by Talbot Mundy
Ali Partab was hustled forward into a high-ceilinged room, whose light came filtered through a scrollwork mesh of chiselled stone where the wall and ceiling joined. There were no windows, but six doors opened from it, and every one of them was barred, as though they opened into treasure-vaults. The Prince sat restlessly in a high, carved wooden chair; there was no other furniture at all, and Ali Partab was left standing between his guards. The Prince drew a pistol from inside his clothing.
“Leave us alone!” he ordered; and the guards went out, closing the door behind them.
“I gave no orders for your capture,” said Jaimihr, with a smile.
“Then, let me go,” grinned Ali Partab.
“First, I must be informed on certain matters.”
Ali Partab still grinned, but the muscles of his face changed their position slightly, and it took no expert in physiognomy to read that questions he would answer must be very tactfully asked.
“Ask on!”
“You are Mahommed Gunga’s man?”
“Yes. It is an honorable service.”
“Did he order you to stay here?”
“Here — in this palace? Allah forbid!”
“Did he order you to stay in Howrah?”
“He gave me certain orders. I obeyed them until your men invited swift death for themselves and you by interfering with me!”
“What were the orders?”
Ali Partab grinned again — this time insolently.
“To make sure that the Jaimihr-sahib did not make away with the treasure of his brother Howrah!” he answered.
“If you were released now what would you proceed to do?”
“To obey my orders.”
Jaimihr changed his tactics and assumed the frequently successful legal line of pretending to know far more than he really did.
“I am told by one who overheard you speak that you were to take the missionary and his daughter to Alwa’s place. How much is my brother Howrah paying for Mahommed Gunga’s services in this matter? It is well known that he and Alwa between them could call out all the Rangars in the district for whichever side they chose. Since they are not on my side, they must be for Howrah. How much does he pay? I might offer more.”
“I know not,” said Ali Partab, perfectly ready to admit anything that was not true.
“It is true, then, that Howrah has designs on the missionary’s daughter? Alwa is to keep her prisoner until the great blow is struck, and Howrah dare take possession of her?”
“That is not my business,” answered Ali Partab, with the air of a man who knew all of the secret details but would not admit it. Jaimihr began to think that he had lit at random on the answer to the riddle.
“Where is Mahommed Gunga?”
“I know not.”
“At Alwa’s place?”
“Am I God that I should know where any man is whom I cannot see?”
“Oh! So he is at Alwa’s, eh?” That overdose of opium had rendered Jaimihr’s brain very dull indeed; he considered himself clever, and overlooked the fact that Ali Partab would be almost surely lying to him. In India men never tell the truth to chance-met strangers or to their enemies; the truth is a valuable thing, to be shared cautiously among friends.
“If Mahommed Gunga is at Alwa’s,” reasoned Jaimihr, “then he is much too close at hand to take any chances with. I must keep this man close confined.” He raised his voice in a high-pitched command, and the guards opened the door instantly; at a sign from the Prince they seized Ali Partab by the wrists.
“I will send a message to Mahommed Gunga for thee,” said Jaimihr. “On his answer will depend your release or otherwise.” He nodded. The guards took their prisoner out between them — led him past the wrinkled old woman in the courtyard — and halted him in a far corner, where an evil-smelling cage of a place stood open to receive him. A moment later, in order to make sure, the master of the horse sent for the old woman and made her sweep out the cell a little; then he drove her away with a fierce injunction not to let herself be caught anywhere near the cell again unless ordered. Following the line of eastern reasoning, had he not given that order he would not have known what her object could be should she make her way toward the cell; but now, if she risked his wrath by disobeying, he would know beyond the least shadow of a doubt that she had a message to deliver to the prisoner — the man who was hidden in the dark corner need entertain no hope of keeping the secret to himself for purposes of sale or blackmail!
They trust each other wonderfully — with an almost childlike confidence — in a household such as Jaimihr’s!
CHAPTER XV
Ho! I am king! All lesser fry
Must cringe, and crawl, and cry to me,
And none have any rights but I, —
Except the right to lie to me.
JAIMIHR was not the only man who would have dearly liked to know of the whereabouts of Mahommed Gunga. It had been reported to Maharajah Howrah, by his spies, that the redoubtable ex-Risaldar of horse had visited his relatives in Howrah City, and, though he had not been able to ascertain a word of what had passed, he was none the less anxious.
He knew, of course — for every soul in Howrah knew — that Jaimihr was plotting for the throne. He knew, too, that the priests of Siva, who with himself were joint keepers of the wickedly won, tax-swollen treasure, had sounded Jaimihr; they had tentatively hinted that they might espouse his cause, provided that an equitable division of the treasure were arranged beforehand. The question uppermost in Maharajah Howrah’s mind was whether the Rangars — the Moslem descendants of once Hindoo Rajputs, who formed such a small but valuable proportion of the local population — could or could not be induced to throw in their lot with him.
No man on the whole tax-ridden countryside believed or considered it as a distant possibility that the Rangars would strike for any hand except their own; they were known, on the other hand, to be more or less cohesive, and it was considered certain that, whichever way they swung, when the priest-pulled string let loose the flood of revolution, they would swing all together. The question, then, was how to win the favor of the Rangars. It was not at all an easy question, for the love lost between Hindoos and Mohammedans is less than that between dark-skinned men and white — a lot less.
Within two hours of its happening he had been told of the capture of Ali Partab; and he knew — for that was another thing his spies had told him — that Ali Partab was Mahommed Gunga’s man. Apparently, then, Ali Partab — a prisoner in Jaimihr’s palace-yard — was the only connecting link between him and the Rangars whom he wished to win over to his side. He was as anxious as any to help overwhelm the British, but he naturally wished to come out of the turmoil high and dry himself, and he was, therefore, ready to consider the protection of individual British subjects if that would please the men whom he wanted for his friends.
Mahommed Gunga was known to have carried letters for the missionaries. He was known to have engaged a new servant when he rode away from Howrah and to have left his trusted man behind. Miss McClean was known to have conversed with the retainer, immediately after which the man had been seized and carried off by Jaimihr’s men. Jaimihr was known to have placed watchers round the mission house and — once — to have killed a man in Miss McClean’s defense. The deduction was not too far-fetched that the retainer had been left as a protection against Jaimihr, and consequently that the Rangars, at the behest of Mahommed Gunga, had decided — on at least the white girl’s safety.
Therefore, he argued, if he now proceeded to protect the McCleans, he would, at all events, not incur the Rangars’ enmity.
It was a serious decision that he had to make, for, for one thing, he dared not yet make any move likely to incite his strongly supported brother to open rebellion; he dared not, therefore, interfere at present with the watchers near the mission house. To openly befriend the Christian priests would be to set the whole Hindoo population against himself, for it had been mainly against suttee and its kindred horrors
that the missionaries had bent all their energy.
The great palace of Howrah was ahum. Elephants with painted tusks, and loaded to the groaning-point under howdahs decked with jewels and gold-leaf, came and went through the carved entrance-gates. Occasionally camels, loaded too until their legs all but buckled underneath them, strutted with their weird, mixed air of foolishness and dignity, to be disburdened of great cases that eight men could scarcely lift; on the outside the cases were marked “Hardware,” but a horde of armed and waiting malcontents scattered about the countryside could have given a more detailed and accurate guess at what was in them.
Men came and went — men almost of all castes and many nationalities. Priests — not all of them fat, but every single one fat-smiling — sunned themselves, or waited in the shade until they could have audience; no priest of any Hindoo temple had to wait long to be admitted to that Rajah’s presence, and there was an everlasting chain of them, each with his axe to grind, coming and going by day and night.
Color rioted in the blazing sun and deep, dark shadows lurked in all the thousand places where the sun could never penetrate. It was India in essence — noise and blaze and flouted splendor, with a back-ground and underground of mystery. Any but the purblind British could have told at half a glance, merely by the attitude of Howrah’s armed sepoys, that a concerted movement of some kind was afoot — that there was a tight-held thread of plan running through the whole confusion; but no man — not even a native — could have guessed what secret plotting might be going on within the acres of the straggling palace.
From the courtyard there was no least hint obtainable even of the building’s size; its shape could only have been marked down from a bird’s-eye view aloft. Even the roof was so uneven, and so subdivided by traced and deep-carved walls and ramparts, that a sentry posted at one end could not have seen the next man to him, perhaps some twenty feet away. Building had been piled on building — other buildings had been added end to end and crisscrosswise — and each extension had been walled in as new centuries saw new additions, until the many acres were a maze of bricks and stone and fountain-decorated gardens that no lifelong palace denizen could have learned to know in their entirety.
Within — one story up above the courtyard din — in a spacious, richly decorated room that gave on to a gorgeous roof-garden, the Maharajah sat and let himself be fanned by women, who were purchasable for perhaps a tenth of what any of the fans had cost. Another woman, younger than the rest, played wild minor music to him on an instrument not much unlike a flute; they were melancholy notes — beautiful — but sad enough to sow pessimism’s seed in any one who listened.
His divan — carved, inlaid, and gilded — faced the wide, awning-hung opening to the garden. Round him on all three sides was a carved stone screen through whose interstices came rustlings and whisperings that told of the hidden life which sees and is not seen. The women with the fans and flute were mere court accessories; the real nerves of Asia — the veiled intriguers whom none may know but whose secret power any man may feel — could be heard like caged birds crowding on their perches.
Now and then glass bracelets tinkled from behind the screen; ever and again the music stopped, until another girl appeared to play another melancholy air. But the even purring of the fans went on incessantly, and the poor, priest-ridden fool who owned it all scowled straight in front of him, his brows lined deep in thought.
It is a strange malady, that which seizes men whom fate has elevated to a throne. It acts as certain Indian drugs are known to do — deprives its victim of the power to act, but intensifies his ability to think, and theorize, and feel. Howrah, with untold treasure in his vaults, with an army of five thousand men, with the authority and backing that a hundred generations give, could long for more — could fear the loss of what he did have — but could not act.
The priests held him fear-bound. His brother held him hate-bound. His women — and not even he knew, probably, how many of them languished in the secret warren inside those palace walls — kept him restless in a net of this-and-that-way-tugged intrigue. Flattery — and that is by far the subtlest poison of the East — blinded him utterly to his own best course, and kept him blind. Luxury unmanned him; he who had once held the straightest spear in western India, and for the love of feeling red blood racing in his veins had ridden down panthers on the maidan, was flabby now; deep, dark rings underlined his eyes and the once steel-sinewed wrist trembled.
His brother Jaimihr in his place, unsapped yet by decadent delights, would have loosed his five thousand on the countryside — butchered any who opposed him — pressed into service those who merely lagged — and would have plunged India in a welter of blood before the priests had time to mature their plans and arrange to keep all the power and plunder to themselves. But Jaimihr had to stalk lesser game and content himself with pricking at the ever-growing hate that gradually rendered the Maharajah decisionless and sorry only for himself.
A first glimpse at Howrah, particularly in the shaded room, showed a handsome man, black-bearded, lean, and lithe; a second look, undazzled by his jewelry or by the studied magnificence of each apparently unstudied movement, betrayed a man whose lightest word was law, but who feared to give the word. Where muscles had been were unfilled folds of skin that shook; where a firm if selfish mouth had once smiled merrily beneath a pointed black mustache, a mouth still smiled, but meanly; the selfishness was there, but the firmness had faded.
His eyes, though, were his most marked feature. They were hungry eyes, pathetic as a caged beast’s and as savage. No one could see them without pitying him, and no man in his senses would have accepted their owner’s word on any point at all. A man looks as he did when the fire of a burning velt has circled him and there is no way out. There was fear behind them, and the look of restless search for safety that is nowhere.
In one of the many-columned courtyards of the palace was a chained, mad elephant whose duty was to kneel on the Rajah’s captive enemies. In another courtyard was a big, square tank with a weedy, slippery stone ramp at one end; in the tank were alligators; down the ramp other of the Rajah’s enemies, tight-bound, would scream and struggle and slide from time to time. But they were only little enemies who died in that way; the greater ones, who had power or influence, lived on and plotted, because the owner of the execution beasts was afraid to put them to their use.
Below, in damp, unlit dungeons, there were silken cords suspended from stone ceilings; their ends were noosed, and the nooses hung ten feet above the floor; those told only, though, of the fate of women who had schemed unwisely — favorites of a week, perhaps, who had dared to sulk, listeners through screens who had forgotten to forget. No men died ever by the silken cord, and no tales ever reached the outside world of who did die down in the echoing brick cellars; there was a path that led underground to the alligator tank and a trap-door that opened just above the water edge. Night, and the fungus-fouled long jaws, and slimy, weed-filled water — the creak of rusty hinges — a splash — the bang of a falling trap — a swirl in the moonlit water, and ring after heavy, widening ring that lapped at last against the stone would write conclusion to a tragedy. There would be no record kept.
Howrah was childless. That, of all the hell-sent troubles that beset him, was the worst. That alone was worse than the hoarded treasure whose secret he and his brother and the priests of Siva shared. Only in India could it happen that a line of Rajahs, drag-net-armed — oblivious to the duties of a king and greedy only of the royal right to tax — could pile up, century by century, a hoard of gold an jewels — to be looked at. The secret of that treasure made the throne worth plotting for — gave the priests, who shared the secret, more than nine tenths of their power for blackmail, pressure, and intrigue — and grew, like a cancer, into each succeeding Rajah’s mind until, from a man with a soul inside him he became in turn a heartless, fear ridden miser.
Any childless king is liable to feel the insolent expectancy betrayed by the heir appare
nt. But Jaimihr — who had no sons either — was an heir who understood all of the Indian arts whereby a man of brain may hasten the succession. Worry, artfully stirred up, is the greatest weapon of them all, and never a day passed but some cleverly concocted tale would reach the Rajah, calculated to set his guessing faculties at work.
Either of the brothers, when he happened to be thirsty, would call his least-trusted counsellor to drink first from the jewelled cup, and would watch the man afterward for at least ten minutes before daring to slake his thirst; but Jaimihr had the moral advantage of an aspirant; Howrah, on the defensive, wilted under the nibbling necessity for wakefulness, while Jaimihr grinned.
What were five thousand drilled, armed men to a king who feared to use them? Of what use was a waiting countryside, armed if not drilled, if he was not sure that his brother had not won every man’s allegiance? Being Hindoo, priest-reared, priest-fooled, and priest-flattered, he knew, or thought he knew, to an anna the value he might set on Hindoo loyalty or on the loyalty of any man who did not stand to gain in pocket by remaining true; and, as many another fear-sick tyrant has begun to do, he turned, in his mind at least, to men of another creed — which in India means of another race, practically-wondering whether he could not make use of them against his own.
Like every other Rajah of his line, he longed to have sole control of that wonderful treasure that had eaten out his very manhood. Miser though he was, he was prepared at least to bargain with outsiders with the promise of a portion of it, if that would give him possession of it all. He had learned from the priests who took such full advantage of him an absolute contempt for Mohammedans; and their teaching, as well as his own trend of character, made him quite indifferent to promises he might make, for the sake of diplomacy, to men of another creed. It began to be obvious to him that he would lose nothing by courting the favor of the Rangars, and of Alwa in particular, and that he might win security by coaxing them to take his part. Of one thing he was certain: the Rangars would do anything at all, if by doing it they could harm the Hindoo priests.