On the Face of the Waters: A Tale of the Mutiny. Flora Annie Webster Steel
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"It will leave us naught to ourselves soon," he muttered sulkily as he went out to the doorstep to finish polishing the master's sword; that being a recognized office during these occasional visits, which, as it occurred to him in his discontent, would be still more occasional if among other things the Sirkar, now that Oude was was annexed, took away the extra leave due to foreign service. They had said so in the regiment; and though he was too tough to feel pin-pricks in advance, he had sneered with others in the current jest that the maps were tinted red--i. e., shown to be British territory--by savings stolen from the sepoy's pocket.
It was very quiet on the paved slope leading up from the alley to the carved door beyond the gutter. The lane was too narrow for wheeled traffic, the evening not sufficiently advanced for the neighbors to gather in it for gossip. But every now and again a veiled figure would sidle along the further wall, passing good-looking Soma with a flurried shuffle. Whereat, though he knew these ghostly figures to be old women on their way to market, he cocked his turban more awry, and curled his mustachios nearer his eyes; from no set purpose of playing the gay Lothario, but for the honor of the regiment, and because War and Women go together, East and West.
After a time, however, the workmen began to dawdle past from their work, and some of them, remembering Soma, paused to ask him the latest news; a stranger in a native city being equivalent to an evening paper. And, of course, there were questions as to what the regiment thought of this and that. But Soma's replies were curt. He never relished being lumped in as a simple Rajpoot with the rest of the Rajpoots, for he was inordinately proud of his tribe. That was one reason why he stood aloof, as he did, from much that went on among his comrades. He drilled, it is true, between two of them who were entered as he was--that is to say, as a Rajpoot--on the roster. But the three were in reality as wide apart as the Sun, the Moon, and the Fire from which they respectively claimed descent. They would not have intermarried into each other's families for all the world and its wealth. A causeless differentiation which makes, and must make, a people who cling to it incomprehensible to a race which boasts as a check to pride or an encouragement to humility that all men are born of Adam, and which seeks no hall-mark for its descendants save the stamp of the almighty dollar.
Soma, therefore, polishing his master's sword sulkily, grew irritable also; especially when the frequenters of the opium and hemp shops began, with wavering steps and lack-luster eyes, to loaf homeward for the evening meal which would give them strength for another dose. There were many such habitual drug-takers in the quarter; for it was largely inhabited by poor claimants to nobility who, having nothing to do, had time for dreams. That was why people from other quarters flocked to this one at sundown for gossip; since it is to be had at its best from the opium-eater, whose imagination is stimulated, his reason dulled, beyond the power of discriminating even his own truth or falsehood. One of these, a haggard, sallow fellow in torn muslin and ragged embroidery, stopped with a heavy-lidded leer beside Soma.
"So, brother, back again!" he said with the maudlin gravity of a hemp-smoker; "and thou lookest fat. The bone dust must agree with thee."
It was as if a bomb had fallen. The Hindoo bystanders, recognizing the rumor that ground bones were mixed with commissariat flour, drew back from the Rajpoot instinctively; the Mohammedans smiled on the sly. Soma himself had in a moment one sinewy hand on the half-drunk creature's throat, the other brandishing the fresh-polished sword.
"Bone dust thyself, and pigs meat too, foul-mouthed slayer of sacred kine!" he gasped, carrying the war into the enemy's country. "Thou beast! Unsay the lie!"
His indignation, showing that he appreciated the credence some might be disposed to give to the accusation, only made the Hindoos look at each other. The Mohammedans, however, dragged him from the swaying figure of the accuser, who, after all, was one of themselves.
"Heed him not!" they chorused appeasingly. "'Tis drug-shop talk, and every sane man knows that for dreams. Lo! his sense is clean gone as horns from a donkey! Sure, thy mother ate chillies in her time for thou to be so hot-blooded. It is not morning, brother, because a hen crows, and a snake is but a snake, and goes crooked even to his own home!"
These hoarded saws, with physical force superadded, left Soma reduced to glaring, and renewed claims for a retraction of the insult.
The hemp-smoker looked at him mournfully. "Wouldst have me deny God's truth?" he hiccuped. "Lo! I say not thou didst eat it. Thou sayst not, and who am I to decide between a man and his stomach, even though he looks fat? Yet this all know, that as a bird fattens his tail shrinks, and honor is nowhere nowadays. But this I say for certain. Let him eat who will, there is bone dust in the flour--there is bone dust in the flour----"
He lurched from a supporter's hold and drifted down the lane, half-chanting the words.
Soma glared, now, at those doubtful faces which remained. "'Tis a lie, brothers! But there, 'tis no use wearing the red coat nowadays when all scoff at it. And why not? when the Sirkar itself mocks our rights. I tell thee at the father-in-law's village, but now, a man who titled me sahib last year puffed his smoke in my face this. And wherefore not? May not every scoundrel nowadays drag us to court and set us a-bribing underlings as the common herd have to do? We, soldiers of Oude, who had a Resident of our own always, and----"
"Nothing lasts for always, save God," said a long-bearded bystander, interrupting Soma's parrot roll of military grievances, "as the Moulvie said last night at our mosque, it is well he remains ever the same, giving the same plain orders once and for all. So none of the faithful can mistake. God is Might and Right. All the rest is change."
"Wah! wah!" murmured some respectfully; but the Rajpoot's scowl lost its fierceness in supercilious indifference.
"That may suit the Moulvie. It may suit thee and thine, syyed-jee," he replied, with a shrug of the shoulders. "It suits not me nor mine, being of a different race. We are Rajpoots, and there is no change possible to that. We are ever the same."
The pride in his voice and manner reflected but faintly the inconceivable pride in his heart. Yet he was on the alert, salaaming cheerfully, as James Greyman came riding with a clatter down the alley, and without drawing bridle, passed through the low gateway into the dark garden heavy with the perfume of orange-blossom. His arrival ended the incident, for Soma followed him quickly, and in obedience to his curt order to see the groom rub down the horse while it waited, as it had been a breather round the race course, walked off with it toward the well. It was such an opportunity for ordering other men about as natives dearly love; so that the more autocratic a master is, the better pleased they are to gain dignity by serving him.
James Greyman, meanwhile, had paused on the plinth to give a low whistle and look upward to the terraced roof. And as he did so his face was full of weariness, and yet of impatience. He had been telling himself that he was a fool ever since he had left Kate Erlton's drawing room half an hour before, and even his mad gallop round the steeple-chase course had not effaced the curious sense of compulsion which had made him promise to let her husband go scot-free. Even now, when he waited with that dread at his heart, which of late had been growing stronger day by day, for the answer which Zora loved to make to his signal, his fear lest the Great Silence had fallen between them was lost in the recollection that, if it were so, his freedom had come too late. He hated himself for thus bracketing death and freedom together, but for all that he would not blind himself to its truth. Now that his profession had gone with the King's exile, Zora was, indeed, the only tie to a life which had grown distasteful to him, and when the Great Silence came, as come it must, he had made up his mind to leave James Greyman behind, and go home to England. He was nearing forty, and though the spirit of reckless adventure was fading, the ambitions of his youth seemed to be returning; as they so often do when the burden and heat of passion passes. He was tired of perpetual sunshine; the thought of the cold mists on the hilltops, the wild storms on the west coast, haunted him. He wanted to see them again. Above all, he wanted to hear himself called by his own familiar name, not by the one he had assumed. It had seemed brutal to dream of all this sometimes, while little Zora still lay in his arms smiling contentedly; but it was inevitable. And so, while he waited, watching with the dread growing at his heart for the flutter of the tinsel veil, the half-heard whisper "Khush amud-eed" (welcome), it was inevitable