by M. M. Kaye
Only a handful of passengers who had travelled on the mail-train from Bombay were going further north into the Punjab, and the remainder of the journey had been undertaken in dâk-gharis, rickety horse-drawn vehicles that resembled closed boxes on wheels. This time Ash had only one companion to share his carriage with him, but as it turned out to be George Garforth he would have been happier on his own or with a full complement of passengers.
George had no intention of relinquishing the hopes that Belinda had encouraged by her treatment of him during the first three days out from Bombay. The fact that she considered herself engaged to Ashton Pelham-Martyn made no difference to his feelings for her (beyond adding jealousy and despair to the other emotions he was suffering on her behalf) and as he saw no reason why he should not discuss the subject of his wounded heart with her betrothed, Ash found himself listening to a good deal of talk from his love-sick rival, and was often hard put to it to keep his temper.
It was sad that Belinda, by encouraging George to talk about himself, should have released such an uninhibited torrent of speech, for once having got the bit between his teeth, George showed every sign of bolting. But as Ash could see no way of stopping him that did not involve unpleasantness, he merely took the easier way of spending a large part of each day in the company of Zarin, Ala Yar and Mahdoo; not only because he found their society infinitely preferable to Mr Garforth's, but because it was no longer possible for him to get Belinda to himself – her Mama having invited an old acquaintance, a Mrs Viccary, to share their dâk-ghari.
The presence of a third, and middle-aged lady, effectively put an end to any hope of his being invited to pass an occasional hour or so in the Harlowes' carriage, or of spending much time alone with them at the various stopping places where rooms and meals were available and the horses were changed. Yet in spite of this disappointment he did not, as might have been expected, take a strong dislike to the interloper, for Mrs Viccary turned out to be a delightful person, wise, tolerant and understanding, with a talent for making friends and a genuine interest in other people that made her very easy to talk to. As she was also an excellent and sympathetic listener, it was not long before Ash found himself telling her more of his history than he was ever to tell Belinda; which surprised him though it did not surprise her.
Edith Viccary was used to receiving confidences (and had never been known to betray one, which probably accounted for the fact that she received so many). Moreover in the present instance, having listened to a voluble account of young Mr Pelham-Martyn's prospects, relatives and background from his prospective mother-in-law, she had exerted herself to draw him out, as she not only fully understood but shared his passion for his adopted country, which was, in a sense, her own, because she too had been born in it. She had also by now spent the greater part of her life there, for having been sent home to England at the age of eight, she had come back as a young lady of sixteen to rejoin her parents who were at that time stationed at Delhi; and it was there in the capital city of the Moguls that a year later she met and married a young engineer, Charles Viccary.
That had been in the winter of 1849, and since then her husband's work had taken her to most parts of the vast sub-continent in which men of both their families, Carrolls and Viccarys, had served for three successive generations – initially in the East India Company and later under the Crown. And the more she saw of it, the more she came to love the land, and to appreciate its peoples, among whom she was proud to number many close friends, for unlike Mrs Harlowe, she had set herself to master at least four of India's main languages and learned to speak them with enviable fluency. When cholera deprived her of her only child, and the great Sepoy Rising of '57 took the lives of her parents, and of her sister Sarah and Sarah's three small children who died in the terrible Bibi-gurh at Cawnpore, she did not give way to despair or lose her sense of proportion and justice; and even during the bitter aftermath of the Mutiny she did not allow herself to hate.
In this, as in all else, she was by no means unique. But as she happened to be the first of her kind whom Ash had met, it was Edith Viccary who was responsible for erasing for ever an uneasy suspicion that he had lately begun to entertain – that Mrs Harlowe and those of her fellow-sightseers who had laughed and talked so loudly during the prayers at the Juma-Masjid were typical of all the British-born ‘memsahibs’ in India. For this alone he would have been willing to forgive her almost anything – even for being the unwitting cause of preventing him from seeing as much of Belinda as he had hoped to do on the journey north.
Apart from that deprivation, the days passed pleasantly. It was good to be with Zarin again and listen to familiar talk while the remembered scenes unrolled beyond the windows; to eat the food that Gul Baz bought from the stalls of vendors in the villages – curries and dais, rice, chuppattis and sticky sweetmeats shimmering with beaten silver – served as often as not on green leaves, and washed down with draughts of buffalo milk or water from the wells that were to be found at every hamlet. The names of towns and rivers and the aspect of every little village was suddenly familiar to him, for this was the country across which he and Sita had wandered in the months that followed their escape from Gulkote.
Karnal, Ambala, Ludhiana, Jullundar, Amritsar and Lahore, the Sutlej and the Ravi Rivers. He knew them all… The temperature at mid-morning and for the best part of the afternoon remained uncomfortably high, and the sun still blistered the paintwork on the roofs and sides of the gharies. But as the teams of starveling ponies rattled them forward across the rich crop-lands of the Punjab, the air became noticeably cooler, and there came a day when Ash, descending in the early dawn to stretch his legs on the quiet roadside, saw above the far horizon to the north a long, jagged line of pale rose glowing bright against the cool green of the sky: and knew that he was looking at the snow peaks of the Himalayas.
His heart seemed to turn over as he looked, and his eyes filled with tears. And all at once he wanted to laugh and cry and to shout aloud – or to pray, as Zarin and Ala Yar and a dozen of their co-religionists were doing. Only it was not towards Mecca that he would face, but to the mountains. His own mountains, in whose shadow he had been born – to the Dur Khaima to which he had prayed as a child. Somewhere over there lay the Far Pavilions, with Tarakalas, the ‘Star Tower’, catching the first rays of the sunrise. And somewhere, too, the valley that Sita had so longed to reach before she died, and that he himself would reach one day.
They had stopped for the previous night on the outskirts of a little village, and there was a food-stall near by. Ash bought a handful of cooked rice, and remembering the offerings he used to make to the Dur Khaima in the Queen's balcony at Gulkote, he strewed it on the dew-wet ground. Perhaps it would bring him luck. A grey-headed plains crow and a famished pariah dog swooped upon the feast, and the sight of the emaciated mongrel recalled him abruptly from the past. Gulkote and the Dur Khaima were forgotten, and it was Ashton Pelham-Martyn and not Ashok who bought half-a-dozen chuppattis and fed them to a starving dog; and Isobel's son, not Sita's, who boarded the ghari again, hands in pockets and whistling ‘John Peel’ as the sun rose above the horizon and flooded the plains with brilliant light.
‘Ah! This smells like my own country again,’ said Ala Yar, snuffing the wind like an elderly horse that scents its stable. ‘Now it will not matter so much if these gharis should break down, for if need be we can walk the rest of the way.’ (Ala Yar distrusted hired vehicles and was convinced that the frequent halts were due to faulty driving.)
The gharis did not break down, but a culvert and half a mile of road that had been swept away by the flooding of a river caused a delay of two days, and the travellers were forced to put up in a near-by dâk-bungalow until the road was mended.
There is little doubt that but for George Garforth, Ash would not have been able to resist the temptation to play truant in the company of Zarin and Ala Yar. But he had not forgotten Belinda's graciousness to George during those three dismal days after leaving B
ombay, or that George had been quick to step into the breach when he, Ash, had absented himself in Delhi, so to Zarin's disgust he spent every possible moment in her company during that two days' delay.
Mr Garforth had been equally assiduous, though once again he had been compelled to spend most of the time talking to Mrs Harlowe rather than to her daughter. He had, however, won golden opinions from that lady by holding her knitting wool and telling her at length about his childhood. She had always considered George Garforth to be a very personable and presentable young man, but Byronic features, chestnut curls and melting brown eyes did not compensate for lack of means, and it had to be owned that Mr Garforth's prospects, for the moment anyway, were not bright.
As a new and very junior member of a firm which dealt in beer, wines and spirits, his salary was modest and his social position even more so; for except in the great ports such as Calcutta, Bombay and Madras, where Commerce was King, Anglo-Indian society ranked the ‘boxwallah’ (a scornful term applied to all who engaged in trade) well below the level of those two ruling castes, the army and the Civil Service, and in such a military stronghold as Peshawar, a junior ‘boxwallah’ would count for very little indeed; which was a pity, thought Mrs Harlowe, because if only things had been different she would have been far happier with George Garforth as a son-in-law than with Ashton Pelham-Martyn, who was so… who was so… It was difficult to explain what she felt about Ashton. On board he had seemed such a quiet and dependable young man, and the fact that he was rich (or, at least, so comfortably off) and that as his uncle had only the one son, there was always the chance that Ashton might one day inherit a baronetcy, had made him appear an excellent matrimonial prospect; but ever since that dreadful day in Bombay she had been beset by doubts.
If only George had been as eligible as Ashton, sighed Mrs Harlowe, how much happier she would feel about dear Bella's future. George, for all his spectacular looks, was so comfortably normal and uncomplicated, and his parents certainly seemed to be well off; his description of his home made it plain that they lived in far greater style than she herself had ever been accustomed to. Two carriages, no less - it made one wonder if he were not a better prospect than he appeared. His father, he had told her, was Irish by extraction, and his maternal grandmother a Greek lady of title (which would account for the romantic profile), and though he himself had wanted to go into the army, his mother had been so set against it that to please her he had given up the idea and agreed instead to go in for commerce. The romance of the East had appealed to his adventurous spirit and led to his accepting a post in the firm of Brown & Macdonald, in preference to some well-paid sinecure obtained for him through family influence in England; for, fond as he was of his parents, George had confessed that he preferred to stand on his own feet and start at the bottom of the ladder, a sentiment that won Mrs Harlowe's full approval.
What a nice boy he was. Now Ashton never mentioned his parents, and what little he had told her of his childhood was so exceedingly odd that she had been forced to discourage him from saying any more, and had told him (tactfully of course) that the less he said about it the better as such a story was likely to be… well… misunderstood. A Hindu foster-mother, the wife of a common syce, whom he actually spoke of as ‘my mother’ as though she had been the real one! Mrs Harlowe shuddered at the thought of what people would say if they knew, and wished she had not been so precipitate over agreeing to his betrothal to Belinda. She would never have done such a thing if it had not been for little Harry and Teddy and her longing to be with them again. People did not understand how terrible it was to be separated from one's children for years at a time. Even Archie did not. She had only wanted Belinda to be safely and happily married and she did so hope Archie was not going to be cross. After all, she had done it for the best. The best for Harry and Teddy…
By dusk on the second day the repairs to the road were completed and the passengers rounded up and re-embarked, and shortly after moon-rise the gharis rattled forward upon the last leg of the journey to Jhelum, where there was a British military cantonment of some size.
The Jhelum River was running high and swiftly, swollen by heavy autumn rains in far-away Kashmir, and there was nothing in the sight of that turbulent brown flood to remind Ash of the quiet river that had carried Sita away from him so many years ago. The town itself, together with the cantonments, lay on the far side, but as there had been a military exercise that day, there were a number of British officers idling on the near bank waiting for boats to ferry them back, and Belinda viewed the younger ones with lively interest and thought how very different (and how much more exciting) these cheerful, sunburned young officers were from the stolid and soberly clad townsmen of Nelbury, who, viewed in retrospect, might have belonged to a different race from these gaily uniformed men whom the furnace summers and bitter Khyber winters, warfare, responsibility and hard exercise had welded into a type that had become as instantly recognizable as a Red Indian or the cowboys of Texas.
The very sight of them served to restore Belinda's spirits, which had sunk considerably during the last day or two. The mounting tedium and discomfort of the dusty, interminable journey had depressed her, and the group of young officers on the bank was a welcome reminder that civilization and gaiety had not been left behind. No pretty girl need ever feel bored or neglected with so many men to squire her to picnics and partner her at dances, and it was almost a pity that she had engaged herself to marry Ashton. But then she was in love with him, and so of course she wished to marry him; though perhaps not too soon. It would be pleasant to be free for a few years longer and to enjoy all the delights of being courted by half-a-dozen young men instead of only one; and it wasn't as though Ash would even be in the same station. He would be miles away in Mardan and probably unable to ride over and see her more than once a week at most, yet as an engaged girl she would be unable to accept invitations from other men; that would be considered shockingly fast.
Belinda sighed, admiring the scarlet coats and luxuriant moustaches of the young officers, and somewhat naturally did not spare a look for the older ones, as she was not expecting to see her father. Even if she had been, she would not have recognized him. The man she dimly remembered had seemed a giant to his seven-year-old daughter, while the small and elderly gentleman who now appeared at the door of their ghari was an unimpressive figure, and Belinda was as shocked as she was startled when her mother uttered a piercing cry of ‘Archie!’ and warmly embraced the stranger. Could this really be the alarming autocrat of whom her resolute Aunt Lizzie and her stout and voluble Mama had so often said, ‘Your Papa would never permit it ’?
But if Belinda was disappointed in her Papa, it was plain that he was far from disappointed in his daughter. She was, he told her, the very image of her dear Mama at the same age, and it was the greatest pity that the Brigade would be going off on manoeuvres so soon, for he was afraid she might find Peshawar a trifle slow with all the young sparks away under canvas. But by Christmas the regiments would all be back in cantonments, and after that she would have nothing to complain of, as Peshawar was a very gay station.
Major Harlowe pinched his daughter's chin, and added that he could see they would soon have all the young fellows lining up to take his pretty little puss out riding and dancing – a remark that caused Belinda to blush uncomfortably and her mother to hope that Edith Viccary would not say anything indiscreet, or Ashton put in an appearance before she had been able to explain matters to Archie. It was really very vexing that Archie should have elected to meet them at Jhelum, for she had counted upon being able to choose her time and broach the subject of Belinda's engagement in the privacy of their own bungalow before there was any chance of his meeting Mr Pelham-Martyn, who would be parting company with them at Nowshera.
The next quarter of an hour had proved a difficult one, but Mrs Viccary had said nothing untoward, and when Ash put in an appearance he was so closely followed by George Garforth that it had been possible for Mrs Harlowe to intro
duce both young men as shipboard acquaintances, and to get rid of them on the excuse that she and her husband and dear Bella had so much to say to each other after so long a separation… she was sure they would understand.
Ash certainly understood that this was not the time or the place for him to present himself to Major Harlowe in the character of a future son-in-law, and he had retired to the dining room of the dak-bungalow to eat a four-course meal while Zarin arranged transport and accommodation for the rest of the journey, and George prowled up and down the verandah in the hope of catching a last glance from Belinda's blue eyes.
‘I can't understand you,’ said George bitterly, joining Ash at the table when the Harlowes had finally departed. ‘If I had only had the luck to be in your shoes, I'd be with them now, tackling the old man and staking my claim before the whole world. You don't deserve that angel, and it'll serve you right if some other fellow cuts you out. I bet you there'll be dozens of them hanging about her in Peshawar.’
‘There were at least a dozen on the boat,’ observed Ash amicably. ‘And if you think this is a good place to line up before a complete stranger and demand his daughter's hand in marriage, you're the one who must be mad. Damn it, he hasn't seen her since she was in short socks. I can't embark on a subject like that five minutes after he's met her; and in a crowded dâk-bungalow at that. Talk sense.’
‘I believe I am mad,’ groaned George, striking his forehead in a manner that would have done credit to Henry Irving. ‘But I can't help loving her. I know it's hopeless, but that doesn't make any difference. I love her, and if you let her down –’
‘Oh, stow it, George!’ interrupted Ash impatiently. ‘You've just announced that she'll probably throw me over for someone else, and you can't have it both ways. Tell a khidmatgar to get you something to eat and let me get on with my dinner.’