by Talbot Mundy
Poonch-Terai promptly upheld Mrs. Beddington:
“Take my advice and clear out of here, Captain Bruce. Did you ever hear of black art? This is where they teach it. Haven’t you any brains? You know the monsoon isn’t due for four weeks, yet here’s a thunderstorm. Never mind the rain; my carriage is outside; help me get Mrs. Beddington out of here before—” “You shut up,” Hawkes advised him, “or I’ll knock your teeth out!”
Volleying thunder. Poonch-Terai backed out of range of Hawkes’ fist. Lightning showed far too much white in his eyes, and he was glaring at Ram-Chittra Gunga as if the Yogi had him by the throat. But the length of the room lay between them. The Yogi was calm. When the squall had spent its momentary fury Rita continued as if there had been no comments:
“Eternity is life. The substance of eternity is love, and love is affluent. I have no need to make demands on any one. And least of all will I bend the rays of circumstance to make misfortune for the one I love most. I have not made — I will not make one claim on Joe. I love him. He is more free than if I did not love him. Because love enlarges; it is not cruel; it is no python strangling what it seizes. Love sets free.”
She had to pause a moment to let another thundersquall explode its fury. Then she continued:
“Joe and I have loved each other long before we met in this life. But it will need a gentler curiosity than yours to unveil that secret, and a harder heart than mine to bring down ruin on him merely because I am young, and a woman, and yearn for him—” Thunder interrupted her. Then Joe’s voice:
“Rita—” But she gestured to him to be still; and because he loved her, and knew she was saying what was sacred, he obeyed.
“ — merely because,” she continued, “destiny delivered him at my door — wounded him at my feet — gave me charge of him to watch and wait on and to clutch back from the gates of death. My duty that I did confers on me no right to claim him into poverty and what you would consider disgrace.” She choked a little. “So I set Joe free from any claim that even he may think I have on him.”
Joe answered her. Thunder and rain and shrieking wind swallowed his words. He could not even hear his own voice. And strangely stronger though he felt, as if the Yogi were sending him rays of energy, he could not get up from the bed without assistance. He was wild to go and take her in his arms. He would have led her out into the storm to any destiny that might await them. He could have killed his mother when the squall lulled suddenly and her voice, tart and catty, interrupted:
“Did you hear that, all of you? She makes no claim on him. She can’t bring suit for breach of promise after that. You heard her, Joe? You needn’t be quixotic now. You can act sensibly and come away.”
“Speak about forgetting,” boomed the Yogi, “when her tale is finished. Then let him or her forget whose right that is. I challenge judgment.”
Poonch-Terai spoke hoarsely: “He is making magic. I tell you, this storm is his doing! He is a black magician! It is the wrong time of the year for storms—” Whatever else he said was drowned in thunder. There was no other sound than the storm, until the Yogi answered him:
“I wonder there is not an earthquake.”
“Did you hear him?” Poonch-Terai protested. But the Yogi’s calm commanding voice retorted:
“Hear her. I have challenged judgment.”
“There is not much that I need to tell,” said Rita. “I am accused of low birth and of looseness. The only parents I have known were Sri Ram-Chittra Gunga and Miss Annie Weems. My nurse was Amal. They three told me I was born in India. So Indian I am. And I am grateful to the tired and troubled land that gave me all I know of kindness and experience. If I am loose then I am false to all the teaching I have had. If I am loose — it must have been a dream I dreamed that Annie Weems has always known my inmost secrets, and has praised me, and that Sri Ram-Chittra Gunga has examined my inmost consciousness before he taught such secrets as are not told to the unregenerate. I must have dreamed that I was saving all I have to give for him whom I would infinitely rather die than offer less than my whole self. If I am Eurasian—” “She said it!” exclaimed Mrs. Beddington.
“ — then I am so in spirit. Spirit is universal. Spiritually I claim kinship with all life, everywhere. But as for this body—” “You needn’t insult our intelligence,” Mrs. Beddington interrupted. “Besides, you have admitted what you are.”
“ — there is not in me one drop of Indian blood.”
The thunder crashed as if in confirmation of her words, but Mrs. Beddington saw fit to retort:
“Mere assertions prove nothing. All I can say is—” “You have said too much,” Ram-Chittra Gunga interrupted. “Let her speak, on whom your malice is as wasted as the spit of fools who hear the name of wisdom.”
Suddenly he raised his right hand. As if even thunder-storms obeyed him a terrific flash of lightning split the darkness into fragments again and again. Wind shrieked and the rain seethed past the open doorway, almost parallel to earth. The whole earth seemed to tremble under blows of thunder. Mrs. Beddington screamed. But the squall over-spent its fury and paused as if panting for breath. In the ensuing sea of sound that felt like silence Poonch-Terai lifted his voice to a strained, excited challenge:
“Liar!” He used English, perhaps because he hoped that Bruce would sympathize. “You pretend to govern nature! You employ foul devils, do you? The truth is, that you are their servant! Yours is idiots’ magic! You’re ridiculous!”
“You hold your jaw unless you want it broke!” Hawkes interrupted angrily; but there was more than anger in his voice; the lightning showed fear on his face.
“Magic?” Mrs. Beddington’s was the insolence of fear that knows it is found out, and that has no weapon except ridicule. “Any charlatan with nerves could have known a thunder-storm was coming. Only children would believe you started it.”
“Children would know better,” the Yogi answered. “Does a rock raise winds that whip the sea against it?”
Through the rumble of new thunder Poonch-Terai laughed excitedly:
“Show us some more of your magic!”
Three terrific, shuddering stabs of lightning showed what Hawkes was doing and even the thunder did not drown out Bruce’s voice:
“Hawkes! Give that pistol to me!”
“Free love — blackmail — and now murder!” said Mrs. Beddington. “Is it the act of an innocent man to try to prove a case by shooting? Joe,—” But thunder silenced her.
Then Poonch-Terai resumed the offensive: “That is an old trick. Any wayside fakir can make a weak-willed drunkard commit murder. That old fool is using wayside magic, that’s all. He would have let them hang Hawkes because Hawkes knows too much.”
The Yogi was silent. Mrs. Beddington hurled her Parthian shot: “The madhouse would be much too merciful for—” Rita interrupted: “You?” Her voice changed; it had a note of authority now. It was masterful. “You dare to insult my teacher? You, who have allied yourself with all the evil elementals in the universe! You, who have used black arts to try to govern your own son! You, who have lent yourself to a conspiracy against him, and against me! You, who have become the tool of a devil! Do you dare to mock my teacher?”
Poonch-Terai laughed. “It is I who mock him! Bah! He has used all his magic against me — and he couldn’t even make that sergeant pull the trigger!”
“On your own head be your mockery,” said Rita, “you, who were too cowardly to come and seize me! You, who used bribery, threats and all the black art that you know! You, who have used lies and deceit and violence to get me in your clutches because you hoped to make me tell you secrets that you think I have learned at the feet of Sri Ram-Chittra Gunga! You, who sent your men from Poonch to bind and gag me! You, who plotted with Joe’s mother—” Mrs. Beddington jumped to her feet. “Do you dare—” But Bruce objected.
“Order, please. It was you who first accused her. Let her answer.”
Mrs. Beddington sat down. There was something about Bruce’s l
evel-voiced restraint that disarmed her. But Poonch-Terai was as excited as a tiger at bay.
“She is simply lying,” he objected. “She is making random accusations— “Thunder silenced him — thunder, wind, rain and lightning-flashes that revealed him looking like a swordsman at bay and alert but not too sure of his advantage. And then Rita’s voice, stronger than his:
“You, who challenge truth, are those two men from Poonch not your men? Order them to stand up and relate how they obeyed you and then disobeyed you! Let them tell their story.”
The two coachmen stood up because she pointed to them. But they hesitated. They were scared out of their wits. They stared at her, and then at Poonch-Terai. The Maharajah strode toward them. He said something to them in an undertone. Then he faced about and strode back to his place near Mrs. Beddington, murmuring something to her, too.
“Make them speak if you can!” he sneered at Rita. “You can lie about me and my men. But what proof have you?”
She turned toward the Yogi, saying nothing. But her gesture was suppliant, as if she asked a favor in extremity.
The Yogi’s answer boomed forth like an oracle from some Delphic underworld:
“Is memory imprisoned in the words that terror holds unspoken? And is speech the whole of wisdom? Is thought powerless, that it must limp with words, as lame men lean on crutches?”
He commanded with a gesture. Rita turned the lamp out. Then she closed the courtyard door and sat down near the Yogi’s feet. He, with his thumb and finger, extinguished the night-light. Stifling, pitch-black darkness filled the room as if there never had been light, and all was breathless silence, save for the thunder rumbling as if Dyan Chohans were re-massing their artillery on hurrying wheels.’
CHAPTER XXVI. “I have demanded judgment. If it fall on my head, let it.”
Then weird things happened. Faculties, which Joe did not know that he had, possessed him, as they do in dreams, where time and space imblend into a new dimension that unites them both and transcends both. Nevertheless, he knew he was not dreaming. He could smell, for instance, the sour smoke of the night-light wick that the Yogi had extinguished. He could feel the sharp pain below his shoulder-blade that always tortured him unless he leaned his weight to one side. He could hear Annie Weems nervously moving a foot inside her slipper, where she sat on the floor beside Amal’s body. He could taste the salt sweat on his own hand when he pressed his lips against it. He could count the buttons on his pajama jacket. But for a length of time that he guessed was sixty seconds he could not see.
Then, however, he saw Rita very clearly, although there was no light. She emerged out of the darkness like the image on a photographic plate, only in color, life-size and in relief, not flat. She was sitting near the Yogi’s feet, quite motionless except that he could see her breathing. Her outline, it appeared to Joe, was silver, but her head and body were of the color of fiery opal and the colors were not motionless, although it would be equally incorrect to say that they were moving. The strangest part of all was, that he could see her also in her natural color. There was a small red flame, brighter than blood, that seemed to leap from the crown of her head, and there was another one over her heart. He could see her white dress quite distinctly.
He realized that he had been looking at the Yogi, too, for several seconds before he became actually conscious of him. Then he saw him peacock-colored, only infinitely more bright and fiery than any peacock in the world. Him, too, he could see in his natural color, bearded and with hair down to his shoulders; but when he looked at him the other way he seemed to be a young man, clean-shaven, with a flame on the crown of his head that shone with every color in the prism. The Yogi sat quite still and did not seem to breathe, but the flames moved constantly, although their motion was indescribable.
Joe coughed. He was awake; he could hear himself cough. But when he did that he found he could see much less distinctly for several moments.
He wondered whether the others could see what he did and since thought, like emotion, obeys habit, he looked around him, not remembering how absolutely dark the room was, until he began to see the others one by one, in outline first, then more or less filled in with color, each one different. Annie Weems was mostly silver, blue and yellow — bright, but shot with sad-gray. Bruce was a golden walnut color, edged with bright green. Hawkes was crimson, although there were other colors lurking in him that seemed to change their hue at intervals. Then he looked for his mother.
He found her — sulky saffron, shot with dull blood-red; and around her, what might be an aura of the color of floating petroleum seen in slanting light; there was a sort of background, too, of gray-blue steel — a cruel color that made Joe shudder, and made him also feel ashamed of himself because of his reaction to her cruelty. His predominant sensation was one of shame. It seemed to him that, with the exception of the men from Poonch, who were khaki-tinted and almost invisible, he was the only person in the room not burning like an incandescent flame with zeal of one kind or another. He could not see himself. He could not even see his own hands.
The silence was broken awesomely by Poonch-Terai. In a strange, excited, hoarse half-whisper he sneered at the Yogi — in English, again, no doubt, for Bruce’s benefit:
“You don’t dare! If you do, you take the consequences!”
Suddenly Joe saw him. He was jet-black. It was a mystery how jet-black could be visible in that intense darkness. Even after several seconds, when burnt-orange and vermilion appeared around the region of his eyes, he still seemed jet-black and distinctly outlined. But the outline grew, perhaps in Joe’s imagination. Things like spider’s legs were added to him — or they might be the arms of an octopus. They were the sort of horrors that a man in delirium tremens sees. Joe glanced at Rita, wondering whether she, too, saw what he did. But he could not guess. She sat stock-still. And it appeared to Joe as if the Yogi’s aura, or whatever it was, had extended until it included Rita within its incandescent rays. At the same time he felt, although he could not have described the feeling, a compelling inhibition against speech — against sound of any sort, or even movement. He hardly breathed.
Then light, that somehow was not light, stole slowly on the senses and the room was not there. It was like a dream in which forces seemed at war with one another. There was chaos. Poonch-Terai appeared on horseback, but a dark cloud swallowed him almost instantly. He appeared again; and again the dark cloud. Then Mrs. Beddington emerged in mid-room out of nothing. Suddenly she screamed, so that Joe knew she had seen herself. Her scream took effect. The vision vanished. The room was again in pitch-darkness — nothing visible, not even the Yogi’s aura.
Poonch-Terai spoke hoarsely: “You — Bruce — you’re the only other sane man in the room.” It sounded strained; he was either in deadly fear or else so angry that he could hardly control himself. “Bruce, I warn you. This is dangerous. You’ve probably heard how men go mad when they get a glimpse of things they shouldn’t see. I vote we stop this — you and I. Let’s light that lamp. Have you a match? He can only do his tricks in darkness.”
“Why, yes,” said Bruce. “I’ve matches. How do other people feel about it?”
“Feel afraid?” Joe asked him.
“Scared, yes. But I don’t feel called upon to interfere.”
“Hawkes has matches!” said Mrs. Beddington sharply; her voice was like a cracker going off.
“What’s mine is mine,” Hawkes answered. “Try to get ’em!”
“Light that lamp or I’ll make trouble!” she retorted. She was on the edge of hysteria. Joe heard her tugging at something. “I’ve a pistol. I warn you all. I’ll use it unless there’s light before I count ten!”
Bruce struck one match — Hawkes another. Bruce crossed over to her. “Give that pistol to me,” he commanded. He took it from her, turned his back and returned to his seat. “Now — are there any other firearms?” he demanded. He struck another match; its flare showed Poonch-Terai in mid-room making swiftly toward the courtyard do
or. “Sit down, Hawkes!” He struck a third match. Poonch-Terai drew the bolt and threw the door wide open. The match blew out instantly. Poonch-Terai suddenly screamed and bit the scream off as if strangled. Wind slammed the door shut and again there was utter darkness. Some one slid the bolt, and Poonch-Terai swore in his own tongue, using gutturals that sounded like boiling volcanic mud. Then, in English:
“Damn — I might have foreseen that!”
Bruce crushed an empty match-box in his fist. “Where are yours, Hawkes? Hand them over.”
Hawkes struck one and Bruce took the box from him. “Quick now — take the chimney off that lamp while I light it.”
But Poonch-Terai interrupted: “No, no. Give him darkness. Let him work his magic. I will give him twenty minutes. After that—” “If you don’t light that lamp, I will!” said Mrs. Beddington.
“You sit still!” Poonch-Terai retorted; and he seemed to say it through his set teeth. “Go mad — go to the devil — only sit still! Bruce—” “Yes?”
“If you light that lamp, I’ll smash it. Sit down. You have twenty minutes. I will sit here.”
“What’s the matter with you?” Bruce asked.
“Nothing. Not a dam’ thing.”
“Then why did you scream?”
“I didn’t.”
“Who did?”
“Oh, well, if I did, do you have to keep on reminding me? Nerves — that’s all. Caught my finger when the door slammed. Didn’t hurt much. I was frightened. There — are you satisfied?”
Joe, for one, doubted him. He had a feeling that Bruce and Hawkes did, too, but no one spoke. However, he distinctly heard Bruce cock two automatics. The feeling of tension was terrific. Mrs. Beddington gulped as she started to scream and checked herself:
“Joe!” she blurted, “this is nothing but a plot to hocus-pocus me! I’ll not forgive it — do you hear me?”
Before Joe could answer her, the Yogi’s voice boomed through the dark:
“There is a time for all things. Speak about forgiveness when the tale is finished. You, who judged another — be judged in the Black Light.”
