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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Stories by English Authors, Orient
+You may also want to see:
+Stories by English Authors in Africa, Scribners Ed[sbeaa*.*]1980
+
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+
+THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING, Rudyard Kipling
+TAJIMA, Miss Mitford
+A CHINESE GIRL GRADUATE, R. K. Douglas
+THE REVENGE OF HER RACE, Mary Beaumont
+KING BILLY OF BALLARAT, Morley Roberts
+THY HEART'S DESIRE, Netta Syrett
+
+January, 2000  [Etext #2035]
+
+
+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Stories by English Authors, Orient
+*******This file should be named sbeao10.txt or sbeao10.zip******
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+
+
+STORIES BY ENGLISH AUTHORS
+
+THE ORIENT
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING, Rudyard Kipling
+TAJIMA, Miss Mitford
+A CHINESE GIRL GRADUATE, R. K. Douglas
+THE REVENGE OF HER RACE, Mary Beaumont
+KING BILLY OF BALLARAT, Morley Roberts
+THY HEART'S DESIRE, Netta Syrett
+
+
+
+
+THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING
+
+Brother to a Prince and fellow to a beggar if he be found worthy
+
+BY
+
+RUDYARD KIPLING
+
+
+
+The Law, as quoted, lays down a fair conduct of life, and one not easy
+to follow. I have been fellow to a beggar again and again under
+circumstances which prevented either of us finding out whether the
+other was worthy. I have still to be brother to a Prince, though I
+once came near to kinship with what might have been a veritable King,
+and was promised the reversion of a Kingdom--army, law-courts,
+revenue, and policy all complete. But, to-day, I greatly fear that my
+King is dead, and if I want a crown I must go hunt it for myself.
+
+The beginning of everything was in a railway-train upon the road to
+Mhow from Ajmir. There had been a Deficit in the Budget, which
+necessitated travelling, not Second-class, which is only half as dear
+as First-Class, but by Intermediate, which is very awful indeed. There
+are no cushions in the Intermediate class, and the population are
+either Intermediate, which is Eurasian, or native, which for a long
+night journey is nasty, or Loafer, which is amusing though
+intoxicated. Intermediates do not buy from refreshment-rooms. They
+carry their food in bundles and pots, and buy sweets from the native
+sweetmeat-sellers, and drink the roadside water. This is why in hot
+weather Intermediates are taken out of the carriages dead, and in all
+weathers are most properly looked down upon.
+
+My particular Intermediate happened to be empty till I reached
+Nasirabad, when the big black-browed gentleman in shirt-sleeves
+entered, and, following the custom of Intermediates, passed the time
+of day. He was a wanderer and a vagabond like myself, but with an
+educated taste for whisky. He told tales of things he had seen and
+done, of out-of-the-way corners of the Empire into which he had
+penetrated, and of adventures in which he risked his life for a few
+days' food.
+
+"If India was filled with men like you and me, not knowing more than
+the crows where they'd get their next day's rations, it isn't seventy
+millions of revenue the land would be paying--it's seven hundred
+millions," said he; and as I looked at his mouth and chin I was
+disposed to agree with him.
+
+We talked politics,--the politics of Loaferdom that sees things from
+the under side where the lath and plaster is not smoothed off,--and we
+talked postal arrangements because my friend wanted to send a telegram
+back from the next station to Ajmir, the turning-off place from the
+Bombay to the Mhow line as you travel westward. My friend had no money
+beyond eight annas which he wanted for dinner, and I had no money at
+all, owing to the hitch in the Budget before mentioned. Further, I was
+going into a wilderness where, though I should resume touch with the
+Treasury, there were no telegraph offices. I was, therefore, unable to
+help him in any way.
+
+"We might threaten a Station-master, and make him send a wire on
+tick," said my friend, "but that'd mean inquiries for you and for me,
+and /I/'ve got my hands full these days. Did you say you were
+travelling back along this line within any days?"
+
+"Within ten," I said.
+
+"Can't you make it eight?" said he. "Mine is rather urgent business."
+
+"I can send your telegrams within ten days if that will serve you," I
+said.
+
+"I couldn't trust the wire to fetch him, now I think of it. It's this
+way. He leaves Delhi on the 23rd for Bombay. That means he'll be
+running through Ajmir about the night of the 23rd."
+
+"But I'm going into the Indian Desert," I explained.
+
+"Well /and/ good," said he. "You'll be changing at Marwar Junction to
+get into Jodhpore territory,--you must do that,--and he'll be coming
+through Marwar Junction in the early morning of the 24th by the Bombay
+Mail. Can you be at Marwar Junction on that time? 'T won't be
+inconveniencing you, because I know that there's precious few pickings
+to be got out of these Central India States--even though you pretend
+to be correspondent of the 'Backwoodsman.' "
+
+"Have you ever tried that trick?" I asked.
+
+"Again and again, but the Residents find you out, and then you get
+escorted to the Border before you've time to get your knife into them.
+But about my friend here. I /must/ give him a word o' mouth to tell
+him what's come to me, or else he won't know where to go. I would take
+it more than kind of you if you was to come out of Central India in
+time to catch him at Marwar Junction, and say to him, 'He has gone
+South for the week.' He'll know what that means. He's a big man with a
+red beard, and a great swell he is. You'll find him sleeping like a
+gentleman with all his luggage round him in a Second-class apartment.
+But don't you be afraid. Slip down the window and say, 'He has gone
+South for the week,' and he'll tumble. It's only cutting your time of
+stay in those parts by two days. I ask you as a stranger--going to the
+West," he said, with emphasis.
+
+"Where have /you/ come from?" said I.
+
+"From the East," said he, "and I am hoping that you will give him the
+message on the Square--for the sake of my Mother as well as your own."
+
+Englishmen are not usually softened by appeals to the memory of their
+mothers; but for certain reasons, which will be fully apparent, I saw
+fit to agree.
+
+"It's more than a little matter," said he, "and that's why I asked you
+to do it--and now I know that I can depend on you doing it. A Second-
+class carriage at Marwar Junction, and a red-haired man asleep in it.
+You'll be sure to remember. I get out at the next station, and I must
+hold on there till he comes or sends me what I want."
+
+"I'll give the message if I catch him," I said, "and for the sake of
+your Mother as well as mine I'll give you a word of advice. Don't try
+to run the Central India States just now as the correspondent of the
+'Backwoodsman.' There's a real one knocking about here, and it might
+lead to trouble."
+
+"Thank you," said he, simply; "and when will the swine be gone? I
+can't starve because he's ruining my work. I wanted to get hold of the
+Degumber Rajah down here about his father's widow, and give him a
+jump."
+
+"What did he do to his father's widow, then?"
+
+"Filled her up with red pepper and slippered her to death as she hung
+from a beam. I found that out myself, and I'm the only man that would
+dare going into the State to get hush-money for it. They'll try to
+poison me, same as they did in Chortumna when I went on the loot
+there. But you'll give the man at Marwar Junction my message?"
+
+He got out at a little roadside station, and I reflected. I had heard,
+more than once, of men personating correspondents of newspapers and
+bleeding small Native States with threats of exposure, but I had never
+met any of the caste before. They lead a hard life, and generally die
+with great suddenness. The Native States have a wholesome horror of
+English newspapers, which may throw light on their peculiar methods of
+government, and do their best to choke correspondents with champagne,
+or drive them out of their mind with four-in-hand barouches. They do
+not understand that nobody cares a straw for the internal
+administration of Native States so long as oppression and crime are
+kept within decent limits, and the ruler is not drugged, drunk, or
+diseased from one end of the year to the other. They are the dark
+places of the earth, full of unimaginable cruelty, touching the
+Railway and the Telegraph on one side, and, on the other, the days of
+Harun-al-Raschid. When I left the train I did business with divers
+Kings, and in eight days passed through many changes of life.
+Sometimes I wore dress-clothes and consorted with Princes and
+Politicals, drinking from crystal and eating from silver. Sometimes I
+lay out upon the ground and devoured what I could get, from a plate
+made of leaves, and drank the running water, and slept under the same
+rug as my servant. It was all in the day's work.
+
+Then I headed for the Great Indian Desert upon the proper date, as I
+had promised, and the night Mail set me down at Marwar Junction, where
+a funny little, happy-go-lucky, native-managed railway runs to
+Jodhpore. The Bombay Mail from Delhi makes a short halt at Marwar. She
+arrived just as I got in, and I had just time to hurry to her platform
+and go down the carriages. There was only one Second-class on the
+train. I slipped the window and looked down upon a flaming-red beard,
+half covered by a railway-rug. That was my man, fast asleep, and I dug
+him gently in the ribs. He woke with a grunt, and I saw his face in
+the light of the lamps. It was a great and shining face.
+
+"Tickets again?" said he.
+
+"No," said I. "I am to tell you that he is gone South for the week. He
+has gone South for the week!"
+
+The train had begun to move out. The red man rubbed his eyes. "He has
+gone South for the week," he repeated. "Now that's just like his
+impidence. Did he say that I was to give you anything? 'Cause I
+won't."
+
+"He didn't," I said, and dropped away, and watched the red lights die
+out in the dark. It was horribly cold because the wind was blowing off
+the sands. I climbed into my own train--not an Intermediate carriage
+this time--and went to sleep.
+
+If the man with the beard had given me a rupee I should have kept it
+as a memento of a rather curious affair. But the consciousness of
+having done my duty was my only reward.
+
+Later on I reflected that two gentlemen like my friends could not do
+any good if they foregathered and personated correspondents of
+newspapers, and might, if they blackmailed one of the little rat-trap
+States of Central India or Southern Rajputana, get themselves into
+serious difficulties. I therefore took some trouble to describe them
+as accurately as I could remember to people who would be interested in
+deporting them; and succeeded, so I was later informed, in having them
+headed back from the Degumber borders.
+
+Then I became respectable, and returned to an office where there were
+no Kings and no incidents outside the daily manufacture of a
+newspaper. A newspaper office seems to attract every conceivable sort
+of person, to the prejudice of discipline. Zenana-mission ladies
+arrive, and beg that the Editor will instantly abandon all his duties
+to describe a Christian prize-giving in a back slum of a perfectly
+inaccessible village; Colonels who have been overpassed for command
+sit down and sketch the outline of a series of ten, twelve, or twenty-
+four leading articles on Seniority /versus/ Selection; missionaries
+wish to know why they have not been permitted to escape from their
+regular vehicles of abuse, and swear at a brother missionary under
+special patronage of the editorial We; stranded theatrical companies
+troop up to explain that they cannot pay for their advertisements, but
+on their return from New Zealand or Tahiti will do so with interest;
+inventors of patent punka-pulling machines, carriage couplings, and
+unbreakable swords and axletrees call with specifications in their
+pockets and hours at their disposal; tea companies enter and elaborate
+their prospectuses with the office pens; secretaries of ball
+committees clamour to have the glories of their last dance more fully
+described; strange ladies rustle in and say, "I want a hundred lady's
+cards printed /at once/, please," which is manifestly part of an
+Editor's duty; and every dissolute ruffian that ever tramped the Grand
+Trunk Road makes it his business to ask for employment as a proof-
+reader. And, all the time, the telephone-bell is ringing madly, and
+Kings are being killed on the Continent, and Empires are saying,
+"You're another," and Mister Gladstone is calling down brimstone upon
+the British Dominions, and the little black copyboys are whining,
+"/kaa-pi chay-ha-yeh/" ("Copy wanted"), like tired bees, and most of
+the paper is as blank as Modred's shield.
+
+But that is the amusing part of the year. There are six other months
+when none ever come to call, and the thermometer walks inch by inch up
+to the top of the glass, and the office is darkened to just above
+reading-light, and the press-machines are red-hot to touch, and nobody
+writes anything but accounts of amusements in the Hill-stations or
+obituary notices. Then the telephone becomes a tinkling terror,
+because it tells you of the sudden deaths of men and women that you
+knew intimately, and the prickly heat covers you with a garment, and
+you sit down and write: "A slight increase of sickness is reported
+from the Khuda Janta Khan District. The outbreak is purely sporadic in
+its nature, and, thanks to the energetic efforts of the District
+authorities, is now almost at an end. It is, however, with deep regret
+we record the death," etc.
+
+Then the sickness really breaks out, and the less recording and
+reporting the better for the peace of the subscribers. But the Empires
+and the Kings continue to divert themselves as selfishly as before,
+and the Foreman thinks that a daily paper really ought to come out
+once in twenty-four hours, and all the people at the Hill-stations in
+the middle of their amusements say, "Good gracious! why can't the
+paper be sparkling? I'm sure there's plenty going on up here."
+
+That is the dark half of the moon, and, as the advertisements say,
+"must be experienced to be appreciated."
+
+It was in that season, and a remarkably evil season, that the paper
+began running the last issue of the week on Saturday night, which is
+to say Sunday morning, after the custom of a London paper. This was a
+great convenience, for immediately after the paper was put to bed the
+dawn would lower the thermometer from 96 degrees to almost 84 degrees
+for half an hour, and in that chill--you have no idea how cold is 84
+degrees on the grass until you begin to pray for it--a very tired man
+could get off to sleep ere the heat roused him.
+
+One Saturday night it was my pleasant duty to put the paper to bed
+alone. A King or courtier or a courtesan or a Community was going to
+die or get a new Constitution, or do something that was important on
+the other side of the world, and the paper was to be held open till
+the latest possible minute in order to catch the telegram.
+
+It was a pitchy-black night, as stifling as a June night can be, and
+the /loo/, the red-hot wind from the westward, was booming among the
+tinder-dry trees and pretending that the rain was on its heels. Now
+and again a spot of almost boiling water would fall on the dust with
+the flop of a frog, but all our weary world knew that was only
+pretence. It was a shade cooler in the press-room than the office, so
+I sat there, while the type ticked and clicked, and the night-jars
+hooted at the windows, and the all but naked compositors wiped the
+sweat from their foreheads and called for water. The thing that was
+keeping us back, whatever it was, would not come off, though the loo
+dropped and the last type was set, and the whole round earth stood
+still in the choking heat, with its finger on its lip, to wait the
+event. I drowsed, and wondered whether the telegraph was a blessing,
+and whether this dying man, or struggling people, might be aware of
+the inconvenience the delay was causing. There was no special reason
+beyond the heat and worry to make tension, but, as the clock-hands
+crept up to three o-clock and the machines spun their fly-wheels two
+and three times to see that all was in order, before I said the word
+that would set them off, I could have shrieked aloud.
+
+Then the roar and rattle of the wheels shivered the quiet into little
+bits. I rose to go away, but two men in white clothes stood in front
+of me. The first one said, "It's him!" The second said, "So it is!"
+And they both laughed almost as loudly as the machinery roared, and
+mopped their foreheads. "We seed there was a light burning across the
+road, and we were sleeping in that ditch there for coolness, and I
+said to my friend here, 'The office is open. Let's come along and
+speak to him as turned us back from Degumber State,' " said the
+smaller of the two. He was the man I had met in the Mhow train, and
+his fellow was the red-bearded man of Marwar Junction. There was no
+mistaking the eyebrows of the one or the beard of the other.
+
+I was not pleased, because I wished to go to sleep, not to squabble
+with loafers. "What do you want?" I asked.
+
+"Half an hour's talk with you, cool and comfortable, in the office,"
+said the red-bearded man. "We'd /like/ some drink,--the Contrack
+doesn't begin yet, Peachey, so you needn't look,--but what we really
+want is advice. We don't want money. We ask you as a favour, because
+we found out you did us a bad turn about Degumber State."
+
+I led from the press-room to the stifling office with the maps on the
+walls, and the red-haired man rubbed his hands. "That's something
+like," said he. "This was the proper shop to come to. Now, Sir, let me
+introduce you to Brother Peachey Carnehan, that's him, and Brother
+Daniel Dravot, that is /me/, and the less said about our professions
+the better, for we have been most things in our time--soldier, sailor,
+compositor, photographer, proof-reader, street-preacher, and
+correspondents of the 'Backwoodsman' when we thought the paper wanted
+one. Carnehan is sober, and so am I. Look at us first, and see that's
+sure. It will save you cutting into my talk. We'll take one of your
+cigars apiece, and you shall see us light up."
+
+I watched the test. The men were absolutely sober, so I gave them each
+a tepid whisky-and-soda.
+
+"Well /and/ good," said Carnehan of the eyebrows, wiping the froth
+from his moustache. "Let me talk now, Dan. We have been all over
+India, mostly on foot. We have been boiler-fitters, engine-drivers,
+petty contractors, and all that, and we have decided that India isn't
+big enough for such as us."
+
+They certainly were too big for the office. Dravot's beard seemed to
+fill half the room and Carnehan's shoulders the other half, as they
+sat on the big table. Carnehan continued: "The country isn't half
+worked out because they that governs it won't let you touch it. They
+spend all their blessed time in governing it, and you can't lift a
+spade, nor chip a rock, nor look for oil, nor anything like that,
+without all the Government saying, 'Leave it alone, and let us
+govern.' Therefore, such /as/ it is, we will let it alone, and go away
+to some other place where a man isn't crowded and can come to his own.
+We are not little men, and there is nothing that we are afraid of
+except Drink, and we have signed a Contrack on that. /Therefore/ we
+are going away to be Kings."
+
+"Kings in our own right," muttered Dravot.
+
+"Yes, of course," I said. "You've been tramping in the sun, and it's a
+very warm night, and hadn't you better sleep over the notion? Come
+to-morrow."
+
+"Neither drunk nor sunstruck," said Dravot. "We have slept over the
+notion half a year, and require to see Books and Atlases, and we have
+decided that there is only one place now in the world that two strong
+men can Sar-a-/whack/. They call it Kafiristan. By my reckoning it's
+the top right-hand corner of Afghanistan, not more than three hundred
+miles from Peshawar. They have two and thirty heathen idols there, and
+we'll be the thirty-third and fourth. It's a mountaineous country, the
+women of those parts are very beautiful."
+
+"But that is provided against in the Contrack," said Carnehan.
+"Neither Women nor Liqu-or, Daniel."
+
+"And that's all we know, except that no one has gone there, and they
+fight, and in any place where they fight a man who knows how to drill
+men can always be a King. We shall go to those parts and say to any
+King we find, 'D' you want to vanquish your foes?' and we will show
+him how to drill men; for that we know better than anything else. Then
+we will subvert that King and seize his Throne and establish a
+Dy-nasty."
+
+"You'll be cut to pieces before you're fifty miles across the Border,"
+I said. "You have to travel through Afghanistan to get to that
+country. It's one mass of mountains and peaks and glaciers, and no
+Englishman has been through it. The people are utter brutes, and even
+if you reached them you couldn't do anything."
+
+"That's more like," said Carnehan. "If you could think us a little
+more mad we would be more pleased. We have come to you to know about
+this country, to read a book about it, and to be shown maps. We want
+you to tell us that we are fools and to show us your books." He turned
+to the bookcases.
+
+"Are you at all in earnest?" I said.
+
+"A little," said Dravot, sweetly. "As big a map as you have got, even
+if it's all blank where Kafiristan is, and any books you've got. We
+can read, though we aren't very educated."
+
+I uncased the big thirty-two-miles-to-the-inch map of India and two
+smaller Frontier maps, hauled down volume INF-KAN of the
+"Encyclopaedia Britannica," and the men consulted them.
+
+"See here!" said Dravot, his thumb on the map. "Up to Jagdallak,
+Peachey and me know the road. We was there with Robert's Army. We'll
+have to turn off to the right at Jagdallak through Laghmann territory.
+Then we get among the hills--fourteen thousand feet--fifteen thousand
+--it will be cold work there, but it don't look very far on the map."
+
+I handed him Wood on the "Sources of the Oxus." Carnehan was deep in
+the "Encyclopaedia."
+
+"They're a mixed lot," said Dravot, reflectively; "and it won't help
+us to know the names of their tribes. The more tribes the more they'll
+fight, and the better for us. From Jagdallak to Ashang. H'mm!"
+
+"But all the information about the country is as sketchy and
+inaccurate as can be," I protested. "No one knows anything about it
+really. Here's the file of the 'United Services' Institute.' Read what
+Bellew says."
+
+"Blow Bellew!" said Carnehan. "Dan, they're a stinkin' lot of
+heathens, but this book here says they think they're related to us
+English."
+
+I smoked while the men poured over Raverty, Wood, the maps, and the
+"Encyclopaedia."
+
+"There is no use your waiting," said Dravot, politely. "It's about
+four o'clock now. We'll go before six o'clock if you want to sleep,
+and we won't steal any of the papers. Don't you sit up. We're two
+harmless lunatics, and if you come to-morrow evening down to the Serai
+we'll say good-bye to you."
+
+"You /are/ two fools," I answered. "You'll be turned back at the
+Frontier or cut up the minute you set foot in Afghanistan. Do you want
+any money or a recommendation down-country? I can help you to the
+chance of work next week."
+
+"Next week we shall be hard at work ourselves, thank you," said
+Dravot. "It isn't so easy being a King as it looks. When we've got our
+Kingdom in going order we'll let you know, and you can come up and
+help us govern it."
+
+"Would two lunatics make a Contrack like that?" said Carnehan, with
+subdued pride, showing me a greasy half-sheet of notepaper on which
+was written the following. I copied it, then and there, as a
+curiosity.
+
+  This Contracx between me and you persuing witnesseth in
+  the name of God--Amen and so forth.
+
+    (One)     That me and you will settle this matter
+              together; i.e., to be Kings of Kafiristan.
+
+    (Two)     That you and me will not, while this
+              matter is being settled, look at any
+              Liquor, nor any Woman, black, white,
+              or brown, so as to get mixed up with
+              one or the other harmful.
+
+    (Three)   That we conduct ourselves with Dignity
+              and Discretion, and if one of us gets
+              into trouble the other will stay by him.
+
+       Signed by you and me this day.
+              Peachey Taliaferro Carnehan.
+              Daniel Dravot.
+              Both Gentlemen at Large.
+
+"There was no need for the last article," said Carnehan, blushing
+modestly; "but it looks regular. Now you know the sort of men that
+loafers are,--we /are/ loafers, Dan, until we get out of India,--and
+/do/ you think that we would sign a Contrack like that unless we was
+in earnest? We have kept away from the two things that make life worth
+having."
+
+"You won't enjoy your lives much longer if you are going to try this
+idiotic adventure. Don't set the office on fire," I said, "and go away
+before nine o'clock."
+
+I left them still poring over the maps and making notes on the back of
+the "Contrack." "Be sure to come down to the Serai to-morrow," were
+their parting words.
+
+The Kumharsen Serai is the great foursquare sink of humanity where the
+strings of camels and horses from the North load and unload. All the
+nationalities of Central Asia may be found there, and most of the folk
+of India proper. Balkh and Bokhara there meet Bengal and Bombay, and
+try to draw eye-teeth. You can buy ponies, turquoises, Persian pussy-
+cats, saddle-bags, fat-tailed sheep, and musk in the Kumharsen Serai,
+and get many strange things for nothing. In the afternoon I went down
+to see whether my friends intended to keep their word or were lying
+there drunk.
+
+A priest attired in fragments of ribbons and rags stalked up to me,
+gravely twisting a child's paper whirligig. Behind him was his servant
+bending under the load of a crate of mud toys. The two were loading up
+two camels, and the inhabitants of the Serai watched them with shrieks
+of laughter.
+
+"The priest is mad," said a horse-dealer to me. "He is going up to
+Kabul to sell toys to the Amir. He will either be raised to honour or
+have his head cut off. He came in here this morning and has been
+behaving madly ever since."
+
+"The witless are under the protection of God," stammered a flat-
+cheeked Usbeg in broken Hindi. "They foretell future events."
+
+"Would they could have foretold that my caravan would have been cut up
+by the Shinwaris almost within shadow of the Pass!" grunted the
+Eusufzai agent of a Rajputana trading-house whose goods had been
+diverted into the hands of other robbers just across the Border, and
+whose misfortunes were the laughing-stock of the bazaar. "Ohe, priest,
+whence come you and whither do you go?"
+
+"From Roum have I come," shouted the priest, waving his whirligig;
+"from Roum, blown by the breath of a hundred devils across the sea! O
+thieves, robbers, liars, the blessing of Pir Khan on pigs, dogs, and
+perjurers! Who will take the Protected of God to the North to sell
+charms that are never still to the Amir? The camels shall not gall,
+the sons shall not fall sick, and the wives shall remain faithful
+while they are away, of the men who give me place in their caravan.
+Who will assist me to slipper the King of the Roos with a golden
+slipper with a silver heel? The protection of Pir Khan be upon his
+labours!" He spread out the skirts of his gabardine and pirouetted
+between the lines of tethered horses.
+
+"There starts a caravan from Peshawar to Kabul in twenty days,
+/Huzrut/," said the Eusufzai trader. "My camels go therewith. Do thou
+also go and bring us good luck."
+
+"I will go even now!" shouted the priest. "I will depart upon my
+winged camels, and be at Peshawar in a day! Ho! Hazar Mir Khan," he
+yelled to his servant, "drive out the camels, but let me first mount
+my own."
+
+He leaped on the back of his beast as it knelt, and, turning round to
+me, cried, "Come thou also, Sahib, a little along the road, and I will
+sell thee a charm--an amulet that shall make thee King of Kafiristan."
+
+Then the light broke upon me, and I followed the two camels out of the
+Serai till we reached open road and the priest halted.
+
+"What d' you think o' that?" said he in English. "Carnehan can't talk
+their patter, so I've made him my servant. He makes a handsome
+servant. 'T isn't for nothing that I've been knocking about the
+country for fourteen years. Didn't I do that talk neat? We'll hitch on
+to a caravan at Peshawar till we get to Jagdallak, and then we'll see
+if we can get donkeys for our camels, and strike into Kafiristan.
+Whirligigs for the Amir, O Lor'! Put your hand under the camelbags and
+tell me what you feel."
+
+I felt the butt of a Martini, and another and another.
+
+"Twenty of 'em," said Dravot, placidly. "Twenty of 'em and ammunition
+to correspond, under the whirligigs and the mud dolls."
+
+"Heaven help you if you are caught with those things!" I said. "A
+Martini is worth her weight in silver among the Pathans."
+
+"Fifteen hundred rupees of capital--every rupee we could beg, borrow,
+or steal--are invested on these two camels," said Dravot. "We won't
+get caught. We're going through the Khaiber with a regular caravan.
+Who'd touch a poor mad priest?"
+
+"Have you got everything you want?" I asked, overcome with
+astonishment.
+
+"Not yet, but we shall soon. Give us a momento of your kindness,
+/Brother/. You did me a service yesterday, and that time in Marwar.
+Half my Kingdom shall you have, as the saying is." I slipped a small
+charm compass from my watch-chain and handed it up to the priest.
+
+"Good-bye," said Dravot, giving me hand cautiously. "It's the last
+time we'll shake hands with an Englishman these many days. Shake hands
+with him, Carnehan," he cried, as the second camel passed me.
+
+Carnehan leaned down and shook hands. Then the camels passed away
+along the dusty road, and I was left alone to wonder. My eye could
+detect no failure in the disguises. The scene in the Serai proved that
+they were complete to the native mind. There was just the chance,
+therefore, that Carnehan and Dravot would be able to wander through
+Afghanistan without detection. But, beyond, they would find death--
+certain and awful death.
+
+Ten days later a native correspondent, giving me the news of the day
+from Peshawar, wound up his letter with: "There has been much laughter
+here on account of a certain mad priest who is going in his estimation
+to sell petty gauds and insignificant trinkets which he ascribes as
+great charms to H. H. the Amir of Bokhara. He passed through Peshawar
+and associated himself to the Second Summer caravan that goes to
+Kabul. The merchants are pleased because through superstition they
+imagine that such mad fellows bring good fortune."
+
+The two, then, were beyond the Border. I would have prayed for them,
+but that night a real King died in Europe, and demanded an obituary
+notice.
+
+
+
+The wheel of the world swings through the same phases again and again.
+Summer passed and winter thereafter, and came and passed again. The
+daily paper continued and I with it, and upon the third summer there
+fell a hot night, a night issue, and a strained waiting for something
+to be telegraphed from the other side of the world, exactly as had
+happened before. A few great men had died in the past two years, the
+machines worked with more clatter, and some of the trees in the office
+garden were a few feet taller. But that was all the difference.
+
+I passed over to the press-room, and went through just such a scene as
+I have already described. The nervous tension was stronger than it had
+been two years before, and I felt the heat more acutely. At three
+o'clock I cried, "Print off," and turned to go, when there crept to my
+chair what was left of a man. He was bent into a circle, his head was
+sunk between his shoulders, and he moved his feet one over the other
+like a bear. I could hardly see whether he walked or crawled--this
+rag-wrapped, whining cripple who addressed me by name, crying that he
+was come back. "Can you give me a drink?" he whimpered. "For the
+Lord's sake, give me a drink!"
+
+I went back to the office, the man following with groans of pain, and
+I turned up the lamp.
+
+"Don't you know me?" he gasped, dropping into a chair, and he turned
+his drawn face, surmounted by a shock of gray hair, to the light.
+
+I looked at him intently. Once before had I seen eyebrows that met
+over the nose in an inch-broad black band, but for the life of me I
+could not tell where.
+
+"I don't know you," I said, handing him the whisky. "What can I do for
+you?"
+
+He took a gulp of the spirit raw, and shivered in spite of the
+suffocating heat.
+
+"I've come back," he repeated; "and I was the King of Kafiristan--me
+and Dravot--crowned Kings we was! In this office we settled it--you
+setting there and giving us the books. I am Peachey,--Peachey
+Taliaferro Carnehan,--and you've been setting here ever since--O
+Lord!"
+
+I was more than a little astonished, and expressed my feelings
+accordingly.
+
+"It's true," said Carnehan, with a dry cackle, nursing his feet, which
+were wrapped in rags--"true as gospel. Kings we were, with crowns upon
+our heads--me and Dravot--poor Dan--oh, poor, poor Dan, that would
+never take advice, not though I begged of him!"
+
+"Take the whisky," I said, "and take your own time. Tell me all you
+can recollect of everything from beginning to end. You got across the
+Border on your camels, Dravot dressed as a mad priest and you his
+servant. Do you remember that?"
+
+"I ain't mad--yet, but I shall be that way soon. Of course I remember.
+Keep looking at me, or maybe my words will go all to pieces. Keep
+looking at me in my eyes and don't say anything."
+
+I leaned forward and looked into his face as steadily as I could. He
+dropped one hand upon the table and I grasped it by the wrist. It was
+twisted like a bird's claw, and upon the back was a ragged, red,
+diamond-shaped scar.
+
+"No, don't look there. Look at /me/," said Carnehan. "That comes
+afterward, but for the Lord's sake don't distrack me. We left with
+that caravan, me and Dravot playing all sorts of antics to amuse the
+people we were with. Dravot used to make us laugh in the evenings when
+all the people was cooking their dinners--cooking their dinners, and
+. . . what did they do then? They lit little fires with sparks that
+went into Dravot's beard, and we all laughed--fit to die. Little red
+fires they was, going into Dravot's big red beard--so funny." His eyes
+left mine and he smiled foolishly.
+
+"You went as far as Jagdallak with that caravan," I said, at a
+venture, "after you had lit those fires. To Jagdallak, where you
+turned off to try to get into Kafiristan."
+
+"No, we didn't, neither. What are you talking about? We turned off
+before Jagdallak, because we heard the roads was good. But they wasn't
+good enough for our two camels--mine and Dravot's. When we left the
+caravan, Dravot took off all his clothes and mine too, and said we
+would be heathen, because the Kafirs didn't allow Mohammedans to talk
+to them. So we dressed betwixt and between, and such a sight as Daniel
+Dravot I never saw yet nor expect to see again. He burned half his
+beard, and slung a sheepskin over his shoulder, and shaved his head
+into patterns. He shaved mine too, and made me wear outrageous things
+to look like a heathen. That was in a most mountaineous country, and
+our camels couldn't go along any more because of the mountains. They
+were tall and black, and coming home I saw them fight like wild goats
+--there are lots of goats in Kafiristan. And these mountains, they
+never keep still, no more than the goats. Always fighting they are,
+and don't let you sleep at night."
+
+"Take some more whisky," I said, very slowly. "What did you and Daniel
+Dravot do when the camels could go no farther because of the rough
+roads that led into Kafiristan?"
+
+"What did which do? There was a party called Peachey Taliaferro
+Carnehan that was with Dravot. Shall I tell you about him? He died out
+there in the cold. Slap from the bridge fell old Peachey, turning and
+twisting in the air like a penny whirligig that you can sell to the
+Amir. No; they was two for three ha'pence, those whirligigs, or I am
+much mistaken and woful sore. . . . And then these camels were no use,
+and Peachey said to Dravot, 'For the Lord's sake let's get out of this
+before our heads are chopped off,' and with that they killed the
+camels all among the mountains, not having anything in particular to
+eat, but first they took off the boxes with the guns and the
+ammunition, till two men came along driving four mules. Dravot up and
+dances in front of them, singing, 'Sell me four mules.' Says the first
+man, 'If you are rich enough to buy, you are rich enough to rob;' but
+before ever he could put his hand to his knife, Dravot breaks his neck
+over his knee, and the other party runs away. So Carnehan loaded the
+mules with the rifles that was taken off the camels, and together we
+starts forward into those bitter-cold mountaineous parts, and never a
+road broader than the back of your hand."
+
+He paused for a moment, while I asked him if he could remember the
+nature of the country through which he had journeyed.
+
+"I am telling you as straight as I can, but my head isn't as good as
+it might be. They drove nails through it to make me hear better how
+Dravot died. The country was mountaineous and the mules were most
+contrary, and the inhabitants was dispersed and solitary. They went up
+and up, and down and down, and that other party, Carnehan, was
+imploring of Dravot not to sing and whistle so loud, for fear of
+bringing down the tremenjus avalanches. But Dravot says that if a King
+couldn't sing it wasn't worth being King, and whacked the mules over
+the rump, and never took no heed for ten cold days. We came to a big
+level valley all among the mountains, and the mules were near dead, so
+we killed them, not having anything in special for them or us to eat.
+We sat upon the boxes, and played odd and even with the cartridges
+that was jolted out.
+
+"Then ten men with bows and arrows ran down that valley, chasing
+twenty men with bows and arrows, and the row was tremenjus. They was
+fair men--fairer than you or me--with yellow hair and remarkable well
+built. Says Dravot, unpacking the guns, 'This is the beginning of the
+business. We'll fight for the ten men,' and with that he fires two
+rifles at the twenty men, and drops one of them at two hundred yards
+from the rock where he was sitting. The other men began to run, but
+Carnehan and Dravot sits on the boxes picking them off at all ranges,
+up and down the valley. Then we goes up to the ten men that had run
+across the snow too, and they fires a footy little arrow at us. Dravot
+he shoots above their heads, and they all falls down flat. Then he
+walks over them and kicks them, and then he lifts them up and shakes
+hands all round to make them friendly like. He calls them and gives
+them the boxes to carry, and waves his hand for all the world as
+though he was King already. They takes the boxes and him across the
+valley and up the hill into a pine wood on the top, where there was
+half a dozen big stone idols. Dravot he goes to the biggest--a fellow
+they call Imbra--and lays a rifle and a cartridge at his feet, rubbing
+his nose respectfuly with his own nose, patting him on the head, and
+nods his head, and says, 'That's all right. I'm in the know too, and
+these old jimjams are my friends.' Then he opens his mouth and points
+down it, and when the first man brings him food, he says, 'No;' and
+when the second man brings him food, he says 'no;' but when one of the
+old priests and the boss of the village brings him food, he says,
+'Yes;' very haughty, and eats it slow. That was how he came to our
+first village without any trouble, just as though we had tumbled from
+the skies. But we tumbled from one of those damned rope-bridges, you
+see, and--you couldn't expect a man to laugh much after that?"
+
+"Take some more whisky and go on," I said. "That was the first village
+you came into. How did you get to be King?"
+
+"I wasn't King," said Carnehan. "Dravot he was the King, and a
+handsome man he looked with the gold crown on his head and all. Him
+and the other party stayed in that village, and every morning Dravot
+sat by the side of old Imbra, and the people came and worshipped. That
+was Dravot's order. Then a lot of men came into the valley, and
+Carnehan Dravot picks them off with the rifles before they knew where
+they was, and runs down into the valley and up again the other side,
+and finds another village, same as the first one, and the people all
+falls down flat on their faces, and Dravot says, 'Now what is the
+trouble between you two villages?' and the people points to a woman,
+as fair as you or me, that was carried off, and Dravot takes her back
+to the first village and counts up the dead--eight there was. For each
+dead man Dravot pours a little milk on the ground and waves his arms
+like a whirligig, and 'That's all right,' says he. Then he and
+Carnehan takes the big boss of each village by the arm, and walks them
+down the valley, and shows them how to scratch a line with a spear
+right down the valley, and gives each a sod of turf from both sides of
+the line. Then all the people comes down and shouts like the devil and
+all, and Dravot says, 'Go and dig the land, and be fruitful and
+multiply,' which they did, though they didn't understand. Then we asks
+the names of things in their lingo--bread and water and fire and idols
+and such; and Dravot leads the priest of each village up to the idol,
+and says he must sit there and judge the people, and if anything goes
+wrong he is to be shot.
+
+"Next week they was all turning up the land in the valley as quiet as
+bees and much prettier, and the priests heard all the complaints and
+told Dravot in dumb-show what it was about. 'That's just the
+beginning,' says Dravot. 'They think we're Gods.' He and Carnehan
+picks out twenty good men and shows them how to click off a rifle and
+form fours and advance in line; and they was very pleased to do so,
+and clever to see the hang of it. Then he takes out his pipe and his
+baccy-pouch, and leaves one at one village and one at the other, and
+off we two goes to see what was to be done in the next valley. That
+was all rock, and there was a little village there, and Carnehan says,
+'Send 'em to the old valley to plant,' and takes 'em there and gives
+'em some land that wasn't took before. They were a poor lot, and we
+blooded 'em with a kid before letting 'em into the new Kingdom. That
+was to impress the people, and then they settled down quiet, and
+Carnehan went back to Dravot, who had got into another valley, all
+snow and ice and most mountaineous. There was no people there, and the
+Army got afraid; so Dravot shoots one of them, and goes on till he
+finds some people in a village, and the Army explains that unless the
+people wants to be killed they had better not shoot their little
+matchlocks, for they had matchlocks. We makes friends with the priest,
+and I stays there alone with two of the Army, teaching the men how to
+drill; and a thundering big Chief comes across the snow with
+kettledrums and horns twanging, because he heard there was a new God
+kicking about. Carnehan sights for the brown of the men half a mile
+across the snow and wings one of them. Then he sends a message to the
+Chief that, unless he wished to be killed, he must come and shake
+hands with me and leave his arms behind. The Chief comes alone first,
+and Carnehan shakes hands with him and whirls his arms about, same as
+Dravot used, and very much surprised that Chief was, and strokes my
+eyebrows. Then Carnehan goes alone to the Chief, and asks him in dumb-
+show if he had an enemy he hated. 'I have,' says the chief. So
+Carnehan weeds out the pick of his men, and sets the two of the Army
+to show them drill, and at the end of two weeks the men can manoeuvre
+about as well as Volunteers. So he marches with the Chief to a great
+big plain on the top of a mountain, and the Chief's men rushes into a
+village and takes it; we three Martinis firing into the brown of the
+enemy. So we took that village too, and I gives the Chief a rag from
+my coat, and says, 'Occupy till I come;' which was scriptural. By way
+of a reminder, when me and the Army was eighteen hundred yards away, I
+drops a bullet near him standing on the snow, and all the people falls
+flat on their faces. Then I sends a letter to Dravot wherever he be by
+land or by sea."
+
+At the risk of throwing the creature out of train I interrupted: "How
+could you write a letter up yonder?"
+
+"The letter?--oh!--the letter! Keep looking at me between the eyes,
+please. It was a string-talk letter, that we'd learned the way of it
+from a blind beggar in the Punjab."
+
+I remember that there had once come to the office a blind man with a
+knotted twig, and a piece of string which he wound round the twig
+according to some cipher of his own. He could, after the lapse of days
+or hours, repeat the sentence which he had reeled up. He had reduced
+the alphabet to eleven primitive sounds, and tried to teach me his
+method, but I could not understand.
+
+"I sent that letter to Dravot," said Carnehan, "and told him to come
+back because this Kingdom was growing too big for me to handle; and
+then I struck for the first valley, to see how the priests were
+working. They called the village we took along with the Chief,
+Bashkai, and the first village we took, Er-Heb. The priests at Er-Heb
+was doing all right, but they had a lot of pending cases about land to
+show me, and some men from another village had been firing arrows at
+night. I went out and looked for that village, and fired four rounds
+at it from a thousand yards. That used all the cartridges I cared to
+spend, and I waited for Dravot, who had been away two or three months,
+and I kept my people quiet.
+
+"One morning I heard the devil's own noise of drums and horns, and Dan
+Dravot marches down the hill with his Army and a tail of hundreds of
+men, and, which was the most amazing, a great gold crown on his head.
+'My Gord, Carnehan,' says Daniel, 'this is a tremenjus business, and
+we've got the whole country as far as it's worth having. I am the son
+of Alexander by Queen Semiramis, and you're my younger brother and a
+God too! It's the biggest thing we've ever seen. I've been marching
+and fighting for six weeks with the Army, and every footy little
+village for fifty miles has come in rejoiceful; and more than that,
+I've got the key of the whole show, as you'll see, and I've got a
+crown for you! I told 'em to make two of 'em at a place called Shu,
+where the gold lies in the rock like suet in mutton. Gold I've seen,
+and turquoise I've kicked out of the cliffs, and there's garnets in
+the sands of the river, and here's a chunk of amber that a man brought
+me. Call up all the priests and, here, take your crown.'
+
+"One of the men opens a black hair bag, and I slips the crown on. It
+was too small and too heavy, but I wore it for the glory. Hammered
+gold it was--five pounds weight, like a hoop of a barrel.
+
+" 'Peachey,' says Dravot, 'we don't want to fight no more. The Craft's
+the trick, so help me!' and he brings forward that same Chief that I
+left at Bashkai--Billy Fish we called him afterward, because he was so
+like Billy Fish that drove the big tank-engine at Mach on the Bolan in
+the old days. 'Shake hands with him,' says Dravot; and I shook hands
+and nearly dropped, for Billy Fish gave me the Grip. I said nothing,
+but tried him with the Fellow-craft Grip. He answers all right, and I
+tried the Master's Grip, but that was a slip. 'A Fellow-craft he is!'
+I says to Dan. 'Does he know the word?' 'He does,' says Dan, 'and all
+the priests know. It's a miracle! The Chiefs and the priests can work
+a Fellow-craft Lodge in a way that's very like ours, and they've cut
+the marks on the rocks, but they don't know the Third Degree, and
+they've come to find out. It's Gord's Truth. I've known these long
+years that the Afghans knew up to the Fellow-craft Degree, but this is
+a miracle. A God and a Grand Master of the Craft am I, and a Lodge in
+the Third Degree I will open, and we'll raise the head priests and the
+Chiefs of the villages.'
+
+" 'It's against all the law,' I says, 'holding a Lodge without warrant
+from any one; and you know we never held office in any Lodge.'
+
+" 'It's a master stroke o' policy,' says Dravot. 'It means running the
+country as easy as a four-wheeled bogie on a down grade. We can't stop
+to inquire now, or they'll turn against us. I've forty Chiefs at my
+heel, and passed and raised according to their merit they shall be.
+Billet these men on the villages, and see that we run up a Lodge of
+some kind. The temple of Imbra will do for a Lodge-room. The women
+must make aprons as you show them. I'll hold a levee of Chiefs
+to-night and Lodge to-morrow.'
+
+"I was fair run off my legs, but I wasn't such a fool as not to see
+what a pull this Craft business gave us. I showed the priests'
+families how to make aprons of the degrees, but for Dravot's apron the
+blue border and marks was made of turquoise lumps on white hide, not
+cloth. We took a great square stone in the temple for the Master's
+chair, and little stones for the officer's chairs, and painted the
+black pavement with white squares, and did what we could to make
+things regular.
+
+"At the levee which was held that night on the hillside with big
+bonfires, Dravot gives out that him and me were Gods and sons of
+Alexander, and Passed Grand Masters in the Craft, and was come to make
+Kafiristan a country where every man should eat in peace and drink in
+quiet, and specially obey us. Then the Chiefs come round to shake
+hands, and they were so hairy and white and fair it was just shaking
+hands with old friends. We gave them names according as they was like
+men we had known in India--Billy Fish, Holly Dilworth, Pikky Kergan,
+that was Bazaar-master when I was at Mhow, and so on, and so on.
+
+"/The/ most amazing miracles was at Lodge next night. One of the old
+priests was watching us continuous, and I felt uneasy, for I knew we'd
+have to fudge the Ritual, and I didn't know what the men knew. The old
+priest was a stranger come in from beyond the village of Bashkai. The
+minute Dravot puts on the Master's apron that the girls had made for
+him, the priest fetches a whoop and a howl, and tries to overturn the
+stone that Dravot was sitting on. 'It's all up now,' I says. 'That
+comes of meddling with the Craft without warrant!' Dravot never winked
+an eye, not when ten priests took and tilted over the Grand Master's
+chair--which was to say, the stone of Imbra. The priest begins rubbing
+the bottom end of it to clear away the black dirt, and presently he
+shows all the other priests the Master's Mark, same as was on Dravot's
+apron, cut into the stone. Not even the priests of the temple of Imbra
+knew it was there. The old chap falls flat on his face at Dravot's
+feet and kisses 'em. 'Luck again,' says Dravot, across the Lodge, to
+me; 'they say it's the missing Mark that no one could understand the
+why of. We're more than safe now.' Then he bangs the butt of his gun
+for a gavel and says, 'By virtue of the authority vested in me by my
+own right hand and the help of Peachey, I declare myself Grand Master
+of all Freemasonry in Kafiristan in this the Mother Lodge o' the
+country, and King of Kafiristan equally with Peachey!' At that he puts
+on his crown and I puts on mine,--I was doing Senior Warden,--and we
+opens the Lodge in most ample form. It was an amazing miracle! The
+priests moved in Lodge through the first two degrees almost without
+telling, as if the memory was coming back to them. After that Peachey
+and Dravot raised such as was worthy--high priests and Chiefs of far-
+off villages. Billy Fish was the first, and I can tell you we scared
+the soul out of him. It was not in any way according to Ritual, but it
+served our turn. We didn't raise more than ten of the biggest men,
+because we didn't want to make the Degree common. And they was
+clamouring to be raised.
+
+" 'In another six months,' says Dravot, 'we'll hold another
+Communication and see how you are working.' Then he asks them about
+their villages, and learns that they was fighting one against the
+other, and were sick and tired of it. And when they wasn't doing that
+they was fighting with the Mohammedans. 'You can fight those when they
+come into our country,' says Dravot. 'Tell off every tenth man of your
+tribes for a Frontier guard, and send two hundred at a time to this
+valley to be drilled. Nobody is going to be shot or speared any more
+so long as he does well, and I know that you won't cheat me, because
+you're white people--sons of Alexander--and not like common black
+Mohammedans. You are /my/ people, and, by God,' says he, running off
+into English at the end, 'I'll make a damned fine Nation of you, or
+I'll die in the making!'
+
+"I can't tell all we did for the next six months, because Dravot did a
+lot I couldn't see the hang of, and he learned their lingo in a way I
+never could. My work was to help the people plough, and now and again
+go out with some of the Army and see what the other villages were
+doing, and make 'em throw rope bridges across the ravines which cut up
+the country horrid. Dravot was very kind to me, but when he walked up
+and down in the pine wood pulling that bloody red beard of his with
+both fists I knew he was thinking plans I could not advise about, and
+I just waited for orders.
+
+"But Dravot never showed me disrespect before the people. They were
+afraid of me and the Army, but they loved Dan. He was the best of
+friends with the priests and the Chiefs; but any one could come across
+the hills with a complaint, and Dravot would hear him out fair, and
+call four priests together and say what was to be done. He used to
+call in Billy Fish from Bashkai, and Pikky Kergan from Shu, and an old
+Chief we called Kafuzelum,--it was like enough to his real name,--and
+hold councils with 'em when there was any fighting to be done in small
+villages. That was his Council of War, and the four priests of
+Bashkai, Shu, Khawak, and Madora was his Privy Council. Between the
+lot of 'em they sent me, with forty men and twenty rifles, and sixty
+men carrying turquoises, into the Ghorband country to buy those hand-
+made Martini rifles, that come out of the Amir's workshops at Kabul,
+from one of the Amir's Herati regiments that would have sold the very
+teeth out of their mouths for turquoises.
+
+"I stayed in Ghorband a month, and gave the Governor there the pick of
+my baskets for hush-money, and bribed the Colonel of the regiment some
+more, and, between the two and the tribes-people, we got more than a
+hundred hand-made Martinis, a hundred good Kohat Jezails that'll throw
+to six hundred yards, and forty man-loads of very bad ammunition for
+the rifles. I came back with what I had, and distributed 'em among the
+men that the Chiefs sent in to me to drill. Dravot was too busy to
+attend to those things, but the old Army that we first made helped me,
+and we turned out five hundred men that could drill, and two hundred
+that knew how to hold arms pretty straight. Even those cork-screwed,
+hand-made guns was a miracle to them. Dravot talked big about powder-
+shops and factories, walking up and down in the pine wood when the
+winter was coming on.
+
+" 'I won't make a Nation,' says he. 'I'll make an Empire! These men
+aren't niggers; they're English! Look at their eyes--look at their
+mouths. Look at the way they stand up. They sit on chairs in their own
+houses. They're the Lost Tribes, or something like it, and they've
+grown to be English. I'll take a census in the spring if the priests
+don't get frightened. There must be a fair two million of 'em in these
+hills. The villages are full o' little children. Two million people--
+two hundred and fifty thousand fighting men--and all English! They
+only want the rifles and a little drilling. Two hundred and fifty
+thousand men, ready to cut in on Russia's right flank when she tries
+for India! Peachey, man,' he says, chewing his beard in great hunks,
+'we shall be Emperors--Emperors of the Earth! Rajah Brooke will be a
+suckling to us. I'll treat with the Viceroy on equal terms. I'll ask
+him to send me twelve picked English--twelve that I know of--to help
+us govern a bit. There's Mackray, Serjeant Pensioner at Segowli--
+many's the good dinner he's given me, and his wife a pair of trousers.
+There's Donkin, the Warder of Tounghoo Jail; there's hundreds that I
+could lay my hand on if I was in India. The Viceroy shall do it for
+me; I'll send a man through in the spring for those men, and I'll
+write for a dispensation from the Grand Lodge for what I've done as
+Grand Master. That--and all the Sniders that'll be thrown out when the
+native troops in India take up the Martini. They'll be worn smooth,
+but they'll do for fighting in these hills. Twelve English, a hundred
+thousand Sniders run through the Amir's country in driblets,--I'd be
+content with twenty thousand in one year,--and we'd be an Empire. When
+everything was shipshape I'd hand over the crown--this crown I'm
+wearing now--to Queen Victoria on my knees, and she'd say, "Rise up,
+Sir Daniel Dravot." Oh, it's big! It's big, I tell you! But there's so
+much to be done in every place--Bashkai, Khawak, Shu, and everywhere
+else.'
+
+" 'What is it?' I says. 'There are no more men coming in to be drilled
+this autumn. Look at those fat black clouds. They're bringing the
+snow.'
+
+" 'It isn't that,' says Daniel, putting his hand very hard on my
+shoulder; 'and I don't wish to say anything that's against you, for no
+other living man would have followed me and made me what I am as you
+have done. You're a first-class Commander-in-Chief, and the people
+know you; but--it's a big country, and somehow you can't help me,
+Peachey, in the way I want to be helped.'
+
+" 'Go to your blasted priests, then!' I said, and I was sorry when I
+made that remark, but it did hurt me sore to find Daniel talking so
+superior, when I'd drilled all the men and done all he told me.
+
+" 'Don't let's quarrel, Peachey,' says Daniel, without cursing.
+'You're a King too, and the half of this Kingdom is yours; but can't
+you see, Peachey, we want cleverer men than us now--three or four of
+'em, that we can scatter about for our Deputies. It's a hugeous great
+State, and I can't always tell the right thing to do, and I haven't
+time for all I want to do, and here's the winter coming on and all.'
+He put half his beard into his mouth, all red like the gold of his
+crown.
+
+" 'I'm sorry, Daniel,' says I. 'I've done all I could. I've drilled
+the men and shown the people how to stack their oats better; and I've
+brought in those tinware rifles from Ghorband--but I know what you're
+driving at. I take it Kings always feel oppressed that way.'
+
+" 'There's another thing too,' says Dravot, walking up and down. 'The
+winter's coming, and these people won't be giving much trouble, and if
+they do we can't move about. I want a wife.'
+
+" 'For Gord's sake leave the women alone!' I says. 'We've both got all
+the work we can, though I /am/ a fool. Remember the Contrack, and keep
+clear o' women.'
+
+" 'The Contrack only lasted till such time as we was Kings; and Kings
+we have been these months past,' says Dravot, weighing his crown in
+his hand. 'You go get a wife too, Peachey--a nice, strappin', plump
+girl that'll keep you warm in the winter. They're prettier than
+English girls, and we can take the pick of 'em. Boil 'em once or twice
+in hot water, and they'll come out like chicken and ham.'
+
+" 'Don't tempt me!' I says. 'I will not have any dealings with a
+woman, not till we are a dam' side more settled than we are now. I've
+been doing the work o' two men, and you've been doing the work of
+three. Let's lie off a bit, and see if we can get some better tobacco
+from Afghan country and run in some good liquor; and no women.'
+
+" 'Who's talking o' /women/?' says Dravot. 'I said /wife/--a Queen to
+breed a King's son for the King. A Queen out of the strongest tribe,
+that'll make them your blood-brothers, and that'll lie by your side
+and tell you all the people thinks about you and their own affairs.
+That's what I want.'
+
+" 'Do you remember that Bengali woman I kept at Mogul Serai when I was
+a plate-layer?' says I. 'A fat lot o' good she was to me. She taught
+me the lingo and one or two other things; but what happened? She ran
+away with the Station-master's servant and half my month's pay. Then
+she turned up at Dadur Junction in tow of a half-caste, and had the
+impidence to say I was her husband--all among the drivers in the
+running-shed too!'
+
+" 'We've done with that,' says Dravot; 'these women are whiter than
+you or me, and a Queen I will have for the winter months.'
+
+" 'For the last time o' asking, Dan, do /not/,' I says. 'It'll only
+bring us harm. The Bible says that Kings ain't to waste their strength
+on women, 'specially when they've got a new raw Kingdom to work over.'
+
+" 'For the last time of answering, I will,' said Dravot, and he went
+away through the pine-trees looking like a big red devil, the sun
+being on his crown and beard and all.
+
+"But getting a wife was not as easy as Dan thought. He put it before
+the Council, and there was no answer till Billy Fish said that he'd
+better ask the girls. Dravot damned them all round. 'What's wrong with
+me?' he shouts, standing by the idol Imbra. 'Am I a dog, or am I not
+enough of a man for your wenches? Haven't I put the shadow of my hand
+over this country? Who stopped the last Afghan raid?' It was me
+really, but Dravot was too angry to remember. 'Who bought your guns?
+Who repaired the bridges? Who's the Grand Master of the sign cut in
+the stone?' says he, and he thumped his hand on the block that he used
+to sit on in Lodge, and at Council, which opened like Lodge always.
+Billy Fish said nothing, and no more did the others. 'Keep your hair
+on, Dan,' said I, 'and ask the girls. That's how it's done at Home,
+and these people are quite English.'
+
+" 'The marriage of the King is a matter of State,' says Dan, in a
+white-hot rage, for he could feel, I hope, that he was going against
+his better mind. He walked out of the Council-room, and the others sat
+still, looking at the ground.
+
+" 'Billy Fish,' says I to the Chief of Bashkai, 'what's the difficulty
+here? A straight answer to a true friend.'
+
+" 'You know,' says Billy Fish. 'How should a man tell you who knows
+everything? How can daughters of men marry Gods or Devils? It's not
+proper.'
+
+"I remembered something like that in the Bible; but, if after seeing
+us as long as they had, they still believed we were Gods, it wasn't
+for me to undeceive them.
+
+" 'A God can do anything,' says I. 'If the King is fond of a girl
+he'll not let her die.' 'She'll have to,' said Billy Fish. 'There are
+all sorts of Gods and Devils in these mountains, and now and again a
+girl marries one of them and isn't seen any more. Besides, you two
+know the Mark cut in the stone. Only the Gods know that. We thought
+you were men till you showed the sign of the Master.'
+
+"I wished then that we had explained about the loss of the genuine
+secrets of a Master Mason at the first go-off; but I said nothing. All
+that night there was a blowing of horns in a little dark temple half-
+way down the hill, and I heard the girl crying fit to die. One of the
+priests told us that she was being prepared to marry the King.
+
+" 'I'll have no nonsense of that kind,' says Dan. 'I don't want to
+interfere with your customs, but I'll take my own wife.' 'The girl's a
+little bit afraid,' says the priest. 'She thinks she's going to die,
+and they are a-heartening of her up down in the temple.'
+
+" 'Hearten her very tender, then,' says Dravot, 'or I'll hearten you
+with the butt of a gun so you'll never want to be heartened again.' He
+licked his lips, did Dan, and stayed up walking about more than half
+the night, thinking of the wife that he was going to get in the
+morning. I wasn't any means comfortable, for I knew that dealings with
+a woman in foreign parts, though you was a crowned King twenty times
+over, could not but be risky. I got up very early in the morning while
+Dravot was asleep, and I saw the priests talking together in whispers,
+and the Chiefs talking together too, and they looked at me out of the
+corners of their eyes.
+
+" 'What is up, Fish?' I say to the Bashkai man, who was wrapped up in
+his furs and looking splendid to behold.
+
+" 'I can't rightly say,' says he; 'but if you can make the King drop
+all this nonsense about marriage, you'll be doing him and me and
+yourself a great service.'
+
+" 'That I do believe,' says I. 'But sure, you know, Billy, as well as
+me, having fought against and for us, that the King and me are nothing
+more than two of the finest men that God Almighty ever made. Nothing
+more, I do assure you.'
+
+" 'That may be,' says Billy Fish, 'and yet I should be sorry if it
+was.' He sinks his head upon his great fur cloak for a minute and
+thinks. 'King,' says he, 'be you man or God or Devil, I'll stick by
+you to-day. I have twenty of my men with me, and they will follow me.
+We'll go to Bashkai until the storm blows over.'
+
+" A little snow had fallen in the night, and everything was white
+except the greasy fat clouds that blew down and down from the north.
+Dravot came out with his crown on his head, swinging his arms and
+stamping his feet, and looking more pleased than Punch.
+
+" 'For the last time, drop it, Dan,' says I, in a whisper; 'Billy Fish
+here says that there will be a row.'
+
+" 'A row among my people!' says Dravot. 'Not much. Peachey, you're a
+fool not to get a wife too. Where's the girl?' says he, with a voice
+as loud as the braying of a jackass. 'Call up all the Chiefs and
+priests, and let the Emperor see if his wife suits him.'
+
+"There was no need to call any one. They were all there leaning on
+their guns and spears round the clearing in the centre of the pine
+wood. A lot of priests went down to the little temple to bring up the
+girl, and the horns blew fit to wake the dead. Billy Fish saunters
+round and gets as close to Daniel as he could, and behind him stood
+his twenty men with matchlocks--not a man of them under six feet. I
+was next to Dravot, and behind me was twenty men of the regular Army.
+Up comes the girl, and a strapping wench she was, covered with silver
+and turquoises, but white as death, and looking back every minute at
+the priests.
+
+" 'She'll do,' said Dan, looking her over. 'What's to be afraid of,
+lass? Come and kiss me.' He puts his arm round her. She shuts her
+eyes, gives a bit of a squeak, and down goes her face in the side of
+Dan's flaming-red beard.
+
+" 'The slut's bitten me!' says he, clapping his hand to his neck, and,
+sure enough, his hand was red with blood. Billy Fish and two of his
+matchlock men catches hold of Dan by the shoulders and drags him into
+the Bashkai lot, while the priests howls in their lingo, 'Neither God
+nor Devil, but a man!' I was all taken aback, for a priest cut at me
+in front, and the Army behind began firing into the Bashkai men.
+
+" 'God A'mighty!' says Dan, 'what is the meaning o' this?'
+
+" 'Come back! Come away!' says Billy Fish. 'Ruin and Mutiny is the
+matter. We'll break for Bashkai if we can.'
+
+"I tried to give some sort of orders to my men,--the men o' the
+regular Army,--but it was no use, so I fired into the brown of 'em
+with an English Martini and drilled three beggars in a line. The
+valley was full of shouting, howling creatures, and every soul was
+shrieking, 'Not a God nor a Devil, but only a man!' The Bashkai troops
+stuck to Billy Fish all they were worth, but their matchlocks wasn't
+half as good as the Kabul breech-loaders, and four of them dropped.
+Dan was bellowing like a bull, for he was very wrathy; and Billy Fish
+had a hard job to prevent him running out at the crowd.
+
+" 'We can't stand,' says Billy Fish. 'Make a run for it down the
+valley! The whole place is against us.' The matchlock-men ran, and we
+went down the valley in spite of Dravot. He was swearing horrible and
+crying out that he was a King. The priests rolled great stones on us,
+and the regular Army fired hard, and there wasn't more than six men,
+not counting Dan, Billy Fish, and Me, that came down to the bottom of
+the valley alive.
+
+"Then they stopped firing, and the horns in the temple blew again.
+'Come away--for Gord's sake come away!' says Billy Fish. 'They'll send
+runners out to all the villages before ever we get to Bashkai. I can
+protect you there, but I can't do anything now."
+
+"My own notion is that Dan began to go mad in his head from that hour.
+He stared up and down like a stuck pig. Then he was all for walking
+back alone and killing the priests with his bare hands; which he could
+have done. 'An Emperor am I,' says Daniel, 'and next year I shall be a
+Knight of the Queen.'
+
+" 'All right, Dan,' says I; 'but come along now while there's time.'
+
+" 'It's your fault,' says he, 'for not looking after your Army better.
+There was mutiny in the midst, and you didn't know--you damned engine-
+driving, plate-laying, missionary's-pass-hunting hound!' He sat upon a
+rock and called me every foul name he could lay tongue to. I was too
+heart-sick to care, though it was all his foolishness that brought the
+smash.
+
+" 'I'm sorry, Dan,' says I, 'but there's no accounting for natives.
+This business is our Fifty-seven. Maybe we'll make something out of it
+yet, when we've got to Bashkai.'
+
+" 'Let's get to Bashkai, then,' says Dan, 'and, by God, when I come
+back here again I'll sweep the valley so there isn't a bug in a
+blanket left!'
+
+"We walked all that day, and all that night Dan was stumping up and
+down on the snow, chewing his beard and muttering to himself.
+
+" 'There's no hope o' getting clear,' said Billy Fish. 'The priests
+have sent runners to the villages to say that you are only men. Why
+didn't you stick on as Gods till things was more settled? I'm a dead
+man,' says Billy Fish, and he throws himself down on the snow and
+begins to pray to his Gods.
+
+"Next morning we was in a cruel bad country--all up and down, no level
+ground at all, and no food, either. The six Bashkai men looked at
+Billy Fish hungry-way as if they wanted to ask something, but they
+never said a word. At noon we came to the top of a flat mountain all
+covered with snow, and when we climbed up into it, behold, there was
+an Army in position waiting in the middle!
+
+" 'The runners have been very quick,' says Billy Fish, with a little
+bit of a laugh. 'They are waiting for us.'
+
+"Three or four men began to fire from the enemy's side, and a chance
+shot took Daniel in the calf of the leg. That brought him to his
+senses. He looks across the snow at the Army, and sees the rifles that
+we had brought into the country.
+
+" 'We're done for,' says he. 'They are Englishmen, these people,--and
+it's my blasted nonsense that has brought you to this. Get back, Billy
+Fish, and take your men away; you've done what you could, and now cut
+for it. Carnehan,' says he, 'shake hands with me and go along with
+Billy, Maybe they won't kill you. I'll go and meet 'em alone. It's me
+that did it! Me, the King!'
+
+" 'Go!' says I. 'Go to Hell, Dan! I'm with you here. Billy Fish, you
+clear out, and we two will meet those folk.'
+
+" 'I'm a Chief,' says Billy Fish, quite quiet. 'I stay with you. My
+men can go.'
+
+"The Bashkai fellows didn't wait for a second word, but ran off, and
+Dan and Me and Billy Fish walked across to where the drums were
+drumming and the horns were horning. It was cold--awful cold. I've got
+that cold in the back of my head now. There's a lump of it there."
+
+The punka-coolies had gone to sleep. Two kerosene lamps were blazing
+in the office, and the perspiration poured down my face and splashed
+on the blotter as I leaned forward. Carnehan was shivering, and I
+feared that his mind might go. I wiped my face, took a fresh grip of
+the piteously mangled hands, and said, "What happened after that?"
+
+The momentary shift of my eyes had broken the clear current.
+
+"What was you pleased to say?" whined Carnehan. "They took them
+without any sound. Not a little whisper all along the snow, not though
+the King knocked down the first man that set hand on him--not though
+old Peachey fired his last cartridge into the brown of 'em. Not a
+single solitary sound did those swines make. They just closed up
+tight, and I tell you their furs stunk. There was a man called Billy
+Fish, a good friend of us all, and they cut his throat, Sir, then and
+there, like a pig; and the King kicks up the bloody snow and says,
+'We've had a dashed fine run for our money. What's coming next?' But
+Peachey, Peachey Taliaferro, I tell you, Sir, in confidence as betwixt
+two friends, he lost his head, Sir. No, he didn't, neither. The King
+lost his head, so he did, all along o' one of those cunning rope
+bridges. Kindly let me have the paper-cutter, Sir. It tilted this way.
+They marched him a mile across that snow to a rope bridge over a
+ravine with a river at the bottom. You may have seen such. They
+prodded him behind like an ox. 'Damn your eyes!' says the King. 'D'
+you suppose I can't die like a gentleman?' He turns to Peachey--
+Peachey that was crying like a child. 'I've brought you to this,
+Peachey,' says he. 'Brought you out of your happy life to be killed in
+Kafiristan, where you was late Commander-in-Chief of the Emperor's
+forces. Say you forgive me, Peachey.' 'I do,' says Peachey. 'Fully and
+freely do I forgive you, Dan.' 'Shake hands, Peachey,' says he. 'I'm
+going now.' Out he goes, looking neither right nor left, and when he
+was plumb in the middle of those dizzy dancing ropes, 'Cut you
+beggars,' he shouts; and they cut, and old Dan fell, turning round and
+round and round, twenty thousand miles, for he took half an hour to
+fall till he struck the water, and I could see his body caught on a
+rock with the gold crown close beside.
+
+"But do you know what they did to Peachey between two pine-trees? They
+crucified him, Sir, as Peachey's hand will show. They used wooden pegs
+for his hands and feet; but he didn't die. He hung there and screamed,
+and they took him down next day, and said it was a miracle that he
+wasn't dead. They took him down--poor old Peachey that hadn't done
+them any harm--that hadn't done them any--"
+
+He rocked to and fro and wept bitterly, wiping his eyes with the back
+of his scarred hands and moaning like a child for some ten minutes.
+
+"They was cruel enough to feed him up in the temple, because they said
+he was more of a God than old Daniel that was a man. Then they turned
+him out on the snow, and told him to go home, and Peachey came home in
+about a year, begging along the roads quite safe; for Daniel Dravot he
+walked before and said, 'Come along, Peachey. It's a big thing we're
+doing.' The mountains they danced at night, and the mountains they
+tried to fall on Peachey's head, but Dan he held up his hand, and
+Peachey came along bent double. He never let go of Dan's hand, and he
+never let go of Dan's head. They gave it to him as a present in the
+temple, to remind him not to come again; and though the crown was pure
+gold and Peachey was starving, never would Peachey sell the same. You
+know Dravot, Sir! You knew Right Worshipful Brother Dravot! Look at
+him now!"
+
+He fumbled in the mass of rags round his bent waist; brought out a
+black horsehair bag embroidered with silver thread; and shook
+therefrom on to my table--the dried, withered head of Daniel Dravot!
+The morning sun, that had long been paling the lamps, struck the red
+beard and blind sunken eyes; struck, too, a heavy circlet of gold
+studded with raw turquoises, that Carnehan placed tenderly on the
+battered temples.
+
+"You be'old now," said Carnehan, "the Emperor in his 'abit as he lived
+--the King of Kafiristan with his crown upon his head. Poor old Daniel
+that was a monarch once!"
+
+I shuddered, for, in spite of defacements manifold, I recognised the
+head of the man of Marwar Junction. Carnehan rose to go. I attempted
+to stop him. He was not fit to walk abroad. "Let me take away the
+whisky, and give me a little money," he gasped. "I was a King once.
+I'll go to the Deputy Commissioner and ask to set in the Poorhouse
+till I get my health. No, thank you, I can't wait till you get a
+carriage for me. I've urgent private affairs--in the south--at
+Marwar."
+
+He shambled out of the office and departed in the direction of the
+Deputy Commissioner's house. That day at noon I had occasion to go
+down the blinding-hot Mall, and I saw a crooked man crawling along the
+white dust of the roadside, his hat in his hand, quavering dolorously
+after the fashion of street-singers at Home. There was not a soul in
+sight, and he was out of all possible earshot of the houses. And he
+sang through his nose, turning his head from right to left:
+
+      "The Son of Man goes forth to war,
+            A golden crown to gain;
+       His blood-red banner streams afar--
+            Who follows in His train?"
+
+I waited to hear no more, but put the poor wretch into my carriage and
+drove him off to the nearest missionary for eventual transfer to the
+Asylum. He repeated the hymn twice while he was with me, whom he did
+not in the least recognise, and I left him singing it to the
+missionary.
+
+Two days later I inquired after his welfare of the Superintendent of
+the Asylum.
+
+"He was admitted suffering from sunstroke. He died early yesterday
+morning," said the Superintendent. "Is it true that he was half an
+hour bareheaded in the sun at midday?"
+
+"Yes," said I; "but do you happen to know if he had anything upon him
+by any chance when he died?"
+
+"Not to my knowledge," said the Superintendent.
+
+And there the matter rests.
+
+
+
+TAJIMA
+
+BY
+
+MISS MITFORD
+
+
+
+Once upon a time, a certain ronin, Tajima Shume by name, an able and
+well-read man, being on his travels to see the world, went up to
+Kiyoto by the Tokaido. [The road of the Eastern Sea, the famous
+highroad leading from Kiyoto to Yedo. The name is also used to
+indicate the provinces through which it runs.] One day, in the
+neighbourhood of Nagoya, in the province of Owari, he fell in with a
+wandering priest, with whom he entered into conversation. Finding that
+they were bound for the same place, they agreed to travel together,
+beguiling their weary way by pleasant talk on divers matters; and so
+by degrees, as they became more intimate, they began to speak without
+restraint about their private affairs; and the priest, trusting
+thoroughly in the honour of his companion, told him the object of his
+journey.
+
+"For some time past," said he, "I have nourished a wish that has
+engrossed all my thoughts; for I am bent on setting up a molten image
+in honour of Buddha; with this object I have wandered through various
+provinces collecting alms, and (who knows by what weary toil?) we have
+succeeded in amassing two hundred ounces of silver--enough, I trust,
+to erect a handsome bronze figure."
+
+What says the proverb? "He who bears a jewel in his bosom bears
+poison." Hardly had the ronin heard these words of the priest than an
+evil heart arose within him, and he thought to himself, "Man's life,
+from the womb to the grave, is made up of good and of ill luck. Here
+am I, nearly forty years old, a wanderer, without a calling, or even a
+hope of advancement in the world. To be sure, it seems a shame; yet if
+I could steal the money this priest is boasting about, I could live at
+ease for the rest of my days;" and so he began casting about how best
+he might compass his purpose. But the priest, far from guessing the
+drift of his comrade's thoughts, journeyed cheerfully on till they
+reached the town of Kuana. Here there is an arm of the sea, which is
+crossed in ferry-boats, that start as soon as some twenty or thirty
+passengers are gathered together; and in one of these boats the two
+travellers embarked. About half-way across, the priest was taken with
+a sudden necessity to go to the side of the boat; and the ronin,
+following him, tripped him up while no one was looking, and flung him
+into the sea. When the boatmen and passengers heard the splash, and
+saw the priest struggling in the water, they were afraid, and made
+every effort to save him; but the wind was fair, and the boat running
+swiftly under the bellying sails; so they were soon a few hundred
+yards off from the drowning man, who sank before the boat could be
+turned to rescue him.
+
+When he saw this, the ronin feigned the utmost grief and dismay, and
+said to his fellow-passengers, "This priest, whom we have just lost,
+was my cousin; he was going to Kiyoto, to visit the shrine of his
+patron; and as I happened to have business there as well, we settled
+to travel together. Now, alas! by this misfortune, my cousin is dead,
+and I am left alone."
+
+He spoke so feelingly, and wept so freely, that the passengers
+believed his story, and pitied and tried to comfort him. Then the
+ronin said to the boatmen:
+
+"We ought, by rights, to report this matter to the authorities; but as
+I am pressed for time, and the business might bring trouble on
+yourselves as well, perhaps we had better hush it up for the present;
+I will at once go on to Kiyoto and tell my cousin's patron, besides
+writing home about it. What think you, gentlemen?" added he, turning
+to the other travellers.
+
+They, of course, were only too glad to avoid any hindrance to their
+onward journey, and all with one voice agreed to what the ronin had
+proposed; and so the matter was settled. When, at length, they reached
+the shore, they left the boat, and every man went his way; but the
+ronin, overjoyed in his heart, took the wandering priest's luggage,
+and, putting it with his own, pursued his journey to Kiyoto.
+
+On reaching the capital, the ronin changed his name from Shume to
+Tokubei, and, giving up his position as a samurai, turned merchant,
+and traded with the dead man's money. Fortune favouring his
+speculations, he began to amass great wealth, and lived at his ease,
+denying himself nothing; and in course of time he married a wife, who
+bore him a child.
+
+Thus the days and months wore on, till one fine summer's night, some
+three years after the priest's death, Tokubei stepped out on the
+veranda of his house to enjoy the cool air and the beauty of the
+moonlight. Feeling dull and lonely, he began musing over all kinds of
+things, when on a sudden the deed of murder and theft, done so long
+ago, vividly recurred to his memory, and he thought to himself, "Here
+am I, grown rich and fat on the money I wantonly stole. Since then,
+all has gone well with me; yet, had I not been poor, I had never
+turned assassin nor thief. Woe betide me! what a pity it was!" and as
+he was revolving the matter in his mind, a feeling of remorse came
+over him, in spite of all he could do. While his conscience thus smote
+him, he suddenly, to his utter amazement, beheld the faint outline of
+a man standing near a fir-tree in the garden; on looking more
+attentively, he perceived that the man's whole body was thin and worn,
+and the eyes sunken and dim; and in that poor ghost that was before
+him he recognised the very priest whom he had thrown into the sea at
+Kuana. Chilled with horror, he looked again, and saw that the priest
+was smiling in scorn. He would have fled into the house, but the ghost
+stretched forth its withered arm, and, clutching the back of his neck,
+scowled at him with a vindictive glare and a hideous ghastliness of
+mien so unspeakably awful that any ordinary man would have swooned
+with fear. But Tokubei, tradesman though he was, had once been a
+soldier, and was not easily matched for daring; so he shook off the
+ghost, and, leaping into the room for his dirk, laid about him boldly
+enough; but, strike as he would, the spirit, fading into the air,
+eluded his blows, and suddenly reappeared only to vanish again; and
+from that time forth Tokubei knew no rest, and was haunted night and
+day.
+
+At length, undone by such ceaseless vexation, Tokubei fell ill, and
+kept muttering, "Oh, misery! misery! the wandering priest is coming to
+torture me!" Hearing his moans and the disturbance he made, the people
+in the house fancied he was mad, and called in a physician, who
+prescribed for him. But neither pill nor potion could cure Tokubei,
+whose strange frenzy soon became the talk of the whole neighbourhood.
+
+Now it chanced that the story reached the ears of a certain wandering
+priest who lodged in the next street. When he heard the particulars,
+this priest gravely shook his head as though he knew all about it, and
+sent a friend to Tokubei's house to say that a wandering priest,
+dwelling hard by, had heard of his illness, and, were it never so
+grievous, would undertake to heal it by means of his prayers; and
+Tokubei's wife, driven half wild by her husband's sickness, lost not a
+moment in sending for the priest and taking him into the sick man's
+room.
+
+But no sooner did Tokubei see the priest than he yelled out, "Help!
+help! Here is the wandering priest come to torment me again. Forgive!
+forgive!" and hiding his head under the coverlet, he lay quivering all
+over. Then the priest turned all present out of the room, put his
+mouth to the affrighted man's ear, and whispered:
+
+"Three years ago, at the Kuana ferry, you flung me into the water; and
+well you remember it."
+
+But Tokubei was speechless, and could only quake with fear.
+
+"Happily," continued the priest, "I had learned to swim and to dive as
+a boy; so I reached the shore, and, after wandering through many
+provinces, succeeded in setting up a bronze figure to Buddha, thus
+fulfilling the wish of my heart. On my journey homeward, I took a
+lodging in the next street, and there heard of your marvellous
+ailment. Thinking I could divine its cause, I came to see you, and am
+glad to find I was not mistaken. You have done a hateful deed; but am
+I not a priest, and have I not forsaken the things of this world, and
+would it not ill become me to bear malice? Repent, therefore, and
+abandon your evil ways. To see you do so I should esteem the height of
+happiness. Be of good cheer, now, and look me in the face, and you
+will see that I am really a living man, and no vengeful goblin come to
+torment you."
+
+Seeing he had no ghost to deal with, and overwhelmed by the priest's
+kindness, Tokubei burst into tears, and answered, "Indeed, indeed, I
+don't know what to say. In a fit of madness I was tempted to kill and
+rob you. Fortune befriended me ever after; but the richer I grew, the
+more keenly I felt how wicked I had been, and the more I foresaw that
+my victim's vengeance would some day overtake me. Haunted by this
+thought, I lost my nerve, till one night I beheld your spirit, and
+from that time fell ill. But how you managed to escape, and are still
+alive, is more than I can understand."
+
+"A guilty man," said the priest, with a smile, "shudders at the
+rustling of the wind or the chattering of a stork's beak; a murderer's
+conscience preys upon his mind till he sees what is not. Poverty
+drives a man to crimes which he repents of in his wealth. How true is
+the doctrine of Moshi [Mencius], that the heart of man, pure by
+nature, is corrupted by circumstances!"
+
+Thus he held forth; and Tokubei, who had long since repented of his
+crime, implored forgiveness, and gave him a large sum of money,
+saying, "Half of this is the amount I stole from you three years
+since; the other half I entreat you to accept as interest, or as a
+gift."
+
+The priest at first refused the money; but Tokubei insisted on his
+accepting it, and did all he could to detain him, but in vain; for the
+priest went on his way, and bestowed the money on the poor and needy.
+As for Tokubei himself, he soon shook off his disorder, and
+thenceforward lived at peace with all men, revered both at home and
+abroad, and ever intent on good and charitable deeds.
+
+
+
+A CHINESE GIRL GRADUATE
+
+BY
+
+R. K. DOUGLAS
+
+
+
+Who among the three hundred million sons of Han does not know the
+saying:
+
+      There's Paradise above, 't is true;
+      But here below we've Hang and Soo?
+            [Hangchow and Soochow]
+
+And though no one will deny the beauty of those far-famed cities, they
+cannot compare in grandeur of situation and boldness of features with
+many of the towns of the providence of the "Four Streams." Foremost
+among the favoured spots of this part of the empire is Mienchu, which,
+as its name implies, is celebrated for the silky bamboos which grow in
+its immediate neighbourhood. These form, however, only one of the
+features of its loveliness. Situated at the foot of a range of
+mountains which rise through all the gradations from rich and abundant
+verdure to the region of eternal snow, it lies embosomed in groves of
+beech, cypress, and bamboo, through the leafy screens of which rise
+the upturned yellow roofs of the temples and official residences,
+which dot the landscape like golden islands in an emerald sea; while
+beyond the wall hurries, between high and rugged banks, the tributary
+of the Fu River, which bears to the mighty waters of the Yangtsze-
+Kiang the goods and passengers which seek an outlet to the eastern
+provinces.
+
+The streets within the walls of the city are scenes of life and
+bustle, while in the suburbs stand the residences of those who can
+afford to live in peace and quiet, undisturbed by the clamour of the
+Les and Changs [i.e., the people. Le and Chang are the two commonest
+names in China.] of the town. There, in a situation which the Son of
+Heaven might envy, stands the official residence of Colonel Wen.
+Outwardly it has all the appearance of a grandee's palace, and within
+the massive boundary-walls which surround it, the courtyards, halls,
+grounds, summer-houses, and pavilions are not to be exceeded in
+grandeur and beauty. The office which had fallen to the lot of Colonel
+Wen was one of the most sought after in the province, and commonly
+only fell to officers of distinction. Though not without fame in the
+field, Colonel Wen's main claim to honour lay in the high degrees he
+had taken in the examinations. His literary acquirements gained him
+friends among the civil officers of the district, and the position he
+occupied was altogether one of exceptional dignity.
+
+Unfortunately, his first wife had died, leaving only a daughter to
+keep her memory alive; but at the time when our story opens, his
+second spouse, more kind than his first, had presented him with a
+much-desired son. The mother of this boy was one of those bright,
+pretty, gay creatures who commonly gain the affections of men much
+older than themselves. She sang in the most faultless falsetto, she
+played the guitar with taste and expression, and she danced with grace
+and agility. What wonder, then, that when the colonel returned from
+his tours of inspections and parades, weary with travel and dust, he
+found relief and relaxation in the joyous company of Hyacinth! And was
+she not also the mother of his son? Next to herself, there can be no
+question that this young gentleman held the chief place in the
+colonel's affections; while poor Jasmine, his daughter by his first
+venture, was left very much to her own resources. No one troubled
+themselves about what she did, and she was allowed, as she grew up, to
+follow her own pursuits and to give rein to her fancies without let or
+hindrance. From her earliest childhood one of her lonely amusements
+had been to dress as a boy, and so unchecked had the habit become that
+she gradually drifted into the character which she had chosen to
+assume. She even persuaded her father to let her go to the
+neighbouring boys' school. Her mother had died before the colonel had
+been posted to Mienchu, and among the people of that place, who had
+always seen her in boy's attire, she was regarded as an adopted son of
+her father. Hyacinth was only too glad to get her out of the way as
+much as possible, and so encouraged the idea of allowing her to learn
+to read and write in the company of their neighbours' urchins.
+
+Being bright and clever, she soon gained an intellectual lead among
+the boys, and her uncommon beauty, coupled with the magnetism
+belonging to her sex, secured for her a popularity which almost
+amounted to adoration. She was tall for her age, as are most young
+daughters of Han; and her perfectly oval face, almond-shaped eyes,
+willow-leaf eyebrows, small, well-shaped mouth, brilliantly white
+teeth, and raven-black hair, completed a face and figure which would
+have been noticeable anywhere. By the boys she was worshipped, and no
+undertaking was too difficult or too troublesome if it was to give
+pleasure to Tsunk'ing, or the "Young Noble," as she was called; for to
+have answered to the name of Jasmine would have been to proclaim her
+sex at once. Even the grim old master smiled at her through his horn
+spectacles as she entered the school-house of a morning, and any
+graceful turn in her poetry or scholarly diction in her prose was sure
+to win for her his unsparing praise. Many an evening he invited the
+"young noble" to his house to read over chapters from Confucius and
+the poems of Le Taipoh; and years afterward, when he died, among his
+most cherished papers were found odes signed by Tsunk'ing, in which
+there was a good deal about bending willows, light, flickering
+bamboos, horned moons, wild geese, the sound of a flute on a rainy
+day, and the pleasures of wine, in strict accord with the models set
+forth in the "Aids to Poetry-making" which are common in the land.
+
+If it had not been for the indifference with which she was treated in
+her home, the favour with which she was regarded abroad would have
+been most prejudicial to Jasmine; but any conceit which might have
+been engendered in the school-house was speedily counteracted when she
+got within the portals of the colonel's domain. Coming into the
+presence of her father and his wife, with all the incense of kindness,
+affection, and, it must be confessed, flattery, with which she was
+surrounded by her school-fellows, fresh about her, was like stepping
+into a cold bath. Wholesome and invigorating the change may have been,
+but it was very unpleasant, and Jasmine often longed to be alone to
+give vent to her feelings in tears.
+
+One deep consolation she had, however: she was a devoted student, and
+in the society of her books she forgot the callousness of her parents,
+and, living in imagination in the bygone annals of the empire, she was
+able to take part, as it were, in the great deeds which mark the past
+history of the state, and to enjoy the converse and society of the
+sages and poets of antiquity. When the time came that she had gained
+all the knowledge which the old schoolmaster could impart to her, she
+left the school, and formed a reading-party with two youths of her own
+age. These lads, by name Wei and Tu, had been her school-fellows, and
+were delighted at obtaining her promise to join them in their studies.
+So industriously were these pursued that the three friends succeeded
+in taking their B.A. degree at the next examination, and, encouraged
+by this success, determined to venture on a struggle for a still
+higher distinction.
+
+Though at one in their affection for Jasmine, Tu and Wei were unlike
+in everything else, which probably accounted for the friendship which
+existed between them. Wei was the more clever of the two. He wrote
+poetry with ease and fluency, and his essays were marked by
+correctness of style and aptness of quotation. But there was a want of
+strength in his character. He was exceedingly vain, and was always
+seeking to excite admiration among his companions. This unhappy
+failing made him very susceptible of adverse criticism, and at the
+same time extremely jealous of any one who might happen to excel him
+in any way. Tu, on the other hand, though not so intellectually
+favoured, had a rough kind of originality, which always secured for
+his exercises a respectful attention, and made him at all times an
+agreeable companion. Having no exaggerated ideas of his capabilities,
+he never strove to appear otherwise than he was, and being quite
+independent of the opinions of others, he was always natural. Thus he
+was one who was sought out by his friends, and was best esteemed by
+those whose esteem was best worth having. In outward appearance the
+youths were as different as their characters were diverse. Wei was
+decidedly good-looking, but of a kind of beauty which suggested
+neither rest nor sincerity; while in Tu's features, though there was
+less grace, the want was fully compensated for by the strength and
+honest firmness of his countenance.
+
+For both these young men Jasmine had a liking, but there was no
+question as to which she preferred. As she herself said, "Wei is
+pleasant enough as a companion, but if I had to look to one of them
+for an act of true friendship--or as a lover," she mentally added--"I
+should turn at once to Tu." It was one of her amusements to compare
+the young men in her mind, and one day when so occupied Tu suddenly
+looked up from his book and said to her:
+
+"What a pity it is that the gods have made us both men! If /I/ were a
+woman, the object of my heart would be to be your wife, and if /you/
+were a woman, there is nothing I should like better than to be your
+husband."
+
+Jasmine blushed up to the roots of her hair at having her own thoughts
+thus capped, as it were; but before she could answer, Wei broke in
+with:
+
+"What nonsense you talk! And why, I should like to know, should you be
+the only one the 'young noble' might choose, supposing he belonged to
+the other sex?"
+
+"You are both talking nonsense," said Jasmine, who had had time to
+recover her composure, "and remind me of my two old childless aunts,"
+she added, laughing, "who are always quarrelling about the names they
+would have given their children if the goddess Kwanyin had granted
+them any half a century ago. As a matter of act, we are three friends
+reading for our M.A. degrees, neither more nor less. And I will
+trouble you, my elder brother," she added, turning to Tu, "to explain
+to me what the poet means by the expression 'tuneful Tung' in the
+line:
+
+       'The greedy flames devour the tuneful Tung.' "
+
+A learned disquisition by Tu on the celebrated musician who recognised
+the sonorous qualities of a piece of Tung timber burning in the
+kitchen fire effectually diverted the conversation from the
+inconvenient direction it had taken, and shortly afterward Jasmine
+took her leave.
+
+Haunted by the thought of what had passed, she wandered on to the
+veranda of her archery pavilion, and while gazing half unconsciously
+heavenward her eyes were attracted by a hawk which flew past and
+alighted on a tree beyond the boundary-wall, and in front of the study
+she had lately left. In a restless and thoughtless mood, she took up
+her bow and arrow, and with unerring aim compassed the death of her
+victim. No sooner, however, had the hawk fallen, carrying the arrow
+with it, than she remembered that her name was inscribed on the shaft,
+and fearing lest it should be found by either Wei or Tu, she hurried
+round in the hope of recovering it. But she was too late. On
+approaching the study, she found Tu in the garden in front, examining
+the bird and arrow.
+
+"Look," he said, as he saw her coming, "what a good shot some one has
+made! and whoever it is, he has a due appreciation of his own skill.
+Listen to these lines which are scraped on the arrow:
+
+      'Do not lightly draw your bow;
+       But if you must, bring down your foe.' "
+
+Jasmine was glad enough to find that he had not discovered her name,
+and eagerly exchanged banter with him on the conceit of the owner of
+the arrow. But before she could recover it, Wei, who had heard the
+talking and laughter, joined them, and took the arrow out of Tu's hand
+to examine it. Just at that moment a messenger came to summon Tu to
+his father's presence, and he had no sooner gone than Wei exclaimed:
+
+"But see, here is the name of the mysterious owner of the arrow, and,
+as I live, it is a girl's name--Jasmine! Who, among the goddesses of
+heaven can Jasmine be?"
+
+"Oh, I will take the arrow then," said Jasmine. "It must belong to my
+sister. That is her name."
+
+"I did not know that you had a sister," said Wei.
+
+"Oh yes, I have," answered Jasmine, quite forgetful of the celebrated
+dictum of Confucius: "Be truthful." "She is just one year younger than
+I am," she added, thinking it well to be circumstantial.
+
+"Why have you never mentioned her?" asked Wei, with animation. "What
+is she like? Is she anything like you?"
+
+"She is the very image of me."
+
+"What! In height and features and ways?"
+
+"The very image, so that people have often said that if we changed
+clothes each might pass for the other."
+
+"What a good-looking girl she must be!" said Wei, laughing. "But,
+seriously, I have not, as you know, yet set up a household; and if
+your sister has not received bridal presents, I would beg to be
+allowed to invite her to enter my lowly habitation. What does my elder
+brother say to my proposal?"
+
+"I don't know what my sister would feel about it," said Jasmine. "I
+would never answer for a girl, if I lived to be as old as the God of
+Longevity."
+
+"Will you find out for me?"
+
+"Certainly I will. But remember, not a word must be mentioned on the
+subject to my father, or, in fact, to anybody, until I give you
+leave."
+
+"So long as my elder brother will undertake for me, I will promise
+anything," said the delighted Wei. "I already feel as though I were
+nine-tenths of the way to the abode of the phenix. Take this box of
+precious ointment to your sister as an earnest of my intentions, and I
+will keep the arrow as a token from her until she demands its return.
+I feel inclined to express myself in verse. May I?"
+
+"By all means," said Jasmine, laughing.
+
+Thus encouraged, Wei improvised as follows:
+
+     " 'T was sung of old that Lofu had no mate,
+      Though Che was willing; for no word was said.
+      At last an arrow like a herald came,
+      And now an honoured brother lends his aid."
+
+"Excellent," said Jasmine, laughing. "With such a poetic gift as you
+possess, you certainly deserve a better fate than befell Lofu."
+
+From this day the idea of marrying Jasmine's sister possessed the soul
+of Wei. But not a word did he say to Tu on the matter, for he was
+conscious that, as Tu was the first to pick up the arrow through which
+he had become acquainted with the existence of Jasmine's sister, his
+friend might possibly lay a claim to her hand. To Jasmine also the
+subject was a most absorbing one. She felt that she was becoming most
+unpleasantly involved in a risky matter, and that, if the time should
+ever come when she should have to make an explanation, she might in
+honour be compelled to marry Wei--a prospect which filled her with
+dismay. The turn events had taken had made her analyse her feelings
+more than she had ever done before, and the process made her doubly
+conscious of the depth of her affection for Tu. "A horse," she said to
+herself, "cannot carry two saddles, and a woman cannot marry more than
+one man." Wise as this saw was, it did not help her out of her
+difficulty, and she turned to the chapter of accidents, and determined
+to trust to time, that old disposer of events, to settle the matter.
+But Wei was inclined to be impatient, and Jasmine was obliged to
+resort to more of those departures from truth which circumstances had
+forced upon this generally very upright young lady.
+
+"I have consulted my father on the subject," she said to the expectant
+Wei, "and he insists on your waiting until the autumn examination is
+over. He has every confidence that you will then take your M.A.
+degree, and your marriage will, he hopes, put the coping-stone on your
+happiness and honour."
+
+"That is all very well," said Wei; "but autumn is a long time hence,
+and how do I know that your sister may not change her mind?"
+
+"Has not your younger brother undertaken to look after your interests,
+and cannot you trust him to do his best on your behalf?"
+
+"I can trust my elder brother with anything in the world. It is your
+sister that I am afraid of," said Wei. "But since you will undertake
+for her--"
+
+"No, no," said Jasmine, laughing, "I did not say that I would
+undertake for her. A man who answers for a woman deserves to have
+'fool' written on his forehead."
+
+"Well, at all events, I will be content to leave the matter in your
+hands," said Wei.
+
+At last the time of the autumn examination drew near, and Tu and Wei
+made preparations for their departure to the provincial capital. They
+were both bitterly disappointed when Jasmine announced that she was
+not going up that time. This determination was the result of a
+conference with her father. She had pointed out to the colonel that if
+she passed and took her M.A. degree she might be called upon to take
+office at any time, and that then she would be compelled to confess
+her sex; and as she was by no means disposed to give up the freedom
+which her doublet and hose conferred upon her, it was agreed between
+them that she should plead illness and not go up. Her two friends,
+therefore, went alone, and brilliant success attended their venture.
+They both passed with honours, and returned to Mienchu to receive the
+congratulations of their friends. Jasmine's delight was very genuine,
+more especially as regarded Tu, and the first evening was spent by the
+three students in joyous converse and in confident anticipation of the
+future. As Jasmine took leave of the two new M.A.'s, Wei followed her
+to the outer door and whispered at parting:
+
+"I am coming to-morrow to make my formal proposal to your sister."
+
+Jasmine had no time to answer, but went home full of anxious and
+disturbed thoughts, which were destined to take a more tragic turn
+than she had ever anticipated even in her most gloomy moments. The
+same cruel fate had also decreed that Wei's proposal was to be
+suspended, like Buddha, between heaven and earth. The blow fell upon
+him when he was attiring himself in the garments of his new degree, in
+preparation for his visit. He was in the act of tying his sash and
+appending it to his purse and trinkets, when Jasmine burst into the
+young men's study, looking deadly pale and bearing traces of acute
+mental distress on her usually bright and joyous countenance.
+
+"What is the matter?" cried Tu, with almost as much agitation as was
+shown by Jasmine. "Tell me what has happened."
+
+"Oh, my father, my poor father!" sobbed Jasmine.
+
+"What is the matter with your father? He is not dead, is he?" cried
+the young men in one breath.
+
+"No, it is not so bad as that," said Jasmine, "but a great and bitter
+misfortune has come upon us. As you know, some time ago my father had
+a quarrel with the military intendant, and that horrid man has, out of
+spite, brought charges against him for which he was carried off this
+morning to prison."
+
+The statement of her misery and the shame involved in it completely
+unnerved poor Jasmine, who, true to her inner sex, burst into tears
+and rocked herself to and fro in her grief. Tu and Wei, on their knees
+before her, tried to pour in words of consolation. With a lack of
+reason which might be excused under the circumstances, they vowed that
+her father was innocent before they knew the nature of the charges
+against him, and they pledged themselves to rest neither day nor night
+until they had rescued him from his difficulty. When, under the
+influence of their genuine sympathy, Jasmine recovered some composure,
+Tu begged her to tell him of what her father was accused.
+
+"The villain," said Jasmine, through her tears, "has dared to say that
+my father has made use of government taxes, has taken bribes for
+recommending men for promotion, has appropriated the soldiers' ration-
+money, and has been in league with highwaymen."
+
+"Is it possible?" said Tu, who was rather staggered by this long
+catalogue of crimes. "I should not have believed that any one could
+have ventured to have charged your honoured father with such things,
+least of all the intendant, who is notoriously possessed of an itching
+palm. But I tell you what we can do at once. Wei and I, being M.A.'s,
+have a right to call on the prefect, and it will be a real pleasure to
+us to exercise our new privilege for the first time in your service.
+We will urge him to inquire into the matter, and I cannot doubt that
+he will at once quash the proceedings."
+
+Unhappily, Tu's hopes were not realised. The prefect was very civil,
+but pointed out that, since a higher court had ordered the arrest of
+the colonel, he was powerless to interfere in the matter. Many were
+the consultations held by the three friends, and much personal relief
+Jasmine got from the support and sympathy of the young men. One hope
+yet remained to her: Tu and Wei were about to go to Peking for their
+doctor's degrees, and if they passed they might be able to bring such
+influence to bear as would secure the release of her father.
+
+"Let not the 'young noble' distress himself overmuch," said Wei to
+her, with some importance. "This affair will be engraven on our hearts
+and minds, and if we take our degrees we will use our utmost exertions
+to wipe away the injustice which has been done your father."
+
+"Unhappily," said the more practical Tu, "it is too plain that the
+examining magistrates are all in league to ruin him. But let our elder
+brother remain quietly at home, doing all he can to collect evidence
+in the colonel's favour, while we will do our best at the capital. If
+things turn out well with us there, our elder brother had better
+follow at once to assist us with his advice."
+
+Before the friends parted, Wei, whose own affairs were always his
+first consideration, took an opportunity of whispering to Jasmine,
+"Don't forget your honoured sister's promise, I beseech you. Whether
+we succeed or not, I shall ask for her in marriage on my return."
+
+"Under present circumstances, we must no longer consider the
+engagement," said Jasmine, shocked at his introducing the subject at
+such a moment," and the best thing that you can do is to forget all
+about it."
+
+The moment for the departure of the young men had come, and they had
+no time to say more. With bitter tears, the two youths took leave of
+the weeping Jasmine, who, as their carts disappeared in the distance,
+felt for the first time what it was to be alone in misery. She saw
+little of her stepmother in those days. That poor lady made herself so
+ill with unrestrained grief that she was quite incapable of rendering
+either help or advice. Fortunately the officials showed no disposition
+to proceed with the indictment, and by the judicious use of the money
+at her command Jasmine induced the prison authorities to make her
+father's confinement as little irksome as possible. She was allowed to
+see him at almost any time, and on one occasion, when he was enjoying
+her presence as in his prosperous days he had never expected to do, he
+remarked:
+
+"Since the officials are not proceeding with the business, I think my
+best plan will be to send a petition to Peking asking the Board of War
+to acquit me. But my difficulty is that I have no one whom I can send
+to look after the business."
+
+"Let /me/ go," said Jasmine. "When Tu and Wei were leaving, they
+begged me to follow them to consult as to the best means of helping
+you, and with them to depend on I have nothing to fear."
+
+"I quite believe that you are as capable of managing the matter as
+anybody," said her father, admiringly; "but Peking is a long way off,
+and I cannot bear to think of the things which might happen to you on
+the road."
+
+"From all time," answered Jasmine, "it has been considered the duty of
+a daughter to risk anything in the service of her father; and though
+the way is long, I shall have weapons to defend myself with against
+injury, and a clear conscience with which to answer any
+interrogatories which may be put to me. Besides, I will take our
+messenger, 'The Dragon,' and his wife with me. I will make her dress
+as a man--what fun it will be to see Mrs. Dragon's portly form in
+trousers, and gabardine! When that transformation is made, we shall be
+a party of three men. So, you see, she and I will have a man to
+protect us, and I shall have a woman to wait upon me; and if such a
+gallant company cannot travel from this to Peking in safety, I'll
+forswear boots and trousers and will retire into the harem for ever."
+
+"Well," said her father, laughing, "if you can arrange in that way, go
+by all means, and the sooner you start the sooner I hope you will be
+back."
+
+Delighted at having gained the approval of her father to her scheme,
+Jasmine quickly made the arrangements for her journey. On the morning
+of the day on which she was to start, the results of the doctors'
+examination at Peking reached Mienchu, and, to Jasmine's infinite
+delight, she found the names of Tu and Wei among the successful
+candidates. Armed with this good news, she hurried to the prison. All
+difficulties seemed to disappear like mist before the sun as she
+thought of the powerful advocates she now had at Peking.
+
+"Tu and Wei have passed," she said, as she rushed into her father's
+presence, "and now the end of our troubles is approaching."
+
+
+
+With impatient hope Jasmine took leave of her father, and started on
+her eventful journey. As evening drew on she entered the suburbs of
+Ch'engtu, the provincial capital, and sent "The Dragon" on to find a
+suitable inn for the couple of nights which she knew she would be
+compelled to spend in the city. "The Dragon" was successful in his
+search, and conducted Jasmine and his wife to a comfortable hostelry
+in one of the busiest parts of the town. Having refreshed herself with
+an excellent dinner, Jasmine was glad to rest from the fatigues and
+heat of the day in the cool courtyard into which her room opened.
+Fortune and builders had so arranged that a neighbouring house,
+towering above the inn, overlooked this restful spot, and one of the
+higher windows faced exactly the position which Jasmine had taken up.
+Such a fact would not, in ordinary circumstances, have troubled her in
+the least; but she had not been sitting long before she began to feel
+an extraordinary attraction toward the window. She did her best to
+look the other way, but she was often unconsciously impelled to glance
+up at the lattice. Once she fancied she saw the curtain move.
+Determined to verify her impression, she suddenly raised her eyes,
+after a prolonged contemplation of the pavement, and caught a
+momentary sight of a girl's face, which as instantly disappeared, but
+not before Jasmine had been able to recognise that it was one of
+exceptional beauty.
+
+"Now, if I were a young man," said she to herself, "I ought to feel my
+heart beat at the sight of such loveliness, and it would be my bounden
+duty to swear that I would win the owner of it in the teeth of
+dragons. But as my manhood goes no deeper than my outer garments, I
+can afford to sit here with a quiet pulse and a whole skin."
+
+The next day Jasmine was busily engaged in interviewing some officials
+in the interest of her father, and only reached the shelter of her inn
+toward evening. As she passed through the courtyard she instinctively
+looked up at the window, and again caught a glimpse of the vision of
+beauty which she had seen the evening before. "If she only knew,"
+thought Jasmine, "that I was such a one as herself, she would be less
+anxious to see me, and more likely to avoid me."
+
+While amusing herself at the thought of the fair watcher, the inn door
+opened, and a waiting-woman entered carrying a small box. As she
+approached Jasmine she bowed low, and with bated breath thus addressed
+her:
+
+"May every happiness be yours, sir. My young lady, Miss King, whose
+humble dwelling is the adjoining house, seeing that you are living in
+solitude, has sent me with this fruit and tea as a complimentary
+offering."
+
+So saying, she presented to Jasmine the box, which contained pears and
+a packet of scented tea.
+
+"To what am I indebted for this honour?" replied Jasmine; "I can claim
+no relationship with your lady, nor have I the honour of her
+acquaintance."
+
+"My young lady says," answered the waiting-woman, "that, among the
+myriads who come to this inn and the thousands who go from it, she has
+seen no one to equal your Excellency in form and feature. At sight of
+you she was confident that you came from a lofty and noble family, and
+having learned from your attendants that you are the son of a colonel,
+she ventured to send you these trifles to supplement the needy fare of
+this rude inn."
+
+"Tell me something about your young lady," said Jasmine, in a moment
+of idle curiosity.
+
+"My young lady," said the woman, "is the daughter of Mr. King, who was
+a vice-president of a lower court. Her father and mother having both
+visited the 'Yellow Springs' [Hades], she is now living with an aunt,
+who has been blessed by the God of Wealth, and whose main object in
+life is to find a husband whom her niece may be willing to marry. The
+young gentleman, my young lady's cousin, is one of the richest men in
+Ch'engtu. All the larger inns belong to him, and his profits are as
+boundless as the four seas. He is as anxious as his mother to find a
+suitable match for the young lady, and has promised that so soon as
+she can make a choice he will arrange the wedding."
+
+"I should have thought," said Jasmine, "that, being the owner of so
+much wealth and beauty, the young lady would have been besieged by
+suitors from all parts of the empire."
+
+"So she is," said the woman, "and from her window yonder she espies
+them, for they all put up at this inn. Hitherto she has made fun of
+them all, and describes their appearance and habits in the most
+amusing way. 'See this one,' says she, 'with his bachelor cap on and
+his new official clothes and awkward gait, looking for all the world
+like a barn-door fowl dressed up as a stork; or that one, with his
+round shoulders, monkey-face, and crooked legs;' and so she tells them
+off."
+
+"What does she say of me, I wonder?" said Jasmine, amused.
+
+"Of your Excellency she says that her comparisons fail her, and that
+she can only hope that the Fates who guided your jewelled chariot
+hitherward will not tantalise her by an empty vision, but will bind
+your ankles to hers with the red matrimonial cords."
+
+"How can I hope for such happiness?" said Jasmine, smiling. "But
+please to tell your young lady that, being only a guest at this inn, I
+have nothing worthy of her acceptance to offer in return for her
+bounteous gifts, and that I can only assure her of my boundless
+gratitude."
+
+With many bows, and with reiterated wishes for Jasmine's happiness and
+endless longevity, the woman took her leave.
+
+"Truly this young lady has formed a most perverted attachment," said
+Jasmine to herself. "She reminds me of the man in the fairy tale who
+fell in love with a shadow, and, so far as I can see, she is not
+likely to get any more satisfaction out of it than he did." So saying,
+she took up a pencil and scribbled the following lines on a scrap of
+paper:
+
+     "With thoughts as ardent as a quenchless thirst,
+            She sends me fragrant and most luscious fruit;
+      Without a blush she seeks a phenix guest [a bachelor]
+            Who dwells alone like case-enveloped lute."
+
+After this mental effort Jasmine went to bed. Nor had her interview
+with the waiting-woman made a sufficient impression on her mind to
+interfere in any way with her sleep. She was surprised, however, on
+coming into her sitting-room in the morning, to meet the same
+messenger, who, laden with a dish of hot eggs and a brew of tea,
+begged Jasmine to "deign to look down upon her offerings."
+
+"Many thanks," said Jasmine, "for your kind attention."
+
+"You are putting the saddle on the wrong horse," replied the woman.
+"In bringing you these I am but obeying the orders of Miss King, who
+herself made the tea of leaves from Pu-erh in Yunnan, and who with her
+own fair hands shelled the eggs."
+
+"Your young lady," answered Jasmine, "is as bountiful as she is kind.
+What return can I make her for her kindness to a stranger? Stay," she
+said, as the thought crossed her mind that the verses she had written
+the night before might prove a wholesome tonic for this effusive young
+lady, "I have a few verses which I will venture to ask her to accept."
+So saying, she took a piece of peach-blossom paper, on which she
+carefully copied the quatrain and handed it to the woman. "May I
+trouble you," said she, "to take this to your mistress?"
+
+"If," said Jasmine to herself as the woman took her departure, "Miss
+King is able to penetrate the meaning of my verses, she won't like
+them. Without saying so in so many words, I have told her with
+sufficient plainness that I will have nothing to say to her. But
+stupidity is a shield sent by Providence to protect the greater part
+of mankind from many evils; so perhaps she will escape."
+
+It certainly in this case served to shield Miss King from Jasmine's
+shafts. She was delighted at receiving the verses, and at once sat
+down to compose a quatrain to match Jasmine's in reply. With infinite
+labour she elaborated the following:
+
+     "Sung Yuh on th' eastern wall sat deep in thought,
+            And longed with P'e to pluck the fragrant fruit.
+      If all the well-known tunes be newly set,
+            What use to take again the half-burnt lute?"
+
+Having copied these on a piece of silk-woven paper, she sent them to
+Jasmine by her faithful attendant. On looking over the paper, Jasmine
+said, smiling, "What a clever young lady your mistress must be! These
+lines, though somewhat inconsequential, are incomparable."
+
+But, though Jasmine was partly inclined to treat the matter as a joke,
+she saw that there was a serious side to the affair, more especially
+as the colours under which she was sailing were so undeniably false.
+She knew well that for Sung Yuh should be read Miss King, and for P'e
+her own name; and she determined, therefore, to put an end to the
+philandering of Miss King, which, in her present state of mind, was
+doubly annoying to her.
+
+"I am deeply indebted to your young lady," she said, and then, being
+determined to make a plunge into the morass of untruthfulness, for a
+good end as she believed, added, "and, if I had love at my disposal, I
+should possibly venture to make advances toward the feathery peach [a
+nuptial emblem]; but let me confess to you that I have already taken
+to myself a wife. Had I the felicity of meeting Miss King before I
+committed myself in another direction, I might perhaps have been a
+happier man. But, after all, if this were so, my position is no worse
+than that of most other married men, for I never met one who was not
+occasionally inclined to cry, like the boys at 'toss cash,' 'Hark back
+and try again.' "
+
+"This will be sad news for my lady, for she has set her heart upon you
+ever since you first came to the inn; and when young misses take that
+sort of fancy and lose the objects of their love, they are as bad as
+children when forbidden their sugar-plums. But what's the use of
+talking to you about a young lady's feelings!" said the woman, with a
+vexed toss of her head; "I never knew a man who understood a woman
+yet."
+
+"I am extremely sorry for Miss King," said Jasmine, trying to suppress
+a smile. "As you wisely remark, a young lady is a sealed book to me,
+but I have always been told that their fancies are as variable as the
+shadow of the bamboo; and probably, therefore, though Miss King's sky
+may be overcast just now, the gloom will only make her enjoy
+to-morrow's sunshine all the more."
+
+The woman, who was evidently in a hurry to convey the news to her
+mistress, returned no answer to this last sally, but, with curtailed
+obeisance, took her departure.
+
+Her non-appearance the next morning confirmed Jasmine in the belief
+that her bold departure from truth on the previous evening had had its
+curative effect. The relief was great, for she had felt that these
+complications were becoming too frequent to be pleasant, and,
+reprehensible though it may appear, her relief was mingled with no
+sort of compassion for Miss King. Hers was not a nature to sympathise
+with such sudden and fierce attachments. Her affection for Tu had been
+the growth of many months, and she had no feeling in common with a
+young lady who could take a violent liking for a young man simply from
+seeing him taking his post-prandial ease. It was therefore with
+complete satisfaction that she left the inn in the course of the
+morning to pay her farewell visits to the governor and the judge of
+the province, who had taken an unusual interest in Colonel Wen's case
+since Jasmine had become his personal advocate. Both officials had
+promised to do all they could for the prisoner, and had loaded Jasmine
+with tokens of good will in the shape of strange and rare fruits and
+culinary delicacies. On this particular day the governor had invited
+her to the midday meal, and it was late in the afternoon before she
+found her way back to the inn.
+
+The following morning she rose early, intending to start before noon,
+and was stepping into the courtyard to give directions to "The
+Dragon," when, to her surprise, she was accosted by Miss King's
+servant, who, with a waggish smile and a cunning shake of the head,
+said:
+
+"How can one so young as your Excellency be such a proficient in the
+art of inventing flowers of the imagination?"
+
+"What do you mean?" said Jasmine.
+
+"Why, last night you told me you were married, and my poor young lady
+when she heard it was wrung with grief. But, recovering somewhat, she
+sent me to ask your servants whether what you had said was true or
+not, for she knows what she's about as well as most people, and they
+both with one voice assured me that, far from being married you had
+not even exchanged nuptial presents with anybody. You may imagine Miss
+King's delight when I took her this news. She at once asked her cousin
+to call upon you to make a formal offer of marriage, and she has now
+sent me to tell you that he will be here anon."
+
+Every one knows what it is to pass suddenly from a state of
+pleasurable high spirits into deep despondency, to exchange in an
+instant bright mental sunshine for cloud and gloom. All, therefore,
+must sympathise with poor Jasmine, who believing the road before her
+to be smooth and clear, on a sudden became thus aware of a most
+troublesome and difficult obstruction. She had scarcely finished
+calling down anathemas on the heads of "The Dragon" and his wife, and
+cursing her own folly for bringing them with her, than the inn doors
+were thrown open, and a servant appeared carrying a long red visiting-
+card inscribed with the name of the wealthy inn-proprietor. On the
+heels of this forerunner followed young Mr. King, who, with effusive
+bows, said, "I have ventured to pay my respects to your Excellency."
+
+Poor Jasmine was so upset by the whole affair that she lacked some of
+the courtesy that was habitual to her, and in her confusion very
+nearly seated her guest on her right hand. Fortunately this outrageous
+breach of etiquette was avoided, and the pair eventually arranged
+themselves in the canonical order.
+
+"This old son of Han," began Mr. King, "would not have dared to
+intrude himself upon your Excellency if it were not that he has a
+matter of great delicacy to discuss with you. He has a cousin, the
+daughter of Vice-President King, for whom for years he has been trying
+to find a suitable match. The position is peculiar, for the lady
+declares positively that she will not marry any one she has not seen
+and approved of. Until now she has not been able to find any one whom
+she would care to marry. But the presence of your Excellency has
+thrown a light across her path which has shown her the way to the
+plum-groves of matrimonial felicity."
+
+Here King paused, expecting some reply; but Jasmine was too absorbed
+in thought to speak, so Mr. King went on:
+
+"This old son of Han, hearing that your Excellency is still unmarried,
+has taken it upon himself to make a proposal of marriage to you, and
+to offer his cousin as your 'basket and broom.' [wife] His interview
+with you has, he may say, shown him the wisdom of his cousin's choice,
+and he cannot imagine a pair better suited for one another, or more
+likely to be happy, than your Excellency and his cousin."
+
+"I dare not be anything but straightforward with your worship," said
+Jasmine, "and I am grateful for the extraordinary affection your
+cousin has been pleased to bestow upon me; but I cannot forget that
+she belongs to a family which is entitled to pass through the gate of
+the palace [a family of distinction], and I fear that my rank is not
+sufficient for her. Besides, my father is at present under a cloud,
+and I am now on my way to Peking to try to release him from his
+difficulties. It is no time, therefore, for me to be binding myself
+with promises."
+
+"As to your Excellency's first objection," replied King, "you are
+already the wearer of a hat with a silken tassel, and a man need not
+be a prophet to foretell that in time to come any office, either civil
+or military, will be within your reach. No doubt, also, your business
+in Peking will be quickly brought to a satisfactory conclusion, and
+there can be no objection, therefore, to our settling the
+preliminaries now, and then, on your return from the capital, we can
+celebrate the wedding. This will give rest and composure to my
+cousin's mind, which is now like a disturbed sea, and will not
+interfere, I venture to think, with the affair which calls you to
+Peking."
+
+As King proceeded, Jasmine felt that her difficulties were on the
+increase. It was impossible that she should explain her position in
+full, and she had no sufficient reason at hand to give for rejecting
+the proposal made her, though, as the same time, her annoyance was not
+small at having such a matter forced upon her at a moment when her
+mind was filled with anxieties. "Then," she thought to herself, "there
+is ahead of me that explanation which must inevitably come with Wei;
+so that, altogether, if it were not for the deeply rooted conviction
+which I have that Tu will be mine at last, when he knows what I really
+am, life would not be worth having. As for this inn-proprietor, if he
+has so little delicacy as to push his cousin upon me at this crisis, I
+need not have any compunction regarding him; so perhaps my easiest way
+of getting out of the present hobble will be to accept his proposal
+and to present the box of precious ointment handed me by Wei for my
+sister to this ogling love-sick girl." So turning to King, she said:
+
+"Since you, sir, and your cousin have honoured me with your regard, I
+dare not altogether decline your proposal, and I would therefore beg
+you, sir, to hand this," she added, producing the box of ointment, "to
+your honourable cousin, as a token of the bond between us, and to
+convey to her my promise that, if I don't marry her, I will never
+marry another lady."
+
+Mr. King, with the greatest delight, received the box, and handing it
+to the waiting-woman, who stood expectant by, bade her carry it to her
+mistress, with the news of the engagement. Jasmine now hoped that her
+immediate troubles were over, but King insisted on celebrating the
+event by a feast, and it was not until late in the afternoon that she
+succeeded in making a start. Once on the road, her anxiety to reach
+Peking was such that she travelled night and day, "feeding on wind and
+lodging in water." Nor did she rest until she reached a hotel within
+the Hata Gate of the capital.
+
+
+
+Jasmine's solitary journey had given her abundant time for reflection,
+and for the first time she had set herself seriously to consider her
+position. She recognised that she had hitherto followed only the
+impulses of the moment, of which the main one had been the desire to
+escape complications by the wholesale sacrifice of truth; and she
+acknowledged to herself that, if justice were evenly dealt out, there
+must be a Nemesis in store for her which would bring distress and
+possibly disaster upon her. In her calmer moments she felt an
+instinctive foreboding that she was approaching a crisis in her fate,
+and it was with mixed feelings, therefore, that on the morning after
+her arrival she prepared to visit Tu and Wei, who were as yet ignorant
+of her presence.
+
+She dressed herself with more than usual care for the occasion,
+choosing to attire herself in a blue silk robe and a mauve satin
+jacket which Tu had once admired, topped by a brand-new cap.
+Altogether her appearance as she passed through the streets justified
+the remark made by a passerby: "A pretty youngster, and more like a
+maiden of eighteen than a man."
+
+The hostelry at which Tu and Wei had taken up their abode was an inn
+befitting the dignity of such distinguished scholars. On inquiring at
+the door, Jasmine was ushered by a servant through a courtyard to an
+inner enclosure, where, under the grateful shade of a wide-spreading
+cotton-tree, Tu was reclining at his ease. Jasmine's delight at
+meeting her friend was only equalled by the pleasure with which Tu
+greeted her. In his strong and gracious presence she became conscious
+that she was released from the absorbing care which had haunted her,
+and her soul leaped out in new freedom as she asked and answered
+questions of her friend. Each had much to say, and it was not for some
+time, when an occasional reference brought his name forward that
+Jasmine noticed the absence of Wei. When she did, she asked after him.
+
+"He left this some days ago," said Tu, "having some special business
+which called for his presence at home. He did not tell me what it was,
+but doubtless it was something of importance." Jasmine said nothing,
+but felt pretty certain in her mind as to the object of his hasty
+return.
+
+Tu, attributing her silence to a reflection on Wei for having left the
+capital before her father's affair was settled, hastened to add:
+
+"He was very helpful in the matter of your honoured father's
+difficulty, and only left when he thought he could not do any more."
+
+"How do matters stand now?" asked Jasmine, eagerly.
+
+"We have posted a memorial at the palace gate," said Tu, "and have
+arranged that it shall reach the right quarter. Fortunately, also, I
+have an acquaintance in the Board of War who has undertaken to do all
+he can in that direction, and promises an answer in a few days."
+
+"I have brought with me," said Jasmine, "a petition prepared by my
+father. What do you think about presenting it?"
+
+"At present I believe that it would only do harm. A superabundance of
+memorials is as bad as none at all. Beyond a certain point, they only
+irritate officials."
+
+"Very well," said Jasmine; "I am quite content to leave the conduct of
+affairs in your hands."
+
+"Well then," said Tu, "that being understood, I propose that you
+should move your things over to this inn. There is Wei's room at your
+disposal, and your constant presence here will be balm to my lonely
+spirit. At the Hata Gate you are almost as remote as if you were in
+our study at Mienchu."
+
+Jasmine was at first startled by this proposal. Though she had been
+constantly in the company of Tu, she had never lived under the same
+roof with him, and she at once recognised that there might be
+difficulties in the way of her keeping her secret if she were to be
+constantly under the eyes of her friend. But she had been so long
+accustomed to yield to the present circumstances, and was so confident
+that Fortune, which, with some slight irregularities, had always stood
+her friend, would not desert her on the present occasion, that she
+gave way.
+
+"By all means," she said. "I will go back to my inn, and bring my
+things at once. This writing-case I will leave here. I brought it
+because it contains my father's petition."
+
+So saying, she took her leave, and Tu retired to his easy-chair under
+the cotton-tree. But the demon of curiosity was abroad, and alighting
+on the arm of Tu's chair, whispered in his ear that it might be well
+if he ran his eye over Colonel Wen's petition to see if there was any
+argument in it which he had omitted in his statement to the Board of
+War. At first, Tu, whose nature was the reverse of inquisitive,
+declined to listen to these promptings, but so persistent did they
+become that he at last put down his book--"The Spring and Autumn
+Annals"--and, seating himself, at the sitting-room table, opened the
+writing-case so innocently left by Jasmine. On the top were a number
+of red visiting-cards bearing the inscription, in black, of Wen
+Tsunk'ing, and beneath these was the petition. Carefully Tu read it
+through, and passed mental eulogies on it as he proceeded. The colonel
+had put his case skilfully, but Tu had no difficulty in recognising
+Jasmine's hand, both in the composition of the document and in the
+penmanship. "If my attempt," he thought, "does not succeed, we will
+try what this will do." He was on the point of returning it to its
+resting-place, when he saw another document in Jasmine's handwriting
+lying by it. This was evidently a formal document, probably connected,
+as he thought, with the colonel's case, and he therefore unfolded it
+and read as follows:
+
+"The faithful maiden, Miss Wen of Mienchu Hien, with burning incense
+reverently prays the God of War to release her father from his present
+difficulties, and speedily to restore peace to her own soul by
+nullifying, in accordance with her desire, the engagement of the
+bamboo arrow and the contract of the box of precious ointment. A
+respectful petition."
+
+As Tu read on, surprise and astonishment took possession of his
+countenance. A second time he read it through, and then, throwing
+himself back in his chair, broke out into a fit of laughter.
+
+"So," he said to himself, "I have allowed myself to be deceived by a
+young girl all these years. And yet not altogether deceived," he
+added, trying to find an excuse for himself; "for I have often fancied
+that there was the savour of a woman about the 'young noble.' I hope
+she is not one of those heaven-born genii who appear on earth to
+plague men, and who, just when they have aroused the affections they
+wished to excite, ascend through the air and leave their lovers
+mourning."
+
+Just at this moment the door opened, and Jasmine entered, looking more
+lovely than ever, with the flush begotten by exercise on her
+beautifully moulded cheeks. At sight of her Tu again burst out
+laughing, to Jasmine's not unnatural surprise, who, thinking that
+there must be something wrong with her dress, looked herself up and
+down, to the increasing amusement of Tu.
+
+"So," said he at last, "you deceitful little hussy, you have been
+deceiving me all these years by passing yourself off as a man, when in
+reality you are a girl."
+
+Overcome with confusion, Jasmine hung her head, and murmured:
+
+"Who has betrayed me?"
+
+"You have betrayed yourself," said Tu, holding up the incriminating
+document; "and here we have the story of the arrow with which you shot
+the hawk, but what the box of precious ointment means I don't know."
+
+Confronted with this overwhelming evidence, poor Jasmine remained
+speechless, and dared not even lift her eyes to glance at Tu. That
+young man, seeing her distress, and being in no wise possessed by the
+scorn which he had put into his tone, crossed over to her and gently
+led her to a seat by him.
+
+"Do you remember," he said, in so altered a voice that Jasmine's heart
+ceased to throb as if it wished to force an opening through the finely
+formed bosom which enclosed it, "on one occasion in our study at home
+I wished that you were a woman that you might become my wife? Little
+did I think that my wish might be gratified. Now it is, and I beseech
+you to let us join our lives in one, and seek the happiness of the
+gods in each other's perpetual presence."
+
+But, as if suddenly recollecting herself, Jasmine withdrew her hand
+from his, and, standing up before him with quivering lip and eyes full
+of tears, said:
+
+"No. It can never be."
+
+"Why not?" said Tu, in alarmed surprise.
+
+"Because I am bound to Wei."
+
+"What! Does Wei know your secret?"
+
+"No. But do you remember when I shot that arrow in front of your
+study?"
+
+"Perfectly," said Tu. "But what has that to do with it?"
+
+"Why, Wei discovered my name on the shaft, and I, to keep my secret,
+told him that it was my sister's name. He then wanted to marry my
+sister, and I undertook, fool that I was, to arrange it for him. Now I
+shall be obliged to confess the truth, and he will have a right to
+claim me instead of my supposed sister."
+
+"But," said Tu, "I have a prior right to that of Wei, for it was I who
+found the arrow. And in this matter I shall be ready to outface him at
+all hazards. But," he added, "Wei, I am sure, is not the man to take
+an unfair advantage of you."
+
+"Do you really think so?" asked Jasmine.
+
+"Certainly I do," said Tu.
+
+"Then--then--I shall be--very glad," said poor Jasmine, hesitatingly,
+overcome with bashfulness, but full of joy.
+
+At which gracious consent Tu recovered the hand which had been
+withdrawn from his, and Jasmine sank again into the chair at his side.
+
+"But, Tu, dear," she said, after a pause, "there is something else
+that I must tell you before I can feel that my confessions are over."
+
+"What! You have not engaged yourself to any one else, have you?" said
+Tu, laughing.
+
+"Yes, I have," she replied, with a smile; and she then gave her lover
+a full and particular account of how Mr. King had proposed to her on
+behalf of his cousin, and how she had accepted her.
+
+"How could you frame your lips to utter such untruths?" said Tu, half
+laughing and half in earnest.
+
+"O Tu, falsehood is so easy and truth so difficult sometimes. But I
+feel that I have been very, very wicked," said poor Jasmine, covering
+her face with her hands.
+
+"Well, you certainly have got yourself into a pretty hobble. So far as
+I can make out, you are at the present moment engaged to one young
+lady and two young men."
+
+The situation, thus expressed, was so comical that Jasmine could not
+refrain from laughing through her tears; but, after a somewhat
+lengthened consultation with her lover, her face recovered its wonted
+serenity, and round it hovered a halo of happiness which added light
+and beauty to every feature. There is something particularly
+entrancing in receiving the first confidences of a pure and loving
+soul. So Tu thought on this occasion, and while Jasmine was pouring
+the most secret workings of her inmost being into his ear, those lines
+of the poet of the Sung dynasty came irresistibly into his mind:
+
+     'T is sweet to see the flowers woo the sun,
+            To watch the quaint wiles of the cooing dove,
+      But sweeter far to hear the dulcet tones
+            Of her one loves confessing her great love.
+
+But there is an end to everything, even to the "Confucian Analects,"
+and so there was also to this lovers' colloquy. For just as Jasmine
+was explaining, for the twentieth time, the origin and basis of her
+love for Tu, a waiter entered to announce the arrival of her luggage.
+
+"I don't know quite," said Tu, "where we are to put your two men. But,
+by-the-bye," he added, as the thought struck him, "did you really
+travel all the way in the company of these two men only?"
+
+"O Tu," said Jasmine, laughing, "I have something else to confess to
+you."
+
+"What! another lover?" said Tu, affecting horror and surprise.
+
+"No; not another lover, but another woman. The short, stout one is a
+woman, and came as my maid. She is the wife of 'The Dragon.' "
+
+"Well, now have you told me all? For I am getting so confused about
+the people you have transformed from women to men, that I shall have
+doubts about my own sex next."
+
+"Yes, Tu, dear; now you know all," said Jasmine, laughing. But not all
+the good news which was in store for him, for scarcely had Jasmine
+done speaking when a letter arrived from his friend in the Board of
+War, who wrote to say that he had succeeded in getting the military
+intendant of Mienchu transferred to a post in the province of Kwangsi,
+and that the departure of this noxious official would mean the release
+of the colonel, as he alone was the colonel's accuser. This news added
+one more chord of joy which had been making harmony in Jasmine's heart
+for some hours, and readily she agreed with Tu that they should set
+off homeward on the following morning.
+
+With no such adventure as that which had attended Jasmine's journey to
+the capital, they reached Mienchu, and, to their delight, were
+received by the colonel in his own yamun. After congratulating him on
+his release, which Jasmine took care he should understand was due
+entirely to Tu's exertions, she gave him a full account of her various
+experiences on the road and at the capital.
+
+"It is like a story out of a book of marvels," said her father, "and
+even now you have not exhausted all the necessary explanations. For,
+since my release, your friend Wei has been here to ask for my daughter
+in marriage. From some questions I put to him, he is evidently unaware
+that you are my only daughter, and I therefore put him off and told
+him to wait until you returned. He is in a very impatient state, and,
+no doubt, will be over shortly."
+
+Nor was the colonel wrong, for almost immediately Wei was announced,
+who, after expressing the genuine pleasure he felt at seeing Jasmine
+again, began at once on the subject which filled his mind.
+
+"I am so glad," he said, "to have this opportunity of asking you to
+explain matters. At present I am completely nonplussed. On my return
+from Peking I inquired of one of your father's servants about his
+daughter. 'He has not got one,' quoth the man. I went to another, and
+he said, 'You mean the "young noble," I suppose.' 'No, I don't,' I
+said; 'I mean his sister.' 'Well, that is the only daughter I know
+of,' said he. Then I went to your father, and all I could get out of
+him was, 'Wait until the "young noble" comes home.' Please tell me
+what all this means."
+
+"Your great desire is to marry a beautiful and accomplished girl, is
+it not?" said Jasmine.
+
+"That certainly is my wish," said Wei.
+
+"Well then," said Jasmine, "I can assure you that your betrothal
+present is in the hand of such a one, and a girl whom to look at is to
+love."
+
+"That may be," said Wei, "But my wish is to marry your sister."
+
+"Will you go and talk to Tu about it?" said Jasmine, who felt that the
+subject was becoming too difficult for her, and whose confidence in
+Tu's wisdom was unbounded, "and he will explain it all to you."
+
+Even Tu, however, found it somewhat difficult to explain Jasmine's
+sphinx-like mysteries, and on certain points Wei showed a disposition
+to be anything but satisfied. Jasmine's engagement to Tu implied his
+rejection, and he was disposed to be splenetic and disagreeable about
+it. His pride was touched, and in his irritation he was inclined to
+impute treachery to his friend and deceit to Jasmine. To the first
+charge Tu had a ready answer, but the second was all the more annoying
+because there was some truth in it. However, Tu was not in the humour
+to quarrel, and being determined to seek peace and ensue it, he
+overlooked Wei's innuendos and made out the best case he could for his
+bride. On Miss King's beauty, virtues, and ability he enlarged with a
+wealth of diction and power of imagination which astonished himself,
+and Jasmine also, to whom he afterward repeated the conversation.
+"Why, Tu, dear," said that artless maiden, "how can you know all this
+about Miss King? You have never seen her, and I am sure I never told
+you half of all this."
+
+"Don't ask questions," said the enraptured Tu. "Let it be enough for
+you to know that Wei is as eager for the possession of Miss King as he
+was for your sister, and that he has promised to be my best man at our
+wedding to-morrow."
+
+And Wei was as good as his word. With every regard to ceremony and
+ancient usage, the marriage of Tu and Jasmine was celebrated in the
+presence of relatives and friends, who, attracted by the novelty of
+the antecedent circumstances, came from all parts of the country to
+witness the nuptials. By Tu's especial instructions also a prominence
+was allowed to Wei, which gratified his vanity and smoothed down the
+ruffled feathers of his conceit.
+
+Jasmine thought that no time should be lost in reducing Miss King to
+the same spirit of acquiescence to which Wei had been brought, and on
+the evening of her wedding-day she broached the subject to Tu.
+
+"I shall not feel, Tu, dear," she said, "that I have gained absolution
+for my many deceptions until that very forward Miss King has been
+talked over into marrying Wei; and I insist, therefore," she added,
+with an amount of hesitancy which reduced the demand to the level of a
+plaintive appeal, "that we start to-morrow for Ch'engtu to see the
+young woman."
+
+"Ho! ho!" replied Tu, intensely amused at her attempted bravado.
+"These are brave words, and I suppose that I must humbly register your
+decrees."
+
+"O Tu, you know what I mean. You know that, like a child who takes a
+delight in conquering toy armies, I love to fancy that I can command
+so strong a man as you are. But, Tu, if you knew how absolutely I rely
+on your judgment, you would humour my folly and say yes."
+
+There was a subtle incense of love and flattery about this appeal
+which, backed as it was by a look of tenderness and beauty, made it
+irresistible; and the arrangements for the journey were made in strict
+accordance with Jasmine's wishes.
+
+On arriving at the inn which was so full of chastening memories to
+Jasmine, Tu sent his card to Mr. King, who, flattered by the attention
+paid him by so eminent a scholar, cordially invited Tu to his house.
+
+"To what," he said, as Tu, responding to his invitation, entered his
+reception-hall, "am I to attribute the honour of receiving your
+illustrious steps in my mean apartments?"
+
+"I have heard," said Tu, "that the beautiful Miss King is your
+Excellency's cousin, and having a friend who is desirous of gaining
+her hand, I have come to plead on his behalf."
+
+"I regret to say," replied King, "that your Excellency has come too
+late, as she has already received an engagement token from a Mr. Wen,
+who passed here lately on his way to Peking."
+
+"Mr. Wen is a friend of mine also," said Tu, "and it was because I
+knew that his troth was already plighted that I ventured to come on
+behalf of him of whom I have spoken."
+
+"Mr. Wen," said King, "is a gentleman and a scholar, and having given
+a betrothal present, he is certain to communicate with us direct in
+case of any difficulty."
+
+"Will you, old gentleman," [a term of respect] said Tu, producing the
+lines which Miss King had sent Jasmine, "just cast your eyes over
+these verses, written to Wen by your cousin? Feeling most regretfully
+that he was unable to fulfil his engagement, Wen gave these to me as a
+testimony of the truth of what I now tell you."
+
+King took the paper handed him by Tu, and recognised at a glance his
+cousin's handwriting.
+
+"Alas!" he said, "Mr Wen told us he was engaged, but, not believing
+him, I urged him to consent to marry my cousin. If you will excuse me,
+sir," he added, "I will consult with the lady as to what should be
+done."
+
+After a short absence he returned.
+
+"My cousin is of the opinion," he said, "that she cannot enter into
+any new engagement until Mr. Wen has come here himself and received
+back the betrothal present which he gave her on parting."
+
+"I dare not deceive you, old gentleman, and will tell you at once that
+that betrothal present was not Wen's but was my unworthy friend Wei's,
+and came into Wen's possession in a way that I need not now explain."
+
+"Still," said King, "my cousin thinks Mr. Wen should present himself
+here in person and tell his own story; and I must say that I am of her
+opinion."
+
+"It is quite impossible that Mr. Wen should return here," replied Tu;
+"but my 'stupid thorn' [wife] is in the adjoining hostelry, and would
+be most happy to explain fully to Miss King Wen's entire inability to
+play the part of a husband to her."
+
+"If your honourable consort would meet my cousin, she, I am sure, will
+be glad to talk the matter over with her."
+
+With Tu's permission, Miss King's maid was sent to the inn to invite
+Jasmine to call on her mistress. The maid, who was the same who had
+acted as Miss King's messenger on the former occasion, glanced long
+and earnestly at Jasmine. Her features were familiar to her, but she
+could not associate them with any lady of her acquaintance. As she
+conducted her to Miss King's apartments, she watched her stealthily,
+and became more and more puzzled by her appearance. Miss King received
+her with civility, and after exchanging wishes that each might be
+granted ten thousand blessings, Jasmine said, smiling:
+
+"Do you recognise Mr. Wen?"
+
+Miss King looked at her, and seeing in her a likeness to her beloved,
+said:
+
+"What relation are you to him, lady?"
+
+"I am his very self!" said Jasmine.
+
+Miss King opened her eyes wide at this startling announcement, and
+gazed earnestly at her.
+
+"/Haiyah!/" cried her maid, clapping her hands, "I thought there was a
+wonderful likeness between the lady and Mr. Wen. But who would have
+thought that she was he?"
+
+"But what made you disguise yourself in that fashion?" asked Miss
+King, in an abashed and somewhat vexed tone.
+
+"My father was in difficulties," said Jasmine, "and as it was
+necessary that I should go to Peking to plead for him, I dressed as a
+man for the convenience of travel. You will remember that in the first
+instance I declined your flattering overtures, but when I found that
+you persisted in your proposal, not being able to explain the truth, I
+thought the best thing to do was to hand you my friend's betrothal
+present which I had with me, intending to return and explain matters.
+And you will admit that in one thing I was truthful."
+
+"What was that?" asked the maid.
+
+"Why," answered Jasmine, "I said that if I did not marry your lady I
+would never marry any woman."
+
+"Well, yes," said the maid, laughing, "you have kept your faith
+royally there."
+
+"The friend I speak of," continued Jasmine, "has now taken his
+doctor's degree, and this stupid husband and wife have come from
+Mienchu to make you a proposal on his behalf."
+
+Miss King was not one who could readily take in an entirely new and
+startling idea, and she sat with a half-dazed look, staring at Jasmine
+without uttering a word. If it had not been for the maid, the
+conversation would have ceased; but that young woman was determined to
+probe the matter to the bottom.
+
+"You have not told us," she said, "the gentleman's name. And will you
+explain why you call him your friend? How could you be on terms of
+friendship with him?"
+
+"From my childhood," said Jasmine, "I have always dressed as a boy. I
+went to a boy's school--"
+
+"/Haiyah!/" interjected the maid.
+
+"And afterward I joined my husband and this gentleman, Mr. Wei, in a
+reading-party."
+
+"Didn't they discover your secret?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Never?"
+
+"Never."
+
+"That's odd," said the maid. "But will you tell us something about
+this Mr. Wei?"
+
+Upon this, Jasmine launched out in a glowing eulogy upon her friend.
+She expatiated with fervour on his youth, good looks, learning, and
+prospects, and with such effect did she speak that Miss King, who
+began to take in the situation, ended by accepting cordially Jasmine's
+proposal.
+
+"And now, lady, you must stay and dine with me," said Miss King, when
+the bargain was struck, "while my cousin entertains your husband in
+the hall."
+
+At this meal the beginning of a friendship was formed between the two
+ladies which lasted ever afterward, though it was somewhat unevenly
+balanced. Jasmine's stronger nature felt compassion mingled with
+liking for the pretty doll-like Miss King, while the young lady
+entertained the profoundest admiration for her guest.
+
+There was nothing to delay the fulfilment of the engagement thus
+happily arranged, and at the next full moon Miss King had an
+opportunity of comparing her bridegroom with the picture which Jasmine
+had drawn of him.
+
+Scholars are plentiful in China, but it was plainly impossible that
+men of such distinguished learning as Tu and Wei should be left among
+the unemployed, and almost immediately after their marriage they were
+appointed to important posts in the empire. Tu rose rapidly to the
+highest rank, and died, at a good old age, viceroy of the metropolitan
+province and senior guardian to the heir apparent. Wei was not so
+supremely fortunate, but then, as Tu used to say, "he had not a
+Jasmine to help him."
+
+
+
+THE REVENGE OF HER RACE
+
+BY
+
+MARY BEAUMONT
+
+
+
+The low hedge, where the creepers climbed, divided the lawn and its
+magnificent Wellingtonias from the meadow. There was little grass to
+be seen, for it was at this time one vast profusion of delicate ixias
+of every bright and tender shade.
+
+The evening was still, and the air heavy with scent. In a room opening
+upon the veranda wreathed with white-and-scarlet passion-flowers,
+where she could see the garden and the meadow, and, beyond all, the
+Mountain Beautiful, lay a sick woman. Her dark face was lovely as an
+autumn leaf is lovely--hectic with the passing life. Her eyes wandered
+to the upper snows of the mountain, from time to time resting upon the
+brown-haired English girl who sat on a low stool by her side, holding
+the frail hand in her cool, firm clasp.
+
+The invalid was speaking; her voice was curiously sweet, and there was
+a peculiarity about the "s," and an occasional turn of the sentence,
+which told the listener that her English was an acquired language.
+
+"I am glad he is not here," she said slowly. "I do not want him to
+have pain."
+
+"But perhaps, Mrs. Denison, you will be much better in a day or two,
+and able to welcome him when he comes back."
+
+"No, I shall not be here when he comes back, and it is just as it
+should be. I asked him to turn round as he left the garden, and I
+could see him, oh, so well! He looked kind and so beautiful, and he
+waved to me his hand. Now he will come back, and he will be sad. He
+did not want to leave me, but the governor sent for him. He will be
+sad, and he will remember that I loved him, and some day he will be
+glad again." She smiled into the troubled face near her.
+
+The girl stroked the thick dark hair lovingly.
+
+"Don't," she implored; "it hurts me. You are better to-night, and the
+children are coming in." Mrs. Denison closed her eyes, and with her
+left hand she covered her face.
+
+"No, not the children," she whispered, "not my darlings. I cannot bear
+it. I must see them no more." She pressed her companion's hand with a
+sudden close pressure. "But you will help them, Alice; you will make
+them English like you--like him. We will not pretend to-night; it is
+not long that I shall speak to you. I ask you to promise me to help
+them to be English."
+
+"Dear," the girl urged, "they are such a delicious mixture of England
+and New Zealand--prettier, sweeter than any mere English child could
+ever be. They are enchanting."
+
+But into the dying woman's eyes leaped an eager flame.
+
+"They must all be English, no Maori!" she cried. A violent fit of
+coughing interrupted her, and when the paroxysm was over she was too
+exhausted to speak. The English nurse, Mrs. Bentley, an elderly
+Yorkshire woman, who had been with Mrs. Denison since her first baby
+came six years ago, and who had, in fact, been Horace Denison's own
+nurse-maid, came in and sent the agitated girl into the garden. "For
+you haven't had a breath of fresh air to-day," she said.
+
+At the door Alice turned. The large eyes were resting upon her with an
+intent and solemn regard, in which lay a message. "What was it?" she
+thought, as she passed through the wide hall sweet with flowers. "She
+wanted to say something; I am sure she did. To-morrow I will ask her."
+But before the morrow came she knew. Mrs. Dennison had said /good-
+bye/.
+
+The funeral was over. Mr. Denison, who had looked unaccountably ill
+and weary for months, had been sent home by Mr. Danby for at least a
+year's change and rest, and the doctor's young sister had yielded to
+various pressure, and promised to stay with the children until he
+returned. There was every reason for it. She had loved and been loved
+by the gentle Maori mother; she delighted in the dark beauty and
+sweetness of the children. And they, on their side, clung to her as to
+an adorable fairy relative, dowered with love and the fruits of love--
+tales and new games and tender ways. Best reason of all, in a sense,
+Mrs. Bentley, that kind autocrat, entreated her to stay, "as the
+happiest thing for the children, and to please that poor lamb we laid
+yonder, who fair longed that you should! She was mightily taken up
+with you, Miss Danby, and you've your brother and his wife near, so
+that you won't be lonesome, and if there's aught I can do to make you
+comfortable, you've only to speak, miss." As for Mr. Denison, he was
+pathetically grateful and relieved when Alice promised to remain.
+
+After the evening romp and the last good-night, when the two elder
+children, Ben and Marie, called after her mother, Maritana, had given
+her their last injunctions to be sure and come for them "her very own
+self" on her way down to breakfast in the morning, she usually rode
+down between the cabbage-trees, down by the old rata, fired last
+autumn, away through the grasslands to the doctor's house, a few miles
+nearer Rochester; or he and his wife would ride out to chat with her.
+But there were many evenings when she preferred the quiet of the airy
+house and the garden. The colonial life was new to her, everything had
+its charm, and in the colonies there is always a letter to write to
+those at home--the mail-bag is never satisfied. On such evenings it
+was her custom to cross the meadow to the copse of feathery trees
+beyond, where, sung to by the brook and the Tui, the children's mother
+slept. And from the high presence of the Mountain Beautiful there fell
+a dew of peace.
+
+She would often ask Mrs. Bentley to sit with her until bedtime, and
+revel in the shrewd north-country woman's experiences, and her
+impressions of the new land to which love had brought her. Both women
+grew to have a sincere and trustful affection for each other, and one
+night, seven or eight months after Mrs. Denison's death, Mrs. Bentley
+told a story which explained what had frequently puzzled Alice--the
+patient sorrow in Mrs. Denison's eyes, and Mr. Denison's harassed and
+dejected manner. "But for your goodness to the children," said the old
+woman, "and the way that precious baby takes to you, I don't think I
+should be willing to say what I am going to do, miss. Though my dear
+mistress wished it, and said, the very last night, 'You must tell her
+all about it, some day, Nana,'--and I promised, to quiet her,--I don't
+think I could bring myself to it if I hadn't lived with you and known
+you." And then the good nurse told her strange and moving tale.
+
+She described how her master had come out young and careless-hearted
+to New Zealand in the service of the government, and how scandalised
+and angry his father and mother, the old Tory squire and his wife, had
+been to receive from him, after a year or two, letters brimming with a
+boyish love for his "beautiful Maori princess," whom he described as
+having "the sweetest heart and the loveliest eyes in the world." It
+gave them little comfort to hear that her father was one of the
+wealthiest Maoris in the island, and that, though but half civilised
+himself, he had had his daughter well educated in the "bishop's" and
+other English schools. To them she was a savage. There was no threat
+of disinheritance, for there was nothing for him to inherit. There was
+little money, and the estate was entailed on the elder brother. But
+all that could be done to intimidate him was done, and in vain. Then
+silence fell between the parents and the son.
+
+But one spring day came the news of a grandson, called Benjamin after
+his grandfather, and an urgent letter from their boy himself,
+enclosing a prettily and humbly worded note from the new strange
+daughter, begging for an English nurse. She told them that she had now
+no father and no mother, for they had died before the baby came, and
+if she might love her husband's parents a little she would be glad.
+
+"My lady read the letters to me herself," Mrs. Bentley said; "I'd
+taken the housekeeper's place a bit before, and she asked me to find
+her a sensible young woman. Well, I tried, but there wasn't a girl in
+the place that was fit to nurse Master Horace's child. And the end of
+it was, I came myself, for Master Horace had been like my own when he
+was a little lad. My lady pretended to be vexed with me, but the day I
+sailed she thanked me in words I never thought to hear from her, for
+she was a bit proud always." The faithful servant's voice trembled.
+She leaned back in her chair, and forgot for the moment the new house
+and the new duties. She was back again in the old nursery with the
+fair-haired child playing about her knees. But Alice's face recalled
+her, and she continued the story. She had, she said, dreaded the
+meeting with her new mistress, and was prepared to find her "a sort of
+a heathen woman, who'd pull down Master Horace till he couldn't call
+himself a gentleman."
+
+But when she saw the graceful creature who received her with gentle
+words and gestures of kindliness, and when she found her young master
+not only content, but happy, and when she took in her arms the
+laughing healthy baby, she felt--though she regretted its dark eyes
+and hair--more at home than she could have believed possible. The
+nurseries were so large and comfortable, and so much consideration was
+shown to her, that she confessed, "I should have been more ungrateful
+than a cat if I hadn't settled comfortable."
+
+Then came nearly five happy years, during which time her young
+mistress had found a warm and secure place in the good Yorkshire
+heart. "She was that loving and that kind that Dick Burdas, the groom,
+used to say that he believed she was an angel as had took up with them
+dark folks, to show 'em what an angel was like." Mrs. Bentley went on:
+
+"She wasn't always quite happy, and I wondered what brought the shadow
+into her face, and why she would at times sigh that deep that I could
+have cried. After a bit I knew what it was. It was the Maori in her.
+She told me one night that she was a wicked woman, and ought never to
+have married Master Horace, for she got tired sometimes of the English
+house and its ways, and longed for her father's /whare/; (that's a
+native hut, miss). She grieved something awful one day when she had
+been to see old Tim, the Maori who lives behind the stables. She
+called herself a bad and ungrateful woman, and thought there must be
+some evil spirit in her tempting her into the old ways, because, when
+she saw Tim eating, and you know what bad stuff they eat, she had fair
+longed to join him. She gave me a fright I didn't get over for nigh a
+week. She leaned her bonny head against my knee, and I stroked her
+cheek and hummed some silly nursery tune,--for she was all of a
+tremble and like a child,--and she fell asleep just where she was."
+
+"Poor thing!" said Alice, softly.
+
+"Eh, but it's what's coming that upsets me, ma'am. Eh, what suffering
+for my pretty lamb, and her that wouldn't have hurt a worm! Baby would
+be about six months old when she came in one day with him in her arms,
+and they /were/ a picture. His little hand was fast in her hair. She
+always walked as if she'd wheels on her feet, that gliding and
+graceful. She had on a sort of sheeny yellow silk, and her cheeks were
+like them damask roses at home, and her eyes fair shone like stars.
+'Isn't he a beauty, Nana?' she asked me. 'If only he had blue eyes,
+and that hair of gold like my husband's, and not these ugly eyes of
+mine!' And as she spoke she sighed as I dreaded to hear. Then she told
+me to help her to unpack her new dress from Paris, which she was to
+wear at the Rochester races the next day. Master Horace always chose
+her dresses, and he was right proud of her in them. And next morning
+he came into the nursery with her, and she was all in pale red, and
+that beautiful! 'Isn't she scrumptious, Nana?' he said, in his boyish
+way. 'Don't spoil her dress, children. How like her Marie grows!'
+Those two little ones they had got her on her knees on the ground, and
+were hugging her as if they couldn't let her go. But when he said
+that, she got up very still and white.
+
+" 'I am sorry,' she said; 'they must never be like me.'
+
+" 'They can't be any one better, can they, baby?' he answered her, and
+he tossed the child nearly up to the ceiling. But he looked worried as
+he went out. I saw them drive away, and they looked happy enough. And
+oh, miss, I saw them come back. We were in the porch, me and the
+children. Master Horace lifted her down, and I heard him say, 'Never
+mind, Marie.' But she never looked his way nor ours; she walked
+straight in and upstairs to her room, past my bonny darling with his
+arm stretched out to her, and past Miss Marie, who was jumping up and
+down, and shouting 'Muvver'; and I heard her door shut. Then Master
+Horace took baby from me.
+
+" 'Go up to her,' he said, and I could scarce hear him. His face was
+all drawn like, but I felt that silly and stupid that I could say
+nothing, and just went upstairs." Mrs. Bentley put her knitting down,
+and throwing her apron over her head sobbed aloud.
+
+"O nurse, what was it?" cried Alice, and the colour left her cheeks.
+"Do tell me. I am so sorry for them. What was it?" It was several
+minutes before the good woman could recover herself; then she began:
+
+"She told me, and Dick Burdas he told me, and it was like this. When
+they got to the race-course,--it was the first races they'd had in
+Rochester,--all the gentry was there, and those that knew her always
+made a deal of her, she had such half-shy, winning ways. And she
+seemed very bright, Dick said, talking with the governor's lady, who
+is full of fun and sparkle. The carriages were all together, and Major
+Beaumont, a kind old gentleman who's always been a good friend to
+Master Horace, would have them in his carriage for luncheon, or
+whatever it was. Dick says he was thinking that she was the prettiest
+lady there, when his eye was caught by two or three parties of Maoris
+setting themselves right in front of the carriages. There were four or
+five in each lot, and they were mostly old. They got out their sharks'
+flesh and that bad corn they eat, and began to make their meal of
+them. Near Mrs. Denison there was one old man with a better sort of
+face, and Dick heard her say to master, 'Isn't he like my father?'
+What Master Horace answered he didn't hear; he says he never saw
+anything like her face, so sad and wild, and working for all the world
+as if something were fighting her within. Then all in a minute she ran
+out and slipped down in her beautiful dress close by the old Maori in
+his dirty rags, and was rubbing her face against his, as them folks do
+when they meet. She had just taken a mouthful of the raw fish when
+Master Horace missed her. He hadn't noticed her slip away. But in a
+moment he seemed to understand what it meant. He saw the Maori come
+out strong in her face, and he knew the Maori had got the better of
+everything, husband and friends and all. He gave a little cry, and in
+a minute he had her on her feet and was bringing her back to the
+carriage. Some folks thought Dick Burdas a rough hard man, and I know
+he was a shocker of a lad (he was fra Whitby), but that night he cried
+like a baby when he tell 't me," and Mrs. Bentley fell for a moment
+into the dialect of her youth.
+
+"He said," she continued, "that she looked like a poor stricken thing
+condemned, and let herself be led back as submissive as a child, and
+Master Horace's face was like the dead. He didn't think any one but
+the major and Dr. Danby saw her go, all was done in a minute. But it
+was done, and some few had seen, and it got out, and things were said
+that wasn't true. Not the doctor! No, miss, you needn't tell me that;
+he's told none, that I'll warrant. He's faithful and he's close."
+
+"O Mrs. Bentley, how dreadful for her, how dreadful!" and the girl
+went down on her knees by the old woman, her tears flowing fast.
+
+"That's it, miss, you understand. I feel like that. It was bad enough
+for Master Horace with the future before him, and his children to
+think of, but for her it was desperate cruel. Eh, ma'am, what she went
+through! She loved more than you'd have thought us poor human beings
+could. And, after all, the nature was in her; she didn't put it there.
+I've had a deal to do to keep down sinful thoughts since then; there's
+a lot of things that's wrong in this world, ma'am."
+
+"What did she do?" Alice whispered.
+
+"She! She was for going away and leaving everything; she felt herself
+the worst woman in the world. It was only by begging and praying of
+her on my knees that I got her to stay in the house that night, for
+she was so far English, and had such a fancy, that she saw everything
+blacker than any Englishwoman would, even the partick'lerest.
+Afterward Master Horace was that good and gentle, and she loved him so
+much, that he persuaded her to say nothing more about it, and to try
+to live as if it hadn't been. And so she seemed to do, outward like,
+to other people. But it wasn't ever the same again. Something had
+broken in them both; with him it was his trust and his pride, but in
+her it was her heart."
+
+"But the children--surely they comforted her."
+
+"Eh, miss, that was the worst. Poor lamb, poor lamb! Never after that
+day, though they were more to her nor children ever were to a mother
+before, would she have them with her. Just a morning and a good-night
+kiss, and a quarter of an hour at most, and I must take them away. She
+watched them play in the garden from her window or the little hill
+there, and when they were asleep she would sit by them for hours,
+saying how bonny they were and how good they were growing. And she
+looked after their clothes and their food and every little toy and
+pleasure, but never came in for a romp and a chat any more."
+
+"Dear, brave heart!" murmured the girl.
+
+"Yes, ma'am, you feel for her, I know. She was fair terrified of them
+turning Maori and shaming their father. That was it. You didn't
+notice? No; after you came she was too ill to bear them about, and it
+seemed natural, I dare say. The Maoris are a fearful delicate set of
+folks. A bad cold takes them off into consumption directly. And with
+her there was the sorrow as well as the cold. It was wonderful that
+she lived so long."
+
+Alice threw her arms round Mrs. Bentley's neck.
+
+"O nurse, it is all so dreadful and sad. Couldn't we have somehow kept
+her with us and made her happy?"
+
+The old woman held her close. "Nay, my dear bairn, never after that
+happened. It, or worse, might have come again. It's something stronger
+in them than we know; it's the very blood, I'm thinking. But she's
+gone to be the angel that Dick always said she was."
+
+Alice looked away over the starlit garden to where the plumy trees
+stirred in the night wind. "No," she said, fervently, "not 'gone to
+be,' nurse dear; she was an angel always. Dick was right."
+
+
+
+KING BILLY OF BALLARAT
+
+BY
+
+MORLEY ROBERTS
+
+
+
+King Billy was given to strolling up and down the streets of Ballarat
+when that eviscerated city was merely in process of disembowelment,
+before alluvial mining gave way to quartz-crushing, when the
+individual had a chance, if a very vague one, of sudden and delightful
+fortune. The Ballarat blacks were a scaly lot, to talk of them like
+ill-fed hogs, as men were wont to do. They dwined and dwindled, as
+natives will before the resources of civilisation: the bloodthirsty
+ones got killed out; the rumthirsty ones died out; the wild corroboree
+was reduced to a poverty-stricken imitation of its former glory. King
+Billy's authority grew less with the increase of his clothes. The
+brass plate with his name on it was about the last relic of his
+precarious power, and was chiefly valued as a means of notifying the
+public generally that they might stand drinks to a monarch if they saw
+fit and were not too humble. He was not haughty, and never presumed on
+his plate, as parvenus will. He came of an ancient stock, and could
+afford to condescend, even if he could not afford to pay for drinks.
+He was very kind to children,--white children, of course,--and was
+hale-fellow-well-met with many of them.
+
+He was particularly fond of Annie Colborn, whose father was a
+magistrate and a gold commissioner, and a person of very great
+importance. Whether or not King Billy was wise in his generation, and
+out of the unwritten Scriptures of the somber bush had culled a maxim
+inculcating the wisdom of making friends of the sons of Mammon, I
+cannot say, but he was always good to Annie. For my own part, I do not
+believe the simple-hearted old king had any such notion inside his
+thick antipodean skull. He was good because he was not bad, which is
+the very best morality after all, and a great advance on much we hear
+of. And, besides, he was sometimes hungry, and Mr. Colborn's Chinese
+cook was very haughty, and not to be approached except through an
+intermediary. And who so capable of conciliating Wong as Annie? Wong
+would make her cakes even when his pigtail hung despondently from his
+aching head after an opium debauch, and his cheeks were shining with
+anything but gladness; for if you get drunk very often on opium you
+shine.
+
+Old Billy was mostly to be found where there was a chance of a drink;
+but if the fountains were dried up, or he had been insulted by some
+democratic, revolutionary, king-hating miner knocking his high hat
+down over his eyes, he usually went up to Mr. Colborn's place, and sat
+on the fence, or on a log outside the gate. So he was often very
+melancholy when Annie came out. One day his hat was very, very badly
+bulged indeed.
+
+"Your hat is very bad to-day, King Billy," said six-year-old Annie, as
+she stood in front of him critically, with her head on one side.
+Without knowing it, the child had come to look upon the state of the
+poor king's hat as emblematical of his state of mind. When it shut up
+like a closed concertina his barometer was low.
+
+"Yes, missy," said the king; "white man knock 'um over eyes, and"--
+with a rub down his face--"skin 'um nose."
+
+She inspected his nose carefully--though from a certain distance,
+because her own nose was very good, both inside and out, and she knew
+the king never got washed unless it rained when he was very drunk. And
+this was the end of summer. It had not rained since November.
+
+"There is not very much skin off," said Annie. "You had better wash
+it."
+
+The king made a wry face and changed the conversation.
+
+"You got 'um hat, Missy Annie? One hat baal brokum, allasame white
+fellow hat. Bad hat, King Billy bad; black fellow, white fellow
+laugh."
+
+He peered into his hat, and, trying to straighten it out, put his fist
+through the side. Poor Billy looked as if he could cry.
+
+"You stop a minute," said Annie, and, flying indoors, she brought out
+a very good high hat indeed. "Budgeree!" thought the king, that was a
+good hat. He could go down the streets like a king indeed, able to
+hold up his head with any rich man in Ballarat. He tried it on, and
+though it was much too big, he knew it shone. And the glory of a hat
+is in its shining as much as its shape; even a black fellow knows
+that.
+
+But that hat very nearly led to serious trouble. For one thing, Mr.
+Colborn missed it; and never thinking Annie had given it away, when he
+saw the king sitting on the fence decorated with it, he stopped and
+interviewed him.
+
+"Where did you get that hat, you old thief?" asked the magistrate,
+without any politeness to him who ruled the land before white men
+broke into the country. Some in authority are polite to those they
+dispossess; the Prussians, for instance, to the miserable King Billys
+who strut about the empire. But the Anglo-Saxon only respects himself,
+and even that to a limited extent, in new conquests.
+
+The question troubled King Billy greatly. He did not know that Mr.
+Colborn would as soon have thought of murdering Annie as of bullying
+her; so he lied promptly: "Me buy 'um, Mistah Cobon!"
+
+Mr. Colborn took it off of his head, and saw that it was his, as he
+had thought. What he would have said I do not know, for just then he
+heard a voice behind him:
+
+"Papa, it is my fault; I gave it to King Billy."
+
+Colborn turned round and took her up, letting fall the hat as he did
+so. Billy made a jump, picked it up, and, in his agitation, brushed it
+carefully the wrong way.
+
+"My dear, if you gave it to him it's all right. But why didn't the old
+fool tell me?"
+
+"He's not an old fool, papa, and you must not say so. He's a good man,
+and I think he thought you would be angry with me. Didn't you, King
+Billy?" And the king, with a smile of conscious rectitude, admitted it
+was so.
+
+Mr. Colborn gave him sixpence; and he gave Annie a great many kisses,
+declaring, with uncommon thoughtlessness, that whatever she did was
+right, and that she could give the king all his house, and Australia
+to boot. Whereon King Billy smiled a smile that was portentous, and
+showed his teeth to the uttermost recesses of his ample mouth. Looking
+down, he surveyed the rest of his clothes, which in parts resembled
+the child's definition of a net as a lot of holes tied together with
+string, and, looking up, he inspected Mr. Colborn as if estimating the
+resources of his wardrobe. But being urgently smitten with the
+necessity of getting rid of his sixpence, he shambled off into the
+town. Other matters might wait; that admitted of no delay.
+
+The mind of King Billy was not a big mind; it would no more have taken
+in an abstract idea than his /gunyah/ would have accommodated a grand
+piano. He was as simple as sunlight, and to resolve his intellect into
+seven colours would want the most ingenious spectroscope. But he could
+make an inference from a positive fact, and, having made it, he did
+not allow more remote deductions to trouble his legitimate conclusion.
+He ceased to fear Mr. Colborn, and began to look upon the magistrate's
+property as if it were at least half his own. So he got very drunk on
+the hospitality of a new chum miner who had been successful, and
+presently, presuming on his new possessions, got into a fight with his
+entertainer and a disrespectful subking of his own blacks, and was
+reduced to worse rags than ever.
+
+Next morning he sat outside the magistrate's house, on the lowest log
+he could find, and when Mr. Colborn came out he tackled him with the
+air of a subject king demanding redress of his suzerain.
+
+"Well, Billy, what is it?" asked the suzerain.
+
+"You belong gublement?" said Billy the king, with a question, an
+implied doubt, and a great complaint in his voice. Colborn laughed.
+
+"Why, yes, Billy; I belong to the government, I suppose."
+
+"Then," said Billy, "what you say to white fellow make 'um black
+fellow drunk, knock 'um all about? Call you that gublement?" And he
+showed his kingly robe, which had once been a frock-coat, with great
+disgust.
+
+However, he met with no favour, and was told that he should not get
+drunk--that it served him right; with which magisterial decision
+Colborn got on his horse and rode off to the flat.
+
+The king sat down sadly and considered thickly in his slow brain.
+Annie did not come out, and he knew better than to ask for her, for
+Mr. Colborn's niece, who kept house for him, was but newly come from
+home, and thought all black fellows congenital murderers, which indeed
+they are in some parts of the north. So Billy sat and waited, for he
+wanted a new coat. How could he be respected in one whose natural
+divisions were unnaturally extended to the very neck? It was obviously
+necessary to get a new garment at once, and the best chance of a good
+one lay in little Annie's kindness. But in order to obviate the
+slightest chance of his girl patron's refusing, he must bring her some
+offering. He went off into the bush at the back of the town, and,
+coming to where three or four black fellows were camped, he sat down
+and talked with them. In spite of the heat, a wretched old gin,
+muffled up in her one garment, a ragged blanket, held her hands over
+the few burning sticks which represent an Australian native's idea of
+a fire. Presently King Billy rose, and, taking a tomahawk, went
+farther into the bush. He looked about, and at last came to a tree,
+which he climbed native fashion, first discarding his clothes. When
+near the first big branches he came to a hole, and, putting in his
+hand, he extracted a lively young possum by the tail.
+
+Next morning he was sitting on the Colborns' fence as usual. At his
+feet was a little box with two or three slats nailed roughly across
+it. Inside was the possum. King Billy wondered what kind of a coat he
+could get. He liked a frock-coat; there was something majestic about
+it, something fine and ample. Common morning coats would not do; no
+one would insult a king by offering him tweed; even little Annie knew
+better than that, especially if he gave her a live possum he had
+caught himself. And when Annie did come out, she was in the seventh
+heaven of delight with the possum, and ready to bestow anything in the
+world on King Billy.
+
+"You give poor Billy one fellow coat, missy, and he go down along
+street like a king."
+
+Annie flew into the house and seized the first garment she laid her
+little hands on. It was her father's dress-coat. She rolled it up,
+and, running out, thrust it excitedly into the king's black paw. As he
+went off, she carried the possum indoors, and was deliriously happy
+for hours.
+
+King Billy hurried into the bush till he came to a water-hole, and,
+stripping off his rags, he held up the coat. His jaw fell; there was a
+remarkable exiguity about the coat which was inexplicable. He had
+never observed such in his life. He put it on, and, bending over the
+surface of the still pool, took a good look at the general effect. It
+was not bad from some points of view, but Billy had his doubts as to
+whether he would be received with the respect due to his title if he
+went into Ballarat clothed thus. He tried to button it, but discovered
+that, if it had ever been intended for buttoning, he could not get it
+to meet across his chest. He picked up his discarded frock-coat, which
+was held together by the collar; then he felt the stuff of which the
+dress-coat was made, and the material pleased him. "Oh, why," asked
+Billy, "had it not been made with front tails?" He saw at last that
+this coat and his high hat alone were insufficient for civilisation.
+For full dress in a corroboree it might do. Unconsciously, he was so
+wrought upon by the purpose for which the coat had been built that he
+determined to reserve it for parties in the seclusion of the bush,
+where any merriment could be rightly checked by a crack from his
+waddy. He planted it carefully in a hollow log, and, having inserted
+himself with as much care into his discarded rags, he wondered off
+into the town. He got very intoxicated that night, and determined to
+have a party all by himself.
+
+Now it may seem very annoying, and I confess I find it so myself; but,
+having got so far, I don't see my way to tell the rest, even if Annie
+Colborn told me the story herself. For after her father's death she
+married a man who had a small sheep-station and a hotel not forty
+miles from Carabobla, in New South Wales. I stayed there a couple of
+days when I was going north to the Murrumbidgee. But though she told
+me, I cannot tell it again, at least not in bold, bad print. Still, it
+will occur to most that a man of King Billy's sweet and innocent
+disposition might very likely create a sensation, when his natural
+discretion was drowned in bad whisky, if he ended his solitary
+corroboree in the moonlight by going up to Colborn's house in order to
+deliver a speech of gratitude through the French windows.
+
+So Colborn and the king had a corroboree all to themselves in the open
+space before the house, while the gold commissioner's guests roared
+with laughter to find out where the missing dress-coat was. Next day
+King Billy resumed the split frock-coat.
+
+
+
+THY HEART'S DESIRE
+
+BY
+
+NETTA SYRETT
+
+
+
+The tents were pitched in the little plain surrounded by hills. Right
+and left there were stretches of tender, vivid green where the young
+corn was springing; farther still, on either hand, the plain was
+yellow with mustard-flower; but in the immediate foreground it was
+bare and stony. A few thorny bushes pushed their straggling way
+through the dry soil, ineffectively as far as the grace of the
+landscape was concerned, for they merely served to emphasise the
+barren aridness of the land that stretched before the tents, sloping
+gradually to the distant hills.
+
+The hills were uninteresting enough in themselves; they had no
+grandeur of outline, no picturesqueness even, though at morning and
+evening the sun, like a great magician, clothed them with beauty at a
+touch.
+
+They had begun to change, to soften, to blush rose red in the evening
+light, when a woman came to the entrance of the largest of the tents
+and looked toward them. She leaned against the support on one side of
+the canvas flap, and, putting back her head, rested that, too, against
+it, while her eyes wandered over the plain and over the distant hills.
+
+She was bareheaded, for the covering of the tent projected a few feet
+to form an awning overhead. The gentle breeze which had risen with
+sundown stirred the soft brown tendrils of hair on her temples, and
+fluttered her pink cotton gown a little. She stood very still, with
+her arms hanging and her hands clasped loosely in front of her. There
+was about her whole attitude an air of studied quiet which in some
+vague fashion the slight clasp of her hands accentuated. Her face,
+with its tightly, almost rigidly closed lips, would have been quite in
+keeping with the impression of conscious calm which her entire
+presence suggested, had it not been that when she raised her eyes a
+strange contradiction to this idea was afforded. They were large gray
+eyes, unusually bright and rather startling in effect, for they seemed
+the only live thing about her. Gleaming from her still, set face,
+there was something almost alarming in their brilliancy. They softened
+with a sudden glow of pleasure as they rested on the translucent green
+of the wheat-fields under the broad generous sunlight, and then
+wandered to where the pure vivid yellow of the mustard-flower spread
+in waves to the base of the hills, now mystically veiled in radiance.
+She stood motionless, watching their melting, elusive changes from
+palpitating rose to the transparent purple of amethyst. The stillness
+of evening was broken by the monotonous, not unmusical creaking of a
+Persian wheel at some little distance to the left of the tent. The
+well stood in a little grove of trees; between their branches she
+could see, when she turned her head, the coloured saris of the village
+women, where they stood in groups chattering as they drew the water,
+and the little naked brown babies that toddled beside them or sprawled
+on the hard ground beneath the trees. From the village of flat-roofed
+mud houses under the low hill at the back of the tents, other women
+were crossing the plain toward the well, their terra-cotta water-jars
+poised easily on their heads, casting long shadows on the sun-baked
+ground as they came.
+
+Presently, in the distance, from the direction of the sunlit hills
+opposite a little group of men came into sight. Far off, the mustard-
+coloured jackets and the red turbans of the orderlies made vivid
+splashes of colour on the dull plain. As they came nearer, the guns
+slung across their shoulders, the cases of mathematical instruments,
+the hammers, and other heavy baggage they carried for the sahib,
+became visible. A little in front, at walking pace rode the sahib
+himself, making notes as he came in a book he held before him. The
+girl at the tent entrance watched the advance of the little company
+indifferently, it seemed; except for a slight tightening of the
+muscles about her mouth, her face remained unchanged. While he was
+still some little distance away, the man with the notebook raised his
+head and smiled awkwardly as he saw her standing there. Awkwardness,
+perhaps, best describes the whole man. He was badly put together,
+loose-jointed, ungainly. The fact that he was tall profited him
+nothing, for it merely emphasised the extreme ungracefulness of his
+figure. His long pale face was made paler by the shock of coarse, tow-
+coloured hair; his eyes, even, looked colourless, though they were
+certainly the least uninteresting feature of his face, for they were
+not devoid of expression. He had a way of slouching when he moved that
+singularly intensified the general uncouthness of his appearance. "Are
+you very tired?" asked his wife, gently, when he had dismounted close
+to the tent. The question would have been an unnecessary one had it
+been put to her instead of to her husband, for her voice had that
+peculiar flat toneless sound for which extreme weariness is
+answerable.
+
+"Well, no, my dear, not very," he replied, drawling out the words with
+an exasperating air of delivering a final verdict, after deep
+reflection on the subject.
+
+The girl glanced once more at the fading colours on the hills. "Come
+in and rest," she said, moving aside a little to let him pass.
+
+She stood lingering a moment after he had entered the tent, as though
+unwilling to leave the outer air; and before she turned to follow him
+she drew a deep breath, and her hand went for one swift second to her
+throat as though she felt stifled.
+
+Later on that evening she sat in her tent, sewing by the light of the
+lamp that stood on her little table.
+
+Opposite to her, her husband stretched his ungainly length in a deck-
+chair, and turned over a pile of official notes. Every now and then
+her eyes wandered from the gay silks of the table-cover she was
+embroidering to the canvas walls which bounded the narrow space into
+which their few household goods were crowded. Outside there was a deep
+hush. The silence of the vast empty plain seemed to work its way
+slowly, steadily in toward the little patch of light set in its midst.
+The girl felt it in every nerve; it was as though some soft-footed,
+noiseless, shapeless creature, whose presence she only dimly divined,
+was approaching nearer--/nearer/. The heavy outer stillness was in
+some way made more terrifying by the rustle of the papers her husband
+was reading, by the creaking of his chair as he moved, and by the
+little fidgeting grunts and half-exclamations which from time to time
+broke from him. His wife's hand shook at every unintelligible mutter
+from him, and the slight habitual contraction between her eyes
+deepened.
+
+All at once she threw her work down on to the table. "For heaven's
+sake--/please/, John, /talk/!" she cried. Her eyes, for the moment's
+space in which they met the startled ones of her husband, had a wild,
+hunted look, but it was gone almost before his slow brain had time to
+note that it had been there--and was vaguely disturbing. She laughed a
+little unsteadily.
+
+"Did I startle you? I'm sorry. I"--she laughed again--"I believe I'm a
+little nervous. When one is all day alone--" She paused without
+finishing the sentence. The man's face changed suddenly. A wave of
+tenderness swept over it, and at the same time an expression of half-
+incredulous delight shone in his pale eyes.
+
+"Poor little girl, are you really lonely?" he said. Even the real
+feeling in his tone failed to rob his voice of its peculiarly
+irritating grating quality. He rose awkwardly, and moved to his wife's
+side.
+
+Involuntarily she shrank a little, and the hand which he had stretched
+out to touch her hair sank to his side. She recovered herself
+immediately, and turned her face up to his, though she did not raise
+her eyes; but he did not kiss her. Instead, he stood in an embarrassed
+fashion a moment by her side, and then went back to his seat.
+
+There was silence again for some time. The man lay back in his chair,
+gazing at his big, clumsy shoes as though he hoped for some
+inspiration from that quarter, while his wife worked with nervous
+haste.
+
+"Don't let me keep you from reading, John," she said, and her voice
+had regained its usual gentle tone.
+
+"No, my dear; I'm just thinking of something to say to you, but I
+don't seem--"
+
+She smiled a little. In spite of herself, her lip curled faintly.
+"Don't worry about it; it was stupid of me to expect it. I mean--" she
+added, hastily, immediately repenting the sarcasm. She glanced
+furtively at him, but his face was quite unmoved; evidently he had not
+noticed it, and she smiled faintly again.
+
+"O Kathie, I knew there was /something/ I'd forgotten to tell you, my
+dear; there's a man coming down here. I don't know whether--"
+
+She looked up sharply. "A man coming /here/? What for?" she
+interrupted, breathlessly.
+
+"Sent to help me about this oil-boring business, my dear."
+
+He had lighted his pipe, and was smoking placidly, taking long whiffs
+between his words.
+
+"Well?" impatiently questioned his wife, fixing her bright eyes on his
+face.
+
+"Well--that's all, my dear."
+
+She checked an exclamation. "But don't you know anything about him--
+his name? where he comes from? what he is like?" She was leaning
+forward against the table, her needle, with a long end of yellow silk
+drawn half-way through her work, held in her upraised hand, her whole
+attitude one of quivering excitement and expectancy.
+
+The man took his pipe from his mouth deliberately, with a look of slow
+wonder.
+
+"Why, Kathie, you seem quite anxious. I didn't know you'd be so
+interested, my dear. Well,"--another long pull at his pipe,--"his
+name's Brook--/Brookfield/, I think." He paused again. "This pipe
+doesn't draw well a bit; there's something wrong with it, I shouldn't
+wonder," he added, taking it out and examining the bowl as though
+struck with the brilliance of the idea.
+
+The woman opposite put down her work and clinched her hands under the
+table.
+
+"Go on, John," she said, presently, in a tense, vibrating voice; "his
+name is Brookfield. Well, where does he come from?"
+
+"Straight from home, my dear, I believe." He fumbled in his pocket,
+and after some time extricated a pencil, with which he began to poke
+the tobacco in the bowl in an ineffectual aimless fashion, becoming
+completely engrossed in the occupation apparently. There was another
+long pause. The woman went on working, or feigning to work, for her
+hands were trembling a good deal.
+
+After some moments she raised her head again. "John, will you mind
+attending to me one moment, and answering these questions as quickly
+as you can?" The emphasis on the last word was so faint as to be
+almost as imperceptible as the touch of exasperated contempt which she
+could not absolutely banish from her tone.
+
+Her husband, looking up, met her clear bright gaze, and reddened like
+a school-boy.
+
+"Whereabouts '/from home/' does he come?" she asked, in a studiedly
+gentle fashion.
+
+"Well, from London, I think," he replied, almost briskly for him,
+though he stammered and tripped over the words. "He's a university
+chap; I used to hear he was clever; I don't know about that, I'm sure;
+he used to chaff me, I remember, but--"
+
+"Chaff /you/? You have met him then?"
+
+"Yes, my dear,"--he was fast relapsing into his slow drawl again,--
+"that is, I went to school with him; but it's a long time ago.
+Brookfield--yes, that must be his name."
+
+She waited a moment; then, "When is he coming?" she inquired,
+abruptly.
+
+"Let me see--to-day's--"
+
+"/Monday/;" the word came swiftly between her set teeth.
+
+"Ah, yes--Monday; well," reflectively, "/next/ Monday, my dear."
+
+Mrs. Drayton rose, and began to pace softly the narrow passage between
+the table and the tent wall, her hands clasped loosely behind her.
+
+"How long have you known this?" she said, stopping abruptly. "O John,
+you /needn't/ consider; it's quite a simple question. To-day?
+Yesterday?
+
+Her foot moved restlessly on the ground as she waited.
+
+"I think it was the day before yesterday," he replied.
+
+"Then why, in heaven's name, didn't you tell me before?" she broke
+out, fiercely.
+
+"My dear, it slipped my memory. If I'd thought you would be
+interested--"
+
+"Interested!" She laughed shortly. "It /is/ rather interesting to hear
+that after six months of this"--she made a quick comprehensive gesture
+with her hand--"one will have some one to speak to--some one. It is
+the hand of Providence; it comes just in time to save me from--" She
+checked herself abruptly.
+
+He sat staring up at her stupidly, without a word.
+
+"It's all right, John," she said, with a quick change of tone,
+gathering up her work quietly as she spoke. "I'm not mad--yet. You--
+you must get used to these little outbreaks," she added, after a
+moment, smiling faintly; "and, to do me justice, I don't /often/
+trouble you with them, do I? I'm just a little tired, or it's the heat
+or--something. No--don't touch me!" she cried, shrinking back; for he
+had risen slowly and was coming toward her.
+
+She had lost command over her voice, and the shrill note of horror in
+it was unmistakable. The man heard it, and shrank in his turn.
+
+"I'm so sorry, John," she murmured, raising her great bright eyes to
+his face. They had not lost their goaded expression, though they were
+full of tears. "I'm awfully sorry; but I'm just nervous and stupid,
+and I can't bear /any one/ to touch me when I'm nervous."
+
+
+
+"Here's Broomhurst, my dear! I made a mistake in his name after all, I
+find. I told you /Brookfield/, I believe, didn't I? Well, it isn't
+Brookfield, he says; it's Broomhurst."
+
+Mrs. Drayton had walked some little distance across the plain to meet
+and welcome the expected guest. She stood quietly waiting while her
+husband stammered over his incoherent sentences, and then put out her
+hand.
+
+"We are very glad to see you," she said, with a quick glance at the
+new-comer's face as she spoke.
+
+As they walked together toward the tent, after the first greetings,
+she felt his keen eyes upon her before he turned to her husband.
+
+"I'm afraid Mrs. Drayton finds the climate trying?" he asked. "Perhaps
+she ought not to have come so far in this heat?"
+
+"Kathie is often pale. You /do/ look white to-day, my dear," he
+observed, turning anxiously toward his wife.
+
+"Do I?" she replied. The unsteadiness of her tone was hardly
+appreciable, but it was not lost on Broomhurst's quick ears. "Oh, I
+don't think so. I /feel/ very well."
+
+"I'll come and see if they've fixed you up all right," said Drayton,
+following his companion toward the new tent that had been pitched at
+some little distance from the large one.
+
+"We shall see you at dinner then?" Mrs. Drayton observed in reply to
+Broomhurst's smile as they parted.
+
+She entered the tent slowly, and, moving up to the table already laid
+for dinner, began to rearrange the things upon it in a purposeless,
+mechanical fashion.
+
+After a moment she sank down upon a seat opposite the open entrance,
+and put her hand to her head.
+
+"What is the matter with me?" she thought, wearily. "All the week I've
+been looking forward to seeing this man--/any/ man, /any one/ to take
+off the edge of this." She shuddered. Even in thought she hesitated to
+analyse the feeling that possessed her. "Well, he's here, and I think
+I feel /worse/." Her eyes travelled toward the hills she had been used
+to watch at this hour, and rested on them with a vague, unseeing gaze.
+
+"Tired Kathie? A penny for your thoughts, my dear," said her husband,
+coming in presently to find her still sitting there.
+
+"I'm thinking what a curious world this is, and what an ironical vein
+of humour the gods who look after it must possess," she replied, with
+a mirthless laugh, rising as she spoke.
+
+John looked puzzled.
+
+"Funny my having known Broomhurst before, you mean?" he said
+doubtfully.
+
+
+
+"I was fishing down at Lynmouth this time last year," Broomhurst said
+at dinner. "You know Lynmouth, Mrs. Drayton? Do you never imagine you
+hear the gurgling of the stream? I am tantalised already by the sound
+of it rushing through the beautiful green gloom of those woods--
+/aren't/ they lovely? And /I/ haven't been in this burnt-up spot as
+many hours as you've had months of it."
+
+She smiled a little.
+
+"You must learn to possess your soul in patience," she said, and
+glanced inconsequently from Broomhurst to her husband, and then
+dropped her eyes and was silent a moment.
+
+John was obviously, and a little audibly, enjoying his dinner. He sat
+with his chair pushed close to the table, and his elbows awkwardly
+raised, swallowing his soup in gulps. He grasped his spoon tightly in
+his bony hand, so that its swollen joints stood out larger and uglier
+than ever, his wife thought.
+
+Her eyes wandered to Broomhurst's hands. They were well shaped, and,
+though not small, there was a look of refinement about them; he had a
+way of touching things delicately, a little lingeringly, she noticed.
+There was an air of distinction about his clear-cut, clean-shaven
+face, possibly intensified by contrast with Drayton's blurred
+features; and it was, perhaps, also by contrast with the gray cuffs
+that showed beneath John's ill-cut drab suit that the linen Broomhurst
+wore seemed to her particularly spotless.
+
+Broomhurst's thoughts, for his part, were a good deal occupied with
+his hostess.
+
+She was pretty, he thought, or perhaps it was that, with the wide, dry
+lonely plain as a setting, her fragile delicacy of appearance was
+invested with a certain flower-like charm.
+
+"The silence here seems rather strange, rather appalling at first,
+when one is fresh from a town," he pursued, after a moment's pause;
+"but I suppose you're used to it, eh, Drayton? How do /you/ find life
+here, Mrs. Drayton?" he asked, a little curiously, turning to her as
+he spoke.
+
+She hesitated a second. "Oh, much the same as I should find it
+anywhere else, I expect," she replied; "after all, one carries the
+possibilities of a happy life about with one; don't you think so? The
+Garden of Eden wouldn't necessarily make my life any happier, or less
+happy, than a howling wilderness like this. It depends on one's self
+entirely."
+
+"Given the right Adam and Eve, the desert blossoms like the rose, in
+fact," Broomhurst answered, lightly, with a smiling glance inclusive
+of husband and wife; "you two don't feel as though you'd been driven
+out of Paradise, evidently."
+
+Drayton raised his eyes from his plate with a smile of total
+incomprehension.
+
+"Great heavens! what an Adam to select!" thought Broomhurst,
+involuntarily, as Mrs. Drayton rose rather suddenly from the table.
+
+"I'll come and help with that packing-case," John said, rising, in his
+turn, lumberingly from his place; "then we can have a smoke--eh!
+Kathie don't mind, if we sit near the entrance.
+
+The two men went out together, Broomhurst holding the lantern, for the
+moon had not yet risen. Mrs. Drayton followed them to the doorway,
+and, pushing the looped-up hanging farther aside, stepped out into the
+cool darkness.
+
+Her heart was beating quickly, and there was a great lump in her
+throat that frightened her as though she were choking.
+
+"And I am his /wife/--I /belong/ to him!" she cried, almost aloud.
+
+She pressed both her hands tightly against her breast, and set her
+teeth, fighting to keep down the rising flood that threatened to sweep
+away her composure. "Oh, what a fool I am! What an hysterical fool of
+a woman I am!" she whispered below her breath. She began to walk
+slowly up and down outside the tent, in the space illumined by the
+lamplight, as though striving to make her outwardly quiet movements
+react upon the inward tumult. In a little while she had conquered; she
+quietly entered the tent, drew a low chair to the entrance, and took
+up a book, just as footsteps became audible. A moment afterward
+Broomhurst emerged from the darkness into the circle of light outside,
+and Mrs. Drayton raised her eyes from the pages she was turning to
+greet him with a smile.
+
+"Are your things all right?"
+
+"Oh, yes, more or less, thank you. I was a little concerned about a
+case of books, but it isn't much damaged fortunately. Perhaps I've
+some you would care to look at?"
+
+"The books will be a godsend," she returned, with a sudden brightening
+of the eyes; "I was getting /desperate/--for books."
+
+"What are you reading now?" he asked, glancing at the volume that lay
+in her lap.
+
+"It's a Browning. I carry it about a good deal. I think I like to have
+it with me, but I don't seem to read it much."
+
+"Are you waiting for a suitable optimistic moment?" Broomhurst
+inquired, smiling.
+
+"Yes, now that you mention it, I think that must be why I am waiting,"
+she replied, slowly.
+
+"And it doesn't come--even in the Garden of Eden? Surely the serpent,
+pessimism, hasn't been insolent enough to draw you into conversation
+with him?" he said, lightly.
+
+"There has been no one to converse with at all--when John is away, I
+mean. I think I should have liked a little chat with the serpent
+immensely by way of a change," she replied, in the same tone.
+
+"Ah, yes," Broomhurst said, with sudden seriousness; "it must be
+unbearably dull for you alone here, with Drayton away all day."
+
+Mrs. Drayton's hand shook a little as she fluttered a page of her open
+book.
+
+"I should think it quite natural you would be irritated beyond
+endurance to hear that all's right with the world, for instance, when
+you were sighing for the long day to pass," he continued.
+
+"I don't mind the day so much; it's the evenings." She abruptly
+checked the swift words, and flushed painfully. "I mean--I've grown
+stupidly nervous, I think--even when John is here. Oh, you have no
+idea of the awful /silence/ of this place at night," she added, rising
+hurriedly from her low seat, and moving closer to the doorway. "It is
+so close, isn't it?" she said, almost apologetically. There was
+silence for quite a minute.
+
+Broomhurst's quick eyes noted the silent momentary clinching of the
+hands that hung at her side, as she stood leaning against the support
+at the entrance.
+
+"But how stupid of me to give you such a bad impression of the camp--
+the first evening, too!" Mrs. Drayton exclaimed, presently; and her
+companion mentally commended the admirable composure of her voice.
+
+"Probably you will never notice that it /is/ lonely at all," she
+continued; "John likes it here. He is immensely interested in his
+work, you know. I hope /you/ are too. If you are interested it is all
+quite right. I think the climate tries me a little. I never used to be
+stupid--and nervous. Ah, here's John; he's been round to the kitchen
+tent, I suppose."
+
+"Been looking after that fellow cleanin' my gun, my dear," John
+explained, shambling toward the deck-chair.
+
+Later Broomhurst stood at his own tent door. He looked up at the star-
+sown sky, and the heavy silence seemed to press upon him like an
+actual, physical burden.
+
+He took his cigar from between his lips presently, and looked at the
+glowing end reflectively before throwing it away.
+
+"Considering that she has been alone with him here for six months, she
+has herself very well in hand--/very/ well in hand," he repeated.
+
+
+
+It was Sunday morning. John Drayton sat just inside the tent,
+presumably enjoying his pipe before the heat of the day. His eyes
+furtively followed his wife as she moved about near him, sometimes
+passing close to his chair in search of something she had mislaid.
+There was colour in her cheeks; her eyes, though preoccupied, were
+bright; there was a lightness and buoyancy in her step which she set
+to a little dancing air she was humming under her breath.
+
+After a moment or two the song ceased; she began to move slowly,
+sedately; and, as if chilled by a raw breath of air, the light faded
+from her eyes, which she presently turned toward her husband.
+
+"Why do you look at me?" she asked, suddenly.
+
+"I don't know, my dear," he began slowly and laboriously, as was his
+wont. "I was thinkin' how nice you looked--jest now--much better, you
+know; but somehow,"--he was taking long whiffs at his pipe, as usual,
+between each word, while she stood patiently waiting for him to
+finish,--"somehow, you alter so, my dear--you're quite pale again, all
+of a minute."
+
+She stood listening to him, noticing against her will the more than
+suspicion of cockney accent and the thick drawl with which the words
+were uttered.
+
+His eyes sought her face piteously. She noticed that too, and stood
+before him torn by conflicting emotions, pity and disgust struggling
+in a hand-to-hand fight within her.
+
+"Mr. Broomhurst and I are going down by the well to sit; it's cooler
+there. Won't you come?" she said at last, gently.
+
+He did not reply for a moment; then he turned his head aside, sharply
+for him.
+
+"No, my dear, thank you; I'm comfortable enough here," he returned,
+huskily.
+
+She stood over him, hesitating a second; then moved abruptly to the
+table, from which she took a book.
+
+He had risen from his seat by the time she turned to go out, and he
+intercepted her timorously.
+
+"Kathie, give me a kiss before you go," he whispered, hoarsely. "I--I
+don't often bother you."
+
+She drew her breath in deeply as he put his arms clumsily about her;
+but she stood still, and he kissed her on the forehead, and touched
+the little wavy curls that strayed across it gently with his big,
+trembling fingers.
+
+When he released her, she moved at once impetuously to the open
+doorway. On the threshold she hesitated, paused a moment irresolutely,
+and then turned back.
+
+"Shall I--does your pipe want filling, John?" she asked, softly.
+
+"No, thank you, my dear."
+
+"Would you like me to stay, read to you, or anything?"
+
+He looked up at her wistfully. "N-no, thank you; I'm not much of a
+reader, you know, my dear--somehow."
+
+She hated herself for knowing that there would be a "my dear,"
+probably a "somehow," in his reply, and despised herself for the sense
+of irritated impatience she felt by anticipation, even before the
+words were uttered.
+
+There was a moment's hesitating silence, broken by the sound of quick,
+firm footsteps without. Broomhurst paused at the entrance, and looked
+into the tent.
+
+"Aren't you coming, Drayton?" he asked, looking first at Drayton's
+wife and then swiftly putting in his name with a scarcely perceptible
+pause. "Too lazy? But you, Mrs. Drayton?"
+
+"Yes, I'm coming," she said.
+
+They left the tent together, and walked some few steps in silence.
+
+Broomhurst shot a quick glance at his companion's face.
+
+"Anything wrong?" he asked, presently.
+
+Though the words were ordinary enough, the voice in which they were
+spoken was in some subtle fashion a different voice from that in which
+he had talked to her nearly two months ago, though it would have
+required a keen sense of nice shades in sound to have detected the
+change.
+
+Mrs. Drayton's sense of niceties in sound was particularly keen, but
+she answered quietly, "Nothing, thank you."
+
+They did not speak again till the trees round the stone well were
+reached.
+
+Broomhurst arranged their seats comfortably beside it.
+
+"Are we going to read or talk?" he asked, looking up at her from his
+lower place.
+
+"Well, we generally talk most when we arrange to read; so shall we
+agree to talk to-day for a change, by way of getting some reading
+done?" she rejoined, smiling. "/You/ begin."
+
+Broomhurst seemed in no hurry to avail himself of the permission; he
+was apparently engrossed in watching the flecks of sunshine on Mrs.
+Drayton's white dress. The whirring of insects, and the creaking of a
+Persian wheel somewhere in the neighbourhood, filtered through the hot
+silence.
+
+Mrs. Drayton laughed after a few minutes; there was a touch of
+embarrassment in the sound.
+
+"The new plan doesn't answer. Suppose you read, as usual, and let me
+interrupt, also as usual, after the first two lines."
+
+He opened the book obediently, but turned the pages at random.
+
+She watched him for a moment, and then bent a little forward toward
+him.
+
+"It is my turn now," she said, suddenly; "is anything wrong?"
+
+He raised his head, and their eyes met. There was a pause. "I will be
+more honest than you," he returned; "yes, there is."
+
+"What?"
+
+"I've had orders to move on."
+
+She drew back, and her lips whitened, though she kept them steady.
+
+"When do you go?"
+
+"On Wednesday."
+
+There was silence again; the man still kept his eyes on her face.
+
+The whirring of the insects and the creaking of the wheel had suddenly
+grown so strangely loud and insistent that it was in a half-dazed
+fashion she at length heard her name--"/Kathleen!/"
+
+"Kathleen!" he whispered again, hoarsely.
+
+She looked him full in the face, and once more their eyes met in a
+long, grave gaze.
+
+The man's face flushed, and he half rose from his seat with an
+impetuous movement; but Kathleen stopped him with a glance.
+
+"Will you go and fetch my work? I left it in the tent," she said,
+speaking very clearly and distinctly; "and then will you go on
+reading? I will find the place while you are gone."
+
+She took the book from his hand, and he rose and stood before her.
+
+There was a mute appeal in his silence, and she raised her head
+slowly.
+
+Her face was white to the lips, but she looked at him unflinchingly;
+and without a word he turned and left her.
+
+
+
+Mrs. Drayton was resting in the tent on Tuesday afternoon. With the
+help of cushions and some low chairs, she had improvised a couch, on
+which she lay quietly with her eyes closed. There was a tenseness,
+however, in her attitude which indicated that sleep was far from her.
+
+Her features seemed to have sharpened during the last few days, and
+there were hollows in her cheeks. She had been very ill for a long
+time, but all at once, with a sudden movement, she turned her head and
+buried her face in the cushions with a groan. Slipping from her place,
+she fell on her knees beside the couch, and put both hands before her
+mouth to force back the cry that she felt struggling to her lips.
+
+For some moments the wild effort she was making for outward calm,
+which even when she was alone was her first instinct, strained every
+nerve and blotted out sight and hearing, and it was not till the sound
+was very near that she was conscious of the ring of horse's hoofs on
+the plain.
+
+She raised her head sharply, with a thrill of fear, still kneeling,
+and listened.
+
+There was no mistake. The horseman was riding in hot haste, for the
+thud of the hoofs followed one another swiftly.
+
+As Mrs. Drayton listened her white face grew whiter, and she began to
+tremble. Putting out shaking hands, she raised herself by the arms of
+the folding-chair and stood upright.
+
+Nearer and nearer came the thunder of the approaching sound, mingled
+with startled exclamations and the noise of trampling feet from the
+direction of the kitchen tent.
+
+Slowly, mechanically almost, she dragged herself to the entrance, and
+stood clinging to the canvas there. By the time she had reached it
+Broomhurst had flung himself from the saddle, and had thrown the reins
+to one of the men.
+
+Mrs. Drayton stared at him with wide, bright eyes as he hastened
+toward her.
+
+"I thought you--you are not--" she began, and then her teeth began to
+chatter. "I am so cold!" she said, in a little, weak voice.
+
+Broomhurst took her hand and led her over the threshold back into the
+tent.
+
+"Don't be so frightened," he implored; "I came to tell you first. I
+thought it wouldn't frighten you so much as--Your--Drayton is--very
+ill. They are bringing him. I--"
+
+He paused. She gazed at him a moment with parted lips; then she broke
+into a horrible, discordant laugh, and stood clinging to the back of a
+chair.
+
+Broomhurst started back.
+
+"Do you understand what I mean?" he whispered. "Kathleen, for God's
+sake--/don't/--he is /dead/."
+
+He looked over his shoulder as he spoke, her shrill laughter ringing
+in his ears. The white glare and dazzle of the plain stretched before
+him, framed by the entrance to the tent; far off, against the horizon,
+there were moving black specks, which he knew to be the returning
+servants with their still burden.
+
+They were bringing John Drayton home.
+
+
+
+One afternoon, some months later, Broomhurst climbed the steep lane
+leading to the cliffs of a little English village by the sea. He had
+already been to the inn, and had been shown by the proprietress the
+house where Mrs. Drayton lodged.
+
+"The lady was out, but the gentleman would likely find her if he went
+to the cliffs--down by the bay, or thereabouts," her landlady
+explained; and, obeying her directions, Broomhurst presently emerged
+from the shady woodland path on to the hillside overhanging the sea.
+
+He glanced eagerly round him, and then, with a sudden quickening of
+the heart, walked on over the springy heather to where she sat. She
+turned when the rustling his footsteps made through the bracken was
+near enough to arrest her attention, and looked up at him as he came.
+Then she rose slowly and stood waiting for him. He came up to her
+without a word, and seized both her hands, devouring her face with his
+eyes. Something he saw there repelled him. Slowly he let her hands
+fall, still looking at her silently. "You are not glad to see me, and
+I have counted the hours," he said, at last, in a dull, toneless
+voice.
+
+Her lips quivered. "Don't be angry with me--I can't help it--I'm not
+glad or sorry for anything now," she answered; and her voice matched
+his for grayness.
+
+They sat down together on a long flat stone half embedded in a wiry
+clump of whortleberries. Behind them the lonely hillsides rose,
+brilliant with yellow bracken and the purple of heather. Before them
+stretched the wide sea. It was a soft, gray day. Streaks of pale
+sunlight trembled at moments far out on the water. The tide was rising
+in the little bay above which they sat, and Broomhurst watched the
+lazy foam-edged waves slipping over the uncovered rocks toward the
+shore, then sliding back as though for very weariness they despaired
+of reaching it. The muffled, pulsing sound of the sea filled the
+silence. Broomhurst thought suddenly of hot Eastern sunshine, of the
+whir of insect wings on the still air, and the creaking of a wheel in
+the distance. He turned and looked at his companion.
+
+"I have come thousands of miles to see you," he said; "aren't you
+going to speak to me now I am here?"
+
+"Why did you come? I told you not to come," she answered, falteringly.
+"I--" she paused.
+
+"And I replied that I should follow you--if you remember," he
+answered, still quietly. "I came because I would not listen to what
+you said then, at that awful time. You didn't know /yourself/ what you
+said. No wonder! I have given you some months, and now I have come."
+
+There was silence between them. Broomhurst saw that she was crying;
+her tears fell fast on to her hands, that were clasped in her lap. Her
+face, he noticed, was thin and drawn.
+
+Very gently he put his arm round her shoulder and drew her nearer to
+him. She made no resistance; it seemed that she did not notice the
+movement; and his arm dropped at his side.
+
+"You asked me why I had come. You think it possible that three months
+can change one very thoroughly, then?" he said, in a cold voice.
+
+"I not only think it possible; I have proved it," she replied,
+wearily.
+
+He turned round and faced her.
+
+"You /did/ love me, Kathleen!" he asserted. "You never said so in
+words, but I know it," he added, fiercely.
+
+"Yes, I did."
+
+"And--you mean that you don't now?"
+
+Her voice was very tired. "Yes; I can't help it," she answered; "it
+has gone--utterly."
+
+The gray sea slowly lapped the rocks. Overhead the sharp scream of a
+gull cut through the stillness. It was broken again, a moment
+afterward, by a short hard laugh from the man.
+
+"Don't!" she whispered, and laid a hand swiftly on his arm. "Do you
+think it isn't worse for me? I wish to God I /did/ love you!" she
+cried, passionately. "Perhaps it would make me forget that, to all
+intents and purposes, I am a murderess.
+
+Broomhurst met her wide, despairing eyes with an amazement which
+yielded to sudden pitying comprehension.
+
+"So that is it, my darling? You are worrying about /that/? You who
+were as loyal as--"
+
+She stopped him with a frantic gesture.
+
+"Don't! /don't!/" she wailed. "If you only knew! Let me try to tell
+you--will you?" she urged, pitifully. "It may be better if I tell some
+one--if I don't keep it all to myself, and think, and /think/."
+
+She clasped her hands tight, with the old gesture he remembered when
+she was struggling for self-control, and waited a moment.
+
+Presently she began to speak in a low, hurried tone: "It began before
+you came. I know now what the feeling was that I was afraid to
+acknowledge to myself. I used to try and smother it; I used to repeat
+things to myself all day--poems, stupid rhymes--/anything/ to keep my
+thoughts quite underneath--but I--/hated/ John before you came! We had
+been married nearly a year then. I never loved him. Of course you are
+going to say, 'Why did you marry him?' " She looked drearily over the
+placid sea. "Why /did/ I marry him? I don't know; for the reason that
+hundreds of ignorant, inexperienced girls marry, I suppose. My home
+wasn't a happy one. I was miserable, and oh--/restless/. I wonder if
+men know what it feels like to be restless? Sometimes I think they
+can't even guess. John wanted me very badly; nobody wanted me at home
+particularly. There didn't seem to be any point in my life. Do you
+understand? . . . Of course, being alone with him in that little camp
+in that silent plain"--she shuddered--"made things worse. My nerves
+went all to pieces. Everything he said, his voice, his accent, his
+walk, the way he ate, irritated me so that I longed to rush out
+sometimes and shriek--and go /mad/. Does it sound ridiculous to you to
+be driven mad by such trifles? I only know I used to get up from the
+table sometimes and walk up and down outside, with both hands over my
+mouth to keep myself quiet. And all the time I /hated/ myself--how I
+hated myself! I never had a word from him that wasn't gentle and
+tender. I believe he loved the ground I walked on. Oh, it is /awful/
+to be loved like that when you--" She drew in her breath with a sob.
+"I--I--it made me sick for him to come near me--to touch me." She
+stopped a moment.
+
+Broomhurst gently laid his hand on her quivering one. "Poor little
+girl!" he murmured.
+
+"Then /you/ came," she said, "and before long I had another feeling to
+fight against. At first I thought it couldn't be true that I loved you
+--it would die down. I think I was /frightened/ at the feeling; I
+didn't know it hurt so to love any one."
+
+Broomhurst stirred a little. "Go on," he said, tersely.
+
+"But it didn't die," she continued, in a trembling whisper, "and the
+other /awful/ feeling grew stronger and stronger--hatred; no, that is
+not the word--/loathing/ for--for--John. I fought against it. Yes,"
+she cried, feverishly, clasping and unclasping her hands; "Heaven
+knows I fought it with all my strength, and reasoned with myself, and
+--oh, I did /everything/, but--" Her quick-falling tears made speech
+difficult.
+
+"Kathleen!" Broomhurst urged, desperately, "you couldn't help it, you
+poor child. You say yourself you struggled against your feelings. You
+were always gentle; perhaps he didn't know."
+
+"But he did--he /did/," she wailed; "it is just that. I hurt him a
+hundred times a day; he never said so, but I knew it; and yet I
+/couldn't/ be kind to him,--except in words,--and he understood. And
+after you came it was worse in one way, for he knew--I /felt/ he knew
+--that I loved you. His eyes used to follow me like a dog's, and I was
+stabbed with remorse, and I tried to be good to him, but I couldn't."
+
+"But--he didn't suspect--he trusted you," began Broomhurst. "He had
+every reason. No woman was ever so loyal, so--"
+
+"Hush!" she almost screamed. "Loyal! it was the least I could do--to
+stop you, I mean--when you--After all, I knew it without your telling
+me. I had deliberately married him without loving him. It was my own
+fault. I felt it. Even if I couldn't prevent his knowing that I hated
+him, I could prevent /that/. It was my punishment. I deserved it for
+/daring/ to marry without love. But I didn't spare John one pang after
+all," she added, bitterly. "He knew what I felt toward him; I don't
+think he cared about anything else. You say I mustn't reproach myself?
+When I went back to the tent that morning--when you--when I stopped
+you from saying you loved me, he was sitting at the table with his
+head buried in his hands; he was crying--bitterly. I saw him,--it is
+terrible to see a man cry,--and I stole away gently, but he saw me. I
+was torn to pieces, but I /couldn't/ go to him. I knew he would kiss
+me, and I shuddered to think of it. It seemed more than ever not to be
+borne that he should do that--when I knew /you/ loved me."
+
+"Kathleen," cried her lover, again, "don't dwell on it all so terribly
+--don't--"
+
+"How can I forget?" she answered, despairingly. "And then,"--she
+lowered her voice,--"oh, I can't tell you--all the time, at the back
+of my mind somewhere, there was a burning wish that he might /die/. I
+used to lie awake at night, and, do what I would to stifle it, that
+thought used to /scorch/ me, I wished it so intensely. Do you believe
+that by willing one can bring such things to pass?" she asked, looking
+at Broomhurst with feverishly bright eyes. "No? Well, I don't know. I
+tried to smother it,--I /really/ tried,--but it was there, whatever
+other thoughts I heaped on the top. Then, when I heard the horse
+galloping across the plain that morning, I had a sick fear that it was
+/you/. I knew something had happened, and my first thought when I saw
+you alive and well, and knew it was /John/, was /that it was too good
+to be true/. I believe I laughed like a maniac, didn't I? . . . Not to
+blame? Why, if it hadn't been for me he wouldn't have died. The men
+say they saw him sitting with his head uncovered in the burning sun,
+his face buried in his hands--just as I had seen him the day before.
+He didn't trouble to be careful; he was too wretched."
+
+She paused, and Broomhurst rose and began to pace the little hillside
+path at the edge of which they were seated.
+
+Presently he came back to her.
+
+"Kathleen, let me take care of you," he implored, stooping toward her.
+"We have only ourselves to consider in this matter. Will you come to
+me at once?"
+
+She shook her head sadly.
+
+Broomhurst set his teeth, and the lines round his mouth deepened. He
+threw himself down beside her on the heather.
+
+"Dear," he urged, still gently, though his voice showed he was
+controlling himself with an effort, "you are morbid about this. You
+have been alone too much; you are ill. Let me take care of you; I
+/can/, Kathleen,--and I love you. Nothing but morbid fancy makes you
+imagine you are in any way responsible for--Drayton's death. You can't
+bring him back to life, and--"
+
+"No," she sighed, drearily, "and if I could, nothing would be altered.
+Though I am mad with self-reproach, I feel /that/--it was all so
+inevitable. If he were alive and well before me this instant, my
+feeling toward him wouldn't have changed. If he spoke to me he would
+say 'my dear'--and I should /loathe/ him. Oh, I know! It is /that/
+that makes it so awful."
+
+"But if you acknowledge it," Broomhurst struck in, eagerly, "will you
+wreck both of our lives for the sake of vain regrets? Kathleen, you
+never will."
+
+He waited breathlessly for her answer.
+
+"I won't wreck both our lives by marrying again without love on my
+side," she replied, firmly.
+
+"I will take the risk," he said. "You /have/ loved me; you will love
+me again. You are crushed and dazed now with brooding over this--this
+trouble, but--"
+
+"But I will not allow you to take the risk," Kathleen answered. "What
+sort of woman should I be to be willing again to live with a man I
+don't love? I have come to know that there are things one owes to
+/one's self/. Self-respect is one of them. I don't know how it has
+come to be so, but all my old feeling for you has /gone/. It is as
+though it had burned itself out. I will not offer gray ashes to any
+man."
+
+Broomhurst, looking up at her pale, set face, knew that her words were
+final, and turned his own aside with a groan.
+
+"Ah," cried Kathleen, with a little break in her voice, "/don't!/ Go
+away, and be happy and strong, and all that I loved in you. I am so
+sorry--so sorry to hurt you. I--" her voice faltered miserably; "I--I
+only bring trouble to people."
+
+There was a long pause.
+
+"Did you never think that there is a terrible vein of irony running
+through the ordering of this world?" she said, presently. "It is a
+mistake to think our prayers are not answered--they are. In due time
+we get our heart's desire--when we have ceased to care for it."
+
+"I haven't yet got mine," Broomhurst answered, doggedly, "and I shall
+never cease to care for it."
+
+She smiled a little, with infinite sadness.
+
+"Listen, Kathleen," he said. They had both risen, and he stood before
+her, looking down at her. "I will go now, but in a year's time I shall
+come back. I will not give you up. You shall love me yet."
+
+"Perhaps--I don't think so," she answered, wearily.
+
+Broomhurst looked at her trembling lips a moment in silence; then he
+stooped and kissed both her hands instead.
+
+"I will wait till you tell me you love me," he said.
+
+She stood watching him out of sight. He did not look back, and she
+turned with swimming eyes to the gray sea and the transient gleams of
+sunlight that swept like tender smiles across its face.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of Stories by English Authors, Orient
+
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