The Bronze Bell Part 26

"You may be right. We'll never know. At all events, I seem to have a more--more painful comprehension of the native than most of the English in this country have; I seem to feel, to sense their motives, their desires, aspirations, even sometimes their untranslatable thoughts. I believe I understand perfectly their feeling toward us, the governing race."

"Then," said Amber, "you know something his Highness the Viceroy himself would give his ears to be sure of."

"I know that; but I do."

"And that feeling is----?"

"Not love, Mr. Amber."

"Much to the contrary----?"

"Very much," she affirmed with deep conviction.

"This 'Indian unrest' one reads of in the papers is not mere gossip, then?"

"Anything but that; it's the hidden fire stirring within the volcano we told ourselves was dead. The quiet of the last fifty years has been not content but slumber; deep down there has always been the fire, slow, deadly, smouldering beneath the ashes. The Mutiny still lives in spirit; some day it will break out afresh. You must believe me--I _know_. The more we English give our lives to educate the natives, the further we spread the propaganda of discontent; day by day we're teaching them to understand that we are no better than they, no more fit to rule; they are beginning to look up and to see over the rim of the world--and we have opened their eyes. They have learned that j.a.panese can defeat Caucasians, that China turns in its sleep, that England is no more omnipotent than omniscient. They've heard of anarchy and socialism and have learned to throw bombs. Only the other day a justice in Bengal was killed by a bomb.... I fancy I talk," the girl broke off with her clear laugh, "precisely like my father, who talks precisely as a political pamphleteer writes. You'll see when you meet him."

"Do you take much interest in politics?"

"No more than the every-day Englishwoman; it's one of our staples of conversation, when we've exhausted the weather, you know. But I'm not in the least advanced, if that's what you mean; I hunger after fas.h.i.+on-papers and spend more time than I ought, devouring home-made trash imported in paper-covers. I only feel what I feel by instinct--as I said awhile ago."

Perhaps if he had known less about the girl, he would have attached less importance to her statements. As it was, she impressed him profoundly. He pondered her words deeply, storing them in his memory, remembering that another had spoken in the same manner--one for whose insight into the ways of the native he had intense respect.

As the slow afternoon dragged out its blazing hours, their spirits languished, and they fell silent, full weary and listless. Towards the last quarter of the journey their road forsook the s.p.a.cious, haggard plain and again entered a hilly country, but this time one wherein there was no lack either of water or of life: a green and fertile land parcelled into farms and dotted with villages.

Night overtook the tonga when it was close upon Kuttarpur, swooping down upon the world like a blanket of darkness, at the moment that the final relay of ponies was being hitched in. The sun dipped behind the encircling hills; the west blazed with the lambent flame of fire-opal; the wonderful translucent blue of the sky shaded suddenly to deep purple lanced by great shafts of mauve and amethyst light, and in the east stars popped out; the hills shone like huge, crude gems--sapphire, jade, jasper, malachite, chalcedony--their valleys swimming with mists of mother-of-pearl.... And it was night, the hills dark and still, the sky a deeper purple and opaque, the ruddy fires of wayfarers on the roadside leaping clear and bright.

With fresh ponies the tonga took the road with a wild initial rush soon to be moderated, when it began to climb the last steep grade to the pa.s.s that gives access to Kuttarpur from the south. For an hour the road toiled up and ever upward; steep cliffs of rock crowded it, threatening to push it over into black abysses, or to choke it off between towering, formidable walls. It swerved suddenly into a broad, clear s.p.a.ce. The tonga paused. Voluntarily Ram Nath spoke for almost the first time since morning.

"Kuttarpur," he said, with a wave of his whip.

Aloof, austere and haughty, the City of Swords sits in the mouth of a ravine so narrow that a wall no more than a hundred yards in length is sufficient to seal its southerly approach. Beneath this wall, to one side of the city gate, a river flows from the lake that is Kuttarpur's chiefest beauty. Within, a mult.i.tude of dwellings huddles, all interpenetrated by streets and backways so straitened and sinuous as scarcely to permit the pa.s.sage of an elephant from the Maharana's herd; congested in the bottom of the valley, the houses climb tier upon tier the flanking hillsides, until their topmost roofs threaten even the supremacy of that miracle in white marble, the Raj Mahal.

Northwards the palace of Khandawar's kings stands, exquisite, rare, and marvellous, unlike any other building in the world. White, all white, from the lake that washes its lowest walls to the crenellated rim of its highest roof, it sweeps upward in breath-taking steps and wide terraces to the crest of the western hill, into which it burrows, from which it springs; a vast enigma propounded in white marble without a note of colour save where the foliage of a hidden garden peeps over the edge of a jealous screen--a hundred imposing mansions merged into one monstrous and imperial maze.

Impregnable in the old days, before cannon were brought to India, Kuttarpur lives to-day remote, unfriendly, inhospitable. Within its walls there is no room for many visitors; they who come in numbers, therefore, must perforce camp down before the gates.

Now figure the city to yourself, seeing it as Sophia was later to see it in the light of day; then drench it with blue Indian night and stud it with a myriad eyes of fire--lamps, torches, candles, blue-white electric arcs, lights running up and down both hillsides and fringing the very star-sheeted skies, cl.u.s.tering and diverging in vast, bewildering, inconsequent designs, picking out the walls and main thoroughfares, s.h.i.+ning through coloured globes upon the palace terraces, glimmering mysteriously from isolate windows and balconies; and add to these the softly illuminated walls of a hundred silken state marquees and a thousand meaner canvas tents arrayed south of the city.... And that is Kuttarpur as it first revealed itself to Amber and Sophia Farrell.

But for a moment were they permitted to gaze in wonderment; Ram Nath had little patience. When he chose to, he applied his whip, and the ponies stretched out, the tonga plunging on their heels down the steep hillside, like an ungoverned, ungovernable thing, maddened. Within a quarter of an hour they were careering through the city of tents on the parked plain before the southern wall. In five minutes more they drew up at the main city gate to parley with the Quarter Guard.

Here they suffered an exasperating delay. It appeared that the gates were shut at sundown, in deference to custom immemorial. Between that hour and sunrise none were permitted to pa.s.s either in or out without the express sanction of the State. The commander of the guard inst.i.tuted an impudent catechism, in response to which Ram Nath discovered the several ident.i.ties and estates of his charges. The commander received the information with impartial equanimity and retired within the city to confer with his superiors. After some time a trooper was sent to advise the travellers that the tonga would be permitted to enter with the understanding that the unaccredited Englishman (meaning Amber) would consent to lodge for the night in no other spot than the State rest-house beyond the northern limits of the city.

Amber agreed. The trooper saluted with much deference and withdrew. And for a long time nothing happened; the gates remained shut, the postern of the Quarter Guard irresponsive to Ram Nath's repeated summons. His pa.s.sengers endured with what patience they could command; they were aware that it was necessary to obtain from some quarter official sanction for the opening of the gates, but they had understood that it had already been obtained.

Abruptly the peace of the night was shattered, and the hum of the encampment behind them with the roar of the city before them was dwarfed, by a dull and thunderous detonation of cannon from a terrace of the palace. The tonga ponies, reared and plunged, Ram Nath mastering them with much difficulty. Sophia was startled, and Amber himself stirred uneasily on his perch.

"What now?" he grumbled. "You'd think we were visitors of state and had to be durbarred!"

Far up on the heights a second red flame stabbed the night, and again the thunder pealed. Thereafter gun after gun bellowed at imperative, stately intervals.

"Fifteen," Amber announced after a time. "Isn't this something extraordinary, Miss Farrell?"

"Perhaps," she suggested, "there's a native potentate arriving at the northern gate. They're very punctilious about their salutes, you know."

Another crash silenced her. Amber continued to count. "Twenty-one," he said when it seemed that there was to be no more cannonading. "Isn't that a royal salute?"

"Yes," said the girl; "four more guns than the Maharana of Khandawar himself is ent.i.tled to."

"How do you explain it?"

"I don't," she replied simply. "Can you?"

He was dumb. Could it be possible that this imperial greeting was intended for the man supposed to be the Maharana of Khandawar--Har Dyal Rutton? He glanced sharply at the girl, but her face was shadowed; and he believed she suspected nothing.

A great hush had fallen, replacing the rolling thunder of the State ordnance. Even the voice of the city seemed moderate, subdued. In silence the ma.s.sive gates studded with sharp-toothed elephant-spikes swung open.

With a grunt, Ram Nath cracked his whiplash and the tonga sped into the city. Amber bent forward.

"What's the name of that gate, Ram Nath--if you happen to know?"

"That," said the tonga-wallah in a level voice, "is known as the Gateway of Swords, sahib." He added in his own good time: "But not _the_ Gateway of Swords."

Amber failed to educe from him any satisfactory explanation of this orphic utterance.

CHAPTER XIII

THE PHOTOGRAPH

That same night Amber dined at the Residency, on the invitation of Raikes, the local representative of Government, seconded by the insistence of Colonel Farrell. It developed that Sophia's telegram had somehow been lost in transit, and Farrell's surprise and pleasure at sight of her were tempered only by his keen appreciation of Amber's advent.i.tious services, slight though they had been. He was urged to stay the evening out, before proceeding to his designated quarters, and the reluctance with which he acceded to this arrangement which worked so happily with his desires, may be imagined.

Their arrival coincided with the dinner-hour; the meal was held half an hour to permit them to dress. Raikes put a room at Amber's disposal, and the Virginian contrived to bathe and get into his evening clothes within less time than had been allowed him. Sophia, contrary to the habit of her s.e.x, was little tardier. At thirty minutes past eight they sat down to dine, at a table in the garden of the Residency.

Ease of anxiety was more than food and drink to Amber; his feeling of relief, to have convoyed Sophia to the company and protection of Anglo-Saxons like himself, was intense. Yet he swallowed his preliminary brandy-peg in a distinctly uncomfortable frame of mind, strangely troubled by the reflection that round that lone white table was gathered together the known white population of the State; a census of which accounted for just five souls.

In the encompa.s.sing, exotic gloom of that blue Indian night--the kind of night that never seems friendly to the Occidental but forever teems with hints of tragic mystery--the cloth, lighted by shaded candles, shone as immaculate and l.u.s.trous as an island of snow in a sea of ink--as a good deed in a naughty world. Its punctilious array of crystal and silver was no more foreign to the setting than were the men who sat round it, stiff in that black-and-white armour of civilisation, impregnable against the insidious ease of the East, in which your expatriate Englishman nightly encases himself wherever he may be, as loath to forego the ceremony of "dressing for dinner" as he would be to dispense with letters from Home.

Raikes presided, a heavy man with the flaming red face of one who const.i.tutionally is unable to tan; of middle-age, good-natured, mellow, adroit of manner. On his one hand sat Amber, over across from Sophia.

Next to Amber sat Farrell, tall and lean, sad of eye and slow of speech, his sun-faded hair and moustache streaked with grey setting off a dark complexion and thin, fine features. He wore the habit of authority equally with the irascibility of one who temporizes with his liver. Opposite him was a young, mild-eyed missionary, too new in the land to have lost his illusions or have blunted the keen edge of his enthusiasms; a colourless person with a finical way of handling his knife and fork, who darted continually shy, sidelong glances at Sophia, or interpolated eager, undigested comments, nervously into the conversation.

The table-talk was inconsequent; Amber took a courteous and easy part in it without feeling that any strain was being put upon his intelligence. His attention was centred upon the woman who faced him, flushed with gaiety and pleasure, not alone because she was once more with her father, but also because she unexpectedly was looking her best. If she had been well suited in her tidy pongee travelling costume, she found her evening gown no less becoming. It was a black affair, very simple and individual; her shoulders rose from it with intensified purity of tone, like fair white ivory gleaming with a suggestion of the sleek sheen of satin; their strong, clean lines rounded bewitchingly into the fair, slender neck upholding the young head with its deftly coiffed crown of bronze and gold....

Tall, well-trained, silent servants moved like white-robed wraiths behind the guests; the dishes of the many courses disappeared and were replaced in a twinkling, as if by slight of hand. They were over plentiful; Amber was relieved when at length the meal was over, and Miss Farrell having withdrawn in conformance with inviolable custom, the cloth was deftly whisked away and cigars, cigarettes, liqueurs, whiskey and soda were served.