Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (50 page)

A priest, sprung from an unguessable retreat, came out of the temple immediately afterward, and smiled upon him.

Tarvin, willing to renew his hold on the wholesome world in which there were homes and women, betook himself to the missionary’s cottage, where he invited himself to breakfast. Mr. and Mrs. Estes had kept themselves strictly aloof from the marriage ceremony, but they could enjoy Tarvin’s account of it, delivered from the Topaz point of view. Kate was unfeignedly glad to see him. She was full of the discreditable desertion of Dhunpat Rai and the hospital staff from their posts. They had all gone to watch the wedding festivities, and for three days had not appeared at the hospital. The entire work of the place had devolved on herself and the wild woman of the desert who was watching her husband’s cure. Kate was very tired, and her heart was troubled with misgivings for the welfare of the little Prince, which she communicated to Tarvin when he drew her out upon the verandah after breakfast.

‘I’m sure he wants absolute rest now,’ she said, almost tearfully. ‘He came to me at the end of the dinner last night — I was in the women’s wing of the palace — and cried for half an hour. Poor little baby! It’s cruel.’

‘Oh, well, he’ll be resting today. Don’t worry.’

‘No; today they take his bride back to her own people again, and he has to drive out with the procession or something — in this sun, too. It’s very wicked. Doesn’t it ever make your head ache, Nick? I sometimes think of you sitting out on that dam of yours, and wonder how you can bear it.’

‘I can bear a good deal for you, little girl,’ returned Tarvin, looking down into her eyes.

‘Why, how is that for me, Nick?’

‘You’ll see if you live long enough,’ he assured her; but he was not anxious to discuss his dam, and returned to the safer subject of the Maharaj Kunwar.

Next day and the day after he rode aimlessly about in the neighbourhood of the temple, not caring to trust himself within its walls again, but determined to keep his eye upon the first and last spot where he had seen the Naulahka. There was no chance at present of getting speech with the only living person, save the King, whom he definitely knew to have touched the treasure. It was maddening to await the reappearance of the Maharaj Kunwar in his barouche, but he summoned what patience he could. He hoped much from him; but meanwhile he often looked in at the hospital to see how Kate fared. The traitor Dhunpat Rai and his helpers had returned; but the hospital was crowded with cases from the furthest portions of the State — fractures caused by the King’s reckless barouches, and one or two cases, new in Kate’s experience, of men drugged, under the guise of friendship, for the sake of the money they carried with them, and left helpless in the public ways.

Tarvin, as he cast his shrewd eye about the perfectly kept men’s ward, humbly owned to himself that, after all, she was doing better work in Rhatore than he. She at least did not run a hospital to cover up deeper and darker designs, and she had the inestimable advantage over him of having her goal in sight. It was not snatched from her after one maddening glimpse; it was not the charge of a mysterious priesthood, or of an impalpable State; it was not hidden in treacherous temples, nor hung round the necks of vanishing infants.

One morning, before the hour at which he usually set out for the dam, Kate sent a note over to him at the rest-house asking him to call at the hospital as soon as possible. For one rapturous moment he dreamed of impossible things. But smiling bitterly at his readiness to hope, he lighted a cigar, and obeyed the order.

Kate met him on the steps, and led him into the dispensary.

She laid an eager hand on his arm. ‘Do you know anything about the symptoms of hemp-poisoning?’ she asked him.

He caught her by both hands quickly, and stared wildly into her face. ‘Why? Why? Has any one been daring —  — ?’

She laughed nervously. ‘No, no. It isn’t me. It’s him.’

‘Who?’

The Maharaj — the child. I’m certain of it now.’ She went on to tell him how, that morning, the barouche, the escort, and a pompous native had hurried up to the missionary’s door bearing the almost lifeless form of the Maharaj Kunwar; how she had at first attributed the attack, whatever it might be, to exhaustion consequent upon the wedding festivities; how the little one had roused from his stupor, blue-lipped and hollow-eyed, and had fallen from one convulsion into another, until she had begun to despair and how, at the last, he had dropped into a deep sleep of exhaustion, when she had left him in the care of Mrs. Estes. She added that Mrs. Estes had believed that the young prince was suffering from a return of his usual malady; she had seen him in paroxysms of this kind twice before Kate came.

‘Now look at this,’ said Kate, taking down the chart of her hospital cases, on which were recorded the symptoms and progress of two cases of hemp-poisoning that had come to her within the past week.

‘These men,’ she said, ‘had been given sweetmeats by a gang of travelling gipsies, and all their money was taken from them before they woke up. Read for yourself.’

Tarvin read, biting his lips. At the end he looked up at her sharply.

‘Yes,’ he said, with an emphatic nod of his head — ’ yes. Sitabhai?’

‘Who else would dare?’ answered Kate passionately.

‘I know. I know. But how to stop her going on! how to bring it home to her!’

‘Tell the Maharajah,’ responded Kate decidedly.

Tarvin took her hand. ‘Good! I’ll try it. But there’s no shadow of proof, you know.’

‘No matter. Remember the boy. Try. I must go back to him now.’

The two returned to the house of the missionary together, saying very little on the way. Tarvin’s indignation that Kate should be mixed up in this miserable business almost turned to anger at Kate herself, as he rode beside her but his wrath was extinguished at sight of the Maharaj Kunwar. The child lay on a bed in an inner room at the missionary’s, almost too weak to turn his head. As Kate and Tarvin entered, Mrs. Estes rose from giving him his medicine, said a word to Kate by way of report, and returned to her own work. The child was clothed only in a soft muslin coat; but his sword and jewelled belt lay across his feet.

‘Salaam, Tarvin Sahib,’ he murmured. ‘I am very sorry that I was ill.’

Tarvin bent over him tenderly. ‘Don’t try to talk, little one.’

‘Nay; I am well now,’ was the answer. ‘Soon we will go riding together.’

‘Were you very sick, little man?’

‘I cannot tell. It is all dark to me. I was in the palace laughing with some of the dance-girls. Then I fell. And after that I remember no more till I came here.’

He gulped down the cooling draught that Kate gave him, and resettled himself on the pillows, while one wax-yellow hand played with the hilt of his sword. Kate was kneeling by his side, one arm under the pillow supporting his head; and it seemed to Tarvin that he had never before done justice to the beauty latent in her good, plain, strong features. The trim little figure took softer outlines, the firm mouth quivered, the eyes were filled with a light that Tarvin had never seen before.

‘Come to the other side — so,’ said the child, beckoning Tarvin in the native fashion, by folding all his tiny fingers into his palms rapidly and repeatedly. Tarvin knelt obediently on the other side of the couch. ‘Now I am a king, and this is my court.’

Kate laughed musically in her delight at seeing the boy recovering strength. Tarvin slid his arm under the pillow, found Kate’s hand there, and held it.

The portière at, the door of the room dropped softly. Mrs. Estes had stolen in for a moment, and imagined that she saw enough to cause her to steal out again. She had been thinking a great deal since the days when Tarvin first introduced himself.

The child’s eyes began to grow dull and heavy, and Kate would have withdrawn her arm to give him another draught.

‘Nay; stay so,’ he said imperiously; and relapsing into the vernacular, muttered thickly — ’Those who serve the King shall not lack their reward. They shall have villages free of tax — three, five villages; Sujjain, Amet, and Gungra. Let it be entered as a free gift when they marry. They shall marry, and be about me always — Miss Kate and Tarvin Sahib.’

Tarvin did not understand why Kate’s hand was withdrawn swiftly. He did not know the vernacular as she did.

‘He is getting delirious again,’ said Kate, under her breath. ‘Poor, poor little one!’

Tarvin ground his teeth, and cursed Sitabhai between them. Kate was wiping the damp forehead, and trying to still the head as it was thrown restlessly from side to side. Tarvin held the child’s hands, which closed fiercely on his own, as the boy was racked and convulsed by the last effects of the hemp.

For some minutes he fought and writhed, calling upon the names of many gods, striving to reach his sword, and ordering imaginary regiments to hang those white dogs to the beams of the palace gate, and to smoke them to death.

Then the crisis passed, and he began to talk to himself and to call for his mother.

The vision of a little grave dug in the open plain sloping to the river, where they had laid out the Topaz cemetery, rose before Tarvin’s memory. They were lowering Heckler’s first baby into it, in its pine coffin; and Kate, standing by the graveside, was writing the child’s name on the finger’s length of smoothed pine which was to be its only headstone.

‘Nay, nay, nay!’ wailed the Maharaj Kunwar. ‘I am speaking the truth; and oh, I was so tired at that pagal dance in the temple, and I only crossed the courtyard. . . . It was a new girl from Lucknow; she sang the song of “The Green Pulse of Mundore.” . . . Yes; but only some almond curd. I was hungry, too. A little white almond curd, mother. Why should I not eat when I feel inclined? Am I a sweeper’s son, or a prince? Pick me up! pick me up! It is very hot inside my head. . . . Louder. I do not understand. Will they take me over to Kate? She will make all well. What was the message?’ The child began to wring his hands despairingly. ‘The message! The message! I have forgotten the message. No one in the State speaks English as I speak English. But I have forgotten the message.

‘Tiger, tiger, burning bright In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Framed thy fearful symmetry?

Yes, mother; till she cries. I am to say the whole of it till she cries. I will not forget. I did not forget the first message. By the great god Har! I have forgotten this message.’ And he began to cry.

Kate, who had watched so long by bedsides of pain, was calm and strong; she soothed the child, speaking to him in a low, quieting voice, administering a sedative draught, doing the right thing, as Tarvin saw, surely and steadily, undisturbed. It was he who was shaken by the agony that he could not alleviate.

The Maharaj Kunwar drew a long, sobbing breath, and contracted his eyebrows.

‘Mahadeo ki jai!’ he shouted. ‘It has come back. A gipsy has done this. A gipsy has done this. And I was to say it until she cried.’

Kate half rose, with an awful look at Tarvin. He returned it, and, nodding, strode from the room, dashing the tears from his eyes.

XVI

Heart of my heart, is it meet or wise
To warn a King of his enemies?
We know what Heaven or Hell may bring,
But no man knoweth the mind of the King.

— The Ballad of the King’s Jest.

‘Want to see the Maharajah.’

‘He cannot be seen.’

‘I shall wait until he comes.’

‘He will not be seen all day.’

‘Then I shall wait all day.’

Tarvin settled himself comfortably in his saddle, and drew up in the centre of the courtyard, where he was wont to confer with the Maharajah.

The pigeons were asleep in the sunlight, and the little fountain was talking to itself, as a pigeon coos before settling to its nest. The white marble flagging glared like hot iron, and waves of heat flooded him from the green-shaded walls. The guardian of the gate tucked himself up in his sheet again and slept. And with him slept, as it seemed, the whole world in a welter of silence as intense as the heat. Tarvin’s horse champed his bit, and the echoes of the ringing iron tinkled from side to side of the courtyard. The man himself whipped a silk handkerchief round his neck as some slight protection against the peeling sunbeams, and, scorning the shade of the archway, waited in the open that the Maharajah might see there was an urgency in his visit.

In a few minutes there crept out of the stillness a sound like the far-off rustle of wind across a wheat-field on a still autumn day. It came from behind the green shutters, and with its coming Tarvin mechanically straightened himself in the saddle. It grew, died down again, and at last remained fixed in a continuous murmur, for which the ear strained uneasily — such a murmur as heralds the advance of a loud racing tide in a nightmare, when the dreamer cannot flee nor declare his terror in any voice but a whisper. After the rustle came the smell of jasmine and musk that Tarvin knew well.

The palace wing had wakened from its afternoon siesta, and was looking at him with a hundred eyes. He felt the glances that he could not see, and they filled him with wrath as he sat immovable, while the horse swished at the flies. Somebody behind the shutters yawned a polite little yawn. Tarvin chose to regard it as an insult, and resolved to stay where he was till he or the horse dropped. The shadow of the afternoon sun crept across the courtyard inch by inch, and wrapped him at last in stifling shade.

There was a muffled hum — quite distinct from the rustle — of voices within the palace. A little ivory inlaid door opened, and the Maharajah rolled into the courtyard. He was in the ugliest muslin undress, and his little saffron-coloured Rajput turban was set awry on his head, so that the emerald plume tilted drunkenly. His eyes were red with opium, and he walked as a bear walks when he is overtaken by the dawn in the poppyfield, where he has gorged his fill through the night watches.

Tarvin’s face darkened at the sight, and the Maharajah, catching the look, bade his attendants stand back out of earshot.