with a strong native accent, yet with a curiously English phrasing in it, "but by dismounting here you will reach the Fort in a few minutes on foot. The road is longer."
Captain Dering turned, as if surprised, to the speaker, a native officer who sat his horse at the salute; then smiled, and with a clatter of accoutrements slipped to the ground.
"Come along, Carlyon. I was forgetting that Roshan Khân is up to the ropes here. You belong to Eshwara, don't you, risaldar sahib?"
The man to whom he spoke had slipped from his saddle also, and stood, smart as uniform could make him, still as discipline could hold him. He was a good-looking young Mahomedan of about thirty, curiously English in his movements, curiously native in his exaggeration of martial airs.
"Huzoor!" he assented. "We are connected with the late Nawab's house."
He spoke with absolute indifference, but Captain Dering, as they left the bazaar, which led from the bridge, for a short flight of steps and a narrow alley cleaving it's way through crowded, shouldering houses, remarked aside:--
"I believe that means he is about the nearest relation left. The Colonel, I know, wasn't sure about the wisdom of his coming here; but then the Colonel is that sort. So I insisted. One wants somebody who can tell you things in a new place. What's that, in there, Roshan?"
They had come to a long, high wall, with trees showing above it, which stretched away on their right hand for two or three hundred yards, until it ended in an arched tunnel through a massive block of buildings at right angles to it.
"The palace garden, sir; and that is the palace. There is no entrance this side."
"The women's apartments, I suppose?"
"Huzoor," assented Roshan Khân once more. "The Miss Sahib lives there now, and the Padré has his chapel there too. The river runs along the side, and it is pleasant."
"Pleasant and cool," echoed Lance, as the shadow of the tunnel closed in on them. "I'd no idea it was so hot outside. By Jove! what a quaint place."
They were emerging on a wide, square courtyard of which the palace formed one side, the fort another, a flight of steps leading down to the river a third, while the fourth was apparently, a wing of the palace. All three walls were absolutely blank save for a low door at each of the four corners; and these were, so to speak, connected with each other by pathways raised two steps above the rest of the courtyard. A similar footpath crossed it in the middle and so completed the resemblance to a union-jack; for the pathways were of white marble and red Agra stone, the courtyard of purple-blue brick. These paths met in a round platform in the centre, where, on a stone carriage, stood an old cannon.
"That's a big gun," said Vincent Dering, when, with a quickened clink of his spurred steps he had reached it; so, laying his hand lightly on the cylinder, he vaulted to it, as on to a horse, and stooped to read an inscription on the riveted band about the breech.
"Sanskrit," he said--"that stumps me! it's so confounded straight. Ah! here it is in Persian too--that's better."
There was a faint clash of steel on stone, for, as he read the motto aloud, Roshan's hand, stiffening on his sword-hilt, made ground and scabbard meet.
Captain Dering slipped to his feet again with a laugh.
"'Teacher of religion, and instructor of souls;' that's about a correct translation, isn't it, risaldar sahib? Well! I'd back a Maxim against old Blunderbore as a missionary agent nowadays. Hullo! they worship it still, do they?" He pointed to a faded chaplet of marigolds around the muzzle, and a red hand printed on the marble below.
The Mahomedan's face took on the expression of his race and creed; all unconsciously, too, he reverted to his own language.
"The idolators do that when they come to bathe; and they give alms to the saint, when he is inside."
"Inside!" echoed Captain Dering. "What! Inside the gun?"
Here Lance, who had promptly peered down the muzzle, came up from it excitedly, asserting that the saint was there now; he could see the brute's fuzzy head half way down, so he must have crawled in feet foremost--one of those naked brutes who smeared themselves with ashes, to judge by his chignon.
"Make a ripping mop," laughed Vincent Dering, after glancing down in his turn; "clean the gun nicely,"--then the insouciance of his face disappeared, its curves hardened--"and by God! I'll make him. I'm not going to have my guns worshipped! eh, Roshan?"
"Huzoor," assented the Mahomedan once more, this time joyfully, as--a decorous two paces behind--his spurs jingled in harmony with his captain's across the raised union-jack towards the river-end of the courtyard where, in a projecting bastion right upon the bathing steps, the low arched door stood which gave access to the Fort.
In order to reach it they had to pass the solitary visible occupant of the wide, sunlit courtyard. This was a man--of what rank, education, occupation, none could tell--who having raised a square of two-inch-high mud wall between his twice-born purity and the world, was preparing his daily food. Naked, save for his waistcloth, and the thread of the twice-born over his left shoulder, he was isolated even from his kindred. Alone with himself and his God.
Before him in the mud-plastered square, as he sat immovable, was the mud fireplace on which his wheaten dough-cake was cooking; beside him was a leaf-platter of curds, a brass vessel of milk; a sight to be seen a hundred times a day in India; one which should never be forgotten.
The noon was almost shadowless; yet, even so, as he led the way, Captain Dering, from sheer habit, swerved to step further from the sacred square. Doing so his foot slipped an instant on the lower step. He gave an impatient exclamation and passed on. A minute later the door of the fort clanged behind the little party, cutting short an English laugh.
Then, not till then, the man in that square of purity showed signs of life. He rose quietly, almost unconcernedly, took the half-baked cake from the embers, the leaf-platter of curds, the vessel of milk, and going down to the river's edge, flung his dinner into it, to feed the fishes.
In that stumble, the plume-like fringe of Vincent Dering's high peaked turban had sent a shadow to overtop the two-inch barrier between one man and his fellows.
CHAPTER II
"HE SHALL FEED HIS FLOCK LIKE A SHEPHERD"
The garden of the old palace at Eshwara had been rightly described by Roshan Khân as a pleasant place. Longer than it was broad, its shady walks and orange groves clung to the river, raised above it by a balconied wall against which the current ran dimpling. On two of the remaining sides, a twenty-feet high barrier of sheer masonry, buttressed and bastioned, blocked out all curious eyes. On the third, separating it from the courtyard where the big gun stood, rose the palace. Seen thus intimately from within, the latter had changed its character. No longer severe, stern, giving a blank stare at the world from the narrow slits of infrequent windows, it had grown fanciful, almost fantastic, full of canopied
