THE COMPLETE WORKS OF RUDYARD KIPLING (Illustrated Edition). Rudyard 1865-1936 Kipling
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and the kettle singing; the clock ticked in her ear, and the cracks between the boards in the floor of the hastily built section-house blew the cold prairie air against her heels.
She gazed over Tarvin's, shoulder at the two cuts of Topaz which appeared in every issue of the Telegram--the one representing the town in its first year, the other the town of to-day--and a lump rose in her throat.
'Quite a difference, isn't there?' said Tarvin, following her eye. 'Do you remember where your father's tent used to stand, and the old sectionhouse, just here by the river?' He pointed, and Kate nodded without speaking. 'Those were good days, weren't they? Your father wasn't as rich as he is now, and neither was I; but we were all mighty happy together.'
Kate's thought drifted back to that time, and called up other visions of her mother expending her slight frame in many forms of hard work. The memory of the little characteristic motion with which she would shield with raised hand the worn young-old face when she would be broiling above an open fire, or frying doughnuts, or lifting the stove lid, forced her to gulp down the tears. The simple picture was too clear, even to the light of the fire on the face, and the pink light shining through the frail hand.
'Hello!' said Tarvin, casting his eye up and down the columns, 'they've had to put another team on to keep the streets clean. We had one. Heckler don't forget the climate either. And they are doing well at the Mesa House. That's a good sign. The tourists will all have to stop over at Topaz when the new line comes through, and we have the right hotel. Some towns might think we had a little tourist traffic now. Here's Loomis dining fifty at the Mesa the other day--through express. They've formed a new syndicate to work the Hot Springs. Do you know, I shouldn't wonder if they made a town down there. Heckler's right. It will help Topaz. We don't mind a town that near. It makes a suburb of it.'
He marked his sense of the concession implied in letting him stay that evening by going early; but he did not go so early on the following evening, and as he showed no inclination to broach forbidden subjects, Kate found herself glad to have him there, and it became a habit of his to drop in, in the evenings, and to join the group that gathered, with open doors and windows, about the family lamp. In the happiness of seeing visible effects from her labours blossoming under her eyes, Kate regarded his presence less and less. Sometimes she would let him draw her out upon the verandah under the sumptuous Indian night-nights when the heat-lightning played like a drawn sword on the horizon, and the heavens hovered near the earth, and the earth was very still. But commonly they sat within, with the missionary and his wife, talking of Topaz, of the hospital, of the Maharaj Kunwar, of the dam, and sometimes of the Estes children at Bangor. For the most part, however, when the talk was among the group, it fell upon the infinitesimal gossip of a sequestered life, to the irritation and misery of Tarvin.
When the conversation lagged in these deeps he would fetch up violently with a challenge to Estes on the subject of the tariff or silver legislation, and after that the talk was at least lively. Tarvin was, by his training, largely a newspaper-educated man. But he had also been taught at first hand by life itself, and by the habit of making his own history; and he used the hairy fist of horse-sense in dealing with the theories of newspaper politics and the systems of the schools.
Argument had no allurements for him, however; it was with Kate that he talked when he could, and oftenest, of late, of the hospital, since her progress there had begun to encourage her. She yielded at last to his entreaties to be allowed to see this paragon, and to look for himself upon the reforms she had wrought.
Matters had greatly improved since the days of the lunatic and the 'much-esteemed woman,' but only Kate knew how much remained to be done. The hospital was at least clean and sweet if she inspected it every day, and the people in their fashion were grateful for kinder tending and more skilful treatment than they had hitherto dreamed of. Upon each cure a rumour went abroad through the country-side of a new power in the land, and other patients came; or the convalescent herself would bring back a sister, a child, or a mother with absolute faith in the power of the White Fairy to make all whole. They could not know all the help that Kate brought in the train of her quiet movements, but for what they knew they blessed her as they lay. Her new energy swept even Dhunpat Rai along the path of reform. He became curious in the limewashing of stonework, the disinfecting of wards, the proper airing of bed-linen, and even the destruction by fire of the bedsteads, once his perquisite, on which smallpox patients had died. Native-like, he worked best for a woman with the knowledge that there was an energetic white man in the background. Tarvin's visits, and a few cheery words addressed to him by that capable outsider, supplied him with this knowledge.
Tarvin could not understand the uncouth talk of the out-patients, and did not visit the women's wards; but he saw enough to congratulate Kate unreservedly. She smiled contentedly. Mrs. Estes was sympathetic, but in no way enthusiastic; and it was good to be praised by Nick, who had found so much to blame in her project.
'It's clean and it's wholesome, little girl,' he said, peering and sniffing; 'and you've done miracles with these jellyfish. If you'd been on the opposition ticket instead of your father I shouldn't be a member of the legislature.'
Kate never talked to him about that large part of her work which lay among the women of the Maharajah's palace. Little by little she learned her way about such portions of the pile as she was permitted to traverse. From the first she had understood that the palace was ruled by one Queen, of whom the women spoke under their breath, and whose lightest word, conveyed by the mouth of a grinning child, set the packed mazes humming. Once only had she seen this Queen, glimmering like a tiger-beetle among a pile of kincob cushions--a lithe, black-haired young girl, it seemed, with a voice as soft as running water at night, and with eyes that had no shadow of fear in them. She turned lazily, the jewels clinking on ankle, arm, and bosom, and looked at Kate for a long time without speaking.
'I have sent that I may see you,' she said at last. 'You have come here across the water to help these cattle?'
Kate nodded, every instinct in her revolting at the silver-tongued splendour at her feet.
'You are not married?' The Queen put her hands behind her head and looked at the painted peacocks on the ceiling.
Kate did not reply, but her heart was hot.
'Is there any sickness here?' she asked at last sharply. 'I have much to do.'
'There is none, unless it may be that you yourself are sick. There are those who sicken without knowing it.'
The eyes turned to meet Kate's, which were blazing with indignation. This woman, lapped in idleness, had struck at the life of the Maharaj Kunwar; and the horror of it was that she was younger than herself.
'Achcha,' said the Queen, still more slowly, watching her face. 'If you hate me so, why do you not say so? You white people love truth.'
Kate turned on her heel to leave the room. Sitabhai called her back for an instant, and, moved by some royal caprice, would have caressed her, but she fled indignant, and was careful never again to venture into that wing of the palace. None of the women there called for her services, and not once but several times, when she passed the mouth of the covered way that led to Sitabhai's apartments, she saw a little naked child flourishing a jewelled knife, and shouting round the headless carcass of a goat whose blood was flooding the white marble. 'That,' said the women, 'is the gipsy's son. He learns to kill daily. A snake is a snake, and a gipsy is a gipsy, till they are dead.'
There was no slaughter of goats, singing of songs, or twangling of musical instruments in the wing of the palace that made itself specially Kate's own. Here lived, forgotten by the Maharajah and mocked by Sitabhai's maidens, the mother of the Maharaj Kunwar. Sitabhai had taken from her--by the dark arts of the gipsies, so the Queen's adherents said; by her own beauty and knowledge in love, they sang in the other wing of the palace--all honour and consideration due to her as the Queen Mother. There were scores of empty rooms where once there had been scores of waiting-women, and those who remained with the fallen Queen were forlorn and ill-favoured. She herself was a middle-aged woman, by Eastern standards; that is to say, she had passed twenty-five, and had never been more than ordinarily comely.
Her eyes were dull with much weeping, and her mind was full