The Hosts of the Lord. Flora Annie Webster Steel
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breathless as he was, gave an inarticulate cry of rage, and shook his fist at the swarming ants. Already their work was altering the currents he had known for so long. That it was possible to allow for this, as Am-ma had done, did not comfort him. He swam back sulkily, his wrath increased by the knowledge one glance had given him, that the log on which his rival was paddling to shore triumphantly bore its broad arrow so lightly, and so near its end, that a little dexterous manipulation would have left the runaway unmarked, and so given its captor the right, not merely of ransom, but of sale!
Truly, it was an ill world for the poor!
But Lance Carlyon laughed, as he lounged over his early tea and watched the river through his field-glass, in a balcony of the fort, dressed in a gorgeous ring-streaked sleeping suit which he could only wear when on outpost duty, as the regiment had tabooed it. In truth it made him not unlike Tom Sawyer's "Royal Nonsuch."
"The little 'un's got it! I say! Dering, I believe I shall like Eshwara. It's--it's--new--don't you know." His eyes rested, as he spoke, on the low, bastioned building, all hemmed in by temple spires, at the very point of the city's triangle, which Erda Shepherd had told him was the mission house. Truly, he thought, she was in the thick of it!
"New!" echoed Vincent Dering captiously, "I should have called it old. I thought that sort of thing had died with the pagoda tree."
"What sort of thing?"
Vincent nodded towards the palace with an odd, cynical laugh. "That; it's ghostly. Doesn't belong to the nineteenth century!"
Lance turned curiously. "I said that to--to Pidar Narâyan--I can't call him anything else, somehow--when he was showing me over yesterday. And--you know that inscrutable smile of his--he just pointed up to the telegraph wires--they go right across the garden you know--and said, 'There is half the news of half the world over our heads, anyhow.' It knocked me over, I tell you, to think of it; and by Jove! Dering, next week when the Lord-sahib comes--"
Vincent Dering laughed boisterously. "There'll be the millennium, of course. Come along, Lance! It's time we were off to prepare his way. Dashwood wants it done A1. They are going to lay on electric light, and all that. By the way, Mrs. Smith told me to tell you she expected you to breakfast."
Ten minutes afterwards they were riding over the boat bridge to superintend the laying out of the Vice-regal camp against the coming of the Lord-sahib and his hosts.
CHAPTER IV
UNDER-CURRENTS
Mumtâza Mahal, Roshan Khân's grandmother, lived in a queer little backwater of a house which had eddied itself away from the main stream of the town, and jammed itself against a wall of the palace as if seeking dignity thereby. For all that it belonged irredeemably to the city, and to its evil-smelling lanes. The word house, however, is misleading to western ears, since this was simply a well-like courtyard, with a great wooden bed set in the centre under a miserable attempt at a tree which was used as a clothes-peg, a rack for saucepans, and a variety of other domestic purposes. It fulfilled them to the perfect satisfaction of its proprietress, a roundabout old lady, plump as a button-quail, who, when she was not asleep inside the arcaded slip of a room on one side, passed her time on the bed in the scanty shade, keeping company with a sausage-roll of a pillow and a quilt, both covered in faded, greasy silk. As a rule she did nothing save eat pân; though sometimes, as a favour to Erda Shepherd, who came to read to her once a week, she would give a few more stitches to a knitted comforter which never seemed to get any longer. It had been begun, indeed, under the auspices of another "Miss," who had returned to England only to die, as so many do, from exposure, and overwork, and homesickness. For the rest, Mumtâza was an arrogant, yet good-natured old soul, who, despite those tears on her wedding-day, had kept dissolute Walidâd under her thumb, and his son also. Therefore, it was one of her pet grievances--and she had many--that Roshan, her grandson, should have defied her authority and entered the army. The great standing grievance, however, was that the "pinson" she received from Government because her husband had been deported with the Nawab to Calcutta, was not so large as one received by a neighbour and gossip whose husband had been hanged in the mutiny! The two old ladies came to loggerheads over their respective claims once a month, regularly, when pay-day came round; Mumtâza asserting shrilly that to die in a strange country was more painful than hanging, Ashrâf-un-nissa contending roundly that if Walidâd had had as much respectful affection for his widow as her husband had had for his, he could easily have caused himself to be hanged; since he had certainly deserved it.
Whereat there would be war, until some one in the alley, or round the corner did something outrageous,--threw slops over some one, or had twins, or imported a new mother-in-law! Then, friendly discussion becoming a necessity of life, the big wooden bed would once more hold two old ladies, two roly-poly bolsters, two quilts--also two tongues! But these confined themselves, for a time, to lesser grievances; such as the general decadence of the age, manifested by the reluctance of young people to obey the old.
There was, however, no sign of displeasure in the reception prepared for Roshan, when one afternoon, immediately after his arrival at Eshwara, he appeared to prostrate himself at the feet of age; at least so he had said in his letter of intimation. Mumtâza Mahal knew her duty towards men-folk better than to show temper at once; knew also the suffocating effect of ceremonials. So the tarnished treasures of past state had been dug out of the mounds of litter heaped up in all four corners of the arcaded room, and set about the courtyard. An old elephant-housing covered the wooden bed, and to it Roshan was conducted: his grandmother, despite her best green satin trousers, squatting below, on a mat.
The young soldier felt and looked thoroughly uncomfortable. Out of sheer funk of the old lady's remarks if he had appeared in his usual mufti of English tweed and a close-fitting turban, he had reverted to the airy muslins and embroidered smoking-caps of his forbears. He felt chilly, barely decent in them; and, indeed, the whole environment was absolutely repugnant to him. His grandmother's tramways could scarcely be otherwise to one who had gone ahead by express train like Roshan Khân. Thoroughly well-educated, he knew himself to be considered one of the smartest native officers in the army. A first-class polo player, a fair cricketer, able to handle cue and racket, and without equal at the foils, he had for years met Englishmen on equal terms in sporting matters. What wonder, then, that he sat looking inexpressibly bored beside the hookah which was the pride of his grandmamma's heart, in that it had belonged to many dead and gone Nawabs? He was simply longing for the solace of a smoke, yet he did not dare to use the silver cigarette case with his initials, "R.K." on it, which Lance Carlyon had given him at Christmas in return for the fencing lessons. Fortunately, however, boredom and yawns are correct during visits of ceremony, so Mumtâza Mahal crossed her little fat hands over her little fat green-trousered legs, and told herself the lad was improved in both manners and looks; was distinctly more like her brother, the late and sainted Nawab. The fact emphasized her regret that, after a brilliant career in a mission school, a career which must have led to a minor clerkship, her grandson should have taken the unheard-of course of entering the army! If he could even have gone as the Nawab's grand-nephew, with a dozen troopers or so as following, it might have been bearable; but, as Walidâd's extraction barred all claim to noble descent, enlistment meant something very different. The old lady, accustomed to obedience all round, when the dreadful defiance had occurred, ten years before, had called the stars to witness that it was all--that everything was--Pidar Narâyan's fault! And then she had fallen a-whimpering, knowing right well that but for the latter's intercession, she herself would have had no "pinson"; since Government bars those who can be proved to be personally implicated in evil doings. And now, as she sat looking at her grandson, the same conflicting estimates made her irritable. Why had Pidar Narâyan ever put his finger in the Eshwara pie? Yet, without him, where would they all have