Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  Diana found them, and he put them in his pocket. Then he mounted his horse and set out to find the ekka and its driver — nearly lost both, for the dun believed Diana was a wolf and the driver agreed with her. They went a mile before he overhauled them.

  “Back with you!” he ordered. “Drive on till you come to a gate in a wall!”

  The driver obeyed, but he was wild-eyed. Once he made a jump for freedom, but Diana caught him, and Ommony threw him back into the ekka by the loincloth. After that he began to proclaim virtue, denouncing all wicked men and calling no less than Ganesha to witness that he never in his life harmed anyone.

  Why was the sahib taking him, and where? He had done no wrong. For a very low price he had driven Jannath the priest — That was all Ommony needed to know. He knew the priest’s name. Lock and key for him!

  They came to the ancient gate, and over the old man’s protests hauled the ekka up the brick steps and under the arch. Then Ommony brought his own horse in.

  “But this is unheard of!” the old man objected. “Never were wheels or a horse in this place! Never in her day — never since then! It was her wish, and the diwan sahib—”

  “Gave me full permission,” Ommony assured him.

  “It is sacrilege!”

  “Leave the ekka here under the rock. Stable the horses somewhere. Have you any grain?”

  Grain was produced. There were sacks full kept for wild birds beloved of the diwan’s wife. Room was discovered for the horses in a shed beside the granary, and the driver of the ekka was shut in there along with them. Then Ommony returned to Jannath, having begged first from the old gatekeeper aromatic oil, which is never far out of reach in India.

  “He will refuse it. He will say his caste forbids,” the gateman grumbled, but Ommony was in no mind to be refused.

  He found Jannath glowering like Marius in a dungeon.

  “Now,” he began, “suppose I dress your wrist and we’ll be friendly.”

  Jannath cursed him, without emphasis, because no fraction of the curse was less emphatic than the rest — a venomous monotone. Ommony seized the injured wrist and washed it while the priest, not otherwise protesting, went on with the commination service. Ommony tore a long strip from the priest’s own clothing, soaked it thoroughly in aromatic oil and bound it on.

  “You will be a sow when the time comes!” Jannath assured him calmly.

  “Maybe. I’ll try to be a good sow and bring forth prodigies of young! Is the wrist comfortable?”

  Jannath refused to answer. It was enough that he had submitted to defilement by a foreigner. He was certainly not going to acknowledge obligation to the impudent beast from oversea, who had done no more than dress an injury committed by his own dog.

  “Listen to me!” said Ommony. “You came to find out where Memsahib Craig is.”

  The priest became suddenly alert.

  “Incidentally to kill me.”

  The shark eyes gleamed in the gloom of the cell, but there was no response.

  “What if I show Memsahib Craig to you alive and well? What then?”

  As well argue with a mummy about metaphysics! Jannath was intensely interested; that much was as obvious as the malicious leer and the hate in his motionless eyes.

  “Um-m-m! If I were to kick you,” said Ommony aloud to himself in English, “that might only awaken the lust for martyrdom that’s in the veins of all your kind.”

  Then to the priest in the other language:

  “You’re defiled already. You may as well wallow in defilement. Why not come to terms with me? You can wipe it all out together afterward in one course of holy disinfection in the temple!”

  No reply — but a change behind the trustless eyes. Unyielding, Jannath was alert for opportunity.

  “I’ll admit to you I’m in a mess,” said Ommony. “It never crossed my mind to use violence toward a sacred personage. How should I have known who you were? But here we are, and I’ve done it! What now? In one sense you’re at my mercy, but you know quite well I won’t kill you, so in another sense I’m at yours. We’ve got to get you out of this without involving me if possible. You understand?”

  He did, for that was something Jannath could appreciate. The law of action and reaction as applied to evil was his life-long study. As the tides flow and the moon wanes, there is always repercussion in affairs of men, victors in their turn becoming vanquished and all plans being riddled full of flaws because of human lack of foresight. He could now resume where he had left off. Were the gods not with him?

  “The Government is obliged to protect priests,” he said acidly.

  “Of course. That’s what Government’s for.”

  Jannath almost let a smile escape him. This was absolutely typical of an Englishman, making a bluff for days on end at being subtle and then becoming as transparent as a child!

  “I shall do nothing,” he announced with an air of finality.

  “Nothing tonight,” Ommony agreed sarcastically. “Tomorrow, though, unless I’ve come to terms with you, I’ll go to Parumpadpa and—”

  Jannath betrayed alarm. His eyes narrowed. He shrugged himself as if stung.

  “ — and I’ll tell Parumpadpa the whole story,” Ommony continued. “Parumpadpa might not excuse me — but at least he will make a laughing- stock and an example out of you! Think it over,” he added, and walked out, padlocking the door behind him.

  He chuckled as he found his way back to the gate and hardly grew serious until the old gatekeeper led him to within eyeshot of the Home of Peace where Elsa was installed. There another old man greeted him respectfully and led the way up the marble steps, on which the lightest footfall sounded like rank impropriety.

  Ommony became aware that he was walking like a cat and smiled at himself. No humility was likely to serve much in the next few minutes. Thorough! That would have to be the keynote of the next tune, and he hated it, but let his heels ring on the marble and went up thenceforth boldly.

  “Mr. Ommony?”

  Elsa in the clinging draperies of India stood before him in a doorway, looking like a goddess, feeling as if she were in night attire.

  “They said, ‘the sahib.’ I felt sure it was my husband. You mustn’t see me like this.”

  “I’ve seen you,” said Ommony.

  Her detestation of the man revived and flooded her thoughts. Too surely he had seen her, and seen through her! The basis of their enmity!

  “What do you want?” she demanded.

  “Your help.”

  “At this hour? Where’s my husband?”

  “He’s all right. He slept last night in the guest-house with me.”

  “Does he know where I am?”

  “No. He’s badly worried, but behaving like a man.”

  “Why don’t you tell him where I am?”

  Ommony’s reply was truthful literally, if evasive.

  “The dog traced you here. I came to find the dog. The man at the gate admitted me after some argument.”

  “The dog? Diana? She found me? Where is she? Bless her heart!”

  Ommony whistled, and Diana came out of the shadows, where she was studying history with her nose to earth. At sight of Elsa Craig she threw her head up and bayed, all golden in the moonlight.

  “She’s hungry,” Ommony said cunningly. “Have you anything she can eat?”

  He had divined the password!

  “Come!” she called to the dog, and Ommony went on up with Diana.

  When Elsa returned from a hinterland of old women and cooking-pots with a great bowl nearly full of cooked rice, Ommony was seated on an ebony chair in the marble hallway. Elsa draped herself in a cashmere shawl and stood in the doorway against the full moon, watching Diana eat.

  “May I smoke?” asked Ommony, craving something commonplace to bring them both down to earth.

  “What happens next?” she answered, not caring whether he smoked or not.

  She had small use for him, and showed it in her manner.

  “I
smoke,” he said genially, and pulled out a cigar.

  She watched him light it, he being at great pains to appear at ease.

  “Do you propose to spend the night here?”

  “Not for fifty rajahs’ ransoms! I propose to talk to you and ride a tired horse back.”

  “Have you eaten since morning?” she asked.

  “Why no. It was nice of you to think of that.”

  Having thought of it, she had to feed him. One of the old women was requested to put food before him in the dining-room. Elsa at last had recognized a quality she liked, and was quick enough to comment on it.

  “So you thought of the dog first?”

  “No, the horse. I’m next. The priest comes last.”

  “What priest?”

  “Jannath. He was outside, trying to get in. I let him in. He had a dagger. The priests have said you’re dead, and are trying to prove it. Here’s one of Jannath’s daggers.”

  He pulled the thing out of his pocket and showed it to her.

  “He’s in the toolshed now, considering new sins.”

  “Are you sure he’s in there?”

  “Perfectly. I have the key.”

  “But there are tools in there.”

  “No. I removed them.”

  “Heavens, Mr. Ommony! I wonder what all this means.”

  “So do I,” he answered. “It means one of two things — trees or treason. Either I grow trees — a million of them — or you commit treason to yourself, your sex, your race, your husband, and the world! We’ve got to understand each other.”

  “Then kindly don’t talk in riddles!”

  “I’m a plain man,” he answered. “You’re the riddle. Would you rather snub me because I don’t pretend to like your John Ishmittee — or help me defeat Parumpadpa?”

  “To what end?”

  “Trees!” he answered, knocking ash from his cigar. “You were at the bottom of this tree business,” he went on. “Do you care to see it through?”

  She leaned back against the doorpost, for she felt hot temper rising and herself not strong enough to battle with it. But she looked amazing with the moon’s rays silvering her outline and the edges of her hair.

  “See it through? And I’m at the bottom of it! Mr. Ommony, you thought you saw through me that first morning when you came to breakfast. You—”

  “I recognized your courage,” he interrupted. “I was sorry—”

  “What right had you to be sorry for me?” she burst in, grinding her heel on the marble threshold.

  “None. I was sorry to see courage wasted.”

  “Wasted? Our mission—”

  “Wasted in a losing struggle with the Hindu priests. But, you know, you can’t help people who defy you from the word Go. Now I need your help badly,” he added, judging he had stood on the defensive long enough.

  And Elsa did not answer, but stood wondering with her face toward the moonlight, until the old woman came and said food was ready.

  CHAPTER 12. “How’s the situation?”— “Ticklish!”

  Elsa did not sit down facing Ommony across the buhlwork dining-table as he suggested; that would have looked too much like a signature of peace. There was none. Peace had vanished from the tranquil place.

  But her thoughts had undergone a great change in the night and a day she had spent there. She went to the seat in the great square window looking out on moonlight shimmering among the lotus-leaves and sat there rigid; but she was conscious of a weakness in her own attitude, and not so sure of the impudence in Ommony’s. After all, what had the man done to her? And was he not there offering protection and requesting her help?

  “What do you want me to do?” she asked presently.

  “Nothing you don’t care to,” said Ommony. “I can manage natives usually, but I wouldn’t interfere with your judgment.”

  “It wouldn’t pay you. What then?”

  He finished eating very deliberately, and turned his chair so as to face her.

  “My sympathy for your mission is about on a par with your sympathy for me. I don’t pretend to any. But I like Craig. He’s a man, and he’s entitled to his own opinions and their product. He believes in his mission, and I’ll help him as far as I can without surrendering my own judgment. My job is to provide trees for the generation that will follow us; and there we’re on common ground, for the priests are against your mission and against me.”

  “Prejudice and all that sort of thing aside, and conceding to the Hindu priests a right to their own viewpoint, we’ve got to defeat them before either your mission or my trees have a ghost of a chance.”

  “We can’t defeat them in the open, because they fight underground. Their weakness is in mutual mistrust. So is ours. Now what about it?”

  “What can I do?”

  “You can postpone your chastisement of me, for one thing, until we haven’t an enemy in common who needs our undivided attention.”

  She smiled in spite of herself, aware that she did not dislike him so much as she had thought.

  “Very well, we will postpone our enmity.”

  “That’s thoroughly agreeable to me. The other thing I’ll ask you to do is to let me play this hand, and to obey my orders implicitly. You’ll need courage—”

  “I think I don’t lack that.”

  He decided courage was a sympathetic chord and harped on it, reminding her at long length that the white man’s chance in India had always hung as much on woman’s bravery as on any other factor. He even mentioned Lucknow and the Mutiny, and talked of the wives who wilt beside their husbands in the fever districts.

  “Tell me your plan,” she demanded after a while, and he unfolded it while she thrilled and trembled alternately.

  “You understand,” he said finally, “there’s a chance you may not come alive through this. There’s an equally strong chance that I may be broke forever for it; and if they kill you, they’ll probably kill me and all the rest of us. We’ve got to win or take the consequences standing. Are you game?”

  She nodded.

  “But my husband? How much does he know?”

  “Nothing. He would never have agreed. He has acted splendidly. Left to follow his own course he has been a prodigious help, but he would go up in the air at once if be knew the part you are to play. When he learns the whole truth he will probably denounce me for a scoundrel. He would never let you do it if he—”

  “I will do it,” she interrupted, drumming with her fingers on the window- sill, and Ommony did not disguse his smile of triumph.

  “You’ll make a dangerous opponent when the time comes to resume your enmity with me,” he assured her.

  Thereafter he wasted no time, but got to horse, and with Diana cantering beside him splashed through the fords on the way back, hoping against hope to reach the quay before the Maharajah’s motor-boat could come with Molyneux.

  Hope was confirmed. He had to wait, with the horse dripping sweat and the hound asleep, until an hour before dawn, hearing the thug of the approaching motor miles away and observant that a dozen priests, who waited in a group near by, had no boat in which to put out and obtain first audience. The diwan’s representative, who came at the last minute, saluted cordially, but it was even his place to wait until Ommony, as acting substitute for the British Resident, should have tendered the first greetings.

  So, though the priests pressed close, it was Ommony who blocked the gangway, and he who stepped down into the launch, awakening Sir William Molyneux, who slept the sleep of all God-fearing, unimaginative men.

  “D’you mind backing out again, sir? We can talk unheard in mid-stream.”

  “Bet your last rupee! How’s poor old Gould? Spiffy boat this — Tottenham Court Road cushions — slept all the way down.”

  “Gould’s in the hands of the Maharajah’s court physician. The priests are waiting on the quay to get your private ear.”

  “Want to confess me, eh? Well, that’s premature. By gad, sir, I’m not nearly on my last legs. How’s
the situation?”

  “Ticklish!”

  “Found the missionary lady yet?”

  “I know where she is.”

  “Why not pounce on her and pull the plug?”

  “Didn’t care to act prematurely. Needed you to use your well-known discretion in such matters. The priests daren’t kill her—”

  “What? Those rascals have her, and you—”

  “Half a minute! Thought you might take better advantage of the situation. You’ll find she’s in Siva’s temple. Tomorrow — no by Jove, today; there’s the false dawn! — this evening there’s a temple ceremony — feast of the full moon.”

  “They’ll be at their wits’ end what to do with her. I have the information. They admit the crowd at sunset. Meanwhile you might commit the priests to a statement, preferably in writing, that they haven’t got Mrs. Craig. Then if you demand admission to the temple, say an hour before the crowd’s due, and find her in there—”

  “Yes,” said Molyneux, “that sounds like common sense. Are you sure she’s safe meanwhile?”

  “Reasonably sure. My informant had word with her during the night. She seems to be comfortable and not put to indignity.”

  “But she’s a lady! She must be suffering the tortures of the damned! These missionaries are a nervous lot, you know, Ommony. We ought to take that in consideration.”

  “Mrs. Craig is a plucky woman.”

  “Well, I’ll take your word for her. So you think I should be a bit stand- offish with these priests?”

  “I would gain time if I were you, sir.”

  The launch put back to the quay, and Sir William Molyneux stepped out to shake hands with the diwan’s representative. But almost before the usual courtesies were over that deferent individual was thrust aside by a dozen others in the white robes of their office, who pushed forward a little narrow-faced man as interpreter.

  “Sir William Molyneux—”

  “That is my name, sir.”

  “That man—”

  “Why don’t you name him? Which man?”

  “Mr. Ommony and the diwan have accused—”