreadful things happening to Dick and
+his father while I stood by and could do nothing. Oh, it seems to me a
+living thing greedy for blood--our blood."
+
+She turned to him a haggard face. Dewes sought to reassure her.
+
+"But there is peace now in Chiltistan. We keep a close watch on that
+country, I can tell you. I don't think we shall be caught napping
+there again."
+
+But these arguments had little weight with Sybil Linforth. The tragedy of
+fourteen years ago had beaten her down with too strong a hand. She could
+not reason about the road. She only felt, and she felt with all the
+passion of her nature.
+
+"What will you do, then?" asked Dewes.
+
+She walked a little further on before she answered.
+
+"I shall do nothing. If, when the time comes, Dick feels that work upon
+that road is his heritage, if he wants to follow in his father's steps, I
+shall say not a single word to dissuade him."
+
+Dewes stared at her. This half-hour of conversation had made real to him
+at all events the great strength of her hostility. Yet she would put the
+hostility aside and say not a word.
+
+"That's more than I could do," he said, "if I felt as you do. By
+George it is!"
+
+Sybil smiled at him with friendliness.
+
+"It's not bravery. Do you remember the unfinished letter which you
+brought home to me from Harry? There were three sentences in that which I
+cannot pretend to have forgotten," and she repeated the sentences:
+
+"'Whether he will come out here, it is too early to think about. But the
+road will not be finished--and I wonder. If he wants to, let him.' It is
+quite clear--isn't it?--that Harry wanted him to take up the work. You
+can read that in the words. I can imagine him speaking them and hear the
+tone he would use. Besides--I have still a greater fear than the one of
+which you know. I don't want Dick, when he grows up, ever to think that I
+have been cowardly, and, because I was cowardly, disloyal to his father."
+
+"Yes, I see," said Colonel Dewes.
+
+And this time he really did understand.
+
+"We will go in and lunch," said Sybil, and they walked back to the house.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+A LONG WALK
+
+
+The footsteps sounded overhead with a singular regularity. From the
+fireplace to the door, and back again from the door to the fireplace. At
+each turn there was a short pause, and each pause was of the same
+duration. The footsteps were very light; it was almost as though an
+animal, a caged animal, padded from the bars at one end to the bars at
+the other. There was something stealthy in the footsteps too.
+
+In the room below a man of forty-five sat writing at a desk--a very tall,
+broad-shouldered man, in clerical dress. Twenty-five years before he had
+rowed as number seven in the Oxford Eight, with an eye all the while upon
+a mastership at his old school. He had taken a first in Greats; he had
+obtained his mastership; for the last two years he had had a House. As he
+had been at the beginning, so he was now, a man without theories but with
+an instinctive comprehension of boys. In consequence there were no
+vacancies in his house, and the Headmaster had grown accustomed to
+recommend the Rev. Mr. Arthur Pollard when boys who needed any special
+care came to the school.
+
+He was now so engrossed with the preparations for the term which was to
+begin to-morrow that for some while the footsteps overhead did not
+attract his attention. When he did hear them he just lifted his head,
+listened for a moment or two, lit his pipe and went on with his work.
+
+But the sounds continued. Backwards and forwards from the fireplace to
+the door, the footsteps came and went--without haste and without
+cessation; stealthily regular; inhumanly light. Their very monotony
+helped them to pass as unnoticed as the ticking of a clock. Mr. Pollard
+continued the preparation of his class-work for a full hour, and only
+when the dusk was falling, and it was becoming difficult for him to see
+what he was writing, did he lean back in his chair and stretch his arms
+above his head with a sigh of relief.
+
+Then once more he became aware of the footsteps overhead. He rose and
+rang the bell.
+
+"Who is that walking up and down the drawingroom, Evans?" he asked of
+the butler.
+
+The butler threw back his head and listened.
+
+"I don't know, sir," he replied.
+
+"Those footsteps have been sounding like that for more than an hour."
+
+"For more than an hour?" Evans repeated. "Then I am afraid, sir, it's the
+new young gentleman from India."
+
+Arthur Pollard started.
+
+"Has he been waiting up there alone all this time?" he exclaimed. "Why in
+the world wasn't I told?"
+
+"You were told, sir," said Evans firmly but respectfully. "I came into
+the study here and told you, and you answered 'All right, Evans.' But I
+had my doubts, sir, whether you really heard or not."
+
+Mr. Pollard hardly waited for the end of the explanation. He hurried out
+of the room and sprang up the stairs. He had arranged purposely for the
+young Prince to come to the house a day before term began. He was likely
+to be shy, ill-at-ease and homesick, among so many strange faces and
+unfamiliar ways. Moreover, Mr. Pollard wished to become better acquainted
+with the boy than would be easily possible once the term was in full
+swing. For he was something more of an experiment than the ordinary
+Indian princeling from a State well under the thumb of the Viceroy and
+the Indian Council. This boy came of the fighting stock in the north. To
+leave him tramping about a strange drawing-room alone for over an hour
+was not the best possible introduction to English ways and English life.
+Mr. Pollard opened the door and saw a slim, tall boy, with his hands
+behind his back and his eyes fixed on the floor, walking up and down in
+the gloom.
+
+"Shere Ali," he said, and he held out his hand. The boy took it shyly.
+
+"You have been waiting here for some time," Mr. Pollard continued, "I am
+sorry. I did not know that you had come. You should have rung the bell."
+
+"I was not lonely," Shere Ali replied. "I was taking a walk."
+
+"Yes, so I gathered," said the master with a smile. "Rather a long walk."
+
+"Yes, sir," the boy answered seriously. "I was walking from Kohara up the
+valley, and remembering the landmarks as I went. I had walked a long way.
+I had come to the fort where my father was besieged."
+
+"Yes, that reminds me," said Pollard, "you won't feel so lonely to-morrow
+as you do to-day. There is a new boy joining whose father was a great
+friend of your father's. Richard Linforth is his name. Very likely your
+father has mentioned that name to you."
+
+Mr. Pollard switched on the light as he spoke and saw Shere All's face
+flash with eagerness.
+
+"Oh yes!" he answered, "I know. He was killed upon the road by my
+uncle's people."
+
+"I have put you into the next room to his. If you will come with me I
+will show you."
+
+Mr. Pollard led the way along a passage into the boys' quarters.
+
+"This is your room. There's your bed. Here's your 'burry,'" pointing to a
+bureau with a bookcase on the top. He threw open the next door. "This is
+Linforth's room. By the way, you speak English very well."
+
+"Yes," said Shere Ali. "I was taught it in Lahore first of all. My father
+is very fond of the English."
+
+"Well, come along," said Mr. Pollard. "I expect my wife has come back and
+she shall give us some tea. You will dine with us to-night, and we will
+try to make you as fond of the English as your father is."
+
+The next day the rest of the boys arrived, and Mr. Pollard took the
+occasion to speak a word or two to young Linforth.
+
+"You are both new boys," he said, "but you will fit into the scheme of
+things quickly enough. He won't. He's in a strange land, among strange
+people. So just do what you can to help him."
+
+Dick Linforth was curious enough to see the son of the Khan of
+Chiltistan. But not for anything would he have talked to him of his
+father who had died upon the road, or of the road itself. These things
+were sacred. He greeted his companion in quite another way.
+
+"What's your name?" he asked.
+
+"Shere Ali," replied the young Prince.
+
+"That won't do," said Linforth, and he contemplated the boy solemnly. "I
+shall call you Sherry-Face," he said.
+
+And "Sherry-Face" the heir to Chiltistan remained; and in due time the
+name followed him to College.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+IN THE DAUPHINE
+
+
+The day broke tardily among the mountains of Dauphine. At half-past three
+on a morning of early August light should be already stealing through the
+little window and the chinks into the hut upon the Meije. But the four
+men who lay wrapped in blankets on the long broad shelf still slept in
+darkness. And when the darkness was broken it was by the sudden spit of a
+match. The tiny blue flame spluttered for a few seconds and then burned
+bright and yellow. It lit up the face of a man bending over the dial of a
+watch and above him and about him the wooden rafters and walls came dimly
+into view. The face was stout and burned by the sun to the colour of a
+ripe apple, and in spite of a black heavy moustache had a merry and
+good-humoured look. Little gold earrings twinkled in his ears by the
+light of the match. Annoyance clouded his face as he remarked the time.
+
+"Verdammt! Verdammt!" he muttered.
+
+The match burned out, and for a while he listened to the wind wailing
+about the hut, plucking at the door and the shutters of the window. He
+climbed down from the shelf with a rustle of straw, walked lightly for a
+moment or two about the hut, and then pulled open the door quickly. As
+quickly he shut it again.
+
+From the shelf Linforth spoke:
+
+"It is bad, Peter?"
+
+"It is impossible," replied Peter in English with a strong German accent.
+For the last three years he and his brother had acted as guides to the
+same two men who were now in the Meije hut. "We are a strong party, but
+it is impossible. Before I could walk a yard from the door, I would have
+to lend a lantern. And it is after four o'clock! The water is frozen in
+the pail, and I have never known that before in August."
+
+"Very well," said Linforth, turning over in his blankets. It was warm
+among the blankets and the straw, and he spoke with contentment. Later in
+the day he might rail against the weather. But for the moment he was very
+clear that there were worse things in the world than to lie snug and hear
+the wind tearing about the cliffs and know that there was no chance of
+facing it.
+
+"We will not go back to La Berarde," he said. "The storm may clear. We
+will wait in the hut until tomorrow."
+
+And from a third figure on the shelf there came in guttural English:
+
+"Yes, yes. Of course."
+
+The fourth man had not wakened from his sleep, and it was not until he
+was shaken by the shoulder at ten o'clock in the morning that he sat up
+and rubbed his eyes.
+
+The fourth man was Shere Ali.
+
+"Get up and come outside," said Linforth.
+
+Ten years had passed since Shere Ali had taken his long walk from Kohara
+up the valley in the drawing-room of his house-master at Eton. And those
+ten years had had their due effect. He betrayed his race nowadays by
+little more than his colour, a certain high-pitched intonation of his
+voice and an extraordinary skill in the game of polo. There had been a
+time of revolt against discipline, of inability to understand the points
+of view of his masters and their companions, and of difficulty to
+discover much sense in their institutions.
+
+It is to be remembered that he came from the hill-country, not from the
+plains of India. That honour was a principle, not a matter of
+circumstance, and that treachery was in itself disgraceful, whether it
+was profitable or not--here were hard sayings for a native of Chiltistan.
+He could look back upon the day when he had thought a public-house with a
+great gilt sign or the picture of an animal over the door a temple for
+some particular sect of worshippers.
+
+"And, indeed, you are far from wrong," his tutor had replied to him. "But
+since we do not worship at that fiery shrine such holy places are
+forbidden us."
+
+Gradually, however, his own character was overlaid; he was quick to
+learn, and in games quick to excel. He made friends amongst his
+schoolmates, he carried with him to Oxford the charm of manner which is
+Eton's particular gift, and from Oxford he passed to London. He was rich,
+he was liked, and he found a ready welcome, which did not spoil him.
+Luffe would undoubtedly have classed him amongst the best of the native
+Princes who go to England for their training, and on that very account,
+would have feared the more for his future. Shere Ali was now just
+twenty-four, he was tall, spare of body and wonderfully supple of limbs,
+and but for a fulness of the lower lip, which was characteristic of his
+family, would have been reckoned more than usually handsome.
+
+He came out of the door of the hut and stood by the side of Linforth.
+They looked up towards the Meije, but little of that majestic mass of
+rock was visible. The clouds hung low; the glacier below them upon their
+left had a dull and unillumined look, and over the top of the Breche de
+la Meije, the pass to the left of their mountain, the snow whirled up
+from the further side like smoke. The hut is built upon a great spur of
+the mountain which runs down into the desolate valley des Etancons, and
+at its upper end melts into the great precipitous rock-wall which forms
+one of the main difficulties of the ascent. Against this wall the clouds
+were massed. Snow lay where yesterday the rocks had shone grey and ruddy
+brown in the sunlight, and against the great wall here and there icicles
+were hung.
+
+"It looks unpromising," said Linforth. "But Peter says that the
+mountain is in good condition. To-morrow it may be possible. It is
+worth while waiting. We shall get down to La Grave to-morrow instead of
+to-day. That is all."
+
+"Yes. It will make no difference to our plans," said Shere Ali; and so
+far as their immediate plans were concerned Shere Ali was right. But
+these two men had other and wider plans which embraced not a summer's
+holiday but a lifetime, plans which they jealously kept secret; and these
+plans, as it happened, the delay of a day in the hut upon the Meije was
+deeply to affect.
+
+They turned back into the room and breakfasted. Then Linforth lit his
+pipe and once more curled himself up in his rug upon the straw. Shere Ali
+followed his example. And it was of the wider plans that they at once
+began to talk.
+
+"But heaven only knows when I shall get out to India," cried Linforth
+after a while. "There am I at Chatham and not a chance, so far as I can
+see, of getting away. You will go back first."
+
+It was significant that Linforth, who had never been in India, none the
+less spoke habitually of going back to it, as though that country in
+truth was his native soil. Shere Ali shook his head.
+
+"I shall wait for you," he said. "You will come out there." He raised
+himself upon his elbow and glanced at his friend's face. Linforth had
+retained the delicacy of feature, the fineness of outline which ten years
+before had called forth the admiration of Colonel Dewes. But the ten
+years had also added a look of quiet strength. A man can hardly live with
+a definite purpose very near to his heart without gaining some reward
+from the labour of his thoughts. Though he speak never so little, people
+will be aware of him as they are not aware of the loudest chatterer in
+the room. Thus it was with Linforth. He talked with no greater wit than
+his companions, he made no greater display of ability, he never outshone,
+and yet not a few men were conscious of a force underlying his quietude
+of manner. Those men were the old and the experienced; the unobservant
+overlooked him altogether.
+
+"Yes," said Shere Ali, "since you want to come you will come."
+
+"I shall try to come," said Linforth, simply. "We belong to the Road,"
+and for a little while he lay silent. Then in a low voice he spoke,
+quoting from that page which was as a picture in his thoughts.
+
+"Over the passes! Over the snow passes to the foot of the Hindu Kush!"
+
+"Then and then only India will be safe," the young Prince of Chiltistan
+added, speaking solemnly, so that the words seemed a kind of ritual.
+
+And to both they were no less. Long before, when Shere Ali was first
+brought into his room, on his first day at Eton, Linforth had seen his
+opportunity, and seized it. Shere Ali's father retained his kingdom with
+an English Resident at his elbow. Shere Ali would in due time succeed.
+Linforth had quietly put forth his powers to make Shere Ali his friend,
+to force him to see with his eyes, and to believe what he believed. And
+Shere Ali had been easily persuaded. He had become one of the white men,
+he proudly told himself. Here was a proof, the surest of proofs. The
+belief in the Road--that was one of the beliefs of the white men, one of
+the beliefs which marked him off from the native, not merely in
+Chiltistan, but throughout the East. To the white man, the Road was the
+beginning of things, to the Oriental the shadow of the end. Shere Ali
+sided with the white men. He too had faith in the Road and he was proud
+of his faith because he shared it with the white men.
+
+"We shall be very glad of these expeditions, some day, in Chiltistan,"
+said Linforth.
+
+Shere Ali stared.
+
+"It was for that reason--?" he asked.
+
+"Yes."
+
+Shere Ali was silent for a while. Then he said, and with some regret:
+
+"There is a great difference between us. You can wait and wait. I want
+everything done within the year."
+
+Linforth laughed. He knew very well the impulsiveness of his friend.
+
+"If a few miles, or even a few furlongs, stand to my credit at the end, I
+shall not think that I have failed."
+
+They were both young, and they talked with the bright and simple faith in
+their ideals which is the great gift of youth. An older man might have
+laughed if he had heard, but had there been an older man in the hut to
+overhear them, he would have heard nothing. They were alone, save for
+their guides, and the single purpose for which--as they then
+thought--their lives were to be lived out made that long day short as a
+summer's night.
+
+"The Government will thank us when the work is done," said Shere Ali
+enthusiastically.
+
+"The Government will be in no hurry to let us begin," replied Linforth
+drily. "There is a Resident at your father's court. Your father is
+willing, and yet there's not a coolie on the road."
+
+"Yes, but you will get your way," and again confidence rang in the voice
+of the Chilti prince.
+
+"It will not be I," answered Linforth. "It will be the Road. The power of
+the Road is beyond the power of any Government."
+
+"Yes, I remember and I understand." Shere Ali lit his pipe and lay back
+among the straw. "At first I did not understand what the words meant. Now
+I know. The power of the Road is great, because it inspires men to strive
+for its completion."
+
+"Or its mastery," said Linforth slowly. "Perhaps one day on the other
+side of the Hindu Kush, the Russians may covet it--and then the Road will
+go on to meet them."
+
+"Something will happen," said Shere Ali. "At all events something
+will happen."
+
+The shadows of the evening found them still debating what complication
+might force the hand of those in authority. But always they came back to
+the Russians and a movement of troops in the Pamirs. Yet unknown to both
+of them the something else had already happened, though its consequences
+were not yet to be foreseen. A storm had delayed them for a day in a hut
+upon the Meije. They went out of the hut. The sky had cleared; and in
+the sunset the steep buttress of the Promontoire ran sharply up to the
+Great Wall; above the wall the small square patch of ice sloped to the
+base of the Grand Pic and beyond the deep gap behind that pinnacle the
+long serrated ridge ran out to the right, rising and falling, to the
+Doight de Dieu.
+
+There were some heavy icicles overhanging the Great Wall, and
+Linforth looked at them anxiously. There was also still a little snow
+upon the rocks.
+
+"It will be possible," said Peter, cheerily. "Tomorrow night we shall
+sleep in La Grave."
+
+"Yes, yes, of course," said his brother.
+
+They walked round the hut, looked for a little while down the stony
+valley des Etancons, with its one green patch up which they had toiled
+from La Berarde the day before, and returned to watch the purple flush of
+the sunset die off the crags of the Meije. But the future they had
+planned was as a vision before their eyes, and even along the high cliffs
+of the Dauphine the road they were to make seemed to wind and climb.
+
+"It would be strange," said Linforth, "if old Andrew Linforth were still
+alive. Somewhere in your country, perhaps in Kohara, waiting for the
+thing he dreamed to come to pass. He would be an old man now, but he
+might still be alive."
+
+"I wonder," said Shere Ali absently, and he suddenly turned to Linforth.
+"Nothing must come between us," he cried almost fiercely. "Nothing to
+hinder what we shall do together."
+
+He was the more emotional of the two. The dreams to which they had given
+utterance had uplifted him.
+
+"That's all right," said Linforth, and he turned back into the hut. But
+he remembered afterwards that it was Shere Ali who had protested against
+the possibility of their association being broken.
+
+They came out from the hut again at half-past three in the morning and
+looked up to a cloudless starlit sky which faded in the east to the
+colour of pearl. Above their heads some knobs of rock stood out upon the
+thin crest of the buttress against the sky. In the darkness of a small
+couloir underneath the knobs Peter was already ascending. The traverse of
+the Meije even for an experienced mountaineer is a long day's climb. They
+reached the summit of the Grand Pic in seven hours, descended into the
+Breche Zsigmondy, climbed up the precipice on the further side of that
+gap, and reached the Pic Central by two o'clock in the afternoon. There
+they rested for an hour, and looked far down to the village of La Grave
+among the cornfields of the valley. There was no reason for any hurry.
+
+"We shall reach La Grave by eight," said Peter, but he was wrong, as they
+soon discovered. A slope which should have been soft snow down which they
+could plunge was hard ice, in which a ladder of steps must be cut before
+the glacier could be reached. The glacier itself was crevassed so that
+many a devour was necessary, and occasionally a jump; and evening came
+upon them while they were on the Rocher de L'Aigle. It was quite dark
+when at last they reached the grass slopes, and still far below them the
+lights were gleaming in La Grave. To both men those grass slopes seemed
+interminable. The lights of La Grave seemed never to come nearer, never
+to grow larger. Little points of fire very far away--as they had been at
+first, so they remained. But for the slope of ground beneath his feet and
+the aching of his knees, Linforth could almost have believed that they
+were not descending at all. He struck a match and looked at his watch and
+saw that it was after nine; and a little while after they had come to
+water and taken their fill of it, that it was nearly ten, but now the low
+thunder of the river in the valley was louder in his ears, and then
+suddenly he saw that the lights of La Grave were bright and near at hand.
+
+Linforth flung himself down upon the grass, and clasping his hands
+behind his head, gave himself up to the cool of the night and the
+stars overhead.
+
+"I could sleep here," he said. "Why should we go down to La Grave
+to-night?"
+
+"There is a dew falling. It will be cold when the morning breaks. And La
+Grave is very near. It is better to go," said Peter.
+
+The question was still in debate when above the roar of the river there
+came to their ears a faint throbbing sound from across the valley. It
+grew louder and suddenly two blinding lights flashed along the
+hill-side opposite.
+
+"A motor-car," said Shere Ali, and as he spoke the lights ceased
+to travel.
+
+"It's stopping at the hotel," said Linforth carelessly.
+
+"No," said Peter. "It has not reached the hotel. Look, not by a hundred
+yards. It has broken down."
+
+Linforth discussed the point at length, not because he was at all
+interested at the moment in the movements of that or of any other
+motor-car, but because he wished to stay where he was. Peter, however,
+was obdurate. It was his pride to get his patron indoors each night.
+
+"Let us go on," he said, and Linforth wearily rose to his feet.
+
+"We are making a big mistake," he grumbled, and he spoke with more truth
+than he was aware.
+
+They reached the hotel at eleven, ordered their supper and bathed. It was
+half-past eleven before Linforth and Shere Ali entered the long
+dining-room, and they found another party already supping there. Linforth
+heard himself greeted by name, and turned in surprise. It was a party of
+four--two ladies and two men. One of the men had called to him, an
+elderly man with a bald forehead, a grizzled moustache, and a shrewd
+kindly face.
+
+"I remember you, though you can't say as much of me," he said. "I
+came down to Chatham a year ago and dined at your mess as the guest
+of your Colonel."
+
+Linforth came forward with a smile of recognition.
+
+"I beg your pardon for not recognising you at once. I remember you, of
+course, quite well," he said.
+
+"Who am I, then?"
+
+"Sir John Casson, late Lieutenant-Governor of the United Provinces," said
+Linforth promptly.
+
+"And now nothing but a bore at my club," replied Sir John cheerfully. "We
+were motoring through to Grenoble, but the car has broken down. You are
+mountain-climbing, I suppose. Phyllis," and he turned to the younger of
+the two ladies, "this is Mr. Linforth of the Royal Engineers. My
+daughter, Linforth!" He introduced the second lady.
+
+"Mrs. Oliver," he said, and Linforth turning, saw that the eyes of Mrs.
+Oliver were already fixed upon him. He returned the look, and his eyes
+frankly showed her that he thought her beautiful.
+
+"And what are you going to do with yourself?" said Sir John.
+
+"Go to the country from which you have just come, as soon as I can," said
+Linforth with a smile. At this moment the fourth of the party, a stout,
+red-faced, plethoric gentleman, broke in.
+
+"India!" he exclaimed indignantly. "Bless my soul, what on earth sends
+all you young fellows racing out to India? A great mistake! I once went
+to India myself--to shoot a tiger. I stayed there for months and never
+saw one. Not a tiger, sir!"
+
+But Linforth was paying very little attention to the plethoric gentleman.
+Sir John introduced him as Colonel Fitzwarren, and Linforth bowed
+politely. Then he asked of Sir John:
+
+"Your car was not seriously damaged, I suppose?"
+
+"Keep us here two days," said Sir John. "The chauffeur will have to go on
+by diligence to-morrow to get a new sparking plug. Perhaps we shall see
+more of you in consequence."
+
+Linforth's eyes travelled back to Mrs. Oliver.
+
+"We are in no hurry," he said slowly. "We shall rest here probably for a
+day or so. May I introduce my friend?"
+
+He introduced him as the son of the Khan of Chiltistan, and Mrs. Oliver's
+eyes, which had been quietly resting upon Linforth's face, turned towards
+Shere Ali, and as quietly rested upon his.
+
+"Then, perhaps, you can tell me," said Colonel Fitzwarren, "how it was I
+never saw a tiger in India, though I stayed there four months. A most
+disappointing country, I call it. I looked for a tiger everywhere and I
+never saw one--no, not one."
+
+The Colonel's one idea of the Indian Peninsula was a huge tiger waiting
+somewhere in a jungle to be shot.
+
+But Shere Ali was paying no more attention to the Colonel's
+disparagements than Linforth had done.
+
+"Will you join us at supper?" said Sir John, and both young men replied
+simultaneously, "We shall be very pleased."
+
+Sir John Casson smiled. He could never quite be sure whether it was or
+was not to Mrs. Oliver's credit that her looks made so powerful an appeal
+to the chivalry of young men. "All young men immediately want to protect
+her," he was wont to say, "and their trouble is that they can't find
+anyone to protect her from."
+
+He watched Shere Ali and Dick Linforth with a sly amusement, and as a
+result of his watching promised himself yet more amusement during the
+next two days. He was roused from this pleasing anticipation by his
+irascible friend, Colonel Fitzwarren, who, without the slightest warning,
+flung a loud and defiant challenge across the table to Shere All.
+
+"I don't believe there is one," he cried, and breathed heavily.
+
+Shere Ali interrupted his conversation with Mrs. Oliver. "One what?" he
+asked with a smile.
+
+"Tiger, sir, tiger," said the Colonel, rapping with his knuckles upon the
+table. "Of what else should I be speaking? I don't believe there's a
+tiger in India outside the Zoo. Otherwise, why didn't I see one?"
+
+Colonel Fitzwarren glared at Shere Ali as though he held him personally
+responsible for that unhappy omission. Sir John, however, intervened with
+smooth speeches and for the rest of supper the conversation was kept to
+less painful topics. But the Colonel had not said his last word. As they
+went upstairs to their rooms he turned to Shere Ali, who was just behind
+him, and sighed heavily.
+
+"If I had shot a tiger in India," he said, with an indescribable look
+of pathos upon his big red face, "it would have made a great difference
+to my life."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+A STRING OF PEARLS
+
+
+"So you go to parties nowadays," said Mrs. Linforth, and Sir John Casson,
+leaning his back against the wall of the ball-room, puzzled his brains
+for the name of the lady with the pleasant winning face to whom he had
+just been introduced. At first it had seemed to him merely that her
+hearing was better than his. The "nowadays," however, showed that it was
+her memory which had the advantage. They were apparently old
+acquaintances; and Sir John belonged to an old-fashioned school which
+thought it discourtesy to forget even the least memorable of his
+acquaintances.
+
+"You were not so easily persuaded to decorate a ball-room at Mussoorie,"
+Mrs. Linforth continued.
+
+Sir John smiled, and there was a little bitterness in the smile.
+
+"Ah!" he said, and there was a hint, too, of bitterness in his voice, "I
+was wanted to decorate ball-rooms then. So I didn't go. Now I am not
+wanted. So I do."
+
+"That's not the true explanation," Mrs. Linforth said gently, and she
+shook her head. She spoke so gently and with so clear a note of sympathy
+and comprehension that Sir John was at more pains than ever to discover
+who she was. To hardly anyone would it naturally have occurred that Sir
+John Casson, with a tail of letters to his name, and a handsome pension,
+enjoyed at an age when his faculties were alert and his bodily strength
+not yet diminished, could stand in need of sympathy. But that precisely
+was the fact, as the woman at his side understood. A great ruler
+yesterday, with a council and an organized Government, subordinated to
+his leadership, he now merely lived at Camberley, and as he had
+confessed, was a bore at his club. And life at Camberley was dull.
+
+He looked closely at Mrs. Linforth. She was a woman of forty, or perhaps
+a year or two more. On the other hand, she might be a year or two less.
+She had the figure of a young woman, and though her dark hair was flecked
+with grey, he knew that was not to be accounted as a sign of either age
+or trouble. Yet she looked as if trouble had been no stranger to her.
+There were little lines about the eyes which told their tale to a shrewd
+observer, though the face smiled never so pleasantly. In what summer, he
+wondered, had she come up to the hill station of Mussoorie.
+
+"No," he said. "I did not give you the real explanation. Now I will."
+
+He nodded towards a girl who was at that moment crossing the ball-room
+towards the door, upon the arm of a young man.
+
+"That's the explanation."
+
+Mrs. Linforth looked at the girl and smiled.
+
+"The explanation seems to be enjoying itself," she said. "Yours?"
+
+"Mine," replied Sir John with evident pride.
+
+"She is very pretty," said Mrs. Linforth, and the sincerity of her
+admiration made the father glow with satisfaction. Phyllis Casson was a
+girl of eighteen, with the fresh looks and the clear eyes of her years. A
+bright colour graced her cheeks, where, when she laughed, the dimples
+played, and the white dress she wore was matched by the whiteness of her
+throat. She was talking gaily with the youth on whose arm her hand
+lightly rested.
+
+"Who is he?" asked Mrs. Linforth.
+
+Sir John raised his shoulders.
+
+"I am not concerned," he replied. "The explanation is amusing itself, as
+it ought to do, being only eighteen. The explanation wants everyone to
+love her at the present moment. When she wants only one, then it will be
+time for me to begin to get flurried." He turned abruptly to his
+companion. "I would like you to know her."
+
+"Thank you," said Mrs. Linforth, as she bowed to an acquaintance.
+
+"Would you like to dance?" asked Sir John. "If so, I'll stand aside."
+
+"No. I came here to look on," she explained.
+
+"Lady Marfield," and she nodded towards their hostess, "is my cousin,
+and--well, I don't want to grow rusty. You see I have an explanation
+too--oh, not here! He's at Chatham, and it's as well to keep up with the
+world--" She broke off abruptly, and with a perceptible start of
+surprise. She was looking towards the door. Casson followed the direction
+of her eyes, and saw young Linforth in the doorway.
+
+At last he remembered. There had been one hot weather, years ago, when
+this boy's father and his newly-married wife had come up to the
+hill-station of Mussoorie. He remembered that Linforth had sent his wife
+back to England, when he went North into Chiltistan on that work from
+which he was never to return. It was the wife who was now at his side.
+
+"I thought you said he was at Chatham," said Sir John, as Dick Linforth
+advanced into the room.
+
+"So I believed he was. He must have changed his mind at the last moment."
+Then she looked with a little surprise at her companion. "You know him?"
+
+"Yes," said Sir John, "I will tell you how it happened. I was dining
+eighteen months ago at the Sappers' mess at Chatham. And that boy's face
+came out of the crowd and took my eyes and my imagination too. You know,
+perhaps, how that happens at times. There seems to be no particular
+reason why it should happen at the moment. Afterwards you realise that
+there was very good reason. A great career, perhaps, perhaps only some
+one signal act, an act typical of a whole unknown life, leaps to light
+and justifies the claim the young face made upon your sympathy. Anyhow, I
+noticed young Linforth. It was not his good looks which attracted me.
+There was something else. I made inquiries. The Colonel was not a very
+observant man. Linforth was one of the subalterns--a good bat and a good
+change bowler. That was all. Only I happened to look round the walls of
+the Sappers' mess. There are portraits hung there of famous members of
+that mess who were thought of no particular account when they were
+subalterns at Chatham. There's one alive to-day. Another died at
+Khartoum."
+
+"Yes," said Mrs. Linforth.
+
+"Well, I made the acquaintance of your son that night," said Sir John.
+
+Mrs. Linforth stood for a moment silent, her face for the moment quite
+beautiful. Then she broke into a laugh.
+
+"I am glad I scratched your back first," she said. "And as for the
+cricket, it's quite true. I taught him to keep a straight bat myself."
+
+Meanwhile, Dick Linforth was walking across the floor of the ball-room,
+quite unconscious of the two who talked of him. He was not, indeed,
+looking about him at all. It seemed to both his mother and Sir John, as
+they watched him steadily moving in and out amongst the throng--for it
+was the height of the season, and Lady Marfield's big drawing-room in
+Chesterfield Gardens was crowded--that he was making his way to a
+definite spot, as though just at this moment he had a definite
+appointment.
+
+"He changed his mind at the last moment," said Sir John with a laugh,
+which gave to him the look of a boy. "Let us see who it is that has
+brought him up from Chatham to London at the last moment!"
+
+"Would it be fair?" asked Mrs. Linforth reluctantly. She was, indeed, no
+less curious upon the point than her companion, and while she asked the
+question, her eyes followed her son's movements. He was tall, and though
+he moved quickly and easily, it was possible to keep him in view.
+
+A gap in the crowd opened before them, making a lane--and at the end of
+the lane they saw Linforth approach a lady and receive the welcome of
+her smile. For a moment the gap remained open, and then the bright
+frocks and black coats swept across the space. But both had seen, and
+Mrs. Linforth, in addition, was aware of a barely perceptible start made
+by Sir John at her side.
+
+She looked at him sharply. His face had grown grave.
+
+"You know her?" asked Mrs. Linforth. There was anxiety in her voice.
+There was also a note of jealousy.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Who is she?"
+
+"Mrs. Oliver. Violet Oliver."
+
+"Married!"
+
+"A widow. I introduced her to your son at La Grave in the Dauphine
+country last summer. Our motor-car had broken down. We all stayed for a
+couple of days together in the same hotel. Mrs. Oliver is a friend of my
+daughter's. Phyllis admires her very much, and in most instances I am
+prepared to trust Phyllis' instincts."
+
+"But not in this instance," said Mrs. Linforth quietly. She had been
+quick to note a very slight embarrassment in Sir John Casson's manner.
+
+"I don't say that," he replied quickly--a little too quickly.
+
+"Will you find me a chair?" said Mrs. Linforth, looking about her. "There
+are two over here." She led the way to the chairs which were placed in a
+nook of the room not very far from the door by which Linforth had
+entered. She took her seat, and when Sir John had seated himself beside
+her, she said:
+
+"Please tell me what you know of her."
+
+Sir John spread out his hands in protest.
+
+"Certainly, I will. But there is nothing to her discredit, so far as I
+know, Mrs. Linforth--nothing at all. Beyond that she is beautiful--really
+beautiful, as few women are. That, no doubt, will be looked upon as a
+crime by many, though you and I will not be of that number."
+
+Sybil Linforth maintained a determined silence--not for anything would
+she admit, even to herself, that Violet Oliver was beautiful.
+
+"You are telling me nothing," she said.
+
+"There is so little to tell," replied Sir John. "Violet Oliver comes of a
+family which is known, though it is not rich. She studied music with a
+view to making her living as a singer. For she has a very sweet voice,
+though its want of power forbade grand opera. Her studies were
+interrupted by the appearance of a cavalry captain, who made love to her.
+She liked it, whereas she did not like studying music. Very naturally she
+married the cavalry officer. Captain Oliver took her with him abroad,
+and, I believe, brought her to India. At all events she knows something
+of India, and has friends there. She is going back there this winter.
+Captain Oliver was killed in a hill campaign two years ago. Mrs. Oliver
+is now twenty-three years old. That is all."
+
+Mrs. Linforth, however, was not satisfied.
+
+"Was Captain Oliver rich?" she asked.
+
+"Not that I know of," said Sir John. "His widow lives in a little house
+at the wrong end of Curzon Street."
+
+"But she is wearing to-night very beautiful pearls," said Sybil
+Linforth quietly.
+
+Sir John Casson moved suddenly in his chair. Moreover, Sybil Linforth's
+eyes were at that moment resting with a quiet scrutiny upon his face.
+
+"It was difficult to see exactly what she was wearing," he said. "The gap
+in the crowd filled up so quickly."
+
+"There was time enough for any woman," said Mrs. Linforth with a smile.
+"And more than time enough for any mother."
+
+"Mrs. Oliver is always, I believe, exquisitely dressed," said Sir John
+with an assumption of carelessness. "I am not much of a judge myself."
+
+But his carelessness did not deceive his companion. Sybil Linforth was
+certain, absolutely certain, that the cause of the constraint and
+embarrassment which had been audible in Sir John's voice, and noticeable
+in his very manner, was that double string of big pearls of perfect
+colour which adorned Violet Oliver's white throat.
+
+She looked Sir John straight in the face.
+
+"Would you introduce Dick to Mrs. Oliver now, if you had not done it
+before?" she asked.
+
+"My dear lady," protested Sir John, "if I met Dick at a little hotel in
+the Dauphine, and did not introduce him to the ladies who were travelling
+with me, it would surely reflect upon Dick, not upon the ladies"; and
+with that subtle evasion Sir John escaped from the fire of questions. He
+turned the conversation into another channel, pluming himself upon his
+cleverness. But he forgot that the subtlest evasions of the male mind are
+clumsy and obvious to a woman, especially if the woman be on the alert.
+Sybil Linforth did not think Sir John had showed any cleverness whatever.
+She let him turn the conversation, because she knew what she had set out
+to know. That string of pearls had made the difference between Sir John's
+estimate of Violet Oliver last year and his estimate of her this season.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+LUFFE IS REMEMBERED
+
+
+Violet Oliver took a quick step forward when she caught sight of
+Linforth's tall and well-knit figure coming towards her; and the smile
+with which she welcomed him was a warm smile of genuine pleasure. There
+were people who called Violet Oliver affected--chiefly ladies. But
+Phyllis Casson was not one of them.
+
+"There is no one more natural in the room," she was in the habit of
+stoutly declaring when she heard the gossips at work, and we know, on her
+father's authority, that Phyllis Casson's judgments were in most
+instances to be respected. Certainly it was not Violet Oliver's fault
+that her face in repose took on a wistful and pathetic look, and that her
+dark quiet eyes, even when her thoughts were absent--and her thoughts
+were often absent--rested pensively upon you with an unconscious
+flattery. It appeared that she was pondering deeply who and what you
+were; whereas she was probably debating whether she should or should not
+powder her nose before she went in to supper. Nor was she to blame
+because at the approach of a friend that sweet and thoughtful face would
+twinkle suddenly into mischief and amusement. "She is as God made her,"
+Phyllis Casson protested, "and He made her beautiful."
+
+It will be recognised, therefore, that there was truth in Sir John's
+observation that young men wanted to protect her. But the bald statement
+is not sufficient. Whether that quick transition from pensiveness to a
+dancing gaiety was the cause, or whether it only helped her beauty, this
+is certain. Young men went down before her like ninepins in a bowling
+alley. There was something singularly virginal about her. She had, too,
+quite naturally, an affectionate manner which it was difficult to resist;
+and above all she made no effort ever. What she said and what she did
+seemed always purely spontaneous. For the rest, she was a little over the
+general height of women, and even looked a little taller. For she was
+very fragile, and dainty, like an exquisite piece of china. Her head was
+small, and, poised as it was upon a slender throat, looked almost
+overweighted by the wealth of her dark hair. Her features were finely
+chiselled from the nose to the oval of her chin, and the red bow of her
+lips; and, with all her fragility, a delicate colour in her cheeks spoke
+of health.
+
+"You have come!" she said.
+
+Linforth took her little white-gloved hand in his.
+
+"You knew I should," he answered.
+
+"Yes, I knew that. But I didn't know that I should have to wait," she
+replied reproachfully. "I was here, in this corner, at the moment."
+
+"I couldn't catch an earlier train. I only got your telegram saying you
+would be at the dance late in the afternoon."
+
+"I did not know that I should be coming until this morning," she said.
+
+"Then it was very kind of you to send the telegram at all."
+
+"Yes, it was," said Violet Oliver simply, and Linforth laughed.
+
+"Shall we dance?" he asked.
+
+Mrs. Oliver nodded.
+
+"Round the room as far as the door. I am hungry. We will go downstairs
+and have supper."
+
+Linforth could have wished for nothing better. But the moment that his
+arm was about her waist and they had started for the door, Violet Oliver
+realised that her partner was the lightest dancer in the room. She
+herself loved dancing, and for once in a way to be steered in and out
+amongst the couples without a bump or even a single entanglement of her
+satin train was a pleasure not to be foregone. She gave herself up to it.
+
+"Let us go on," she said. "I did not know. You see, we have never danced
+together before. I had not thought of you in that way."
+
+She ceased to speak, being content to dance. Linforth for his part was
+content to watch her, to hold her as something very precious, and to
+evoke a smile upon her lips when her eyes met his. "I had not thought of
+you in that way!" she had said. Did not that mean that she had at all
+events been thinking of him in some way? And with that flattery still
+sweet in his thoughts, he was aware that her feet suddenly faltered. He
+looked at her face. It had changed. Yet so swiftly did it recover its
+composure that Linforth had not even the time to understand what the
+change implied. Annoyance, surprise, fear! One of these feelings,
+certainly, or perhaps a trifle of each. Linforth could not make sure.
+There had been a flash of some sudden emotion. That at all events was
+certain. But in guessing fear, he argued, his wits must surely have gone
+far astray; though fear was the first guess which he had made.
+
+"What was the matter?"
+
+Violet Oliver answered readily.
+
+"A big man was jigging down upon us. I saw him over your shoulder. I
+dislike being bumped by big men," she said, with a little easy laugh.
+"And still more I hate having a new frock torn."
+
+Dick Linforth was content with the answer. But it happened that Sybil
+Linforth was looking on from her chair in the corner, and the corner was
+very close to the spot where for a moment Violet Oliver had lost
+countenance. She looked sharply at Sir John Casson, who might have
+noticed or might not. His face betrayed nothing whatever. He went on
+talking placidly, but Mrs. Linforth ceased to listen to him.
+
+Violet Oliver waltzed with her partner once more round the room.
+Then she said:
+
+"Let us stop!" and in almost the same breath she added, "Oh, there's
+your friend."
+
+Linforth turned and saw standing just within the doorway his friend
+Shere Ali.
+
+"You could hardly tell that he was not English," she went on; and indeed,
+with his straight features, his supple figure, and a colour no darker
+than many a sunburnt Englishman wears every August, Shere Ali might have
+passed unnoticed by a stranger. It seemed that he had been watching for
+the couple to stop dancing. For no sooner had they stopped than he
+advanced quickly towards them.
+
+Linforth, however, had not as yet noticed him.
+
+"It can't be Shere Ali," he said. "He is in the country. I heard from him
+only to-day."
+
+"Yet it is he," said Mrs. Oliver, and then Linforth saw him.
+
+"Hallo!" he said softly to himself, and as Shere Ali joined them he added
+aloud, "something has happened."
+
+"Yes, I have news," said Shere Ali. But he was looking at Mrs. Oliver,
+and spoke as though the news had been pushed for a moment into the back
+of his mind.
+
+"What is it?" asked Linforth.
+
+Shere Ali turned to Linforth.
+
+"I go back to Chiltistan."
+
+"When?" asked Linforth, and a note of envy was audible in his voice. Mrs.
+Oliver heard it and understood it. She shrugged her shoulders
+impatiently.
+
+"By the first boat to Bombay."
+
+"In a week's time, then?" said Mrs. Oliver, quickly.
+
+Shere Ali glanced swiftly at her, seeking the meaning of that question.
+Did regret prompt it? Or, on the other hand, was she glad?
+
+"Yes, in a week's time," he replied slowly.
+
+"Why?" asked Linforth. "Is there trouble in Chiltistan?" He spoke
+regretfully. It would be hard luck if that uneasy State were to wake
+again into turmoil while he was kept kicking his heels at Chatham.
+
+"Yes, there is trouble," Shere Ali replied. "But it is not the kind of
+trouble which will help you forward with the Road."
+
+The trouble, indeed, was of quite another kind. The Russians were not
+stirring behind the Hindu Kush or on the Pamirs. The turbulent people of
+Chiltistan were making trouble, and profit out of the trouble, it is
+true. That they would be sure to do somewhere, and, moreover, they would
+do it with a sense of humour more common upon the Frontier than in the
+Provinces of India. But they were not at the moment making trouble in
+their own country. They were heard of in Masulipatam and other cities of
+Madras, where they were badly wanted by the police and not often caught.
+The quarrel in Chiltistan lay between the British Raj, as represented by
+the Resident, and the Khan, who was spending the revenue of his State
+chiefly upon his own amusements. It was claimed that the Resident should
+henceforth supervise the disposition of the revenue, and it had been
+suggested to the Khan that unless he consented to the proposal he would
+have to retire into private life in some other quarter of the Indian
+Peninsula. To give to the suggestion the necessary persuasive power, the
+young Prince was to be brought back at once, so that he might be ready at
+a moment's notice to succeed. This reason, however, was not given to
+Shere Ali. He was merely informed by the Indian Government that he must
+return to his country at once.
+
+Shere Ali stood before Mrs. Oliver.
+
+"You will give me a dance?" he said.
+
+"After supper," she replied, and she laid her hand within Linforth's arm.
+But Shere Ali did not give way.
+
+"Where shall I find you?" he asked.
+
+"By the door, here."
+
+And upon that Shere Ali's voice changed to one of appeal. There came a
+note of longing into his voice. He looked at Violet Oliver with burning
+eyes. He seemed unaware Linforth was standing by.
+
+"You will not fail me?" he said; and Linforth moved impatiently.
+
+"No. I shall be there," said Violet Oliver, and she spoke hurriedly and
+moved by through the doorway. Beneath her eyelids she stole a glance at
+her companion. His face was clouded. The scene which he had witnessed had
+jarred upon him, and still jarred. When he spoke to her his voice had a
+sternness which Violet Oliver had not heard before. But she had always
+been aware that it might be heard, if at any time he disapproved.
+
+"'Your friend,' you called him, speaking to me," he said. "It seems that
+he is your friend too."
+
+"He was with you at La Grave. I met him there."
+
+"He comes to your house?"
+
+"He has called once or twice," said Mrs. Oliver submissively. It was by
+no wish of hers that Shere Ali had appeared at this dance. She had, on
+the contrary, been at some pains to assure herself that he would not be
+there. And while she answered Linforth she was turning over in her mind a
+difficulty which had freshly arisen. Shere Ali was returning to India. In
+some respects that was awkward. But Linforth's ill-humour promised her a
+way of escape. He was rather silent during the earlier part of their
+supper. They had a little table to themselves, and while she talked, and
+talked with now and then an anxious glance at Linforth, he was content to
+listen or to answer shortly. Finally she said:
+
+"I suppose you will not see your friend again before he starts?"
+
+"Yes, I shall," replied Linforth, and the frown gathered afresh upon his
+forehead. "He dines to-morrow night with me at Chatham."
+
+"Then I want to ask you something," she continued. "I want you not to
+mention to him that I am paying a visit to India in the cold weather."
+
+Linforth's face cleared in an instant.
+
+"I am glad that you have made that request," he said frankly. "I have no
+right to say it, perhaps. But I think you are wise."
+
+"Things are possible here," she agreed, "which are impossible there."
+
+"Friendship, for instance."
+
+"Some friendships," said Mrs. Oliver; and the rest of their supper they
+ate cheerily enough. Violet Oliver was genuinely interested in her
+partner. She was not very familiar with the large view and the definite
+purpose. Those who gathered within her tiny drawing-room, who sought her
+out at balls and parties, were, as a rule, the younger men of the day,
+and Linforth, though like them in age and like them, too, in his capacity
+for enjoyment, was different in most other ways. For the large view and
+the definite purpose coloured all his life, and, though he spoke little
+of either, set him apart.
+
+Mrs. Oliver did not cultivate many illusions about herself. She saw very
+clearly what manner of men they were to whom her beauty made its chief
+appeal--lean-minded youths for the most part not remarkable for
+brains--and she was sincerely proud that Linforth sought her out no less
+than they did. She could imagine herself afraid of Linforth, and that
+fancy gave her a little thrill of pleasure. She understood that he could
+easily be lost altogether, that if once he went away he would not return;
+and that knowledge made her careful not to lose him. Moreover, she had
+brains herself. She led him on that evening, and he spoke with greater
+freedom than he had used with her before--greater freedom, she hoped,
+than he had used with anyone. The lighted supper-room grew dim before his
+eyes, the noise and the laughter and the passing figures of the other
+guests ceased to be noticed. He talked in a low voice, and with his keen
+face pushed a trifle forward as though, while he spoke, he listened. He
+was listening to the call of the Road.
+
+He stopped abruptly and looked anxiously at Violet.
+
+"Have I bored you?" he asked. "Generally I watch you," he added with a
+smile, "lest I should bore you. To-night I haven't watched."
+
+"For that reason I have been interested to-night more than I have
+been before."
+
+She gathered up her fan with a little sigh. "I must go upstairs
+again," she said, and she rose from her chair. "I am sorry. But I have
+promised dances."
+
+"I will take you up. Then I shall go."
+
+"You will dance no more?"
+
+"No," he said with a smile. "I'll not spoil a perfect evening." Violet
+Oliver was not given to tricks or any play of the eyelids. She looked at
+him directly, and she said simply "Thank you."
+
+He took her up to the landing, and came down stairs again for his hat and
+coat. But, as he passed with them along the passage door he turned, and
+looking up the stairs, saw Violet Oliver watching him. She waved her hand
+lightly and smiled. As the door closed behind him she returned to the
+ball-room. Linforth went away with no suspicion in his mind that she had
+stayed her feet upon the landing merely to make very sure that he went.
+He had left his mother behind, however, and she was all suspicion. She
+had remarked the little scene when Shere Ali had unexpectedly appeared.
+She had noticed the embarrassment of Violet Oliver and the anger of Shere
+Ali. It was possible that Sir John Casson had also not been blind to it.
+For, a little time afterwards, he nodded towards Shere Ali.
+
+"Do you know that boy?" he asked.
+
+"Yes. He is Dick's great friend. They have much in common. His father was
+my husband's friend."
+
+"And both believed in the new Road, I know," said Sir John. He pulled at
+his grey moustache thoughtfully, and asked: "Have the sons the Road in
+common, too?" A shadow darkened Sybil Linforth's face. She sat silent for
+some seconds, and when she answered, it was with a great reluctance.
+
+"I believe so," she said in a low voice, and she shivered. She turned her
+face towards Casson. It was troubled, fear-stricken, and in that assembly
+of laughing and light-hearted people it roused him with a shock. "I wish,
+with all my heart, that they had not," she added, and her voice shook and
+trembled as she spoke.
+
+The terrible story of Linforth's end, long since dim in Sir John Casson's
+recollections, came back in vivid detail. He said no more upon that
+point. He took Mrs. Linforth down to supper, and bringing her back again,
+led her round the ball-room. An open archway upon one side led into a
+conservatory, where only fairy lights glowed amongst the plants and
+flowers. As the couple passed this archway, Sir John looked in. He did
+not stop, but, after they had walked a few yards further, he said:
+
+"Was it pale blue that Violet Oliver was wearing? I am not clever at
+noticing these things."
+
+"Yes, pale blue and--pearls," said Sybil Linforth.
+
+"There is no need that we should walk any further. Here are two chairs,"
+said Sir John. There was in truth no need. He had ascertained something
+about which, in spite of his outward placidity, he had been very curious.
+
+"Did you ever hear of a man named Luffe?" he asked.
+
+Sybil Linforth started. It had been Luffe whose continual arguments,
+entreaties, threats, and persuasions had caused the Road long ago to be
+carried forward. But she answered quietly, "Yes."
+
+"Of course you and I remember him," said Sir John. "But how many others?
+That's the penalty of Indian service. You are soon forgotten, in India as
+quickly as here. In most cases, no doubt, it doesn't matter. Men just as
+good and younger stand waiting at the milestones to carry on the torch.
+But in some cases I think it's a pity."
+
+"In Mr. Luffe's case?" asked Sybil Linforth.
+
+"Particularly in Luffe's case," said Sir John.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+AN UNANSWERED QUESTION
+
+
+Sir John had guessed aright. Shere Ali was in the conservatory, and
+Violet Oliver sat by his side.
+
+"I did not expect you to-night," she said lightly, as she opened and
+shut her fan.
+
+"Nor did I mean to come," he answered. "I had arranged to stay in the
+country until to-morrow. But I got my letter from the India Office this
+morning. It left me--restless." He uttered the word with reluctance, and
+almost with an air of shame. Then he clasped his hands together, and
+blurted out violently: "It left me miserable. I could not stay away," and
+he turned to his companion. "I wanted to see you, if only for five
+minutes." It was Violet Oliver's instinct to be kind. She fitted herself
+naturally to the words of her companions, sympathised with them in their
+troubles, laughed with them when they were at the top of their spirits.
+So now her natural kindness made her eyes gentle. She leaned forward.
+
+"Did you?" she asked softly. "And yet you are going home!"
+
+"I am going back to Chiltistan," said Shere Ali.
+
+"Home!" Violet Oliver repeated, dwelling upon the word with a friendly
+insistence.
+
+But the young prince did not assent; he remained silent--so long silent
+that Violet Oliver moved uneasily. She was conscious of suspense; she
+began to dread his answer. He turned to her quickly as she moved.
+
+"You say that I am going home. That's the whole question," he said. "I am
+trying to answer it--and I can't. Listen!"
+
+Into the quiet and dimly lit place of flowers the music of the violins
+floated with a note of wistfulness in the melody they played--a
+suggestion of regret. Through a doorway at the end of the conservatory
+Shere Ali could see the dancers swing by in the lighted ball-room, the
+women in their bright frocks and glancing jewels, some of whom had
+flattered him, a few of whom had been his friends, and all of whom had
+treated him as one of their own folk and their equal.
+
+"I have heard the tune, which they are playing, before," he said slowly.
+"I heard it one summer night in Geneva. Linforth and I had come down from
+the mountains. We were dining with a party on the balcony of a restaurant
+over the lake. A boat passed hidden by the darkness. We could hear the
+splash of the oars. There were musicians in the boat playing this melody.
+We were all very happy that night. And I hear it again now--when I am
+with you. I think that I shall remember it very often in Chiltistan."
+
+There was so unmistakable a misery in his manner, in his voice, in his
+dejected looks, that Violet was moved to a deep sympathy. He was only a
+boy, of course, but he was a boy sunk in distress.
+
+"But there are your plans," she urged. "Have you forgotten them? You were
+going to do so much. There was so much to do. So many changes, so many
+reforms which must be made. You used to talk to me so eagerly. No more of
+your people were to be sold into slavery. You were going to stop all
+that. You were going to silence the mullahs when they preached sedition
+and to free Chiltistan from their tyranny."
+
+Violet remembered with a whimsical little smile how Shere All's
+enthusiasm had wearied her, but she checked the smile and continued:
+
+"Are all those plans mere dreams and fancies?"
+
+"No," replied Shere Ali, lifting his head. "No," he said again with
+something of violence in the emphasis; and for a moment he sat erect,
+with his shoulders squared, fronting his destiny. Almost for a moment he
+recaptured that for which he had been seeking--his identity with his own
+race. But the moment passed. His attitude relaxed. He turned to Violet
+with troubled eyes. "No, they are not dreams; they are things which need
+to be done. But I can't realise them now, with you sitting here, any more
+than I can realise, with this music in my ears, that it is my home to
+which I am going back."
+
+"Oh, but you will!" cried Violet. "When you are out there you will.
+There's the road, too, the road which you and Mr. Linforth--"
+
+She did not complete the sentence. With a low cry Shere All broke in upon
+her words. He leaned forward, with his hands covering his face.
+
+"Yes," he whispered, "there's the road--there's the road." A passion of
+self-reproach shook him. Not for nothing had Linforth been his friend. "I
+feel a traitor," he cried. "For ten years we have talked of that road,
+planned it, and made it in thought, poring over the maps. Yes, for even
+at the beginning, in our first term at Eton, we began. Over the passes to
+the foot of the Hindu Kush! Only a year ago I was eager, really, honestly
+eager," and he paused for a moment, wondering at that picture of himself
+which his words evoked, wondering whether it was indeed he--he who sat in
+the conservatory--who had cherished those bright dreams of a great life
+in Chiltistan. "Yes, it is true. I was honestly eager to go back."
+
+"Less than a year ago," said Violet Oliver quickly. "Less than a week
+ago. When did I see you last? On Sunday, wasn't it?"
+
+"But was I honest then?" exclaimed Shere Ali. "I don't know. I thought I
+was--right up to to-day, right up to this morning when the letter came.
+And then--" He made a despairing gesture, as of a man crumbling dust
+between his fingers.
+
+"I will tell you," he said, turning towards her. "I believe that the last
+time I was really honest was in August of last year. Linforth and I
+talked of the Road through a long day in the hut upon the Meije. I was
+keen then--honestly keen. But the next evening we came down to La Grave,
+and--I met you."
+
+"No," Violet Oliver protested. "That's not the reason."
+
+"I think it is," said Shere Ali quietly; and Violet was silent.
+
+In spite of her pity, which was genuine enough, her thoughts went out
+towards Shere Ali's friend. With what words and in what spirit would he
+have received Shere Ali's summons to Chiltistan? She asked herself the
+question, knowing well the answer. There would have been no
+lamentations--a little regret, perhaps, perhaps indeed a longing to take
+her with him. But there would have been not a thought of abandoning the
+work. She recognised that truth with a sudden spasm of anger, but yet
+admiration strove with the anger and mastered it.
+
+"If what you say is true," she said to Shere Ali gently, "I am very
+sorry. But I hope it is not true. You have been ten years here; you have
+made many friends. Just for the moment the thought of leaving them behind
+troubles you. But that will pass."
+
+"Will it?" he asked quietly. Then a smile came upon his face. "There's
+one thing of which I am glad," he whispered.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"You are wearing my pearls to-night."
+
+Violet Oliver smiled, and with a tender caressing movement her fingers
+touched and felt the rope of pearls about her neck. Both the smile and
+the movement revealed Violet Oliver. She had a love of beautiful things,
+but, above all, of jewels. It was a passion with her deeper than any she
+had ever known. Beautiful stones, and pearls more than any other stones,
+made an appeal to her which she could not resist.
+
+"They are very lovely," she said softly.
+
+"I shall be glad to remember that you wore them to-night," said Shere
+Ali; "for, as you know, I love you."
+
+"Hush!" said Mrs. Oliver; and she rose with a start from her chair. Shere
+Ali did the same.
+
+"It's true," he said sullenly; and then, with a swift step, he placed
+himself in her way. Violet Oliver drew back quietly. Her heart beat
+quickly. She looked into Shere Ali's face and was afraid. He was quite
+still; even the expression of his face was set, but his eyes burned upon
+her. There was a fierceness in his manner which was new to her.
+
+His hand darted out quickly towards her. But Violet Oliver was no less
+quick. She drew back yet another step. "I didn't understand," she said,
+and her lips shook, so that the words were blurred. She raised her hands
+to her neck and loosened the coils of pearls about it as though she meant
+to lift them off and return them to the giver.
+
+"Oh, don't do that, please," said Shere Ali; and already his voice and
+his manner had changed. The sullenness had gone. Now he besought. His
+English training came to his aid. He had learned reverence for women,
+acquiring it gradually and almost unconsciously rather than from any
+direct teaching. He had spent one summer's holidays with Mrs. Linforth
+for his hostess in the house under the Sussex Downs, and from her and
+from Dick's manner towards her he had begun to acquire it. He had become
+conscious of that reverence, and proudly conscious. He had fostered it.
+It was one of the qualities, one of the essential qualities, of the white
+people. It marked the sahibs off from the Eastern races. To possess that
+reverence, to be influenced and moved and guided by it--that made him one
+with them. He called upon it to help him now. Almost he had forgotten it.
+
+"Please don't take them off," he implored. "There was nothing to
+understand."
+
+And perhaps there was not, except this--that Violet Oliver was of those
+who take but do not give. She removed her hands from her throat. The
+moment of danger had passed, as she very well knew.
+
+"There is one thing I should be very grateful for," he said humbly. "It
+would not cause you very much trouble, and it would mean a great deal to
+me. I would like you to write to me now and then."
+
+"Why, of course I will," said Mrs. Oliver, with a smile.
+
+"You promise?"
+
+"Yes. But you will come back to England."
+
+"I shall try to come next summer, if it's only for a week," said Shere
+Ali; and he made way for Violet.
+
+She moved a few yards across the conservatory, and then stopped for Shere
+Ali to come level with her. "I shall write, of course, to Chiltistan,"
+she said carelessly.
+
+"Yes," he replied, "I go northwards from Bombay. I travel straight
+to Kohara."
+
+"Very well. I will write to you there," said Violet Oliver; but it seemed
+that she was not satisfied. She walked slowly towards the door, with
+Shere Ali at her side.
+
+"And you will stay in Chiltistan until you come back to us?" she asked.
+"You won't go down to Calcutta at Christmas, for instance? Calcutta is
+the place to which people go at Christmas, isn't it? I think you are
+right. You have a career in your own country, amongst your own people."
+
+She spoke urgently. And Shere Ali, thinking that thus she spoke in
+concern for his future, drew some pride from her encouragement. He
+also drew some shame; for she might have been speaking, too, in pity
+for his distress.
+
+"Mrs. Oliver," he said, with hesitation; and she stopped and turned to
+him. "Perhaps I said more than I meant to say a few minutes ago. I have
+not forgotten really that there is much for me to do in my own country; I
+have not forgotten that I can thank all of you here who have shown me so
+much kindness by more than mere words. For I can help in Chiltistan--I
+can really help."
+
+Then came a smile upon Violet Oliver's face, and her eyes shone.
+
+"That is how I would have you speak," she cried. "I am glad. Oh, I am
+glad!" and her voice rang with the fulness of her pleasure. She had been
+greatly distressed by the unhappiness of her friend, and in that distress
+compunction had played its part. There was no hardness in Violet Oliver's
+character. To give pain flattered no vanity in her. She understood that
+Shere Ali would suffer because of her, and she longed that he should find
+his compensation in the opportunities of rulership.
+
+"Let us say good-bye here," he said. "We may not be alone again
+before I go."
+
+She gave him her hand, and he held it for a little while, and then
+reluctantly let it go.
+
+"That must last me until the summer of next year," he said with a smile.
+
+"Until the summer," said Violet Oliver; and she passed out from the
+doorway into the ball-room. But as she entered the room and came once
+more amongst the lights and the noise, and the familiar groups of her
+friends, she uttered a little sigh of relief. The summer of next year
+was a long way off; and meanwhile here was an episode in her life ended
+as she wished it to end; for in these last minutes it had begun to
+disquiet her.
+
+Shere Ali remained behind in the conservatory. His eyes wandered about
+it. He was impressing upon his memory every detail of the place, the
+colours of the flowers and their very perfumes. He looked through the
+doorway into the ball-room whence the music swelled. The note of regret
+was louder than ever in his ears, and dominated the melody. To-morrow the
+lights, the delicate frocks, the laughing voices and bright eyes would be
+gone. The violins spoke to him of that morrow of blank emptiness softly
+and languorously like one making a luxury of grief. In a week's time he
+would be setting his face towards Chiltistan; and, in spite of the brave
+words he had used to Violet Oliver, once more the question forced itself
+into his mind.
+
+"Do I belong here?" he asked. "Or do I belong to Chiltistan?"
+
+On the one side was all that during ten years he had gradually learned to
+love and enjoy; on the other side was his race and the land of his birth.
+He could not answer the question; for there was a third possibility which
+had not yet entered into his speculations, and in that third possibility
+alone was the answer to be found.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+AT THE GATE OF LAHORE
+
+
+Shere Ali, accordingly, travelled with reluctance to Bombay, and at that
+port an anonymous letter with the postmark of Calcutta was brought to him
+on board the steamer. Shere Ali glanced through it, and laughed, knowing
+well his countrymen's passion for mysteries and intrigues. He put the
+letter in his pocket and took the northward mail. These were the days
+before the North-West Province had been severed from the Punjab, and
+instructions had been given to Shere Ali to break his journey at Lahore.
+He left the train, therefore, at that station, on a morning when the
+thermometer stood at over a hundred in the shade, and was carried in a
+barouche drawn by camels to Government House. There a haggard and
+heat-worn Commissioner received him, and in the cool of the evening took
+him for a ride, giving him sage advice with the accent of authority.
+
+"His Excellency would have liked to have seen you himself," said the
+Commissioner. "But he is in the Hills and he did not think it necessary
+to take you so far out of your way. It is as well that you should get to
+Kohara as soon as possible, and on particular subjects the Resident,
+Captain Phillips, will be able and glad to advise you."
+
+The Commissioner spoke politely enough, but the accent of authority was
+there. Shere Ali's ears were quick to notice and resent it. Some years
+had passed since commands had been laid upon him.
+
+"I shall always be glad to hear what Captain Phillips has to say," he
+replied stiffly.
+
+"Yes, yes, of course," said the Commissioner, taking that for granted.
+"Captain Phillips has our views."
+
+He did not seem to notice the stiffness of Shere Ali's tone. He was tired
+with the strain of the hot weather, as his drawn face and hollow eyes
+showed clearly.
+
+"On general lines," he continued, "his Excellency would like you to
+understand that the Government has no intention and no wish to interfere
+with the customs and laws of Chiltistan. In fact it is at this moment
+particularly desirable that you should throw your influence on the side
+of the native observances."
+
+"Indeed," said Shere Ali, as he rode along the Mall by the Commissioner's
+side. "Then why was I sent to Oxford?"
+
+The Commissioner was not surprised by the question, though it was
+abruptly put.
+
+"Surely that is a question to ask of his Highness, your father," he
+replied. "No doubt all you learnt and saw there will be extremely
+valuable. What I am saying now is that the Government wishes to give no
+pretext whatever to those who would disturb Chiltistan, and it looks to
+you with every confidence for help and support."
+
+"And the road?" asked Shere Ali.
+
+"It is not proposed to carry on the road. The merchants in Kohara think
+that by bringing more trade, their profits would become less, while the
+country people look upon it as a deliberate attack upon their
+independence. The Government has no desire to force it upon the people
+against their wish."
+
+Shere Ali made no reply, but his heart grew bitter within him. He had
+come out to India sore and distressed at parting from his friends, from
+the life he had grown to love. All the way down the Red Sea and across
+the Indian Ocean, the pangs of regret had been growing keener with each
+new mile which was gathered in behind the screw. He had lain awake
+listening to the throb of the engine with an aching heart, and with every
+longing for the country he had left behind growing stronger, every
+recollection growing more vivid and intense. There was just one
+consolation which he had. Violet Oliver had enheartened him to make the
+most of it, and calling up the image of her face before him, he had
+striven so to do. There were his plans for the regeneration of his
+country. And lo! here at Lahore, three days after he had set foot on
+land, they were shattered--before they were begun. He had been trained
+and educated in the West according to Western notions and he was now
+bidden to go and rule in the East according to the ideals of the East.
+Bidden! For the quiet accent of authority in the words of the unobservant
+man who rode beside him rankled deeply. He had it in his thoughts to cry
+out: "Then what place have I in Chiltistan?"
+
+But though he never uttered the question, it was none the less answered.
+
+"Economy and quiet are the two things which Chiltistan needs," said the
+Commissioner. Then he looked carelessly at Shere Ali.
+
+"It is hoped that you will marry and settle down as soon as possible,"
+he said.
+
+Shere Ali reined in his horse, stared for a moment at his companion and
+then began quietly to laugh. The laughter was not pleasant to listen to,
+and it grew harsher and louder. But it brought no change to the tired
+face of the Commissioner, who had stopped his horse beside Shere Ali's
+and was busy with the buckle of his stirrup leather. He raised his head
+when the laughter stopped. And it stopped as abruptly as it had begun.
+
+"You were saying--" he remarked politely.
+
+"That I would like, if there is time, to ride through the Bazaar."
+
+"Certainly," said the Commissioner. "This way," and he turned at right
+angles out of the Mall and its avenue of great trees and led the way
+towards the native city. Short of it, however, he stopped.
+
+"You won't mind if I leave you here," he said. "There is some work to be
+done. You can make no mistake. You can see the Gate from here."
+
+"Is that the Delhi Gate?" asked Shere Ali.
+
+"Yes. You can find your own way back, no doubt"; and the unobservant
+Commissioner rode away at a trot.
+
+Shere Ali went forward alone down the narrowing street towards the Gate.
+He was aflame with indignation. So he was to be nothing, he was to do
+nothing, except to practice economy and marry--a _nigger_. The
+contemptuous word rose to his mind. Long ago it had been applied to him
+more than once during his early school-days, until desperate battles and
+black eyes had won him immunity. Now he used it savagely himself to
+stigmatise his own people. He was of the White People, he declared. He
+felt it, he looked it. Even at that moment a portly gentleman of Lahore
+in a coloured turban and patent-leather shoes salaamed to him as he
+passed upon his horse. "Surely," he thought, "I am one of the Sahibs.
+This fool of a Commissioner does not understand."
+
+A woman passed him carrying a babe poised upon her head, with silver
+anklets upon her bare ankles and heavy silver rings upon her toes. She
+turned her face, which was overshadowed by a hood, to look at Shere Ali
+as he rode by. He saw the heavy stud of silver and enamel in her nostril,
+the withered brown face. He turned and looked at her, as she walked
+flat-footed and ungainly, her pyjamas of pink cotton showing beneath her
+cloak. He had no part or lot with any of these people of the East. The
+face of Violet Oliver shone before his eyes. There was his mate. He
+recalled the exquisite daintiness of her appearance, her ruffles of lace,
+the winning sweetness of her eyes. Not in Chiltistan would he find a
+woman to drive that image from his thoughts.
+
+Meanwhile he drew nearer to the Delhi Gate. A stream of people flowed out
+from it towards him. Over their heads he looked through the archway down
+the narrow street, where between the booths and under the carved
+overhanging balconies the brown people robed and turbaned, in saffron and
+blue, pink and white, thronged and chattered and jostled, a kaleidoscope
+of colour. Shere Ali turned his eyes to the right and the left as he
+went. It was not merely to rid himself of the Commissioner that he had
+proposed to ride on to the bazaars by way of the Delhi Gate. The
+anonymous letter bearing the postmark of Calcutta, which had been placed
+in his hand when the steamer reached Bombay, besought him to pass by the
+Delhi Gate at Lahore and do certain things by which means he would hear
+much to his advantage. He had no thought at the moment to do the
+particular things, but he was sufficiently curious to pass by the Delhi
+Gate. Some intrigue was on hand into which it was sought to lure him. He
+had not forgotten that his countrymen were born intriguers.
+
+Slowly he rode along. Here and there a group of people were squatting on
+the ground, talking noisily. Here and there a beggar stretched out a
+maimed limb and sought for alms. Then close to the gate he saw that for
+which he searched: a man sitting apart with a blanket over his head. No
+one spoke to the man, and for his part he never moved. He sat erect with
+his legs crossed in front of him and his hands resting idly on his knees,
+a strange and rather grim figure; so motionless, so utterly lifeless he
+seemed. The blanket reached almost to the ground behind and hung down
+to his lap in front, and Shere Ali noticed that a leathern begging-bowl
+at his side was well filled with coins. So he must have sat just in that
+attitude, with that thick covering stifling him, all through the fiery
+heat of that long day. As Shere Ali looked, he saw a poor bent man in
+rags, with yellow caste marks on his forehead, add a copper pi to the
+collection in the bowl. Shere Ali stopped the giver.
+
+"Who is he?" he asked, pointing to the draped figure.
+
+The old Hindu raised his hand and bowed his forehead into the palm.
+
+"Huzoor, he is a holy man, a stranger who has lately come to Lahore, but
+the holiest of all the holy men who have ever sat by the Delhi Gate. His
+fame is already great."
+
+"But why does he sit covered with the blanket?" asked Shere Ali.
+
+"Huzoor, because of his holiness. He is so holy that his face must
+not be seen."
+
+Shere Ali laughed.
+
+"He told you that himself, I suppose," he said.
+
+"Huzoor, it is well known," said the old man. "He sits by the road all
+day until the darkness comes--"
+
+"Yes," said Shere Ali, bethinking him of the recommendations in his
+letter, "until the darkness comes--and then?"
+
+"Then he goes away into the city and no one sees him until the morning";
+and the old man passed on.
+
+Shere Ali chuckled and rode by the hooded man. His curiosity increased.
+It was quite likely that the blanket hid a Mohammedan Pathan from beyond
+the hills. To come down into the plains and mulct the pious Hindu by some
+such ingenious practice would appeal to the Pathan's sense of humour
+almost as much as to his pocket. Shere Ali drew the letter from his
+pocket, and in the waning light read it through again. True, the postmark
+showed that the letter had been posted in Calcutta, but more than one
+native of Chiltistan had come south and set up as a money-lender in that
+city on the proceeds of a successful burglary. He replaced the letter in
+his pocket, and rode on at a walk through the throng. The darkness came
+quickly; oil lamps were lighted in the booths and shone though the
+unglazed window-spaces overhead. A refreshing coolness fell upon the
+town, the short, welcome interval between the heat of the day and the
+suffocating heat of the night. Shere Ali turned his horse and rode back
+again to the gate. The hooded beggar still sat upon the ground, but he
+was alone. The others, the blind and the maimed, had crawled away to
+their dens. Except this grim motionless man, there was no one squatting
+upon the ground.
+
+Shere Ali reined in beside him, and bending forward in his saddle spoke
+in a low voice a few words of Pushtu. The hooded figure did not move, but
+from behind the blanket there issued a muffled voice.
+
+"If your Highness will ride slowly on, your servant will follow and come
+to his side."
+
+Shere Ali went on, and in a few moments he heard the soft patter of a man
+running barefoot along the dusty road. He stopped his horse and the
+patter of feet ceased, but a moment after, silent as a shadow, the man
+was at his side.
+
+"You are of my country?" said Shere Ali.
+
+"I am of Kohara," returned the man. "Safdar Khan of Kohara. May God keep
+your Highness in health. We have waited long for your presence."
+
+"What are you doing in Lahore?" asked Shere Ali.
+
+In the darkness he saw a flash of white as Safdar Khan smiled.
+
+"There was a little trouble, your Highness, with one Ishak Mohammed
+and--Ishak Mohammed's son is still alive. He is a boy of eight, it is
+true, and could not hold a rifle to his shoulder. But the trouble took
+place near the road."
+
+Shere Ali nodded his head in comprehension. Safdar Khan had shot his
+enemy on the road, which is a holy place, and therefore he came
+within the law.
+
+"Blood-money was offered," continued Safdar Khan, "but the boy would not
+consent, and claims my life. His mother would hold the rifle for him
+while he pulled the trigger. So I am better in Lahore. Moreover, your
+Highness, for a poor man life is difficult in Kohara. Taxes are high. So
+I came down to this gate and sat with a cloak over my head."
+
+"And you have found it profitable," said Shere Ali.
+
+Again the teeth flashed in the darkness and Safdar Khan laughed.
+
+"For two days I sat by the Delhi Gate and no one spoke to me or dropped a
+single coin in my bowl. But on the third day a good man, may God preserve
+him, passed by when I was nearly stifled and asked me why I sat in the
+heat of the sun under a blanket. Thereupon I told him, what doubtless
+your Highness knows, that my face is much too holy to be looked upon, and
+since then your Highness' servant has prospered exceedingly. The device
+is a good one."
+
+Suddenly Safdar Khan stumbled as he walked and lurched against the
+horse and its rider. He recovered himself in a moment, with prayers
+for forgiveness and curses upon his stupidity for setting his foot
+upon a sharp stone. But he had put out his hand as he stumbled and
+that hand had run lightly down Shere Ali's coat and had felt the
+texture of his clothes.
+
+"I had a letter from Calcutta," said the Prince, "which besought me to
+speak to you, for you had something for my ear. Therefore speak, and
+speak quickly."
+
+But a change had come over Safdar Khan. Certainly Shere Ali was wearing
+the dress of one of the Sahibs. A man passed carrying a lantern, and the
+light, feeble though it was, threw into outline against the darkness a
+pith helmet and a very English figure. Certainly, too, Shere Ali spoke
+the Pushtu tongue with a slight hesitation, and an unfamiliar accent. He
+seemed to grope for words.
+
+"A letter?" he cried. "From Calcutta? Nay, how can that be? Some foolish
+fellow has dared to play a trick," and in a few short, effective
+sentences Safdar Khan expressed his opinion of the foolish fellow and of
+his ancestry distant and immediate.
+
+"Yet the letter bade me seek you by the Delhi Gate of Lahore," continued
+Shere Ali calmly, "and by the Delhi Gate of Lahore I found you."
+
+"My fame is great," replied Safdar Khan bombastically. "Far and wide it
+has spread like the boughs of a gigantic tree."
+
+"Rubbish," said Shere Ali curtly, breaking in upon Safdar's vehemence.
+"I am not one of the Hindu fools who fill your begging-bowl," and he
+laughed.
+
+In the darkness he heard Safdar Khan laugh too.
+
+"You expected me," continued Shere Ali. "You looked for my coming. Your
+ears were listening for the few words of Pushtu. Why else should you say,
+'Ride forward and I will follow'?"
+
+Safdar Khan walked for a little while in silence. Then in a voice of
+humility, he said:
+
+"I will tell my lord the truth. Yes, some foolish talk has passed from
+one man to another, and has been thrown back again like a ball. I too,"
+he admitted, "have been without wisdom. But I have seen how vain such
+talk is. The Mullahs in the Hills speak only ignorance and folly."
+
+"Ah!" said Shere Ali. He took the letter from his pocket and tore it into
+fragments and scattered the fragments upon the Road. "So I thought. The
+letter is of their prompting."
+
+"My lord, it may be so," replied Safdar Khan. "For my part I have no lot
+or share in any of these things. For I am now of Lahore."
+
+"Aye," said Shere Ali. "The begging-bowl is filled to overflowing at the
+Delhi Gate. So you are of Lahore, though your name is Safdar Khan and you
+were born at Kohara," and suddenly he leaned down and asked in a wistful
+voice with a great curiosity, "Are you content? Have you forgotten the
+hills and valleys? Is Lahore more to you than Chiltistan?"
+
+So perpetually had Shere All's mind run of late upon his isolation that
+it crept into all his thoughts. So now it seemed to him that there was
+some vague parallel between his mental state and that of Safdar Khan. But
+Safdar Khan's next words disabused him:
+
+"Nay, nay," he said. "But the widow of a rich merchant in the city here,
+a devout and holy woman, has been greatly moved by my piety. She seeks my
+hand in marriage and--" here Safdar Khan laughed pleasantly--"I shall
+marry her. Already she has given me a necklace of price which I have had
+weighed and tested to prove that she does not play me false. She is very
+rich, and it is too hot to sit in the sun under a blanket. So I will be a
+merchant of Lahore instead, and live at my ease on the upper balcony of
+my house."
+
+Shere Ali laughed and answered, "It is well." Then he added shrewdly:
+"But it is possible that you may yet at some time meet the man in
+Calcutta who wrote the letter to me. If so, tell him what I did with it,"
+and Shere Ali's voice became hard and stern. "Tell him that I tore it up
+and scattered it in the dust. And let him send the news to the Mullahs in
+the Hills. I know that soft-handed brood with their well-fed bodies and
+their treacherous mouths. If only they would let me carry on the road!"
+he cried passionately, "I would drag them out of the houses where they
+batten on poor men's families and set them to work till the palms of
+their hands were honestly blistered. Let the Mullahs have a care, Safdar
+Khan. I go North to-morrow to Kohara."
+
+He spoke with a greater vehemence than perhaps he had meant to show. But
+he was carried along by his own words, and sought always a stronger
+epithet than that which he had used. He was sore and indignant, and he
+vented his anger on the first object which served him as an opportunity.
+Safdar Khan bowed his head in the darkness. Safe though he might be in
+Lahore, he was still afraid of the Mullahs, afraid of their curses, and
+mindful of their power to ruin the venturesome man who dared to stand
+against them.
+
+"It shall be as your Highness wishes," he said in a low voice, and he
+hurried away from Shere Ali's side. Abuse of the Mullahs was
+dangerous--as dangerous to listen to as to speak. Who knew but what the
+very leaves of the neem trees might whisper the words and bear witness
+against him? Moreover, it was clear that the Prince of Chiltistan was a
+Sahib. Shere Ali rode back to Government House. He understood clearly why
+Safdar Khan had so unceremoniously fled; and he was glad. If the fool of
+a Commissioner did not know him for what he was, at all events Safdar
+Khan did. He was one of the White People. For who else would dare to
+speak as he had spoken of the Mullahs? The Mullahs would hear what he had
+said. That was certain. They would hear it with additions. They would try
+to make things unpleasant for him in Chiltistan in consequence. But Shere
+Ali was glad. For their very opposition--in so loverlike a way did every
+thought somehow reach out to Violet Oliver--brought him a little nearer
+to the lady who held his heart. He found the Commissioner sealing up his
+letters in his office.
+
+That unobservant man had just written at length, privately and
+confidentially, both to the Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab at the
+hill-station and to the Resident at Kohara. And to both he had written to
+the one effect:
+
+"We must expect trouble in Chiltistan."
+
+He based his conclusions upon the glimpse which he had obtained into the
+troubled feelings of Shere Ali. The next morning Shere Ali travelled
+northwards and forty-eight hours later from the top of the Malakand Pass
+he saw winding across the Swat valley past Chakdara the road which
+reached to Kohara and there stopped.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+ON THE POLO-GROUND
+
+
+Violet Oliver travelled to India in the late autumn of that year, free
+from apprehension. Somewhere beyond the high snow-passes Shere Ali would
+be working out his destiny among his own people. She was not of those who
+seek publicity either for themselves or for their gowns in the daily
+papers. Shere Ali would never hear of her visit; she was safe. She spent
+her Christmas in Calcutta, saw the race for the Viceroy's Cup run without
+a fear that on that crowded racecourse the importunate figure of the
+young Prince of Chiltistan might emerge to reproach her, and a week later
+went northwards into the United Provinces. It was a year, now some while
+past, when a royal visitor came from a neighbouring country into India.
+And in his honour at one great city in those Provinces the troops
+gathered and the tents went up. Little towns of canvas, gay with bordered
+walks and flowers, were dotted on the dusty plains about and within the
+city. Great ministers and functionaries came with their retinues and
+their guests. Native princes from Rajputana brought their elephants and
+their escorts. Thither also came Violet Oliver. It was, indeed, to attend
+this Durbar that she had been invited out from England. She stayed in a
+small camp on the great Parade Ground where the tents faced one another
+in a single street, each with its little garden of grass and flowers
+before the door. The ends of the street were closed in by posts, and
+outside the posts sentries were placed.
+
+It was a week of bright, sunlit, rainless days, and of starry nights. It
+was a week of reviews and State functions. But it was also a week during
+which the best polo to be seen in India drew the visitors each afternoon
+to the club-ground. There was no more constant attendant than Violet
+Oliver. She understood the game and followed it with a nice appreciation
+of the player's skill. The first round of the competition had been played
+off on the third day, but a native team organised by the ruler of a
+Mohammedan State in Central India had drawn a by and did not appear in
+the contest until the fourth day. Mrs. Oliver took her seat in the front
+row of the stand, as the opposing teams cantered into the field upon
+their ponies. A programme was handed to her, but she did not open it. For
+already one of the umpires had tossed the ball into the middle of the
+ground. The game had begun.
+
+The native team was matched against a regiment of Dragoons, and from the
+beginning it was plain that the four English players were the stronger
+team. But on the other side there was one who in point of skill
+outstripped them all. He was stationed on the outside of the field
+farthest away from Violet Oliver. He was a young man, almost a boy, she
+judged; he was beautifully mounted, and he sat his pony as though he and
+it were one. He was quick to turn, quick to pass the ball; and he never
+played a dangerous game. A desire that the native team should win woke in
+her and grew strong just because of that slim youth's extraordinary
+skill. Time after time he relieved his side, and once, as it seemed to
+her, he picked the ball out of the very goalposts. The bugle, she
+remembered afterwards, had just sounded. He drove the ball out from the
+press, leaned over until it seemed he must fall to resist an opponent who
+tried to ride him off, and then somehow he shook himself free from the
+tangle of polo-sticks and ponies.
+
+"Oh, well done! well done!" cried Violet Oliver, clenching her hands in
+her enthusiasm. A roar of applause went up. He came racing down the very
+centre of the ground, the long ends of his white turban streaming out
+behind him like a pennant. The seven other players followed upon his
+heels outpaced and outplayed. He rode swinging his polo-stick for the
+stroke, and then with clean hard blows sent the ball skimming through
+the air like a bird. Violet Oliver watched him in suspense, dreading
+lest he should override the ball, or that his stroke should glance. But
+he made no mistake. The sound of the strokes rose clear and sharp; the
+ball flew straight. He drove it between the posts, and the players
+streamed in behind as though through the gateway of a beleaguered town.
+He had scored the first goal of the game at the end of the first
+chukkur. He cantered back to change his pony. But this time he rode
+along the edge of the stand, since on this side the ponies waited with
+their blankets thrown over their saddles and the syces at their heads.
+He ran his eyes along the row of onlookers as he cantered by, and
+suddenly Violet Oliver leaned forward. She had been interested merely in
+the player. Now she was interested in the man who played. She was more
+than interested. For she felt a tightening of the heart and she caught
+her breath. "It could not be," she said to herself. She could see his
+face clearly, however, now; and as suddenly as she had leaned forward
+she drew back. She lowered her head, until her broad hat-brim hid her
+face. She opened her programme, looked for and found the names of the
+players. Shere Ali's stared her in the face.
+
+"He has broken his word," she said angrily to herself, quite forgetting
+that he had given no word, and that she had asked for none. Then she fell
+to wondering whether or no he had recognised her as he rode past the
+stand. She stole a glance as he cantered back, but Shere Ali was not
+looking towards her. She debated whether she should make an excuse and go
+back to her camp. But if he had thought he had seen her, he would look
+again, and her empty place would be convincing evidence. Moreover, the
+teams had changed goals. Shere Ali would be playing on this side of the
+ground during the next chukkur unless the Dragoons scored quickly. Violet
+Oliver kept her place, but she saw little of the game. She watched Shere
+Ali's play furtively, however, hoping thereby to learn whether he had
+noticed her. And in a little while she knew. He played wildly, his
+strokes had lost their precision, he was less quick to follow the twists
+of the ball. Shere Ali had seen her. At the end of the game he galloped
+quickly to the corner, and when Violet Oliver came out of the enclosure
+she saw him standing, with his long overcoat already on his shoulders,
+waiting for her.
+
+Violet Oliver separated herself from her friends and went forward towards
+him. She held out her hand. Shere Ali hesitated and then took it. All
+through the game, pride had been urging him to hold his head high and
+seek not so much as a single word with her. But he had been alone for six
+months in Chiltistan and he was young.
+
+"You might have let me know," he said, in a troubled voice.
+
+Violet Oliver faltered out some beginnings of an excuse. She did not want
+to bring him away from his work in Chiltistan. But Shere Ali was not
+listening to the excuses.
+
+"I must see you again," he said. "I must."
+
+"No doubt we shall meet," replied Violet Oliver.
+
+"To-morrow," continued Shere Ali. "To-morrow evening. You will be going
+to the Fort."
+
+There was to be an investiture, and after the investiture a great
+reception in the Fort on the evening of the next day. It would be as good
+a place as any, thought Violet Oliver--nay, a better place. There would
+be crowds of people wandering about the Fort. Since they must meet, let
+it be there and soon.
+
+"Very well," she said. "To-morrow evening," and she passed on and
+rejoined her friends.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+THE INVIDIOUS BAR
+
+
+Violet Oliver drove back to her camp in the company of her friends and
+they remarked upon her silence.
+
+"You are tired, Violet?" her hostess asked of her.
+
+"A little, perhaps," Violet admitted, and, urging fatigue as her excuse,
+she escaped to her tent. There she took counsel of her looking-glass.
+
+"I couldn't possibly have foreseen that he would be here," she pleaded to
+her reflection. "He was to have stayed in Chiltistan. I asked him and he
+told me that he meant to stay. If he had stayed there, he would never
+have known that I was in India," and she added and repeated, "It's really
+not my fault."
+
+In a word she was distressed and sincerely distressed. But it was not
+upon her own account. She was not thinking of the awkwardness to her of
+this unexpected encounter. But she realised that she had given pain where
+she had meant not to give pain. Shere Ali had seen her. He had been
+assured that she sought to avoid him. And this was not the end. She must
+go on and give more pain.
+
+Violet Oliver had hoped and believed that her friendship with the young
+Prince was something which had gone quite out of her life. She had closed
+it and put it away, as you put away upon an upper shelf a book which you
+do not mean to read again. The last word had been spoken eight months ago
+in the conservatory of Lady Marfield's house. And behold they had met
+again. There must be yet another meeting, yet another last interview. And
+from that last interview nothing but pain could come to Shere Ali.
+Therefore she anticipated it with a great reluctance. Violet Oliver did
+not live among illusions. She was no sentimentalist. She never made up
+and rehearsed in imagination little scenes of a melting pathos where
+eternal adieux were spoken amid tears. She had no appreciation of the
+woeful luxury of last interviews. On the contrary, she hated to confront
+distress or pain. It was in her character always to take the easier way
+when trouble threatened. She would have avoided altogether this meeting
+with Shere Ali, had it been possible.
+
+"It's a pity," she said, and that was all. She was reluctant, but she had
+no misgiving. Shere Ali was to her still the youth to whom she had said
+good-bye in Lady Marfield's conservatory. She had seen him in the flush
+of victory after a close-fought game, and thus she had seen him often
+enough before. It was not to be wondered at that she noted no difference
+at that moment.
+
+But the difference was there for the few who had eyes to see. He had
+journeyed up the broken road into Chiltistan. At the Fort of Chakdara, in
+the rice fields on the banks of the Swat river, he had taken his luncheon
+one day with the English commandant and the English doctor, and there he
+had parted with the ways of life which had become to him the only ways.
+He had travelled thence for a few hundred yards along a straight strip of
+road running over level ground, and so with the levies of Dir to escort
+him he swung round to the left. A screen of hillside and grey rock moved
+across the face of the country behind him. The last outpost was left
+behind. The Fort and the Signal Tower on the pinnacle opposite and the
+English flag flying over all were hidden from his sight. Wretched as any
+exile from his native land, Shere All went up into the lower passes of
+the Himalayas. Days were to pass and still the high snow-peaks which
+glittered in the sky, gold in the noonday, silver in the night time,
+above the valleys of Chiltistan were to be hidden in the far North. But
+already the words began to be spoken and the little incidents to occur
+which were to ripen him for his destiny. They were garnered into his
+memories as separate and unrelated events. It was not until afterwards
+that he came to know how deeply they had left their marks, or that he set
+them in an ordered sequence and gave to them a particular significance.
+Even at the Fort of Chakdara a beginning had been made.
+
+Shere Ali was standing in the little battery on the very summit of the
+Fort. Below him was the oblong enclosure of the men's barracks, the stone
+landings and steps, the iron railings, the numbered doors. He looked down
+into the enclosure as into a well. It might almost have been a section of
+the barracks at Chatham. But Shere Ali raised his head, and, over against
+him, on the opposite side of a natural gateway in the hills, rose the
+steep slope and the Signal Tower.
+
+"I was here," said the Doctor, who stood behind him, "during the Malakand
+campaign. You remember it, no doubt?"
+
+"I was at Oxford. I remember it well," said Shere Ali.
+
+"We were hard pressed here, but the handful of men in the Signal Tower
+had the worst of it," continued the Doctor in a matter-of-fact voice. "It
+was reckoned that there were fourteen thousand men from the Swat Valley
+besieging us, and as they did not mind how many they lost, even with the
+Maxims and our wire defences it was difficult to keep them off. We had to
+hold on to the Signal Tower because we could communicate with the people
+on the Malakand from there, while we couldn't from the Fort itself. The
+Amandara ridge, on the other side of the valley, as you can see, just
+hides the Pass from us. Well, the handful of men in the tower managed to
+keep in communication with the main force, and this is how it was done. A
+Sepoy called Prem Singh used to come out into full view of the enemy
+through a porthole of the tower, deliberately set up his apparatus, and
+heliograph away to the main force in the Malakand Camp, with the Swatis
+firing at him from short range. How it was he was not hit, I could never
+understand. He did it day after day. It was the bravest and coolest thing
+I ever saw done or ever heard of, with one exception, perhaps. Prem Singh
+would have got the Victoria Cross--" and the Doctor stopped suddenly
+and his face flushed.
+
+Shere Ali, however, was too keenly interested in the incident itself to
+take any note of the narrator's confusion. Baldly though it was told,
+there was the square, strong tower with its door six feet from the
+ground, its machicoulis, its narrow portholes over against him, to give
+life and vividness to the story. Here that brave deed had been done and
+daily repeated. Shere Ali peopled the empty slopes which ran down from
+the tower to the river and the high crags beyond the tower with the
+hordes of white-clad Swatis, all in their finest robes, like men who have
+just reached the goal of a holy pilgrimage, as indeed they had. He saw
+their standards, he heard the din of their firearms, and high above them
+on the wall of the tower he saw the khaki-clad figure of a single Sepoy
+calmly flashing across the valley news of the defenders' plight.
+
+"Didn't he get the Victoria Cross?" he asked.
+
+"No," returned the Doctor with a certain awkwardness. But still Shere Ali
+did not notice.
+
+"And what was the exception?" he asked eagerly. "What was the other brave
+deed you have seen fit to rank with this?"
+
+"That, too, happened over there," said the Doctor, seizing upon the
+question with relief. "During the early days of the siege we were able to
+send in to the tower water and food. But when the first of August came we
+could help them no more. The enemy thronged too closely round us, we were
+attacked by night and by day, and stone sangars, in which the Swatis lay
+after dark, were built between us and the tower. We sent up water to the
+tower for the last time at half-past nine on a Saturday morning, and it
+was not until half-past four on the Monday afternoon that the relieving
+force marched across the bridge down there and set us free."
+
+"They were without water for all that time--and in August?" cried
+Shere Ali.
+
+"No," the Doctor answered. "But they would have been had the Sepoy not
+found his equal. A bheestie"--and he nodded his head to emphasise the
+word--"not a soldier at all, but a mere water-carrier, a mere
+camp-follower, volunteered to go down to the river. He crept out of the
+tower after nightfall with his water-skins, crawled down between the
+sangars--and I can tell you the hill-side was thick with them--to the
+brink of the Swat river below there, filled his skins, and returned
+with them."
+
+"That man, too, earned the Victoria Cross," said Shere Ali.
+
+"Yes," said the Doctor, "no doubt, no doubt."
+
+Something of flurry was again audible in his voice, and this time Shere
+Ali noticed it.
+
+"Earned--but did not get it?" he went on slowly; and turning to the
+Doctor he waited quietly for an answer. The answer was given reluctantly,
+after a pause.
+
+"Well! That is so."
+
+"Why?"
+
+The question was uttered sharply, close upon the words which had preceded
+it. The Doctor looked upon the ground, shifted his feet, and looked up
+again. He was a young man, and inexperienced. The question was repeated.
+
+"Why?"
+
+The Doctor's confusion increased. He recognised that his delay in
+answering only made the answer more difficult to give. It could not be
+evaded. He blurted out the truth apologetically.
+
+"Well, you see, we don't give the Victoria Cross to natives."
+
+Shere Ali was silent for a while. He stood with his eyes fixed upon the
+tower, his face quite inscrutable.
+
+"Yes, I guessed that would be the reason," he said quietly.
+
+"Well," said his companion uncomfortably, "I expect some day that will
+be altered."
+
+Shere Ali shrugged his shoulders, and turned to go down. At the gateway
+of the Fort, by the wire bridge, his escort, mounted upon their horses,
+waited for him. He climbed into the saddle without a word. He had been
+labouring for these last days under a sense of injury, and his thoughts
+had narrowed in upon himself. He was thinking. "I, too, then, could never
+win that prize." His conviction that he was really one of the White
+People, bolstered up as it had been by so many vain arguments, was put to
+the test of fact. The truth shone in upon his mind. For here was a
+coveted privilege of the White People from which he was debarred, he and
+the bheestie and the Sepoy. They were all one, he thought bitterly, to
+the White People. The invidious bar of his colour was not to be broken.
+
+"Good-bye," he said, leaning down from his saddle and holding out his
+hand. "Thank you very much."
+
+He shook hands with the Doctor and cantered down the road, with a smile
+upon his face. But the consciousness of the invidious bar was rankling
+cruelly at his heart, and it continued to rankle long after he had swung
+round the bend of the road and had lost sight of Chakdara and the
+English flag.
+
+He passed through Jandol and climbed the Lowari Pass among the fir trees
+and the pines, and on the very summit he met three men clothed in brown
+homespun with their hair clubbed at the sides of their heads. Each man
+carried a rifle on his back and two of them carried swords besides, and
+they wore sandals of grass upon their feet. They were talking as they
+went, and they were talking in the Chilti tongue. Shere Ali hailed them
+and bade them stop.
+
+"On what journey are you going?" he asked, and one of the three bowed low
+and answered him.
+
+"Sir, we are going to Mecca."
+
+"To Mecca!" exclaimed Shere Ali. "How will you ever get to Mecca? Have
+you money?"
+
+"Sir, we have each six rupees, and with six rupees a man may reach Mecca
+from Kurrachee. Till we reach Kurrachee, there is no fear that we shall
+starve. Dwellers in the villages will befriend us."
+
+"Why, that is true," said Shere Ali, "but since you are countrymen of my
+own and my father's subjects, you shall not tax too heavily your friends
+upon the road."
+
+He added to their scanty store of rupees, and one after another they
+thanked him and so went cheerily down the Pass. Shere Ali watched them as
+they went, wondering that men should take such a journey and endure so
+much discomfort for their faith. He watched their dwindling figures and
+understood how far he was set apart from them. He was of their faith
+himself, nominally at all events, but Mecca--? He shrugged his
+shoulders at the name. It meant no more to him than it did to the White
+People who had cast him out. But that chance meeting lingered in his
+memory, and as he travelled northwards, he would wonder at times by night
+at what village his three countrymen slept and by day whether their faith
+still cheered them on their road.
+
+He came at last to the borders of Chiltistan, and travelled thenceforward
+through a country rich with orchards and green rice and golden amaranth.
+The terraced slopes of the mountains, ablaze with wild indigo, closed in
+upon him and widened out. Above the terraces great dark forests of pines
+and deodars, maples and horse chestnuts clung to the hill sides; and
+above the forests grass slopes stretched up to bare rock and the
+snowfields. From the villages the people came out to meet him, and here
+and there from some castle of a greater importance a chieftain would ride
+out with his bodyguard, gay in velvets, and silks from Bokhara and chogas
+of gold kinkob, and offer to him gold dust twisted up in the petal of a
+flower, which he touched and remitted. He was escorted to polo-grounds
+and sat for hours witnessing sports and trials of skill, and at night to
+the music of kettledrums and pipes men and boys danced interminably
+before him. There was one evening which he particularly remembered. He
+had set up his camp outside a large village and was sitting alone by his
+fire in the open air. The night was very still, the sky dark but studded
+with stars extraordinarily bright--so bright, indeed, that Shere Ali
+could see upon the water of the river below the low cliff on which his
+camp fire was lit a trembling golden path made by the rays of a planet.
+And as he sat, unexpectedly in the hush a boy with a clear, sweet voice
+began to sing from the darkness behind him. The melody was plaintive and
+sweet; a few notes of a pipe accompanied him; and as Shere Ali listened
+in this high valley of the Himalayas on a summer's night, the music took
+hold upon him and wrung his heart. The yearning for all that he had left
+behind became a pain almost beyond endurance. The days of his boyhood and
+his youth went by before his eyes in a glittering procession. His school
+life, his first summer term at Oxford, the Cherwell with the shadows of
+the branches overhead dappling the water, the strenuous week of the
+Eights, his climbs with Linforth, and, above all, London in June, a
+London bright with lilac and sunshine and the fair faces of women,
+crowded in upon his memory. He had been steadily of late refusing to
+remember, but the sweet voice and the plaintive melody had caught him
+unawares. The ghosts of his dead pleasures trooped out and took life and
+substance. Particular hours were lived through again--a motor ride alone
+with Violet Oliver to Pangbourne, a dinner on the lawn outside the inn,
+the drive back to London in the cool of the evening. It all seemed very
+far away to-night. Shere Ali sat late beside his fire, nor when he went
+into his tent did he close his eyes.
+
+The next morning he rode among orchards bright with apricots and
+mulberries, peaches and white grapes, and in another day he looked down
+from a high cliff, across which the road was carried on a scaffolding,
+upon the town of Kohara and the castle of his father rising in terraces
+upon a hill behind. The nobles and their followers came out to meet him
+with courteous words and protestations of good will. But they looked him
+over with curious and not too friendly eyes. News had gone before Shere
+Ali that the young Prince of Chiltistan was coming to Kohara wearing the
+dress of the White People. They saw that the news was true, but no word
+or comment was uttered in his hearing. Joking and laughing they escorted
+him to the gates of his father's palace. Thus Shere Ali at the last had
+come home to Kohara. Of the life which he lived there he was to tell
+something to Violet Oliver.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+IN THE COURTYARD
+
+
+The investiture was over, and the guests, thronging from the Hall of
+Audience, came out beneath arches and saw the whole length of the great
+marble court spread before them. A vast canopy roofed it in, and a soft
+dim light pervaded it. To those who came from the glitter of the
+ceremonies it brought a sense of coolness and of peace. From the arches a
+broad flight of steps led downwards to the floor, where water gleamed
+darkly in a marble basin. Lilies floated upon its surface, and marble
+paths crossed it to the steps at the far end; and here and there, in its
+depth, the reflection of a lamp burned steadily. At the far end steps
+rose again to a great platform and to gilded arches through which lights
+poured in a blaze, and gave to that end almost the appearance of a
+lighted stage, and made of the courtyard a darkened auditorium. From one
+flight of steps to the other, in the dim cool light, the guests passed
+across the floor of the court, soldiers in uniforms, civilians in their
+dress of state, jewelled princes of the native kingdoms, ladies in their
+bravest array. But now and again one or two would slip from the throng,
+and, leaving the procession, take their own way about the Fort. Among
+those who slipped away was Violet Oliver. She went to the side of the
+courtyard where a couch stood empty. There she seated herself and waited.
+In front of her the stream of people passed by talking and laughing,
+within view, within earshot if only one raised one's voice a trifle above
+the ordinary note. Yet there was no other couch near. One might talk at
+will and not be overheard. It was, to Violet Oliver's thinking, a good
+strategic position, and there she proposed to remain till Shere Ali found
+her, and after he had found her, until he went away.
+
+She wondered in what guise he would come to her: a picturesque figure
+with a turban of some delicate shade upon his head and pearls about his
+throat, or--as she wondered, a young man in the evening dress of an
+Englishman stepped aside from the press of visitors and came towards her.
+Before she could, in that dim light, distinguish his face, she recognised
+him by the lightness of his step and the suppleness of his figure. She
+raised herself into a position a little more upright, and held out her
+hand. She made room for him on the couch beside her, and when he had
+taken his seat, she turned at once to speak.
+
+But Shere Ali raised his hand in a gesture of entreaty.
+
+"Hush!" he said with a smile; and the smile pleaded with her as much as
+did his words. "Just for a moment! We can argue afterwards. Just for a
+moment, let us pretend."
+
+Violet Oliver had expected anger, accusations, prayers. Even for some
+threat, some act of violence, she had come prepared. But the quiet
+wistfulness of his manner, as of a man too tired greatly to long for
+anything, took her at a disadvantage. But the one thing which she surely
+understood was the danger of pretence. There had been too much of
+pretence already.
+
+"No," she said.
+
+"Just for a moment," he insisted. He sat beside her, watching the clear
+profile of her face, the slender throat, the heavy masses of hair so
+daintily coiled upon her head. "The last eight months have not
+been--could not be. Yesterday we were at Richmond, just you and I. It was
+Sunday--you remember. I called on you in the afternoon, and for a wonder
+you were alone. We drove down together to Richmond, and dined together in
+the little room at the end of the passage--the room with the big windows,
+and the name of the woman who was murdered in France scratched upon the
+glass. That was yesterday."
+
+"It was last year," said Violet.
+
+"Yesterday," Shere Ali persisted. "I dreamt last night that I had gone
+back to Chiltistan; but it was only a dream."
+
+"It was the truth," and the quiet assurance of her voice dispelled Shere
+Ali's own effort at pretence. He leaned forward suddenly, clasping his
+hands upon his knees in an attitude familiar to her as characteristic of
+the man. There was a tenseness which gave to him even in repose a look
+of activity.
+
+"Well, it's the truth, then," he said, and his voice took on an accent of
+bitterness. "And here's more truth. I never thought to see you here
+to-night."
+
+"Did you think that I should be afraid?" asked Violet Oliver in a low,
+steady voice.
+
+"Afraid!" Shere Ali turned towards her in surprise and met her
+gaze. "No."
+
+"Why, then, should I break my word? Have I done it so often?"
+
+Shere Ali did not answer her directly.
+
+"You promised to write to me," he said, and Violet Oliver replied at
+once:
+
+"Yes. And I did write."
+
+"You wrote twice," he cried bitterly. "Oh, yes, you kept your word.
+There's a post every day, winter and summer, into Chiltistan. Sometimes
+an avalanche or a snowstorm delays it; but on most days it comes. If you
+could only have guessed how eagerly I looked forward to your letters,
+you would have written, I think, more often. There's a path over a high
+ridge by which the courier must come. I could see it from the casement
+of the tower. I used to watch it through a pair of field-glasses, that I
+might catch the first glimpse of the man as he rose against the sky.
+Each day I thought 'Perhaps there's a letter in your handwriting.' And
+you wrote twice, and in neither letter was there a hint that you were
+coming out to India."
+
+He was speaking in a low, passionate voice. In spite of herself, Violet
+Oliver was moved. The picture of him watching from his window in the
+tower for the black speck against the skyline was clear before her mind,
+and troubled her. Her voice grew gentle.
+
+"I did not write more often on purpose," she said.
+
+"It was on purpose, too, that you left out all mention of your visit
+to India?"
+
+Violet nodded her head.
+
+"Yes," she said.
+
+"You did not want to see me again."
+
+Violet turned her face towards him, and leaned forward a little.
+
+"I don't say that," she said softly. "But I thought it would be better
+that we two should not meet again, if meeting could be avoided. I saw
+that you cared--I may say that, mayn't I?" and for a second she laid her
+hand gently upon his sleeve. "I saw that you cared too much. It seemed to
+me best that it should end altogether."
+
+Shere Ali lifted his head, and turned quickly towards her.
+
+"Why should it end at all?" he cried. His eyes kindled and sought hers.
+"Violet, why should it end at all?"
+
+Violet Oliver drew back. She cast a glance to the courtyard. Only a few
+paces away the stream of people passed up and down.
+
+"It must end," she answered. "You know that as well as I."
+
+"I don't know it. I won't know it," he replied. He reached out his hand
+towards hers, but she was too quick for him. He bent nearer to her.
+
+"Violet," he whispered, "marry me!"
+
+Violet Oliver glanced again to the courtyard. But it was no longer to
+assure herself that friends of her own race were comfortably near at
+hand. Now she was anxious that they should not be near enough to listen
+and overhear.
+
+"That's impossible!" she answered in a startled voice.
+
+"It's not impossible! It's not!" And the desperation in his voice
+betrayed him. In the depths of his heart he knew that, for this woman, at
+all events, it was impossible. But he would not listen to that knowledge.
+
+"Other women, here in India, have had the courage."
+
+"And what have their lives been afterwards?" she asked. She had not
+herself any very strong feeling on the subject of colour. She was not
+repelled, as men are repelled. But she was aware, nevertheless, how
+strong the feeling was in others. She had not lived in India for nothing.
+Marriage with Shere Ali was impossible, even had she wished for it. It
+meant ostracism and social suicide.
+
+"Where should I live?" she went on. "In Chiltistan? What life would there
+be there for me?"
+
+"No," he replied. "I would not ask it. I never thought of it. In
+England. We could live there!" and, ceasing to insist, he began
+wistfully to plead. "Oh, if you knew how I have hated these past months.
+I used to sit at night, alone, alone, alone, eating my heart for want of
+you; for want of everything I care for. I could not sleep. I used to see
+the morning break. Perhaps here and there a drum would begin to beat,
+the cries of children would rise up from the streets, and I would lie in
+my bed with my hands clenched, thinking of the jingle of a hansom cab
+along the streets of London, and the gas lamps paling as the grey light
+spread. Violet!"
+
+Violet twisted her hands one within the other. This was just what she had
+thought to avoid, to shut out from her mind--the knowledge that he had
+suffered. But the evidence of his pain was too indisputable. There was no
+shutting it out. It sounded loud in his voice, it showed in his looks.
+His face had grown white and haggard, the face of a tortured man; his
+hands trembled, his eyes were fierce with longing.
+
+"Oh, don't," she cried, and so great was her trouble that for once she
+did not choose her words. "You know that it's impossible. We can't alter
+these things."
+
+She meant by "these things" the natural law that white shall mate with
+white, and brown with brown; and so Shere Ali understood her. He ceased
+to plead. There came a dreadful look upon his face.
+
+"Oh, I know," he exclaimed brutally. "You would be marrying a nigger."
+
+"I never said that," Violet interrupted hastily.
+
+"But you meant it," and he began to laugh bitterly and very quietly. To
+Violet that laughter was horrible. It frightened her. "Oh, yes, yes," he
+said. "When we come over to England we are very fine people. Women
+welcome us and are kind, men make us their friends. But out here! We
+quickly learn out here that we are the inferior people. Suppose that I
+wanted to be a soldier, not an officer of my levies, but a soldier in
+your army with a soldier's chances of promotion and high rank! Do you
+know what would happen? I might serve for twenty years, and at the end of
+it the youngest subaltern out of Sandhurst, with a moustache he can't
+feel upon his lip, would in case of war step over my head and command me.
+Why, I couldn't win the Victoria Cross, even though I had earned it ten
+times over. We are the subject races," and he turned to her abruptly. "I
+am in disfavour to-night. Do you know why? Because I am not dressed in a
+silk jacket; because I am not wearing jewels like a woman, as those
+Princes are," and he waved his hand contemptuously towards a group of
+them. "They are content," he cried. "But I was brought up in England, and
+I am not."
+
+He buried his face in his hands and was silent; and as he sat thus,
+Violet Oliver said to him with a gentle reproach:
+
+"When we parted in London last year you spoke in a different way--a
+better way. I remember very well what you said. For I was glad to hear
+it. You said: 'I have not forgotten really that there is much to do in my
+own country. I have not forgotten that I can thank all of you here who
+have shown me so much kindness by more than mere words. For I can help in
+Chiltistan--I can really help.'"
+
+Shere All raised his face from his hands with the air of a man listening
+to strange and curious words.
+
+"I said that?"
+
+"Yes," and in her turn Violet Oliver began to plead. "I wish that
+to-night you could recapture that fine spirit. I should be very glad of
+it. For I am troubled by your unhappiness."
+
+But Shere Ali shook his head.
+
+"I have been in Chiltistan since I spoke those words. And they will not
+let me help."
+
+"There's the road."
+
+"It must not be continued."
+
+"There is, at all events, your father," Violet suggested. "You can
+help him."
+
+And again Shere Ali laughed. But this time the bitterness had gone from
+his voice. He laughed with a sense of humour, almost, it seemed to
+Violet, with enjoyment.
+
+"My father!" he said. "I'll tell you about my father," and his face
+cleared for a moment of its distress as he turned towards her. "He
+received me in the audience chamber of his palace at Kohara. I had not
+seen him for ten years. How do you think he received me? He was sitting
+on a chair of brocade with silver legs in great magnificence, and across
+his knees he held a loaded rifle at full cock. It was a Snider, so that I
+could be quite sure it was cocked."
+
+Violet stared at him, not understanding.
+
+"But why?" she asked.
+
+"Well, he knew quite well that I was brought back to Kohara in order to
+replace him, if he didn't mend his ways and spend less money. And he
+didn't mean to be replaced." The smile broke out again on Shere Ali's
+face as he remembered the scene. "He sat there with his great beard, dyed
+red, spreading across his chest, a long velvet coat covering his knees,
+and the loaded rifle laid over the coat. His eyes watched me, while his
+fingers played about the trigger."
+
+Violet Oliver was horrified.
+
+"You mean--that he meant to kill you!" she cried incredulously.
+
+"Yes," said Shere Ali calmly. "I think he meant to do that. It's not so
+very unusual in our family. He probably thought that I might try to kill
+him. However, he didn't do it. You see, my father's very fond of the
+English, so I at once began to talk to him about England. It was evening
+when I went into the reception chamber; but it was broad daylight when I
+came out. I talked for my life that night--and won. He became so
+interested that he forgot to shoot me; and at the end I was wise enough
+to assure him that there was a great deal more to tell."
+
+The ways of the Princes in the States beyond the Frontier were unknown to
+Violet Oliver. The ruling family of Chiltistan was no exception to the
+general rule. In its annals there was hardly a page which was not stained
+with blood. When the son succeeded to the throne, it was, as often as
+not, after murdering his brothers, and if he omitted that precaution, as
+often as not he paid the penalty. Shere Ali was fortunate in that he had
+no brothers. But, on the other hand, he had a father, and there was no
+great security. Violet was startled, and almost as much bewildered as she
+was startled. She could not understand Shere Ali's composure. He spoke in
+so matter-of-fact a tone.
+
+"However," she said, grasping at the fact, "he has not killed you. He has
+not since tried to kill you."
+
+"No. I don't think he has," said Shere Ali slowly. But he spoke like one
+in doubt. "You see he realised very soon that I was not after all
+acceptable to the English. I wouldn't quite do what they wanted," and the
+humour died out of his face.
+
+"What did they want?"
+
+Shere Ali looked at her in hesitation.
+
+"Shall I tell you? I will. They wanted me to marry--one of my own people.
+They wanted me to forget," and he broke out in a passionate scorn. "As if
+I could do either--after I had known you."
+
+"Hush!" said she.
+
+But he was not to be checked.
+
+"You said it was impossible that you should marry me. It's no less
+impossible that I should marry now one of my own race. You know that. You
+can't deny it."
+
+Violet did not try to. He was speaking truth then, she was well aware. A
+great pity swelled up in her heart for him. She turned to him with a
+smile, in which there was much tenderness. His life was all awry; and
+both were quite helpless to set it right.
+
+"I am very sorry," she said in a whisper of remorse. "I did not think. I
+have done you grave harm."
+
+"Not you," he said quietly. "You may be quite sure of that. Those who
+have done me harm are those who sent me, ten years ago, to England."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+A QUESTION ANSWERED
+
+
+Thereafter both sat silent for a little while. The stream of people
+across the courtyard had diminished. High up on the great platform by the
+lighted arches the throng still pressed and shifted. But here there was
+quietude. The clatter of voices had died down. A band playing somewhere
+near at hand could be heard. Violet Oliver for the first time in her life
+had been brought face to face with a real tragedy. She was conscious of
+it as something irremediable and terribly sad. And for her own share in
+bringing it about she was full of remorse. She looked at Shere Ali as he
+sat beside her, his eyes gazing into the courtyard, his face tired and
+hopeless. There was nothing to be done. Her thoughts told her so no less
+clearly than his face. Here was a life spoilt at the beginning. But that
+was all that she saw. That the spoilt life might become an instrument of
+evil--she was blind to that possibility: she thought merely of the youth
+who suffered and still must suffer; who was crippled by the very means
+which were meant to strengthen him: and pity inclined her towards him
+with an ever-increasing strength.
+
+"I couldn't do it," she repeated silently to herself. "I couldn't do it.
+It would be madness."
+
+Shere Ali raised his head and said with a smile, "I am glad they are not
+playing the tune which I once heard on the Lake of Geneva, and again in
+London when I said good-bye to you."
+
+And then Violet sought to comfort him, her mind still working on what he
+had told her of his life in Chiltistan.
+
+"But it will become easier," she said, beginning in that general way. "In
+time you will rule in Chiltistan. That is certain." But he checked her
+with a shake of the head.
+
+"Certain? There is the son of Abdulla Mohammed, who fought against my
+father when Linforth's father was killed. It is likely enough that those
+old days will be revived. And I should have the priests against me."
+
+"The Mullahs!" she exclaimed, remembering in what terms he was wont to
+speak of them to her.
+
+"Yes," he answered, "I have set them against me already. They laid their
+traps for me while I was on the sea, and I would not fall into them. They
+would have liked to raise the country against my father and the English,
+just as they raised it twenty-five years ago. And they would have liked
+me to join in with them."
+
+He related to Violet the story of his meeting with Safdar Khan at the
+Gate of Lahore, and he repeated the words which he had used in Safdar
+Khan's hearing.
+
+"It did not take long for my threats to be repeated in the bazaar of
+Kohara, and from the bazaar they were quickly carried to the ears of the
+Mullahs. I had proof of it," he said with a laugh.
+
+Violet asked him anxiously for the proof.
+
+"I can tell to a day when the words were repeated in Kohara. For a
+fortnight after my coming the Mullahs still had hopes. They had heard
+nothing, and they met me always with salutations and greetings. Then
+came the day when I rode up the valley and a Mullah who had smiled the
+day before passed me as though he had not noticed me at all. The news
+had come. I was sure of it at the time. I reined in my horse and called
+sharply to one of the servants riding behind me, 'Who is that?' The
+Mullah heard the question, and he turned and up went the palm of his
+hand to his forehead in a flash. But I was not inclined to let him off
+so easily."
+
+"What did you do?" Violet asked uneasily.
+
+"I said to him, 'My friend, I will take care that you know me the next
+time we meet upon the road. Show me your hands!' He held them out, and
+they were soft as a woman's. I was close to a bridge which some workmen
+were repairing. So I had my friend brought along to the bridge. Then I
+said to one of the workmen, 'Would you like to earn your day's wage and
+yet do no work?' He laughed, thinking that I was joking. But I was not. I
+said to him, 'Very well, then, see that this soft-handed creature does
+your day's work. You will bring him to me at the Palace this evening, and
+if I find that he has not done the work, or that you have helped him, you
+will forfeit your wages and I will whip you both into the bargain.' The
+Mullah was brought to me in the evening," said Shere Ali, smiling grimly.
+"He was so stiff he could hardly walk. I made him show me his hands
+again, and this time they were blistered. So I told him to remember his
+manners in the future, and I let him go. But he was a man of prominence
+in the country, and when the story got known he became rather
+ridiculous." He turned with a smile to Violet Oliver.
+
+"My people don't like being made ridiculous--least of all Mullahs."
+
+But there was no answering smile on Violet's face. Rather she was
+troubled and alarmed.
+
+"But surely that was unwise?"
+
+Shere Ali shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"What does it matter?" he said. He did not tell her all of that story.
+There was an episode which had occurred two days later when Shere Ali was
+stalking an ibex on the hillside. A bullet had whistled close by his ear,
+and it had been fired from behind him. He was never quite sure whether
+his father or the Mullah was responsible for that bullet, but he inclined
+to attribute it to the Mullah.
+
+"Yes, I have the priests against me," he said. "They call me the
+Englishman." Then he laughed. "A curious piece of irony, isn't it?"
+
+He stood up suddenly and said: "When I left England I was in doubt. I
+could not be sure whether my home, my true home, was there or in
+Chiltistan."
+
+"Yes, I remember," said Violet.
+
+"I am no longer in doubt. It is neither in England nor in Chiltistan. I
+am a citizen of no country. I have no place anywhere at all."
+
+Violet Oliver stood up and faced him.
+
+"I must be going. I must find my friends," she said, and as he took her
+hand, she added, "I am so very sorry."
+
+The words, she felt, were utterly inadequate, but no others would come to
+her lips, and so with a trembling smile she repeated them. She drew her
+hand from his clasp and moved a step or two away. But he followed her,
+and she stopped and shook her head.
+
+"This is really good-bye," she said simply and very gravely.
+
+"I want to ask you a question," he explained. "Will you answer it?"
+
+"How can I tell you until you ask it?"
+
+He looked at her for a moment as though in doubt whether he should speak
+or not. Then he said, "Are you going to marry--Linforth?"
+
+The blood slowly mounted into her face and flushed her forehead
+and cheeks.
+
+"He has not even asked me to marry him," she said, and moved down into
+the courtyard.
+
+Shere Ali watched her as she went. That was the last time he should see
+her, he told himself. The last time in all his life. His eyes followed
+her, noting the grace of her movements, the whiteness of her skin, all
+her daintiness of dress and person. A madness kindled in his blood. He
+had a wild thought of springing down, of capturing her. She mounted the
+steps and disappeared among the throng.
+
+And they wanted him to marry--to marry one of his own people. Shere Ali
+suddenly saw the face of the Deputy Commissioner at Lahore calmly
+suggesting the arrangement, almost ordering it. He sat down again upon
+the couch and once more began to laugh. But the laughter ceased very
+quickly, and folding his arms upon the high end of the couch, he bowed
+his head upon them and was still.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+SHERE ALI MEETS AN OLD FRIEND
+
+
+The carriage which was to take Violet Oliver and her friends back to
+their camp had been parked amongst those farthest from the door. Violet
+stood for a long while under the awning, waiting while the interminable
+procession went by. The generals in their scarlet coats, the ladies in
+their satin gowns, the great officers of state attended by their escorts,
+the native princes, mounted into their carriages and were driven away.
+The ceremony and the reception which followed it had been markedly
+successful even in that land of ceremonies and magnificence. The voices
+about her told her so as they spoke of this or that splendour and
+recalled the picturesque figures which had given colour to the scene. But
+the laughter, the praise, the very tones of enjoyment had to her a
+heartless ring. She watched the pageantry of the great Indian
+Administration dissolve, and was blind to its glitter and conscious only
+of its ruthlessness. For ruthless she found it to-night. She had been
+face to face with a victim of the system--a youth broken by it,
+needlessly broken, and as helpless to recover from his hurt as a wounded
+animal. The harm had been done no doubt with the very best intention, but
+the harm had been done. She was conscious of her own share in the blame
+and she drove miserably home, with the picture of Shere Ali's face as she
+had last seen it to bear her company, and with his cry, that he had no
+place anywhere at all, sounding in her ears.
+
+When she reached the privacy of her own tent, and had dismissed her maid,
+she unlocked one of her trunks and took out from it her jewel case. She
+had been careful not to wear her necklace of pearls that night, and she
+took it out of the case now and laid it upon her knees. She was very
+sorry to part with it. She touched and caressed the pearls with loving
+fingers, and once she lifted it as though she would place it about her
+neck. But she checked her hands, fearing that if she put it on she would
+never bring herself to let it go. Already as she watched and fingered it
+and bent her head now and again to scrutinise a stone, small insidious
+voices began to whisper at her heart.
+
+"He asked for nothing when he gave it you."
+
+"You made no promise when you took it."
+
+"It was a gift without conditions hinted or implied."
+
+Violet Oliver took the world lightly on the whole. Only this one passion
+for jewels and precious stones had touched her deeply as yet. Of love
+she knew little beyond the name and its aspect in others. She was
+familiar enough with that, so familiar that she gave little heed to what
+lay behind the aspect--or had given little heed until to-night. Her
+husband she had accepted rather than actively welcomed. She had lived
+with him in a mood of placid and unquestioning good-humour, and she had
+greatly missed him when he died. But it was the presence in the house
+that she missed, rather than the lover. To-night, almost for the first
+time, she had really looked under the surface. Insight had been
+vouchsafed to her; and in remorse she was minded to put the thing she
+greatly valued away from her.
+
+She rose suddenly, and, lest the temptation to keep the necklace should
+prove too strong, laid it away in its case.
+
+A post went every day over the passes into Chiltistan. She wrapped up the
+case in brown paper, tied it, sealed it, and addressed it. There was need
+to send it off, she well knew, before the picture of Shere Ali, now so
+vivid in her mind, lost its aspect of poignant suffering and faded out of
+her thoughts.
+
+But she slept ill and in the middle of the night she rose from her bed.
+The tent was pitch dark. She lit her candle; and it was the light of the
+candle which awoke her maid. The tent was a double one; the maid slept in
+the smaller portion of it and a canvas doorway gave entrance into her
+mistress' room. Over this doorway hung the usual screen of green matting.
+Now these screens act as screens, are as impenetrable to the eye as a
+door--so long as there is no light behind them. But place a light behind
+them and they become transparent. This was what Violet Oliver had done.
+She had lit her candle and at once a part of the interior of her tent was
+visible to her maid as she lay in bed.
+
+The maid saw the table and the sealed parcel upon it. Then she saw Mrs.
+Oliver come to the table, break the seals, open the parcel, take out a
+jewel case--a jewel case which the maid knew well--and carry it and the
+parcel out of sight. Mrs. Oliver crossed to a corner of the room where
+her trunks lay; and the next moment the maid heard a key grate in a lock.
+For a little while the candle still burned, and every now and then a
+distorted shadow was flung upon the wall of the tent within the maid's
+vision. It seemed to her that Mrs. Oliver was sitting at a little writing
+table which stood close by the trunk. Then the light went out again. The
+maid would have thought no more of this incident, but on entering the
+room next morning with a cup of tea, she was surprised to see the packet
+once more sealed and fastened on the centre table.
+
+"Adela," said Mrs. Oliver, "I want you to take that parcel to the Post
+Office yourself and send it off."
+
+The maid took the parcel away.
+
+Violet Oliver, with a sigh of relief, drank her tea. At last, she
+thought, the end was reached. Now, indeed, her life and Shere Ali's life
+would touch no more. But she was to see him again. For two days later, as
+the train which was carrying her northwards to Lahore moved out of the
+station, she saw from the window of her carriage the young Prince of
+Chiltistan standing upon the platform. She drew back quickly, fearing
+that he would see her. But he was watching the train with indifferent
+eyes; and the spectacle of his indifference struck her as something
+incongruous and strange. She had been thinking of him with remorse as a
+man twisting like Hamlet in the coils of tragedy, and wearing like Hamlet
+the tragic mien. Yet here he was on the platform of a railway station,
+waiting, like any commonplace traveller, with an uninterested patience
+for his train. The aspect of Shere Ali diminished Violet Oliver's
+remorse. She wondered for a moment why he was not travelling upon the
+same train as herself, for his destination must be northwards too. And
+then she lost sight of him. She was glad that after all the last vision
+of him which she was to carry away was not the vision of a youth helpless
+and despairing with a trouble-tortured face.
+
+Shere Ali was following out the destiny to which his character bound
+him. He had been made and moulded and fashioned, and though he knew he
+had been fashioned awry, he could no more change and rebuild himself
+than the hunchback can will away his hump. He was driven down the ways
+of circumstance. At present he saw and knew that he was so driven. He
+knew, too, that he could not resist. This half-year in Chiltistan had
+taught him that.
+
+So he went southwards to Calcutta. The mere thought of Chiltistan was
+unendurable. He had to forget. There was no possibility of forgetfulness
+amongst his own hills and the foreign race that once had been his own
+people. Southwards he went to Calcutta, and in that city for a time was
+lost to sight. He emerged one afternoon upon the racecourse, and while
+standing on the grass in front of the Club stand, before the horses
+cantered down to the starting post, he saw an elderly man, heavy of build
+but still erect, approach him with a smile.
+
+Shere Ali would have avoided that man if he could. He hesitated,
+unwilling to recognise and unable quite to ignore. And while he
+hesitated, the elderly man held out his hand.
+
+"We know each other, surely. I used to see you at Eton, didn't I? I used
+to run down to see a young friend of mine and a friend of yours, Dick
+Linforth. I am Colonel Dewes."
+
+"Yes, I remember," said Shere Ali with some embarrassment; and he took
+the Colonel's outstretched hand. "I thought that you had left India
+for good."
+
+"So did I," said Dewes. "But I was wrong." He turned and walked along by
+the side of Shere Ali. "I don't know why exactly, but I did not find life
+in London so very interesting."
+
+Shere Ali looked quickly at the Colonel.
+
+"Yet you had looked forward to retiring and going home?" he asked with a
+keen interest. Colonel Dewes gave himself up to reflection. He sounded
+the obscurities of his mind. It was a practice to which he was not
+accustomed. He drew himself erect, his eyes became fixed, and with a
+puckered forehead he thought.
+
+"I suppose so," he said. "Yes, certainly. I remember. One used to buck at
+mess of the good time one would have, the comfort of one's club and one's
+rooms, and the rest of it. It isn't comfortable in India, is it? Not
+compared with England. Your furniture, your house, and all that sort of
+thing. You live as if you were a lodger, don't you know, and it didn't
+matter for a little while whether you were comfortable or not. The little
+while slips on and on, and suddenly you find you have been in the country
+twenty or thirty years, and you have never taken the trouble to be
+comfortable. It's like living in a dak-bungalow."
+
+The Colonel halted and pulled at his moustache. He had made a discovery.
+He had reflected not without result. "By George!" he said, "that's
+right. Let me put it properly now, as a fellow would put it in a book,
+if he hit upon anything as good." He framed his aphorism in different
+phrases before he was satisfied with it. Then he delivered himself of it
+with pride.
+
+"At the bottom of the Englishman's conception of life in India, there is
+always the idea of a dak-bungalow," and he repeated the sentence to
+commit it surely to memory. "But don't you use it," he said, turning to
+Shere Ali suddenly. "I thought of that--not you. It's mine."
+
+"I won't use it," said Shere Ali.
+
+"Life in India is based upon the dak-bungalow," said Dewes. "Yes, yes";
+and so great was his pride that he relented towards Shere Ali. "You may
+use it if you like," he conceded. "Only you would naturally add that it
+was I who thought of it."
+
+Shere Ali smiled and replied:
+
+"I won't fail to do that, Colonel Dewes."
+
+"No? Then use it as much as you like, for it's true. Out here one
+remembers the comfort of England and looks forward to it. But back there,
+one forgets the discomfort of India. By George! that's pretty good, too.
+Shall we look at the horses?"
+
+Shere Ali did not answer that question. With a quiet persistence he kept
+Colonel Dewes to the conversation. Colonel Dewes for his part was not
+reluctant to continue it, in spite of the mental wear and tear which it
+involved. He felt that he was clearly in the vein. There was no knowing
+what brilliant thing he might not say next. He wished that some of those
+clever fellows on the India Council were listening to him.
+
+"Why?" asked Shere Ali. "Why back there does one forget the discomfort
+of India?"
+
+He asked the question less in search of information than to discover
+whether the feelings of which he was conscious were shared too by his
+companion.
+
+"Why?" answered Dewes wrinkling his forehead again. "Because one misses
+more than one thought to miss and one doesn't find half what one thought
+to find. Come along here!"
+
+He led Shere Ali up to the top of the stand.
+
+"We can see the race quite well from here," he said, "although that is
+not the reason why I brought you up. This is what I wanted to show you."
+
+He waved his hand over towards the great space which the racecourse
+enclosed. It was thronged with natives robed in saffron and pink, in blue
+and white, in scarlet and delicate shades of mauve and violet. The whole
+enclosure was ablaze with colour, and the colours perpetually moved and
+grouped themselves afresh as the throng shifted. A great noise of cries
+rose up into the clear air.
+
+"I suppose that is what I missed," said Dewes, "not the noise, not the
+mere crowd--you can get both on an English racecourse--but the colour."
+
+And suddenly before Shere Ali's eyes there rose a vision of the Paddock
+at Newmarket during a July meeting. The sleek horses paced within the
+cool grove of trees; the bright sunlight, piercing the screen of leaves
+overhead, dappled their backs with flecks of gold. Nothing of the
+sunburnt grass before his eyes was visible to him. He saw the green turf
+of the Jockey Club enclosure, the seats, the luncheon room behind with
+its open doors and windows.
+
+"Yes, I understand," he said. "But you have come back," and a note of
+envy sounded in his voice. Here was one point in which the parallel
+between his case and that of Colonel Dewes was not complete. Dewes had
+missed India as he had missed England. But Dewes was a free man. He
+could go whither he would. "Yes, you were able to come back. How long do
+you stay?"
+
+And the answer to that question startled Shere Ali.
+
+"I have come back for good."
+
+"You are going to live here?" cried Shere Ali.
+
+"Not here, exactly. In Cashmere. I go up to Cashmere in a week's time. I
+shall live there and die there."
+
+Colonel Dewes spoke without any note of anticipation, and without any
+regret. It was difficult for Shere Ali to understand how deeply he felt.
+Yet the feeling must be deep. He had cut himself off from his own people,
+from his own country. Shere Ali was stirred to yet more questions. He was
+anxious to understand thoroughly all that had moved this commonplace
+matter-of-fact man at his side.
+
+"You found life in England so dull?" he asked.
+
+"Well, one felt a stranger," said Dewes. "One had lost one's
+associations. I know there are men who throw themselves into public life
+and the rest of it. But I couldn't. I hadn't the heart for it even if I
+had the ability. There was Lawrence, of course. He governed India and
+then he went on the School Board," and Dewes thumped his fist upon the
+rail in front of him. "How he was able to do it beats me altogether. I
+read his life with amazement. He was just as keen about the School Board
+as he had been about India when he was Viceroy here. He threw himself
+into it with just as much vigour. That beats me. He was a big man, of
+course, and I am not. I suppose that's the explanation. Anyway, the
+School Board was not for me. I put in my winters for some years at Corfu
+shooting woodcock. And in the summer I met a man or two back on leave at
+my club. But on the whole it was pretty dull. Yes," and he nodded his
+head, and for the first time a note of despondency sounded in his voice.
+"Yes, on the whole it was pretty dull. It will be better in Cashmere."
+
+"It would have been still better if you had never seen India at all,"
+said Shere Ali.
+
+"No; I don't say that. I had my good time in India--twenty-five years of
+it, the prime of my life. No; I have nothing to complain of," said Dewes.
+
+Here was another difference brought to Shere Ali's eyes. He himself was
+still young; the prime years were before him, not behind. He looked down,
+even as Dewes had done, over that wide space gay with colours as a garden
+of flowers; but in the one man's eyes there was a light of satisfaction,
+in the other's a gleam almost of hatred.
+
+"You are not sorry you came out to India," he said. "Well, for my part,"
+and his voice suddenly shook with passion, "I wish to heaven I had never
+seen England."
+
+Dewes turned about, a vacant stare of perplexity upon his face.
+
+"Oh, come, I say!" he protested.
+
+"I mean it!" cried Shere Ali. "It was the worst thing that could have
+happened. I shall know no peace of mind again, no contentment, no
+happiness, not until I am dead. I wish I were dead!"
+
+And though he spoke in a low voice, he spoke with so much violence that
+Colonel Dewes was quite astounded. He was aware of no similiarity between
+his own case and that of Shere Ali. He had long since forgotten the
+exhortations of Luffe.
+
+"Oh, come now," he repeated. "Isn't that a little ungrateful--what?"
+
+He could hardly have chosen a word less likely to soothe the exasperated
+nerves of his companion. Shere Ali laughed harshly.
+
+"I ought to be grateful?" said he.
+
+"Well," said Dewes, "you have been to Eton and Oxford, you have seen
+London. All that is bound to have broadened your mind. Don't you feel
+that your mind has broadened?"
+
+"Tell me the use of a broad mind in Chiltistan," said Shere Ali. And
+Colonel Dewes, who had last seen the valleys of that remote country more
+than twenty years before, was baffled by the challenge.
+
+"To tell the truth, I am a little out of touch with Indian problems," he
+said. "But it's surely good in every way that there should be a man up
+there who knows we have something in the way of an army. When I was
+there, there was trouble which would have been quite prevented by
+knowledge of that kind."
+
+"Are you sure?" said Shere Ali quietly; and the two men turned and went
+down from the roof of the stand.
+
+The words which Dewes had just used rankled in Shere Ali's mind, quietly
+though he had received them. Here was the one definite advantage of his
+education in England on which Dewes could lay his finger. He knew enough
+of the strength of the British army to know also the wisdom of keeping
+his people quiet. For that he had been sacrificed. It was an
+advantage--yes. But an advantage to whom? he asked. Why, to those
+governing people here who had to find the money and the troops to
+suppress a rising, and to confront at the same time an outcry at home
+from the opponents of the forward movement. It was to their advantage
+certainly that he should have been sent to England. And then he was told
+to be grateful!
+
+As they came out again from the winding staircase and turned towards the
+paddock Colonel Dewes took Shere Ali by the arm, and said in a voice of
+kindliness:
+
+"And what has become of all the fine ambitions you and Dick Linforth used
+to have in common?"
+
+"Linforth's still at Chatham," replied Shere Ali shortly.
+
+"Yes, but you are here. You might make a beginning by yourself."
+
+"They won't let me."
+
+"There's the road," suggested Dewes.
+
+"They won't let me add an inch to it. They will let me do nothing, and
+they won't let Linforth come out. I wish they would," he added in a
+softer voice. "If Linforth were to come out to Chiltistan it might make a
+difference."
+
+They had walked round to the rails in front of the stand, and Shere Ali
+looked up the steps to the Viceroy's box. The Viceroy was present that
+afternoon. Shere Ali saw his tall figure, with the stoop of the shoulders
+characteristic of him, as he stood dressed in a grey frock-coat, with the
+ladies of his family and one or two of his _aides-de-camp_ about him.
+Shere Ali suddenly stopped and nodded towards the box.
+
+"Have you any influence there?" he asked of Colonel Dewes; and he spoke
+with a great longing, a great eagerness, and he waited for the answer in
+a great suspense.
+
+Dewes shook his head.
+
+"None," he replied; "I am nobody at all."
+
+The hope died out of Shere Ali's face.
+
+"I am sorry," he said; and the eagerness had changed into despair. There
+was just a chance, he thought, of salvation for himself if only Linforth
+could be fetched out to India. He might resume with Linforth his old
+companionship, and so recapture something of his old faith and of his
+bright ideals. There was sore need that he should recapture them. Shere
+Ali was well aware of it. More and more frequently sure warnings came to
+him. Now it was some dim recollection of beliefs once strongly clung to,
+which came back to him with a shock. He would awaken through some chance
+word to the glory of the English rule in India, the lessening poverty of
+the Indian nations, the incorruptibility of the English officials and
+their justice.
+
+"Yes, yes," he would say with astonishment, "I was sure of these things;
+I knew them as familiar truths," even as a man gradually going blind
+might one day see clearly and become aware of his narrowing vision. Or
+perhaps it would be some sudden unsuspected revulsion of feeling in his
+heart. Such a revulsion had come to him this afternoon as he had gazed up
+to the Viceroy's box. A wild and unreasoning wrath had flashed up within
+him, not against the system, but against that tall stooping man, worn
+with work, who was at once its representative and its flower. Up there
+the great man stood--so his thoughts ran--complacent, self-satisfied,
+careless of the harm which his system wrought. Down here upon the grass
+walked a man warped and perverted out of his natural course. He had been
+sent to Eton and to Oxford, and had been filled with longings and desires
+which could have no fruition; he had been trained to delicate thoughts
+and habits which must daily be offended and daily be a cause of offence
+to his countrymen. But what did the tall stooping man care? Shere Ali now
+knew that the English had something in the way of an army. What did it
+matter whether he lived in unhappiness so long as that knowledge was the
+price of his unhappiness? A cruel, careless, warping business, this
+English rule.
+
+Thus Shere Ali felt rather than thought, and realised the while the
+danger of his bitter heart. Once more he appealed to Colonel Dewes,
+standing before him with burning eyes.
+
+"Bring Linforth out to India! If you have any influence, use it; if you
+have none, obtain it. Only bring Linforth out to India, and bring him
+very quickly!"
+
+Once before a passionate appeal had been made to Colonel Dewes by a man
+in straits, and Colonel Dewes had not understood and had not obeyed. Now,
+a quarter of a century later another appeal was made by a man sinking, as
+surely as Luffe had been sinking before, and once again Dewes did not
+understand.
+
+He took Shere Ali by the arm, and said in a kindly voice:
+
+"I tell you what it is, my lad. You have been going the pace a bit, eh?
+Calcutta's no good. You'll only collect debts and a lot of things you are
+better without. Better get out of it."
+
+Shere Ali's face closed as his lips had done. All expression died from it
+in a moment. There was no help for him in Colonel Dewes. He said good-bye
+with a smile, and walked out past the stand. His syce was waiting for him
+outside the railings.
+
+Shere Ali had come to the races wearing a sun-helmet, and, as the fashion
+is amongst the Europeans in Calcutta, his syce carried a silk hat for
+Shere Ali to take in exchange for his helmet when the sun went down.
+Shere Ali, like most of the Europeanised Indians, was more scrupulous
+than any Englishman in adhering to the European custom. But to-day, with
+an angry gesture, he repelled his syce.
+
+"I am going," he said. "You can take that thing away."
+
+His sense of humour failed him altogether. He would have liked furiously
+to kick and trample upon that glossy emblem of the civilised world; he
+had much ado to refrain. The syce carried back the silk hat to Shere
+Ali's smart trap, and Shere Ali drove home in his helmet. Thus he began
+publicly to renounce the cherished illusion that he was of the white
+people, and must do as the white people did.
+
+But Colonel Dewes pointed unwittingly the significance of that trivial
+matter on the same night. He dined at the house of an old friend, and
+after the ladies had gone he moved up into the next chair, and so sat
+beside a weary-looking official from the Punjab named Ralston, who had
+come down to Calcutta on leave. Colonel Dewes began to talk of his
+meeting with Shere Ali that afternoon. At the mention of Shere Ali's name
+the official sat up and asked for more.
+
+"He looked pretty bad," said Colonel Dewes. "Jumpy and feverish, and with
+the air of a man who has been sitting up all night for a week or two. But
+this is what interested me most," and Dewes told how the lad had implored
+him to bring Linforth out to India.
+
+"Who's Linforth?" asked the official quickly. "Not the son of that
+Linforth who--"
+
+"Yes, that's the man," said the Colonel testily. "But you interrupt me.
+What interested me was this--when I refused to help, Shere Ali's face
+changed in a most extraordinary way. All the fire went from his eyes, all
+the agitation from his face. It was like looking at an open box full of
+interesting things, and then--bang! someone slaps down the lid, and you
+are staring at a flat piece of wood. It was as if--as if--well, I can't
+find a better comparison."
+
+"It was as if a European suddenly changed before your eyes into an
+Oriental."
+
+Dewes was not pleased with Ralston's success in supplying the simile he
+could not hit upon himself.
+
+"That's a little fanciful," he said grudgingly; and then recognised
+frankly the justness of its application. "Yet it's true--a European
+changing into an Oriental! Yes, it just looked like that."
+
+"It may actually have been that," said the official quietly. And he
+added: "I met Shere Ali last year at Lahore on his way north to
+Chiltistan. I was interested then; I am all the more interested now, for
+I have just been appointed to Peshawur."
+
+He spoke in a voice which was grave--so grave that Colonel Dewes looked
+quickly towards him.
+
+"Do you think there will be trouble up there in Chiltistan?" he asked.
+
+The Deputy-Commissioner, who was now Chief Commissioner, smiled wearily.
+
+"There is always trouble up there in Chiltistan," he said. "That I know.
+What I think is this--Shere Ali should have gone to the Mayo College at
+Ajmere. That would have been a compromise which would have satisfied his
+father and done him no harm. But since he didn't--since he went to Eton,
+and to Oxford, and ran loose in London for a year or two--why, I think he
+is right."
+
+"How do you mean--right?" asked the Colonel.
+
+"I mean that the sooner Linforth is fetched out to India and sent up to
+Chiltistan, the better it will be," said the Commissioner.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+NEWS FROM MECCA
+
+
+Mr. Charles Ralston, being a bachelor and of an economical mind even when
+on leave in Calcutta, had taken up his quarters in a grass hut in the
+garden of his Club. He awoke the next morning with an uncomfortable
+feeling that there was work to be done. The feeling changed into sure
+knowledge as he reflected upon the conversation which he had had with
+Colonel Dewes, and he accordingly arose and went about it. For ten days
+he went to and fro between the Club and Government House, where he held
+long and vigorous interviews with officials who did not wish to see him.
+Moreover, other people came to see him privately--people of no social
+importance for the most part, although there were one or two officers of
+the police service amongst them. With these he again held long
+interviews, asking many inquisitive questions. Then he would go out by
+himself into those parts of the city where the men of broken fortunes,
+the jockeys run to seed, and the prize-fighters chiefly preferred to
+congregate. In the low quarters he sought his information of the waifs
+and strays who are cast up into the drinking-bars of any Oriental port,
+and he did not come back empty-handed.
+
+For ten days he thus toiled for the good of the Indian Government,
+and, above all, of that part of it which had its headquarters at
+Lahore. And on the morning of the eleventh day, as he was just
+preparing to leave for Government House, where his persistence had
+prevailed, a tall, black-bearded and very sunburnt man noiselessly
+opened the door of the hut and as noiselessly stepped inside. Ralston,
+indeed, did not at once notice him, nor did the stranger call attention
+to his presence. He waited, motionless and patient, until Ralston
+happened to turn and see him.
+
+"Hatch!" cried Ralston with a smile of welcome stealing over his startled
+face, and making it very pleasant to look upon. "You?"
+
+"Yes," answered the tall man; "I reached Calcutta last night. I went into
+the Club for breakfast. They told me you were here."
+
+Robert Hatch was of the same age as Ralston. But there was little else
+which they had in common. The two men had met some fifteen years ago for
+the first time, in Peshawur, and on that first meeting some subtle chord
+of sympathy had drawn them together; and so securely that even though
+they met but seldom nowadays, their friendship had easily survived the
+long intervals. The story of Hatch's life was a simple one. He had
+married in his twenty-second year a wife a year younger than himself, and
+together the couple had settled down upon an estate which Hatch owned in
+Devonshire. Only a year after the marriage, however, Hatch's wife died,
+and he, disliking his home, had gone restlessly abroad. The restlessness
+had grown, a certain taste for Oriental literature and thought had been
+fostered by his travels. He had become a wanderer upon the face of the
+earth--a man of many clubs in different quarters of the world, and of
+many friends, who had come to look upon his unexpected appearance and no
+less sudden departure as part of the ordinary tenour of their lives. Thus
+it was not the appearance of Hatch which had startled Ralston, but rather
+the silence of it.
+
+"Why didn't you speak?" he asked. "Why did you stand waiting there for me
+to look your way?"
+
+Hatch laughed as he sat down in a chair.
+
+"I have got into the habit of waiting, I suppose," he said. "For the last
+five months I have been a servant in the train of the Sultan of the
+Maldive Islands."
+
+Ralston was not as a rule to be surprised by any strange thing which
+Hatch might have chosen to do. He merely glanced at his companion
+and asked:
+
+"What in the world were you doing in the Maldive Islands?"
+
+"Nothing at all," replied Hatch. "I did not go to them. I joined the
+Sultan at Suez."
+
+This time Ralston, who had been moving about the room in search of some
+papers which he had mislaid, came to a stop. His attention was arrested.
+He sat down in a chair and prepared to listen.
+
+"Go on," he said.
+
+"I wanted to go to Mecca," said Hatch, and Ralston nodded his head as
+though he had expected just those words.
+
+"I did not see how I was going to get there by myself," Hatch continued,
+"however carefully I managed my disguise."
+
+"Yet you speak Arabic," said Ralston.
+
+"Yes, the language wasn't the difficulty. Indeed, a great many of the
+pilgrims--the people from Central Asia, for instance--don't speak Arabic
+at all. But I felt sure that if I went down the Red Sea alone on a
+pilgrim steamer, landed alone at Jeddah, and went up with a crowd of
+others to Mecca, living with them, sleeping with them, day after day,
+sooner or later I should make some fatal slip and never reach Mecca at
+all. If Burton made one mistake, how many should I? So I put the journey
+off year after year. But this autumn I heard that the Sultan of the
+Maldive Islands intended to make the pilgrimage. He was a friend of mine.
+I waited for him at Suez, and he reluctantly consented to take me."
+
+"So you went to Mecca," exclaimed Ralston.
+
+"Yes; I have just come from Mecca. As I told you, I only landed at
+Calcutta last night."
+
+Ralston was silent for a few moments.
+
+"I think you may be able to help me," he said at length. "There's a man
+here in Calcutta," and Ralston related what he knew of the history of
+Shere Ali, dwelling less upon the unhappiness and isolation of the Prince
+than upon the political consequences of his isolation.
+
+"He has come to grief in Chiltistan," he continued. "He won't
+marry--there may be a reason for that. I don't know. English women are
+not always wise in their attitude towards these boys. But it seems to me
+quite a natural result of his education and his life. He is suspected by
+his people. When he goes back, he will probably be murdered. At present
+he is consorting with the lowest Europeans here, drinking with them,
+playing cards with them, and going to ruin as fast as he can. I am not
+sure that there's a chance for him at all. A few minutes ago I would
+certainly have said that there was none. Now, however, I am wondering.
+You see, I don't know the lad well enough. I don't know how many of the
+old instincts and traditions of his race and his faith are still alive in
+him, underneath all the Western ideas and the Western feelings to which
+he has been trained. But if they are dead, there is no chance for him. If
+they are alive--well, couldn't they be evoked? That's the problem."
+
+Hatch nodded his head.
+
+"He might be turned again into a genuine Mohammedan," he said. "I
+wonder too."
+
+"At all events, it's worth trying," said Ralston. "For it's the only
+chance left to try. If we could sweep away the effects of the last few
+years, if we could obliterate his years in England--oh, I know it's
+improbable. But help me and let us see."
+
+"How?" asked Hatch.
+
+"Come and dine with me to-morrow night. I'll make Shere Ali come. I _can_
+make him. For I can threaten to send him back to Chiltistan. Then talk to
+him of Mecca, talk to him of the city, and the shrine, and the pilgrims.
+Perhaps something of their devotion may strike a spark in him, perhaps he
+may have some remnant of faith still dormant in him. Make Mecca a symbol
+to him, make it live for him as a place of pilgrimage. You could,
+perhaps, because you have seen with your own eyes, and you know."
+
+"I can try, of course," said Hatch with a shrug of his shoulders. "But
+isn't there a danger--if I succeed? I might try to kindle faith, I might
+only succeed in kindling fanaticism. Are the Mohammedans beyond the
+frontier such a very quiet people that you are anxious to add another to
+their number?"
+
+Ralston was prepared for the objection. Already, indeed, Shere Ali
+might be seething with hatred against the English rule. It would be no
+more than natural if he were. Ralston had pondered the question with an
+uncomfortable vision before his eyes, evoked by certain words of
+Colonel Dewes--a youth appealing for help, for the only help which
+could be of service to him, and then, as the appeal was rejected,
+composing his face to a complete and stolid inexpressiveness, no longer
+showing either his pain or his desire--reverting, as it were, from the
+European to the Oriental.
+
+"Yes, there is that danger," he admitted. "Seeking to restore a friend,
+we might kindle an enemy." And then he rose up and suddenly burst out:
+"But upon my word, were that to come to pass, we should deserve it. For
+we are to blame--we who took him from Chiltistan and sent him to be
+petted by the fine people in England." And once more it was evident from
+his words that he was thinking not of Shere Ali--not of the human being
+who had just his one life to live, just his few years with their
+opportunities of happiness, and their certain irrevocable periods of
+distress--but of the Prince of Chiltistan who might or might not be a
+cause of great trouble to the Government of the Punjab.
+
+"We must take the risk," he cried as one arguing almost against himself.
+"It's the only chance. So we must take the risk. Besides, I have been at
+some pains already to minimise it. Shere Ali has a friend in England. We
+are asking for that friend. A telegram goes to-day. So come to-morrow
+night and do your best."
+
+"Very well, I will," said Hatch, and, taking up his hat, he went away. He
+had no great hopes that any good would come of the dinner. But at the
+worst, he thought, it would leave matters where they were.
+
+In that, however, he was wrong. For there were important moments in the
+history of the young Prince of Chiltistan of which both Hatch and Ralston
+were quite unaware. And because they were unaware the dinner which was to
+help in straightening out the tangle of Shere Ali's life became a
+veritable catastrophe. Shere Ali was brought reluctantly to the table in
+the corner of the great balcony upon the first floor. He had little to
+say, and it was as evident to the two men who entertained him as it had
+been to Colonel Dewes that the last few weeks had taken their toll of
+him. There were dark, heavy pouches beneath his eyes, his manner was
+feverish, and when he talked at all it was with a boisterous and a
+somewhat braggart voice.
+
+Ralston turned the conversation on to the journey which Hatch had taken,
+and for a little while the dinner promised well. At the mere mention of
+Mecca, Shere Ali looked up with a swift interest. "Mecca!" he cried, "you
+have been there! Tell me of Mecca. On my way up to Chiltistan I met three
+of my own countrymen on the summit of the Lowari Pass. They had a few
+rupees apiece--just enough, they told me, to carry them to Mecca. I
+remember watching them as they went laughing and talking down the snow on
+their long journey. And I wondered--" He broke off abruptly and sat
+looking out from the balcony. The night was coming on. In front stretched
+the great grass plain of the Maidan with its big trees and the wide
+carriage-road bisecting it. The carriages had driven home; the road and
+the plain were empty. Beyond them the high chimney-stacks of the steamers
+on the river could still be seen, some with a wisp of smoke curling
+upwards into the still air; and at times the long, melancholy hoot of a
+steam-syren broke the stillness of the evening.
+
+Shere Ali turned to Hatch again and said in a quiet voice which had some
+note of rather pathetic appeal: "Will you tell me what you thought of
+Mecca? I should like to know."
+
+The vision of the three men descending the Lowari Pass was present to him
+as he listened. And he listened, wondering what strange, real power that
+sacred place possessed to draw men cheerfully on so long and hazardous a
+pilgrimage. But the secret was not yet to be revealed to him. Hatch
+talked well. He told Shere Ali of the journey down the Red Sea, and the
+crowded deck at the last sunset before Jeddah was reached, when every one
+of the pilgrims robed himself in spotless white and stood facing the east
+and uttering his prayers in his own tongue. He described the journey
+across the desert, the great shrine of the Prophet in Mecca, the great
+gathering for prayer upon the plain two miles away. Something of the
+fervour of the pilgrims he managed to make real by his words, but Shere
+Ali listened with the picture of the three men in his thoughts, and with
+a deep envy of their contentment.
+
+Then Hatch made his mistake. He turned suddenly towards Ralston and said:
+
+"But something curious happened--something very strange and
+curious--which I think you ought to know, for the matter can hardly be
+left where it is."
+
+Ralston leaned forward.
+
+"Wait a moment," he said, and he called to the waiter. "Light a cigar
+before you begin, Hatch," he continued.
+
+The cigars were brought, and Hatch lighted one.
+
+"In what way am I concerned?" asked Ralston.
+
+"My story has to do with India," Hatch replied, and in his turn he looked
+out across the Maidan. Darkness had come and lights gleamed upon the
+carriage-way; the funnels of the ships had disappeared, and above, in a
+clear, dark sky, glittered a great host of stars.
+
+"With India, but not with the India of to-day," Hatch continued.
+"Listen"; and over his coffee he told his story. "I was walking down a
+narrow street of Mecca towards the big tank, when to my amazement I saw
+written up on a signboard above a door the single word 'Lodgings.' It was
+the English word, written, too, in the English character. I could hardly
+believe my eyes when I saw it. I stood amazed. What was an English
+announcement, that lodgings were to be had within, doing in a town where
+no Englishman, were he known to be such, would live for a single hour? I
+had half a mind to knock at the door and ask. But I noticed opposite to
+the door a little shop in which a man sat with an array of heavy
+country-made bolts and locks hung upon the walls and spread about him as
+he squatted on the floor. I crossed over to the booth, and sitting down
+upon the edge of the floor, which was raised a couple of feet or so from
+the ground, I made some small purchase. Then, looking across to the sign,
+I asked him what the writing on it meant. I suppose that I did not put my
+question carelessly enough, for the shopkeeper leaned forward and peered
+closely into my face.
+
+"'Why do you ask?' he said, sharply.
+
+"'Because I do not understand,' I replied.
+
+"The man looked me over again. There was no mistake in my dress, and with
+my black beard and eyes I could well pass for an Arab. It seemed that he
+was content, for he continued: 'How should I know what the word means? I
+have heard a story, but whether it is true or not, who shall say?'"
+
+Hatch paused for a moment and lighted his cigar again.
+
+"Well, the account which he gave me was this. Among the pilgrims who come
+up to Mecca, there are at times Hottentots from South Africa who speak no
+language intelligible to anyone in Mecca; but they speak English, and it
+is for their benefit that the sign was hung up."
+
+"What a strange thing!" said Shere Ali.
+
+"The explanation," continued Hatch, "is not very important to my story,
+but what followed upon it is; for the very next day, as I was walking
+alone, I heard a voice in my ear, whispering: 'The Englishwoman would
+like to see you this evening at five.' I turned round in amazement, and
+there stood the shopkeeper of whom I had made the inquiries. I thought,
+of course, that he was laying a trap for me. But he repeated his
+statement, and, telling me that he would wait for me on this spot at ten
+minutes to five, he walked away.
+
+"I did not know what to do. One moment I feared treachery and proposed to
+stay away, the next I was curious and proposed to go. How in the world
+could there be an Englishwoman in Mecca--above all, an Englishwoman who
+was in a position to ask me to tea? Curiosity conquered in the end. I
+tucked a loaded revolver into my waist underneath my jellaba and kept the
+appointment."
+
+"Go on," said Shere Ali, who was leaning forward with a great perplexity
+upon his face.
+
+"The shopkeeper was already there. 'Follow me,' he said, 'but not too
+closely.' We passed in that way through two or three streets, and then my
+guide turned into a dead alley closed in at the end by a house. In the
+wall of the house there was a door. My guide looked cautiously round, but
+there was no one to oversee us. He rapped gently with his knuckles on the
+door, and immediately the door was opened. He beckoned to me, and went
+quickly in. I followed him no less quickly. At once the door was shut
+behind me, and I found myself in darkness. For a moment I was sure that I
+had fallen into a trap, but my guide laid a hand upon my arm and led me
+forward. I was brought into a small, bare room, where a woman sat upon
+cushions. She was dressed in white like a Mohammedan woman of the East,
+and over her face she wore a veil. But a sort of shrivelled aspect which
+she had told me that she was very old. She dismissed the guide who had
+brought me to her, and as soon as we were alone she said:
+
+"'You are English.'
+
+"And she spoke in English, though with a certain rustiness of speech, as
+though that language had been long unfamiliar to her tongue.
+
+"'No,' I replied, and I expressed my contempt of that infidel race in
+suitable words.
+
+"The old woman only laughed and removed her veil. She showed me an old
+wizened face in which there was not a remnant of good looks--a face worn
+and wrinkled with hard living and great sorrows.
+
+"'You are English,' she said, 'and since I am English too, I thought that
+I would like to speak once more with one of my own countrymen.'
+
+"I no longer doubted. I took the hand she held out to me and--
+
+"'But what are you doing here in Mecca?' I asked.
+
+"'I live in Mecca,' she replied quietly. 'I have lived here for
+twenty years.'
+
+"I looked round that bare and sordid little room with horror. What
+strange fate had cast her up there? I asked her, and she told me her
+story. Guess what it was!"
+
+Ralston shook his head.
+
+"I can't imagine."
+
+Hatch turned to Shere Ali.
+
+"Can you?" he asked, and even as he asked he saw that a change had come
+over the young Prince's mood. He was no longer oppressed with envy and
+discontent. He was leaning forward with parted lips and a look in his
+eyes which Hatch had not seen that evening--a look as if hope had somehow
+dared to lift its head within him. And there was more than a look of
+hope; there was savagery too.
+
+"No. I want to hear," replied Shere Ali. "Go on, please! How did the
+Englishwoman come to Mecca?"
+
+"She was a governess in the family of an officer at Cawnpore when the
+Mutiny broke out, more than forty years ago," said Hatch.
+
+Ralston leaned back in his chair with an exclamation of horror. Shere Ali
+said nothing. His eyes rested intently and brightly upon Hatch's face.
+Under the table, and out of sight, his fingers worked convulsively.
+
+"She was in that room," continued Hatch, "in that dark room with the
+other Englishwomen and children who were murdered. But she was spared.
+She was very pretty, she told me, in her youth, and she was only eighteen
+when the massacre took place. She was carried up to the hills and forced
+to become a Mohammedan. The man who had spared her married her. He died,
+and a small chieftain in the hills took her and married her, and finally
+brought her out with him when he made the pilgrimage to Mecca. While he
+was at Mecca, however, he fell ill, and in his turn he died. She was left
+alone. She had a little money, and she stayed. Indeed, she could not get
+away. A strange story, eh?"
+
+And Hatch leaned back in his chair, and once more lighted his cigar which
+for a second time had gone out.
+
+"You didn't bring her back?" exclaimed Ralston.
+
+"She wouldn't come," replied Hatch. "I offered to smuggle her out of
+Mecca, but she refused. She felt that she wouldn't and couldn't face her
+own people again. She should have died at Cawnpore, and she did not die.
+Besides, she was old; she had long since grown accustomed to her life,
+and in England she had long since been given up for dead. She would not
+even tell me her real name. Perhaps she ought to be fetched away. I
+don't know."
+
+Ralston and Hatch fell to debating that point with great earnestness.
+Neither of them paid heed to Shere Ali, and when he rose they easily let
+him go. Nor did their thoughts follow him upon his way. But he was
+thinking deeply as he went, and a queer and not very pleasant smile
+played about his lips.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+SYBIL LINFORTH'S LOYALTY
+
+
+A fortnight after Shere Ali had dined with Ralston in Calcutta, a
+telegram was handed to Linforth at Chatham. It was Friday, and a
+guest-night. The mess-room was full, and here and there amongst the
+scarlet and gold lace the sombre black of a civilian caught the eye.
+Dinner was just over, and at the ends of the long tables the mess-waiters
+stood ready to draw, with a single jerk, the strips of white tablecloth
+from the shining mahogany. The silver and the glasses had been removed,
+the word was given, and the strips of tablecloth vanished as though by
+some swift legerdemain. The port was passed round, and while the glasses
+were being filled the telegram was handed to Linforth by his servant.
+
+He opened it carelessly, but as he read the words his heart jumped within
+him. His importunities had succeeded, he thought. At all events, his
+opportunity had come; for the telegram informed him of his appointment to
+the Punjab Commission. He sat for a moment with his thoughts in a whirl.
+He could hardly believe the good news. He had longed so desperately for
+this one chance that it had seemed to him of late impossible that he
+should ever obtain it. Yet here it had come to him, and upon that his
+neighbour jogged him in the ribs and said:
+
+"Wake up!"
+
+He waked to see the Colonel at the centre of the top table standing on
+his feet with his glass in his hand.
+
+"Gentlemen, the Queen. God bless her!" and all that company arose and
+drank to the toast. The prayer, thus simply pronounced amongst the men
+who had pledged their lives in service to the Queen, had always been to
+Linforth a very moving thing. Some of those who drank to it had already
+run their risks and borne their sufferings in proof of their sincerity;
+the others all burned to do the like. It had always seemed to him, too,
+to link him up closely and inseparably with the soldiers of the regiment
+who had fallen years ago or had died quietly in their beds, their service
+ended. It gave continuity to the regiment of Sappers, so that what each
+man did increased or tarnished its fair fame. For years back that toast
+had been drunk, that prayer uttered in just those simple words, and
+Linforth was wont to gaze round the walls on the portraits of the famous
+generals who had looked to these barracks and to this mess-room as their
+home. They, too, had heard that prayer, and, carrying it in their hearts,
+without parade or needless speech had gone forth, each in his turn, and
+laboured unsparingly.
+
+But never had Linforth been so moved as he was tonight. He choked in his
+throat as he drank. For his turn to go forth had at the last come to him.
+And in all humility of spirit he sent up a prayer on his own account,
+that he might not fail--and again that he might not fail.
+
+He sat down and told his companions the good news, and rejoiced at their
+congratulations. But he slipped away to his own quarters very quietly as
+soon as the Colonel rose, and sat late by himself.
+
+There was one, he knew very well, to whom the glad tidings would be a
+heavy blow--but he could not--no, not even for her sake--stand aside.
+For this opportunity he had lived, training alike his body and mind
+against its coming. He could not relinquish it. There was too strong a
+constraint upon him.
+
+"Over the passes to the foot of the Hindu Kush," he murmured; and in his
+mind's eye he saw the road--a broad, white, graded road--snake across the
+valleys and climb the cliffs.
+
+Was Russia at work? he wondered. Was he to be sent to Chiltistan? What
+was Shere Ali doing? He turned the questions over in his mind without
+being at much pains to answer them. In such a very short time now he
+would know. He was to embark before a month had passed.
+
+He travelled down the very next day into Sussex, and came to the house
+under the Downs at twelve o'clock. It was early spring, and as yet there
+were no buds upon the trees, no daffodils upon the lawns. The house,
+standing apart in its bare garden of brown earth, black trees, and dull
+green turf, had a desolate aspect which somehow filled him with remorse.
+He might have done more, perhaps, to fill this house with happiness. He
+feared that, now that it was too late to do the things left undone. He
+had been so absorbed in his great plans, which for a moment lost in his
+eyes their magnitude.
+
+Dick Linforth found his mother in the study, through the window of which
+she had once looked from the garden in the company of Colonel Dewes. She
+was writing her letters, and when she saw him enter, she sprang up with a
+cry of joy.
+
+"Dick!" she cried, coming towards him with outstretched hands. But she
+stopped half-way. The happiness died out of her. She raised a hand to her
+heart, and her voice once more repeated his name; but her voice faltered
+as she spoke, and the hand was clasped tight upon her breast.
+
+"Dick," she said, and in his face she read the tidings he had brought.
+The blow so long dreaded had at last fallen.
+
+"Yes, mother, it's true," he said very gently; and leading her to a
+chair, he sat beside her, stroking her hand, almost as a lover might do.
+"It's true. The telegram came last night. I start within the month."
+
+"For Chiltistan?"
+
+Dick looked at her for a moment.
+
+"For the Punjab," he said, and added: "But it will mean Chiltistan. Else
+why should I be sent for? It has been always for Chiltistan that I have
+importuned them."
+
+Sybil Linforth bowed her head. The horror which had been present with her
+night and day for so long a while twenty-five years ago rushed upon her
+afresh, so that she could not speak. She sat living over again the bitter
+days when Luffe was shut up with his handful of men in the fort by
+Kohara. She remembered the morning when the postman came up the garden
+path with the official letter that her husband had been slain. And at
+last in a whisper she said:
+
+"The Road?"
+
+Dick, even in the presence of her pain, could not deny the implication of
+her words.
+
+"We Linforths belong to the Road," he answered gravely. The words struck
+upon a chord of memory. Sybil Linforth sat upright, turned to her sort
+and greatly surprised him. He had expected an appeal, a prayer. What he
+heard was something which raised her higher in his thoughts than ever she
+had been, high though he had always placed her.
+
+"Dick," she said, "I have never said a word to dissuade you, have I?
+Never a word? Never a single word?" and her tone besought him to
+assure her.
+
+"Never a word, mother," he replied.
+
+But still she was not content.
+
+"When you were a boy, when the Road began to take hold on you--when we
+were much together, playing cricket out there in the garden," and her
+voice broke upon the memory of those golden days, "when I might have been
+able, perhaps, to turn you to other thoughts, I never tried to, Dick? Own
+to that! I never tried to. When I came upon you up on the top of the Down
+behind the house, lying on the grass, looking out--always--always towards
+the sea--oh, I knew very well what it was that was drawing you; but I
+said nothing, Dick. Not a word--not a word!"
+
+Dick nodded his head.
+
+"That's true, mother. You never questioned me. You never tried to
+dissuade me."
+
+Sybil's face shone with a wan smile. She unlocked a drawer in her
+writing-table, and took out an envelope. From the envelope she drew a
+sheet of paper covered with a faded and yellow handwriting.
+
+"This is the last letter your father ever wrote to me," she said. "Harry
+wrote on the night that he--that he died. Oh, Dick, my boy, I have known
+for a long time that I would have one day to show it to you, and I wanted
+you to feel when that time came that I had not been disloyal."
+
+She had kept her face steady, even her voice calm, by a great effort.
+But now the tears filled her eyes and brimmed over, and her voice
+suddenly shook between a laugh and a sob. "But oh, Dick," she cried, "I
+have so often wanted to be disloyal. I was so often near to it--oh,
+very, very near."
+
+She handed him the faded letter, and, turning towards the window, stood
+with her back to him while he read. It was that letter, with its constant
+refrain of "I am very tired," which Linforth had written in his tent
+whilst his murderers crouched outside waiting for sleep to overcome him.
+
+"I am sitting writing this by the light of a candle," Dick read. "The
+tent door is open. In front of me I can see the great snow-mountains. All
+the ugliness of the shale-slopes is hidden. By such a moonlight, my dear,
+may you always look back upon my memory. For it is all over, Sybil."
+
+Then followed the advice about himself and his school; and after that
+advice the message which was now for the first time delivered:
+
+"Whether he will come out here, it is too early to think about. But the
+Road will not be finished--and I wonder. If he wants to, let him! We
+Linforths belong to the Road."
+
+Dick folded the letter reverently, and crossing to his mother's side, put
+his arm about her waist.
+
+"Yes," he said. "My father knew it as I know it. He used the words which
+I in my turn have used. We Linforths belong to the Road."
+
+His mother took the letter from his hand and locked it away.
+
+"Yes," she said bravely, and called a smile to her face. "So you must
+go."
+
+Dick nodded his head.
+
+"Yes. You see, the Road has not advanced since my father died. It almost
+seems, mother, that it waits for me."
+
+He stayed that day and that night with Sybil, and in the morning both
+brought haggard faces to the breakfast table. Sybil, indeed, had slept,
+but, with her memories crowding hard upon her, she had dreamed again one
+of those almost forgotten dreams which, in the time of her suspense, had
+so tortured her. The old vague terror had seized upon her again. She
+dreamed once more of a young Englishman who pursued a young Indian along
+the wooden galleries of the road above the torrents into the far mists.
+She could tell as of old the very dress of the native who fled. A thick
+sheepskin coat swung aside as he ran and gave her a glimpse of gay silk;
+soft high leather boots protected his feet; and upon his face there was a
+look of fury and wild fear. But this night there was a difference in the
+dream. Her present distress added a detail. The young Englishman who
+pursued turned his face to her as he disappeared amongst the mists, and
+she saw that it was the face of Dick.
+
+But of this she said nothing at all at the breakfast table, nor when she
+bade Dick good-bye at the stile on the further side of the field beyond
+the garden.
+
+"You will come down again, and I shall go to Marseilles to see you off,"
+she said, and so let him go.
+
+There was something, too, stirring in Dick's mind of which he said no
+word. In the letter of his father, certain sentences had caught his eye,
+and on his way up to London they recurred to his thoughts, as, indeed,
+they had more than once during the evening before.
+
+"May he meet," Harry Linforth had written to Sybil of his son Dick--"may
+he meet a woman like you, my dear, when his time comes, and love her as I
+love you."
+
+Dick Linforth fell to thinking of Violet Oliver. She was in India at this
+moment. She might still be there when he landed. Would he meet her, he
+wondered, somewhere on the way to Chiltistan?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+A GIFT MISUNDERSTOOD
+
+
+The month was over before Linforth at last steamed out of the harbour at
+Marseilles. He was as impatient to reach Bombay as a year before Shere
+Ali had been reluctant. To Shere Ali the boat had flown with wings of
+swiftness, to Linforth she was a laggard. The steamer passed Stromboli
+on a wild night of storm and moonlight. The wrack of clouds scurrying
+overhead, now obscured, now let the moonlight through, and the great
+cone rising sheer from a tempestuous sea glowed angrily. Linforth, in
+the shelter of a canvas screen, watched the glow suddenly expand, and a
+stream of bright sparkling red flow swiftly along the shoulder of the
+mountain, turn at a right angle, and plunge down towards the sea. The
+bright red would become dull, the dull red grow black, the glare of
+light above the cone contract for a little while and then burst out
+again. Yet men lived upon the slope of Stromboli, even as
+Englishmen--the thought flashed into his mind--lived in India,
+recognising the peril and going quietly about their work. There was
+always that glare of menacing light over the hill-districts of India as
+above the crater of Stromboli, now contracting, now expanding and
+casting its molten stream down towards the plains.
+
+At the moment when Linforth watched the crown of light above Stromboli,
+the glare was widening over the hill country of Chiltistan. Ralston so
+far away as Peshawur saw it reddening the sky and was the more troubled
+in that he could not discover why just at this moment the menace should
+glow red. The son of Abdulla Mohammed was apparently quiet and Shere Ali
+had not left Calcutta. The Resident at Kohara admitted the danger. Every
+despatch he sent to Peshawur pointed to the likelihood of trouble. But he
+too was at fault. Unrest was evident, the cause of it quite obscure. But
+what was hidden from Government House in Peshawur and the Old Mission
+House at Kohara was already whispered in the bazaars. There among the
+thatched booths which have their backs upon the brink of the
+water-channel in the great square, men knew very well that Shere Ali was
+the cause, though Shere Ali knew nothing of it himself. One of those
+queer little accidents possible in the East had happened within the last
+few weeks. A trifling gift had been magnified into a symbol and a
+message, and the message had run through Chiltistan like fire through a
+dry field of stubble. And then two events occurred in Peshawur which gave
+to Ralston the key of the mystery.
+
+The first was the arrival in that city of a Hindu lady from Gujerat who
+had lately come to the conclusion that she was a reincarnation of the
+Goddess Devi. She arrived in great pomp, and there was some trouble in
+the streets as the procession passed through to the temple which she had
+chosen as her residence. For the Hindus, on the one hand, firmly believed
+in her divinity. The lady came of a class which, held in dishonour in the
+West, had its social position and prestige in India. There was no reason
+in the eyes of the faithful why she should say she was the Goddess Devi
+if she were not. Therefore they lined the streets to acclaim her coming.
+The Mohammedans, on the other hand, Afghans from the far side of the
+Khyber, men of the Hassan and the Aka and the Adam Khel tribes, Afridis
+from Kohat and Tirah and the Araksai country, any who happened to be in
+that wild and crowded town, turned out, too--to keep order, as they
+pleasantly termed it, when their leaders were subsequently asked for
+explanations. In the end a good many heads were broken before the lady
+was safely lodged in her temple. Nor did the trouble end there. The
+presence of a reincarnated Devi at once kindled the Hindus to fervour and
+stimulated to hostility against them the fanatical Mohammedans. Futteh
+Ali Shah, a merchant, a municipal councillor and a landowner of some
+importance, headed a deputation of elderly gentlemen who begged Ralston
+to remove the danger from the city.
+
+Danger there was, as Ralston on his morning rides through the streets
+could not but understand. The temple was built in the corner of an open
+space, and upon that open space a noisy and excited crowd surged all day;
+while from the countryside around pilgrims in a mood of frenzied piety
+and Pathans spoiling for a fight trooped daily in through the gates of
+Peshawur. Ralston understood that the time had come for definite steps to
+be taken; and he took them with that unconcerned half-weary air which was
+at once natural to him and impressive to these particular people with
+whom he had to deal.
+
+He summoned two of his native levies and mounted his horse.
+
+"But you will take a guard," said Colonel Ward, of the Oxfordshires, who
+had been lunching with Ralston. "I'll send a company down with you."
+
+"No, thank you," said Ralston listlessly, "I think my two men will do."
+
+The Colonel stared and expostulated.
+
+"You know, Ralston, you are very rash. Your predecessor never rode into
+the City without an escort."
+
+"I do every morning."
+
+"I know," returned the Colonel, "and that's where you are wrong. Some day
+something will happen. To go down with two of your levies to-day is
+madness. I speak seriously. The place is in a ferment."
+
+"Oh, I think I'll be all right," said Ralston, and he rode at a trot
+down from Government House into the road which leads past the gaol and
+the Fort to the gate of Peshawur. At the gate he reduced the trot to a
+walk, and so, with his two levies behind him, passed up along the
+streets like a man utterly undisturbed. It was not bravado which had
+made him refuse an escort. On the contrary, it was policy. To assume
+that no one questioned his authority was in Ralston's view the best way
+and the quickest to establish it. He pushed forward through the crowd
+right up to the walls of the temple, seemingly indifferent to every cry
+or threat which was uttered as he passed. The throng closed in behind
+him, and he came to a halt in front of a low door set in the whitewashed
+wall which enclosed the temple and its precincts. Upon this door he beat
+with the butt of his crop and a little wicket in the door was opened. At
+the bars of the wicket an old man's face showed for a moment and then
+drew back in fear.
+
+"Open!" cried Ralston peremptorily.
+
+The face appeared again.
+
+"Your Excellency, the goddess is meditating. Besides, this is holy
+ground. Your Excellency would not wish to set foot on it. Moreover, the
+courtyard is full of worshippers. It would not be safe."
+
+Ralston broke in upon the old man's fluttering protestations. "Open the
+door, or my men will break it in."
+
+A murmur of indignation arose from the crowd which thronged about him.
+Ralston paid no heed to it. He called to his two levies:
+
+"Quick! Break that door in!"
+
+As they advanced the door was opened. Ralston dismounted, and bade one of
+his men do likewise and follow him. To the second man he said,
+
+"Hold the horses!"
+
+He strode into the courtyard and stood still.
+
+"It will be touch and go," he said to himself, as he looked about him.
+
+The courtyard was as thronged as the open space without, and four strong
+walls enclosed it. The worshippers were strangely silent. It seemed to
+Ralston that suspense had struck them dumb. They looked at the intruder
+with set faces and impassive eyes. At the far end of the courtyard there
+was a raised stone platform, and this part was roofed. At the back in the
+gloom he could see a great idol of the goddess, and in front, facing the
+courtyard, stood the lady from Gujerat. She was what Ralston expected to
+see--a dancing girl of Northern India, a girl with a good figure, small
+hands and feet, and a complexion of an olive tint. Her eyes were large
+and lustrous, with a line of black pencilled upon the edges of the
+eyelids, her eyebrows arched and regular, her face oval, her forehead
+high. The dress was richly embroidered with gold, and she had anklets
+with silver bells upon her feet.
+
+Ralston pushed his way through the courtyard until he reached the wall of
+the platform.
+
+"Come down and speak to me," he cried peremptorily to the lady, but she
+took no notice of his presence. She did not move so much as an eyelid.
+She gazed over his head as one lost in meditation. From the side an old
+priest advanced to the edge of the platform.
+
+"Go away," he cried insolently. "You have no place here. The goddess does
+not speak to any but her priests," and through the throng there ran a
+murmur of approval. There, was a movement, too--a movement towards
+Ralston. It was as yet a hesitating movement--those behind pushed, those
+in front and within Ralston's vision held back. But at any moment the
+movement might become a rush.
+
+Ralston spoke to the priest.
+
+"Come down, you dog!" he said quite quietly.
+
+The priest was silent. He hesitated. He looked for help to the crowd
+below, which in turn looked for leadership to him. "Come down," once more
+cried Ralston, and he moved towards the steps as though he would mount on
+to the platform and tear the fellow down.
+
+"I come, I come," said the priest, and he went down and stood
+before Ralston.
+
+Ralston turned to the Pathan who accompanied him. "Turn the fellow into
+the street."
+
+Protests rose from the crowd; the protests became cries of anger; the
+throng swayed and jostled. But the Pathan led the priest to the door and
+thrust him out.
+
+Again Ralston turned to the platform.
+
+"Listen to me," he called out to the lady from Gujerat. "You must leave
+Peshawur. You are a trouble to the town. I will not let you stay."
+
+But the lady paid no heed. Her mind floated above the earth, and with
+every moment the danger grew. Closer and closer the throng pressed in
+upon Ralston and his attendant. The clamour rose shrill and menacing.
+Ralston cried out to his Pathan in a voice which rang clear and audible
+even above the clamour:
+
+"Bring handcuffs!"
+
+The words were heard and silence fell upon all that crowd, the sudden
+silence of stupefaction. That such an outrage, such a defilement of a
+holy place, could be contemplated came upon the worshippers with a shock.
+But the Pathan levy was seen to be moving towards the door to obey the
+order, and as he went the cries and threats rose with redoubled ardour.
+For a moment it seemed to Ralston that the day would go against him, so
+fierce were the faces which shouted in his ears, so turbulent the
+movement of the crowd. It needed just one hand to be laid upon the
+Pathan's shoulder as he forced his way towards the door, just one blow to
+be struck, and the ugly rush would come. But the hand was not stretched
+out, nor the blow struck; and the Pathan was seen actually at the
+threshold of the door. Then the Goddess Devi came down to earth and spoke
+to another of her priests quickly and urgently. The priest went swiftly
+down the steps.
+
+"The goddess will leave Peshawur, since your Excellency so wills it," he
+said to Ralston. "She will shake the dust of this city from her feet. She
+will not bring trouble upon its people." So far he had got when the
+goddess became violently agitated. She beckoned to the priest and when he
+came to her side she spoke quickly to him in an undertone. For the last
+second or two the goddess had grown quite human and even feminine. She
+was rating the priest well and she did it spitefully. It was a
+crestfallen priest who returned to Ralston.
+
+"The goddess, however, makes a condition," said he. "If she goes there
+must be a procession."
+
+The goddess nodded her head emphatically. She was clearly adamant upon
+that point.
+
+Ralston smiled.
+
+"By all means. The lady shall have a show, since she wants one," said he,
+and turning towards the door, he signalled to the Pathan to stop.
+
+"But it must be this afternoon," said he. "For she must go this
+afternoon."
+
+And he made his way out of the courtyard into the street. The lady from
+Gujerat left Peshawur three hours later. The streets were lined with
+levies, although the Mohammedans assured his Excellency that there was no
+need for troops.
+
+"We ourselves will keep order," they urged. Ralston smiled, and ordered
+up a company of Regulars. He himself rode out from Government House, and
+at the bend of the road he met the procession, with the lady from Gujerat
+at its head in a litter with drawn curtains of tawdry gold.
+
+As the procession came abreast of him a little brown hand was thrust
+out from the curtains, and the bearers and the rabble behind came to a
+halt. A man in a rough brown homespun cloak, with a beggar's bowl
+attached to his girdle, came to the side of the litter, and thence went
+across to Ralston.
+
+"Your Highness, the Goddess Devi has a word for your ear alone."
+Ralston, with a shrug of his shoulders, walked his horse up to the side
+of the litter and bent down his head. The lady spoke through the
+curtains in a whisper.
+
+"Your Excellency has been very kind to me, and allowed me to leave
+Peshawur with a procession, guarding the streets so that I might pass in
+safety and with great honour. Therefore I make a return. There is a
+matter which troubles your Excellency. You ask yourself the why and the
+wherefore, and there is no answer. But the danger grows."
+
+Ralston's thoughts flew out towards Chiltistan. Was it of that country
+she was speaking?
+
+"Well?" he asked. "Why does the danger grow?"
+
+"Because bags of grain and melons were sent," she replied, "and the
+message was understood."
+
+She waved her hand again, and the bearers of the litter stepped forward
+on their march through the cantonment. Ralston rode up the hill to his
+home, wondering what in the world was the meaning of her oracular
+words. It might be that she had no meaning--that was certainly a
+possibility. She might merely be keeping up her pose as a divinity. On
+the other hand, she had been so careful to speak in a low whisper, lest
+any should overhear.
+
+"Some melons and bags of grain," he said to himself. "What message could
+they convey? And who sent them? And to whom?"
+
+He wrote that night to the Resident at Kohara, on the chance that he
+might be able to throw some light upon the problem.
+
+"Have you heard anything of a melon and a bag of grain?" he wrote. "It
+seems an absurd question, but please make inquiries. Find out what it
+all means."
+
+The messenger carried the letter over the Malakand Pass and up the road
+by Dir, and in due time an answer was returned. Ralston received the
+answer late one afternoon, when the light was failing, and, taking it
+over to the window, read it through. Its contents fairly startled him.
+
+"I have made inquiries," wrote Captain Phillips, the Resident, "as you
+wished, and I have found out that some melons and bags of grain were sent
+by Shere Ali's orders a few weeks ago as a present to one of the chief
+Mullahs in the town."
+
+Ralston was brought to a stop. So it was Shere Ali, after all, who was
+at the bottom of the trouble. It was Shere Ali who had sent the present,
+and had sent it to one of the Mullahs. Ralston looked back upon the
+little dinner party, whereby he had brought Hatch and Shere Ali
+together. Had that party been too successful, he wondered? Had it
+achieved more than he had wished to bring about? He turned in doubt to
+the letter which he held.
+
+"It seems," he read, "that there had been some trouble between this man
+and Shere Ali. There is a story that Shere Ali set him to work for a day
+upon a bridge just below Kohara. But I do not know whether there is any
+truth in the story. Nor can I find that any particular meaning is
+attached to the present. I imagine that Shere Ali realised that it would
+be wise--as undoubtedly it was--for him to make his peace with the
+Mullah, and sent him accordingly the melons and the bags of grain as an
+earnest of his good-will."
+
+There the letter ended, and Ralston stood by the window as the light
+failed more and more from off the earth, pondering with a heavy heart
+upon its contents. He had to make his choice between the Resident at
+Kohara and the lady of Gujerat. Captain Phillips held that the present
+was not interpreted in any symbolic sense. But the lady of Gujerat had
+known of the present. It was matter of talk, then, in the bazaars, and it
+would hardly have been that had it meant no more than an earnest of
+good-will. She had heard of the present; she knew what it was held to
+convey. It was a message. There was that glare broadening over
+Chiltistan. Surely the lady of Gujerat was right.
+
+So far his thoughts had carried him when across the window there fell a
+shadow, and a young officer of the Khyber Rifles passed by to the door.
+Captain Singleton was announced, and a boy--or so he looked--dark-haired
+and sunburnt, entered the office. For eighteen months he had been
+stationed in the fort at Landi Kotal, whence the road dips down between
+the bare brown cliffs towards the plains and mountains of Afghanistan.
+With two other English officers he had taken his share in the difficult
+task of ruling that regiment of wild tribesmen which, twice a week,
+perched in threes on some rocky promontory, or looking down from a
+machicolated tower, keeps open the Khyber Pass from dawn to dusk and
+protects the caravans. The eighteen months had written their history upon
+his face; he stood before Ralston, for all his youthful looks, a quiet,
+self-reliant man.
+
+"I have come down on leave, sir," he said. "On the way I fetched Rahat
+Mian out of his house and brought him in to Peshawur."
+
+Ralston looked up with interest.
+
+"Any trouble?" he asked.
+
+"I took care there should be none."
+
+Ralston nodded.
+
+"He had better be safely lodged. Where is he?"
+
+"I have him outside."
+
+Ralston rang for lights, and then said to Singleton: "Then, I'll
+see him now."
+
+And in a few minutes an elderly white-bearded man, dressed from head to
+foot in his best white robes, was shown into the room.
+
+"This is his Excellency," said Captain Singleton, and Rahat Mian bowed
+with dignity and stood waiting. But while he stood his eyes roamed
+inquisitively about the room.
+
+"All this is strange to you, Rahat Mian," said Ralston. "How long is it
+since you left your house in the Khyber Pass?"
+
+"Five years, your Highness," said Rahat Mian, quietly, as though there
+were nothing very strange in so long a confinement within his doors.
+
+"Have you never crossed your threshold for five years?" asked Ralston.
+
+"No, your Highness. I should not have stepped back over it again, had I
+been so foolish. Before, yes. There was a deep trench dug between my
+house and the road, and I used to crawl along the trench when no-one was
+about. But after a little my enemies saw me walking in the road, and
+watched the trench."
+
+Rahat Mian lived in one of the square mud windowless houses, each with a
+tower at a corner which dot the green wheat fields in the Khyber Pass
+wherever the hills fall back and leave a level space. His house was
+fifty yards from the road, and the trench stretched to it from his very
+door. But not two hundred yards away there were other houses, and one of
+these held Rahat Mian's enemies. The feud went back many years to the
+date when Rahat Mian, without asking anyone's leave or paying a single
+farthing of money, secretly married the widowed mother of Futteh Ali
+Shah. Now Futteh Ali Shah was a boy of fourteen who had the right to
+dispose of his mother in second marriage as he saw fit, and for the best
+price he could obtain. And this deprivation of his rights kindled in him
+a great anger against Rahat Mian. He nursed it until he became a man and
+was able to buy for a couple of hundred rupees a good pedigree rifle--a
+rifle which had belonged to a soldier killed in a hill-campaign and for
+which inquiries would not be made. Armed with his pedigree rifle, Futteh
+Ali Shah lay in wait vainly for Rahat Mian, until an unexpected bequest
+caused a revolution in his fortunes. He went down to Bombay, added to
+his bequest by becoming a money-lender, and finally returned to
+Peshawur, in the neighbourhood of which city he had become a landowner
+of some importance. Meanwhile, however, he had not been forgetful of
+Rahat Mian. He left relations behind to carry on the feud, and in
+addition he set a price on Rahat Mian's head. It was this feud which
+Ralston had it in his mind to settle.
+
+He turned to Rahat Mian.
+
+"You are willing to make peace?"
+
+"Yes," said the old man.
+
+"You will take your most solemn oath that the feud shall end. You will
+swear to divorce your wife, if you break your word?"
+
+For a moment Rahat Mian hesitated. There was no oath more binding, more
+sacred, than that which he was called upon to take. In the end he
+consented.
+
+"Then come here at eight to-morrow morning," said Ralston, and,
+dismissing the man, he gave instructions that he should be safely lodged.
+He sent word at the same time to Futteh Ali Shah, with whom, not for the
+first time, he had had trouble.
+
+Futteh Ali Shah arrived late the next morning in order to show his
+independence. But he was not so late as Ralston, who replied by keeping
+him waiting for an hour. When Ralston entered the room he saw that Futteh
+Ali Shah had dressed himself for the occasion. His tall high-shouldered
+frame was buttoned up in a grey frock coat, grey trousers clothed his
+legs, and he wore patent-leather shoes upon his feet.
+
+"I hope you have not been waiting very long. They should have told me you
+were here," said Ralston, and though he spoke politely, there was just a
+suggestion that it was not really of importance whether Futteh Ali Shah
+was kept waiting or not.
+
+"I have brought you here that together we may put an end to your dispute
+with Rahat Mian," said Ralston, and, taking no notice of the exclamation
+of surprise which broke from the Pathan's lips, he rang the bell and
+ordered Rahat Mian to be shown in.
+
+"Now let us see if we cannot come to an understanding," said Ralston, and
+he seated himself between the two antagonists.
+
+But though they talked for an hour, they came no nearer to a settlement.
+Futteh Ali Shah was obdurate; Rahat Mian's temper and pride rose in their
+turn. At the sight of each other the old grievance became fresh as a
+thing of yesterday in both their minds. Their dark faces, with the high
+cheek-bones and the beaked noses of the Afridi, became passionate and
+fierce. Finally Futteh Ali Shah forgot all his Bombay manners; he leaned
+across Ralston, and cried to Rahat Mian:
+
+"Do you know what I would like to do with you? I would like to string my
+bedstead with your skin and lie on it."
+
+And upon that Ralston arrived at the conclusion that the meeting might as
+well come to an end.
+
+He dismissed Rahat Mian, promising him a safe conveyance to his home. But
+he had not yet done with Futteh Ali Shah.
+
+"I am going out," he said suavely. "Shall we walk a little way together?"
+
+Futteh Ali Shah smiled. Landowner of importance that he was, the
+opportunity to ride side by side through Peshawur with the Chief
+Commissioner did not come every day. The two men went out into the porch.
+Ralston's horse was waiting, with a scarlet-clad syce at its head.
+Ralston walked on down the steps and took a step or two along the drive.
+Futteh Ali Shah lagged behind.
+
+"Your Excellency is forgetting your horse."
+
+"No," said Ralston. "The horse can follow. Let us walk a little. It is a
+good thing to walk."
+
+It was nine o'clock in the morning, and the weather was getting hot. And
+it is said that the heat of Peshawur is beyond the heat of any other city
+from the hills to Cape Comorin. Futteh Ali Shah, however, could not
+refuse. Regretfully he signalled to his own groom who stood apart in
+charge of a fine dark bay stallion from the Kirghiz Steppes. The two men
+walked out from the garden and down the road towards Peshawur city, with
+their horses following behind them.
+
+"We will go this way," said Ralston, and he turned to the left and walked
+along a mud-walled lane between rich orchards heavy with fruit. For a
+mile they thus walked, and then Futteh Ali Shah stopped and said:
+
+"I am very anxious to have your Excellency's opinion of my horse. I am
+very proud of it."
+
+"Later on," said Ralston, carelessly. "I want to walk for a little"; and,
+conversing upon indifferent topics, they skirted the city and came out
+upon the broad open road which runs to Jamrud and the Khyber Pass.
+
+It was here that Futteh Ali Shah once more pressingly invited Ralston to
+try the paces of his stallion. But Ralston again refused.
+
+"I will with pleasure later on," he said. "But a little exercise will be
+good for both of us; and they continued to walk along the road. The heat
+was overpowering; Futteh Ali Shah was soft from too much good living; his
+thin patent-leather shoes began to draw his feet and gall his heels; his
+frock coat was tight; the perspiration poured down his face. Ralston was
+hot, too. But he strode on with apparent unconcern, and talked with the
+utmost friendliness on the municipal affairs of Peshawur."
+
+"It is very hot," said Futteh Ali Shah, "and I am afraid for your
+Excellency's health. For myself, of course, I am not troubled, but so
+much walking will be dangerous to you"; and he halted and looked
+longingly back to his horse.
+
+"Thank you," said Ralston. "But my horse is fresh, and I should not be
+able to talk to you so well. I do not feel that I am in danger."
+
+Futteh Ali Shah mopped his face and walked on. His feet blistered; he
+began to limp, and he had nothing but a riding-switch in his hand. Now
+across the plain he saw in the distance the round fort of Jamrud, and he
+suddenly halted:
+
+"I must sit down," he said. "I cannot help it, your Excellency, I must
+stop and sit down."
+
+Ralston turned to him with a look of cold surprise.
+
+"Before me, Futteh Ali Shah? You will sit down in my presence before I
+sit down? I think you will not."
+
+Futteh Ali Shah gazed up the road and down the road, and saw no help
+anywhere. Only this devilish Chief Commissioner stood threateningly
+before him. With a gesture of despair he wiped his face and walked on.
+For a mile more he limped on by Ralston's side, the while Ralston
+discoursed upon the great question of Agricultural Banks. Then he stopped
+again and blurted out:
+
+"I will give you no more trouble. If your Excellency will let me go,
+never again will I give you trouble. I swear it."
+
+Ralston smiled. He had had enough of the walk himself.
+
+"And Rahat Mian?" he asked.
+
+There was a momentary struggle in the zemindar's mind. But his fatigue
+and exhaustion were too heavy upon him.
+
+"He, too, shall go his own way. Neither I nor mine shall molest him."
+
+Ralston turned at once and mounted his horse. With a sigh of relief
+Futteh Ali Shah followed his example.
+
+"Shall we ride back together?" said Ralston, pleasantly. And as on the
+way out he had made no mention of any trouble between the landowner and
+himself, so he did not refer to it by a single word on his way back.
+
+But close to the city their ways parted and Futteh Ali Shah, as he took
+his leave, said hesitatingly,
+
+"If this story goes abroad, your Excellency--this story of how we walked
+together towards Jamrud--there will be much laughter and ridicule."
+
+The fear of ridicule--there was the weak point of the Afridi, as Ralston
+very well knew. To be laughed at--Futteh Ali Shah, who was wont to lord
+it among his friends, writhed under the mere possibility. And how they
+would laugh in and round about Peshawur! A fine figure he would cut as he
+rode through the streets with every ragged bystander jeering at the man
+who was walked into docility and submission by his Excellency the Chief
+Commissioner.
+
+"My life would be intolerable," he said, "were the story to get about."
+
+Ralston shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"But why should it get about?"
+
+"I do not know, but it surely will. It may be that the trees have ears
+and eyes and a mouth to speak." He edged a little nearer to the
+Commissioner. "It may be, too," he said cunningly, "that your Excellency
+loves to tell a good story after dinner. Now there is one way to stop
+that story."
+
+Ralston laughed. "If I could hold my tongue, you mean," he replied.
+
+Futteh Ali Shah came nearer still. He rode up close and leaned a little
+over towards Ralston.
+
+"Your Excellency would lose the story," he said, "but on the other hand
+there would be a gain--a gain of many hours of sleep passed otherwise in
+guessing."
+
+He spoke in an insinuating fashion, which made Ralston disinclined to
+strike a bargain--and he nodded his head like one who wishes to convey
+that he could tell much if only he would. But Ralston paused before he
+answered, and when he answered it was only to put a question.
+
+"What do you mean?" he asked.
+
+And the reply came in a low quick voice.
+
+"There was a message sent through Chiltistan."
+
+Ralston started. Was it in this strange way the truth was to come to him?
+He sat his horse carelessly. "I know," he said. "Some melons and some
+bags of grain."
+
+Futteh Ali Shah was disappointed. This devilish Chief Commissioner knew
+everything. Yet the story of the walk must not get abroad in Peshawur,
+and surely it would unless the Chief Commissioner were pledged to
+silence. He drew a bow at a venture.
+
+"Can your Excellency interpret the message? As they interpret it in
+Chiltistan?" and it seemed to him that he had this time struck true. "It
+is a little thing I ask of your Excellency."
+
+"It is not a great thing, to be sure," Ralston admitted. He looked at the
+zemindar and laughed. "But I could tell the story rather well," he said
+doubtfully. "It would be an amusing story as I should tell it. Yet--well,
+we will see," and he changed his tone suddenly. "Interpret to me that
+present as it is interpreted in the villages of Chiltistan."
+
+Futteh Ali Shah looked about him fearfully, making sure that there was no
+one within earshot. Then in a whisper he said: "The grain is the army
+which will rise up from the hills and descend from the heavens to destroy
+the power of the Government. The melons are the forces of the Government;
+for as easily as melons they will be cut into pieces."
+
+He rode off quickly when he had ended, like a man who understands that he
+has said too much, and then halted and returned.
+
+"You will not tell that story?" he said.
+
+"No," answered Ralston abstractedly. "I shall never tell that story."
+
+He understood the truth at last. So that was the message which Shere Ali
+had sent. No wonder, he thought, that the glare broadened over
+Chiltistan.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+THE SOLDIER AND THE JEW
+
+
+These two events took place at Peshawur, while Linforth was still upon
+the waters of the Red Sea. To be quite exact, on that morning when
+Ralston was taking his long walk towards Jamrud with the zemindar Futteh
+Ali Shah, Linforth was watching impatiently from his deck-chair the high
+mosque towers, the white domes and great houses of Mocha, as they
+shimmered in the heat at the water's edge against a wide background of
+yellow sand. It seemed to him that the long narrow city so small and
+clear across the great level of calm sea would never slide past the
+taffrail. But it disappeared, and in due course the ship moved slowly
+through the narrows into Aden harbour. This was on a Thursday evening,
+and the steamer stopped in Aden for three hours to coal. The night came
+on hot, windless and dark. Linforth leaned over the side, looking out
+upon the short curve of lights and the black mass of hill rising dimly
+above them. Three and a half more days and he would be standing on Indian
+soil. A bright light flashed towards the ship across the water and a
+launch came alongside, bearing the agent of the company.
+
+He had the latest telegrams in his hand.
+
+"Any trouble on the Frontier?" Linforth asked.
+
+"None," the agent replied, and Linforth's fever of impatience was
+assuaged. If trouble were threatening he would surely be in time--since
+there were only three and a half more days.
+
+But he did not know why he had been brought out from England, and the
+three and a half days made him by just three and a half days too late.
+For on this very night when the steamer stopped to coal in Aden harbour
+Shere Ali made his choice.
+
+He was present that evening at a prize-fight which took place in a
+music-hall at Calcutta. The lightweight champion of Singapore and the
+East, a Jew, was pitted against a young soldier who had secured his
+discharge and had just taken to boxing as a profession. The soldier
+brought a great reputation as an amateur. This was his first appearance
+as a professional, and his friends had gathered in numbers to encourage
+him. The hall was crowded with soldiers from the barracks, sailors from
+the fleet, and patrons of the fancy in Calcutta. The heat was
+overpowering, the audience noisy, and overhead the electric fans, which
+hung downwards from the ceiling, whirled above the spectators with so
+swift a rotation that those looking up saw only a vague blur in the air.
+The ring had been roped off upon the stage, and about three sides of the
+ring chairs for the privileged had been placed. The fourth side was open
+to the spectators in the hall, and behind the ropes at the back there sat
+in the centre of the row of chairs a fat red-faced man in evening-dress
+who was greeted on all sides as Colonel Joe. "Colonel Joe" was the
+referee, and a person on these occasions of great importance.
+
+There were several preliminary contests and before each one Colonel Joe
+came to the front and introduced the combatants with a short history of
+their achievements. A Hindu boy was matched against a white one, a couple
+of wrestlers came next, and then two English sailors, with more spirit
+than skill, had a set-to which warmed the audience into enthusiasm and
+ended amid shouts, whistles, shrill cat-calls, and thunders of applause.
+Meanwhile the heat grew more and more intense, the faces shinier, the air
+more and more smoke-laden and heavy.
+
+Shere Ali came on to the stage while the sailors were at work. He
+exchanged a nod with "Colonel Joe," and took his seat in the front row of
+chairs behind the ropes.
+
+It was a rough gathering on the whole, though there were some men in
+evening-dress besides Colonel Joe, and of these two sat beside Shere Ali.
+They were talking together, and Shere Ali at the first paid no heed to
+them. The trainers, the backers, the pugilists themselves were the men
+who had become his associates in Calcutta. There were many of them
+present upon the stage, and in turn they approached Shere Ali and spoke
+to him with familiarity upon the chances of the fight. Yet in their
+familiarity there was a kind of deference. They were speaking to a
+patron. Moreover, there was some flattery in the attention with which
+they waited to catch his eye and the eagerness with which they came at
+once to his side.
+
+"We are all glad to see you, sir," said a small man who had been a jockey
+until he was warned off the turf.
+
+"Yes," said Shere Ali with a smile, "I am among friends."
+
+"Now who would you say was going to win this fight?" continued the
+jockey, cocking his head with an air of shrewdness, which said as plainly
+as words, "You are the one to tell if you will only say."
+
+Shere Ali expanded. Deference and flattery, however gross, so long as
+they came from white people were balm to his wounded vanity. The weeks in
+Calcutta had worked more harm than Ralston had suspected. Shy of meeting
+those who had once treated him as an equal, imagining when he did meet
+them that now they only admitted him to their company on sufferance and
+held him in their thoughts of no account, he had become avid for
+recognition among the riff-raff of the town.
+
+"I have backed the man from Singapore," he replied, "I know him. The
+soldier is a stranger to me"; and gradually as he talked the voices of
+his two neighbours forced themselves upon his consciousness. It was not
+what they said which caught his attention. But their accents and the
+pitch of their voices arrested him, and swept him back to his days at
+Eton and at Oxford. He turned his head and looked carelessly towards
+them. They were both young; both a year ago might have been his intimates
+and friends. As it was, he imagined bitterly, they probably resented his
+sitting even in the next chair to them.
+
+The stage was now clear; the two sailors had departed, the audience sat
+waiting for the heroes of the evening and calling for them with impatient
+outbursts of applause. Shere Ali waited too. But there was no impatience
+on his part, as there was no enthusiasm. He was just getting through the
+evening; and this hot and crowded den, with its glitter of lights,
+promised a thrill of excitement which would for a moment lift him from
+the torture of his thoughts.
+
+But the antagonists still lingered in their dressing-rooms while their
+trainers put the final touch to their preparations. And while the
+antagonists lingered, the two young men next to him began again to talk,
+and this time the words fell on Shere Ali's ears.
+
+"I think it ought to be stopped," said one. "It can't be good for us. Of
+course the fellow who runs the circus doesn't care, although he is an
+Englishman, and although he must have understood what was being shouted."
+
+"He is out for money, of course," replied the other.
+
+"Yes. But not half a mile away, just across the Maidan there, is
+Government House. Surely it ought to be stopped."
+
+The speaker was evidently serious. He spoke, indeed, with some heat.
+Shere Ali wondered indifferently what it was that went on in the circus
+in the Maidan half a mile from the Government House. Something which
+ought to be stopped, something which could not be "good for us." Shere
+Ali clenched his hands in a gust of passion. How well he knew the
+phrase! Good for us, good for the magic of British prestige! How often
+he had used the words himself in the days when he had been fool enough
+to believe that he belonged to the white people. He had used it in the
+company of just such youths as those who sat next to him now, and he
+writhed in his seat as he imagined how they must have laughed at him in
+their hearts. What was it that was not "good for us" in the circus on
+the Maidan?
+
+As he wondered there was a burst of applause, and on the opposite side of
+the ring the soldier, stripped to the waist, entered with his two
+assistants. Shere Ali was sitting close to the lower corner of the ring
+on the right-hand side of the stage; the soldier took his seat in the
+upper corner on the other side. He was a big, heavily-built man, but
+young, active, and upon his open face he had a look of confidence. It
+seemed to Shere Ali that he had been trained to the very perfection of
+his strength, and when he moved the muscles upon his shoulders and back
+worked under his skin as though they lived. Shouts greeted him, shouts in
+which his surname and his Christian name and his nicknames were mingled,
+and he smiled pleasantly back at his friends. Shere Ali looked at him.
+From his cheery, honest face to the firm set of his feet upon the floor,
+he was typical of his class and race.
+
+"Oh, I hope he'll be beaten!"
+
+Shere Ali found himself repeating the words in a whisper. The wish had
+suddenly sprung up within him, but it grew in intensity; it became a
+great longing. He looked anxiously for the appearance of the Jew from
+Singapore. He was glad that, knowing little of either man, he had laid
+his money against the soldier.
+
+Meanwhile the two youths beside him resumed their talk, and Shere Ali
+learned what it was that was not "good for us"!
+
+"There were four girls," said the youth who had been most indignant.
+"Four English girls dancing a _pas de quatre_ on the sand of the circus.
+The dance was all right, the dresses were all right. In an English
+theatre no one would have had a word to say. It was the audience that was
+wrong. The cheaper parts at the back of the tent were crowded with
+natives, tier above tier--and I tell you--I don't know much Hindustani,
+but the things they shouted made my blood boil. After all, if you are
+going to be the governing race it's not a good thing to let your women be
+insulted, eh?"
+
+Shere Ali laughed quietly. He could picture to himself the whole scene,
+the floor of the circus, the tiers of grinning faces rising up against
+the back walls of the tent.
+
+"Did the girls themselves mind?" asked the other of the youths.
+
+"They didn't understand." And again the angry utterance followed. "It
+ought to be stopped! It ought to be stopped!"
+
+Shere Ali turned suddenly upon the speaker.
+
+"Why?" he asked fiercely, and he thrust a savage face towards him.
+
+The young man was taken by surprise; for a second it warmed Shere Ali to
+think that he was afraid. And, indeed, there was very little of the
+civilised man in Shere Ali's look at this moment. His own people were
+claiming him. It was one of the keen grim tribesmen of the hills who
+challenged the young Englishman. The Englishman, however, was not afraid.
+He was merely disconcerted by the unexpected attack. He recovered his
+composure the next moment.
+
+"I don't think that I was speaking to you," he said quietly, and then
+turned away.
+
+Shere Ali half rose in his seat. But he was not yet quite emancipated
+from the traditions of his upbringing. To create a disturbance in a
+public place, to draw all eyes upon himself, to look a fool, eventually
+to be turned ignominiously into the street--all this he was within an
+ace of doing and suffering, but he refrained. He sat down again
+quickly, feeling hot and cold with shame, just as he remembered he had
+been wont to feel when he had committed some gaucherie in his early
+days in England.
+
+At that moment the light-weight champion from Singapore came out from his
+dressing-room and entered the ring. He was of a slighter build than his
+opponent, but very quick upon his feet. He was shorter, too. Colonel Joe
+introduced the antagonists to the audience, standing before the
+footlights as he did so. And it was at once evident who was the
+favourite. The shouts were nearly all for the soldier.
+
+The Jew took his seat in a chair down in the corner where Shere Ali
+was sitting, and Shere Ali leaned over the ropes and whispered to
+him fiercely,
+
+"Win! Win! I'll double the stake if you do!"
+
+The Jew turned and smiled at the young Prince.
+
+"I'll do my best."
+
+Shere Ali leaned back in his chair and the fight began. He followed it
+with an excitement and a suspense which were astonishing even to him.
+When the soldier brought his fist home upon the prominent nose of the
+Singapore champion and plaudits resounded through the house, his heart
+sank with bitter disappointment. When the Jew replied with a dull
+body-blow, his hopes rebounded. He soon began to understand that in the
+arts of prize-fighting the soldier was a child compared with the man from
+Singapore. The Champion of the East knew his trade. He was as hard as
+iron. The sounding blows upon his forehead and nose did no more than
+flush his face for a few moments. Meanwhile he struck for the body.
+Moreover, he had certain tricks which lured his antagonist to an
+imprudent confidence. For instance, he breathed heavily from the
+beginning of the second round, as though he were clean out of condition.
+But each round found him strong and quick to press an advantage. After
+one blow, which toppled his opponent through the ropes, Shere Ali clapped
+his hands.
+
+"Bravo!" he cried; and one of the youths at his side said to his
+companion:
+
+"This fellow's a Jew, too. Look at his face."
+
+For twelve rounds the combatants seemed still to be upon equal terms,
+though those in the audience who had knowledge began to shake their heads
+over the chances of the soldier. Shere Ali, however, was still racked by
+suspense. The fight had become a symbol, almost a message to him, even as
+his gift to the Mullah had become a message to the people of Chiltistan.
+All that he had once loved, and now furiously raged against, was
+represented by the soldier, the confident, big, heavily built soldier,
+while, on the other hand, by the victory of the Jew all the subject
+peoples would be vindicated. More and more as the fight fluctuated from
+round to round the people and the country of Chiltistan claimed its own.
+The soldier represented even those youths at his side, whose women must
+on no account be insulted.
+
+"Why should they be respected?" he cried to himself.
+
+For at the bottom of his heart lay the thought that he had been set aside
+as impossible by Violet Oliver. There was the real cause of his
+bitterness against the white people. He still longed for Violet Oliver,
+still greatly coveted her. But his own people and his own country were
+claiming him; and he longed for her in a different way. Chivalry--the
+chivalry of the young man who wants to guard and cherish--respect, the
+desire that the loved one should share ambitions, life work, all--what
+follies and illusions these things were!
+
+"I know," said Shere Ali to himself. "I know. I am myself the victim of
+them," and he lowered his head and clasped his hands tightly together
+between his knees. He forgot the prize-fight, the very sound of the
+pugilists' feet upon the bare boards of the stage ceased to be audible to
+his ears. He ached like a man bruised and beaten; he was possessed with a
+sense of loneliness, poignant as pain. "If I had only taken the easier
+way, bought and never cared!" he cried despairingly. "But at all events
+there's no need for respect. Why should one respect those who take and do
+not give?"
+
+As he asked himself the question, there came a roar from the audience. He
+looked up. The soldier was standing, but he was stooping and the fingers
+of one hand touched the boards. Over against the soldier the man from
+Singapore stood waiting with steady eyes, and behind the ropes Colonel
+Joe was counting in a loud voice:
+
+"One, two, three, four."
+
+Shere Ali's eyes lit up. Would the soldier rise? Would he take the tips
+of those fingers from the floor, stand up again and face his man? Or was
+he beaten?
+
+"Five, six, seven, eight"--the referee counted, his voice rising above
+the clamour of voices. The audience had risen, men stood upon their
+benches, cries of expostulation were shouted to the soldier.
+
+"Nine, ten," counted the referee, and the fight was over. The soldier had
+been counted out.
+
+Shere Ali was upon his feet like the rest of the enthusiasts.
+
+"Well done!" he cried. "Well done!" and as the Jew came back to his
+corner Shere Ali shook him excitedly by the hand. The sign had been
+given; the subject race had beaten the soldier. Shere Ali was livid with
+excitement. Perhaps, indeed, the young Englishmen had been right, and
+some dim racial sympathy stirred Shere Ali to his great enthusiasm.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+SHERE ALI IS CLAIMED BY CHILTISTAN
+
+
+While these thoughts were seething in his mind, while the excitement was
+still at its height, the cries still at their loudest, Shere All heard a
+quiet penetrating voice speak in his ear. And the voice spoke in Pushtu.
+
+The mere sound of the language struck upon Shere Ali's senses at that
+moment of exultation with a strange effect. He thrilled to it from head
+to foot. He heard it with a feeling of joy. And then he took note of the
+spoken words.
+
+"The man who wrote to your Highness from Calcutta waits outside the
+doors. As you stand under the gas lamps, take your handkerchief from your
+pocket if you wish to speak with him."
+
+Shere Ali turned back from the ropes. But the spectators were already
+moving from their chairs to the steps which led from the stage to the
+auditorium. There was a crowd about those steps, and Shere Ali could not
+distinguish among it the man who was likely to have whispered in his ear.
+All seemed bent upon their own business, and that business was to escape
+from the close heat-laden air of the building as quickly as might be.
+
+Shere Ali stood alone and pondered upon the words.
+
+The man who had written to him from Calcutta! That was the man who had
+sent the anonymous letter which had caused him one day to pass through
+the Delhi Gate of Lahore. A money-lender at Calcutta, but a countryman
+from Chiltistan. So he had gathered from Safdar Khan, while heaping scorn
+upon the message.
+
+But now, and on this night of all nights, Shere Ali was in a mood to
+listen. There were intrigues on foot--there were always intrigues on
+foot. But to-night he would weigh those intrigues. He went out from the
+music-hall, and under the white glare of the electric lamps above the
+door he stood for a moment in full view. Then he deliberately took his
+handkerchief from his pocket. From the opposite side of the road, a man
+in native dress, wearing a thick dark cloak over his white shirt and
+pyjamas, stepped forward. Shere Ali advanced to meet him.
+
+"Huzoor, huzoor," said the man, bending low, and he raised Shere Ali's
+hand and pressed his forehead upon it, in sign of loyalty.
+
+"You wish to speak to me?" said Shere Ali.
+
+"If your Highness will deign to follow. I am Ahmed Ismail. Your Highness
+has heard of me, no doubt."
+
+Shere Ali did not so much as smile, nor did he deny the statement. He
+nodded gravely. After all, vanity was not the prerogative of his people
+alone in all the world.
+
+"Yes," he said, "I will follow."
+
+Ahmed Ismail crossed the road once more out of the lights into the
+shadows, and walked on, keeping close to the lines of houses. Shere Ali
+followed upon his heels. But these two were not alone to take that road.
+A third man, a Bengali, bespectacled, and in appearance most respectable,
+came down the steps of the musichall, a second after Shere Ali had
+crossed the road. He, too, had been a witness of the prize-fight. He
+hurried after Shere Ali and caught him up.
+
+"Very good fight, sir," he said. "Would Prince of Chiltistan like to
+utter some few welcome words to great Indian public on extraordinary
+skill of respective pugilists? I am full-fledged reporter of _Bande
+Mataram_, great Nationalist paper."
+
+He drew out a note-book and a pencil as he spoke. Ahmed Ismail stopped
+and turned back towards the two men. The Babu looked once, and only once,
+at the money-lender. Then he stood waiting for Shere Ali's answer.
+
+"No, I have nothing to say," said Shere Ali civilly. "Good-night," and he
+walked on.
+
+"Great disappointment for Indian public," said the Bengali. "Prince of
+Chiltistan will say nothing. I make first-class leading article on
+reticence of Indian Prince in presence of high-class spectacular events.
+Good-night, sir," and the Babu shut up his book and fell back.
+
+Shere Ali followed upon the heels of Ahmed Ismail. The money-lender
+walked down the street to the Maidan, and then turned to the left. The
+Babu, on the other hand, hailed a third-class gharry and, ascending into
+it gave the driver some whispered instructions.
+
+The gharry drove on past the Bengal Club, and came, at length, to the
+native town. At the corner of a street the Babu descended, paid the
+driver, and dismissed him.
+
+"I will walk the rest of the way," he said. "My home is quite near and a
+little exercise is good. I have large varicose veins in the legs, or I
+should have tramped hand and foot all the way."
+
+He walked slowly until the driver had turned his gharry and was driving
+back. Then, for a man afflicted with varicose veins the Babu displayed
+amazing agility. He ran through the silent and deserted street until he
+came to a turning. The lane which ran into the main road was a blind
+alley. Mean hovels and shuttered booths flanked it, but at the end a tall
+house stood. The Babu looked about him and perceived a cart standing in
+the lane. He advanced to it and looked in.
+
+"This is obvious place for satisfactory concealment," he said, as with
+some difficulty he clambered in. Over the edge of the cart he kept watch.
+In a while he heard the sound of a man walking. The man was certainly at
+some distance from the turning, but the Babu's head went down at once.
+The man whose footsteps he heard was wearing boots, but there would be
+one walking in front of that man who was wearing slippers--Ahmed Ismail.
+
+Ahmed Ismail, indeed, turned an instant afterwards into the lane, passed
+the cart and walked up to the door of the big house. There he halted, and
+Shere Ali joined him.
+
+"The gift was understood, your Highness," he said. "The message was sent
+from end to end of Chiltistan."
+
+"What gift?" asked Shere Ali, in genuine surprise.
+
+"Your Highness has forgotten? The melons and the bags of grain."
+
+Shere Ali was silent for a few moments. Then he said:
+
+"And how was the gift interpreted?"
+
+Ahmed Ismail smiled in the darkness.
+
+"There are wise men in Chiltistan, and they found the riddle easy to
+read. The melons were the infidels which would be cut to pieces, even as
+a knife cuts a melon. The grain was the army of the faithful."
+
+Again Shere Ali was silent. He stood with his eyes upon his companion.
+
+"Thus they understand my gift to the Mullah?" he said at length.
+
+"Thus they understood it," said Ahmed Ismail. "Were they wrong?" and
+since Shere Ali paused before he answered, Ahmed repeated the question,
+holding the while the key of his door between his fingers.
+
+"Were they wrong, your Highness?"
+
+"No," said Shere Ali firmly. "They were right."
+
+Ahmed Ismail put the key into the lock. The bolt shot back with a grating
+sound, the door opened upon blackness.
+
+"Will your Highness deign to enter?" he said, standing aside.
+
+"Yes," said Shere Ali, and he passed in. His own people, his own country,
+had claimed and obtained him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+THE CASTING OF THE DIE
+
+
+Ahmed Ismail crossed the threshold behind Shere Ali. He closed the door
+quietly, bolted and locked it. Then for a space of time the two men stood
+silent in the darkness, and both listened intently--Ahmed Ismail for the
+sound of someone stirring in the house, Shere Ali for a quiet secret
+movement at his elbow. The blackness of the passage gaping as the door
+opened had roused him to suspicion even while he had been standing in the
+street. But he had not thought of drawing back. He had entered without
+fear, just as now he stood, without fear, drawn up against the wall.
+There was, indeed, a smile upon his face. Then he reached out his hand.
+Ahmed Ismail, who still stood afraid lest any of his family should have
+been disturbed, suddenly felt a light touch, like a caress, upon his
+face, and then before he could so much as turn his head, five strong lean
+fingers gripped him by the throat and tightened.
+
+"Ahmed, I have enemies in Chiltistan," said Shere Ali, between a whisper
+and a laugh. "The son of Abdulla Mohammed, for instance," and he loosened
+his grip a little upon Ahmed's throat, but held him still with a straight
+arm. Ahmed did not struggle. He whispered in reply:
+
+"I am not of your Highness's enemies. Long ago I gave your Highness a
+sign of friendship when I prayed you to pass by the Delhi Gate of
+Lahore."
+
+Shere Ali turned Ahmed Ismail towards the inner part of the house and
+loosed his neck.
+
+"Go forward, then. Light a lamp," he said, and Ahmed moved noiselessly
+along the passage. Shere Ali heard the sound of a door opening upstairs,
+and then a pale light gleamed from above. Shere Ali walked to the end of
+the passage, and mounting the stairs found Ahmed Ismail in the doorway of
+a little room with a lighted lamp in his hand.
+
+"I was this moment coming down," said Ahmed Ismail as he stood aside from
+the door. Shere Ali walked in. He crossed to the window, which was
+unglazed but had little wooden shutters. These shutters were closed.
+Shere Ali opened one and looked out. The room was on the first floor, and
+the window opened on to a small square courtyard. A movement of Ahmed
+Ismail's brought him swiftly round. He saw the money-lender on his knees
+with his forehead to the ground, grovelling before his Prince's feet.
+
+"The time has come, oh, my Lord," he cried in a low, eager voice, and
+again, "the time has come."
+
+Shere Ali looked down and pleasure glowed unwontedly within him. He did
+not answer, he did not give Ahmed Ismail leave to rise from the ground.
+He sated his eyes and his vanity with the spectacle of the man's
+abasement. Even his troubled heart ached with a duller pain.
+
+"I have been a fool," he murmured, "I have wasted my years. I have
+tortured myself for nothing. Yes, I have been a fool."
+
+A wave of anger swept over him, drowning his pride--anger against
+himself. He thought of the white people with whom he had lived.
+
+"I sought for a recognition of my equality with them," he went on. "I
+sought it from their men and from their women. I hungered for it like a
+dog for a bone. They would not give it--neither their men, nor their
+women. And all the while here were my own people willing at a sign to
+offer me their homage."
+
+He spoke in Pushtu, and Ahmed Ismail drank in every word.
+
+"They wanted a leader, Huzoor," he said.
+
+"I turned away from them like a fool," replied Shere Ali, "while I sought
+favours from the white women like a slave."
+
+"Your Highness shall take as a right what you sought for as a favour."
+
+"As a right?" cried Shere Ali, his heart leaping to the incense of Ahmed
+Ismail's flattery. "What right?" he asked, suddenly bending his eyes upon
+his companion.
+
+"The right of a conqueror," cried Ahmed Ismail, and he bowed himself
+again at his Prince's feet. He had spoken Shere Ali's wild and secret
+thought. But whereas Shere Ali had only whispered it to himself, Ahmed
+Ismail spoke it aloud, boldly and with a challenge in his voice, like one
+ready to make good his words. An interval of silence followed, a fateful
+interval as both men knew. Not a sound from without penetrated into that
+little shuttered room, but to Shere Ali it seemed that the air throbbed
+and was heavy with unknown things to come. Memories and fancies whirled
+in his disordered brain without relation to each other or consequence in
+his thoughts. Now it was the two Englishmen seated side by side behind
+the ropes and quietly talking of what was "not good for us," as though
+they had the whole of India, and the hill-districts, besides, in their
+pockets. He saw their faces, and, quietly though he stood and impassive
+as he looked, he was possessed with a longing to behold them within
+reach, so that he might strike them and disfigure them for ever. Now it
+was Violet Oliver as she descended the steps into the great courtyard of
+the Fort, dainty and provoking from the arched slipper upon her foot to
+the soft perfection of her hair. He saw her caught into the twilight
+swirl of pale white faces and so pass from his sight, thinking that at
+the same moment she passed from his life. Then it was the Viceroy in his
+box at the racecourse and all Calcutta upon the lawn which swept past his
+eyes. He saw the Eurasian girls prinked out in their best frocks to lure
+into marriage some unwary Englishman. And again it was Colonel Dewes, the
+man who had lost his place amongst his own people, even as he, Shere Ali,
+had himself. A half-contemptuous smile of pity for a moment softened the
+hard lines of his mouth as he thought upon that forlorn and elderly man
+taking his loneliness with him into Cashmere.
+
+"That shall not be my way," he said aloud, and the lines of his mouth
+hardened again. And once more before his eyes rose the vision of
+Violet Oliver.
+
+Ahmed Ismail had risen to his feet and stood watching his Prince with
+eager, anxious eyes. Shere Ali crossed to the table and turned down the
+lamp, which was smoking. Then he went to the window and thrust the
+shutters open. He turned round suddenly upon Ahmed.
+
+"Were you ever in Mecca?"
+
+"Yes, Huzoor," and Ahmed's eyes flashed at the question.
+
+"I met three men from Chiltistan on the Lowari Pass. They were going down
+to Kurachi. I, too, must make the pilgrimage to Mecca."
+
+He stood watching the flame of the lamp as he spoke, and spoke in a
+monotonous dull voice, as though what he said were of little importance.
+But Ahmed Ismail listened to the words, not the voice, and his joy was
+great. It was as though he heard a renegade acknowledge once more the
+true faith.
+
+"Afterwards, Huzoor," he said, significantly. "Afterwards." Shere Ali
+nodded his head.
+
+"Yes, afterwards. When we have driven the white people down from the
+hills into the plains."
+
+"And from the plains into the sea," cried Ahmed Ismail. "The angels will
+fight by our side--so the Mullahs have said---and no man who fights with
+faith will be hurt. All will be invulnerable. It is written, and the
+Mullahs have read the writing and translated it through Chiltistan."
+
+"Is that so?" said Shere Ali, and as he put the question there was an
+irony in his voice which Ahmed Ismail was quick to notice. But Shere Ali
+put it yet a second time, after a pause, and this time there was no
+trace of irony.
+
+"But I will not go alone," he said, suddenly raising his eyes from the
+flame of the lamp and looking towards Ahmed Ismail.
+
+Ahmed did not understand. But also he did not interrupt, and Shere Ali
+spoke again, with a smile slowly creeping over his face.
+
+"I will not go alone to Mecca. I will follow the example of Sirdar Khan."
+
+The saying was still a riddle to Ahmed Ismail.
+
+"Sirdar Khan, your Highness?" he said. "I do not know him."
+
+Shere Ali turned his eyes again upon the flame of the lamp, and the smile
+broadened upon his face, a thing not pleasant to see. He wetted his lips
+with the tip of his tongue and told his story.
+
+"Sirdar Khan is dead long since," he said, "but he was one of the five
+men of the bodyguard of Nana, who went into the Bibigarh at Cawnpore on
+July 12 of the year 1857. Have you heard of that year, Ahmed Ismail, and
+of the month and of the day? Do you know what was done that day in the
+Bibigarh at Cawnpore?"
+
+Ahmed Ismail watched the light grow in Shere Ali's eyes, and a smile
+crept into his face, too.
+
+"Huzoor, Huzoor," he said, in a whisper of delight. He knew very well
+what had happened in Cawnpore, though he knew nothing of the month or the
+day, and cared little in what year it had happened.
+
+"There were 206 women and children, English women, English children,
+shut up in the Bibigarh. At five o'clock--and it is well to remember the
+hour, Ahmed Ismail--at five o'clock in the evening the five men of the
+Nana's bodyguard went into the Bibigarh and the doors were closed upon
+them. It was dark when they came out again and shut the doors behind
+them, saying that all were dead. But it was not true. There was an
+Englishwoman alive in the Bibigarh, and Sirdar Khan came back in the
+night and took her away."
+
+"And she is in Mecca now?" cried Ahmed Ismail.
+
+"Yes. An old, old woman," said Shere Ali, dwelling upon the words with a
+quiet, cruel pleasure. He had the picture clear before his eyes, he saw
+it in the flame of the lamp at which he gazed so steadily--an old,
+wizened, shrunken woman, living in a bare room, friendless and solitary,
+so old that she had even ceased to be aware of her unhappiness, and so
+coarsened out of all likeness to the young, bright English girl who had
+once dwelt in Cawnpore, that even her own countryman had hardly believed
+she was of his race. He set another picture side by side with that--the
+picture of Violet Oliver as she turned to him on the steps and said,
+"This is really good-bye." And in his imagination, he saw the one picture
+merge and coarsen into the other, the dainty trappings of lace and
+ribbons change to a shapeless cloak, the young face wither from its
+beauty into a wrinkled and yellow mask. It would be a just punishment, he
+said to himself. Anger against her was as a lust at his heart. He had
+lost sight of her kindness, and her pity; he desired her and hated her in
+the same breath.
+
+"Are you married, Ahmed Ismail?" he asked.
+
+Ahmed Ismail smiled.
+
+"Truly, Huzoor."
+
+"Do you carry your troubles to your wife? Is she your companion as well
+as your wife? Your friend as well as your mistress?"
+
+Ahmed Ismail laughed.
+
+"Yet that is what the Englishwomen are," said Shere Ali.
+
+"Perhaps, Huzoor," replied Ahmed, cunningly, "it is for that reason that
+there are some who take and do not give."
+
+He came a little nearer to his Prince.
+
+"Where is she, Huzoor?"
+
+Shere Ali was startled by the question out of his dreams. For it had been
+a dream, this thought of capturing Violet Oliver and plucking her out of
+her life into his. He had played with it, knowing it to be a fancy. There
+had been no settled plan, no settled intention in his mind. But to-night
+he was carried away. It appeared to him there was a possibility his dream
+might come true. It seemed so not alone to him but to Ahmed Ismail too.
+He turned and gazed at the man, wondering whether Ahmed Ismail played
+with him or not. But Ahmed bore the scrutiny without a shadow of
+embarrassment.
+
+"Is she in India, Huzoor?"
+
+Shere Ali hesitated. Some memory of the lessons learned in England was
+still alive within him, bidding him guard his secret. But the memory was
+no longer strong enough. He bowed his head in assent.
+
+"In Calcutta?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Your Highness shall point her out to me one evening as she drives in the
+Maidan," said Ahmed Ismail, and again Shere Ali answered--
+
+"Yes."
+
+But he caught himself back the next moment. He flung away from Ahmed
+Ismail with a harsh outburst of laughter.
+
+"But this is all folly," he cried. "We are not in the days of the
+uprising," for thus he termed now what a month ago he would have called
+"The Mutiny." "Cawnpore is not Calcutta," and he turned in a gust of fury
+upon Ahmed Ismail. "Do you play with me, Ahmed Ismail?"
+
+"Upon my head, no! Light of my life, hope of my race, who would dare?"
+and he was on the ground at Shere Ali's feet. "Do I indeed speak follies?
+I pray your Highness to bethink you that the summer sets its foot upon
+the plains. She will go to the hills, Huzoor. She will go to the hills.
+And your people are not fools. They have cunning to direct their
+strength. See, your Highness, is there a regiment in Peshawur whose
+rifles are safe, guard them howsoever carefully they will? Every week
+they are brought over the hills into Chiltistan that we may be ready for
+the Great Day," and Ahmed Ismail chuckled to himself. "A month ago,
+Huzoor, so many rifles had been stolen that a regiment in camp locked
+their rifles to their tent poles, and so thought to sleep in peace. But
+on the first night the cords of the tents were cut, and while the men
+waked and struggled under the folds of canvas, the tent poles with the
+rifles chained to them were carried away. All those rifles are now in
+Kohara. Surely, Huzoor, if they can steal the rifles from the middle of a
+camp, they can steal a weak girl among the hills."
+
+Ahmed Ismail waited in suspense, with his forehead bowed to the ground,
+and when the answer came he smiled. He had made good use of this
+unexpected inducement which had been given to him. He knew very well that
+nothing but an unlikely chance would enable him to fulfil his promise.
+But that did not matter. The young Prince would point out the
+Englishwoman in the Maidan and, at a later time when all was ready in
+Chiltistan, a fine and obvious attempt should be made to carry her off.
+The pretence might, if occasion served, become a reality, to be sure, but
+the attempt must be as public as possible. There must be no doubt as to
+its author. Shere Ali, in a word, must be committed beyond any
+possibility of withdrawal. Ahmed Ismail himself would see to that.
+
+"Very well. I will point her out to you," said Shere Ali, and Ahmed
+Ismail rose to his feet. He waited before his master, silent and
+respectful. Shere Ali had no suspicion that he was being jockeyed by that
+respectful man into a hopeless rebellion. He had, indeed, lost sight of
+the fact that the rebellion must be hopeless.
+
+"When," he asked, "will Chiltistan be ready?"
+
+"As soon as the harvest is got in," replied Ahmed Ismail.
+
+Shere Ali nodded his head.
+
+"You and I will go northwards to-morrow," he said.
+
+"To Kohara?" asked Ahmed Ismail.
+
+"Yes."
+
+For a little while Ahmed Ismail was silent. Then he said: "If your
+Highness will allow his servant to offer a contemptible word of advice--"
+
+"Speak," said Shere Ali.
+
+"Then it might be wise, perhaps, to go slowly to Kohara. Your Highness
+has enemies in Chiltistan. The news of the melons and the bags of grain
+is spread abroad, and jealousy is aroused. For there are some who wish to
+lead when they should serve."
+
+"The son of Abdulla Mohammed," said Shere Ali.
+
+Ahmed Ismail shrugged his shoulders as though the son of Abdulla Mohammed
+were of little account. There was clearly another in his mind, and Shere
+Ali was quick to understand him.
+
+"My father," he said quietly. He remembered how his father had received
+him with his Snider rifle cocked and laid across his knees. This time the
+Snider would be fired if ever Shere Ali came within range of its bullet.
+But it was unlikely that he would get so far, unless he went quickly and
+secretly at an appointed time.
+
+"I had a poor foolish thought," said Ahmed Ismail, "not worthy a moment's
+consideration by my Prince."
+
+Shere Ali broke in impatiently upon his words.
+
+"Speak it."
+
+"If we travelled slowly to Ajmere, we should come to that town at the
+time of pilgrimage. There in secret the final arrangements can be made,
+so that the blow may fall upon an uncovered head."
+
+"The advice is good," said Shere Ali. But he spoke reluctantly. He wanted
+not to wait at all. He wanted to strike now while his anger was at its
+hottest. But undoubtedly the advice was good.
+
+Ahmed Ismail, carrying the light in his hand, went down the stairs before
+Shere Ali and along the passage to the door. There he extinguished the
+lamp and cautiously drew back the bolts. He looked out and saw that the
+street was empty.
+
+"There is no one," he said, and Shere Ali passed out to the mouth of the
+blind alley and turned to the left towards the Maidan. He walked
+thoughtfully and did not notice a head rise cautiously above the side of
+a cart in the mouth of the alley. It was the head of the reporter of
+Bande Mataram, whose copy would be assuredly too late for the press.
+
+Shere Ali walked on through the streets. It was late, and he met no one.
+There had come upon him during the last hours a great yearning for his
+own country. He ran over in his mind, with a sense of anger against
+himself, the miserable wasted weeks in Calcutta--the nights in the
+glaring bars and halls, the friends he had made, the depths in which he
+had wallowed. He came to the Maidan, and, standing upon that empty plain,
+gazed round on the great silent city. He hated it, with its statues of
+Viceroys and soldiers, its houses of rich merchants, its insolence. He
+would lead his own people against all that it symbolised. Perhaps, some
+day, when all the frontier was in flame, and the British power rolled
+back, he and his people might pour down from the hills and knock even
+against the gates of Calcutta. Men from the hills had come down to Tonk,
+and Bhopal, and Rohilcund, and Rampur, and founded kingdoms for
+themselves. Why should he and his not push on to Calcutta?
+
+He bared his head to the night wind. He was uplifted, and fired with mad,
+impossible dreams. All that he had learned was of little account to him
+now. It might be that the English, as Colonel Dewes had said, had
+something of an army. Let them come to Chiltistan and prove their boast.
+
+"I will go north to the hills," he cried, and with a shock he understood
+that, after all, he had recovered his own place. The longing at his heart
+was for his own country--for his own people. It might have been bred of
+disappointment and despair. Envy of the white people might have cradled
+it, desire for the white woman might have nursed it into strength. But it
+was alive now. That was all of which Shere Ali was conscious. The
+knowledge filled all his thoughts. He had his place in the world. Greatly
+he rejoiced.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+SHERE ALI'S PILGRIMAGE
+
+
+There were times when Ralston held aloft his hands and cursed the Indian
+administration by all his gods. But he never did so with a more
+whole-hearted conviction than on the day when he received word that
+Linforth had been diverted to Rawal Pindi, in order that he might take up
+purely military duties. It took Ralston just seven months to secure his
+release, and it was not until the early days of autumn had arrived that
+Linforth at last reached Peshawur. A landau, with a coachman and groom in
+scarlet liveries, was waiting for him at the station, and he drove along
+the broad road through the cantonment to Government House. As the
+carriage swung in at the gates, a tall, thin man came from the
+croquet-ground on the left. He joined Dick in the porch.
+
+"You are Mr. Linforth?" he said.
+
+"Yes."
+
+For a moment a pair of grey, tired eyes ran Dick over from head to foot
+in a careless scrutiny. Apparently, however, the scrutiny was favourable.
+
+"I am the Chief Commissioner. I am glad that you have come. My sister
+will give you some tea, and afterwards, if you are not tired, we might go
+for a ride together. You would like to see your room first."
+
+Ralston spoke with his usual indifference. There was no intonation in his
+voice which gave to any one sentence a particular meaning; and for a
+particular meaning Dick Linforth was listening with keen ears. He
+followed Ralston across the hall to his room, and disappointment gained
+upon him with every step. He had grown familiar with disappointment of
+late years, but he was still young enough in years and spirit to expect
+the end of disappointment with each change in his fortunes. He had
+expected it when the news of his appointment had reached him in Calcutta,
+and disappointment had awaited him in Bombay. He had expected it again
+when, at last, he was sent from Rawal Pindi to Peshawur. All the way up
+the line he had been watching the far hills of Cashmere, and repeating to
+himself, "At last! At last!"
+
+The words had been a song at his heart, tuned to the jolt and rhythm of
+the wheels. Ralston of Peshawur had asked for him. So much he had been
+told. His longing had explained to him why Ralston of Peshawur had asked
+for him, and easily he had believed the explanation. He was a Linforth,
+one of the Linforths of the Road. Great was his pride. He would not have
+bartered his position to be a General in command of a division. Ralston
+had sent for him because of his hereditary title to work upon the Road,
+the broad, permanent, graded Road which was to make India safe.
+
+And now he walked behind a tired and indifferent Commissioner, whose very
+voice officialdom had made phlegmatic, and on whose aspect was writ large
+the habit of routine. In this mood he sat, while Miss Ralston prattled to
+him about the social doings of Peshawur, the hunt, the golf; and in this
+mood he rode out with Ralston to the Gate of the City.
+
+They passed through the main street, and, turning to the right, ascended
+to an archway, above which rose a tower. At the archway they dismounted
+and climbed to the roof of the tower. Peshawur, with its crowded streets,
+its open bazaars, its balconied houses of mud bricks built into wooden
+frames, lay mapped beneath them. But Linforth's eyes travelled over the
+trees and the gardens northwards and eastwards, to where the foothills of
+the Himalayas were coloured with the violet light of evening.
+
+"Linforth," Ralston cried. He was leaning on the parapet at the opposite
+side of the tower, and Dick crossed and leaned at his side.
+
+"It was I who had you sent for," said Ralston in his dull voice. "When
+you were at Chatham, I mean. I worried them in Calcutta until they
+sent for you."
+
+Dick took his elbows from the parapet and stood up. His face took life
+and fire, there came a brightness as of joy into his eyes. After all,
+then, this time he was not to be disappointed.
+
+"I wanted you to come to Peshawur straight from Bombay six months ago,"
+Ralston went on. "But I counted without the Indian Government. They
+brought you out to India, at my special request, for a special purpose,
+and then, when they had got you, they turned you over to work which
+anyone else could have done. So six months have been wasted. But that's
+their little way."
+
+"You have special work for me?" said Linforth quietly enough, though his
+heart was beating quickly in his breast. An answer came which still
+quickened its beatings.
+
+"Work that you alone can do," Ralston replied gravely. But he was a man
+who had learned to hope for little, and to expect discouragements as his
+daily bread, and he added:
+
+"That is, if you can do it."
+
+Linforth did not answer at once. He was leaning with his elbows on the
+parapet, and he raised a hand to the side of his face, that side on which
+Ralston stood. And so he remained, shutting himself in with his thoughts,
+and trying to think soberly. But his head whirled. Below him lay the city
+of Peshawur. Behind him the plains came to an end, and straight up from
+them, like cliffs out of the sea, rose the dark hills, brown and grey and
+veined with white. Here on this tower of Northern India, the long dreams,
+dreamed for the first time on the Sussex Downs, and nursed since in every
+moment of leisure--in Alpine huts in days of storm, in his own quarters
+at Chatham--had come to their fulfilment.
+
+"I have lived for this work," he said in a low voice which shook ever so
+little, try as he might to quiet it. "Ever since I was a boy I have lived
+for it, and trained myself for it. It is the Road."
+
+Linforth's evident emotion came upon Ralston as an unexpected thing. He
+was carried back suddenly to his own youth, and was surprised to
+recollect that he, too, had once cherished great plans. He saw himself
+as he was to-day, and, side by side with that disillusioned figure, he
+saw himself as he had been in his youth. A smile of friendliness came
+over his face.
+
+"If I had shut my eyes," he said, "I should have thought it was your
+father who was speaking."
+
+Linforth turned quickly to Ralston.
+
+"My father. You knew him?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I never did," said Dick regretfully.
+
+Ralston nodded his head and continued:
+
+"Twenty-six years ago we were here in Peshawur together. We came up on
+to the top of this tower, as everyone does who comes to Peshawur. He was
+like you. He was dreaming night and day of the Great Road through
+Chiltistan to the foot of the Hindu Kush. Look!" and Ralston pointed
+down to the roof-tops of the city, whereon the women and children worked
+and played. For the most part they were enclosed within brick walls, and
+the two men looked down into them as you might look in the rooms of a
+doll's house by taking off the lid. Ralston pointed to one such open
+chamber just beneath their eyes. An awning supported on wooden pillars
+sheltered one end of it, and between two of these pillars a child
+swooped backwards and forwards in a swing. In the open, a woman, seated
+upon a string charpoy, rocked a cradle with her foot, while her hands
+were busy with a needle, and an old woman, with a black shawl upon her
+shoulders and head, sat near by, inactive. But she was talking. For at
+times the younger woman would raise her head, and, though at that
+distance no voice could be heard, it was evident that she was answering.
+"I remember noticing that roof when your father and I were talking up
+here all those years ago. There was just the same family group as you
+see now. I remember it quite clearly, for your father went away to
+Chiltistan the next day, and never came back. It was the last time I saw
+him, and we were both young and full of all the great changes we were to
+bring about." He smiled, half it seemed in amusement, half in regret.
+"We talked of the Road, of course. Well, there's just one change. The
+old woman, sitting there with the shawl upon her shoulders now, was in
+those days the young woman rocking the cradle and working with her
+needle. That's all. Troubles there have been, disturbances, an
+expedition or two--but there's no real change. Here are you talking of
+the Road just as your father did, not ambitious for yourself," he
+explained with a kindly smile which illumined his whole face, "but
+ambitious for the Road, and the Road still stops at Kohara."
+
+"But it will go on--now," cried Linforth.
+
+"Perhaps," said Ralston slowly. Then he stood up and confronted Linforth.
+
+"It was not that you might carry on the Road that I brought you out from
+England," he skid. "On the contrary."
+
+Once more disappointment seized upon Dick Linforth, and he found it all
+the more bitter in that he had believed a minute since that his dreams
+were to be fulfilled. He looked down upon Peshawur, and the words which
+Ralston had lately spoken, half in amusement, half with regret, suddenly
+took for him their full meaning. Was it true that there was no change
+but the change from the young woman to the old one, from enthusiasm to
+acquiescence? He was young, and the possibility chilled him and even
+inspired him with a kind of terror. Was he to carry the Road no further
+than his father had done? Would another Linforth in another generation
+come to the tower in Peshawur with hopes as high as his and with the
+like futility?
+
+"On the contrary?" he asked. "Then why?"
+
+"That you might stop the Road from going on," said Ralston quietly.
+
+In the very midst of his disappointment Linforth realised that he had
+misjudged his companion. Here was no official, here was a man. The
+attitude of indifference had gone, the air of lassitude with it. Here was
+a man quietly exacting the hardest service which it was in his power to
+exact, claiming it as a right, and yet making it clear by some subtle
+sympathy that he understood very well all that the service would cost to
+the man who served.
+
+"I am to hinder the making of that Road?" cried Linforth.
+
+"You are to do more. You are to prevent it."
+
+"I have lived so that it should be made."
+
+"So you have told me," said Ralston quietly, and Dick was silent. With
+each quiet sentence Ralston had become more and more the dominating
+figure. He was so certain, so assured. Linforth recognised him no longer
+as the man to argue with; but as the representative of Government which
+overrides predilections, sympathies, ambitions, and bends its servants to
+their duty.
+
+"I will tell you more," Ralston continued. "You alone can prevent the
+extension of the Road. I believe it--I know it. I sent to England for
+you, knowing it. Do your duty, and it may be that the Road will stop at
+Kohara--an unfinished, broken thing. Flinch, and the Road runs straight
+to the Hindu Kush. You will have your desire; but you will have failed."
+
+There was something implacable and relentless in the tone and the words.
+There was more, too. There was an intimation, subtly yet most clearly
+conveyed, that Ralston who spoke had in his day trampled his ambitions
+and desires beneath his feet in service to the Government, and asked no
+more now from Linforth than he himself had in his turn performed. "I,
+too, have lived in Arcady," he added. It twas this last intimation which
+subdued the protests in Linforth's mind. He looked at the worn face of
+the Commissioner, then he lifted his eyes and swept the horizon with his
+gaze. The violet light upon the hills had lost its brightness and its
+glamour. In the far distance the hills themselves were withdrawn.
+Somewhere in that great barrier to the east was the gap of the Malakand
+Pass, where the Road now began. Linforth turned away from the hills
+towards Peshawur.
+
+"What must I do?" he asked simply.
+
+Ralston nodded his head. His attitude relaxed, his voice lost its
+dominating note.
+
+"What you have to understand is this," he explained. "To drive the Road
+through Chiltistan means war. It would be the cause of war if we insisted
+upon it now, just as it was the cause of war when your father went up
+from Peshawur twenty-six years ago. Or it might be the consequence of
+war. If the Chiltis rose in arms, undoubtedly we should carry it on to
+secure control of the country in the future. Well, it is the last
+alternative that we are face to face with now."
+
+"The Chiltis might rise!" cried Linforth.
+
+"There is that possibility," Ralston returned. "We don't mean on our own
+account to carry on the Road; but the Chiltis might rise."
+
+"And how should I prevent them?" asked Dick Linforth in perplexity.
+
+"You know Shere Ali?" said Ralston
+
+"Yes."
+
+"You are a friend of his?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"A great friend. His chief friend?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"You have some control over him?"
+
+"I think so," said Linforth.
+
+"Very well," said Ralston. "You must use that control."
+
+Linforth's perplexity increased. That danger should come from Shere
+Ali--here was something quite incredible. He remembered their long talks,
+their joint ambition. A day passed in the hut in the Promontoire of the
+Meije stood out vividly in his memories. He saw the snow rising in a
+swirl of white over the Breche de la Meije, that gap in the rock-wall
+between the Meije and the Rateau, and driving down the glacier towards
+the hut. He remembered the eagerness, the enthusiasm of Shere Ali.
+
+"But he's loyal," Linforth cried. "There is no one in India more loyal."
+
+"He was loyal, no doubt," said Ralston, with a shrug of his shoulders,
+and, beginning with his first meeting with Shere Ali in Lahore, he told
+Linforth all that he knew of the history of the young Prince.
+
+"There can be no doubt," he said, "of his disloyalty," and he recounted
+the story of the melons and the bags of grain. "Since then he has been
+intriguing in Calcutta."
+
+"Is he in Calcutta now?" Linforth asked.
+
+"No," said Ralston. "He left Calcutta just about the time when you landed
+in Bombay. And there is something rather strange--something, I think,
+very disquieting in his movements since he left Calcutta. I have had him
+watched, of course. He came north with one of his own countrymen, and the
+pair of them have been seen at Cawnpore, at Lucknow, at Delhi."
+
+Ralston paused. His face had grown very grave, very troubled.
+
+"I am not sure," he said slowly. "It is difficult, however long you stay
+in India, to get behind these fellows' minds, to understand the thoughts
+and the motives which move them. And the longer you stay, the more
+difficult you realise it to be. But it looks to me as if Shere Ali had
+been taken by his companion on a sort of pilgrimage."
+
+Linforth started.
+
+"A pilgrimage!" and he added slowly, "I think I understand. A pilgrimage
+to all the places which could most inflame the passions of a native
+against the English race," and then he broke out in protest. "But it's
+impossible. I know Shere Ali. It's not reasonable--"
+
+Ralston interrupted him upon the utterance of the word.
+
+"Reasonable!" he cried. "You are in India. Do ever white men act
+reasonably in India?" and he turned with a smile. "There was a
+great-uncle of yours in the days of the John Company, wasn't there? Your
+father told me about him here on this tower. When his time was up, he
+sent his money home and took his passage, and then came back--came back
+to the mountains and disappeared. Very likely he may be sitting somewhere
+beyond that barrier of hills by a little shrine to this hour, an old, old
+man, reverenced as a saint, with a strip of cloth about his loins, and
+forgetful of the days when he ruled a district in the Plains. I should
+not wonder. It's not a reasonable country."
+
+Ralston, indeed, was not far out in his judgment. Ahmed Ismail had
+carried Shere Ali off from Calcutta. He had taken him first of all to
+Cawnpore, and had led him up to the gate of the enclosure, wherein are
+the Bibigarh, where the women and children were massacred, and the well
+into which their bodies were flung. An English soldier turned them back
+from that enclosure, refusing them admittance. Ahmed Ismail, knowing
+well that it would be so, smiled quietly under his moustache; but Shere
+Ali angrily pointed to some English tourists who were within the
+enclosure.
+
+"Why should we remain outside?" he asked.
+
+"They are Bilati," said Ahmed Ismail in a smooth voice as they moved
+away. "They are foreigners. The place is sacred to the foreigners. It is
+Indian soil; but the Indian may not walk on it; no, not though he were
+born next door. Yet why should we grumble or complain? We are the dirt
+beneath their feet. We are dogs and sons of dogs, and a hireling will
+turn our Princes from the gate lest the soles of our shoes should defile
+their sacred places. And are they not right, Huzoor?" he asked cunningly.
+"Since we submit to it, since we cringe at their indignities and fawn
+upon them for their insults, are they not right?"
+
+"Why, that's true, Ahmed Ismail," replied Shere Ali bitterly. He was in
+the mood to make much of any trifle. This reservation of the enclosure at
+Cawnpore was but one sign of the overbearing arrogance of the foreigners,
+the Bilati--the men from over the sea. He had fawned upon them himself in
+the days of his folly.
+
+"But turn a little, Huzoor," Ahmed whispered in his ear, and led him
+back. "Look! There is the Bibigarh where the women were imprisoned. That
+is the house. Through that opening Sirdar Khan and his four companions
+went--and shut the door behind them. In that room the women of Mecca
+knelt and prayed for mercy. Come away, Huzoor. We have seen. Those were
+days when there were men upon the plains of India."
+
+And Shere Ali broke out with a fierce oath.
+
+"Amongst the hills, at all events, there are men today. There is no
+sacred ground for them in Chiltistan."
+
+"Not even the Road?" asked Ahmed Ismail; and Shere Ali stopped dead,
+and stared at his companion with startled eyes. He walked away in
+silence after that; and for the rest of that day he said little to
+Ahmed Ismail, who watched him anxiously. At night, however, Ahmed was
+justified of his policy. For Shere Ali appeared before him in the white
+robes of a Mohammedan. Up till then he had retained the English dress.
+Now he had discarded it. Ahmed Ismail fell at his feet, and bowed
+himself to the ground.
+
+"My Lord! My Lord!" he cried, and there was no simulation in his outburst
+of joy. "Would that your people could behold you now! But we have much to
+see first. To-morrow we go to Lucknow."
+
+Accordingly the two men travelled the next day to Lucknow. Shere Ali was
+led up under the broken archway by Evans's Battery into the grounds of
+the Residency. He walked with Ahmed Ismail at his elbow on the green
+lawns where the golden-crested hoopoes flashed in the sunlight and the
+ruined buildings stood agape to the air. They looked peaceful enough, as
+they strolled from one battery to another, but all the while Ahmed Ismail
+preached his sermon into Shere Ali's ears. There Lawrence had died; here
+at the top of the narrow lane had stood Johannes's house whence Nebo the
+Nailer had watched day after day with his rifle in his hand. Hardly a
+man, be he never so swift, could cross that little lane from one quarter
+of the Residency to another, so long as daylight lasted and so long as
+Nebo the Nailer stood behind the shutters of Johannes's house. Shere Ali
+was fired by the story of that siege. By so little was the garrison
+saved. Ahmed Ismail led him down to a corner of the grounds and once more
+a sentry barred the way.
+
+"This is the graveyard," said Ahmed Ismail, and Shere Ali, looking up,
+stepped back with a look upon his face which Ahmed Ismail did not
+understand.
+
+"Huzoor!" he said anxiously, and Shere Ali turned upon him with an
+imperious word.
+
+"Silence, dog!" he cried. "Stand apart. I wish to be alone."
+
+His eyes were on the little church with the trees and the wall girding
+it in. At the side a green meadow with high trees, had the look of a
+playing-ground--the playing-ground of some great public school in
+England. Shere Ali's eyes took in the whole picture, and then saw it but
+dimly through a mist. For the little church, though he had never seen it
+before, was familiar and most moving. It was a model of the Royal Chapel
+at Eton, and, in spite of himself, as he gazed the tears filled his eyes
+and the memory of his schooldays ached at his heart. He yearned to be
+back once more in the shadow of that chapel with his comrades and his
+friends. Not yet had he wholly forgotten; he was softened out of his
+bitterness; the burden of his jealousy and his anger fell for awhile
+from his shoulders. When he rejoined Ahmed Ismail, he bade him follow
+and speak no word. He drove back to the town, and then only he spoke to
+Ahmed Ismail.
+
+"We will go from Lucknow to-day," he said. "I will not sleep in
+this town."
+
+"As your Highness wills," said Ahmed Ismail humbly, and he went into the
+station and bought tickets for Delhi. It was on a Thursday morning that
+the pair reached that town; and that day Ahmed Ismail had an unreceptive
+listener for his sermons. The monument before the Post Office, the
+tablets on the arch of the arsenal, even the barracks in the gardens of
+the Moghul Palace fired no antagonism in the Prince, who so short a time
+ago had been a boy at Eton. The memories evoked by the little church at
+Lucknow had borne him company all night and still clung to him that day.
+He was homesick for his school. Only twice was he really roused.
+
+The first instance took place when he was driving along the Chandni
+Chauk, the straight broad tree-fringed street which runs from the Lahore
+Gate to the Fort. Ahmed Ismail sat opposite to him, and, leaning forward,
+he pointed to a tree and to a tall house in front of the tree.
+
+"My Lord," said he, "could that tree speak, what groans would one hear!"
+
+"Why?" said Shere Ali listlessly.
+
+"Listen, your Highness," said Ahmed Ismail. Like the rest of his
+countrymen, he had a keen love for a story. And the love was the keener
+when he himself had the telling of it. He sat up alertly. "In that house
+lived an Englishman of high authority. He escaped when Delhi was seized
+by the faithful. He came back when Delhi was recaptured by the infidels.
+And there he sat with an English officer, at his window, every morning
+from eight to nine. And every morning from eight to nine every native who
+passed his door was stopped and hanged upon that tree, while he looked
+on. Huzoor, there was no inquiry. It might be some peaceable merchant,
+some poor man from the countryside. What did it matter? There was a
+lesson to be taught to this city. And so whoever walked down the Chandni
+Chauk during that hour dangled from those branches. Huzoor, for a week
+this went on--for a whole week."
+
+The story was current in Delhi. Ahmed Ismail found it to his hand, and
+Shere Ali did not question it. He sat up erect, and something of the
+fire which this last day had been extinct kindled again in his sombre
+eyes. Later on he drove along the sinuous road on the top of the ridge,
+and as he looked over Delhi, hidden amongst its foliage, he saw the
+great white dome of the Jumma Musjid rising above the tree-tops, like a
+balloon. "The Mosque," he said, standing up in his carriage. "To-morrow
+we will worship there."
+
+Before noon the next day he mounted the steep broad flight of steps and
+passed under the red sandstone arch into the vast enclosure. He performed
+his ablutions at the fountain, and, kneeling upon the marble tiles,
+waited for the priest to ascend the ladder on to the wooden platform. He
+knelt with Ahmed Ismail at his side, in the open, amongst the lowliest.
+In front of him rows of worshippers knelt and bowed their foreheads to
+the tiles--rows and rows covering the enclosure up to the arches of the
+mosque itself. There were others too--rows and rows within the arches, in
+the dusk of the mosque itself, and from man to man emotion passed like a
+spark upon the wind. The crowd grew denser, there came a suspense, a
+tension. It gained upon all, it laid its clutch upon Shere Ali. He ceased
+to think, even upon his injuries, he was possessed with expectancy. And
+then a man kneeling beside him interrupted his prayers and began to curse
+fiercely beneath his breath.
+
+"May they burn, they and their fathers and their children, to the last
+generation!" And he added epithets of a surprising ingenuity. The while
+he looked backwards over his shoulder.
+
+Shere Ali followed his example. He saw at the back of the enclosure, in
+the galleries which surmounted the archway and the wall, English men and
+English women waiting. Shere Ali's blood boiled at the sight. They were
+laughing, talking. Some of them had brought sandwiches and were eating
+their lunch. Others were taking photographs with their cameras. They were
+waiting for the show to begin.
+
+Shere Ali followed the example of his neighbour and cursed them. All his
+anger kindled again and quickened into hatred. They were so careful of
+themselves, so careless of others!
+
+"Not a Mohammedan," he cried to himself, "must set foot in their
+graveyard at Lucknow, but they come to our mosque as to a show."
+
+Suddenly he saw the priest climb the ladder on to the high wooden
+platform in front of the central arch of the mosque and bow his forehead
+to the floor. His voice rang out resonant and clear and confident over
+that vast assemblage.
+
+"There is only one God."
+
+And a shiver passed across the rows of kneeling men, as though
+unexpectedly a wind had blown across a ripe field of corn. Shere Ali was
+moved like the rest, but all the while at the back of his mind there was
+the thought of those white people in the galleries.
+
+"They are laughing at us, they are making a mock of us, they think we
+are of no account." And fiercely he called upon his God, the God of the
+Mohammedans, to root them out from the land and cast them as weeds in
+the flame.
+
+The priest stood up erect upon the platform, and with a vibrating voice,
+now plaintive and conveying some strange sense of loneliness, now loud in
+praise, now humble in submission, he intoned the prayers. His voice rose
+and sank, reverberating back over the crowded courtyard from the walls of
+the mosque. Shere Ali prayed too, but he prayed silently, with all the
+fervour of a fanatic, that it might be his hand which should drive the
+English to their ships upon the sea.
+
+When he rose and came out from the mosque he turned to Ahmed Ismail.
+
+"There are some of my people in Delhi?"
+
+Ahmed Ismail bowed.
+
+"Let us go to them," said Shere Ali; he sought refuge amongst them from
+the thought of those people in the galleries. Ahmed Ismail was well
+content with the results of his pilgrimage. Shere Ali, as he paced the
+streets of Delhi with a fierce rapt look in his eyes, had the very aspect
+of a Ghazi fresh from the hills and bent upon murder and immolation.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+NEWS FROM AJMERE
+
+
+Something of this pilgrimage Ralston understood; and what he understood
+he explained to Dick Linforth on the top of the tower at Peshawur.
+Linforth, however, was still perplexed, still unconvinced.
+
+"I can't believe it," he cried; "I know Shere Ali so well."
+
+Ralston shook his head.
+
+"England overlaid the real man with a pretty varnish," he said. "That's
+all it ever does. And the varnish peels off easily when the man comes
+back to an Indian sun. There's not one of these people from the hills but
+has in him the makings of a fanatic. It's a question of circumstances
+whether the fanaticism comes to the top or not. Given the circumstances,
+neither Eton, nor Oxford, nor all the schools and universities rolled
+into one would hinder the relapse."
+
+"But why?" exclaimed Linforth. "Why should Shere Ali have relapsed?"
+
+"Disappointment here, flattery in England--there are many reasons.
+Usually there's a particular reason."
+
+"And what is that?" asked Linforth.
+
+"The love of a white woman."
+
+Ralston was aware that Linforth at his side started. He started ever so
+slightly. But Ralston was on the alert. He made no sign, however, that he
+had noticed anything.
+
+"I know that reason held good in Shere Ali's case," Ralston went on;
+and there came a change in Linforth's voice. It grew rather stern,
+rather abrupt.
+
+"Why? Has he talked?"
+
+"Not that I know of. Nevertheless, I am sure that there was one who
+played a part in Shere Ali's life," said Ralston. "I have known it ever
+since I first met him--more than a year ago on his way northwards to
+Chiltistan. He stopped for a day at Lahore and rode out with me. I told
+him that the Government expected him to marry as soon as possible, and
+settle down in his own country. I gave him that advice deliberately. You
+see I wanted to find out. And I did find out. His consternation, his
+anger, answered me clearly enough. I have no doubt that there was someone
+over there in England--a woman, perhaps an innocent woman, who had been
+merely careless--perhaps--"
+
+But he did not finish the sentence. Linforth interrupted him before he
+had time to complete it. And he interrupted without flurry or any sign of
+agitation.
+
+"There was a woman," he said. "But I don't think she was thoughtless.
+I don't see how she could have known that there was any danger in her
+friendliness. For she was merely friendly to Shere Ali. I know her
+myself."
+
+The answer was given frankly and simply. For once Ralston was outwitted.
+Dick Linforth had Violet Oliver to defend, and the defence was well done.
+Ralston was left without a suspicion that Linforth had any reason beyond
+the mere truth of the facts to spur him to defend her.
+
+"Yes, that's the mistake," said Ralston. "The woman's friendly and means
+no more than she says or looks. But these fellows don't understand such
+friendship. Shere Ali is here dreaming of a woman he knows he can never
+marry--because of his race. And so he's ready to run amuck. That's what
+it comes to."
+
+He turned away from the city as he spoke and took a step or two towards
+the flight of stone stairs which led down from the tower.
+
+"Where is Shere Ali now?" Linforth asked, and Ralston stopped and came
+back again.
+
+"I don't know," he said. "But I shall know, and very soon. There may be a
+letter waiting for me at home. You see, when there's trouble brewing over
+there behind the hills, and I want to discover to what height it has
+grown and how high it's likely to grow, I select one of my police, a
+Pathan, of course, and I send him to find out."
+
+"You send him over the Malakand," said Linforth, with a glance
+towards the great hill-barrier. He was to be astonished by the answer
+Ralston gave.
+
+"No. On the contrary, I send him south. I send him to Ajmere, in
+Rajputana."
+
+"In Ajmere?" cried Linforth.
+
+"Yes. There is a great Mohammedan shrine. Pilgrims go there from all
+parts, but mostly from beyond the frontier. I get my fingers on the pulse
+of the frontier in Ajmere more surely than I should if I sent spies up
+into the hills. I have a man there now. But that's not all. There's a
+great feast in Ajmere this week. And I think I shall find out from there
+where Shere Ali is and what he's doing. As soon as I do find out, I want
+you to go to him."
+
+"I understand," said Linforth. "But if he has changed so much, he will
+have changed to me."
+
+"Yes," Ralston admitted. He turned again towards the steps, and the two
+men descended to their horses. "That's likely enough. They ought to have
+sent you to me six months ago. Anyway, you must do your best." He climbed
+into the saddle, and Linforth did the same.
+
+"Very well," said Dick, as they rode through the archway. "I will do my
+best," and he turned towards Ralston with a smile. "I'll do my best to
+hinder the Road from going on."
+
+It was a queer piece of irony that the first real demand made upon him in
+his life was that he should stop the very thing on the accomplishment of
+which his hopes were set. But there was his friend to save. He comforted
+himself with that thought. There was his friend rushing blindly upon
+ruin. Linforth could not doubt it. How in the world could Shere Ali, he
+wondered. He could not yet dissociate the Shere Ali of to-day from the
+boy and the youth who had been his chum.
+
+They passed out of the further gate of Peshawur and rode along the broad
+white road towards Government House. It was growing dark, and as they
+turned in at the gateway of the garden, lights shone in the windows ahead
+of them. The lights recalled to Ralston's mind a fact which he had
+forgotten to mention.
+
+"By the way," he said, turning towards Linforth, "we have a lady staying
+with us who knows you."
+
+Linforth leaned forward in his saddle and stooped as if to adjust a
+stirrup, and it was thus a second or two before he answered.
+
+"Indeed!" he said. "Who is she?"
+
+"A Mrs. Oliver," replied Ralston, "She was at Srinagar in Cashmere this
+summer, staying with the Resident. My sister met her there, I think she
+told Mrs. Oliver you were likely to come to us about this time."
+
+Dick's heart leaped within him suddenly. Had Violet Oliver arranged her
+visit so that it might coincide with his? It was at all events a pleasant
+fancy to play with. He looked up at the windows of the house. She was
+really there! After all these months he would see her. No wonder the
+windows were bright. As they rode up to the porch and the door was
+opened, he heard her voice. She was singing in the drawing-room, and the
+door of the drawing-room stood open. She sang in a low small voice, very
+pretty to the ear, and she was accompanying herself softly on the piano.
+Dick stood for a while listening in the lofty hall, while Ralston looked
+over his letters which were lying upon a small table. He opened one of
+them and uttered an exclamation.
+
+"This is from my man at Ajmere," he said, but Dick paid no attention.
+Ralston glanced through the letter.
+
+"He has found him," he cried. "Shere Ali is in Ajmere."
+
+It took a moment or two for the words to penetrate to Linforth's mind.
+Then he said slowly:
+
+"Oh! Shere Ali's in Ajmere. I must start for Ajmere to-morrow."
+
+Ralston looked up from his letters and glanced at Linforth. Something in
+the abstracted way in which Linforth had spoken attracted his attention.
+He smiled:
+
+"Yes, it's a pity," he said. But again it seemed that Linforth did not
+hear. And then the voice at the piano stopped abruptly as though the
+singer had just become aware that there were people talking in the hall.
+Linforth moved forward, and in the doorway of the drawing-room he came
+face to face with Violet Oliver. Ralston smiled again.
+
+"There's something between those two," he said to himself. But Linforth
+had kept his secrets better half an hour ago. For it did not occur to
+Ralston to suspect that there had been something also between Violet
+Oliver and Shere Ali.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+IN THE ROSE GARDEN
+
+
+"Let us go out," said Linforth.
+
+It was after dinner on the same evening, and he was standing with Violet
+Oliver at the window of the drawing-room. Behind them an officer and his
+wife from the cantonment were playing "Bridge" with Ralston and his
+sister. Violet Oliver hesitated. The window opened upon the garden.
+Already Linforth's hand was on the knob.
+
+"Very well," she said. But there was a note of reluctance in her voice.
+
+"You will need a cloak," he said.
+
+"No," said Violet Oliver. She had a scarf of lace in her hand, and she
+twisted it about her throat. Linforth opened the long window and they
+stepped out into the garden. It was a clear night of bright stars. The
+chill of sunset had passed, the air was warm. It was dark in spite of the
+stars. The path glimmered faintly in front of them.
+
+"I was hoping very much that I should meet you somewhere in India," said
+Dick. "Lately I had grown afraid that you would be going home before the
+chance came."
+
+"You left it to chance," said Violet.
+
+The reluctance had gone from her voice; but in its place there was
+audible a note of resentment. She had spoken abruptly and a little
+sharply, as though a grievance present in her mind had caught her
+unawares and forced her to give it utterance.
+
+"No," replied Linforth, turning to her earnestly. "That's not fair. I did
+not know where you were. I asked all who might be likely to know. No one
+could tell me. I could not get away from my station. So that I had to
+leave it to chance."
+
+They walked down the drive, and then turned off past the croquet lawn
+towards a garden of roses and jasmine and chrysanthemums.
+
+"And chance, after all, has been my friend," he said with a smile.
+
+Violet Oliver stopped suddenly. Linforth turned to her. They were walking
+along a narrow path between high bushes of rhododendrons. It was very
+dark, so that Linforth could only see dimly her face and eyes framed in
+the white scarf which she had draped over her hair. But even so he could
+see that she was very grave.
+
+"I was wondering whether I should tell you," she said quietly. "It was
+not chance which brought me here--which brought us together again."
+
+Dick came to her side.
+
+"No?" he asked, looking down into her face. He spoke very gently, and
+with a graver voice than he had used before.
+
+"No," she answered. Her eyes were raised to his frankly and simply. "I
+heard that you were to be here. I came on that account. I wanted to see
+you again."
+
+As she finished she walked forward again, and again Linforth walked at
+her side. Dick, though his settled aim had given to him a manner and an
+aspect beyond his age, was for the same reason younger than his years in
+other ways. Very early in his youth he had come by a great and definite
+ambition, he had been inspired by it, he had welcomed and clung to it
+with the simplicity and whole-heartedness which are of the essence of
+youth. It was always new to him, however long he pondered over it; his
+joy in it was always fresh. He had never doubted either the true gold of
+the thing he desired, or his capacity ultimately to attain it. But he had
+ordered his life towards its attainment with the method of a far older
+man, examining each opportunity which came his way with always the one
+question in his mind--"Does it help?"--and leaving or using that
+opportunity according to the answer. Youth, however, was the truth of
+him. The inspiration, the freshness, the simplicity of outlook--these
+were the dominating elements in his character, and they were altogether
+compact of youth. He looked upon the world with expectant eyes and an
+unfaltering faith. Nor did he go about to detect intrigues in men or
+deceits in women. Violet's words therefore moved him not merely to
+tenderness, but to self-reproach.
+
+"It is very kind of you to say that," he said, and he turned to her
+suddenly. "Because you mean it."
+
+"It is true," said Violet simply; and the next moment she was aware that
+someone very young was standing before her in that Indian garden beneath
+the starlit sky and faltering out statements as to his unworthiness. The
+statements were familiar to her ears, but there was this which was
+unfamiliar: they stirred her to passion.
+
+She stepped back, throwing out a hand as if to keep him from her.
+
+"Don't," she whispered. "Don't!"
+
+She spoke like one who is hurt. Amongst the feelings which had waked in
+her, dim and for the most part hardly understood, two at all events were
+clear. One a vague longing for something different from the banal path
+she daily trod, the other a poignant regret that she was as she was.
+
+But Linforth caught the hand which she held out to thrust him off, and,
+clasping it, drew her towards him.
+
+"I love you," he said; and she answered him in desperation:
+
+"But you don't know me."
+
+"I know that I want you. I know that I am not fit for you."
+
+And Violet Oliver laughed harshly.
+
+But Dick Linforth paid no attention to that laugh. His hesitation had
+gone. He found that for this occasion only he had the gift of tongues.
+There was nothing new and original in what he said. But, on the other
+hand, he said it over and over again, and the look upon his face and the
+tone of his voice were the things which mattered. At the opera it is the
+singer you listen to, and not the words of the song. So in this rose
+garden Violet Oliver listened to Dick Linforth rather than to what he
+said. There was audible in his voice from sentence to sentence, ringing
+through them, inspiring them, the reverence a young man's heart holds for
+the woman whom he loves.
+
+"You ought to marry, not me, but someone better," she cried. "There is
+someone I know--in--England--who--"
+
+But Linforth would not listen. He laughed to scorn the notion that there
+could be anyone better than Violet Oliver; and with each word he spoke he
+seemed to grow younger. It was as though a miracle had happened. He
+remained in her eyes what he really was, a man head and shoulders above
+her friends, and in fibre altogether different. Yet to her, and for her,
+he was young, and younger than the youngest. In spite of herself, the
+longing at her heart cried with a louder voice. She sought to stifle it.
+
+"There is the Road," she cried. "That is first with you. That is what you
+really care for."
+
+"No," he replied quietly. She had hoped to take him at a disadvantage.
+But he replied at once:
+
+"No. I have thought that out. I do not separate you from the Road. I put
+neither first. It is true that there was a time when the Road was
+everything to me. But that was before I met you--do you remember?--in the
+inn at La Grave."
+
+Violet Oliver looked curiously at Linforth--curiously, and rather
+quickly. But it seemed that he at all events did not remember that he had
+not come alone down to La Grave.
+
+"It isn't that I have come to care less for the Road," he went on. "Not
+by one jot. Rather, indeed, I care more. But I can't dissociate you from
+the Road. The Road's my life-work; but it will be the better done if it's
+done with your help. It will be done best of all if it's done for you."
+
+Violet Oliver turned away quickly, and stood with her head averted.
+Ardently she longed to take him at his word. A glimpse of a great life
+was vouchsafed to her, such as she had not dreamt of. That some time she
+would marry again, she had not doubted. But always she had thought of her
+husband to be, as a man very rich, with no ambition but to please her, no
+work to do which would thwart her. And here was another life offered, a
+life upon a higher, a more difficult plane; but a life much more worth
+living. That she saw clearly enough. But out of her self-knowledge sprang
+the insistent question:
+
+"Could I live it?"
+
+There would be sacrifices to be made by her. Could she make them? Would
+not dissatisfaction with herself follow very quickly upon her marriage?
+Out of her dissatisfaction would there not grow disappointment in her
+husband? Would not bitterness spring up between them and both their lives
+be marred?
+
+Dick was still holding her hand.
+
+"Let me see you," he said, drawing her towards him. "Let me see
+your face!"
+
+She turned and showed it. There was a great trouble in her eyes, her
+voice was piteous as she spoke.
+
+"Dick, I can't answer you. When I told you that I came here on purpose to
+meet you, that I wanted to see you again, it was true, all true. But oh,
+Dick, did I mean more?"
+
+"How should I know?" said Dick, with a quiet laugh--a laugh of happiness.
+
+"I suppose that I did. I wanted you to say just what you have said
+to-night. Yet now that you have said it--" she broke off with a cry.
+"Dick, I have met no one like you in my life. And I am very proud.
+Oh, Dick, my boy!" And she gave him her other hand. Tears glistened
+in her eyes.
+
+"But I am not sure," she went on. "Now that you have spoken, I am not
+sure. It would be all so different from what my life has been, from what
+I thought it would be. Dick, you make me ashamed."
+
+"Hush!" he said gently, as one might chide a child for talking nonsense.
+He put an arm about her, and she hid her face in his coat.
+
+"Yes, that's the truth, Dick. You make me ashamed."
+
+So she remained for a little while, and then she drew herself away.
+
+"I will think and tell you, Dick," she said.
+
+"Tell me now!"
+
+"No, not yet. It's all your life and my life, you know, Dick. Give me a
+little while."
+
+"I go away to-morrow."
+
+"To-morrow?" she cried.
+
+"Yes, I go to Ajmere. I go to find my friend. I must go."
+
+Violet started. Into her eyes there crept a look of fear, and she
+was silent.
+
+"The Prince?" she asked with a queer suspense in her voice.
+
+"Yes--Shere Ali," and Dick became perceptibly embarrassed. "He is not as
+friendly to us as he used to be. There is some trouble," he said lamely.
+
+Violet looked him frankly in the face. It was not her habit to
+flinch. She read and understood his embarrassment. Yet her eyes met
+his quite steadily.
+
+"I am afraid that I am the trouble," she said quietly.
+
+Dick did not deny the truth of what she said. On the other hand, he had
+as yet no thought or word of blame for her. There was more for her to
+tell. He waited to hear it.
+
+"I tried to avoid him here in India, as I told you I meant to do," she
+said. "I thought he was safe in Chiltistan. I did not let him know that I
+was coming out. I did not write to him after I had landed. But he came
+down to Agra--and we met. There he asked me to marry him."
+
+"He asked _you!_" cried Linforth. "He must have been mad to think that
+such a thing was possible."
+
+"He was very unhappy," Violet Oliver explained. "I told him that it was
+impossible. But he would not see. I am afraid that is the cause of his
+unfriendliness."
+
+"Yes," said Dick. Then he was silent for a little while.
+
+"But you are not to blame," he added at length, in a quiet but decisive
+voice; and he turned as though the subject were now closed.
+
+But Violet was not content. She stayed him with a gesture. She was driven
+that night to speak out all the truth. Certainly he deserved that she
+should make no concealment. Moreover, the truth would put him to the
+test, would show to her how deep his passion ran. It might change his
+thoughts towards her, and so she would escape by the easiest way the
+difficult problem she had to solve. And the easiest way was the way which
+Violet Oliver always chose to take.
+
+"I am to blame," she said. "I took jewels from him in London. Yes." She
+saw Dick standing in front of her, silent and with a face quite
+inscrutable, and she lowered her head and spoke with the submission of a
+penitent to her judge. "He offered me jewels. I love them," and she
+spread out her hands. "Yes, I cannot help it. I am a foolish lover of
+beautiful things. I took them. I made no promises, he asked for none.
+There were no conditions, he stipulated for none. He just offered me the
+pearls, and I took them. But very likely he thought that my taking them
+meant more than it did."
+
+"And where are they now?" asked Dick.
+
+She was silent for a perceptible time. Then she said:
+
+"I sent them back." She heard Dick draw a breath of relief, and she went
+on quickly, as though she had been in doubt what she should say and now
+was sure. "The same night--after he had asked me to marry him--I packed
+them up and sent them to him."
+
+"He has them now, then?" asked Linforth.
+
+"I don't know. I sent them to Kohara. I did not know in what camp he was
+staying. I thought it likely he would go home at once."
+
+"Yes," said Dick.
+
+They turned and walked back towards the house. Dick did not speak. Violet
+was afraid. She walked by his side, stealing every now and then a look at
+his set face. It was dark; she could see little but the profile. But she
+imagined it very stern, and she was afraid. She regretted now that she
+had spoken. She felt now that she could not lose him.
+
+"Dick," she whispered timidly, laying a hand upon his arm; but he made no
+answer. The lighted windows of the house blazed upon the night. Would he
+reach the door, pass in and be gone the next morning without another word
+to her except a formal goodnight in front of the others?
+
+"Oh, Dick," she said again, entreatingly; and at that reiteration of his
+name he stopped.
+
+"I am very sorry," he said gently. "But I know quite well--others have
+taken presents from these princes. It is a pity.... One rather hates it.
+But you sent yours back," and he turned to her with a smile. "The others
+have not always done as much. Yes, you sent yours back."
+
+Violet Oliver drew a breath of relief. She raised her face towards his.
+She spoke with pleading lips.
+
+"I am forgiven then?"
+
+"Hush!"
+
+And in a moment she was in his arms. Passion swept her away. It seemed to
+her that new worlds were opening before her eyes. There were heights to
+walk upon for her--even for her who had never dreamed that she would even
+see them near. Their lips touched.
+
+"Oh, Dick," she murmured. Her hands were clasped about his neck. She hid
+her face against his coat, and when he would raise it she would not
+suffer him. But in a little while she drew herself apart, and, holding
+his hands, looked at him with a great pride.
+
+"My Dick," she said, and she laughed--a low sweet laugh of happiness
+which thrilled to the heart of her lover.
+
+"I'll tell you something," she said. "When I said good-bye to him--to the
+Prince--he asked me if I was going to marry you."
+
+"And you answered?"
+
+"That you hadn't asked me."
+
+"Now I have. Violet!" he whispered.
+
+But now she held him off, and suddenly her face grew serious.
+
+"Dick, I will tell you something," she said, "now, so that I may never
+tell you it again. Remember it, Dick! For both our sakes remember it!"
+
+"Well?" he asked. "What is it?"
+
+"Don't forgive so easily," she said very gravely, "when we both know that
+there is something real to be forgiven." She let go of his hands before
+he could answer, and ran from him up the steps into the house. Linforth
+saw no more of her that night.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+THE BREAKING OF THE PITCHER
+
+
+It is a far cry from Peshawur to Ajmere, and Linforth travelled in the
+train for two nights and the greater part of two days before he came to
+it. A little State carved out of Rajputana and settled under English
+rule, it is the place of all places where East and West come nearest to
+meeting. Within the walls of the city the great Dargah Mosque, with its
+shrine of pilgrimage and its ancient rites, lies close against the foot
+of the Taragarh Hill. Behind it the mass of the mountain rises steeply to
+its white crown of fortress walls. In front, its high bright-blue
+archway, a thing of cupolas and porticoes, faces the narrow street of the
+grain-sellers and the locksmiths. Here is the East, with its memories of
+Akbar and Shah Jehan, its fiery superstitions and its crudities of
+decoration. Gaudy chandeliers of coloured glass hang from the roof of a
+marble mosque, and though the marble may crack and no one give heed to
+it, the glass chandeliers will be carefully swathed in holland bags. Here
+is the East, but outside the city walls the pile of Mayo College rises
+high above its playing-grounds and gives to the princes and the chiefs of
+Rajputana a modern public school for the education of their sons.
+
+From the roof top of the college tower Linforth looked to the city
+huddled under the Taragarh Hill, and dimly made out the high archway of
+the mosque. He turned back to the broad playing-fields at his feet where
+a cricket match was going on. There was the true solution of the great
+problem, he thought.
+
+"Here at Ajmere," he said to himself, "Shere Ali could have learned what
+the West had to teach him. Had he come here he would have been spared the
+disappointments, and the disillusions. He would not have fallen in with
+Violet Oliver. He would have married and ruled in his own country."
+
+As it was, he had gone instead to Eton and to Oxford, and Linforth must
+needs search for him over there in the huddled city under the Taragarh
+Hill. Ralston's Pathan was even then waiting for Linforth at the bottom
+of the tower.
+
+"Sir," he said, making a low salaam when Linforth had descended, "His
+Highness Shere Ali is now in Ajmere. Every morning between ten and eleven
+he is to be found in a balcony above the well at the back of the Dargah
+Mosque, and to-morrow I will lead you to him."
+
+"Every morning!" said Linforth. "What does he do upon this balcony?"
+
+"He watches the well below, and the water-carriers descending with their
+jars," said the Pathan, "and he talks with his friends. That is all."
+
+"Very well," said Linforth. "To-morrow we will go to him."
+
+He passed up the steps under the blue portico a little before the hour on
+the next morning, and entered a stone-flagged court which was thronged
+with pilgrims. On each side of the archway a great copper vat was raised
+upon stone steps, and it was about these two vats that the crowd
+thronged. Linforth and his guide could hardly force their way through. On
+the steps of the vats natives, wrapped to the eyes in cloths to save
+themselves from burns, stood emptying the caldrons of boiling ghee. And
+on every side Linforth heard the name of Shere Ali spoken in praise.
+
+"What does it mean?" he asked of his guide, and the Pathan replied:
+
+"His Highness the Prince has made an offering. He has filled those
+caldrons with rice and butter and spices, as pilgrims of great position
+and honour sometimes do. The rice is cooked in the vats, and so many jars
+are set aside for the strangers, while the people of Indrakot have
+hereditary rights to what is left. Sir, it is an act of great piety to
+make so rich an offering."
+
+Linforth looked at the swathed men scrambling, with cries of pain, for
+the burning rice. He remembered how lightly Shere Ali had been wont to
+speak of the superstitions of the Mohammedans and in what contempt he
+held the Mullahs of his country. Not in those days would he have
+celebrated his pilgrimage to the shrine of Khwajah Mueeyinudin Chisti by
+a public offering of ghee.
+
+Linforth looked back upon the Indrakotis struggling and scrambling and
+burning themselves on the steps about the vast caldrons, and the crowd
+waiting and clamouring below. It was a scene grotesque enough in all
+conscience, but Linforth was never further from smiling than at this
+moment. A strong intuition made him grave.
+
+"Does this mark Shere Ali's return to the ways of his fathers?" he asked
+himself. "Is this his renunciation of the White People?"
+
+He moved forward slowly towards the inner archway, and the Pathan at his
+side gave a new turn to his thoughts.
+
+"Sir, that will be talked of for many months," the Pathan said. "The
+Prince will gain many friends who up till now distrust him."
+
+"It will be taken as a sign of faith?" asked Linforth.
+
+"And more than that," said the guide significantly. "This one thing
+done here in Ajmere to-day will be spread abroad through Chiltistan
+and beyond."
+
+Linforth looked more closely at the crowd. Yes, there were many men there
+from the hills beyond the Frontier to carry the news of Shere Ali's
+munificence to their homes.
+
+"It costs a thousand rupees at the least to fill one of those caldrons,"
+said the Pathan. "In truth, his Highness has done a wise thing if--"
+And he left the sentence unfinished.
+
+But Linforth could fill in the gap.
+
+"If he means to make trouble."
+
+But he did not utter the explanation aloud.
+
+"Let us go in," he said; and they passed through the high inner archway
+into the great court where the saint's tomb, gilded and decked out with
+canopies and marble, stands in the middle.
+
+"Follow me closely," said the Pathan. "There may be bad men. Watch any
+who approach you, and should one spit, I beseech your Excellency to
+pay no heed."
+
+The huge paved square, indeed, was thronged like a bazaar. Along the wall
+on the left hand booths were erected, where food and sweetmeats were
+being sold. Stone tombs dotted the enclosure; and amongst them men walked
+up and down, shouting and talking. Here and there big mango and peepul
+trees threw a welcome shade.
+
+The Pathan led Linforth to the right between the Chisti's tomb and the
+raised marble court surrounded by its marble balustrade in front of the
+long mosque of Shah Jehan. Behind the tomb there were more trees, and the
+shrine of a dancing saint, before which dancers from Chitral were moving
+in and out with quick and flying steps. The Pathan led Linforth quickly
+through the groups, and though here and there a man stood in their way
+and screamed insults, and here and there one walked along beside them
+with a scowling face and muttered threats, no one molested them.
+
+The Pathan turned to the right, mounted a few steps, and passed under a
+low stone archway. Linforth found himself upon a balcony overhanging a
+great ditch between the Dargah and Taragarh Hill. He leaned forward over
+the balustrade, and from every direction, opposite to him, below him,
+and at the ends, steps ran down to the bottom of the gulf--twisting and
+turning at every sort of angle, now in long lines, now narrow as a
+stair. The place had the look of some ancient amphitheatre. And at the
+bottom, and a little to the right of the balcony, was the mouth of an
+open spring.
+
+"The Prince is here, your Excellency."
+
+Linforth looked along the balcony. There were only three men standing
+there, in white robes, with white turbans upon their heads. The turban of
+one was hemmed with gold. There was gold, too, upon his robe.
+
+"No," said Linforth. "He has not yet come," and even as he turned again
+to look down into that strange gulf of steps the man with the gold-hemmed
+turban changed his attitude and showed Linforth the profile of his face.
+
+Linforth was startled.
+
+"Is that the Prince?" he exclaimed. He saw a man, young to be sure, but
+older than Shere Ali, and surely taller too. He looked more closely. That
+small carefully trimmed black beard might give the look of age, the long
+robe add to his height. Yes, it was Shere Ali. Linforth walked along the
+balcony, and as he approached, Shere Ali turned quickly towards him. The
+blood rushed into his dark face; he stood staring at Linforth like a man
+transfixed.
+
+Linforth held out his hand with a smile.
+
+"I hardly knew you again," he said.
+
+Shere Ali did not take the hand outstretched to him; he did not move;
+neither did he speak. He just stood with his eyes fixed upon Linforth.
+But there was recognition in his eyes, and there was something more.
+Linforth recalled something that Violet Oliver had told to him in the
+garden at Peshawur--"Are you going to marry Linforth?" That had been
+Shere Ali's last question when he had parted from her upon the steps of
+the courtyard of the Fort. Linforth remembered it now as he looked into
+Shere Ali's face. "Here is a man who hates me," he said to himself. And
+thus, for the first time since they had dined together in the mess-room
+at Chatham, the two friends met.
+
+"Surely you have not forgotten me, Shere Ali?" said Linforth, trying to
+force his voice in to a note of cheery friendliness. But the attempt was
+not very successful. The look of hatred upon Shere Ali's face had died
+away, it is true. But mere impassivity had replaced it. He had aged
+greatly during those months. Linforth recognised that clearly now. His
+face was haggard, his eyes sunken. He was a man, moreover. He had been
+little more than a boy when he had dined with Linforth in the mess-room
+at Chatham.
+
+"After all," Linforth continued, and his voice now really had something
+of genuine friendliness, for he understood that Shere Ali had
+suffered--had suffered deeply; and he was inclined to forgive his
+temerity in proposing marriage to Violet Oliver--"after all, it is not so
+much more than a year ago when we last talked together of our plans."
+
+Shere Ali turned to the younger of the two who stood beside him and spoke
+a few words in a tongue which Linforth did not yet understand. The
+youth--he was a youth with a soft pleasant voice, a graceful manner and
+something of the exquisite in his person--stepped smoothly forward and
+repeated the words to Linforth's Pathan.
+
+"What does he say?" asked Linforth impatiently. The Pathan translated:
+
+"His Highness the Prince would be glad to know what your Excellency means
+by interrupting him."
+
+Linforth flushed with anger. But he had his mission to fulfil, if it
+could be fulfilled.
+
+"What's the use of making this pretence?" he said to Shere Ali. "You and
+I know one another well enough."
+
+And as he ended, Shere Ali suddenly leaned over the balustrade of the
+balcony. His two companions followed the direction of his eyes; and both
+their faces became alert with some expectancy. For a moment Linforth
+imagined that Shere Ali was merely pretending to be absorbed in what he
+saw. But he, too, looked, and it grew upon him that here was some matter
+of importance--all three were watching in so eager a suspense.
+
+Yet what they saw was a common enough sight in Ajmere, or in any other
+town of India. The balcony was built out from a brick wall which fell
+sheer to the bottom of the foss. But at some little distance from the end
+of the balcony and at the head of the foss, a road from the town broke
+the wall, and a flight of steep steps descended to the spring. The steps
+descended along the wall first of all towards the balcony, and then just
+below the end of it they turned, so that any man going down to the well
+would have his face towards the people on the balcony for half the
+descent and his back towards them during the second half.
+
+A water-carrier with an earthen jar upon his head had appeared at the top
+of the steps a second before Shere Ali had turned so abruptly away from
+Linforth. It was this man whom the three were watching. Slowly he
+descended. The steps were high and worn, smooth and slippery. He went
+down with his left hand against the wall, and the lizards basking in the
+sunlight scuttled into their crevices as he approached. On his right hand
+the ground fell in a precipice to the bottom of the gulf. The three men
+watched him, and, it seemed to Linforth, with a growing excitement as he
+neared the turn of the steps. It was almost as though they waited for him
+to slip just at that turn, where a slip was most likely to occur.
+
+Linforth laughed at the thought, but the thought suddenly gained
+strength, nay, conviction in his mind. For as the water-carrier reached
+the bend, turned in safety and went down towards the well, there was a
+simultaneous movement made by the three--a movement of disappointment.
+Shere Ali did more than merely move. He struck his hand upon the
+balustrade and spoke impatiently. But he did not finish the sentence, for
+one of his companions looked significantly towards Linforth and his
+Pathan. Linforth stepped forward again.
+
+"Shere Ali," he said, "I want to speak to you. It is important that
+I should."
+
+Shere Ali leaned his elbows on the balustrade, and gazing across the foss
+to the Taragarh Hill, hummed to himself a tune.
+
+"Have you forgotten everything?" Linforth went on. He found it difficult
+to say what was in his mind. He seemed to be speaking to a stranger--so
+great a gulf was between them now--a gulf as wide, as impassable, as this
+one at his feet between the balcony and the Taragarh Hill. "Have you
+forgotten that night when we sat in the doorway of the hut under the
+Aiguilles d'Arve? I remember it very clearly. You said to me, of your own
+accord, 'We will always be friends. No man, no woman, shall come between
+us. We will work together and we will always be friends.'"
+
+By not so much as the flicker of an eyelid did Shere Ali betray that he
+heard the words. Linforth sought to revive that night so vividly that he
+needs must turn, needs must respond to the call, and needs must renew
+the pledge.
+
+"We sat for a long while that night, smoking our pipes on the step of the
+door. It was a dark night. We watched a planet throw its light upwards
+from behind the amphitheatre of hills on the left, and then rise clear to
+view in a gap. There was a smell of hay, like an English meadow, from the
+hut behind us. You pledged your friendship that night. It's not so very
+long ago--two years, that's all."
+
+He came to a stop with a queer feeling of shame. He remembered the night
+himself, and always had remembered it. But he was not given to sentiment,
+and here he had been talking sentiment and to no purpose.
+
+Shere Ali spoke again to his courtier, and the courtier stepped forward
+more bland than ever.
+
+"His Highness would like to know if his Excellency is still talking, and
+if so, why?" he said to the Pathan, who translated it.
+
+Linforth gave up the attempt to renew his friendship with Shere Ali. He
+must go back to Peshawur and tell Ralston that he had failed. Ralston
+would merely shrug his shoulders and express neither disappointment nor
+surprise. But it was a moment of bitterness to Linforth. He looked at
+Shere Ali's indifferent face, he listened for a second or two to the tune
+he still hummed, and he turned away. But he had not taken more than a
+couple of steps towards the entrance of the balcony when his guide
+touched him cautiously upon the elbow.
+
+Linforth stopped and looked back. The three men were once more gazing at
+the steps which led down from the road to the well. And once more a
+water-carrier descended with his great earthen jar upon his head. He
+descended very cautiously, but as he came to the turn of the steps his
+foot slipped suddenly.
+
+Linforth uttered a cry, but the man had not fallen. He had tottered for a
+moment, then he had recovered himself. But the earthen jar which he
+carried on his head had fallen and been smashed to atoms.
+
+Again the three made a simultaneous movement, but this time it was a
+movement of joy. Again an exclamation burst from Shere Ali's lips, but
+now it was a cry of triumph.
+
+He stood erect, and at once he turned to go. As he turned he met
+Linforth's gaze. All expression died out of his face, but he spoke to his
+young courtier, who fluttered forward sniggering with amusement.
+
+"His Highness would like to know if his Excellency is interested in a
+Road. His Highness thinks it a damn-fool road. His Highness much regrets
+that he cannot even let it go beyond Kohara. His Highness wishes his
+Excellency good-morning."
+
+Linforth made no answer to the gibe. He passed out into the courtyard,
+and from the courtyard through the archway into the grain-market.
+Opposite to him at the end of the street, a grass hill, with the chalk
+showing at one bare spot on the side of it, ridged up against the sky
+curiously like a fragment of the Sussex Downs. Linforth wondered whether
+Shere Ali had ever noticed the resemblance, and whether some recollection
+of the summer which he had spent at Poynings had ever struck poignantly
+home as he had stood upon these steps. Or were all these memories quite
+dead within his breast?
+
+In one respect Shere Ali was wrong. The Road would go on--now. Linforth
+had done his best to hinder it, as Ralston had bidden him to do, but he
+had failed, and the Road would go on to the foot of the Hindu Kush. Old
+Andrew Linforth's words came back to his mind:
+
+"Governments will try to stop it; but the power of the Road will be
+greater than the power of any Government. It will wind through valleys so
+deep that the day's sunshine is gone within the hour. It will be carried
+in galleries along the faces of the mountains, and for eight months of
+the year sections of it will be buried deep in snow. Yet it will be
+finished."
+
+How rightly Andrew Linforth had judged! But Dick for once felt no joy in
+the accuracy of the old man's forecast. He walked back through the city
+silent and with a heavy heart. He had counted more than he had thought
+upon Shere Ali's co-operation. His friendship for Shere Ali had grown
+into a greater and a deeper force than he had ever imagined it until this
+moment to be. He stopped with a sense of weariness and disillusionment,
+and then walked on again. The Road would never again be quite the bright,
+inspiring thing which it had been. The dream had a shadow upon it. In the
+Eton and Oxford days he had given and given and given so much of himself
+to Shere Ali that he could not now lightly and easily lose him altogether
+out of his life. Yet he must so lose him, and even then that was not all
+the truth. For they would be enemies, Shere Ali would be ruined and cast
+out, and his ruin would be the opportunity of the Road.
+
+He turned quickly to his companion.
+
+"What was it that the Prince said," he asked, "when the first of those
+water-carriers came down the steps and did not slip? He beat his hands
+upon the balustrade of the balcony and cried out some words. It seemed to
+me that his companion warned him of your presence, and that he stopped
+with the sentence half spoken."
+
+"That is the truth," Linforth's guide replied. "The Prince cried out in
+anger, 'How long must we wait?'"
+
+Linforth nodded his head.
+
+"He looked for the pitcher to fall and it did not fall," he said. "The
+breaking of the pitcher was to be a sign."
+
+"And the sign was given. Do not forget that, your Excellency. The sign
+was given."
+
+But what did the sign portend? Linforth puzzled his brains vainly over
+that problem. He had not the knowledge by which a man might cipher out
+the intrigues of the hill-folk beyond the Frontier. Did the breaking of
+the pitcher mean that some definite thing had been done in Chiltistan,
+some breaking of the British power? They might look upon the _Raj_ as a
+heavy burden on their heads, like an earthen pitcher and as easily
+broken. Ralston would know.
+
+"You must travel back to Peshawur to-night," said Linforth. "Go
+straight to his Excellency the Chief Commissioner and tell him all that
+you saw upon the balcony and all that you heard. If any man can
+interpret it, it will be he. Meanwhile, show me where the Prince Shere
+Ali lodges in Ajmere."
+
+The policeman led Linforth to a tall house which closed in at one end a
+short and narrow street.
+
+"It is here," he said.
+
+"Very well," said Linforth, "I will seek out the Prince again. I will
+stay in Ajmere and try by some way or another to have talk with him."
+
+But again Linforth was to fail. He stayed for some days in Ajmere, but
+could never gain admittance to the house. He was put off with the
+politest of excuses, delivered with every appearance of deep regret. Now
+his Highness was unwell and could see no one but his physician. At
+another time he was better--so much better, indeed, that he was giving
+thanks to Allah for the restoration of his health in the Mosque of Shah
+Jehan. Linforth could not reach him, nor did he ever see him in the
+streets of Ajmere.
+
+He stayed for a week, and then coming to the house one morning he found
+it shuttered. He knocked upon the door, but no one answered his summons;
+all the reply he got was the melancholy echo of an empty house.
+
+A Babu from the Customs Office, who was passing at the moment, stopped
+and volunteered information.
+
+"There is no one there, Mister," he said gravely. "All have skedaddled to
+other places."
+
+"The Prince Shere Ali, too?" asked Linforth.
+
+The Babu laughed contemptuously at the title.
+
+"Oho, the Prince! The Prince went away a week ago."
+
+Linforth turned in surprise.
+
+"Are you sure?" he asked.
+
+The Babu told him the very day on which Shere Ali had gone from Ajmere.
+It was on the day when the pitcher had fallen on the steps which led down
+to the well. Linforth had been tricked by the smiling courtier like any
+schoolboy.
+
+"Whither did the Prince go?"
+
+The Babu shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"How should I know? They are not of my people, these poor ignorant
+hill-folk."
+
+He went on his way. Linforth was left with the assurance that now,
+indeed, he had really failed. He took the train that night back to
+Peshawur.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+AN ARRESTED CONFESSION
+
+
+Linforth related the history of his failure to Ralston in the office
+at Peshawur.
+
+"Shere Ali went away on the day the pitcher was broken," he said. "It was
+the breaking of the pitcher which gave him the notice to go; I am sure of
+it. If one only knew what message was conveyed--" and Ralston handed to
+him a letter.
+
+The letter had been sent by the Resident at Kohara and had only this day
+reached Peshawur. Linforth took it and read it through. It announced that
+the son of Abdulla Mahommed had been murdered.
+
+"You see?" said Ralston. "He was shot in the back by one of his
+attendants when he was out after Markhor. He was the leader of the rival
+faction, and was bidding for the throne against Shere Ali. His murder
+clears the way. I have no doubt your friend is over the Lowari Pass by
+this time. There will be trouble in Chiltistan. I would have stopped
+Shere Ali on his way up had I known."
+
+"But you don't think Shere Ali had this man murdered!" cried Linforth.
+
+Ralston shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"Why not? What else was he waiting for from ten to eleven in the balcony
+above the well, except just for this news?"
+
+He stopped for a moment, and went on again in a voice which was
+very grave.
+
+"That seems to you horrible. I am very much afraid that another thing,
+another murder much more horrible, will be announced down to me in the
+next few days. The son of Abdulla Mahommed stood in Shere Ali's way a
+week ago and he is gone. But the way is still not clear. There's still
+another in his path."
+
+Linforth interpreted the words according to the gravity with which they
+were uttered.
+
+"His father!" he said, and Ralston nodded his head.
+
+"What can we do?" he cried. "We can threaten--but what is the use of
+threatening without troops? And we mayn't use troops. Chiltistan is an
+independent kingdom. We can advise, but we can't force them to follow our
+advice. We accept the status quo. That's the policy. So long as
+Chiltistan keeps the peace with us we accept Chiltistan as it is and as
+it may be. We can protect if our protection is asked. But our protection
+has not been asked. Why has Shere Ali fled so quickly back to his
+country? Tell me that if you can."
+
+None the less, however, Ralston telegraphed at once to the authorities at
+Lahore. Linforth, though he had failed to renew his old comradeship with
+Shere Ali, had not altogether failed. He had brought back news which
+Ralston counted as of great importance. He had linked up the murder in
+Chiltistan with the intrigues of Shere Ali. That the glare was rapidly
+broadening over that country of hills and orchards Ralston was very well
+aware. But it was evident now that at any moment the eruption might take
+place, and fire pour down the hills. In these terms he telegraphed to
+Lahore. Quietly and quickly, once more after twenty-five years, troops
+were being concentrated at Nowshera for a rush over the passes into
+Chiltistan. But even so Ralston was urgent that the concentration should
+be hurried.
+
+He sent a letter in cipher to the Resident at Kohara, bidding him to
+expect Shere Ali, and with Shere Ali the beginning of the trouble.
+
+He could do no more for the moment. So far as he could see he had taken
+all the precautions which were possible. But that night an event occurred
+in his own house which led him to believe that he had not understood the
+whole extent of the danger.
+
+It was Mrs. Oliver who first aroused his suspicions. The four of
+them--Ralston and his sister, Linforth and Violet Oliver were sitting
+quietly at dinner when Violet suddenly said:
+
+"It's a strange thing. Of course there's nothing really in it, and I am
+not at all frightened, but the last two nights, on going to bed, I have
+found that one of my windows was no longer bolted."
+
+Linforth looked up in alarm. Ralston's face, however, did not change.
+
+"Are you sure that it was bolted before?"
+
+"Yes, quite sure," said Violet. "The room is on the ground floor, and
+outside one of the windows a flight of steps leads down from the verandah
+to the ground. So I have always taken care to bolt them myself."
+
+"When?" asked Ralston.
+
+"After dressing for dinner," she replied. "It is the last thing I do
+before leaving the room."
+
+Ralston leaned back in his chair, as though a momentary anxiety were
+quite relieved.
+
+"It is one of the servants, no doubt," he said. "I will speak about it
+afterwards"; and for the moment the matter dropped.
+
+But Ralston returned to the subject before dinner was finished.
+
+"I don't think you need be uneasy, Mrs. Oliver," he said. "The house is
+guarded by sentinels, as no doubt you know. They are native levies, of
+course, but they are quite reliable"; and in this he was quite sincere.
+So long as they wore the uniform they would be loyal. The time might
+come when they would ask to be allowed to go home. That permission would
+be granted, and it was possible that they would be found in arms against
+the loyal troops immediately afterwards. But they would ask to be
+allowed to go first.
+
+"Still," he resumed, "if you carry valuable jewellery about with you, it
+would be as well, I think, if you locked it up."
+
+"I have very little jewellery, and that not valuable," said Violet, and
+suddenly her face flushed and she looked across the table at Linforth
+with a smile. The smile was returned, and a minute later the ladies rose.
+
+The two men were left alone to smoke.
+
+"You know Mrs. Oliver better than I do," said Ralston. "I will tell you
+frankly what I think. It may be a mere nothing. There may be no cause for
+anxiety at all. In any case anxiety is not the word" he corrected
+himself, and went on. "There is a perfectly natural explanation. The
+servants may have opened the window to air the room when they were
+preparing it for the night, and may easily have forgotten to latch the
+bolt afterwards."
+
+"Yes, I suppose that is the natural explanation," said Linforth, as he
+lit a cigar. "It is hard to conceive any other."
+
+"Theft," replied Ralston, "is the other explanation. What I said about
+the levies is true. I can rely on them. But the servants--that is perhaps
+a different question. They are Mahommedans all of them, and we hear a
+good deal about the loyalty of Mahommedans, don't we?" he said, with a
+smile. "They wear, if not a uniform, a livery. All these things are true.
+But I tell you this, which is no less true. Not one of those Mahommedan
+servants would die wearing the livery, acknowledging their service. Every
+one of them, if he fell ill, if he thought that he was going to die,
+would leave my service to-morrow. So I don't count on them so much.
+However, I will make some inquiries, and to-morrow we will move Mrs.
+Oliver to another room."
+
+He went about the business forthwith, and cross-examined his servants one
+after another. But he obtained no admission from any one of them. No one
+had touched the window. Was a single thing missing of all that the
+honourable lady possessed? On their lives, no!
+
+Meanwhile Linforth sought out Violet Oliver in the drawing-room. He found
+her alone, and she came eagerly towards him and took his hands.
+
+"Oh, Dick," she said, "I am glad you have come back. I am nervous."
+
+"There's no need," said Dick with a laugh. "Let us go out."
+
+He opened the window, but Violet drew back.
+
+"No, let us stay here," she said, and passing her arm through his she
+stared for a few moments with a singular intentness into the darkness of
+the garden.
+
+"Did you see anything?" he asked.
+
+"No," she replied, and he felt the tension of her body relax. "No,
+there's nothing. And since you have come back, Dick, I am no longer
+afraid." She looked up at him with a smile, and tightened her clasp upon
+his arm with a pretty air of ownership. "My Dick!" she said, and laughed.
+
+The door-handle rattled, and Violet proved that she had lost her fear.
+
+"That's Miss Ralston," she said. "Let us go out," and she slipped out of
+the window quickly. As quickly Linforth followed her. She was waiting for
+him in the darkness.
+
+"Dick," she said in a whisper, and she caught him close to her.
+
+"Violet."
+
+He looked up to the dark, clear, starlit sky and down to the sweet and
+gentle face held up towards his. That night and in this Indian garden, it
+seemed to him that his faith was proven and made good. With the sense of
+failure heavy upon his soul, he yet found here a woman whose trust was
+not diminished by any failure, who still looked to him with confidence
+and drew comfort and strength from his presence, even as he did from
+hers. Alone in the drawing-room she had been afraid; outside here in the
+garden she had no fear, and no room in her mind for any thought of fear.
+
+"When you spoke about your window to-night, Violet," he said gently,
+"although I was alarmed for you, although I was troubled that you should
+have cause for alarm--"
+
+"I saw that," said Violet with a smile.
+
+"Yet I never spoke."
+
+"Your eyes, your face spoke. Oh, my dear, I watch you," and she drew in a
+breath. "I am a little afraid of you." She did not laugh. There was
+nothing provocative in her accent. She spoke with simplicity and truth,
+now as often, what was set down to her for a coquetry by those who
+disliked her. Linforth was in no doubt, however. Mistake her as he did,
+he judged her in this respect more truly than the worldly-wise. She had
+at the bottom of her heart a great fear of her lover, a fear that she
+might lose him, a fear that he might hold her in scorn, if he knew her
+only half as well as she knew herself.
+
+"I don't want you to be afraid of me," he said, quietly. "There is no
+reason for it."
+
+"You are hard to others if they come in your way," she replied, and
+Linforth stopped. Yes, that was true. There was his mother in the house
+under the Sussex Downs. He had got his way. He was on the Frontier. The
+Road now would surely go on. It would be a strange thing if he did not
+manage to get some portion of that work entrusted to his hands. He had
+got his way, but he had been hard, undoubtedly.
+
+"It is quite true," he answered. "But I have had my lesson. You need not
+fear that I shall be anything but very gentle towards you."
+
+"In your thoughts?" she asked quickly. "That you will be gentle in word
+and in deed--yes, of that I am sure. But will you think gently of
+me--always? That is a different thing."
+
+"Of course," he answered with a laugh.
+
+But Violet Oliver was in no mood lightly to be put off.
+
+"Promise me that!" she cried in a low and most passionate voice. Her lips
+trembled as she pleaded; her dark eyes besought him, shining starrily.
+"Oh, promise that you will think of me gently--that if ever you are
+inclined to be hard and to judge me harshly, you will remember these two
+nights in the dark garden at Peshawur."
+
+"I shall not forget them," said Linforth, and there was no longer any
+levity in his tones. He spoke gravely, and more than gravely. There was a
+note of anxiety, as though he were troubled.
+
+"I promise," he said.
+
+"Thank you," said Violet simply; "for I know that you will keep
+the promise."
+
+"Yes, but you speak"--and the note of trouble was still more audible in
+Linforth's voice--"you speak as if you and I were going to part to-morrow
+morning for the rest of our lives."
+
+"No," Violet cried quickly and rather sharply. Then she moved on a
+step or two.
+
+"I interrupted you," she said. "You were saying that when I spoke about
+my window, although you were troubled on my account--"
+
+"I felt at the same time some relief," Linforth continued.
+
+"Relief?" she asked.
+
+"Yes; for on my return from Ajmere this morning I noticed a change in
+you." He felt at once Violet's hand shake upon his arm as she started;
+but she did not interrupt him by a word.
+
+"I noticed it at once when we met for the first time since we had talked
+together in the garden, for the first time since your hands had lain in
+mine and your lips touched mine. And afterwards it was still there."
+
+"What change?" Violet asked. But she asked the question in a stifled
+voice and with her face averted from him.
+
+"There was a constraint, an embarrassment," he said. "How can I explain
+it? I felt it rather than noticed it by visible signs. It seemed to me
+that you avoided being alone with me. I had a dread that you regretted
+the evening in the garden, that you were sorry we had agreed to live our
+lives together."
+
+Violet did not protest. She did not turn to him with any denial in her
+eyes. She walked on by his side with her face still turned away from his,
+and for a little while she walked in silence. Then, as if compelled, she
+suddenly stopped and turned. She spoke, too, as if compelled, with a kind
+of desperation in her voice.
+
+"Yes, you were right," she cried. "Oh, Dick, you were right. There was
+constraint, there was embarrassment. I will tell you the reason--now."
+
+"I know it," said Dick with a smile.
+
+Violet stared at him for a moment. She perceived his contentment. He was
+now quite unharassed by fear. There was no disappointment, no anger
+against her. She shook her head and said slowly:
+
+"You can't know it."
+
+"I do."
+
+"Tell me the reason then."
+
+"You were frightened by this business of the window."
+
+Violet made a movement. She was in the mood to contradict him. But he
+went on, and so the mood passed.
+
+"It was only natural. Here were you in a frontier town, a wild town on
+the borders of a wild country. A window bolted at dinner-time and
+unlocked at bedtime--it was easy to find something sinister in that. You
+did not like to speak of it, lest it should trouble your hosts. Yet it
+weighed on you. It occupied your thoughts."
+
+"And to that you put down my embarrassment?" she asked quietly. They had
+come again to the window of the drawing-room.
+
+"Yes, I do," he answered.
+
+She looked at him strangely for a few moments. But the compulsion which
+she had felt upon her a moment ago to speak was gone. She no longer
+sought to contradict him. Without a word she slipped into the
+drawing-room.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+THE THIEF
+
+
+Violet Oliver was harassed that night as she had never before been
+harassed at any moment of her easy life. She fled to her room. She stood
+in front of her mirror gazing helplessly at the reflection of her
+troubled face.
+
+"What shall I do?" she cried piteously. "What shall I do?"
+
+And it was not until some minutes had passed that she gave a thought to
+whether her window on this night was bolted or not.
+
+She moved quickly across the room and drew the curtains apart. This time
+the bolt was shot. But she did not turn back to her room. She let the
+curtains fall behind her and leaned her forehead against the glass. There
+was a moon to-night, and the quiet garden stretched in front of her a
+place of black shadows and white light. Whether a thief lurked in those
+shadows and watched from them she did not now consider. The rattle of a
+rifle from a sentry near at hand gave her confidence; and all her trouble
+lay in the house behind her.
+
+She opened her window and stepped out. "I tried to speak, but he would
+not listen. Oh, why did I ever come here?" she cried. "It would have been
+so easy not to have come."
+
+But even while she cried out her regrets, they were not all the truth.
+There was still alive within her the longing to follow the difficult
+way--the way of fire and stones, as it would be for her--if only she
+could! She had made a beginning that night. Yes, she had made a beginning
+though nothing had come of it. That was not her fault, she assured
+herself. She had tried to speak. But could she keep it up? She turned and
+twisted; she was caught in a trap. Passion had trapped her unawares.
+
+She went back to the room and bolted the window. Then again she stood in
+front of her mirror and gazed at herself in thought.
+
+Suddenly her face changed. She looked up; an idea took shape in her mind.
+"Theft," Ralston had said. Thus had he explained the unbolted window. She
+must lock up what jewels she had. She must be sure to do that. Violet
+Oliver looked towards the window and shivered. It was very silent in the
+room. Fear seized hold of her. It was a big room, and furtively she
+peered into the corners lest already hidden behind some curtain the thief
+should be there.
+
+But always her eyes returned to the window. If she only dared! She ran to
+her trunks. From one of them she took out from its deep hiding-place a
+small jewel-case, a jewel-case very like to that one which a few months
+ago she had sealed up in her tent and addressed to Kohara. She left it on
+her dressing-table. She did not open it. Then she looked about her again.
+It would be the easy way--if only she dared! It would be an easier way
+than trying again to tell her lover what she would have told him
+to-night, had he only been willing to listen.
+
+She stood and listened, with parted lips. It seemed to her that even in
+this lighted room people, unseen people, breathed about her. Then, with a
+little sob in her throat, she ran to the window and shot back the bolt.
+She undressed hurriedly, placed a candle by her bedside and turned out
+the electric lights. As soon as she was in bed she blew out the candle.
+She lay in the darkness, shivering with fear, regretting what she had
+done. Every now and then a board cracked in the corridor outside the
+room, as though beneath a stealthy footstep. And once inside the room the
+door of a wardrobe sprang open. She would have cried out, but terror
+paralysed her throat; and the next moment she heard the tread of the
+sentry outside her window. The sound reassured her. There was safety in
+the heavy regularity of the steps. It was a soldier who was passing, a
+drilled, trustworthy soldier. "Trustworthy" was the word which the
+Commissioner had used. And lulled by the soldier's presence in the garden
+Violet Oliver fell asleep.
+
+But she waked before dawn. The room was still in darkness. The moon had
+sunk. Not a ray of light penetrated from behind the curtains. She lay for
+a little while in bed, listening, wondering whether that window had been
+opened. A queer longing came upon her--a longing to thrust back the
+curtains, so that--if anything happened--she might see. That would be
+better than lying here in the dark, knowing nothing, seeing nothing,
+fearing everything. If she pulled back the curtains, there would be a
+panel of dim light visible, however dark the night.
+
+The longing became a necessity. She could not lie there. She sprang out
+of bed, and hurried across towards the window. She had not stopped to
+light her candle and she held her hands outstretched in front of her.
+Suddenly, as she was half-way across the room, her hands touched
+something soft.
+
+She drew them back with a gasp of fright and stood stone-still,
+stone-cold. She had touched a human face. Already the thief was in the
+room. She stood without a cry, without a movement, while her heart leaped
+and fluttered within her bosom. She knew in that moment the extremity of
+mortal fear.
+
+A loud scratch sounded sharply in the room. A match spurted into flame,
+and above the match there sprang into view, framed in the blackness of
+the room, a wild and menacing dark face. The eyes glittered at her, and
+suddenly a hand was raised as if to strike. And at the gesture Violet
+Oliver found her voice.
+
+She screamed, a loud shrill scream of terror, and even as she screamed,
+in the very midst of her terror, she saw that the hand was lowered, and
+that the threatening face smiled. Then the match went out and darkness
+cloaked her and cloaked the thief again. She heard a quick stealthy
+movement, and once more her scream rang out. It seemed to her ages before
+any answer came, before she heard the sound of hurrying footsteps in the
+corridors. There was a loud rapping upon her door. She ran to it. She
+heard Ralston's voice.
+
+"What is it? Open! Open!" and then in the garden the report of a rifle
+rang loud.
+
+She turned up the lights, flung a dressing-gown about her shoulders and
+opened the door. Ralston was in the passage, behind him she saw lights
+strangely wavering and other faces. These too wavered strangely. From
+very far away, she heard Ralston's voice once more.
+
+"What is it? What is it?"
+
+And then she fell forward against him and sank in a swoon upon the floor.
+
+Ralston lifted her on to her bed and summoned her maid. He went out of
+the house and made inquiries of the guard. The sentry's story was
+explicit and not to be shaken by any cross-examination. He had patrolled
+that side of the house in which Mrs. Oliver's room lay, all night. He had
+seen nothing. At one o'clock in the morning the moon sank and the night
+became very dark. It was about three when a few minutes after passing
+beneath the verandah, and just as he had turned the corner of the house,
+he heard a shrill scream from Mrs. Oliver's room. He ran back at once,
+and as he ran he heard a second scream. He saw no one, but he heard a
+rustling and cracking in the bushes as though a fugitive plunged through.
+He fired in the direction of the noise and then ran with all speed to the
+spot. He found no one, but the bushes were broken.
+
+Ralston went back into the house and knocked at Mrs. Oliver's door. The
+maid opened it.
+
+"How is Mrs. Oliver?" he asked, and he heard Violet herself reply faintly
+from the room:
+
+"I am better, thank you. I was a little frightened, that's all."
+
+"No wonder," said Ralston, and he spoke again to the maid. "Has anything
+gone? Has anything been stolen? There was a jewel-case upon the
+dressing-table. I saw it."
+
+The maid looked at him curiously, before she answered. "Nothing has
+been touched."
+
+Then, with a glance towards the bed, the maid stooped quickly to a trunk
+which stood against the wall close by the door and then slipped out of
+the room, closing the door behind her. The corridors were now lighted up,
+as though it were still evening and the household had not yet gone to
+bed. Ralston saw that the maid held a bundle in her hands.
+
+"I do not think," she said in a whisper, "that the thief came to steal
+any thing." She laid some emphasis upon the word.
+
+Ralston took the bundle from her hands and stared at it.
+
+"Good God!" he muttered. He was astonished and more than astonished.
+There was something of horror in his low exclamation. He looked at the
+maid. She was a woman of forty. She had the look of a capable woman. She
+was certainly quite self-possessed.
+
+"Does your mistress know of this?" he asked.
+
+The maid shook her head.
+
+"No, sir. I saw it upon the floor before she came to. I hid it between
+the trunk and the wall." She spoke with an ear to the door of the room in
+which Violet lay, and in a low voice.
+
+"Good!" said Ralston. "You had better tell her nothing of it for the
+present. It would only frighten her"; as he ended he heard Violet
+Oliver call out:
+
+"Adela! Adela!"
+
+"Mrs. Oliver wants me," said the maid, as she slipped back into
+the bedroom.
+
+Ralston walked slowly back down the corridor into the great hall. He was
+carrying the bundle in his hands and his face was very grave. He saw Dick
+Linforth in the hall, and before he spoke he looked upwards to the
+gallery which ran round it. Even when he had assured himself that there
+was no one listening, he spoke in a low voice.
+
+"Do you see this, Linforth?"
+
+He held out the bundle. There was a thick cloth, a sort of pad of cotton,
+and some thin strong cords.
+
+"These were found in Mrs. Oliver's room."
+
+He laid the things upon the table and Linforth turned them over, startled
+as Ralston had been.
+
+"I don't understand," he said.
+
+"They were left behind," said Ralston.
+
+"By the thief?"
+
+"If he was a thief"; and again Linforth said:
+
+"I don't understand."
+
+But there was now more of anger, more of horror in his voice, than
+surprise; and as he spoke he took up the pad of cotton wool.
+
+"You do understand," said Ralston, quietly.
+
+Linforth's fingers worked. That pad of cotton seemed to him more sinister
+than even the cords.
+
+"For her!" he cried, in a quiet but dangerous voice. "For Violet," and at
+that moment neither noticed his utterance of her Christian name. "Let me
+only find the man who entered her room."
+
+Ralston looked steadily at Linforth.
+
+"Have you any suspicion as to who the man is?" he asked.
+
+There was a momentary silence in that quiet hall. Both men stood looking
+at each other.
+
+"It can't be," said Linforth, at length. But he spoke rather to himself
+than to Ralston. "It can't be."
+
+Ralston did not press the question.
+
+"It's the insolence of the attempt which angers me," he said. "We must
+wait until Mrs. Oliver can tell us what happened, what she saw.
+Meanwhile, she knows nothing of those things. There is no need that she
+should know."
+
+He left Linforth standing in the hall and went up the stairs. When he
+reached the gallery, he leaned over quietly and looked down.
+
+Linforth was still standing by the table, fingering the cotton-pad.
+
+Ralston heard him say again in a voice which was doubtful now rather than
+incredulous:
+
+"It can't be he! He would not dare!"
+
+But no name was uttered.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX
+
+MRS. OLIVER RIDES THROUGH PESHAWUR
+
+
+Violet Oliver told her story later during that day. But there was a
+certain hesitation in her manner which puzzled Ralston, at all events,
+amongst her audience.
+
+"When you went to your room," he asked, "did you find the window again
+unbolted?"
+
+"No," she replied. "It was really my fault last night. I felt the heat
+oppressive. I opened the window myself and went out on to the verandah.
+When I came back I think that I did not bolt it."
+
+"You forgot?" asked Ralston in surprise.
+
+But this was not the only surprising element in the story.
+
+"When you touched the man, he did not close with you, he made no effort
+to silence you," Ralston said. "That is strange enough. But that he
+should strike a match, that he should let you see his face quite
+clearly--that's what I don't understand. It looks, Mrs. Oliver, as if he
+almost wanted you to recognise him."
+
+Ralston turned in his chair sharply towards her. "Did you recognise
+him?" he asked.
+
+"Yes," Violet Oliver replied. "At least I think I did. I think that I had
+seen him before."
+
+Here at all events it was clear that she was concealing nothing. She was
+obviously as puzzled as Ralston was himself.
+
+"Where had you seen him?" he asked, and the answer increased his
+astonishment.
+
+"In Calcutta," she answered. "It was the same man or one very like
+him. I saw him on three successive evenings in the Maidan when I was
+driving there."
+
+"In Calcutta?" cried Ralston. "Some months ago, then?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"How did you come to notice him in the Maidan?" Mrs. Oliver shivered
+slightly as she answered:
+
+"He seemed to be watching me. I thought so at the time. It made me
+uncomfortable. Now I am sure. He _was_ watching me," and she suddenly
+came forward a step.
+
+"I should like to go away to-day if you and your sister won't mind,"
+she pleaded.
+
+Ralston's forehead clouded.
+
+"Of course, I quite understand," he said, "and if you wish to go we can't
+prevent you. But you leave us rather helpless, don't you?--as you alone
+can identify the man. Besides, you leave yourself too in danger."
+
+"But I shall go far away," she urged. "As it is I am going back to
+England in a month."
+
+"Yes," Ralston objected. "But you have not yet started, and if the man
+followed you from Calcutta to Peshawur, he may follow you from Peshawur
+to Bombay."
+
+Mrs. Oliver drew back with a start of terror and Ralston instantly took
+back his words.
+
+"Of course, we will take care of you on your way south. You may rely on
+that," he said with a smile. "But if you could bring yourself to stay
+here for a day or two I should be much obliged. You see, it is impossible
+to fix the man's identity from a description, and it is really important
+that he should be caught."
+
+"Yes, I understand," said Violet Oliver, and she reluctantly
+consented to stay.
+
+"Thank you," said Ralston, and he looked at her with a smile. "There is
+one more thing which I should like you to do. I should like you to ride
+out with me this afternoon through Peshawur. The story of last night will
+already be known in the bazaars. Of that you may be very sure. And it
+would be a good thing if you were seen to ride through the city quite
+unconcerned."
+
+Violet Oliver drew back from the ordeal which Ralston so calmly
+proposed to her.
+
+"I shall be with you," he said. "There will be no danger--or at
+all events no danger that Englishwomen are unprepared to face in
+this country."
+
+The appeal to her courage served Ralston's turn. Violet raised her head
+with a little jerk of pride.
+
+"Certainly I will ride with you this afternoon through Peshawur," she
+said; and she went out of the room and left Ralston alone.
+
+He sat at his desk trying to puzzle out the enigma of the night. The more
+he thought upon it, the further he seemed from any solution. There was
+the perplexing behaviour of Mrs. Oliver herself. She had been troubled,
+greatly troubled, to find her window unbolted on two successive nights
+after she had taken care to bolt it. Yet on the third night she actually
+unbolts it herself and leaving it unbolted puts out her light and goes to
+bed. It seemed incredible that she should so utterly have forgotten her
+fears. But still more bewildering even than her forgetfulness was the
+conduct of the intruder.
+
+Upon that point he took Linforth into his counsels.
+
+"I can't make head or tail of it," he cried. "Here the fellow is in the
+dark room with his cords and the thick cloth and the pad. Mrs. Oliver
+touches him. He knows that his presence is revealed to her. She is within
+reach. And she stands paralysed by fear, unable to cry out. Yet he does
+nothing, except light a match and give her a chance to recognise his
+face. He does not seize her, he does not stifle her voice, as he could
+have done--yes, as he could have done, before she could have uttered a
+cry. He strikes a match and shows her his face."
+
+"So that he might see hers," said Linforth. Ralston shook his head. He
+was not satisfied with that explanation. But Linforth had no other to
+offer. "Have you any clue to the man?"
+
+"None," said Ralston.
+
+He rode out with Mrs. Oliver that afternoon down from his house to the
+Gate of the City. Two men of his levies rode at a distance of twenty
+paces behind them. But these were his invariable escort. He took no
+unusual precautions. There were no extra police in the streets. He went
+out with his guest at his side for an afternoon ride as if nothing
+whatever had occurred. Mrs. Oliver played her part well. She rode with
+her head erect and her eyes glancing boldly over the crowded streets.
+Curious glances were directed at her, but she met them without agitation.
+Ralston observed her with a growing admiration.
+
+"Thank you," he said warmly. "I know this can hardly be a pleasant
+experience for you. But it is good for these people here to know that
+nothing they can do will make any difference--no not enough to alter the
+mere routine of our lives. Let us go forward."
+
+They turned to the left at the head of the main thoroughfare, and passed
+at a walk, now through the open spaces where the booths were erected, now
+through winding narrow streets between high houses. Violet Oliver, though
+she held her head high and her eyes were steady, rode with a fluttering
+heart. In front of them, about them, and behind them the crowd of people
+thronged, tribesmen from the hills, Mohammedans and Hindus of the city;
+from the upper windows the lawyers and merchants looked down upon them;
+and Violet held all of them in horror.
+
+The occurrence of last night had inflicted upon her a heavier shock than
+either Ralston imagined or she herself had been aware until she had
+ridden into the town. The dark wild face suddenly springing into view
+above the lighted match was as vivid and terrible to her still, as a
+nightmare to a child. She was afraid that at any moment she might see
+that face again in the throng of faces. Her heart sickened with dread at
+the thought, and even though she should not see him, at every step she
+looked upon twenty of his like--kinsmen, perhaps, brothers in blood and
+race. She shrank from them in repulsion and she shrank from them in fear.
+Every nerve of her body seemed to cry out against the folly of this ride.
+
+What were they two and the two levies behind them against the throng?
+Four at the most against thousands at the least.
+
+She touched Ralston timidly on the arm.
+
+"Might we go home now?" she asked in a voice which trembled; and he
+looked suddenly and anxiously into her face.
+
+"Certainly," he said, and he wheeled his horse round, keeping close to
+her as she wheeled hers.
+
+"It is all right," he said, and his voice took on an unusual
+friendliness. "We have not far to go. It was brave of you to have come,
+and I am very grateful. We ask much of the Englishwomen in India, and
+because they never fail us, we are apt to ask too much. I asked too much
+of you." Violet responded to the flick at her national pride. She drew
+herself up and straightened her back.
+
+"No," she said, and she actually counterfeited a smile. "No. It's
+all right."
+
+"I asked more than I had a right to ask," he continued remorsefully. "I
+am sorry. I have lived too much amongst men. That's my trouble. One
+becomes inconsiderate to women. It's ignorance, not want of good-will.
+Look!" To distract her thoughts he began to point her out houses and
+people which were of interest.
+
+"Do you see that sign there, 'Bahadur Gobind, Barrister-at-Law, Cambridge
+B.A.,' on the first floor over the cookshop? Yes, he is the genuine
+article. He went to Cambridge and took his degree and here he is back
+again. Take him for all in all, he is the most seditious man in the city.
+Meanly seditious. It only runs to writing letters over a pseudonym in the
+native papers. Now look up. Do you see that very respectable
+white-bearded gentleman on the balcony of his house? Well, his
+daughter-in-law disappeared one day when her husband was away from
+home--disappeared altogether. It had been a great grief to the old
+gentleman that she had borne no son to inherit the family fortune. So
+naturally people began to talk. She was found subsequently under the
+floor of the house, and it cost that respectable old gentleman twenty
+thousand rupees to get himself acquitted."
+
+Ralston pulled himself up with a jerk, realising that this was not the
+most appropriate story which he could have told to a lady with the
+overstrained nerves of Mrs. Oliver.
+
+He turned to her with a fresh apology upon his lips. But the apology was
+never spoken.
+
+"What's the matter, Mrs. Oliver?" he asked.
+
+She had not heard the story of the respectable old gentleman. That was
+clear. They were riding through an open oblong space of ground dotted
+with trees. There were shops down the middle, two rows backing upon a
+stream, and shops again at the sides. Mrs. Oliver was gazing with a
+concentrated look across the space and the people who crowded it towards
+an opening of an alley between two houses. But fixed though her gaze was,
+there was no longer any fear in her eyes. Rather they expressed a keen
+interest, a strong curiosity.
+
+Ralston's eyes followed the direction of her gaze. At the corner of the
+alley there was a shop wherein a man sat rounding a stick of wood with a
+primitive lathe. He made the lathe revolve by working a stringed bow with
+his right hand, while his left hand worked the chisel and his right foot
+directed it. His limbs were making three different motions with an
+absence of effort which needed much practice, and for a moment Ralston
+wondered whether it was the ingenuity of the workman which had attracted
+her. But in a moment he saw that he was wrong.
+
+There were two men standing in the mouth of the alley, both dressed in
+white from head to foot. One stood a little behind with the hood of his
+cloak drawn forward over his head, so that it was impossible to discern
+his face. The other stood forward, a tall slim man with the elegance and
+the grace of youth. It was at this man Violet Oliver was looking.
+
+Ralston looked again at her, and as he looked the colour rose into her
+cheeks; there came a look of sympathy, perhaps of pity, into her eyes.
+Almost her lips began to smile. Ralston turned his head again towards the
+alley, and he started in his saddle. The young man had raised his head.
+He was gazing fixedly towards them. His features were revealed and
+Ralston knew them well.
+
+He turned quickly to Mrs. Oliver.
+
+"You know that man?"
+
+The colour deepened upon her face.
+
+"It is the Prince of Chiltistan."
+
+"But you know him?" Ralston insisted.
+
+"I have met him in London," said Violet Oliver.
+
+So Shere Ali was in Peshawur, when he should have been in
+Chiltistan! "Why?"
+
+Ralston put the question to himself and looked to his companion for the
+answer. The colour upon her face, the interest, the sympathy of her eyes
+gave him the answer. This was the woman, then, whose image stood before
+Shere Ali's memories and hindered him from marrying one of his own race!
+Just with that sympathy and that keen interest does a woman look upon the
+man who loves her and whose love she does not return. Moreover, there was
+Linforth's hesitation. Linforth had admitted there was an Englishwoman
+for whom Shere Ali cared, had admitted it reluctantly, had extenuated her
+thoughtlessness, had pleaded for her. Oh, without a doubt Mrs. Oliver was
+the woman!
+
+There flashed before Ralston's eyes the picture of Linforth standing in
+the hall, turning over the cords and the cotton pad and the thick cloth.
+Ralston looked down again upon him from the gallery and heard his voice,
+saying in a whisper:
+
+"It can't be he! It can't be he!"
+
+What would Linforth say when he knew that Shere Ali was lurking in
+Peshawur?
+
+Ralston was still gazing at Shere Ali when the man behind the Prince made
+a movement. He flung back the hood from his face, and disclosing his
+features looked boldly towards the riders.
+
+A cry rang out at Ralston's side, a woman's cry. He turned in his saddle
+and saw Violet Oliver. The colour had suddenly fled from her cheeks. They
+were blanched. The sympathy had gone from her eyes, and in its place,
+stark terror looked out from them. She swayed in her saddle.
+
+"Do you see that man?" she cried, pointing with her hand. "The man behind
+the Prince. The man who has thrown back his cloak."
+
+"Yes, yes, I see him," answered Ralston impatiently.
+
+"It was he who crept into my room last night."
+
+"You are sure?"
+
+"Could I forget? Could I forget?" she cried; and at that moment, the man
+touched Shere Ali on the sleeve, and they both fled out of sight into
+the alley.
+
+There was no doubt left in Ralston's mind. It was Shere Ali who had
+planned the abduction of Mrs. Oliver. It was his companion who had failed
+to carry it out. Ralston turned to the levies behind him.
+
+"Quick! Into that valley! Fetch me those two men who were standing
+there!"
+
+The two levies pressed their horses through the crowd, but the alley was
+empty when they came to it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX
+
+THE NEEDED IMPLEMENT
+
+
+Ralston rode home with an uncomfortable recollection of the little
+dinner-party in Calcutta at which Hatch had told his story of the
+Englishwoman in Mecca. Had that story fired Shere Ali? The time for
+questions had passed; but none the less this particular one would force
+itself into the front of his mind.
+
+"I would have done better never to have meddled," he said to himself
+remorsefully--even while he gave his orders for the apprehension of
+Shere Ali and his companion. For he did not allow his remorse to hamper
+his action; he set a strong guard at the gates of the city, and gave
+orders that within the gates the city should be methodically searched
+quarter by quarter.
+
+"I want them both laid by the heels," he said; "but, above all, the
+Prince. Let there be no mistake. I want Shere Ali lodged in the gaol here
+before nightfall"; and Linforth's voice broke in rapidly upon his words.
+
+"Can I do anything to help? What can I do?"
+
+Ralston looked sharply up from his desk. There had been a noticeable
+eagerness, a noticeable anger in Linforth's voice.
+
+"You?" said Ralston quietly. "_You_ want to help? You were Shere
+Ali's friend."
+
+Ralston smiled as he spoke, but there was no hint of irony in either
+words or smile. It was a smile rather of tolerance, and almost of
+regret--the smile of a man who was well accustomed to seeing the flowers
+and decorative things of life wither over-quickly, and yet was still
+alert and not indifferent to the change. His work for the moment was
+done. He leaned back thoughtfully in his chair. He no longer looked at
+Linforth. His one quick glance had shown him enough.
+
+"So it's all over, eh?" he said, as he played with his paper-knife.
+"Summer mornings on the Cherwell. Travels in the Dauphine. The Meije and
+the Aiguilles d'Arves. Oh, I know." Linforth moved as he stood at the
+side of Ralston's desk, but the set look upon his face did not change.
+And Ralston went on. There came a kind of gentle mockery into his voice.
+"The shared ambitions, the concerted plans--gone, and not even a regret
+for them left, eh? _Tempi passati!_ Pretty sad, too, when you come to
+think of it."
+
+But Linforth made no answer to Ralston's probings. Violet Oliver's
+instincts had taught her the truth, which Ralston was now learning.
+Linforth could be very hard. There was nothing left of the friendship
+which through many years had played so large a part in his life. A woman
+had intervened, and Linforth had shut the door upon it, had sealed his
+mind against its memories, and his heart against its claims. The evening
+at La Grave in the Dauphine had borne its fruit. Linforth stood there
+white with anger against Shere Ali, hot to join in the chase. Ralston
+understood that if ever he should need a man to hunt down that quarry
+through peril and privations, here at his hand was the man on whom he
+could rely.
+
+Linforth's eager voice broke in again.
+
+"What can I do to help?"
+
+Ralston looked up once more.
+
+"Nothing--for the moment. If Shere Ali is captured in
+Peshawur--nothing at all."
+
+"But if he escapes."
+
+Ralston shrugged his shoulders. Then he filled his pipe and lit it.
+
+"If he escapes--why, then, your turn may come. I make no promises," he
+added quickly, as Linforth, by a movement, betrayed his satisfaction.
+"It is not, indeed, in my power to promise. But there may come work
+for you--difficult work, dangerous work, prolonged work. For this
+outrage can't go unpunished. In any case," he ended with a smile, "the
+Road goes on."
+
+He turned again to his office-table, and Linforth went out of the room.
+
+The task which Ralston had in view for Linforth came by a long step
+nearer that night. For all night the search went on throughout the
+city, and the searchers were still empty-handed in the morning. Ahmed
+Ismail had laid his plans too cunningly. Shere Ali was to be
+compromised, not captured. There was to be a price upon his head, but
+the head was not to fall. And while the search went on from quarter to
+quarter of Peshawur, the Prince and his attendant were already out in
+the darkness upon the hills.
+
+Ralston telegraphed to the station on the Malakand Pass, to the fort at
+Jamrud, even to Landi Khotal, at the far end of the Khyber Pass, but
+Shere Ali had not travelled along any one of the roads those positions
+commanded.
+
+"I had little hope indeed that he would," said Ralston with a shrug
+of the shoulders. "He has given us the slip. We shall not catch up
+with him now."
+
+He was standing with Linforth at the mouth of the well which irrigated
+his garden. The water was drawn up after the Persian plan. A wooden
+vertical wheel wound up the bucket, and this wheel was made to revolve by
+a horizontal wheel with the spokes projecting beyond the rim and fitting
+into similar spokes upon the vertical wheel. A bullock, with a bandage
+over its eyes, was harnessed to the horizontal wheel, and paced slowly
+round and round, turning it; while a boy sat on the bullock's back and
+beat it with a stick. Both men stood and listened to the groaning and
+creaking of the wheels for a few moments, and then Linforth said:
+
+"So, after all, you mean to let him go?"
+
+"No, indeed," answered Ralston. "Only now we shall have to fetch him out
+of Chiltistan."
+
+"Will they give him up?"
+
+Ralston shook his head.
+
+"No." He turned to Linforth with a smile. "I once heard the Political
+Officer described as the man who stands between the soldier and his
+medal. Well, I have tried to stand just in that spot as far as Chiltistan
+is concerned. But I have not succeeded. The soldier will get his medal in
+Chiltistan this year. I have had telegrams this morning from Lahore. A
+punitive force has been gathered at Nowshera. The preparations have been
+going on quietly for a few weeks. It will start in a few days. I shall go
+with it as Political Officer."
+
+"You will take me?" Linforth asked eagerly.
+
+"Yes," Ralston answered. "I mean to take you. I told you yesterday there
+might be service for you."
+
+"In Chiltistan?"
+
+"Or beyond," replied Ralston. "Shere Ali may give us the slip again."
+
+He was thinking of the arid rocky borders of Turkestan, where flight
+would be easy and where capture would be most difficult. It was to that
+work that Ralston, looking far ahead, had in his mind dedicated young
+Linforth, knowing well that he would count its difficulties light in the
+ardour of his pursuit. Anger would spur him, and the Road should be held
+out as his reward. Ralston listened again to the groaning of the
+water-wheel, and watched the hooded bullock circle round and round with
+patient unvarying pace, and the little boy on its back making no
+difference whatever with a long stick.
+
+"Look!" he said. "There's an emblem of the Indian administration. The
+wheels creak and groan, the bullock goes on round and round with a
+bandage over its eyes, and the little boy on its back cuts a fine
+important figure and looks as if he were doing ever so much, and somehow
+the water comes up--that's the great thing, the water is fetched up
+somehow and the land watered. When I am inclined to be despondent, I come
+and look at my water-wheel." He turned away and walked back to the house
+with his hands folded behind his back and his head bent forward.
+
+"You are despondent now?" Linforth asked.
+
+"Yes," replied Ralston, with a rare and sudden outburst of confession.
+"You, perhaps, will hardly understand. You are young. You have a career
+to make. You have particular ambitions. This trouble in Chiltistan is
+your opportunity. But it's my sorrow--it's almost my failure." He turned
+his face towards Linforth with a whimsical smile. "I have tried to stand
+between the soldier and his medal. I wanted to extend our political
+influence there--yes. Because that makes for peace, and it makes for good
+government. The tribes lose their fear that their independence will be
+assailed, they come in time to the Political Officer for advice, they lay
+their private quarrels and feuds before him for arbitration. That has
+happened in many valleys, and I had always a hope that though Chiltistan
+has a ruling Prince, the same sort of thing might in time happen there.
+Yes, even at the cost of the Road," and again his very taking smile
+illumined for a moment his worn face. "But that hope is gone now. A force
+will go up and demand Shere Ali. Shere Ali will not be given up. Even
+were the demand not made, it would make no difference. He will not be
+many days in Chiltistan before Chiltistan is in arms. Already I have sent
+a messenger up to the Resident, telling him to come down."
+
+"And then?" asked Linforth.
+
+Ralston shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"More or less fighting, more or less loss, a few villages burnt, and the
+only inevitable end. We shall either take over the country or set up
+another Prince."
+
+"Set up another Prince?" exclaimed Linforth in a startled voice. "In
+that case--"
+
+Ralston broke in upon him with a laugh.
+
+"Oh, man of one idea, in any case the Road will go on to the foot of
+the Hindu Kush. That's the price which Chiltistan must pay as security
+for future peace--the military road through Kohara to the foot of the
+Hindu Kush."
+
+Linforth's face cleared, and he said cheerfully:
+
+"It's strange that Shere Ali doesn't realise that himself."
+
+The cheerfulness of his voice, as much as his words, caused Ralston to
+stop and turn upon his companion in a moment of exasperation.
+
+"Perhaps he does." he exclaimed, and then he proceeded to pay a tribute
+to the young Prince of Chiltistan which took Linforth fairly by surprise.
+
+"Don't you understand--you who know him, you who grew up with him, you
+who were his friend? He's a man. I know these hill-people, and like every
+other Englishman who has served among them, I love them--knowing their
+faults. Shere Ali has the faults of the Pathan, or some of them. He has
+their vanity; he has, if you like, their fanaticism. But he's a man. He's
+flattered and petted like a lap-dog, he's played with like a toy. Well,
+he's neither a lap-dog nor a toy, and he takes the flattery and the
+petting seriously. He thinks it's _meant_, and he behaves accordingly.
+What, then? The toy is thrown down on the ground, the lap-dog is kicked
+into the corner. But he's not a lap-dog, he's not a toy. He's a man. He
+has a man's resentments, a man's wounded heart, a man's determination not
+to submit to flattery one moment and humiliation the next. So he strikes.
+He tries to take the white, soft, pretty thing which has been dangled
+before his eyes and snatched away--he tries to take her by force and
+fails. He goes back to his own people, and strikes. Do you blame him?
+Would you rather he sat down and grumbled and bragged of his successes,
+and took to drink, as more than one down south has done? Perhaps so. It
+would be more comfortable if he did. But which of the pictures do you
+admire? Which of the two is the better man? For me, the man who
+strikes--even if I have to go up into his country and exact the penalty
+afterwards. Shere Ali is one of the best of the Princes. But he has been
+badly treated and so he must suffer."
+
+Ralston repeated his conclusion with a savage irony. "That's the whole
+truth. He's one of the best of them. Therefore he doesn't take bad
+treatment with a servile gratitude. Therefore he must suffer still more.
+But the fault in the beginning was not his."
+
+Thus it fell to Ralston to explain, twenty-six years later, the saying
+of a long-forgotten Political Officer which had seemed so dark to
+Colonel Dewes when it was uttered in the little fort in Chiltistan.
+There was a special danger for the best in the upbringing of the Indian
+princes in England.
+
+Linforth flushed as he listened to the tirade, but he made no answer.
+Ralston looked at him keenly, wondering with a queer amusement whether he
+had not blunted the keen edge of that tool which he was keeping at his
+side because he foresaw the need of it. But there was no sign of any
+softening upon Linforth's face. He could be hard, but on the other hand,
+when he gave his faith he gave it without reserve. Almost every word
+which Ralston had spoken had seemed to him an aspersion upon Violet
+Oliver. He said nothing, for he had learned to keep silence. But his
+anger was hotter than ever against Shere Ali, since but for Shere Ali the
+aspersions would never have been cast.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI
+
+AN OLD TOMB AND A NEW SHRINE
+
+
+The messenger whom Ralston sent with a sealed letter to the Resident at
+Kohara left Peshawur in the afternoon and travelled up the road by way of
+Dir and the Lowari Pass. He travelled quickly, spending little of his
+time at the rest-houses on the way, and yet arrived no sooner on that
+account. It was not he at all who brought his news to Kohara. Neither
+letter nor messenger, indeed, ever reached the Resident's door, although
+Captain Phillips learned something of the letter's contents a day before
+the messenger was due. A queer, and to use his own epithet, a dramatic
+stroke of fortune aided him at a very critical moment.
+
+It happened in this way. While Captain Phillips was smoking a cheroot as
+he sat over his correspondence in the morning, a servant from the great
+Palace on the hill brought to him a letter in the Khan's own
+handwriting. It was a flowery letter and invoked many blessings upon the
+Khan's faithful friend and brother, and wound up with a single sentence,
+like a lady's postscript, in which the whole object of the letter was
+contained. Would his Excellency the Captain, in spite of his
+overwhelming duties, of which the Khan was well aware, since they all
+tended to the great benefit and prosperity of his State, be kind enough
+to pay a visit to the Khan that day?
+
+"What's the old rascal up to now?" thought Captain Phillips. He replied,
+with less ornament and fewer flourishes, that he would come after
+breakfast; and mounting his horse at the appointed time he rode down
+through the wide street of Kohara and up the hill at the end, on the
+terraced slopes of which climbed the gardens and mud walls of the Palace.
+He was led at once into the big reception-room with the painted walls and
+the silver-gilt chairs, where the Khan had once received his son with a
+loaded rifle across his knees. The Khan was now seated with his courtiers
+about him, and was carving the rind of a pomegranate into patterns, like
+a man with his thoughts far away. But he welcomed Captain Phillips with
+alacrity and at once dismissed his Court.
+
+Captain Phillips settled down patiently in his chair. He was well aware
+of the course the interview would take. The Khan would talk away without
+any apparent aim for an hour or two hours, passing carelessly from
+subject to subject, and then suddenly the important question would be
+asked, the important subject mooted. On this occasion, however, the Khan
+came with unusual rapidity to his point. A few inquiries as to the
+Colonel's health, a short oration on the backwardness of the crops, a
+lengthier one upon his fidelity to and friendship for the British
+Government and the miserable return ever made to him for it, and then
+came a question ludicrously inapposite and put with the solemn _naivet,_
+of a child.
+
+"I suppose you know," said the Khan, tugging at his great grey beard,
+"that my grandfather married a fairy for one of his wives?"
+
+It was on the strength of such abrupt questions that strangers were apt
+to think that the Khan had fallen into his second childhood before his
+time. But the Resident knew his man. He was aware that the Khan was
+watching for his answer. He sat up in his chair and answered politely:
+
+"So, your Highness, I have heard."
+
+"Yes, it is true," continued the Khan. "Moreover, the fairy bore him a
+daughter who is still alive, though very old."
+
+"So there is still a fairy in the family," replied Captain Phillips
+pleasantly, while he wondered what in the world the Khan was driving at.
+"Yes, indeed, I know that. For only a week ago I was asked by a poor man
+up the valley to secure your Highness's intercession. It seems that he is
+much plagued by a fairy who has taken possession of his house, and since
+your Highness is related to the fairies, he would be very grateful if you
+would persuade his fairy to go away."
+
+"I know," said the Khan gravely. "The case has already been brought to
+me. The fellow _will_ open closed boxes in his house, and the fairy
+resents it."
+
+"Then your Highness has exorcised the fairy?"
+
+"No; I have forbidden him to open boxes in his house," said the Khan; and
+then, with a smile, "But it was not of him we were speaking, but of the
+fairy in my family."
+
+He leaned forward and his voice shook.
+
+"She sends me warnings, Captain Sahib. Two nights ago, by the flat stone
+where the fairies dance, she heard them--the voices of an innumerable
+multitude in the air talking the Chilti tongue--talking of trouble to
+come in the near days."
+
+He spoke with burning eyes fixed upon the Resident and with his fingers
+playing nervously in and out among the hairs of his beard. Whether the
+Khan really believed the story of the fairies--there is nothing more
+usual than a belief in fairies in the countries bordered by the
+snow-peaks of the Hindu Kush--or whether he used the story as a blind to
+conceal the real source of his fear, the Resident could not decide. But
+what he did know was this: The Khan of Chiltistan was desperately afraid.
+A whole programme of reform was sketched out for the Captain's hearing.
+
+"I have been a good friend to the English, Captain Sahib. I have kept my
+Mullahs and my people quiet all these years. There are things which might
+be better, as your Excellency has courteously pointed out to me, and the
+words have never been forgotten. The taxes no doubt are very burdensome,
+and it may be the caravans from Bokhara and Central Asia should pay less
+to the treasury as they pass through Chiltistan, and perhaps I do
+unjustly in buying what I want from them at my own price." Thus he
+delicately described the system of barefaced robbery which he practised
+on the traders who passed southwards to India through Chiltistan. "But
+these things can be altered. Moreover," and here he spoke with an air of
+distinguished virtue, "I propose to sell no more of my people into
+slavery--No, and to give none of them, not even the youngest, as presents
+to my friends. It is quite true of course that the wood which I sell to
+the merchants of Peshawur is cut and brought down by forced labour, but
+next year I am thinking of paying. I have been a good friend to the
+English all my life, Colonel Sahib."
+
+Captain Phillips had heard promises of the kind before and accounted them
+at their true value. But he had never heard them delivered with so
+earnest a protestation. And he rode away from the Palace with the
+disturbing conviction that there was something new in the wind of which
+he did not know.
+
+He rode up the valley, pondering what that something new might be.
+Hillside and plain were ablaze with autumn colours. The fruit in the
+orchards--peaches, apples, and grapes--was ripe, and on the river bank
+the gold of the willows glowed among thickets of red rose. High up on the
+hills, field rose above field, supported by stone walls. In the bosom of
+the valley groups of great walnut-trees marked where the villages stood.
+
+Captain Phillips rode through the villages. Everywhere he was met with
+smiling faces and courteous salutes; but he drew no comfort from them.
+The Chilti would smile pleasantly while he was fitting his knife in under
+your fifth rib. Only once did Phillips receive a hint that something was
+amiss, but the hint was so elusive that it did no more than quicken his
+uneasiness.
+
+He was riding over grass, and came silently upon a man whose back was
+turned to him.
+
+"So, Dadu," he said quietly, "you must not open closed boxes any more in
+your house."
+
+The man jumped round. He was not merely surprised, he was startled.
+
+"Your Excellency rides up the valley?" he cried, and almost he
+barred the way.
+
+"Why not, Dadu?"
+
+Dadu's face became impassive.
+
+"It is as your Excellency wills. It is a good day for a ride," said Dadu;
+and Captain Phillips rode on.
+
+It might of course have been that the man had been startled merely by the
+unexpected voice behind him; and the question which had leaped from his
+mouth might have meant nothing at all. Captain Phillips turned round in
+his saddle. Dadu was still standing where he had left him, and was
+following the rider with his eyes.
+
+"I wonder if there is anything up the valley which I ought to know
+about?" Captain Phillips said to himself, and he rode forward now with a
+watchful eye. The hills began to close in; the bosom of the valley to
+narrow. Nine miles from Kohara it became a defile through which the river
+roared between low precipitous cliffs. Above the cliffs on each side a
+level of stony ground, which here and there had been cleared and
+cultivated, stretched to the mountain walls. At one point a great fan of
+debris spread out from a side valley. Across this fan the track mounted,
+and then once more the valley widened out. On the river's edge a roofless
+ruin of a building, with a garden run wild at one end of it, stood apart.
+A few hundred yards beyond there was a village buried among bushes, and
+then a deep nullah cut clean across the valley. It was a lonely and a
+desolate spot. Yet Captain Phillips never rode across the fan of shale
+and came within sight of it but his imagination began to people it with
+living figures and a surge of wild events. He reined in his horse as he
+came to the brow of the hill, and sat for a moment looking downwards.
+Then he rode very quickly a few yards down the hill. Before, he and his
+horse had been standing out clear against the sky. Now, against the
+background of grey and brown he would be an unnoticeable figure.
+
+He halted again, but this time his eyes, instead of roving over the
+valley, were fixed intently upon one particular spot. Under the wall of
+the great ruined building he had seen something move. He made sure now of
+what the something was. There were half a dozen horses--no, seven--seven
+horses tethered apart from each other, and not a syce for any one of
+them. Captain Phillips felt his blood quicken. The Khan's protestations
+and Dadu's startled question, had primed him to expectation. Cautiously
+he rode down into the valley, and suspense grew upon him as he rode. It
+was a still, windless day, and noise carried far. The only sound he heard
+was the sound of the stones rattling under the hoofs of his horse. But in
+a little while he reached turf and level ground and so rode forward in
+silence. When he was within a couple of hundred yards of the ruin he
+halted and tied up his horse in a grove of trees. Thence he walked across
+an open space, passed beneath the remnant of a gateway into a court and,
+crossing the court, threaded his way through a network of narrow alleys
+between crumbling mud walls. As he advanced the sound of a voice reached
+his ears--a deep monotonous voice, which spoke with a kind of rhythm. The
+words Phillips could not distinguish, but there was no need that he
+should. The intonation, the flow of the sentences, told him clearly
+enough that somewhere beyond was a man praying. And then he stopped, for
+other voices broke suddenly in with loud and, as it seemed to Phillips,
+with fierce appeals. But the appeals died away, the one voice again took
+up the prayer, and again Phillips stepped forward.
+
+At the end of the alley he came to a doorway in a high wall. There was no
+door. He stood on the threshold of the doorway and looked in. He looked
+into a court open to the sky, and the seven horses and the monotonous
+voice were explained to him. There were seven young men--nobles of
+Chiltistan, as Phillips knew from their _chogas_ of velvet and Chinese
+silk--gathered in the court. They were kneeling with their backs towards
+him and the doorway, so that not one of them had noticed his approach.
+They were facing a small rough-hewn obelisk of stone which stood at the
+head of a low mound of earth at the far end of the court. Six of them
+were grouped in a sort of semi-circle, and the seventh, a man clad from
+head to foot in green robes, knelt a little in advance and alone. But
+from none of the seven nobles did the voice proceed. In front of them all
+knelt an old man in the brown homespun of the people. Phillips, from the
+doorway, could see his great beard wagging as he prayed, and knew him for
+one of the incendiary priests of Chiltistan.
+
+The prayer was one with which Phillips was familiar: The Day was at hand;
+the infidels would be scattered as chaff; the God of Mahommed was
+besought to send the innumerable company of his angels and to make his
+faithful people invulnerable to wounds. Phillips could have gone on with
+the prayer himself, had the Mullah failed. But it was not the prayer
+which held him rooted to the spot, but the setting of the prayer.
+
+The scene was in itself strange and significant enough. These seven gaily
+robed youths assembled secretly in a lonely and desolate ruin nine miles
+from Kohara had come thither not merely for prayer. The prayer would be
+but the seal upon a compact, the blessing upon an undertaking where life
+and death were the issues. But there was something more; and that
+something more gave to the scene in Phillips' eyes a very startling
+irony. He knew well how quickly in these countries the actual record of
+events is confused, and how quickly any tomb, or any monument becomes a
+shrine before which "the faithful" will bow and make their prayer. But
+that here of all places, and before this tomb of all tombs, the God of
+the Mahommedans should be invoked--this was life turning playwright with
+a vengeance. It needed just one more detail to complete the picture and
+the next moment that detail was provided. For Phillips moved.
+
+His boot rattled upon a loose stone. The prayer ceased, the worshippers
+rose abruptly to their feet and turned as one man towards the doorway.
+Phillips saw, face to face, the youth robed in green, who had knelt at
+the head of his companions. It was Shere Ali, the Prince of Chiltistan.
+
+Phillips advanced at once into the centre of the group. He was wise
+enough not to hold out his hand lest it should be refused. But he spoke
+as though he had taken leave of Shere Ali only yesterday.
+
+"So your Highness has returned?"
+
+"Yes," replied Shere Ali, and he spoke in the same indifferent tone.
+
+But both men knew, however unconcernedly they spoke, that Shere Ali's
+return was to be momentous in the history of Chiltistan. Shere Ali's
+father knew it too, that troubled man in the Palace above Kohara.
+
+"When did you reach Kohara?" Phillips asked.
+
+"I have not yet been to Kohara. I ride down from here this afternoon."
+
+Shere Ali smiled as he spoke, and the smile said more than the words.
+There was a challenge, a defiance in it, which were unmistakable. But
+Phillips chose to interpret the words quite simply.
+
+"Shall we go together?" he said, and then he looked towards the doorway.
+The others had gathered there, the six young men and the priest. They
+were armed and more than one had his hand ready upon his swordhilt. "But
+you have friends, I see," he added grimly. He began to wonder whether he
+would himself ride back to Kohara that afternoon.
+
+"Yes," replied Shere Ali quietly, "I have friends in Chiltistan," and he
+laid a stress upon the name of his country, as though he wished to show
+to Captain Phillips that he recognised no friends outside its borders.
+
+Again Phillips' thoughts were swept to the irony, the tragic irony of the
+scene in which he now was called to play a part.
+
+"Does your Highness know this spot?" he asked suddenly. Then he pointed
+to the tomb and the rude obelisk. "Does your Highness know whose bones
+are laid at the foot of that monument?"
+
+Shere Ali shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"Within these walls, in one of these roofless rooms, you were born," said
+Phillips, "and that grave before which you prayed is the grave of a man
+named Luffe, who defended this fort in those days."
+
+"It is not," replied Shere Ali. "It is the tomb of a saint," and he
+called to the mullah for corroboration of his words.
+
+"It is the tomb of Luffe. He fell in this courtyard, struck down not by a
+bullet, but by overwork and the strain of the siege. I know. I have the
+story from an old soldier whom I met in Cashmere this summer and who
+served here under Luffe. Luffe fell in this court, and when he died was
+buried here."
+
+Shere Ali, in spite of himself was beginning to listen to Captain
+Phillips' words.
+
+"Who was the soldier?" he asked.
+
+"Colonel Dewes."
+
+Shere Ali nodded his head as though he had expected the name. Then he
+said as he turned away:
+
+"What is Luffe to me? What should I know of Luffe?"
+
+"This," said Phillips, and he spoke in so arresting a voice that Shere
+Ali turned again to listen to him. "When Luffe was dying, he uttered an
+appeal--he bequeathed it to India, as his last service; and the appeal
+was that you should not be sent to England, that neither Eton nor Oxford
+should know you, that you should remain in your own country."
+
+The Resident had Shere Ali's attention now.
+
+"He said that?" cried the Prince in a startled voice. Then he pointed his
+finger to the grave. "The man lying there said that?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"And no one listened, I suppose?" said Shere Ali bitterly.
+
+"Or listened too late," said Phillips. "Like Dewes, who only since he met
+you in Calcutta one day upon the racecourse, seems dimly to have
+understood the words the dead man spoke."
+
+Shere Ali was silent. He stood looking at the grave and the obelisk with
+a gentler face than he had shown before.
+
+"Why did he not wish it?" he asked at length.
+
+"He said that it would mean unhappiness for you; that it might mean ruin
+for Chiltistan."
+
+"Did he say that?" said Shere Ali slowly, and there was something of awe
+in his voice. Then he recovered himself and cried defiantly. "Yet in one
+point he was wrong. It will not mean ruin for Chiltistan."
+
+So far he had spoken in English. Now he turned quickly towards his
+friends and spoke in his own tongue.
+
+"It is time. We will go," and to Captain Phillips he said, "You shall
+ride back with me to Kohara. I will leave you at the doorway of the
+Residency." And these words, too, he spoke in his own tongue.
+
+There rose a clamour among the seven who waited in the doorway, and
+loudest of all rose the voice of the mullah, protesting against Shere
+Ali's promise.
+
+"My word is given," said the Prince, and he turned with a smile to
+Captain Phillips. "In memory of my friend,"--he pointed to the
+grave--"For it seems I had a friend once amongst the white people. In
+memory of my friend, I give you your life."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXII
+
+SURPRISES FOR CAPTAIN PHILLIPS
+
+
+The young nobles ceased from their outcry. They went sullenly out and
+mounted their horses under the ruined wall of the old fort. But as they
+mounted they whispered together with quick glances towards Captain
+Phillips. The Resident intercepted the glance and had little doubt as to
+the subject of the whispering.
+
+"I am in the deuce of a tight place," he reflected; "it's seven to one
+against my ever reaching Kohara, and the one's a doubtful quantity."
+
+He looked at Shere Ali, who seemed quite undisturbed by the prospect
+of mutiny amongst his followers. His face had hardened a little.
+That was all.
+
+"And your horse?" Shere Ali asked.
+
+Captain Phillips pointed towards the clump of trees where he had
+tied it up.
+
+"Will you fetch it?" said Shere Ali, and as Phillips walked off, he
+turned towards the nobles and the old mullah who stood amongst them.
+Phillips heard his voice, as he began to speak, and was surprised by a
+masterful quiet ring in it. "The doubtful quantity seems to have grown
+into a man," he thought, and the thought gained strength when he rode
+his horse back from the clump of trees towards the group. Shere Ali met
+him gravely.
+
+"You will ride on my right hand," he said. "You need have no fear."
+
+The seven nobles clustered behind, and the party rode at a walk over the
+fan of shale and through the defile into the broad valley of Kohara.
+Shere Ali did not speak. He rode on with a set and brooding face, and the
+Resident fell once more to pondering the queer scene of which he had been
+the witness. Even at that moment when his life was in the balance his
+thoughts would play with it, so complete a piece of artistry it seemed.
+There was the tomb itself--an earth grave and a rough obelisk without so
+much as a name or a date upon it set up at its head by some past Resident
+at Kohara. It was appropriate and seemly to the man without friends, or
+family, or wife, but to whom the Frontier had been all these. He would
+have wished for no more himself, since vanity had played so small a part
+in his career. He had been the great Force upon the Frontier, keeping the
+Queen's peace by the strength of his character and the sagacity of his
+mind. Yet before his grave, invoking him as an unknown saint, the nobles
+of Chiltistan had knelt to pray for the destruction of such as he and the
+overthrow of the power which he had lived to represent. And all because
+his advice had been neglected.
+
+Captain Phillips was roused out of his reflections as the cavalcade
+approached a village. For out of that village and from the fields about
+it, the men, armed for the most part with good rifles, poured towards
+them with cries of homage. They joined the cavalcade, marched with it
+past their homes, and did not turn back. Only the women and the children
+were left behind. And at the next village and at the next the same thing
+happened. The cavalcade began to swell into a small army, an army of men
+well equipped for war; and at the head of the gathering force Shere Ali
+rode with an impassive face, never speaking but to check a man from time
+to time who brandished a weapon at the Resident.
+
+"Your Highness has counted the cost?" Captain Phillips asked. "There will
+be but the one end to it."
+
+Shere Ali turned to the Resident, and though his face did not change from
+its brooding calm, a fire burned darkly in his eyes.
+
+"From Afghanistan to Thibet the frontier will rise," he said proudly.
+
+Captain Phillips shook his head.
+
+"From Afghanistan to Thibet the Frontier will wait, as it always waits.
+It will wait to see what happens in Chiltistan."
+
+But though he spoke boldly, he had little comfort from his thoughts. The
+rising had been well concerted. Those who flocked to Shere Ali were not
+only the villagers of the Kohara valley. There were shepherds from the
+hills, wild men from the far corners of Chiltistan. Already the small
+army could be counted with the hundred for its unit. To-morrow the
+hundred would be a thousand. Moreover, for once in a way there was no
+divided counsel. Jealousy and intrigue were not, it seemed, to do their
+usual work in Chiltistan. There was only one master, and he of
+unquestioned authority. Else how came it that Captain Phillips rode
+amidst that great and frenzied throng, unhurt and almost unthreatened?
+
+Down the valley the roof-tops of Kohara began to show amongst the trees.
+The high palace on the hill with its latticed windows bulked against the
+evening sky. The sound of many drums was borne to the Resident's ears.
+The Residency stood a mile and a half from the town in a great garden. A
+high wall enclosed it, but it was a house, not a fortress; and Phillips
+had at his command but a few levies to defend it. One of them stood by
+the gate. He kept his ground as Shere Ali and his force approached. The
+only movement which he made was to stand at attention, and as Shere Ali
+halted at the entrance, he saluted. But it was Captain Phillips whom he
+saluted, and not the Prince of Chiltistan. Shere Ali spoke with the same
+quiet note of confident authority which had surprised Captain Phillips
+before, to the seven nobles at his back. Then he turned to the Resident.
+
+"I will ride with you to your door," he said.
+
+The two men passed alone through the gateway and along a broad path which
+divided the forecourt to the steps of the house. And not a man of all
+that crowd which followed Shere Ali to Kohara pressed in behind them.
+Captain Phillips looked back as much in surprise as in relief. But there
+was no surprise on the face of Shere Ali. He, it was plain, expected
+obedience.
+
+"Upon my word," cried Phillips in a burst of admiration, "you have got
+your fellows well in hand."
+
+"I?" said Shere Ali. "I am nothing. What could I do who a week ago was
+still a stranger to my people? I am a voice, nothing more. But the God of
+my people speaks through me"; and as he spoke these last words, his voice
+suddenly rose to a shrill trembling note, his face suddenly quivered with
+excitement.
+
+Captain Phillips stared. "The man's in earnest," he muttered to himself.
+"He actually believes it."
+
+It was the second time that Captain Phillips had been surprised within
+five minutes, and on this occasion the surprise came upon him with a
+shock. How it had come about--that was all dark to Captain Phillips. But
+the result was clear. The few words spoken as they had been spoken
+revealed the fact. The veneer of Shere Ali's English training had gone.
+Shere Ali had reverted. His own people had claimed him.
+
+"And I guessed nothing of this," the Resident reflected bitterly.
+Signs of trouble he had noticed in abundance, but this one crucial
+fact which made trouble a certain and unavoidable thing--that had
+utterly escaped him. His thoughts went back to the nameless tomb in
+the courtyard of the fort.
+
+"Luffe would have known," he thought in a very bitter humility. "Nay, he
+did know. He foresaw."
+
+There was yet a third surprise in store for Captain Phillips. As the two
+men rode up the broad path, he had noticed that the door of the house was
+standing open, as it usually did. Now, however, he saw it swing to--very
+slowly, very noiselessly. He was surprised, for he knew the door to be a
+strong heavy door of walnut wood, not likely to swing to even in a wind.
+And there was no wind. Besides, if it had swung to of its own accord, it
+would have slammed. Its weight would have made it slam. Whereas it was
+not quite closed. As he reined in his horse at the steps, he saw that
+there was a chink between the door and the door-post.
+
+"There's someone behind that door," he said to himself, and he glanced
+quietly at Shere Ali. It would be quite in keeping with the Chilti
+character for Shere Ali politely to escort him home knowing well that an
+assassin waited behind the door; and it was with a smile of some irony
+that he listened to Shere Ali taking his leave.
+
+"You will be safe, so long as you stay within your grounds. I will place
+a guard about the house. I do not make war against my country's guests.
+And in a few days I will send an escort and set you and your attendants
+free from hurt beyond our borders. But"--and his voice lost its
+courtesy--"take care you admit no one, and give shelter to no one."
+
+The menace of Shere Ali's tone roused Captain Phillips. "I take no orders
+from your Highness," he said firmly. "Your Highness may not have noticed
+that," and he pointed upwards to where on a high flagstaff in front of
+the house the English flag hung against the pole.
+
+"I give your Excellency no orders," replied Shere Ali. "But on the other
+hand I give you a warning. Shelter so much as one man and that flag will
+not save you. I should not be able to hold in my men."
+
+Shere Ali turned and rode back to the gates. Captain Phillips dismounted,
+and calling forward a reluctant groom, gave him his horse. Then he
+suddenly flung back the door. But there was no resistance. The door swung
+in and clattered against the wall. Phillips looked into the hall, but the
+dusk was gathering in the garden. He looked into a place of twilight and
+shadows. He grasped his riding-crop a little more firmly in his hand and
+strode through the doorway. In a dark corner something moved.
+
+"Ah! would you!" cried Captain Phillips, turning sharply on the instant.
+He raised his crop above his head and then a crouching figure fell at his
+feet and embraced his knees; and a trembling voice of fear cried:
+
+"Save me! Your Excellency will not give me up! I have been a good friend
+to the English!"
+
+For the second time the Khan of Chiltistan had sought refuge from his own
+people. Captain Phillips looked round.
+
+"Hush," he whispered in a startled voice. "Let me shut the door!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIII
+
+IN THE RESIDENCY
+
+
+Captain Phillips with a sharp gesture ordered the Khan back to the
+shadowy corner from which he had sprung out. Then he shut the door and,
+with the shutting of the door, the darkness deepened suddenly in the
+hall. He shot the bolt and put up the chain. It rattled in his ears with
+a startling loudness. Then he stood without speech or movement. Outside
+he heard Shere Ali's voice ring clear, and the army of tribesmen
+clattered past towards the town. The rattle of their weapons, the hum of
+their voices diminished. Captain Phillips took his handkerchief from his
+pocket and wiped his forehead. He had the sensations of a man reprieved.
+
+"But it's only a reprieve," he thought. "There will be no commutation."
+
+He turned again towards the dark corner.
+
+"How did you come?" he asked in a low voice.
+
+"By the orchard at the back of the house."
+
+"Did no one see you?"
+
+"I hid in the orchard until I saw the red coat of one of your servants. I
+called to him and he let me in secretly. But no one else saw me."
+
+"No one in the city?"
+
+"I came barefoot in a rough cloak with the hood drawn over my face," said
+the Khan. "No one paid any heed to me. There was much noise and running
+to and fro, and polishing of weapons. I crept out into the hill-side at
+the back and so came down into your orchard."
+
+Captain Phillips shrugged his shoulders. He opened a door and led the
+Khan into a room which looked out upon the orchard.
+
+"Well, we will do what we can," he said, "but it's very little. They will
+guess immediately that you are here of course."
+
+"Once before--" faltered the Khan, and Phillips broke in upon him
+impatiently.
+
+"Yes, once before. But it's not the same thing. This is a house, not a
+fort, and I have only a handful of men to defend it; and I am not Luffe."
+Then his voice sharpened. "Why didn't you listen to him? All this is your
+fault--yours and Dewes', who didn't understand, and held his tongue."
+
+The Khan was mystified by the words, but Phillips did not take the
+trouble to explain. He knew something of the Chilti character. They would
+have put up with the taxes, with the selling into slavery, with all the
+other abominations of the Khan's rule. They would have listened to the
+exhortations of the mullahs without anything coming of it, so long as no
+leader appeared. They were great accepters of facts as they were. Let the
+brother or son or nephew murder the ruling Khan and sit in his place,
+they accepted his rule without any struggles of conscience. But let a man
+rise to lead them, then they would bethink them of the exhortations of
+their priests and of their own particular sufferings and flock to his
+standard. And the man had risen--just because twenty-five years ago the
+Khan would not listen to Luffe.
+
+"It's too late, however, for explanations," he said, and he clapped his
+hands together for a servant. In a few moments the light of a lamp
+gleamed in the hall through the doorway. Phillips went quickly out of the
+room, closing the door behind him.
+
+"Fasten the shutters first," he said to the servant in the hall. "Then
+bring the lamp in."
+
+The servant obeyed, but when he brought the lamp into the room, and saw
+the Khan of Chiltistan standing at the table with no more dignity of
+dress or, indeed, of bearing than any beggar in the kingdom, he nearly
+let the lamp fall.
+
+"His Highness will stay in this house," said Phillips, "but his presence
+must not be spoken of. Will you tell Poulteney Sahib that I would like to
+speak to him?" The servant bowed his forehead to the palms of his hand
+and turned away upon his errand. But Poulteney Sahib was already at the
+door. He was the subaltern in command of the half company of Sikhs which
+served Captain Phillips for an escort and a guard.
+
+"You have heard the news I suppose," said Phillips.
+
+"Yes," replied Poulteney. He was a wiry dark youth, with a little black
+moustache and a brisk manner of speech. "I was out on the hill after
+chikkor when my shikari saw Shere Ali and his crowd coming down the
+valley. He knew all about it and gave me a general idea of the situation.
+It seems the whole country's rising. I should have been here before, but
+it seemed advisable to wait until it was dark. I crawled in between a
+couple of guard-posts. There is already a watch kept on the house," and
+then he stopped abruptly. He had caught sight of the Khan in the
+background. He had much ado not to whistle in his surprise. But he
+refrained and merely bowed.
+
+"It seems to be a complicated situation," he said to Captain Phillips.
+"Does Shere Ali know?" and he glanced towards the Khan.
+
+"Not yet," replied Phillips grimly. "But I don't think it will be long
+before he does."
+
+"And then there will be ructions," Poulteney remarked softly. "Yes, there
+will be ructions of a highly-coloured and interesting description."
+
+"We must do what we can," said Phillips with a shrug of his shoulders.
+"It isn't much, of course," and for the next two hours the twenty-five
+Sikhs were kept busy. The doors were barricaded, the shutters closed upon
+the windows and loopholed, and provisions were brought in from the
+outhouses.
+
+"It is lucky we had sense enough to lay in a store of food," said
+Phillips.
+
+The Sikhs were divided into watches and given their appointed places.
+Cartridges were doled out to them, and the rest of the ammunition was
+placed in a stone cellar.
+
+"That's all that we can do," said Phillips. "So we may as well dine."
+
+They dined with the Khan, speaking little and with ears on the alert,
+in a room at the back of the house. At any moment the summons might
+come to surrender the Khan. They waited for a blow upon the door, the
+sound of the firing of a rifle or a loud voice calling upon them from
+the darkness. But all they heard was the interminable babble of the
+Khan, as he sat at the table shivering with fear and unable to eat a
+morsel of his food.
+
+"You won't give me up!... I have been a good friend to the English....
+All my life I have been a good friend to the English."
+
+"We will do what we can," said Phillips, and he rose from the table and
+went up on to the roof. He lay down behind the low parapet and looked
+over towards the town. The house was a poor place to defend. At the back
+beyond the orchard the hill-side rose and commanded the roof. On the
+east of the house a stream ran by to the great river in the centre of
+the valley. But the bank of the stream was a steep slippery bank of
+clay, and less than a hundred yards down a small water-mill on the
+opposite side overlooked it. The Chiltis had only to station a few
+riflemen in the water-mill and not a man would be able to climb down
+that bank and fetch water for the Residency. On the west stood the
+stables and the storehouses, and the barracks of the Sikhs, a square of
+buildings which would afford fine cover for an attacking force. Only in
+front within the walls of the forecourt was there any open space which
+the house commanded. It was certainly a difficult--nay, a
+hopeless--place to defend.
+
+But Captain Phillips, as he lay behind the parapet, began to be puzzled.
+Why did not the attack begin? He looked over to the city. It was a place
+of tossing lights and wild clamours. The noise of it was carried on the
+night wind to Phillips' ears. But about the Residency there was quietude
+and darkness. Here and there a red fire glowed where the guards were
+posted; now and then a shower of sparks leaped up into the air as a fresh
+log was thrown upon the ashes; and a bright flame would glisten on the
+barrel of a rifle and make ruddy the dark faces of the watchmen. But
+there were no preparations for an attack.
+
+Phillips looked across the city. On the hill the Palace was alive with
+moving lights--lights that flashed from room to room as though men
+searched hurriedly.
+
+"Surely they must already have guessed," he murmured to himself. The
+moving lights in the high windows of the Palace held his eyes--so swiftly
+they flitted from room to room, so frenzied seemed the hurry of the
+search--and then to his astonishment one after another they began to die
+out. It could not be that the searchers were content with the failure of
+their search, that the Palace was composing itself to sleep. In the city
+the clamour had died down; little by little it sank to darkness. There
+came a freshness in the air. Though there were many hours still before
+daylight, the night drew on towards morning. What could it mean, he
+wondered? Why was the Residency left in peace?
+
+And as he wondered, he heard a scuffling noise upon the roof behind him.
+He turned his head and Poulteney crawled to his side.
+
+"Will you come down?" the subaltern asked; "I don't know what to do."
+
+Phillips at once crept back to the trap-door. The two men descended, and
+Poulteney led the way into the little room at the back of the house where
+they had dined. There was no longer a light in the room; and they stood
+for awhile in the darkness listening.
+
+"Where is the Khan?" whispered Phillips.
+
+"I fixed up one of the cellars for him," Poulteney replied in the same
+tone, and as he ended there came suddenly a rattle of gravel upon the
+shutter of the window. It was thrown cautiously, but even so it startled
+Phillips almost into a cry.
+
+"That's it," whispered Poulteney. "There is someone in the orchard.
+That's the third time the gravel has rattled on the shutter. What
+shall I do?"
+
+"Have you got your revolver?" asked Phillips.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Then stand by."
+
+Phillips carefully and noiselessly opened the shutter for an inch or two.
+
+"Who's that?" he asked in a low voice; he asked the question in Pushtu,
+and in Pushtu a voice no louder than his own replied:
+
+"I want to speak to Poulteney Sahib."
+
+A startled exclamation broke from the subaltern. "It's my shikari," he
+said, and thrusting open the shutter he leaned out.
+
+"Well, what news do you bring?" he asked; and at the answer Captain
+Phillips for the first time since he had entered into his twilit hall
+had a throb of hope. The expeditionary troops from Nowshera, advancing
+by forced marches, were already close to the borders of Chiltistan. News
+had been brought to the Palace that evening. Shere Ali had started with
+every man he could collect to take up the position where he meant to
+give battle.
+
+"I must hurry or I shall be late," said the shikari, and he crawled away
+through the orchard.
+
+Phillips closed the shutter again and lit the lamp. The news seemed too
+good to be true. But the morning broke over a city of women and old men.
+Only the watchmen remained at their posts about the Residency grounds.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIV
+
+ONE OF THE LITTLE WARS
+
+
+The campaign which Shere Ali directed on the borders of Chiltistan is now
+matter of history, and may be read of, by whoso wills, in the Blue-books
+and despatches of the time. Those documents, with their paragraphs and
+diaries and bare records of facts, have a dry-as-dust look about them
+which their contents very often belie. And the reader will not rise from
+the story of this little war without carrying away an impression of wild
+fury and reckless valour which will long retain its colours in his mind.
+Moreover, there was more than fury to distinguish it. Shere Ali turned
+against his enemies the lessons which they had taught him; and a military
+skill was displayed which delayed the result and thereby endangered the
+position of the British troops. For though at the first the neighbouring
+tribes and states, the little village republics which abound in those
+parts, waited upon the event as Phillips had foretold, nevertheless as
+the days passed, and the event still hung in the balance, they took heart
+of grace and gathered behind the troops to destroy their communications
+and cut off their supplies.
+
+Dick Linforth wrote three letters to his mother, who was living over
+again the suspense and terror which had fallen to her lot a quarter of a
+century ago. The first letter was brought to the house under the Sussex
+Downs at twilight on an evening of late autumn, and as she recognized the
+writing for her son's a sudden weakness overcame her, and her hand so
+shook that she could hardly tear off the envelope.
+
+"I am unhurt," he wrote at the beginning of the letter, and tears of
+gratitude ran down her cheeks as she read the words. "Shere Ali," he
+continued, "occupied a traditional position of defence in a narrow
+valley. The Kohara river ran between steep cliffs through the bed of the
+valley, and, as usual, above the cliffs on each side there were
+cultivated maidans or plateaus. Over the right-hand maidan, the
+road--_our_ road--ran to a fortified village. Behind the village, a deep
+gorge, or nullah, as we call them in these parts, descending from a side
+glacier high up at the back of the hills on our right, cut clean across
+the valley, like a great gash. The sides of the nullah were
+extraordinarily precipitous, and on the edge furthest from us stone
+sangars were already built as a second line of defence. Shere Ali
+occupied the village in front of the nullah, and we encamped six miles
+down the valley, meaning to attack in the morning. But the Chiltis
+abandoned their traditional method of fighting behind walls and standing
+on the defence. A shot rang out on the outskirts of our camp at three
+o'clock in the morning, and in a moment they were upon us. It was
+reckoned that there were fifteen thousand of them engaged from first to
+last in this battle, whereas we were under two thousand combatants. We
+had seven hundred of the Imperial Service troops, four companies of
+Gurkhas, three hundred men of the Punjab Infantry, three companies of the
+Oxfordshires, besides cavalry, mountain batteries and Irregulars. The
+attack was unexpected. We bestrode the road, but Shere Ali brought his
+men in by an old disused Buddhist road, running over the hills on our
+right hand, and in the darkness he forced his way through our lines into
+a little village in the heart of our position. He seized the bazaar and
+held it all that day, a few houses built of stone and with stones upon
+the roof which made them proof against our shells. Meanwhile the slopes
+on both sides of the valley were thronged with Chiltis. They were armed
+with jezails and good rifles stolen from our troops, and they had some
+old cannon--sher bachas as they are called. Altogether they caused us
+great loss, and towards evening things began to look critical. They had
+fortified and barricaded the bazaar, and kept up a constant fire from it.
+At last a sapper named Manders, with half a dozen Gurkhas behind him, ran
+across the open space, and while the Gurkhas shot through the loop holes
+and kept the fire down, Manders fixed his gun cotton at the bottom of the
+door and lighted the fuse. He was shot twice, once in the leg, once in
+the shoulder, but he managed to crawl along the wall of the houses out of
+reach of the explosion, and the door was blown in. We drove them out of
+that house and finally cleared the bazaar after some desperate fighting.
+Shere Ali was in the thick of it. He was dressed from head to foot in
+green, and was a conspicuous mark. But he escaped unhurt. The enemy drew
+off for the night, and we lay down as we were, dog-tired and with no
+fires to cook any food. They came on again in the morning, clouds of
+them, but we held them back with the gatlings and the maxims, and towards
+evening they again retired. To-day nothing has happened except the
+arrival of an envoy with an arrogant letter from Shere Ali, asking why we
+are straying inside the borders of his country 'like camels without
+nose-rings.' We shall show him why to-morrow. For to-morrow we attack the
+fort on the maidan. Good-night, mother. I am very tired." And the last
+sentence took away from Sybil Linforth all the comfort the letter had
+brought her. Dick had begun very well. He could have chosen no better
+words to meet her eyes at the commencement than those three, "I am
+unhurt." But he could have chosen no worse with which to end it. For they
+had ended the last letter which her husband had written to her, and her
+mind flew back to that day, and was filled with fore-bodings.
+
+But by the next mail came another letter in his hand, describing how the
+fort had been carried at the point of the bayonet, and Shere Ali driven
+back behind the nullah. This, however, was the strongest position of all,
+and the most difficult to force. The road which wound down behind the
+fort into the bed of the nullah and zigzagged up again on the far side
+had been broken away, the cliffs were unscaleable, and the stone sangars
+on the brow proof against shell and bullet. Shere Ali's force was
+disposed behind these stone breastworks right across the valley on both
+sides of the river. For three weeks the British force sat in front of
+this position, now trying to force it by the river-bed, now under cover
+of night trying to repair the broken road. But the Chiltis kept good
+watch, and at the least sound of a pick in the gulf below avalanches of
+rocks and stones would be hurled down the cliff-sides. Moreover, wherever
+the cliffs seemed likely to afford a means of ascent Shere Ali had
+directed the water-channels, and since the nights were frosty these
+points were draped with ice as smooth as glass. Finally, however, Mrs.
+Linforth received a third letter which set her heart beating with pride,
+and for the moment turned all her fears to joy.
+
+"The war is over," it began. "The position was turned this morning. The
+Chiltis are in full flight towards Kohara with the cavalry upon their
+heels. They are throwing away their arms as they run, so that they may
+be thought not to have taken part in the fight. We follow to-morrow. It
+is not yet known whether Shere Ali is alive or dead and, mother, it was
+I--yes, I your son, who found out the road by which the position could
+be turned. I had crept up the nullah time after time towards the glacier
+at its head, thinking that if ever the position was to be taken it must
+be turned at that end. At last I thought that I had made out a way up
+the cliffs. There were some gullies and a ledge and then some rocks
+which seemed practicable, and which would lead one out on the brow of
+the cliff just between the two last sangars on the enemy's left. I
+didn't write a word about it to you before. I was so afraid I might be
+wrong. I got leave and used to creep up the nullah in the darkness to
+the tongue of the glacier with a little telescope and lie hidden all day
+behind a boulder working out the way, until darkness came again and
+allowed me to get back to camp. At last I felt sure, and I suggested the
+plan to Ralston the Political Officer, who carried it to the
+General-in-Command. The General himself came out with me, and I pointed
+out to him that the cliffs were so steep just beneath the sangars that
+we might take the men who garrisoned them by surprise, and that in any
+case they could not fire upon us, while sharpshooters from the cliffs on
+our side of the nullah could hinder the enemy from leaving their sangars
+and rolling down stones. I was given permission to try and a hundred
+Gurkhas to try with. We left camp that night at half-past seven, and
+crept up the nullah with our blankets to the foot of the climb, and
+there we waited till the morning."
+
+The years of training to which Linforth had bent himself with a definite
+aim began, in a word, to produce their results. In the early morning he
+led the way up the steep face of cliffs, and the Gurkhas followed. One of
+the sharpshooters lying ready on the British side of the nullah said that
+they looked for all the world like a black train of ants. There were
+thirteen hundred feet of rock to be scaled, and for nine hundred of it
+they climbed undetected. Then from a sangar lower down the line where the
+cliffs of the nullah curved outwards they were seen and the alarm was
+given. But for awhile the defenders of the threatened position did not
+understand the danger, and when they did a hail of bullets kept them in
+their shelters. Linforth followed by his Gurkhas was seen to reach the
+top of the cliffs and charge the sangars from the rear. The defenders
+were driven out and bayoneted, the sangars seized, and the Chilti force
+enfolded while reinforcements clambered in support. "In three hours the
+position, which for eighteen days had resisted every attack and held the
+British force immobile, was in our hands. The way is clear in front of
+us. Manders is recommended for the Victoria Cross. I believe that I am
+for the D.S.O. And above all the Road goes on!"
+
+Thus characteristically the letter was concluded. Linforth wrote it with
+a flush of pride and a great joy. He had no doubt now that he would be
+appointed to the Road. Congratulations were showered upon him. Down upon
+the plains, Violet would hear of his achievement and perhaps claim
+proudly and joyfully some share in it herself. His heart leaped at the
+thought. The world was going very well for Dick Linforth that night. But
+that is only one side of the picture. Linforth had no thoughts to spare
+upon Shere Ali. If he had had a thought, it would not have been one of
+pity. Yet that unhappy Prince, with despair and humiliation gnawing at
+his heart, broken now beyond all hope, stricken in his fortune as sorely
+as in his love, was fleeing with a few devoted followers through the
+darkness. He passed through Kohara at daybreak of the second morning
+after the battle had been lost, and stopping only to change horses,
+galloped off to the north.
+
+Two hours later Captain Phillips mounted on to the roof of his house and
+saw that the guards were no longer at their posts.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXV
+
+A LETTER FROM VIOLET
+
+
+Within a week the Khan was back in his Palace, the smoke rose once more
+above the roof-tops of Kohara, and a smiling shikari presented himself
+before Poulteney Sahib in the grounds of the Residency.
+
+"It was a good fight, Sahib," he declared, grinning from ear to ear at
+the recollection of the battles. "A very good fight. We nearly won. I was
+in the bazaar all that day. Yes, it was a near thing. We made a mistake
+about those cliffs, we did not think they could be climbed. It was a good
+fight, but it is over. Now when will your Excellency go shooting? I have
+heard of some markhor on the hill."
+
+Poulteney Sahib stared, speechless with indignation. Then he burst
+out laughing:
+
+"You old rascal! You dare to come here and ask me to take you out when I
+go shooting, and only a week ago you were fighting against us."
+
+"But the fight is all over, Excellency," the Shikari explained. "Now all
+is as it was and we will go out after the markhor." The idea that any
+ill-feeling could remain after so good a fight was one quite beyond the
+shikari's conception. "Besides," he said, "it was I who threw the gravel
+at your Excellency's windows."
+
+"Why, that's true," said Poulteney, and a window was thrown up behind
+him. Ralston's head appeared at the window.
+
+"You had better take him," the Chief Commissioner said. "Go out with him
+for a couple of days," and when the shikari had retired, he explained the
+reason of his advice.
+
+"That fellow will talk to you, and you might find out which way Shere
+Ali went. He wasn't among the dead, so far as we can discover, and I
+think he has been headed off from Afghanistan. But it is important that
+we should know. So long as he is free, there will always be
+possibilities of trouble."
+
+In every direction, indeed, inquiries were being made. But for the moment
+Shere Ali had got clear away. Meanwhile the Khan waited anxiously in the
+Palace to know what was going to happen to him; and he waited in some
+anxiety. It fell to Ralston to inform him in durbar in the presence of
+his nobles and the chief officers of the British force that the
+Government of India had determined to grant him a pension and a residence
+rent-free at Jellundur.
+
+"The Government of India will rule Chiltistan," said Ralston. "The word
+has been spoken."
+
+He went out from the Palace and down the hill towards the place where the
+British forces were encamped just outside the city. When he came to the
+tents, he asked for Mr. Linforth, and was conducted through the lines. He
+found Linforth sitting alone within his tent on his camp chair, and knew
+from his attitude that some evil thing had befallen him. Linforth rose
+and offered Ralston his chair, and as he did so a letter fluttered from
+his lap to the ground. There were two sheets, and Linforth stooped
+quickly and picked them up.
+
+"Don't move," said Ralston. "This will do for me," and he sat down upon
+the edge of the camp bed. Linforth sat down again on his chair and, as
+though he were almost unaware of Ralston's presence, he smoothed out upon
+his knee the sheets of the letter. Ralston could not but observe that
+they were crumpled and creased, as though they had been clenched and
+twisted in Linforth's hand. Then Linforth raised his head, and suddenly
+thrust the letter into his pocket.
+
+"I beg your pardon," he said, and he spoke in a spiritless voice. "The
+post has just come in. I received a letter which--interested me. Is there
+anything I can do?"
+
+"Yes," said Ralston. "We have sure news at last. Shere Ali has fled to
+the north. The opportunity you asked for at Peshawur has come."
+
+Linforth was silent for a little while. Then he said slowly:
+
+"I see. I am to go in pursuit?"
+
+"Yes!"
+
+It seemed that Linforth's animosity against Shere Ali had died out.
+Ralston watched him keenly from the bed. Something had blunted the edge
+of the tool just when the time had come to use it. He threw an extra
+earnestness into his voice.
+
+"You have got to do more than go in pursuit of him. You have got to find
+him. You have got to bring him back as your prisoner."
+
+Linforth nodded his head.
+
+"He has gone north, you say?"
+
+"Yes. Somewhere in Central Asia you will find him," and as Linforth
+looked up startled, Ralston continued calmly, "Yes, it's a large order, I
+know, but it's not quite so large as it looks. The trade-routes, the only
+possible roads, are not so very many. No man can keep his comings and
+goings secret for very long in that country. You will soon get wind of
+him, and when you do you must never let him shake you off."
+
+"Very well," said Linforth, listlessly. "When do I start?"
+
+Ralston plunged into the details of the expedition and told him the
+number of men he was to take with him.
+
+"You had better go first into Chinese Turkestan," he said. "There are a
+number of Hindu merchants settled there--we will give you letters to
+them. Some of them will be able to put you on the track of Shere Ali. You
+will have to round him up into a corner, I expect. And whatever you do,
+head him off Russian territory. For we want him. We want him brought back
+into Kohara. It will have a great effect on this country. It will show
+them that the Sirkar can even pick a man out of the bazaars of Central
+Asia if he is rash enough to stand up against it in revolt."
+
+"That will be rather humiliating for Shere Ali," said Linforth, after a
+short pause; and Ralston sat up on the bed. What in the world, he
+wondered, could Linforth have read in his letter, so to change him? He
+was actually sympathising with Shere Ali--he who had been hottest in
+his anger.
+
+"Shere Ali should have thought of that before," Ralston said sharply,
+and he rose to his feet. "I rely upon you, Linforth. It may take you a
+year. It may take you only a few months. But I rely upon you to bring
+Shere Ali back. And when you do," he added, with a smile, "there's the
+road waiting for you."
+
+But for once even that promise failed to stir Dick Linforth into
+enthusiasm.
+
+"I will do my best," he said quietly; and with that Ralston left him.
+
+Linforth sat down in his chair and once more took out the crumpled
+letter. He had walked with the Gods of late, like one immune from earthly
+troubles. But his bad hour had been awaiting him. The letter was signed
+Violet. He read it through again, and this was what he read:
+
+"This is the most difficult letter I have ever written. For I don't feel
+that I can make you understand at all just how things are. But somehow or
+other I do feel that this is going to hurt you frightfully, and, oh,
+Dick, do forgive me. But if it will console or help at all, know this,"
+and the words were underlined--as indeed were many words in Violet
+Oliver's letters--"that I never was good enough for you and you are well
+rid of me. I told you what I was, didn't I, Dick?--a foolish lover of
+beautiful things. I tried to tell you the whole truth that last evening
+in the garden at Peshawur, but you wouldn't let me, Dick. And I must tell
+you now. I never sent the pearl necklace back, Dick, although I told you
+that I did. I meant to send it back the night when I parted from the
+Prince. I packed it up and put it ready. But--oh, Dick, how can I tell
+you?--I had had an imitation one made just like it for safety, and in the
+night I got up and changed them. I couldn't part with it--I sent back the
+false one. Now you know me, Dick! But even now perhaps you don't. You
+remember the night in Peshawur, the terrible night? Mr. Ralston wondered
+why, after complaining that my window was unbolted, I unbolted it myself.
+Let me tell you, Dick! Mr. Ralston said that 'theft' was the explanation.
+Well, after I tried to tell you in the garden and you would not listen, I
+thought of what he had said. I thought it would be such an easy way out
+of it, if the thief should come in when I was asleep and steal the
+necklace and go away again before I woke up. I don't know how I brought
+myself to do it. It was you, Dick! I had just left you, I was full of
+thoughts of you. So I slipped back the bolt myself. But you see, Dick,
+what I am. Although I wanted to send that necklace back, I couldn't, I
+_simply couldn't_, and it's the same with other things. I would be very,
+very glad to know that I could be happy with you, dear, and live your
+life. But I know that I couldn't, that it wouldn't last, that I should be
+longing for other things, foolish things and vanities. Again, Dick, you
+are well rid of a silly vain woman, and I wish you all happiness in that
+riddance. I never would have made you a good wife. Nor will I make any
+man a good wife. I have not the sense of a dog. I know it, too! That's
+the sad part of it all, Dick. Forgive me, and thanks, a thousand thanks,
+for the honour you ever did me in wanting me at all." Then followed--it
+seemed to Linforth--a cry. "Won't you forgive me, dear, dear Dick!" and
+after these words her name, "Violet."
+
+But even so the letter was not ended. A postscript was added:
+
+"I shall always think of the little dreams we had together of our future,
+and regret that I couldn't know them. That will always be in my mind.
+Remember that! Perhaps some day we will meet. Oh, Dick, good-bye!"
+
+Dick sat with that letter before his eyes for a long while. Violet had
+told him that he could be hard, but he was not hard to her. He could read
+between the lines, he understood the struggle which she had had with
+herself, he recognised the suffering which the letter had caused her. He
+was touched to pity, to a greater humanity. He had shown it in his
+forecasts of the humiliation which would befall Shere Ali when he was
+brought back a prisoner to Kohara. Linforth, in a word, had shed what was
+left of his boyhood. He had come to recognise that life was never all
+black and all white. He tore up the letter into tiny fragments. It
+required no answer.
+
+"Everything is just wrong," he said to himself, gently, as he thought
+over Shere Ali, Violet, himself. "Everything is just not what it might
+have been."
+
+And a few days later he started northwards for Turkestan.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVI
+
+"THE LITTLE LESS--"
+
+
+Three years passed before Linforth returned on leave to England. He
+landed at Marseilles towards the end of September, travelled to his home,
+and a fortnight later came up from Sussex for a few days to London. It
+was the beginning of the autumn season. People were returning to town.
+Theatres were re-opening with new plays; and a fellow-officer, who had a
+couple of stalls for the first production of a comedy about which public
+curiosity was whetted, meeting Linforth in the hall of his club,
+suggested that they should go together.
+
+"I shall be glad," said Linforth. "I always go to the play with the
+keenest of pleasure. The tuning-up of the orchestra and the rising of the
+curtain are events to me. And, to be honest, I have never been to a first
+night before. Let us do the thing handsomely and dine together before we
+go. It will be my last excitement in London for another three or four
+years, I expect."
+
+The two young men dined together accordingly at one of the great
+restaurants. Linforth, fresh from the deep valleys of Chiltistan, was
+elated by the lights, the neighbourhood of people delicately dressed, and
+the subdued throb of music from muted violins.
+
+"I am the little boy at the bright shop window," he said with a laugh,
+while his eyes wandered round the room. "I look in through the glass from
+the pavement outside, and--"
+
+His voice halted and stopped; and when he resumed he spoke without his
+former gaiety. Indeed, the change of note was more perceptible than the
+brief pause. His friend conjectured that the words which Linforth now
+used were not those which he had intended to speak a moment ago.
+
+"--and," he said slowly, "I wonder what sort of fairyland it is actually
+to live and breathe in?"
+
+While he spoke, his eyes were seeking an answer to his question, and
+seeking it in one particular quarter. A few tables away, and behind
+Linforth's friend and a little to his right, sat Violet Oliver. She was
+with a party of six or eight people, of whom Linforth took no note. He
+had eyes only for her. Bitterness had long since ceased to colour his
+thoughts of Violet Oliver. And though he had not forgotten, there was no
+longer any living pain in his memories. So much had intervened since he
+had walked with her in the rose-garden at Peshawur--so many new
+experiences, so much compulsion of hard endeavour. When his recollections
+went back to the rose-garden at Peshawur, as at rare times they would, he
+was only conscious at the worst that his life was rather dull when tested
+by the high aspirations of his youth. There was less music in it than he
+had thought to hear. Instead of swinging in a soldier's march to the
+sound of drums and bugles down the road, it walked sedately. To use his
+own phrase, everything was--_just not_. There was no more in it than
+that. And indeed at the first it was almost an effort for him to realise
+that between him and this woman whom he now actually saw, after three
+years, there had once existed a bond of passion. But, as he continued to
+look, the memories took substance, and he began to wonder whether in her
+fairyland it was "just not," too. She had what she had wanted--that was
+clear. A collar of pearls, fastened with a diamond bow, encircled her
+throat. A great diamond flashed upon her bosom. Was she satisfied? Did no
+memory of the short week during which she had longed to tread the road of
+fire and stones, the road of high endeavour, trouble her content?
+
+Linforth was curious. She was not paying much heed to the talk about the
+table. She took no part in it, but sat with her head a little raised, her
+eyes dreamily fixed upon nothing in particular. But Linforth remembered
+with a smile that there was no inference to be drawn from that not
+unusual attitude of hers. It did not follow that she was bored or filled
+with discontent. She might simply be oblivious. A remark made about her
+by some forgotten person who had asked a question and received no answer
+came back to Linforth and called a smile to his face. "You might imagine
+that Violet Oliver is thinking of the angels. She is probably considering
+whether she should run upstairs and powder her nose."
+
+Linforth began to look for other signs; and it seemed to him that the
+world had gone well with her. She had a kind of settled look, almost a
+sleekness, as though anxiety never came near to her pillow. She had
+married, surely, and married well. The jewels she wore were evidence, and
+Linforth began to speculate which of the party was her husband. They were
+young people who were gathered at the table. In her liking for young
+people about her she had not changed. Of the men no one was noticeable,
+but Violet Oliver, as he remembered, would hardly have chosen a
+noticeable man. She would have chosen someone with great wealth and no
+ambitions, one who was young enough to ask nothing more from the world
+than Violet Oliver, who would not, in a word, trouble her with a career.
+She might have chosen anyone of her companions. And then her eyes
+travelled round the room and met his.
+
+For a moment she gazed at him, not seeing him at all. In a moment or two
+consciousness came to her. Her brows went up in astonishment. Then she
+smiled and waved her hand to him across the room--gaily, without a trace
+of embarrassment, without even the colour rising to her cheeks. Thus
+might one greet a casual friend of yesterday. Linforth bethought him,
+with a sudden sting of bitterness which surprised him by its sharpness,
+of the postscript in the last of the few letters she had written to him.
+That letter was still vivid enough in his memories for him to be able to
+see the pages, to recognise the writing, and read the sentences.
+
+"I shall always think of the little dreams we had together of our future,
+and regret that I couldn't know them. That will always be in my mind.
+Remember that!"
+
+How much of that postscript remained true, he wondered, after these three
+years. Very little, it seemed. Linforth fell to speculating, with an
+increasing interest, as to which of the men at her table she had mated
+with. Was it the tall youth with the commonplace good looks opposite to
+her? Linforth detected now a certain flashiness in his well grooming
+which he had not noticed before. Or was it the fat insignificant young
+man three seats away from her?
+
+A rather gross young person, Linforth thought him--the offspring of some
+provincial tradesman who had retired with a fortune and made a gentleman
+of his son.
+
+"Well, no doubt he has the dibs," Linforth found himself saying with an
+unexpected irritation, as he contemplated the possible husband. And his
+friend broke in upon his thoughts.
+
+"If you are going to eat any dinner, Linforth, it might be as well to
+begin; we shall have to go very shortly."
+
+Linforth fell to accordingly. His appetite was not impaired, he was happy
+to notice, but, on the whole, he wished he had not seen Violet Oliver.
+This was his last night in London. She might so easily have come
+to-morrow instead, when he would already have departed from the town. It
+was a pity.
+
+He did not look towards her table any more, but the moment her party rose
+he was nevertheless aware of its movement. He was conscious that she
+passed through the restaurant towards the lobby at no great distance from
+himself. He was aware, though he did not raise his head, that she was
+looking at him.
+
+Five minutes afterwards the waiter brought to him a folded piece of
+paper. He opened it and read:
+
+"Dick, won't you speak to me at all? I am waiting.--VIOLET."
+
+Linforth looked up at his friend.
+
+"There is someone I must go and speak to," he said. "I won't be
+five minutes."
+
+He rose from the table and walked out of the restaurant. His heart was
+beating rather fast, but it was surely curiosity which produced that
+effect. Curiosity to know whether with her things were--just not, too. He
+passed across the hall and up the steps. On the top of the steps she was
+waiting for him. She had her cloak upon her shoulders, and in the
+background the gross young man waited for her without interposing--the
+very image of a docile husband.
+
+"Dick," she said quickly, as she held out her hand to him, "I did so want
+to talk to you. I have to rush off to a theatre. So I sent in for you.
+Why wouldn't you speak to me?"
+
+That he should have any reason to avoid her she seemed calmly and
+completely unconscious. And so unembarrassed was her manner that even
+with her voice in his ears and her face before him, delicate and pretty
+as of old, Dick almost believed that never had he spoken of love to her,
+and never had she answered him.
+
+"You are married?" he asked.
+
+Violet nodded her head. She did not, however, introduce her husband. She
+took no notice of him whatever. She did not mention her new name.
+
+"And you?" she asked.
+
+Linforth laughed rather harshly.
+
+"No."
+
+Perhaps the harshness of the laugh troubled her. Her forehead puckered.
+She dropped her eyes from his face.
+
+"But you will," she said in a low voice.
+
+Linforth did not answer, and in a moment or two she raised her head
+again. The trouble had gone from her face. She smiled brightly.
+
+"And the Road?" she asked. She had just remembered it. She had almost an
+air of triumph in remembering it. All these old memories were so dim. But
+at the awkward difficult moment, by an inspiration she had remembered the
+great long-cherished aim of Dick Linforth's life. The Road! Dick wondered
+whether she remembered too that there had been a time when for a few days
+she had thought to have a share herself in the making of that road which
+was to leave India safe.
+
+"It goes on," he said quietly. "It has passed Kohara. It has passed the
+fort where Luffe died. But I beg your pardon. Luffe belongs to the past,
+too, very much to the past--more even than I do."
+
+Violet paid no heed to the sarcasm. She had not heard it. She was
+thinking of something else. It seemed that she had something to say, but
+found the utterance difficult. Once or twice she looked up at Dick
+Linforth and looked down again and played with the fringe of her cloak.
+In the background the docile husband moved restlessly.
+
+"There's a question I should like to ask," she said quickly, and
+then stopped.
+
+Linforth helped her out.
+
+"Perhaps I can guess the question."
+
+"It's about--" she began, and Linforth nodded his head.
+
+"Shere Ali?" he said.
+
+"Yes," replied Violet.
+
+Linforth hesitated, looking at his companion. How much should he tell
+her, he asked himself? The whole truth? If he did, would it trouble her?
+He wondered. He had no wish to hurt her. He began warily:
+
+"After the campaign was over in Chiltistan I was sent after him."
+
+"Yes. I heard that before I left India," she replied.
+
+"I hunted him," and it seemed to Linforth that she flinched. "There's no
+other word, I am afraid. I hunted him--for months, from the borders of
+Tibet to the borders of Russia. In the end I caught him."
+
+"I heard that, too," she said.
+
+"I came up with him one morning, in a desert of stones. He was with three
+of his followers. The only three who had been loyal to him. They had
+camped as best they could under the shelter of a boulder. It was very
+cold. They had no coverings and little food. The place was as desolate as
+you could imagine--a wilderness of boulders and stones stretching away to
+the round of the sky, level as the palm of your hand, with a ragged tree
+growing up here and there. If we had not come up with them that day I
+think they would have died."
+
+He spoke with his eyes upon Violet, ready to modify his words at the
+first evidence of pain. She gave that evidence as he ended. She drew her
+cloak closer about her and shivered.
+
+"What did he say?" she asked.
+
+"To me? Nothing. We spoke only formally. All the way back to India we
+behaved as strangers. It was easier for both of us. I brought him down
+through Chiltistan and Kohara into India. I brought him down--along the
+Road which at Eton we had planned to carry on together. Down that road we
+came together--I the captor, he the prisoner."
+
+Again Violet flinched.
+
+"And where is he now?" she asked in a low voice.
+
+Suddenly Linforth turned round and looked down the steps, across the hall
+to the glass walls of the restaurant.
+
+"Did he ever come here with you?" he asked. "Did he ever dine with you
+there amongst the lights and the merry-makers and the music?"
+
+"Yes," she answered.
+
+Linforth laughed, and again there was a note of bitterness in the
+laughter.
+
+"How long ago it seems! Shere Ali will dine here no more. He is in Burma.
+He was deported to Burma."
+
+He told her no more than that. There was no need that she should know
+that Shere Ali, broken-hearted, ruined and despairing, was drinking
+himself to death with the riffraff of Rangoon, or with such of it as
+would listen to his abuse of the white women and his slanders upon their
+honesty. The contrast between Shere Ali's fate and the hopes with which
+he had set out was shocking enough. Yet even in his case so very little
+had turned the scale. Between the fulfilment of his hopes and the great
+failure what was there? If he had been sent to Ajmere instead of to
+England, if he and Linforth had not crossed the Meije to La Grave in
+Dauphine, if a necklace of pearls he had offered had not been
+accepted--very likely at this very moment he might be reigning in
+Chiltistan, trusted and supported by the Indian Government, a helpful
+friend gratefully recognised. To Linforth's thinking it was only "just
+not" with Shere Ali, too.
+
+Linforth saw his companion coming towards him from the restaurant. He
+held out his hand.
+
+"I have got to go," he said.
+
+"I too," replied Violet. But she detained him. "I want to tell you," she
+said hurriedly. "Long ago--in Peshawur--do you remember? I told you there
+was someone else--a better mate for you than I was. I meant it, Dick, but
+you wouldn't listen. There is still the someone else. I am going to tell
+you her name. She has never said a word to me--but--but I am sure. It may
+sound mean of me to give her away--but I am not really doing that. I
+should be very happy, Dick, if it were possible. It's Phyllis Casson. She
+has never married. She is living with her father at Camberley." And
+before he could answer she had hurried away.
+
+But Linforth was to see her again that night. For when he had taken his
+seat in the stalls of the theatre he saw her and her husband in a box. He
+gathered from the remarks of those about him that her jewels were a
+regular feature upon the first nights of new plays. He looked at her now
+and then during the intervals of the acts. A few people entered her box
+and spoke to her for a little while. Linforth conjectured that she had
+dropped a little out of the world in which he had known her. Yet she was
+contented. On the whole that seemed certain. She was satisfied with her
+life. To attend the first productions of plays, to sit in the
+restaurants, to hear her jewels remarked upon--her life had narrowed
+sleekly down to that, and she was content. But there had been other
+possibilities for Violet Oliver.
+
+Linforth walked back from the theatre to his club. He looked into a room
+and saw an old gentleman dozing alone amongst his newspapers.
+
+"I suppose I shall come to that," he said grimly. "It doesn't look over
+cheerful as a way of spending the evening of one's days," and he was
+suddenly seized with the temptation to go home and take the first train
+in the morning for Camberley. He turned the plan over in his mind for a
+moment, and then swung away from it in self-disgust. He retained a
+general reverence for women, and to seek marriage without bringing love
+to light him in the search was not within his capacity.
+
+"That wouldn't be fair," he said to himself--"even if Violet's tale were
+true." For with his reverence he had retained his modesty. The next
+morning he took the train into Sussex instead, and was welcomed by Sybil
+Linforth to the house under the Downs. In the warmth of that welcome, at
+all events, there was nothing that was just not.
+
+
+
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