by Talbot Mundy
The Maharajah only pretended to eat. In theory, he had abandoned caste restrictions, but in practice, he lacked the Maharanee’s courage. He wilted under Aunty Harding’s barrage of remarks. Her vigor depressed him. Aunty had no patience with weaklings:
“You’re a hypochondriac,” she told him.
The Maharajah sighed. “I am a victim of public duty. Affairs of state impose a sedentary life that has ruined my health. But I have found that Rundhia’s physician understands my ailment.” The physician reappeared in the doorway, nervous, unself-assertive. He came behind Aunty’s chair and whispered to her. Norwood couldn’t hear what he said, but he saw him lay two pellets on a plate at Aunty’s right hand.
“Drugs! No thank you!”
“What are they?” asked the Maharajah. “Exactly the same that your Highness has been taking for your nerves,” said the physician.
“I have iron nerves,” said Aunty.
The physician smiled. He separated the two pellets with a fork and held the plate toward the Maharajah.
“Set her the example,” he suggested.
“My monotonous life consists of nothing else than setting good examples,” said the Maharajah. “If it won’t hurt me, it won’t hurt you.” He reached for a pellet.
Norwood noticed that the doctor moved the plate so that the Maharajah’s fingers closed on the one that had been nearer Aunty. If it was a trick it was smooth. Rundhia was paying rather witty attention to Lynn; he was making her laugh.
“As a compliment, but against my better judgment,” said Aunty. She swallowed the other pellet.
“Thank you,” said the Bengali. “Thank you, madam. That relieves my anxiety. You should not be here. You should be in bed. There is no knowing what people’s nerves may do to them when they have suffered a bodily shock such as you received this afternoon.”
He bowed himself out.
Norwood carried on a desultory conversation with the Maharanee. He liked her. Everybody always liked her. But he was watching Lynn and Rundhia, enjoying Lynn’s vivacity and not slow to perceive that she was flirting on purpose to annoy her aunt. He heard Rundhia say to Lynn: “I notice you’re wearing some of the Kadur jewels. They are the imperishable jackdaw savings of a long line of parasites, of whom I am the only sensible example. If I dared, I would steal them, sell them, and buy Europe’s love, which is for sale, I assure you. But there’s a funny law that makes these hoarded gems the property of our unborn descendants. I would hate to go to prison or be stabbed in the back, even for stealing from problematic grandchildren. How will you feel when they take them off you? They will, you know, tonight. When I wear them, they take them off me. They count them, too. They know my principles! When may I show you the treasures?”
“We leave tomorrow, if Aunty is well enough.” Lynn’s eyes met Norwood’s. She had intended he should hear that. The Maharanee protested: “Lynn, I shall be disconsolate.”
“Sorrow, loving company, will make me your companion in the arms of grief,” said Rundhia. He stared at Norwood.
“Looking for a fellow-mourner?” Norwood asked. “Or have I spilt soup on my shirt.”
“You are spotless,” said Rundhia. “Perfect. I was feeling jealous.”
“Hold it. Jealousy, you know, endureth all things.”
“Don’t be blasphemous,” said Aunty, looking suddenly faint. She recovered, pulled herself together. “It is time Lynn saw Europe.”
“Ah!” remarked Rundhia. “Lynn, how would you like me to show you Paris?”
“India would please me more,” Lynn answered.
Aunty used her napkin suddenly. She was either indisposed or else staggered by Rundhia’s use of Lynn’s first name. Perhaps both. Norwood thought so. He watched her. He was just in time to prevent her falling from the chair. Everyone, including the Maharajah, jumped up. Lynn ran to her. The servants formed a scrimmage around Lynn and Aunty. The Maharajah scolded the Maharanee sotto voce.
Rundhia sent a servant running for the doctor. The other servants picked up Aunty and carried her into the next room, where she groaned on a couch and nearly fainted from humiliation. Rundhia met the doctor at the door. Norwood, watching them, pretending not to, wasn’t certain whether they spoke. The doctor nodded, put on his most judicial professional air, felt Aunty’s pulse and shrugged his shoulders. He spoke to the Maharanee.
“Well, I warned her. At her age, a shock has consequences. She should have remained in bed and kept quiet. She should be put to bed now and I think a nurse should be in attendance.”
“Are you sure she isn’t seriously ill?” Lynn asked him.
“No, I am not. She has a temperature. It is impossible to say, but I think she is only suffering from nervous exhaustion and perhaps, too, from mental disturbance.” He turned again to the Maharanee: “I advise that Miss Lynn Harding should be moved into the palace, so that Mrs. Harding may be quiet.”
Lynn laughed: “That’s a testimonial for me! But thank you, I’ll take care of her.”
“No,” said the doctor. He caught Rundhia’s eye. Rundhia came to his rescue and made signals to the Maharanee, who wanted nothing better than to have Lynn under her own roof.
“Lynn, dear, please do as the doctor tells you. Please, please.”
Aunty groaned and protested that it was a shame to inflict Lynn on the Maharanee, but she was overruled. She was carried out on an improvised litter and rushed to the guesthouse, where Lynn’s belongings were collected by the servants and conveyed to the palace. The doctor whispered to Lynn:
“Miss Harding, I believe this is nothing serious. I overheard her quarrelling with you. She is of a choleric disposition. Swift recovery is not predictable for choleric persons, of great weight, in a hot climate, whose tempers are exasperated. Stay away from her and she will soon recover.”
The picnic, of course, was a total collapse. No one even thought of resuming it. Rundhia, watching Norwood, invited Lynn for a stroll in the moonlit garden. To Norwood’s horror, the Maharajah invited him into the study to discuss the Kadur River survey and the boundary dispute between himself and the priests:
“Just you and I together, Captain Norwood, quite informally, that we may understand each other when the official discussion begins.”
Norwood couldn’t refuse. With the thought at the back of his head that the innocent, beautiful Lynn was being led by Rundhia through moonlit arbors toward Rundhia alone knew what, he had to listen with assumed interest and courteous attention to the Maharajah’s droning homilies on law, tradition, history, and documentary evidence.
It was midnight before Norwood yawned himself out of the study and ordered his horse to be brought to the front door. Nothing that the Maharajah had told him was of the slightest genuine importance except the last remark of all, proffered with a self-conscious giggle as he held Norwood’s hand and bade him good night:
“Are you well protected? Should I lend you a bodyguard?”
“Thanks, it might look compromising.”
“But if the priests should guess that you intend to report in my favor, some of their adherents might kill you. Adherents are always more fanatical than those whose interests they seek to serve. The murder of a British officer, it is true — hee-hee — might lead to an investigation that would break the power of the priesthood. I, not they, would be the gainer in the end. But could you imagine my feelings! I would rather lose all the diamonds in Kadur than that you should meet with what might befall you if you are not discreet.”
“Your Highness may trust me to be careful and strictly neutral,” said Norwood.
Discreet, eh?
Norwood was thinking of Lynn.
Chapter Seven
RUNDHIA was puzzled and Lynn knew it. She enjoyed it. It was cool and beautiful beneath the moonlit trees in the garden. It was exciting to walk with the heir to an ancient throne, whose adoring but understanding aunt had warned her he was dangerous. Lynn knew, because the Maharanee had told her, even if she couldn’t have guessed it, that Rund
hia’s European educational career had been one long series of conquests of women. She wished Aunty could see her. She was just about fed up with Aunty Deborah Harding.
“You are the strangest mixture of intelligence and innocence that I have ever met,” said Rundhia. “You are in love with all this. You are thrilled by the exotic strangeness. But it’s all old stuff to me, remember. I’m a babe in the woods, too, in a certain sense. I’m as lost as you are. Things and places don’t make life worth living. It’s the people in the places, and the things they do together. If you loved me and I loved you—”
“But neither of us does,” Lynn interrupted. “We are East and West. Europe delights you because you can’t ever really understand it. And the East enraptures me for the same reason.”
“So we’ve that much in common,” said Rundhia. “Let me tell you something else we have in common. We like each other.”
“Do we?”
“Yes. One would have to be blind, deaf, demented, not to like you. What’s wrong with me?” Lynn’s defensive tactic was a thousand times more shrewd than Aunty would dream of giving her credit for:
“Well, for instance, why do you dislike Captain Norwood?”
“For the same reason that he doesn’t like me,” said Rundhia. “Cherchez la femme. Thank the father and mother who bred him, he’s only an Engineer. If he were Cavalry, I might feel jealous. Lynn, I love you.”
“How many women have you said that to?”
“Hundreds. But I lied to all the others.”
“I have sometimes had to lie to Aunty. But I’m not nearly as practised a liar as you must be. Let’s be truthful.”
“I am telling you the truth. I have always thought myself a cynic. I didn’t know I had a heart until I met you. I have found and lost it in the same moment. It is yours. What will you do with it?”
His arm crept around her. He hardly knew how she slipped away from him. She waltzed away. She ran along the path, her arms extended to embrace the moonlit luxury of hue and view and perfumed flowers. By the time he overtook her, her retort was ready:
“Tell me about the British Resident in Kadur.”
“He’s a political nuisance, a social bore and a self-conscious prig, about due for a pension.”
“I take it you’re his press agent. What does he look like?”
“Hasn’t he called on you?”
“I believe he did. I wasn’t in. I suspect Aunty was rather rude to him.”
Rundhia chuckled: “Well, he looks like what he is — suspicious, senile, stupid. If your aunt was rude to him, he won’t invite you to dinner at the Residency. You’re lucky. He’ll pretend to forget you. Let’s forget him.”
As if the Resident were a sort of traffic cop, the very thought of him seemed to have reduced Rundhia’s speed. But his right arm presently resumed its sensuous approach. Lynn returned to the subject of Norwood:
“Perhaps you don’t like men with red hair?”
“I am looking,” he answered, “at your hair. I want to bury my hands in it, bathe my face in it, breathe the—”
“Borax! I washed it and the water’s terrible!” She escaped him again. Her black pajamas vanished into shadow; she became a beautiful, disembodied head in a golden aureole that asked:
“Is Captain Norwood married? I didn’t ask him.”
“Well, why didn’t you ask him?”
“I didn’t care.”
“Good!” said Rundhia. “I’m going to make you care about something else. Come along. I’ll behave. Come this way.”
He led her up steps to the top of the ancient garden wall. Lynn almost shouted at the beauty, it was so midnight marvellous. A road ran beneath the wall. Beyond that, in the distance, was the ancient temple and the city, with the Kadur River like molten silver. On the far bank, the ghats where they burned the dead glowed crimson, spaced between shadowy shrines.
The garden wall was ten feet thick. There was a summerhouse on the wall, a sort of kiosk; it had been swept and provided with cushions by a servant who crouched in shadow. Rundhia ordered the servant away. He went and lurked at the foot of the steps, but Rundhia shouted at him and he fled. Rundhia led Lynn into the open-sided kiosk. “You have promised,” she said, “to behave.”
“Do you believe men’s promises when they’re in love? Are you as naive as that?”
“Yes. Don’t be silly. Let us look at the view.”
“Look at me.”
His eyes were hardly less fiery than the glowing end of his cigarette. They made Lynn’s flesh tingle. He threw away the cigarette.
“Lynn, you romantic girl, this scene enchants you because love has stolen on you unaware. Neither of us until now has ever known what love is.”
“Do you think you know now?” she retorted. “You know I know it. You are cruel.”
“You agree with Aunty Harding, do you? She insists I’m cruel.”
“Damn your Aunty Harding.”
“Yes, I hate her. I suppose I shouldn’t. I don’t feel one bit sorry for her. That isn’t right, is it?”
“Of course it’s right. Lynn, you don’t know what a glorious girl you are, nor what life is. You have let that old vixen of an aunt suppress and restrain you, while life beckons! Your aunt’s unkindness is passion deprived of its natural outlet. She’s a savage. She will freeze you, if you let her, and then rob you of your frozen youth! Haven’t you heard the call of life and felt its impulse? Love! Live! Let me teach you, you beautiful, exquisite—”
“I wish you’d sit farther away,” she interrupted. “Why don’t you make love to your own countrywomen?”
“There isn’t in all India such a lovely girl as you are.”
“How do you know? It’s true, isn’t it, that most of them are kept in seclusion and you’re not allowed to see them? Is that why you make love to me? Why not burgle a zenana?”
“Lynn,” he said, “I don’t make love. I am love. And you also. We are love itself, as a musician becomes music. Why waste the glorious hours?”
“What do you know about music?” she retorted. “Can you sing Indian songs?”
“Yes, love songs! I play the guitar.”
“You can? What fun! Why not get it? There couldn’t be a more perfect place for singing than this garden wall in moonlight.”
Rundhia sensed that he had cast his fly too boldly. She wasn’t hooked. She needed more subtle persuasion. He shouted to the servant to fetch the guitar. There was no answer; the servant had taken him too strictly at his word, he was out of earshot. Rundhia shouted again and again. He swore under his breath. Then he governed his anger and smiled at Lynn:
“Will you wait here if I go and get it?”
“Yes, but—”
“What?”
“You look murderous. Don’t whip the servant!” He went in search. He met the man a hundred yards away, waiting for him, making signals, breathless from running but afraid to disobey Rundhia’s order to stay out of sight. His signals could have only one meaning. Even in that mood Rundhia didn’t choose to ignore a summons from the man who did his undercover errands. So Rundhia hurried.
His undercover man was waiting for him in the usual place, by the gate in the wall that separated the Maharajah’s palace from Rundhia’s — an unimportant-looking but peculiarly unmeek Hindu, who spoke in a low voice without preliminary gestures of respect:
“The priests have learned of Captain Norwood’s arrival. They sent me to speak with his Eurasian spy, O’Leary, who is a reptile. O’Leary has already detected the opening of the mine.”
Rundhia thought swiftly, and spoke slowly: “Go and tell the priests that Captain Norwood is here to line his own pocket. Say he is in debt and seeks an opportunity to pay his debts. His secret report will be in favor of the highest bidder. But don’t say you heard it from me. Say O’Leary was drunk and you heard it from him. Make it perfectly clear to the priests that any other officer than Norwood would be scrupulously fair, so let them think about it.”
Then Rundhia fo
und a servant in the garden of his own palace and sent him running to fetch the guitar. He had been absent about ten minutes by the time he started to return toward the summerhouse where he had left Lynn waiting.
Chapter Eight
THE palace front gate clanged behind Norwood. The sullen sentry stood at ease, then easy and resumed his snooze. Norwood turned his horse along the road by the palace wall, riding slowly because the sais was following on foot. He had ridden about fifty yards to a curve in the road when O’Leary stepped forth from a shadow. He didn’t look like O’Leary. He was wearing a turban, and dressed like a dripping wet, dirty Hindu of no caste or ostensible occupation. Norwood drew rein and listened, watching the road for pedestrians.
“I didn’t stable the mare in the city. She’s back in camp. I’ll need her later.”
“What for?”
“As soon as I’m dressed decent again, I’ll go back to the bazaar. I told a yarn about coming back to camp for more money. I’m going to need it.”
“What happened?”
“Plenty. I was right about Noor Mahlam. They’ve ditched him. So I did too. He was only ground bait. He talked too much, then tried to have me knifed to stop me talking. They’d a trap set for me and I walked straight into it. A woman. I’ll tell you about her later; she’d fill a dictionary.”
“Never mind about the woman. What happened?”
“Nothing happened there. It couldn’t. I left your mare tied up to the verandah railing, military saddle and all, and your initials on the bridle. So they couldn’t take chances. And I could. And I did.”
“That’s enough about you. What happened?”
“Kindergarten stuff. Confidence game. The woman’s bully flattered me I knew the woman’s sister in Lahore, and he said the woman’s sister’d given me a rep for being smarter than most, and a man o’ my word. Then he introduced me to the woman. She’s all honey and poison. Sister my eye.
