by Talbot Mundy
So Ali’s youngest went on an errand he could run without much risk of tripping up, but “instantly” is a word of random application and he was gone an hour before the horses stood incuriously at the door perceived by half a hundred very curious eyes; for the doings of a lady such as Gauri are of deeper interest than chronicles of courts.
It was not until Ramsden came forth, bulking like a rajah’s bully, and the others formed up like the riff-raff hirelings who attended, to the unprintable pursuits of aristocracy, that the crowd went its way to imagine the rest and discuss it over betel-nut or water-pipes.
Gauri ceased expostulating when it dawned on her that she would ride escorted by nine assorted footmen. That is an honor and a novelty that comes to few of her position on the stairs of disrepute. And then, there was intrigue, that was meat and drink to her. There was the possibility — the probability of venomous revenge; and a bet to win, if no chance of her money back from the Portuguese.
She began to try to stipulate before the hour was up.
“If I find him for you, you must kill him!” she insisted.
“If you don’t find him, you lose your necklace,” King retorted.
“What if he tells you his secrets?” she said suddenly. “The pashu will be afraid. He will tell the secret of the treasure! He has had ten thousand rupees of my money! You must tell me what he tells you—”
She grew silent — looking — reading men and faces, as the third of her profession was. King’s eyes had met Grim’s and the glance passed all around the circle — not of understanding, but unanimous. They recognized a chance, and without speaking all accepted it. So King conceded terms:
“Daughter of Delight,” he said, “if in obedience to us you help find treasure, you shall have your share of it.
“How much?” she demanded.
But it is wiser, if you want to shorten argument, to let East’s daughters bear the market for themselves.
“How much do you want?” King asked and she named the highest figure she could think of that conveyed a meaning. (Crores look nice on paper but are over ambition’s head.)
“A lakh! “ she said, laughing at her own exorbitance.
“Good! If your help is worth an anna you shall have a lakh of rupees!” King answered.
She demanded, naturally, two lakhs after that, but Ali of Sikunderam declaimed on the subject of unfaithfulness. A lakh she had said; a lakh she should have; his Khyber knife was there to prove it! He was as vehement as if they had the treasure in the room with no more to do than divide it, and she capitulated, more fearful of Ali’s Northern knife than of all other possible contingencies. She understood the glint in those eyes that were the color of the breeding weather.
“A lakh ,” she agreed; and then the horses came, and fiscal whispers had to be exchanged between the owner of the horses and the maid, who indubitably swindled everybody, though she had to part with a “reward” to Ali’s son, that being India — specifically Delhi and the seat of government, where extortion is the one art that survives. The horses were an illustration — crow’s meat, hungry, made to labor for a last rapacious overcharge.
But nothing more was required of the horses than a walking pace. The two veiled women rode them in the midst of men who were in no haste, because to seem to hasten is to draw attention. It was better to swagger and invite attention, which has a way of producing the opposite effect.
They headed as straight as winding ways permitted toward the northern outer fringe of Delhi, where the ruins of the ancient city lie buried amid centuries’ growth of jungle. Not a tiger has been seen in that jungle for more than thirty years, but few care to wander at night there, for everything else that is dangerous abides in that impenetrable maze, including fever and fugitives from justice.
As they left the last of the modern streets the moon rose and they followed a track that wound like the course of a hunted jackal between ancient trees whose roots were in much more ancient masonry. The “servant of delight,” as she preferred to call herself since her mistress was what she was, led with King’s hand on her bridle-rein, recognizing the route by things she was afraid of — ruins shaped like a human skull that drew a scream from her — roots like pythons sprawling in the way — a hole in a broken wall that might be a robber’s entrance — terrified, and yet employing terror consciously — enjoying it, as some folk like to sit in a rocking boat and scream. Life to amuse her had to raise the gooseflesh and offend the law, both of which are accomplishments of night in northern Delhi; so her faculties were working where another’s would have turned numb.
They came at last to the world’s end, where a shadow blacker than a coal mine’s throat declared that life left off, and might have been believed except for moonlight that glistened beyond it along the ragged outline of a broken wall. There, under the bough of an enormous tree, whose tendrils looked like hanged men swinging in the wind, they turned into a space once paved so heavily that no trees grew and only bushes strangled themselves, stunted, between masonry. On the far side was a building, still a building, though the upper part had fallen and the front looked like the broken face of a pyramid.
Once it had been magnificent. The outside and the upper portions had collapsed, from earthquake probably, in such way as to preserve the middle part like the heart of an ant-heap. Partly concealed by bushes was an opening indubitably dug by men through the débris. That they entered, into a tunnel that was once a corridor open on one side to the air. And at the end of fifty dark yards, guided by matches struck two at a time, they turned to the left into a hall, whose marble sides had been quarried off long ago, but whose columns were still standing like rows of twisted Titans holding up the world’s foundation.
There was a platform at one end, on which had stood a throne. But on it now were a canvas camp-bed, an old black hand-bag with a dirty shirt in it, a couple of pairs of filthy blankets, and a lantern. Someone lighted the lantern, and about a million bats took wing; the air was alive with them, and the women hugged their heads, screaming.
A few opened tin cans tossed into a corner showed how someone had contrived his meals; and one meal at any rate was recent, for there was unspoiled soup remaining in a can beside the bed. But no sign of the Portuguese. Not a hint of where he might be. Only the certainty that he had been there that day! There, on the bed, turned inside out and empty, lay the chamois-leather bag that Cyprian had given back to him; but there was no more trace of the coins that had been in it than of da Gama.
Narayan Singh was the first to speak:
“Da Gama came for money, sahibs . I heard the boast made that the Nine never lie.” He seemed afraid his own word might be doubted since they hadn’t found da Gama. “Nevertheless — the money that we know he had is missing — gone — where?”
He picked up the chamois-leather bag and shook it. “Up somebody’s sleeve!” chuckled Jeremy. “Look for the Don and I’ll bet you—”
He spoke English, and the women’s exclamations stopped him.
Ramsden went looking, not so talkative but bashfully aware, as big men sometimes are, of strength and an impulse to apply it. It was foolish to go looking in an empty hall, but men who don’t pride themselves on intellect occasionally are better served by intuition. He stooped over where a solitary section of a broken marble column lay on top of débris in a corner of the floor, and they heard his joints crack as he shoved the marble off the heap.
“Here’s your Portuguese!” he said quietly.
He might have found a golf-ball. But he, too, spoke English and the women exclaimed at it. The maid seized hold of Jeremy’s hand and began to examine his fingernails, which inform the practised eye infallibly; but Jeremy snatched his hand away and hurried to hold the lantern and look with the rest at what Ramsden had discovered.
The yellow rays shone on the body of the Portuguese laid dead and hardly cold in a shallow trench hoed in the rubble. The marble column had closed it without crushing what was in there, and the corpse was smiling with th
e funny, human, easy-natured look that the man had worn in life for fragments of a second as he passed from sneer to sneer. He had died in mid-emotion, and the women vowed the gods had done it. They promised the gods largesse to save them from a like fate.
There was no other explanation than theirs of how he died, nor of who else than the gods had killed him. They searched the body. There was no wound — bruise — no smell of acid poison — no snake- bite — nothing, but a corpse with a scarred chin, smiling! And no hat!
CHAPTER V. “The nine’s spies are everywhere.”
FOR those who sacrifice themselves upon the altar of her needs — whether supposititious needs or otherwise — India holds recompense, as such quarters for instance as Father Cyprian’s, wedged between two gardens in a sleepy street, with the chimney of a long-disused pottery kiln casting a shadow like that of a temple-dome on the sidewalk in the afternoon. From India’s view-point Cyprian was all the more entitled to consideration in that he had never openly conducted any siege against her serried gods. He had saved the face of many a pretending pagan, holding in the privacy of his own conscience that the damned were more in need of comfort than an extra curse. So pagan gratitude had comforted his old bones, unpretending pagans not objecting.
He was housed ascetically; but there is a deal more repose and contentment to be had in quiet cloisters than in the palaces of viceroys, princes, bishops. Tongue in cheek, he had pretended to the arch-pretenders that he thought their magic formulas bewildering, doing it repeatedly for fifty years until it was second nature, and men, whose minds were rummage shops of all the secondhand old-wives’ tales, not only used their influence to repay flattery but labored, too, to unearth facts for him beyond their understanding. India, surviving Anglo-Saxon worship of the playing fields and all unnecessary sweat, takes her amusement mentally. It was “entertainment exquisite” to bring to Father Cyprian, the alien albeit courteous priest, new facts and revel in his intellectual amazement. (For in fifty years a man learns how to play parts, and, as Jeremy had noticed, Cyprian was “all things” to a host of various men.)
He could discuss the metaphysical, remote, aloof though omnipresent All of Parabrahman just as easily as listen to the galloping confession of a Goanese in haste to unburden conscience and, as it were, dump burdens at the padre’s feet. Shapely, dignified old feet, well cased in patent-leather slippers, resting on a folded Afghan chudder to keep them off the tiled floor.
Fernandez de Mendoza de Sousa Diomed Braganza watched them, as he knelt and searched the very lees of his imagination. He was very proud indeed to confess to Father Cyprian, a rare enough privilege, that of itself, if boasted of sufficiently, would raise him twenty notches in the estimation of the envious world he knew. All he could see below the screen were those old aristocratic-looking slippered feet, but they were reassuring, and he longed to touch them.
“And so, father, that Arab, speaking English veree excellentlee, so that in fact I was awfulee taken by astonishment and made suspeecious — yes indeed — recommended me to come to you for confession!”
“Why did you obey an Arab?” wondered Cyprian.
“Oh, I think he, was the devil! How else should he speak English and laugh so light-heartedly? I saw his head against the night sky and I think he had horns — oh yes, certainlee!”
Cyprian cautioned him.
“If he was not thee devil, that one, then the other was — the great brute dressed as a Jat who seized me as if I were trash to be thrown away and hurled me against my customers! Father, I assure you I was like a cannonball! He hurled me and I upset many men — oh yes, decidedlee! And though the whole hotel was subsequently burned, and from below I saw those veree selfsame individuals burning in the flames, I have seen them since! If they are not the devil, they are salamanders—”
“It is not for you to say who the devil is,” warned Cyprian, aware of how the Goanese mind leaps from one conclusion to another. “How is it you escaped?”
“Oh, veree simplee. I have been most faithful in the matter of the candles for the altar of Our Lady of Goa, so when that — I am sure he was thee devil! — hurled me into the ranks of my customers I was assured in my conscience that that is enough, and I fled first, before there was a stampede, which I foresaw infalliblee. So when the stampede began I was on the stairs, and there I smelt the smoke and went to see as Moses went to see the burning bush, and seeing flame I ran to thee street and was saved. But my whole hotel and my fortune are up in flame — oh pity me!”
So Father Cyprian pitied him with due restraint, and dismissed him after a priceless homily in which he pointed out how profitably Diomed might have given all that property to the Church, instead of keeping it for the devil to make a bonfire of. Whereafter he told his servant to open the slats of the jalousies and admit sufficient of the morning sun to make the place look cheerful.
And a plain, cool, white, stone room with an ancient tiled floor and vaulted ceiling is a great deal easier to make cheerful than any sumptuously furnished boudoir in the world. The delights of mild asceticism are immensely keener than the pleasures of the epicure. The sun came in, obedient, and the light and shadow alternated in long triangles on floor and wall, leaving the rear of the room in shadowed mystery.
There was no sign of the library — merely a breviary, and one or two books liberally marked with penciled slips on a table against the wall. In addition to the chair that Cyprian used there were six others, equally simple and equally almost impossibly perfect in design and workmanship — each chair as old as the Taj Mahal and no two chairs alike, yet all one unity because of excellence.
A man may be ascetic without craving ugliness — an anchorite, in moderation, without shutting out his friends. A bronze bell from a vanished Buddhist temple announced visitors.
The servant — Manoel — another Goanese — soft-footed as a cat and armed with pots of fuchsias came in to announce what he regarded as too many visitors at that hour of the morning.
“They are not elegant. Not in the least — oh, no.”
“Their names?” asked Cyprian.
Manoel mispronounced them, was reproved, set the pots down, and departed to admit the visitors, changing his mood like a chameleon, only much more swiftly and with rather less success. For instance, it did not convince Cullender Ghose, who entered first, as impresario.
“Hitherto not having poisoned padre sahib , said sacred person being vigilant, you therefore impel malevolent influence of evil eye on these unholy sahibs who are honoring this babu with employment? Stand back, son of miscegenation! Cease from smiling!”
Who would smile if addressed in those terms by an arrogantly fat babu? Not a bishop’s butler. Still less Manoel. He scowled and — so tradition says — a man must smile before he can blast with that dreadful bane called Evil Eye in which the whole of the Orient and most of the newer world believes implicitly. Under the protecting scowl Chullunder Ghose, with his back to Manoel for extra safety’s sake, marshaled the party in — Grim, Jeremy, King, Ramsden, Ali of Sikunderam, Narayan Singh, and one of Ali’s sons who was beckoned in by Chullunder Ghose for “keyhole prophylaxis,” as the babu explained in an aside. The other sons remained squatting in the dust in the patterned shadow of a great tree opposite. Falstaff never had a raggeder, less royal following as far as mere appearance went — inside or outside the priest’s house. They all looked like men who trod the long leagues rather than the pavement.
For though in the new, raw world, where twenty centuries have not sufficed to give the sons of men a true sense of proportion, he who would be listened to must masquerade and mountebank in new clothes of the newest cut, India knows better — looks deeper — and is more wise. So in vain that net is laid in sight of her. Viceroys, kings and all their pomp are side-shows, and the noise they make is a nuisance to be tolerated only for the sake of more or less peace. They are heard in the land and not listened to — seen, and appraised like shadows on the sands of time. The men who go in rags out-influence them all
.
Manoel the Goanese, for instance, with all European error multiplied within him by miscegenation, scorned that ragged bodyguard beneath the tree for servants of men of no intellect or influence; and even so, a passing constable, with native vision warped by too much European drill, but with all his other faculties and fondnesses alert, paused over the way to meditate how innocence might be made to pay tribute to worldly wisdom — paused, scratching his chin with the butt of a turned wooden truncheon and both eyes roving for a safe accomplice.
“That constabeel is a Hindu pig with hair on his liver, who designs an inconvenience to us — by Allah!” said one Hill brother to the next.
And all six nodded, in a circle, resembling bears because of sheepskin coats hung loosely on their shoulders.
So within; the padre’s servant Manoel approached the seventh, who stood guard by the door of Cyprian’s sitting room, offering cakes to Cerberus.
“Taste it,” he suggested. “Veree excellent — from oversea — the land of my ancestors — it came in a great flagon. Onlee veree distinguished people have been given any.”
A hand like a plucked bear’s paw closed tight on the long glass, and with both eyes on the Goanese the Hillman poured a pint of sweet, strong liquid down his throat, not pausing, not even coughing. The glass was back in the hand of the Goanese before the other had finished his gasp of astonishment.
“Tee-hee! You like it, eh? Come, then, into the pantry, where is plentee more. You shall have your fill.”
“No, for I don’t drink wine,” said Rahman, wiping his lips on a sleeve. “Such dogs as thou know nothing of the Koran, but to drink wine is forbidden.”
In vain the Goanese brought more, in a glass jug, tempting scent and vision. Rahman stood with his back to the keyhole, just sufficiently inflamed by one pint of Oporto to have split the Goanese’s stomach open at the first excuse, and not quite sure that he hadn’t already excuse enough for it. So Manoel kept his distance, and the conference within proceeded safely.