‘I am getting well rapidly in my body,’ replied Hussein, ‘but in a little while I may be poisoned, and even if I am not, it seems to me that before I can walk again I shall be driven out of my mind.’
‘But how is this?’
‘Well, there is a certain woman in this house who talks to me without cease about love.’
‘But is that so deadly?’
‘Without doubt: it is of my love for her that she talks so endlessly. I may have passed some few light words with her, or even more; do not take me for a lecher, but what is a man to do in a dismal place like this? If it were an ordinary affair all would be easy enough, but with me it is different …’ Hussein unfolded his whole tale concerning Sashiya, and concerning Yussuf and their blood-brotherhood. It was an unusual thing for a man of his race and type to speak thus to another about these matters, and Hussein would never have done it but for the fact that he was somewhat feverish and overwrought; moreover, there was something about Ram Narain that made him think that his confidence might be fruitful. He wound up by saying: ‘… she is extremely passionate, and I feel sure that she might be very dangerous.’
‘It was she who served our meat?’
‘The same.’
‘You are right; she would be a bad enemy. I have had to do with those Bikaneeri women before. However, it all sprang up very quickly, and perhaps it may be induced to perish in the same way. I will do my best.’
Hussein began to thank him most profusely, but Ram Narain cut him short. ‘You would be of very little use to us', he said, ‘with your belly full of various poisons.’
Ram Narain started his campaign that very night, and Hussein heard him softly strumming a zitar outside the verandah at about midnight, and singing a song that the love-sick youths of the Bikaneer sing.
His efforts were remarkably successful; within three days Fatima had become distinctly more cool towards Hussein, and as he, being led thereto by Ram Narain, became for a while more ardent towards her, the affair died naturally, and she bore him no grudge, for she judged that he should be almost heartbroken.
Time passed, and Hussein became well enough to return to his own place. One evening the chief of the Rajah’s mahouts came to him, and said that one Ibrahim Khan had told him that Hussein was a mahout of great note, and as the mahout who sometimes rode Jehangir had disappeared, he thought that Hussein might do for the post. The man did not seem at all overbearing, and he did not even hint at a commission, so Hussein put two and two together, and decided that Ram Narain was behind the whole thing, and accepted the post. He wondered what had happened to the mahout who had disappeared, and he spent rather an uneasy night pondering on the great mortality of Ram Narain’s acquaintances.
The next day he sought out Ram Narain, and thanked him, but Ram Narain replied, ‘You will probably be more useful in this way: do not forget that we must be strangers here.’ Then he suddenly hit Hussein, and let flow a scream of the vilest abuse. Hussein saw, out of the corner of his eye, a number of men approaching, so he plucked at Ram Narain’s beard, shouting and gesticulating in a magnificent rage.
After they had been separated by the alarmed men, who came running from all parts, they treated one another coldly and with contempt in public. Fatima heard of this: she was delighted, for she thought that they fought over her.
It was very fine to be with Jehangir again, and in the company of mahouts.
If he had had Sashiya with him, Hussein would have been in Paradise, as he told her when he sent her the Rajah’s ring, by way of Abd’Arahman. He had consulted with Ram Narain as to the advisability of writing to Haiderabad, and he had said that it would be quite safe, as it would be addressed to the old letter-writer.
It was a long while before Ram Narain asked Hussein to do anything for him, and Hussein had almost forgotten that he was there for some unknown purpose.
Seventeen
There was to be a tiger shoot, and Ram Narain had arranged that the Rajah’s howdah should be on Jehangir. Hussein knew of this for several days before the hunt, but it was not until the evening before it that Ram Narain came tapping softly at his window.
‘To-morrow is the day,’ he said, when Hussein had let him in, ‘for which we have been waiting.’ He paused, listening intently for a moment, and then he went on, rather more loudly, ‘… to-morrow Hussein will be away with the elephants, Ramendranath, and we shall have the whole day to search this place — we have no time to-night; he is coming back earlier than I had thought. I know he is only a tool, and he does not know what he is doing, but there might be something in what you say.’
As he spoke Ram Narain knocked a small table over, and, in picking it up, he pushed Hussein away from the door into the shadow. Hussein had his wits about him, and he stayed in the shadow; Ram Narain went on, ‘But he may be back any minute now. We will meet to-morrow at noon. It would be wiser for us to go now, I think.’ He went towards the door; Hussein, straining his ears, caught a little creaking sound outside the door. On the threshold Ram Narain paused, and pointed to the window; Hussein understood, and he nodded.
Ram Narain smiled, and the next moment he was gone, walking on his toes, and whispering as if he were with someone.
Hussein put out the lamp and slipped silently out of the window. Then he went round to his own door. As he passed the door next to his — there were several rooms in a row on top of the stables — he saw that it was ajar; the beam of light that came from it narrowed as he passed by into his own room.
The next day Ram Narain was gone, and there was a rumour in the palace that one of the Rajah’s bodyguard had been killed, while another had been half-strangled in the night.
Hussein was keyed up inside to an extraordinary degree: he took a little opium to keep himself steady, and to the outside world he presented a perfectly normal appearance.
He was wondering what Ram Narain had meant by saying that ‘to-morrow is the day for which we have been waiting'. He also wondered what had happened to him; he had grown to like Ram Narain very much in the last few weeks, and he felt certain, in his own mind, that he was working for the Sirkar. Hussein was no fool, and he had gathered quite a lot from Ram Narain’s conversation, guarded though it always was.
He felt fairly sure that what he had been meant to do was connected with his driving the Rajah during the hunt, but he could not reconcile a plot for kidnapping or doing away with the prince with what he felt sure was Ram Narain’s aim. He felt a certain amount of loyalty to the Sirkar; he had been in Government service, and those sahibs whom he had encountered had been fine men, and he had more respect for them, as rulers, than he had for the men of any other race. He knew that there was izzat to be gained serving them, for they had roughly the same ideas of honour as the men of the Faithful, as well as material recompense, so he entered more whole-heartedly into Ram Narain’s schemes, although he had little more than a vague idea of those against whom they were directed.
He was turning all these things over in his mind as he slowly scrubbed Jehangir’s feet early in the morning. As he scrubbed, a shadow fell between him and his pot of water; he looked up, and saw a man whom he did not know. The man bent down and whispered, ‘Ibrahim Khan says “Kill to-day”: you understand?’
Hussein started to his feet and overturned his pot of water: he thought very rapidly; a doubt flashed through his mind. The man had called Ram Narain ‘Ibrahim Khan’. With hardly a pause he answered, ‘That soor,’ and spat; ‘I am a match for him any day, if that is what he means.’
The man looked at him piercingly for a moment, but Hussein bore the scrutiny without flinching, and the man said, with the lie plain in his voice, ‘But you are Wali Dad, are you not?’
‘Bismillah, no. I am of the true faith, unlike that pig-eating Ibrahim Khan, the Sunni,’ and Hussein scrubbed Jehangir vehemently, muttering the while.
It was really convincing, and the man left him without more words.
An hour later three elephants with howdahs left the summer pa
lace. In the foremost was the Rajah; his treasurer and one or two other officials were in the other two.
The hunt itself was fairly good; a place was known where a pair of very fine tigers lay up during the day. The Rajah’s head shikari made sure that they were in one particular patch of elephant grass, and then Hussein rode Jehangir in until they came upon them. One sprang straight at the elephant’s shoulder, but the Rajah, who was a very fine shot, put a bullet through its head as it leapt: the second turned tail, and the Rajah was only able to wound it in the hindquarters as it ran. They followed it up for some time, until it turned upon them in a deep nullah.
The behaviour of the treasurer on this occasion was a little odd: the Rajah had insisted upon his coming, and when the second tiger turned at bay, the unhappy Bengali was on an elephant only a few feet from Jehangir: the tiger, looking extraordinarily large and savage, suddenly burst from the dense undergrowth, giving vent to a nerve-shattering roar as it did so. In two bounds the great striped beast was clawing its way up on to the neck of the treasurer’s elephant. The mahout slipped off as the tiger came up, and the gun-bearer behind the howdah thrust a rifle into the Bengali’s hands, but the treasurer, who had turned a curious putty colour, dropped it, and gave a very high, shrill scream, almost a squeak.
Hussein had been manoeuvring Jehangir so that the Rajah could get a safe shot at the tiger, and just as it reached the edge of the howdah, the Rajah drilled it from ear to ear. It gave one convulsive spring, and knocked the treasurer out of the howdah, so that he fell to the ground with the dead tiger on top of him. Men came running, and they dragged the treasurer from beneath the tiger; he was unscathed, but it was nearly an hour before he came to himself, for he had really believed that he had been killed.
Then they went to a small hunting lodge, where the Rajah was going to spend the night; there were stables behind it, and the followers were to sleep there.
When Hussein had seen that Jehangir was comfortable, he wandered around and about, for he felt sure that Ram Narain, if he were alive, would be somewhere near by. But he heard nothing, and saw nobody, so he returned, feeling rather gloomy, to the place where they were preparing the evening meal. A little after nightfall half a dozen troopers of the Rajah’s bodyguard came, and demanded food. Then there arose a most bitter controversy, as there was not a great deal to eat, and the soldiers had brought nothing with them but empty bellies: the argument, however, was settled by one of the troopers skewering a large piece of meat on his sword, and asking the world at large whether any man wished to take it away from him. Nobody replied, and the soldiers ate their fill, but the mahouts and the beaters muttered continually, and a fight might easily have been started if their attention had not been diverted by the sudden appearance of a sadhu, who wandered into the circle of light, and squatted before the fire without a word. He was an oldish man, smooth-faced, and his eyes gleamed red with bhang beneath his scarlet caste-mark: his matted hair hung to his shoulders, and his body, naked but for a dhoti and a withered marigold wreath, was indescribably filthy. He leaned forward on the black-buck horns that he carried, and spat left and right. No one spoke a word, for he was evidently a very holy man. He pointed to some chupatties on a leaf, and someone brought them to him. When he had eaten, he snorted, and spat again; then he began a querulous complaint against the modern generation, comparing them most unfavourably with those who had lived in the time of his youth. He was particularly bitter about railways, which, he said, caused pestilences, and were offensive to the gods, being presumptuous. Then he meandered off on to another subject — the impiety of those of other beliefs. ‘… there was a man of Peshawar’, he said, ‘called Feroze Khan, a flesh-eating Mohammedan; he mocked me in the gate, and I cursed him — he was dead within the week, and a white cobra crept from his body …’
He went on to deliver a homily on the virtues of the free-handed and reverent, describing with a wealth of detail the ultimate fate of those who mocked at holy men.
Hussein’s heart had leapt to his throat when he heard the sadhu speak of Feroze Khan; he looked intently at the man for some time, but he could not recall ever having seen him. Then the leaping flames cast a shadow on the lower part of his face, and Hussein recognised Ram Narain. The loss of his beard, which had been a magnificent bushy one, had completely changed the balance of his face, and the rest of his disguise was as perfect as it could well be. Only the chance-thrown shadow, which for a moment had put darkness where the beard had been, made him at all recognisable, even to one who knew his face well. Even his voice was different — he had captured, even to a half-tone, that unpleasant, harsh whine that so many sadhus and sanyassis of the baser sort have.
As the sadhu rambled on, Hussein rose to his feet, snorted, and said, ‘Venomous old dodderer.’ He strolled away, and stood yawning at the edge of the circle of men. They looked at him fearfully, and some murmured angrily, for so ill-placed a remark might easily call down a curse upon all of them. Several spoke placatingly to the sadhu, who was champing his jaws menacingly, and glaring at Hussein. The holy man brushed them aside with a wave of his hand, and said, ‘For that you will be afflicted with a most grievous agony at midnight, and you shall not sleep for eight nights, but only walk to and fro desiring sleep. Were it not for the excellence of the chupatties that I have eaten here, I should have withered the flesh from your bones, but I am a forbearing man.’ He arose, bade good fortune attend the rest for eight days, and departed into the night, disregarding those who asked him to stay until the morning, and sleep comfortably.
Hussein laughed contemptuously, and stretched himself, but the men drew away from him, as from a leper, and regarded him from a little distance, with a boding watchfulness, as they made their beds in the straw.
Hussein lay awake hour after hour, until he judged that it was about midnight; then he began to moan, and the men awoke, saying one to another, ‘He is seized with the sadhu’s anguish.’
After he had moaned for a little while, he arose from his straw, and walked restlessly up and down; then he wandered away from where the men lay, and waited. He wandered about for some time before he met with Ram Narain, who was sitting in some bushes by a bundle, and eating cold boiled rice.
‘I thought you would come,’ said Ram Narain, handing him some of the rice, ‘but it is too early yet.’ They sat eating for some time, and then Hussein said, without any preamble, ‘Are you working for the Sirkar?’
Ram Narain did not answer for some time, then he said, ‘You remember what I told you before you came to Kappilavatthu?’
‘Yes.’
‘Nevertheless,’ said Ram Narain, musingly, half to himself, ‘things are different now. I need a man who will fight with me now, and Dost Mahommed has not come in time. I know you far better now, and I feel fairly certain that I can trust you, although that is a feeling by which one should rarely be guided until a man is well tried, particularly by money. However, I will tell you; we are employed by a Prince who is wholly for the Sirkar. With this you must be content.’
‘I am content.’
They sat in silence for a long while, each deep in his thoughts. They could see the lodge from where they were, and they watched the lights go out and the fires die down. Three men of the Rajah’s bodyguard squatted before the lodge, and one marched up and down.
Suddenly the three soldiers jumped to their feet as a man came out of the lodge; he was followed by two others, one of whom carried a lantern.
They went out along a little path into the jungle. Ram Narain touched Hussein’s elbow, and they followed the three men. Hussein was surprised at Ram Narain’s exceeding skill in moving silently; he slipped along like a shadow, picking his way cunningly between the trees, and avoiding the thick undergrowth. He went after the men at their own speed, keeping always away from them. Hussein had his work cut out to follow; once he stumbled, making a slight noise, and Ram Narain shot a furious glance back at him. Often the three men were lost from sight, but they could be heard in the si
lence of the night, and always Ram Narain kept closely to them.
For half an hour they travelled, or perhaps more; it seemed like an eternity to Hussein, who, towards the end, became increasingly aware of the strain of following so silently. At length the three men came to an old temple half overrun by the jungle. There was a light in it, and Hussein heard the sound of voices. The lantern made its way towards the temple, and disappeared inside it. Ram Narain went on with more caution than before, creeping like a wraith towards the bamboo brake that had grown over the fallen wall of the temple courtyard. In the courtyard itself was a tree whose roots had upturned the green paving stones; they crawled towards it. Across the courtyard the light came out of a small room in the temple; they could not see into it, and they could not distinguish the words of the talk that murmured inside.
Ram Narain took off his loin cloth; Hussein stripped also. Together they crawled again until they came to the window of the room. By very slow degrees Ram Narain got up; Hussein imitated him. They peered in. There were seven men in the room. Hussein recognised the Rajah and the treasurer; the other men he did not know, but it seemed that Ram Narain did, for he caught his breath as he looked into the far corner of the room, where there was an old man who sat apart from the rest.
Hussein’s attention was riveted to the middle of the floor, for there was a great sack of the kind that is laid across the back of an elephant lying open there, and it had so great a store of gold coins showing in its mouth that a fierce emotion seized him by the throat as he looked on them, and he was hardly able to contain himself. The Rajah and the treasurer were arguing about some matter with four of the other men; the old man sat remote. There was a paper on the floor between them, and the treasurer kept tapping it with a pen, saying, ‘… but the expense is too great … too great … even with such a consideration …’
Hussein could not pick up the whole thread of their discourse at first, and just when he was grasping it, the old man came over from the corner, and standing before the Rajah, spoke to him in a tongue that Hussein had never heard. The Rajah nodded again and again; the treasurer shook his head and spread his palms.