lay hold of nothing else soon,' retorted Jack Raymond. 'You're out of work now, I suppose?'
'Jes' so, sir; ready for active service.'
'And I've a great mind to let you find it for yourself. However, you're in the Strangers' Home, I suppose, as usual?'
'As usooal, sir!' came the cheerful reply, and as they passed on, the mellow rich tenor followed them in a florid rendering of 'Home, sweet Home.' It echoed through the hollow of heroes, over the grave-set slope where the descendants of those who held the fort are allowed burial, and so passed with the little party to the gate. Here Budlu, who had followed all the time, ghostlike, silent, made some petition in Urdu, to which Jack Raymond replied with a smile.
'He said something about "Jân-Ali-shân," didn't he?' asked Lesley. 'You must excuse the curiosity, but I am naturally anxious to learn everything about India.'
'A most laudable ambition, I'm sure,' he replied drily. 'Budlu only wanted to know, Miss Drummond, if Jân-Ali-shân was going back to his grave to-night; for if not, it would be better to leave the cemetery gate open--he usually locks it at sundown.'
'Jân-Ali-shân!' she echoed aghast. 'He can't call that wretched creature--he can't think----'
Jack Raymond interrupted her. 'I don't know very much about the possibilities or impossibilities of India, though I've lived in it for twenty years; but I do happen to know that half Nushapore has a sneaking idea that the wretched creature is, well, a sort of emanation of the great John Ellison. He has the same strain, you see, of sheer devilry, pluck, ability, call it what you will--the something that makes its mark on Eastern people. And they think he comes for revenge, because, as you heard him say, he is in such a mortal funk of being cheated out of "an 'ero's grave" if he dies away from Nushapore, that he always comes back when there's trouble about. The natives are quick to notice such things. Well, he may have his tens of thousands this year.'
'You mean that the plague will come?'
'And a row, too, if we aren't careful.'
Jerry's hand tightened on Jack Raymond's. 'A weal wow, sir, with sieges and everything?'
'Sieges? Well, I don't know. What do you want sieges for, young man?'
The child's face showed confident. 'Because I want an 'ero's grave of my vewy own, like what that man's got. An' it wouldn't be dog-in-the-mangery, like two pieces of cake, Miss Dwummond, 'cos I could lend it to other people till I weally did want it; but if it was my vewy own, you see'--he hesitated, then a sudden comprehension seemed to come to him--'then I could fight all the vewy biggest big boys wifout caring. For I could pop into my gwave an' laugh at 'em, even if I was licked--'cos--'cos I should have won weally--shouldn't I, sir?'
The moon shone clear on the ruins before them, and all around them, hidden in the shadows of the trees, lay the little world which forty years before had defied a big one. Through the still silence came only that twittering of birds fighting for a roosting-place, until the man's voice said evenly--
'It is a question, Jerry, "how far high failure overleaps the bound of low successes." Ask Miss Drummond; I don't know.'
The answering woman's voice came swiftly. 'Surely this is no place for an Englishman to talk of failure!'
He turned sharply. So this girl was at it now; she too wanted to rouse him; she had heard the story--or part of it.
'I almost wish it were,' he answered bitterly; 'then we might forget it. But the glory of it gets to our heads--we come back to it again and again.'
He stopped abruptly, for a tenor voice rose in sweet undertones upon that twittering of birds--
'There is a green hill far away,
Outside a city wall.'
The singing and the faint crush of gravel ceased together, as the singer, passing them, drew up and touched the old billycock hat.
'Beg parding, sir,' said John Ellison, loafer, 'but p'r'aps you'd care to 'ear there was a man dead o' plague taken out o' the train I come in this mornin'.'
'Thanks,' replied Jack Raymond. 'I know there have been several isolated cases.'
'Jes' so, sir; not as there's so much isolation, not to speak of, in them third-class cattle-pens,' assented the mellow voice; and as the footstep passed on, it kept time to the refrain of
'Wait for the wagon, and we'll all take a ride.'
'I expect we shall,' remarked Jack Raymond grimly, and his mind reverted to Grace Arbuthnot and her husband. There might be need for that safe-conduct ere long. Well, they must manage things as best they could; he wouldn't.
'Oh! I do hope there'll be a wow, a weal wow!' came Jerry's prayerful voice.
CHAPTER V
SHARK LANE
There was no quainter spot in all Nushapore than Shark Lane (as the road near the public offices where the lawyers congregated was generally called), though at first sight it seemed to differ little from its neighbours. Broad, white, its tree-set margins were studded with the usual inconsequent-looking stucco gate-posts of an Indian station, which, guiltless of any fence, serve to mark the short carriage-drives leading back to the houses.
And these again--colour-washed pink, yellow, or blue--were even as other houses of the second-class. Yet it did not need the placards on those same gate-posts, announcing that 'Mr. Lala Râm Nâth' or 'Mr. Syyed Abdul Rahmân,' 'barristers-at-law,' lived within, to tell the passer-by that the inhabitants were not European.
To begin with, somewhere or another, there was almost sure to be a grass hurdle visible--the grass hurdle which in India does the duty of a hoarding and ensures privacy. Indeed, a knowledgable eye could infer the exact degree to which the social life within was at variance with the Western architecture in which it dwelt by the number and position of such hurdles. Two or three, merely blocking in an arch of verandah, being indicative of a lingering dislike to publicity in some 'new woman'; a dozen or more, screening in a patch of garden ground, showing the rigorous seclusion of the old.
True, in not a few cases, this sign was absent, but then a nameless air of utter desolation, a blank stare out on the world, told its tale of a keener quarrel still--of family ties, family life, lost absolutely in the chase after Western ways, Western ideas. In such houses the only sign of life from dawn to dusk, barring a furtive wielder of a grass broom raising clouds of dust at stated intervals, would be the rickety hired carriage, like a green box on wheels, which, every morning and every evening, would turn out and in between those inconsequent gate-posts, conveying a solitary young man and a pile of law-books to and from the courts.
Such a very solitary-looking young man, that the question sprang inevitably to the spectator's lips, 'Is the game worth the candle?'
There were others, besides spectators,
