The Mating of the Blades/Chapter 9
CHAPTER IX
Which mentions some trivialities about Gwendolyn de Vere, née Bridget O'Callahan, then swings straight back to a section of Calcutta as famous for its evil odors as its evil morals.
Even Tollemache Wade, though he regarded any show in which Miss Gwendolyn de Vere, née Bridget O'Callahan, had a part through the roseate spectacles of his personal affection for her, could not deny that “A Pair of Gray Eyes” was not a new musical play.
For, in a way, it was a historic play, a gently reminiscent play that had been cut out, pasted, remodeled, and recast; had been restored to its original form, renamed, and once again rewritten; finally had been rehashed with the help of a collaborator who was an impecunious cousin of the producing manager, and who took seventy-five per cent of the royalties and put it through all the regular paces of condensement and enlargement which make playwriting such a delightful pastime for a nervous writer blessed with an artistic temperament, a conscience, and a lack of humor.
The music contained stray bits from Gilbert and Sullivan's operas and a good many Wagnerian motifs made over and syncopated, while the dialogue was richly spiced with lines from “Charlie's Aunt.” There was, of course, an opening chorus showing a London society matron whose daughters—seventeen of them, including Gwendolyn de Vere—hopped about in bathing suits; interpolated specialties giving imitations of famous imitators; a whole-hearted Irish self-made man, who had founded the Bermuda Onion Trust and whose daughter was being wooed by a Russian Grand-duke who spoke with a Franco-Hebrew accent; and wheezes, the repetition of which would be considered suicidal on any sunny Broadway corner between Thirty-Fourth and Forty-Seventh Streets.
Even the tuning of the bass-viol was stolen.
But the play was a success.
“Yes, old dear,” said Gwendolyn de Vere to The Honorable Tollemache Wade, reclining on a couch in her bedroom of the Adelphi Apartments, which was typical of her mind and taste—a hectic rubbish and flummery of make-believe art. “They're turning them away night after night.”
“Corkin', what?”
“Corkin'—rather! But not for me! I haven't even a speakin' bit. And the show has positively made Nell Grosvenor. You know yourself she can't dance, and she can't sing, and—her figure—my word! But there you are, Tollie old chap. She is—made! Why—up at Robinson & Smyth's they named a new brassiere after her!”
“Yes?”
Tollemache Wade looked up, a little worried. He was the sort who, never looking ahead of the passing hour when it was a question of staying his own cravings, had not the heart to look beyond the passing hour's pity where those whom he loved were concerned— the sort who pauperized others as well as himself. And he had an idea of what was coming.
“Nell Grosvenor is going to marry that stockbrokin' johnny next week,” went on Gwendolyn; “what's his name?—oh, yes—Madison, and she's goin' to quit the stage straight off.”
“Who's going to substitute for her?” asked Tollemache; and then the answer which he expected—and feared:
“I am—if you'll come through with a bit of the ready. You know how it is in the profession. A girl hasn't got a chance unless she slips something to the manager—and …”
“But, my dear!” expostulated Tollemache. “I haven't a red, you know, and I'm head-over-heels in debts, and …”
“If you can't, Reggie Bullivant will!” came Gwendolyn's terse, brutal rejoinder.
The result was that Tollemache Wade paid another and humiliating call on Sam Lewis, the usurer of Lombard Street, and, by signing a note for fifteen thousand guineas, received five thousand in cash and the remaining ten thousand in champagne and unsalable rugs; that Gwendolyn de Vere appeared the next week in Nell Grosvenor's rôle, coming on in the first act as an English milkmaid, a posy of property daisies in her hand, dressed in a simple little milking-costume of rose madder charmeuse and a diamond tiara; and that, early in September, Mr. Sam Lewis went to Sussex and interviewed the Earl of Dealle.
He came prepared for the usual scene: hard words, a curt refusal to settle his sons debts, then, after certain threats on the part of Mr. Lewis, a check book drawn out and the pen scratching tremblingly across the pink slip, perhaps with an accompanying “I say. Don't deposit this check for a couple of weeks. I have to have time to turn round and make certain arrangements”—a euphemism for mortgaging or selling another piece of property.
But, for once, Mr. Lewis had made a mistake.
He stated what he wanted, and the earl, hiding the wound in his heart, looked up very much with the expression of the Punch and Judy clown just before he frizzles the policeman with a red-hot poker.
“Sam,” he said, for he had had dealings of his own with the money lender when both had been forty years younger, “you backed the wrong mare this time. Long odds—what, what?—but no starter at all! In other words, you lose, my lad.”
“Lose—what?”
“Fifteen thousand guineas, Samuel. That's the amount, isn't it?”
“Yes, yes—also some other notes long overdue—altogether nearly twenty-five thousand …”
“A whole lot of tin,” came the sardonic rejoinder, “but you should thank the God of Abraham and Jacob that you can afford to lose it.”
“But—m'lord!” Mr. Lewis shivered. He wiped beads of perspiration from his bulbous forehead with a large bandana handkerchief. “You mean to say that …”
“I mean to say that I have resigned being chancellor of the exchequer for Tollemache.”
“But …”
“Sorry, my lad. The simple truth is that I have not got it—that you can't wring money from a stone—who is stony broke …” He smiled grimly at his own pun.
Mr. Lewis changed from the wheedling to the minatory.
“M'lord,” he said, “if you don't pay …”
“Right-oh! I know exactly what you are going to do. Have to have your little old pound of flesh, what? And since you can't get it in coin of the realm, you'll take it out in ruin and disgrace—by dragging my son through the court of bankruptcy and through the filth of the ha'penny press. Very well. Hector ruined because of Tollemache”—he mumbled to himself; his sardonic bravado was gone; he was just an old man, feeble, pitiful, senile—“and now Tollemache! Divine Providence and all that sort of asinine drivel …”
He collapsed into a chair and cried, as old men cry, with cracked, ludicrous, high-pitched little sobs, while Tomps, the butler, showed Mr. Sam Lewis to the door.
And one of the results of the interview was that Mr. Preserved Higgins, who was pacing up and down the length of the little cobwebby office of Upper Thames Street, happening to glance at the headline of the afternoon newspaper which the sandy-haired gentleman had brought in, stopped suddenly short and uttered the word “Cricky!”
After which he laughed uproariously.
A minute earlier he had poured forth a volley of oaths, some peculiar to his native heath of Hog Lane, others purloined from Whitechapel and Pimlico, still others learned during his years as able-bodied seaman and borrowed from the cosmopolitan throng of the South African gold fields, and others again that are the proud, linguistic privilege of the British army in partibus infidelium.
The sandy-haired gentleman had smoked a woodbine and listened, torn between awe and envy.
“Diddled me, 'e did, that there—crimson Ali Yusuf Khan!” the millionaire had exclaimed, kicking himself viciously in the shin. “Diddled me, by , the Bilked me, by Kept me 'ere in London, on purpose, for 'is ruddy trial wot's comin' orf in the September assizes so's to keep me aw'y from Calcutta where 'Ector Wade is rubbin' noses with the Hemperor of Dollars and Cents. Yes! They syled on the syme ship, the , I just found out. And 'ere Babu Bansi writes me that the princess, too, is on 'er w'y to Calcutta, doubtless to meet 'Ector and that there plurry Yank.”
“But,” the sandy-haired gentleman had interrupted, “it seems to me the Babu should have …”
“Should 'ave nothink!” Mr. Higgins was fair enough. “'E did 'is part. Cybled me as soon as the old Ameer 'ad kicked the bucket and told me wot 'e'd found out about … you know. 'Ere”—opening the small, plump safe and taking from amongst his private files the wire which Bansi had sent him the day of the Ameer's funeral, addressed to “Gloops.”
He had read aloud: “Tell Gloops meanwhile should look up Burke's Peerage find bally old nobility family whose escutcheon is double headed lion and establish with them jolly old social relations.”
‘Well?” he had continued. “Didn't you and me chuck ourselves all over the bloomin' plyce and look through the British Museum and Westminster Abbey and the Office of 'Eraldry until we'd found the nyme of that there family with the double-'eaded lion? And, after Bansi 'ad wired me particulars, didn't I establish social relytions? Didn't I go down to Sussex and visit them—two-'eaded lions and mortgage and rotten grub and all? Didn't I do everything I bloody well could? Could anybody 'ave been more cyreful than me? And now—bilked, diddled—Gawd stroike me pink! That's wot I am! Done brown! Like a snut-nosed brat with the whoopin' cough and two left feet!”
Then he happened to glance at the newspaper headline, uttered the mysterious “Cricky!” laughed uproariously, and turned to the sandy-haired gentleman who was just about to decide that his employer had lost his reason.
“Don't you see?” he said. “Ain't Tollemache a son of that there two-'eaded lion family as much as 'Ector? And, with good old Sam Lewis puttin' on the thumb screws, ain't 'e every bit as down and out as 'Ector—Gawd bless 'em both? And 'e ain't as proud as 'Ector and I'll 'ave 'im eat out o' my 'and in no time. Mebbe it's even better, 'im bein' the older son. I ain't a religious man, 'avin' been too busy all my life and my people 'avin' been chapel folk, but I call this bloomin' providential!”
He looked at his watch.
“Five o'clock,” he went on. “You'll find the Honorable Tollemache at the Criterion a-drownin' of his sorrers, and if you don't find 'im there, arsk the barmaid at the Lorraine, on Leicester Square. She'll know. Anyway, you get 'im and bring 'im 'ere as quick's you can!”
And the sandy-haired gentleman was off on a run, taking a short cut through Suffolk Lane and disappearing in the blotchy shadows of the Cannon Street Railway Terminus, while Mr. Preserved Higgins telephoned to his devoted adherent, Horatio Pinker of the metropolitan police, recently promoted to desk sergeant, and asked him to see to it that the case against Ali Yusuf Khan be quashed, immediately, and without any undesirable publicity.
He said that he had found the diamond necklace, that he was sorry to have, quite unwittingly, preferred a false charge against the Oriental, and that he would be only too glad to send the latter a good-sized check as balm for his hurt dignity and reputation.
At the other end of the wire, Sergeant Horatio Pinker turned to a colleague.
“Ain't Mr. Higgins the gent, though?” he asked.
Fifteen minutes later, the Cockney millionaire was wagging his russet beard at Tollemache Wade, who was sitting across from him, distracted, nervous, a little the worse for drink.
“I'll do it,” wound up Mr. Higgins, “because of your father, m'boy. Is it a bargain?”
“Oh—I s'pose so.”
“Can you be ready by to-morrow morning—let's s'y to-morrow noon?”
"Rather. There's nothing to keep me in town, you know—” and Tollemache thought, bitterly, that an hour earlier Gwendolyn de Vere's maid had told him that her mistress was not at home, and that, from her drawing-room, he had heard Gwendolyn's light laugh and Reggie Bullivant's answering basso.
"All right, m'boy. Buy everything you want. Charge it up to me. We leave to-morrow via Paris, Berlin, and Moscow, then to Orenburg, and over the Russian military r'ylw'y to Bokhara, Central Asia.”
“I haven't a passport,” said Tollemache Wade, “and I rather doubt if, with this scandal of mine, bankruptcy and drummin' out of the army for conduct unbecomin' and old Gwen givin' interviews to the reporters and all that, you know, the foreign office will give me one.”
“Don't you bother your 'ead about passports, old cock. I 'ave friends from 'ere to Timbuktu, and I 'ave their number, every blasted last one's of 'em, and I knows 'ow to grease palms tactful-like. There's a lad at the Russian Embassy who'll do it dirt cheap. And now—off with you; and remember, me bucko, not a word to anybody, or the bargain's orf, see?”
That evening, using a bizarre code which completely baffled the local Tamerlanistan manager-of the Anglo-Asian Cable Company, he sent a wire to his Babu satellite, and remarked to the sandy-haired gentleman:
“I'd like to see the fyces of the good old Hemperor of Dollars and Cents and of 'Ector when they finds out 'ow I'm goin' to kick 'em in the south side of their pants—and they ain't goin' to find out for a long time yet. By the w'y, look up Babu Bansi's old correspondence and see wot the blighter's nyme is—you know, the governor of the western marches of Tamerlanistan. Phone me, and then go straight to Pollocks, on Bond Street, and get me a 'ole lot of them jewels Oriental potentytes likes—off-color diamonds and moonstones and opals and things. Pollocks will know. 'Ave 'em charge it up to me and damn the expense. Then, to-morrow early, go to the Smith & Union Bank …”
And a string of precise instructions, since Mr. Preserved Higgins' method of doing business, once he had arrived at a decision, was as simple and direct as a question in the Rule-of-Three.
Half an hour later he was closeted with his friend, Baron Vassily Ilyitch de Todleben, of the Russian Embassy, who was one of those men who have to have blatantly outward signs of the fact that they are enjoying themselves: a motor-car, a bottle of champagne, a chorus girl, or a chair in a roulette game; and who, being congenitally impecunious, and as congenitally unscrupulous, was willing not to let his left hand know what his right was taking.
“Yes,” he said to Mr. Preserved Higgins, “I'll find out what I can about that Abderrahman Yahiah Khan—governor of the western marches of Tamerlanistan, didn't you say?”
“Yes, Baron.”
“All right. I have a friend in Moscow, a high official in the Bureau for Pan-Russian Central-Asian Propaganda. I shall send him a wire, and he will get into communication with you.”
“Thanks, my lad, and don't you be afraid—it 'as nothing to do with politics. I ain't doin' any dirty work for England. It's just plain business.”
“That's all right, Mr. Higgins.” The Russian waved a white, excessively well-kept hand. “And now, as to the other little matter …”
And he affixed the Tsar's seal to two passports, one for Mr. Higgins himself, the other for a gentleman by the name of Henry Wallace Wilberforce who, to judge from the written description on the stamped paper, bore a marked physical resemblance to The Honorable Tollemache Wade.
The latter's brother, in the meantime, was worrying about the same matter of passports.
It did not take him over twenty-four hours to discover that he had been right in his surmise and that India, as represented and crystallized by its premier city of Calcutta, held out as little chance to him as home-England. It was the identical story from Park Street to the Howrah Bridge, from Fort William to the Towers of Silence, from the Presbyterian Church in Old Court House Street to Lal Bazaar: here and there he recognized familiar faces, some dead white with the heat of the tropics, others still ruddy with recent British beef and beer.
But it was as he had known it would be:
“Oh, yes. Wade. Hector Wade, old Dealle's son, chap who used to be in the Dragoons—you know. Rotten cad—you heard about it—what?”
And shoulders shrugging, eyes looking pity or contempt, and the very old maids who had been sent to India by their doting parents as a last chance at the matrimonial grab-bag, used their lorgnettes in the approved Mayfair style.
Yes. Calcutta was only an imperial suburb, a tropical annex to Belgravia and Marlborough House!
Within three days of his arrival the thing had become nearly a pathological obsession with him, and he seemed to read the sneering, malicious story of his disgrace in every face he saw in the crowded thorough fares of Calcutta. He imagined that even the natives were looking at him with contempt: the patent-leathered Bengalis, oily with ghee; the lean, monkey-faced Madrassis; the acrid-scented Sansis with baskets of unclean food slung across their backs; the ruffianly Punjaubis, the soft-stepping, neat Parsees, and the big boned, gray-eyed, white-skinned men from the farther north, who looked about them with an odd mixture of wonder and derision.
Later on, he used to remark that it was only the touch of the blade against his heart—“I know it sounds no end silly,” he would add—that kept him, if not from becoming stark mad, then at least from committing assault and battery with intent to kill on some innocent Briton or harmless Bengali.
But, out of the blade, some flooding, massive energy, like a tide of unknown power and beauty and glory, seemed to surge through him, driving his misgivings away with the strength of tremendous, dynamic values and, finally, on the fifth day, quite suddenly, directing his feet to the government office on Park Street where passports were made out for Afghanistan, Central Asia, and the North.
For he had made up his mind to leave Calcutta, India, to go clear, clear away—out into the far, yellow, brooding heart of Asia.
Perhaps Ali Yusuf Khan had been right.
Perhaps the old, tired, patient soul of Asia needed men like himself, young and strong and unhappy …
But when he stated his errand to Sir James Rivet-Carnac, the official in charge, that crimson-necked, purse-mouthed knight smiled in his most pinchbeck manner.
He toyed with his visitor's card.
“Pardon me,” he said, “but are you by any chance that Hector Wade who …”
“I am!” came the terse reply. “What about it?”
“Only that the British-Indian government has a certain prestige to keep up in the North, in Central Asia—with Russia so infernally close, you know. We can't grant passports to”—he coughed; then, brutally—“to people of your kidney, Mr. Wade. What would the natives think of us? Good day, sir.”
And, as Hector was about to cross the threshold:
“By the way, no use trying to cross the border without a passport. I am going to have you watched. Fair warning, don't you know.”
He turned to his assistant after Hector had left:
“I wager long odds that young beggar made up his mind to go North, passport or no passport. Jolly determined looking, what? Too bad he did that foolish, caddish thing. Such a frightful waste of material from an imperial point of view. Oh, well—we'll have him shadowed. We can't afford to have chaps like him floatin' loose about Asia—what with these stinking Babus preaching home rule and our beloved white Babus home in England helping them and all that …”
Sir James was a good physiognomist. He had read Hector's thoughts correctly. For, somehow, the other's refusal to issue him a passport had only strengthened his stubborn resolution to go North, to cross the Himalayas, to look beyond the ranges for the chance which England and India, the Empire, denied him.
Yes. He would go.
But—how?
For even if he managed to evade Sir James Rivet-Carnac's watchers, there was the vital question of money, since the ocean journey, including the tips aboard and other incidental expenses, and his five days' stay in Calcutta, had practically exhausted the money which Ali Yusuf Khan had lent him.
“What shall I do? How can I go?”
He asked himself the question as he looked from the balcony of his room, out into the night cloaked streets whence rose a confused mingling of sounds: voices in many languages, rising, then decreasing, the shouts of itinerant fruit and lemonade venders, the tinkle-tinkle-tinkle of some woman's glass bracelets, a shred of laughter flung carelessly to the winds, a sudden dramatic shriek …
The sounds leaped up to his ear—the sounds of India, of Asia—cruel, beckoning, mysterious, scented, fascinating, portentous, inexplicable—
The rune of Asia—and how could he resist the call of it?
Something tugged at his soul.
If he had wings to fly from the window, to launch himself across the purple haze of the town, to alight on some flat roof, then to rise again and swing out and beyond on the sweep of the northbound wind across the great Indian peninsula; over the central jungles that stretched like a great sea of vegetation, an entangled, exuberant blending of leaves and spiky creepers and waxen, musky flowers, a rolling wave of green life; over the perfumed valley of Kashmere, the foot-hills that rolled down like enormous, over lapping planes; clear across the carved, sardonic immensities of the Himalayas where the harried sun hid and shivered amongst the northern snows … and out into the heart of Asia … if he had wings to fly!
“What shall I do? How can I go?”
Again he asked himself the question, and, suddenly, he thought of Ali Yusuf Khan's parting words:
“Trust the blade. It will speak to you when man fails you—or Fate.”
He felt slightly self-conscious, slightly ludicrous. For he was an “Englishman, a European, an average Occidental swinging, intellectually and emotionally, half way between Christianity and biology, and what was all this painted, twisted, mazed Oriental tommyrot to him? All this mad talk about trusting a dagger, asking a senseless, lifeless length of forged steel to speak to him!
His hand fingered the hilt of the weapon—he had not unsheathed it since that night in Coal Yard Street—while his mind, like a captive bird, was beating against the cage bars of his prosy, two-and-two-is-four intelligence, his typically British refusal to believe the incredible—even after he had seen it happen.
Then his lips curled in a lop-sided smile.
“Oh, well,” he murmured, apologetically, in the general direction of the moon that was racing through the clouds like delicate ivory flotsam, “it can't hurt,” and he drew the blade from the jeweled shagreen scabbard into which Ali Yusuf Khan had fitted it and, from a piece of silver wire scroll work just below the hilt where it had been wedged, a paper fluttered to the ground.
Mechanically he picked it up, and saw that there were words on it, in Persian, signed “Ali Yusuf Khan,” and read;
“If you need help, go to the house of Mehmet Iddrissy Khan. You will find him in the house at the end of Hyder Ahmet's Gully, in the Colootallah section, beyond the Machua Bazaar.”
Hector gave a low laugh. He did not know why he laughed; did not have time to psychologize about it. For, the next second, he had picked up his hat, left the room and the hotel, and was out into the smoky, purple, fantastic Indian night, while, two seconds later, his mind and body acting together with almost uncanny precision, he remembered Sir James Rivet-Carnac's warning that he would be followed, turned swiftly beneath the haggard light of a street lamp, saw that a short, lean Madrassi was slinking close behind him, and had the point of his blade on the man's windpipe.
“Be careful,” he whispered, “this knife may slip. Talk just as if we were friends.”
“Yes, saheb.” The man's teeth clicked together like castanets.
“All right. Now—answer quick and low. From the police, aren't you?”
“Yes, saheb.”
“Anybody else following me?”
“No, saheb.”
“Sure you are speaking the truth?”
“Yes, yes, yes! By Vishnu and Shiva!”—as the blade was pricking his skin.
“Good. Now come along. And walk gently—be careful or …”
And he walked the Madrassi away from the Great Eastern Hotel and into a little, shadow-blotched park which he had visited earlier in the day and which was deserted, except for the ubiquitous crows.
“Sorry I have to be rough,” he said; and, the next minute, he had him on his back, had him gagged securely with his handkerchief and the heavy leather gloves he carried in his pocket; tore off the man's turban cloth and waist shawl, and tied him hand and foot.
Then, very leisurely, he left the park and walked to Old Court House Street where he asked the stolid English policeman the way to the Colootallah.
“Place there called Hyder Ahmet's Gully, isn't it?”
“Yes, sir. But I wouldn't go there if I were you, sir.”
“Why not?”
“Because,” replied the policeman, who had twenty years' Calcutta service to his record, “it is the rottenest, stinkingest, most unregenerate patch of crime in our whole East Indian Empire. Because a white man ain't safe there—leastways this time of night, sir. Oh, well”—as Hector insisted—“it's your own funeral. You go down through the Burra Bazaar—”
“I know where that is—”
“Past the Jora Bagan and the Machua … and he gave the directions as precisely as if it had been London.
“Thank you.”
And a pleasant tinkle of silver, and Hector was off toward the Burra Bazaar at a good round clip, and bidding farewell to the white man's Calcutta, to Government House and green tea and respectability.
On he walked, past the Jora Bagan and the Machua, and plunged into a network of narrow streets where the poor, unwashed, and diseased of all India's motley races seemed to live together in friendship and evil odors. Not many lights stole through the shuttered balconies of the packed, greasy houses. Overhead, between the two facades, he saw a strip of paleness which evidently was doing duty for a bit of moonlit sky.
“Where is Hyder Ahmed's Gully?” he asked a native.
“Over there, saheb!”
The man pointed and, with a word of thanks, Hector was off again, through streets that grew steadily more narrow and crooked, with a glimpse of smoky, discouraged sky above the roof tops revealing scarcely three yards of breadth, the roadway ankle deep in squidgy, sticky blue slime, beggars and roughs and lepers slinking and pushing against him, and a fetid stink hanging over it all like an evil pall; until, directed by another native who, like the policeman, gave him good-natured warning and advised him to return to his hotel, he found himself in Hyder Ahmet Khan's Gully, a long, crooked cul-de-sac that ran the gamut of white-washed walls without windows or doors, mysterious, useless looking, and that was sealed at the farther end by a tall, lonely house, rising into the purple welter of the night with an immense abandon of fretted, tortured stone and masonry work, with bird's-nest balconies and crazy, twisted, bulbous roofs and spires, the whole thing typically Hindu in its maniacal, architectural extravagance.
Not a soul was about. There was not even a sound. It was as if all life had been cut short at the entrance of the Gully, and everything Hector was—racially, traditionally, culturally—bristled within him. He saw a glimmer of burnished metal, bent, looked, and saw that it was the lock of a door set low into the house, to the left of it a brass plate with the name of Mehmet Iddrissy Khan engraved in Persian letters, to the right an old-fashioned, iron knocker.
He stood undecided, rather frightened. Somehow, he felt that it was this door which stood between life as he had known it heretofore and the life of the future—whatever the future might bring.
Should he take the—yes—the plunge. For it was that.
Again he hesitated. Then, suddenly, a wisp of laughter drifted out of the nowhere, a woman's laughter, soft, tinkling, silvery, and he took a deep breath like a man about to dive, and lifted the door knocker—brought it down sharply—banng!—with a dull, portentous thud; and, a few moments later, from the inside, came the brushing of feet, a cough, and the door opened to disclose a tall, elderly Hindu who was holding in his right hand a flickering oil lamp and who surveyed the late visitor with suspicion.
“What do you wish?” he asked, and Hector thought it typical of the neighborhood, the Colootallah, that the man did not use the courteous “saheb.”
“I wish to speak to Mehmet Iddrissy Khan.”
“About what?”
Hector flared up.
“None of your confounded business,” he cried; then, as the other was about to close the door, he stopped him with a gesture, laughed, drew the blade from his pocket and gave it, hilt foremost, to the other.
“Show this to your master,” he said. “Tell him it is all the credentials I have.”
“Very well;” and the Hindu shut the door in Hector's face.
Hector waited. Afterwards he used to say that, had it not been for the fact that the other had taken the blade with him, he would have walked away as fast as his legs would have let him. But—“the blade was an integral part of me, don't you see?” he would add. “I couldn't have left without it. Of course not. That bit of steel had stuck by me.”
He did not have to wait long. For, a minute later, the door opened again, and this time the Hindu salaamed deeply, and there was something almost like awe in his opaque eyes, and respect in his voice as he bade the other enter.
“Thy people are sick with longing for thee, saheb!” he said in purring Persian. “Careful, Protector of the Pitiful! The steps are slippery!”
And, the lamp high in his hand and throwing flickering, fantastic shadows, he led Hector through a labyrinth of rooms, some of them ablaze with raw, clashing colors, others in dull, somber shades which melted into each other; through wide corridors, supported by pillars whose capitals were shaped into pendant lotus forms, or crowned with lateral struts carved into the likenesses of horsemen or war-girt elephants. There was furniture of all ages and climes, from century old sandal-wood pieces chip-carved into flat relief to massive tables topped with slabs of Bokharan lapis lazuli; from wonderful, old, red Chinese lac to, here and there, a horribly clashing, cheap European incongruity … certainly a very wealthy man's house, decided Hector.
Once or twice they encountered native servants in rainbow-colored silks, who stepped aside and salaamed with extended hands, but even in those rooms which were empty of human life Hector was maddeningly conscious of watching eyes and listening ears. He said something of the sort to his guide who smiled.
“This is India, saheb,” he said. “This is an Indian house. Day and night, it is full of eyes and ears.” He stopped. “Look. Listen.”
He pointed at a bull's-eye cut low in an unexpected wall. He coughed loudly. There was a rustle of silken garments, and the noise of bare feet pattering away.
Another time, when directly between his feet Hector heard a sound of deep breathing, the Hindu showed him a tiny peep-hole in the mosaic work which covered the floor.
“A servant's servant,” he whispered, “listening to the gossip of the inner rooms, so as to bring a report to his superior, another report to another superior, still another, until it finally reaches the right ear.”
“Whose?” came the blunt question.
“The ear of the Princess Aziza Nurmahal, ruler of Tamerlanistan;” and, just as Hector was dim-groping in his memory where he had heard that last word, just as some recess in his brain flashed back the reply that Mr. Preserved Higgins had mentioned it a second before Hector's fist had hit him between the eyes and stretched him unconscious on the London pavement, the Hindu repeated:
“The Princess Aziza Nurmahal, ruler of Tamerlanistan!” with a loud voice, like a herald, drew aside a brocade curtain stiff with embroidery, and motioned the other to enter.
Hector stepped across the threshold, while his guide salaamed and disappeared.
Curled upon a couch, he saw a slim young girl, dressed native style in a sari of pale, rose-colored silk, shot with orange and violet and bordered with tiny seed pearls. Her face was small and round and exquisitely chiseled. Her hair was parted in the middle and of a glossy, bluish black, mingled with flowers and jewels.
She rose at Hector's approach, smiled, and walked up to him. It was evident that she expected the Englishman to speak; for an eager light was in her immense, black eyes; her narrow hands fluttered like butterflies; her lips were half open.
Hector coughed. He did not know what to say, did not know what to make of the whole situation. He had expected to find some wealthy native merchant who needed a young Englishman for his business; perhaps an elderly Brahmin who wanted a tutor for his son; perhaps some semi-independent Indian princeling who wished to avail himself of his military training.
But—to be ushered, in the middle of the night, into the presence of a young girl, a young girl of the Orient, a princess?
And to find her alone, and unveiled?
Why—it was incredible; and, momentarily, a sordid, unworthy thought flashed through his mind, to be quickly scotched as he looked at her friendly open face.
But he was tongue-tied, and then, quite suddenly, she threw her arms about his neck, drew his head down, and kissed him full on the lips.
“I have waited for thy coming, my lord,” she said, in a low, musical voice. “I have waited long!”
And Hector did exactly what any other clean bred, self-conscious young Briton would have done under the circumstances.
He blushed a painful brick-red, tried to remove the gentle pressure from around his neck, and murmured something very foolish and entirely inadequate:
“Please! I say—you mustn't—you know …”—positively mid-Victorian.
And the girl broke into a peal of irrepressible laughter.
“It was not the kiss of the love of passion, my lord,” she said. “It was the kiss of a sister's love.”
“A—sister's love?”
He felt more clumsy, less sure of himself, than ever.
“Yes!” the princess looked at him, utterly serious. “For we are sister and brother, thou and I! Rocked in the same cradle of Fate! Mated to Fate by the wooing of swords!”
Words which were quite without sense or meaning to The Honorable Hector Wade who, at that moment, was wishing fervently that he were back on the yellow, sandy Downs of Sussex.