by Talbot Mundy
“Who installed your electric lights?”
“Jonesey, with the aid of Russians who had run from the Reds in Siberia. They came all the way over the mountains, starving, some of them wounded, with their feet in rags and without hope in the world except to find some hiding-place where they could die in comfort. They were engineers.”
A grim suspicion crossed Gup’s mind. “How did you keep them from talking?” he asked. “I mean, after they reached the British border.”
“They never reached it.” For a moment she enjoyed his horror. “Why should they?” she went on. “No, I did not have them shot. I swore them into my service. Russians are wonderful linguists and if you could tell them now from Moslem tribesmen you are cleverer than I think. They are good men, but you will find they need dreadfully hard work and insolence to keep them from being introspective, which makes them sloppy and careless. They enjoy being miserable. But they are good men and one of them commands a thousand of my riflemen.”
“How many thousand have you?”
Their eyes met. She hesitated — laughed. “Is that ambition asking,” she retorted, “or do you propose to catch me boasting? Or are you thinking of buying pardon from the Indian Government by telling them all you can find out about me?”
“You don’t know me,” he said, “or you wouldn’t have troubled to ask that last question. I will never buy pardon. I have done nothing for which any man can pardon me. I would not accept pardon, as you, and undoubtedly they, would call it. I admit no guilt.”
“But there were two other questions!”
“Both wrong. I was idly curious. It means nothing to me how many cutthroats you have sworn into your service, unless I should have the opportunity to fight against them. Then, the more the merrier! It never pays to defeat a mere handful of Hillmen. They need punishment in droves — a big dramatic climax. Then the lesson lasts.”
“Very true. But how can you ever fight against my riflemen? You would be arrested and shot the moment you set foot on Indian soil. My dear man, listen. Do you take me for a half-wit? Do you think I hesitate to be ruthless to attain an end, or that I don’t know all about a man when I have once set eyes on him? There lies your revolver on that side-table. We are alone, but do you think I fear your shooting me? I have no weapon. Yet I am going to tell you now what would make some men want to shoot me without a moment’s hesitation. I admire you or I would not waste breath on you. I wouldn’t want you if you weren’t a man of honor. And I knew I couldn’t get you without leaving you no other possible course. Your only alternative now is suicide.”
“We will see,” said Gup. “What have you done?” He was beginning to enjoy himself. A clean fight over a plain issue suited the state of his nerves. If she could be ruthless, so could he. But he did not know what was coming.
“I have sent down into India the proof that you visited me in the fort that night below the border.”
“Well, what of it? I’ve a right to visit any one I please.”
“They won’t admit that. However, I have also sent the proof that there were emissaries there that night from the Amir of Afghanistan, who is known to be planning to invade India. You did not know that those men were with me in the fort, but they were there, and who would believe that you didn’t know it? Could you prove you didn’t know it? Could you prove that against Major Glint? It was to Glint I sent the evidence.”
“I have learned not to look for much fair play from a woman,” Gup answered. He spoke carelessly, but he felt stung. “On the other hand, I kept my promise not to reveal your plans. If I had chosen I could have gone with Glint and have saved my own good name by ruining yours — telling all I know about you.”
“Do you mind if I call you Gup? It sounds so friendly. I have always thought of you as Gup. You may call me anything you please. Gup, are you so innocent as to believe that the Indian Government doesn’t know my plans? Do you suppose I would have come so soon across the border, had I not known that the Indian Government was drawing in its net to catch me? If I had not had spies in every important government office, they would have trapped me long ago. They think I am in league with the Amir of Afghanistan, whereas I only mean to use that fool. I mean to let him take the blame for invading India and bear the expense and the shock of the first assault.”
“I see no ground for suicide,” said Gup. “You have blackened my name, but it was black already. I will find a way of cleaning it.”
“But I haven’t finished. One of the Amir’s emissaries fell into British hands. They caught him on his way to take the train southward from Mahmud Kot; he intended to talk with the Sikhs at Amritsar, who are seething with sedition. But I did not wish that idiot to upset all my careful arrangements with the Sikhs, who are ready to support me, not the Amir. It was easy to have him arrested. It was easier still to connect you with him.”
“How?” Gup wondered. He was too astonished by the boldness and the breadth of her intrigue to think much just then of his own predicament. He used that monosyllable to keep the conversation going.
“Were your tents and trunks not in charge of Pepul Das?”
“Oh, so that’s why they burst my box open?”
“No need to burst it. Your servant, knowing you did not intend to keep him much longer, had had a false key made. He was only waiting his opportunity to loot your boxes and escape. So Pepul Das took the key from him, opened your box and found your wallet, that was since returned to you. There were English ten-pound notes in it. Your name was written on them. Ten-pound notes without your name were substituted. Those that bore your name were handed secretly to the Amir’s man as a token of support in time of trouble. When he came to be searched, of course those notes, bearing your name in your own handwriting, were on his person. Now prove you are innocent! Now save yourself from being shot, blindfolded, with your face to a wall! Can you imagine Glint not adding enough of his usual sort of evidence to convict you of treason?”
“No,” said Gup. “I think you have me there.”
“You admit that? You admit defeat?” She leaned forward and laughed excitedly; her eyes alight with triumph. “It was a long game, first studying you, then watching for opportunity, then arousing Glint’s suspicion of you so that Glint would make you indignant and force you to some act of violence that would drive you into my camp. Don’t you think I’m patient? Don’t you think I’m a rather good psychologist?”
“No,” said Gup. He liked this sort of fight far better than he enjoyed the thought of whipping all the Glints in Christendom. There was nothing tawdry about this; his antagonist was not a hypocrite, nor was he accused of sedition but of too stiff loyalty, a charge that might have deadly danger wrapped in it but that did not make him feel dirty. “No,” he said, “your psychology is as weak as your spirit is strong and your plans are daring. Your argument, too, is as weak as any other criminal’s.”
“You call me a criminal? Was Napoleon a criminal?”
“I believe he began by being magnificent, sacrificing life and genius in the cause of an adopted country, just as you did. I believe he became a criminal when he let his ambition run away with him, just as yours has. You are offering to plunge three hundred and fifty million people into all the misery and damned cruelty of war, solely because a bewildered and perhaps badly advised government refused to recognize you as a Ranee.
“That is false!” she said angrily. “If they had put a man in my place, who would have carried on what I was doing, I would have retired with good grace. They put a rotten scoundrel on the throne instead, who undid all that Jullunder and I had worked so hard to build up. He neglects the state, and he would pawn its revenues to-morrow, if he dared, for money to spend on vice in Europe. So I decided I will win a new throne, from which to begin with a clean beginning.”
“At the cost of the lives of possibly a quarter of a million men!”
“Or more! What of it? Would they not die anyhow, sooner or later? Which is better for them? To die nobly in a great cause? Or to di
e like rats, of plague and cholera. God kills us all in due time — don’t forget that.”
“In due time, yes — and let God answer for it! You are offering to run God’s business, aren’t you? You are willing — more than that, you are determined to shoulder responsibility for the life or death of millions. Good psychology? Rank bad!”
“Are you afraid?” she asked.
“Do I appear afraid? The answer to your proposal is no, flat, downright, without qualification, and for ever! Now what?”
“Do you realize that you are in my power?”
“Perfectly. I have failed in a fight for independence. I am not even cock of my own dunghill.”
“I can make you the Cock o’ the North!” she retorted. “Lead my army! I will make you chief — king — emperor, if you like, of all these Hills! Cock o’ the North, Gup! Have you any notion of the extent of my wealth and of the rings within rings of influence that I have built up?”
“I’m not interested. I simply don’t care.”
“Can you imagine how important it is for me, and how determined I am to obtain the services of a man of valor, whom I can admire and trust — a man of merit, who can’t be blackmailed, bought or stolen?”
“If you are to succeed, that seems essential.”
“You seem to me to be that man.”
“Why, then, try to blackmail me?” Gup asked her — and she caught her breath, as she might have if a rapier point had pricked her near the heart.
“I offer you,” she said, “a quarter of a million pounds, the office of commander-in-chief of an army of a hundred thousand men — and the title of prince.”
“I am not even tempted.”
“I am! I am tempted to use means that would bend that stiff spirit of yours or break it.”
“Bent or broken it would not be worth much,” Gup retorted.
She leaned back in her chair and looked at him across the daintily laid table, where the coffee was cold in the cups and the food was barely tasted.
“Take a cigarette and think it over. You might do what Akbar did. He conquered India and made it prosper. Help me to build a kingdom in these hills!”
“All that Akbar did has perished,” he answered. “There remains his name and nothing more.”
“A man of your spirit must do something,” she said. “What do you want to do?”
“Nothing,” said Gup. He grew suddenly downcast. All the disgust with life that he had felt in recent months returned to him in one almost overwhelming wave. “I only know I loathe what I see around me and I don’t know how to change it.”
The deaf-and-dumb girl opened the door between the two rooms for a moment. Music, with a muted drum-beat, stole on Gup’s ears — strangely stirring stuff. It ceased as the door closed.
“I remember,” he said, “the old commandments — thou shalt not covet, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not kill.”
“There is a new one,” she answered. “Thou shalt not neglect thy opportunities!”
“Not bad, but you can’t make it work if you forget the others. And after all, I am the sole judge of my opportunities. I have declined your offer. What next?”
“I will give you one whole day and night in which to reconsider.”
“The answer will be no. And then what?”
“If you are still so unwise, I will send you back below the border, where you may face Glint. And — I will hold you to your word of honor not to save yourself by betraying me!” (NORTH TEXT)
But Truth needs neither drum nor bugle blast.
Within all treason, and all untruth, and all doubt,
Truth is, and lies proclaim it. Neither first nor last
But always, Truth is. Silence or the shout
Of myriads of voices — thought or deed or thing —
Corruption and all change — these make no mark
On Truth; they are no part of it. Above,
Beneath, without, within, not light nor dark
But absolute, Truth is. And Truth is Love.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“Did you ask me to command your army because you suspected me of being slow?”
THE door between the two rooms opened again, admitting music. It had ceased to be slumberous, circular stuff that left off where it started as if life were only lazy variations of an old theme. It had changed to a spiraling, challenging lilt that asserted there are unknown principles and new realms waiting for imagination to explore them. But it hardly needed that to arouse Gup’s inward fire. The battle with himself for self-determination might have made him numb, but that was only on the surface. Under that, compressed and consequently ten times strengthened, was the spirit of Scottish Covenanters, never less than eager to accept a challenge, and to which apparent defeat is a spur to superhuman pertinacity and courage. A nation weaned on uncooked oatmeal, lest the smoke of cooking should betray its hiding-places to a foe made cruel by expensive and unprofitable victory, grows rich with hidden assets. Gup’s spirit leaped forth out of ambush, not alone; there came with it what always does accompany the stuff that makes men fight. The Clan of Gup McLeod — the unseen products of heredity, climate, history and culture — more deadly in his case because drilled and disciplined, swaggered out from cover with their sporrans swinging and the skirl of bagpipes in their ears.
“So you will send me below the border?” Gup got up and strode to the side-table where he pocketed his money and revolver, remembering now that there were only three remaining cartridges. He returned and sat down. “You are a fine woman — a bonny woman,” he continued. “You are twice the woman you were when you were Lottie Carstairs, singing across the footlights to make life-hungry youngsters like me, and others, lose our dignity. Many a lad’s head you turned; many and many a lad left the theater and went looking for a lass like you. Not by hundreds am I the only one who saw the next woman he met, through a memory of Lottie Carstairs — heard her laugh, through the ripple of Lottie Carstairs’ chuckle — felt her dancing with him as he thought that Lottie Carstairs’ lissomness might feel — and went and married the wrong lass, for your sake! Nor is that all. Many a feckless chiel has gone to worse hell than a wedding for the sake of your bonny blue eyes.”
“And you blame me for that?” she retorted.
“I blame myself, who should have known that new commandment that you named just now. ‘Thou shalt not neglect thy opportunity.’ I should have known that. But a man seems born with blinkers on his eyes.”
The ancient Egyptian hint of spiritual longing, that came and went but was never entirely absent from her face, grew now so strong that Gup’s eyes narrowed as he watched her. It made his blood leap. It made her ageless — younger by years — older by all eternities in grace and value. She was several years younger than himself; at moments she was almost a child to his eyes, healthy, spiritual, only waiting to be caught and guided into golden womanhood.
“I should have known,” he said, “what I know now. I should have known that the way to power is through song and smiles, not railing and abuses. I should have learned from you the trick of winning people’s hearts — and so their confidence — and so their votes. I might have changed the world.”
The Lottie Carstairs chuckle that had once made London hearts feel gay in the London fog answered him.
“It is nice of you not to speak of Jezebel and the whore o’ Babylon,” she said. “Most Scotsmen do when they reprove a woman.”
But her banter increased his vibrance. She could see the veins and sinews of his strong hands that gripped the table-edge, and her own blue eyes betrayed some other thought than ridicule. Nor was it fear.
“But I will do my duty now,” he said.
Gaily she laughed then — pealing, happy laughter that enjoyed a joke without the scorn that tarnishes good humor. “With a thoroughly Scottish sense of duty, I don’t doubt! You propose to sacrifice yourself for the sake of reforming me? You dour, delightful comedian!”
“Not so,” said Gup. “The pity is, I did not
fall in love with you in days gone by. If I had, it would have needed more than stage-doors and a contract to keep me from snatching you out from behind the footlights. That might have saved the two of us from many a mistake.”
“But don’t you know,” she said, “that by mistakes we learn? We almost never learn anyway else.”
“There is no need to make so many,” Gup retorted. “You are making one that I intend to interfere with. If I thought you were a wanton, I would leave you to your own devices. I would let you go your own gait to the ruin that o’ertakes all wantonness.”
“Akbar,” she said, “Alexander — Cæsar — Cortes — Clive — were they ruined?”
“Spiritual ruin,” he insisted. “Though you conquered India, I would not give twopence for your throne. But I will give my life to save India — and to save you for something better.”
“For what?” she asked mischievously. “Preaching? Would you like to see me in a doctor’s gown, plowing a sea of prejudices with rust-eaten phrases? I have money enough. I could build a cathedral. You might grow a beard and I could make you bishop. But we would have to bleach the beard gray or all the women of the diocese would make me so jealous I couldn’t breathe!” Suddenly her eyes blazed, taking up the challenge of the fire in his. “Nonsense!” she said indignantly. “Do you think I am such a weakling as to yield my goal simply because a handsome gallant tells me I should?”
The word gallant stung Gup’s pride. In all his life he had never offered a woman less than the benefit of whatever doubt might say of her, and he knew this woman had been no man’s light o’ love. He hated insincerity. It scalded him to be accused of it.
“If you were worthless,” he said, “I would not talk to you. If your goal were worthy of you I would win it; I would give it to you, if I died reaching it. Handsome?” he said. “Handsome is that handsome does, and when I say to you that you shall yield that goal and seek another, I mean no less. I will make you do it.”
“How?” she asked, forcing a smile of amusement. She was still indignant.