stopped with a heavy-lidded leer beside Soma.
"So, brother, back again!" he said with the maudlin gravity of a hemp-smoker; "and thou lookest fat. The bone dust must agree with thee."
It was as if a bomb had fallen. The Hindoo bystanders, recognizing the rumor that ground bones were mixed with commissariat flour, drew back from the Rajpoot instinctively; the Mohammedans smiled on the sly. Soma himself had in a moment one sinewy hand on the half-drunk creature's throat, the other brandishing the fresh-polished sword.
"Bone dust thyself, and pigs meat too, foul-mouthed slayer of sacred kine!" he gasped, carrying the war into the enemy's country. "Thou beast! Unsay the lie!"
His indignation, showing that he appreciated the credence some might be disposed to give to the accusation, only made the Hindoos look at each other. The Mohammedans, however, dragged him from the swaying figure of the accuser, who, after all, was one of themselves.
"Heed him not!" they chorused appeasingly. "'Tis drug-shop talk, and every sane man knows that for dreams. Lo! his sense is clean gone as horns from a donkey! Sure, thy mother ate chillies in her time for thou to be so hot-blooded. It is not morning, brother, because a hen crows, and a snake is but a snake, and goes crooked even to his own home!"
These hoarded saws, with physical force superadded, left Soma reduced to glaring, and renewed claims for a retraction of the insult.
The hemp-smoker looked at him mournfully. "Wouldst have me deny God's truth?" he hiccuped. "Lo! I say not thou didst eat it. Thou sayst not, and who am I to decide between a man and his stomach, even though he looks fat? Yet this all know, that as a bird fattens his tail shrinks, and honor is nowhere nowadays. But this I say for certain. Let him eat who will, there is bone dust in the flour--there is bone dust in the flour----"
He lurched from a supporter's hold and drifted down the lane, half-chanting the words.
Soma glared, now, at those doubtful faces which remained. "'Tis a lie, brothers! But there, 'tis no use wearing the red coat nowadays when all scoff at it. And why not? when the Sirkar itself mocks our rights. I tell thee at the father-in-law's village, but now, a man who titled me sahib last year puffed his smoke in my face this. And wherefore not? May not every scoundrel nowadays drag us to court and set us a-bribing underlings as the common herd have to do? We, soldiers of Oude, who had a Resident of our own always, and----"
"Nothing lasts for always, save God," said a long-bearded bystander, interrupting Soma's parrot roll of military grievances, "as the Moulvie said last night at our mosque, it is well he remains ever the same, giving the same plain orders once and for all. So none of the faithful can mistake. God is Might and Right. All the rest is change."
"Wah! wah!" murmured some respectfully; but the Rajpoot's scowl lost its fierceness in supercilious indifference.
"That may suit the Moulvie. It may suit thee and thine, syyed-jee," he replied, with a shrug of the shoulders. "It suits not me nor mine, being of a different race. We are Rajpoots, and there is no change possible to that. We are ever the same."
The pride in his voice and manner reflected but faintly the inconceivable pride in his heart. Yet he was on the alert, salaaming cheerfully, as James Greyman came riding with a clatter down the alley, and without drawing bridle, passed through the low gateway into the dark garden heavy with the perfume of orange-blossom. His arrival ended the incident, for Soma followed him quickly, and in obedience to his curt order to see the groom rub down the horse while it waited, as it had been a breather round the race course, walked off with it toward the well. It was such an opportunity for ordering other men about as natives dearly love; so that the more autocratic a master is, the better pleased they are to gain dignity by serving him.
James Greyman, meanwhile, had paused on the plinth to give a low whistle and look upward to the terraced roof. And as he did so his face was full of weariness, and yet of impatience. He had been telling himself that he was a fool ever since he had left Kate Erlton's drawing room half an hour before, and even his mad gallop round the steeple-chase course had not effaced the curious sense of compulsion which had made him promise to let her husband go scot-free. Even now, when he waited with that dread at his heart, which of late had been growing stronger day by day, for the answer which Zora loved to make to his signal, his fear lest the Great Silence had fallen between them was lost in the recollection that, if it were so, his freedom had come too late. He hated himself for thus bracketing death and freedom together, but for all that he would not blind himself to its truth. Now that his profession had gone with the King's exile, Zora was, indeed, the only tie to a life which had grown distasteful to him, and when the Great Silence came, as come it must, he had made up his mind to leave James Greyman behind, and go home to England. He was nearing forty, and though the spirit of reckless adventure was fading, the ambitions of his youth seemed to be returning; as they so often do when the burden and heat of passion passes. He was tired of perpetual sunshine; the thought of the cold mists on the hilltops, the wild storms on the west coast, haunted him. He wanted to see them again. Above all, he wanted to hear himself called by his own familiar name, not by the one he had assumed. It had seemed brutal to dream of all this sometimes, while little Zora still lay in his arms smiling contentedly; but it was inevitable. And so, while he waited, watching with the dread growing at his heart for the flutter of the tinsel veil, the half-heard whisper "Khush amud-eed" (welcome), it was inevitable also that the remembrance of his promise to Kate Erlton should invade, and as it were desecrate, his real regret for the silence that seemed to grow deeper every second. It had come too late--too late! There could be no solace in freedom now. That other silence in regard to Major Erlton's misdeeds meant the loss of every penny he had scraped together for England. He might have to sell up almost everything he possessed in order to pay his bets honorably; and that he must do, or he gave away his only hope of recouping his bad luck. Why had he promised? Why had he given up a certainty for that vague chance of which he had spoken, he scarcely knew why, to these cold blue northern eyes with the glint of steel. The remembrance brought a passionate anger at himself. Was there anything in the world worth thinking of now, with that silence new-fallen upon him, except the soft warm eyes which were perhaps closed forever? So, with a quick step, he passed up the stairs and gave his signal knock at the door which led on to the terraced roof.
Tara, opening it, answered his look with finger to her lip, and a warning glance to the low string-bed set close to the arches of the summer-house so as to catch the soft-scented breeze. He stepped over to it lightly and looked down on the sleeper; but the relief passed from his face at what he saw there. It could only be a question of hours now.
"Why didst not send before?" he asked in a low voice. "I bid thee send if she were worse and she needed me." Once more the anger against that other woman came uppermost. What was she to him that she should filch even half an hour from this one who loved him? He might so easily have come earlier; and then the promise would not have been made. Was he utterly heartless, that this thought would come again and again?
"She slept," replied Tara coldly. "And sleep needs naught. Not even Love's kisses. It is nigh the end though, master, as thou seest; so I have warned mother Jewuni, the death tender." She had spoken so far as if she desired to make him wince; now the pain on his face made her add hurriedly: "She hath not suffered, Huzoor, she hath not complained. Had it been so I would have sent. But sleep is rest."
She passed on to a lower roof softening her echoing steps with a quaint crooning lullaby:
"My breast is rest
And rest is Death.
Ye who have breath
Say which is best?
Death's Sleep is rest!"
Was
