Deliberately enough the carter swerved his beasts aside to make way for the tonga, lest by undue haste he should make himself seem other than what he was—a free man and a Rajput. But when his fierce, hawk-like eyes encountered those of the dak traveller, his attitude changed curiously and completely. Recognition and reverence fought with surprise in his expression, and as Ram Nath swung the tonga past the man salaamed profoundly. His voice, as he rose, came after them, resonant and clear:

"Hail, thou Chosen of the Gateway! Hail!"

Amber neither turned to look nor replied. But his frown deepened. The incident passed into his history, marked only by the terse comment it educed from Ram Nath—words which were flung curtly over the tonga-wallah's shoulder: "Eyes to see and ears to hear and a tongue withal ... sahib!"

The Virginian said nothing. But it was in his mind that he had indeed thrust his head into the lion's mouth by thus adventuring into the territory which every instinct of caution and common-sense proclaimed taboo to him—the erstwhile kingdom of the Maharana Har Dyal Rutton. It was, in a word, foolhardy—nothing less. But for his pledged word it had been so easy to order Ram Nath to convey him back to Badshah Junction to order and to enforce obedience at the pistol's point, if needs be! Honour held him helpless, bound upon the Wheel of his Destiny: he must and would go on....

He sat in silent gloom while sixty minutes were drummed out by the flying hoofs. The hills folded in about the way, diverting it hither and yon with raw, seamed spurs, whose flanks flung back harsh and heavy echoes of the tonga's flight through riven gulch and scrub-grown valley. And then it was that Ram Nath proved his mettle. Hardened himself, he showed no mercy to his passenger, and never once drew rein, though the tonga danced from rock to ridge and ridge to rut and back again, like a tin can on the tail of an astonished dog. As for Amber, he wedged his feet and held on with both hands, grimly, groaning in spirit when he did not in the flesh, foreseeing as he did nine hours more of this heroic torture punctuated only by brief respites at the end of each stage.



CHAPTER XII

THE LONG DAY

One travels dak by relays casually disposed along the route at the whim of the native contractor. Between Badshah Junction and Kuttarpur there were ten stages, of which the conclusion of the first was at hand—Amber having all but abandoned belief in its existence.

Slamming recklessly down the bed of an ancient watercourse, the tonga spun suddenly upon one wheel round a shoulder of the banks and dashed out upon a rolling plain, across which the trail snaked to other farther hills that lay dim and low, a wavy line of blue, upon the horizon—the hills in whose heart Kuttarpur itself lay occult. And, by the roadside, in a compound fenced with camel-thorn, sat an aged and indigent dak-bungalow, marking the end of the first stage, the beginning of the second.

It wore a look of Heaven to the traveller. In the shade of its veranda he read an urgent invitation to rest and surcease of sunlight. He approved it thoroughly; the ramshackle rest-house itself, the sheds in the rear for the accommodation of relays, the syce squatting asleep in the sunshine, the few scrawny chickens squabbling and scratching over their precarious sustenance in the deep hot dust of the compound, even the broken tonga reposing with its shafts uplifted at a piteous angle of decrepitude—all these Amber surveyed with a kindly eye.

Ram Nath reined in with a flourish and lifted a raucous voice, hailing the syce, while Amber, painfully disengaging his cramped limbs, climbed down and stumbled toward the veranda. The abrupt transition from violent and erratic motion to a solid and substantial footing affected him unpleasantly, with an undeniable qualm; the earth seemed to rock and flow beneath him as if under the influence of an antic earthquake. He was for some seconds occupied with the problem of regaining his poise, and it was not until he heard an Englishwoman's voice uplifted in accents of anger, that he remembered the other wayfarer with whom he was to share his tonga, or associated the white-clad figure in the dark doorway of the bungalow with anything but the khansamah, coming to greet and cheat the chance-brought guest.

"Where is that tonga-wallah who deserted me here last night?" the woman was demanding of Ram Nath, too preoccupied with her resentment to have eyes for the other traveller, who at sight of her had stopped and removed his pith helmet and now stood staring as if he had come from a land in which there were no women. "Where," she continued, with an imperative stamp of a daintily-shod foot, "is that wretched tonga-wallah?"

"Sahiba," protested Ram Nath, with a great show of deference, "how should I know? Belike he is in Badshah Junction, whither ha returned very late last night, being travel-worn and weary, and where I left him, being sent with this excellent tonga to take his place."

"You were? And why have I been detained here, alone and unprotected, this long night? Simply because that other tonga-wallah was a fool, am I to be imposed upon in this fashion?"

"What am I," whimpered Ram Nath, "to endure the wrath of the sahiba for a fault that is none of mine?"

"I beg your pardon, sir," said the girl, turning to Amber, "but it is very annoying." She looked him over, first with abstraction, then with a puzzled gathering of her brows, for he was far from her thoughts—the last person she would have expected to meet in that place, and very effectually disguised in dust and dirt besides, "The tire came off the wheel just as we got here, late yesterday evening, and in trying, or pretending to try, to fit it on again, that block-head of a tonga-wallah hammered the rim with a rock as big as his head and naturally smashed it to kindling-wood. Then, before I could stop him, he flung himself on the back of a pony and went away, saying that it was the will of God that he should return to Badshah for a better tonga. Since when I have had for company one stable-syce, one deaf-and-dumb patriarch of a khansamah and ... the usual dak-bungalow discomforts—insects, bad food, and a terrible fear of dacoits."

"I am so sorry, Miss Farrell," Amber put in. "If I had only been here...."

The girl gave a little gasp and sat down abruptly in one of the veranda chairs, thereby threatening it with instant demolition and herself with a bad spill; for the chair was feeble with the burden of its many years, and she was a quite substantial young person. Indeed, so loudly did it croak a protest and a warning that she immediately arose in alarm.

"Mr. Amber!" she said; and, "Well ...!"

"You'll forgive me the surprise?" he begged, going up on the veranda to her. "I myself had no hope of finding you here."

"But," she protested, with a pretty flush of colour—"but I left you in the States such a little while ago!"

"Yes?" he said gravely. "It seems so long to me.... And when you had gone, Long Island was a very lonely place indeed," he added, with calculated impudence.

Her colour deepened and she sought another chair, seating herself with gingerly decision. "I'm sure you don't mean me to assume that you've followed me half round the world?"

"Why not?" He brought another chair to face her. "Besides, I haven't seen anything of ... India for a good many years."

"Mr. Amber!"

"Ma'am?" he countered with affected humility.

"You're spoiling it all. I was so glad to see you—I'd have been glad to see any white man, of course——"

"Much obliged, I'm sure."

"And now you're actually flirting with me—or pretending to."

"I'm not," he declared soberly. "As a matter of solemn fact, I had to come to India."

"You had to?"

"On a matter of serious business. Please don't ask me what, just yet; but it's very serious, to my way of thinking. This happy accident—I count myself a very happy man to have been so fortunate—only makes my errand the more pleasant."

She regarded him intently, chin in hand, her brown eyes sedate with speculation, for some time. "I believe you've been speaking in parables," she asserted, at length. "If I'm unjust, bear with me; appearances are against you. There isn't any reason I know of why you should tell me what brought you here——"

"There's every reason, in point of fact, Miss Farrell; only ... I can't explain just now."

"Very well," she agreed briskly; "let's be content with that. I am glad to see you again, truly; and—we're to travel on to Kuttarpur in the same tonga?"

"If you'll permit——"

"After what I've endured, this awful night, I wouldn't willingly let you out of my sight."

"Or any other white man?"

She laughed, pleased. "I presume you're wondering what I'm doing here?"

"You were to join your father in Darjeeling, I believe?" he countered, cautious.

"But I found he'd been transferred unexpectedly to Kuttarpur. So, of course, I had to follow. I telegraphed him day before yesterday when I was to arrive at Badshah Junction, and naturally expected he'd come in person or have some one meet me, but I presume the message must have gone astray. At all events there was no one there for me and I had to come on alone. It's hardly been a pleasant experience; that incompetent tonga-wallah behaved precisely as though he had deliberately made up his mind to delay me.... And the tonga's nearly ready; I must lock my kit-bag."

She went into the bungalow, leaving him thoughtful, for perhaps.... But the back of Ram Nath, as that worthy busied himself superintending the harnessing in of fresh ponies, conveyed to him no support for his half-credited hypothesis that this "accident" had been carefully planned by Labertouche for Amber's especial benefit.

He vexed himself with vain speculations, for it was perfectly certain that he would get nothing in the way of either denial or confirmation out of Ram Nath; and, presently, acknowledging this, he called the khansamah and ordered a peg for the sake of the dust in his throat.

The girl joined him on the veranda in due course, very demure and sweet to look upon in her travelling-dress of light pongee and her pith helmet, whose green under-brim and puggaree served very handsomely to set off her fair colouring. If she overlooked the adoration of his eyes, she was rather less than woman; for it was in them, plain to be seen for the looking. The khansamah followed her from the bungalow, staggering under the weight of her box and kit-bag, and with Ram Nath's surly assistance made them fast to the front seat. While Amber gave the girl his hand to help her to her place, and lifted himself to her side in a mute glow of ecstasy. Fate, he thought with reason, was most kind to him.

They rattled headlong from the compound, making for the distant hills of blue. The girl drew down her puggaree, with its soft, thin folds sheltering the pure contours of her face from the dust and burning sun-glare. He watched her hungrily, holding his breath as the thought came to him that he was seated elbow to elbow with the woman who was to be his wife, his hand still a-tingle with the reminiscence of her gloved fingers that had touched it so transiently. She caught his intent look and smiled, her eyes lustrous through the veiling.

She was very tired after her night-long vigil, and after a few words of commonplace as they drew away from the station, he forebore to weary her with talk, and a silence as sweet as communion lengthened between them as the stage lengthened. He was very intent upon her presence; the consciousness of her there beside him seemed, at times, almost suffocating. He could by no means forget that she had in a curious way been assigned to him—set aside to be his wife, the partner of all his days; and she tolerated him kindly, all unsuspicious of the significance of his advent into her life.... If she were made to suspect, to understand, what effect would it have upon their relations, slight and but lately established as they were? Would she shrink from or encourage him?

His wife! He wagged his head in solemn stupefaction, trying to appreciate the intangible, the chimerical dream of yesterday resolved into the actuality of to-day; realising that, even when most intrigued by the adventure of which she was at once the cause and the prize, even though he had met and been charmed by her before becoming enmeshed in its web of incident, he had thought of her with a faint trace of incredulity, as though she had been a thing of fable, trapped with all the fanciful charms of beleaguered fairy princesses, rather than a living woman of flesh and fire and blood—such as she proved to be who rode with him, her thoughts drowsily astray in the vastnesses of her inscrutable, virginal moods.

To think that she was foreordained to be his wife was not more unbelievable than the consciousness that he, her undeclared lover, her predestined mate and protector, was listlessly permitting her to delve further into the black heart of a land out of which he had promised to convey her with all possible speed, for the salvation of her body and soul.... Yet what could he do, save be passive for the time, and wait upon the turn of events? He could not, dared not seize her in his arms and insist that she love him, marry him, fly with him—all within the compass of an hour or even of a day. For words of love came haltingly to his unskilled tongue, though they came from a surcharged heart, and to him the strategy of love was as a sealed book, at whose contents he could but guess, and that with a diffidence and distrust sadly handicapping to one who had urgent need of expedition in his courting.

With a rueful smile and a perturbed heart he pondered his problem. The second stage wore away without a dozen words passing between them; so also the third. The pauses were brief enough, the ponies being exchanged with gratifying despatch. The tonga would pull up, Ram Nath would jump down ... and in a brace of minutes or little more the vehicle would be en route again, Amber engaged with the infinite ramifications of this labyrinthal riddle of his, and the girl insensibly yielding to the need of sleep. She passed, at length, into sound unconsciousness.

Thus the morning stages flowed beneath the tonga, personified in a winding ribbon of roadway, narrow, deep-rutted, inexpressibly dusty, lined uncertainly over a scrubby, sun-scorched waste. Sophia napped uneasily by fits and starts, waking now and again with a sleepy smile and a fragmentary, murmured apology. She roused finally very much refreshed for the midday halt for rest and tiffin, which they passed at one of the conventional bungalows, in nothing particularly unlike its fellows unless it were that they enjoyed, before tiffin, the gorgeous luxury of plenty of clean water, cooled in porous earthen jars. Amber, overwhelmed by the discovery of this abundance, promptly went to the extreme of calling in the khansamah to sluice him down with jar after jar, and felt like himself for the first time in five days when, shaved and dressed, he returned to the common living-room of the resthouse.

The girl kept him waiting but a little while. Lacking the attentions of an ayah she had probably been unable to bathe so extensively as he, but eventually she appeared in an immeasurably more happy state of body and mind, calling up to him the simile, stronger than any other, of a tall, fair lily after a morning shower. And she was in a bewitching humour, one that ingenuously enough succeeded in entangling him more thoroughly than ever before in the web of her fascinations. Over an execrable curry of stringy fowl and questionable rice, eked out with tea and tinned delicacies of their own, their chatter, at the beginning sufficiently gay and inconsequent, drifted by imperceptible and unsuspected gradations perilously close to the shoals of intimacy. And subsequently, when they had packed themselves back into the narrow tonga-seat and Again were being bounced and juggled breathlessly over shocking roads, the exchange of confidences continued with unabated interest. Amber on his part was led to talk of his life and work, of his adventures in the name of Science, of his ambitions and achievements. In return he received a vivid impression of the lives of those women who share with their men the burden of official life in British India: of serene days in the brisk, invigorating, clear atmosphere of hill stations; of sunsmitten days and steaming nights in the Deccan; of the uncertain, anchorless existences of those who know not from one day to another when they may be whisked half across an Empire at the whim of that awful force simply nominated Government....

For all the taint upon her pedigree, she proved herself to Amber at heart a simple, lonely Englishwoman—a stranger in a sullen and suspicious land, desiring nothing better than to return to the England she had seen and learned to love, the England of ample lawns, of box-hedges, and lanes, of travelled highways, pavements and gaslights, of shops and theatres, of home and family ties....

But India she knew. "I sometimes fancy," she told him with the conscious laugh that deprecates a confessed superstition, "that I must have lived here in some past incarnation." She paused, but he did not speak. "Do you believe in reincarnation?" Again he had no answer for her, though temporarily he saw the daylight as darkness. "It's hard to live here for long and resist belief in it.... But as a matter of fact I seem to understand these people better than they're understood by most of my people. Don't you think it curious? Perhaps it's merely intuition——"

"That's the birthright of your sex," he said, rousing. "On the other hand, you have to remember that your father is one of a family that for generations has served the Empire. And your mother?"

"She, too, came of an Anglo-Indian family. Indeed, they met and courted here, though they were married in England.... So you think my insight into native character a sort of birthright—a sense inherited?"

"Perhaps—something of the sort."

"You may be right. We'll never know. At all events, I seem to have a more—more painful comprehension of the native than most of the English in this country have; I seem to feel, to sense their motives, their desires, aspirations, even sometimes their untranslatable thoughts. I believe I understand perfectly their feeling toward us, the governing race."

"Then," said Amber, "you know something his Highness the Viceroy himself would give his ears to be sure of."

"I know that; but I do."

"And that feeling is——?"

"Not love, Mr. Amber."

"Much to the contrary——?"

"Very much," she affirmed with deep conviction.

"This 'Indian unrest' one reads of in the papers is not mere gossip, then?"

"Anything but that; it's the hidden fire stirring within the volcano we told ourselves was dead. The quiet of the last fifty years has been not content but slumber; deep down there has always been the fire, slow, deadly, smouldering beneath the ashes. The Mutiny still lives in spirit; some day it will break out afresh. You must believe me—I know. The more we English give our lives to educate the natives, the further we spread the propaganda of discontent; day by day we're teaching them to understand that we are no better than they, no more fit to rule; they are beginning to look up and to see over the rim of the world—and we have opened their eyes. They have learned that Japanese can defeat Caucasians, that China turns in its sleep, that England is no more omnipotent than omniscient. They've heard of anarchy and socialism and have learned to throw bombs. Only the other day a justice in Bengal was killed by a bomb.... I fancy I talk," the girl broke off with her clear laugh, "precisely like my father, who talks precisely as a political pamphleteer writes. You'll see when you meet him."

"Do you take much interest in politics?"

"No more than the every-day Englishwoman; it's one of our staples of conversation, when we've exhausted the weather, you know. But I'm not in the least advanced, if that's what you mean; I hunger after fashion-papers and spend more time than I ought, devouring home-made trash imported in paper-covers. I only feel what I feel by instinct—as I said awhile ago."

Perhaps if he had known less about the girl, he would have attached less importance to her statements. As it was, she impressed him profoundly. He pondered her words deeply, storing them in his memory, remembering that another had spoken in the same manner—one for whose insight into the ways of the native he had intense respect.

As the slow afternoon dragged out its blazing hours, their spirits languished, and they fell silent, full weary and listless. Towards the last quarter of the journey their road forsook the spacious, haggard plain and again entered a hilly country, but this time one wherein there was no lack either of water or of life: a green and fertile land parcelled into farms and dotted with villages.

Night overtook the tonga when it was close upon Kuttarpur, swooping down upon the world like a blanket of darkness, at the moment that the final relay of ponies was being hitched in. The sun dipped behind the encircling hills; the west blazed with the lambent flame of fire-opal; the wonderful translucent blue of the sky shaded suddenly to deep purple lanced by great shafts of mauve and amethyst light, and in the east stars popped out; the hills shone like huge, crude gems—sapphire, jade, jasper, malachite, chalcedony—their valleys swimming with mists of mother-of-pearl.... And it was night, the hills dark and still, the sky a deeper purple and opaque, the ruddy fires of wayfarers on the roadside leaping clear and bright.

With fresh ponies the tonga took the road with a wild initial rush soon to be moderated, when it began to climb the last steep grade to the pass that gives access to Kuttarpur from the south. For an hour the road toiled up and ever upward; steep cliffs of rock crowded it, threatening to push it over into black abysses, or to choke it off between towering, formidable walls. It swerved suddenly into a broad, clear space. The tonga paused. Voluntarily Ram Nath spoke for almost the first time since morning.

"Kuttarpur," he said, with a wave of his whip.

Aloof, austere and haughty, the City of Swords sits in the mouth of a ravine so narrow that a wall no more than a hundred yards in length is sufficient to seal its southerly approach. Beneath this wall, to one side of the city gate, a river flows from the lake that is Kuttarpur's chiefest beauty. Within, a multitude of dwellings huddles, all interpenetrated by streets and backways so straitened and sinuous as scarcely to permit the passage of an elephant from the Maharana's herd; congested in the bottom of the valley, the houses climb tier upon tier the flanking hillsides, until their topmost roofs threaten even the supremacy of that miracle in white marble, the Raj Mahal.

Northwards the palace of Khandawar's kings stands, exquisite, rare, and marvellous, unlike any other building in the world. White, all white, from the lake that washes its lowest walls to the crenellated rim of its highest roof, it sweeps upward in breath-taking steps and wide terraces to the crest of the western hill, into which it burrows, from which it springs; a vast enigma propounded in white marble without a note of colour save where the foliage of a hidden garden peeps over the edge of a jealous screen—a hundred imposing mansions merged into one monstrous and imperial maze.

Impregnable in the old days, before cannon were brought to India, Kuttarpur lives to-day remote, unfriendly, inhospitable. Within its walls there is no room for many visitors; they who come in numbers, therefore, must perforce camp down before the gates.

Now figure the city to yourself, seeing it as Sophia was later to see it in the light of day; then drench it with blue Indian night and stud it with a myriad eyes of fire—lamps, torches, candles, blue-white electric arcs, lights running up and down both hillsides and fringing the very star-sheeted skies, clustering and diverging in vast, bewildering, inconsequent designs, picking out the walls and main thoroughfares, shining through coloured globes upon the palace terraces, glimmering mysteriously from isolate windows and balconies; and add to these the softly illuminated walls of a hundred silken state marquees and a thousand meaner canvas tents arrayed south of the city.... And that is Kuttarpur as it first revealed itself to Amber and Sophia Farrell.

But for a moment were they permitted to gaze in wonderment; Ram Nath had little patience. When he chose to, he applied his whip, and the ponies stretched out, the tonga plunging on their heels down the steep hillside, like an ungoverned, ungovernable thing, maddened. Within a quarter of an hour they were careering through the city of tents on the parked plain before the southern wall. In five minutes more they drew up at the main city gate to parley with the Quarter Guard.

Here they suffered an exasperating delay. It appeared that the gates were shut at sundown, in deference to custom immemorial. Between that hour and sunrise none were permitted to pass either in or out without the express sanction of the State. The commander of the guard instituted an impudent catechism, in response to which Ram Nath discovered the several identities and estates of his charges. The commander received the information with impartial equanimity and retired within the city to confer with his superiors. After some time a trooper was sent to advise the travellers that the tonga would be permitted to enter with the understanding that the unaccredited Englishman (meaning Amber) would consent to lodge for the night in no other spot than the State rest-house beyond the northern limits of the city.

Amber agreed. The trooper saluted with much deference and withdrew. And for a long time nothing happened; the gates remained shut, the postern of the Quarter Guard irresponsive to Ram Nath's repeated summons. His passengers endured with what patience they could command; they were aware that it was necessary to obtain from some quarter official sanction for the opening of the gates, but they had understood that it had already been obtained.

Abruptly the peace of the night was shattered, and the hum of the encampment behind them with the roar of the city before them was dwarfed, by a dull and thunderous detonation of cannon from a terrace of the palace. The tonga ponies, reared and plunged, Ram Nath mastering them with much difficulty. Sophia was startled, and Amber himself stirred uneasily on his perch.

"What now?" he grumbled. "You'd think we were visitors of state and had to be durbarred!"

Far up on the heights a second red flame stabbed the night, and again the thunder pealed. Thereafter gun after gun bellowed at imperative, stately intervals.

"Fifteen," Amber announced after a time. "Isn't this something extraordinary, Miss Farrell?"

"Perhaps," she suggested, "there's a native potentate arriving at the northern gate. They're very punctilious about their salutes, you know."

Another crash silenced her. Amber continued to count. "Twenty-one," he said when it seemed that there was to be no more cannonading. "Isn't that a royal salute?"

"Yes," said the girl; "four more guns than the Maharana of Khandawar himself is entitled to."

"How do you explain it?"

"I don't," she replied simply. "Can you?"

He was dumb. Could it be possible that this imperial greeting was intended for the man supposed to be the Maharana of Khandawar—Har Dyal Rutton? He glanced sharply at the girl, but her face was shadowed; and he believed she suspected nothing.

A great hush had fallen, replacing the rolling thunder of the State ordnance. Even the voice of the city seemed moderate, subdued. In silence the massive gates studded with sharp-toothed elephant-spikes swung open.

With a grunt, Ram Nath cracked his whiplash and the tonga sped into the city. Amber bent forward.

"What's the name of that gate, Ram Nath—if you happen to know?"

"That," said the tonga-wallah in a level voice, "is known as the Gateway of Swords, sahib." He added in his own good time: "But not the Gateway of Swords."

Amber failed to educe from him any satisfactory explanation of this orphic utterance.



CHAPTER XIII

THE PHOTOGRAPH

That same night Amber dined at the Residency, on the invitation of Raikes, the local representative of Government, seconded by the insistence of Colonel Farrell. It developed that Sophia's telegram had somehow been lost in transit, and Farrell's surprise and pleasure at sight of her were tempered only by his keen appreciation of Amber's adventitious services, slight though they had been. He was urged to stay the evening out, before proceeding to his designated quarters, and the reluctance with which he acceded to this arrangement which worked so happily with his desires, may be imagined.

Their arrival coincided with the dinner-hour; the meal was held half an hour to permit them to dress. Raikes put a room at Amber's disposal, and the Virginian contrived to bathe and get into his evening clothes within less time than had been allowed him. Sophia, contrary to the habit of her sex, was little tardier. At thirty minutes past eight they sat down to dine, at a table in the garden of the Residency.

Ease of anxiety was more than food and drink to Amber; his feeling of relief, to have convoyed Sophia to the company and protection of Anglo-Saxons like himself, was intense. Yet he swallowed his preliminary brandy-peg in a distinctly uncomfortable frame of mind, strangely troubled by the reflection that round that lone white table was gathered together the known white population of the State; a census of which accounted for just five souls.

In the encompassing, exotic gloom of that blue Indian night—the kind of night that never seems friendly to the Occidental but forever teems with hints of tragic mystery—the cloth, lighted by shaded candles, shone as immaculate and lustrous as an island of snow in a sea of ink—as a good deed in a naughty world. Its punctilious array of crystal and silver was no more foreign to the setting than were the men who sat round it, stiff in that black-and-white armour of civilisation, impregnable against the insidious ease of the East, in which your expatriate Englishman nightly encases himself wherever he may be, as loath to forego the ceremony of "dressing for dinner" as he would be to dispense with letters from Home.

Raikes presided, a heavy man with the flaming red face of one who constitutionally is unable to tan; of middle-age, good-natured, mellow, adroit of manner. On his one hand sat Amber, over across from Sophia. Next to Amber sat Farrell, tall and lean, sad of eye and slow of speech, his sun-faded hair and moustache streaked with grey setting off a dark complexion and thin, fine features. He wore the habit of authority equally with the irascibility of one who temporizes with his liver. Opposite him was a young, mild-eyed missionary, too new in the land to have lost his illusions or have blunted the keen edge of his enthusiasms; a colourless person with a finical way of handling his knife and fork, who darted continually shy, sidelong glances at Sophia, or interpolated eager, undigested comments, nervously into the conversation.

The table-talk was inconsequent; Amber took a courteous and easy part in it without feeling that any strain was being put upon his intelligence. His attention was centred upon the woman who faced him, flushed with gaiety and pleasure, not alone because she was once more with her father, but also because she unexpectedly was looking her best. If she had been well suited in her tidy pongee travelling costume, she found her evening gown no less becoming. It was a black affair, very simple and individual; her shoulders rose from it with intensified purity of tone, like fair white ivory gleaming with a suggestion of the sleek sheen of satin; their strong, clean lines rounded bewitchingly into the fair, slender neck upholding the young head with its deftly coiffed crown of bronze and gold....

Tall, well-trained, silent servants moved like white-robed wraiths behind the guests; the dishes of the many courses disappeared and were replaced in a twinkling, as if by slight of hand. They were over plentiful; Amber was relieved when at length the meal was over, and Miss Farrell having withdrawn in conformance with inviolable custom, the cloth was deftly whisked away and cigars, cigarettes, liqueurs, whiskey and soda were served.

Amber took unto himself a cigar and utilised an observation of the Political's as a lever to swing the conversation to a plane more likely to inform him. Farrell had grumbled about the exactions of his position as particularly instanced by the necessity of his attending tedious and tiresome native ceremonies in connection with the tamasha.

"What's, precisely, the nature of this tamasha, Colonel Farrell?"

"Why, my dear young man, I thought you knew. Isn't it what you came to see?"

"No," Amber admitted cautiously; "I merely heard a rumour that there was something uncommon afoot. Is it really anything worth while?"

"Rather," Raikes interjected drily; "the present ruler's abdicating in favour of his son, a child of twelve. That puts the business in a class by itself."

"There's been one precedent, hasn't there?" said the missionary, pretending to be at ease with a cigarette. "The Holkar of Indore?"

"Yes," agreed Farrell; "a similar case, to be sure."

"But why should a prince hand over the reins of government to a child of twelve? There must be some reason for it. Isn't it known?" asked Amber.

"Who can fathom a Hindu's mind?" grunted Farrell. "I daresay there's some scandalous native intrigue at the bottom of it. Eh, Raikes?"

The Resident shook his head. "Don't come to this shop for information about what goes on in Khandawar. I doubt if there's another Resident in India who knows as little of the underhand devilment in his State as I do. His Majesty the Rana loves me as a cheetah loves his trainer. He's an intractable rascal."

"They grease the wheels of the independent native States with intrigue," Farrell explained. "I know from sore experience. And your Rajput is the deepest of the lot. I don't envy Raikes, here."

"The man who can guess what a Rajput intends to do next is entitled to give himself a deal of credit," commented the Resident, with a short laugh.

"I've travelled a bit," continued Farrell, "and have seen something of the courts of Europe, but I've yet to meet a diplomat who's peer to the Rajput. You hear a great deal about the astuteness of the Russians and the yellow races, and a Greek or Turk can lie with a fairly straight face when he sees a profit in deception, but none of them is to be classed with these people. If we English ever decide to let India rule herself, her diplomatic corps will be recruited exclusively from the flower of Rajputana's chivalry."

"I'll back Salig Singh against the field," said Raikes grimly; "he'll be dean of the corps, when that time comes. He'd rather conspire than fight, and the Rajputs—of course you know—are a warrior caste. I've a notion"—the Resident leaned back and searched the shadows for an eavesdropper—"I've a notion," he continued, lowering his voice, "that the Rana has got himself in rather deep in some rascality or other, and wants to get out before he's put out. There's bazaar gossip.... Hmm! Do you speak French, Mr. Amber?"

"A little," said Amber in that tongue. "And I," nodded the missionary. The talk continued in the language of diplomacy.

"Bazaar gossip——?" Farrell repeated enquiringly.

"There have been a number of deaths from cholera in the Palace lately, the grand vizier's amongst them."

"White arsenic cholera?"

"That, and the hemp poison kind."

"Refractory vizier?" questioned Farrell. "The kind that wants to retrench and institute reforms—railways and metalled roads and so forth?"

"No; he was quite suited to his master. But the bazaar says Naraini took a dislike to him for one reason or another."

"Naraini?" queried Amber.

"The genius of the place." Raikes nodded toward the Raj Mahal, shining like a pearl through the darkness on the hill-side over against the Residency. "She's Salig's head queen. At least that's about as near to her status as one can get. She's not actually his queen, but some sort of a heritage from the Rutton dynasty—I hardly know what or why. Salig never married her, but she lives in the Palace, and for several years—ever since she first began to be talked about—she's ruled from behind the screen with a high hand and an out-stretched arm. So the bazaar says."

"I've heard she was beautiful," Farrell observed.

"As beautiful as a peri, according to rumour. You never can tell; very likely she's a withered old hag; nine out of ten native women are, by the time they're thirty." Raikes jerked the glowing end of his cigar into the shrubbery and reverted to English. "Shall we join Miss Farrell?"

They arose and left the table to the servants, the Resident with Amber following Farrell and young Clarkson.

"Old women we are, forever talking scandal," said Raikes, with a chuckle. "Oh, well! it's shop with us, you know."

"Of course.... Then I understand that the tamasha is the reason for the encampment beyond the walls?"

"Yes; they've been coming in for a week. By to-morrow night, I daresay, every rajah, prince, thakur, baron, fief, and lord in Rajputana, each with his 'tail,' horse and foot, will be camped down before the walls of Kuttarpur. You've chosen an interesting time for your visit. It'll be a sight worth seeing, when they begin to make a show. My troubles begin with a State banquet to-morrow that I'd give much to miss; however, I'll have Farrell for company."

"I'm glad to be here," said Amber thoughtfully. Could it be possible that the proposed abdication of Salig Singh in favour of his son were merely a cloak to a conspiracy to restore to power the house of Rutton? Or had the tamasha been arranged in order to gather together all the rulers in Rajputana without exciting suspicion, that they might agree upon a concerted plan of mutiny against the Sirkar? This state affair of surpassing importance had been arranged for the last day of grace allotted the Prince of the house of Rutton. What had it to do with the Gateway of Swords, the Voice, the Mind, the Eye, the Body, the Bell?

"By the way, Mr. Raikes," said the Virginian suddenly, "what do they call the gate by which we entered the city—the southern gate?"

"The Gateway of Swords, I believe."

Farrell, on the point of entering the house, overheard and turned. "Is that so? Why, I thought that gateway was in Kathiapur."

"I've heard of a Gateway of Swords in Kathiapur," Raikes admitted. "Never been there, myself."

"Kathiapur?"

"A dead city, Mr. Amber, not far away—originally the capital of Khandawar. It's over there in the hills to the north, somewhere. Old Rao Rutton, founder of the old dynasty, got tired of the place and caused it to be depopulated, building Kuttarpur in its stead—I believe, to commemorate some victory or other. That sort of thing used to be quite the fashion in India, before we came." Raikes fell back, giving Amber precedence as they entered the Residency. "By the way, remind me, if you think of it, Colonel Farrell, to get after the telegraph-clerk to-morrow. There's a new man in charge—a Bengali babu—and I presume he's about as worthless as the run of his kind."

Amber made a careful note of this information; he was curious about that babu.

In the drawing-room Raikes and Farrell impressed Clarkson for three-handed Bridge. Sophia did not care to play and Amber was ignorant of the game—a defect in his social education which he found no cause to regret, since it left him in undisputed attendance upon the girl.

She had seated herself at a warped and discouraged piano, for which Raikes had already apologised; it was, he said, a legacy from a former Resident. For years its yellow keys had not known a woman's touch such as that to which they now responded with thin, cracked voices; the girl's fine, slender fingers wrung from them a plaintive, pathetic parody of melody. Amber stood over her with his arms folded on the top of the instrument, comfortably unconscious that his pose was copied from any number of sentimental photogravures and "art photographs." His temper was sentimental enough, for that matter; the woman was very sweet and beautiful in his eyes as she sat with her white, round arms flashing over the keyboard, her head bowed and her face a little averted, the long lashes low upon her cheeks and tremulous with a fathomless emotion. It was his thought that his time was momentarily becoming shorter, and that just now, more than ever, she was very distant from his arms, something inaccessible, too rare and delicate and fine for the rude possession of him who sighed for his own unworthiness.

Abruptly she brought both hands down upon the keys, educing a jangled, startled crash from the tortured wires, and swinging round, glanced up at Amber with quaint mirth trembling behind the veil of moisture in her misty eyes.

"India!" she cried, with a broken laugh: "India epitomised: a homesick, exiled woman trying to drag a song of Home from the broken heart of a crippled piano! That is an Englishwoman's India: it's our life, ever to strive and struggle and contrive to piece together out of makeshift odds and ends the atmosphere of Home!... It's suffocating in here. Come." She rose with a quick shrug of impatience, and led the way back to the gardens.

The table had been removed together with the chairs and candles; nothing remained to remind them of the hour just gone. The walks were clear of servants. Their only light came from the high arch of stars smitten to its zenith with pale, quivering waves of light from the moon invisible behind the hills. Below them the city hummed like a disturbed beehive. Somewhere afar a gentle hand was sweeping the strings of a zitar, sounding weird, sad chords. The perfumed languor of the night weighed heavily upon the senses, like the woven witchery of some age-old enchantment....

Pensive, the girl trained her long skirts heedlessly over the dew-drenched grasses, Amber at her side, himself speechless with an intangible, ineluctable, unreasoning sense of expectancy. Never, he told himself, had a lover's hour been more auspiciously timed or staged; and this was his hour, altogether his!... If only he might find the words of wooing to which his lips were strange! He dared not delay; to-morrow it might be too late; in the womb of the morrow a world of chances stirred—contingencies that might in a breath set them a world apart.

They found seats in the shadow of a pepul.

"You must be tired, Mr. Amber," she said. "Why don't you smoke?"

"I hadn't thought of it, and hadn't asked permission."

"Please do. I like it."

He found his cigarette-case and struck a match, Sophia watching intently his face in the rosy glow of the little, flickering flame.

"Are you in the habit of indulging in protracted silences?" she rallied him gently. "Between friends of old standing they're permissible, I believe, but——"

"A day's journey by tonga matures acquaintanceships wonderfully," he observed abstrusely.

"Indeed?" She laughed.

"At least, I hope so."

He felt that he must be making progress; thus far he had been no less inane than any average lover of the stage or fiction. And he wondered: was she laughing at him, softly, there in the shadows?

"You see," she said, amused at his relapse into reverie, "you're incurable and ungrateful. I'm trying my best to be attractive and interesting, and you won't pay me any attention whatever. There must be something on your mind. Is it this mysterious errand that brings you so unexpectedly to India—to Kuttarpur, Mr. Amber?"

"Yes," he answered truthfully.

"And you won't tell me?"

"I think I must," he said, bending forward.

There sounded a stealthy rustling in the shrubbery. The girl drew away and rose with a startled exclamation. With a bound, a man in native dress sped from the shadows and paused before them, panting.

Amber jumped up, overturning his chair, and instinctively feeling for the pistol that was with his travelling things, upstairs in the Residency.

The native reassured him with a swift, obsequious gesture. "Pardon, sahib, and yours, sahiba, if I have alarmed you, but I am come on an errand of haste, seeking him who is known as the Sahib David Amber."

"I am he. What do you want with me?"

"It is only this, that I have been commissioned to bear to you, sahib."

The man fumbled hurriedly in the folds of his surtout, darting quick glances of apprehension round the garden. Amber looked him over as closely as he could in the dim light, but found him wholly a stranger—merely a low-caste Hindu, counterpart of a million others to be encountered daily in the highways and bazaars of India. The Virginian's rising hope that he might prove to be Labertouche failed for want of encouragement; the intruder was of a stature the Englishman could by no means have counterfeited.

"From whom come you?" he demanded in the vernacular.

"Nay, a name that is unspoken harms none, sahib." The native produced a small, thin, flat package and thrust it into Amber's hands. "With permission, I go, sahib; it were unwise to linger——"

"There is no answer?"

"None, sahib." The man salaamed and strode away, seeming to melt soundlessly into the foliage.

For a minute Amber remained astare. The girl's voice alone roused him.

"I think you are a very interesting person, Mr. Amber," she said, resuming her chair.

"Well!... I begin to think this a most uncommonly interesting country." He laughed uncertainly, turning the package over and over. "Upon my word——! I haven't the least notion what this can be!"

"Why not bring it to the light, and find out?"

He assented meekly, having been perfectly candid in his assertion that he had no suspicion of what the packet might contain, and a moment later they stood beneath the window of the Residency, from which a broad shaft of light streamed out like vaporised gold.

Amber held the packet to the light; it was oblong, thin, stiff, covered with common paper, guiltless of superscription, and sealed with mucilage. He tore the covering, withdrew the enclosure, and heard the girl gasp with surprise. For himself, he was transfixed with consternation. His look wavered in dismay between the girl and the photograph in his hand—her photograph, which had been stolen from him aboard the Poonah.

She extended her hand imperiously. "Give that to me, please, Mr. Amber," she insisted. He surrendered it without a word. "Mr. Amber!" she cried in a voice that quivered with wonder and resentment.

He faced her with a hang-dog air, feeling that now indeed had his case been made hopeless by this contretemps. "Confound Labertouche!" he cried in his ungrateful heart. "Confound his meddling mystery-mongering and hokus-pokus!"

"Well?" enquired the girl sharply.

"Yes, Miss Farrell." He could invent nothing else to say.

"You—you are going to explain, I presume."

He shook his head in despair. "No-o...."

"What!"

"I've no explanation whatever to make—that'd be adequate, I mean."

He saw that she was shaken by impatience. "I think," said she evenly—"I think you will find it best to let me judge of that. This is my photograph. How do you come to have it? What right have you to it?"

"I ... ah...." He stammered and paused, acutely conscious of the voices of the Englishmen, Farrell, Raikes, and young Clarkson, drifting out through the open window of the drawing-room. "If you'll be kind enough to return to our chairs," he said, "I'll try to make a satisfactory explanation. I'd rather not be overheard."

The girl doubted, was strongly inclined to refuse him; then, perhaps moved to compassion by his abject attitude, she relented and agreed. "Very well," she said, and retaining the picture moved swiftly before him into the shadowed garden. He lagged after her, inventing a hundred impracticable yarns. She found her chair and sat down with a manner of hauteur moderated by expectancy. He took his place beside her.

"Who sent you this photograph of me?" she began to cross-examine him.

"A friend."

"His name?"

"I'm sorry I can't tell you just now."

"Oh!... Why did he send it?"

"Because...." In his desperation it occurred to him to tell the truth—as much of it, at least, as his word to Rutton would permit. "Because it's mine. My friend knew I had lost it."

"How could it have been yours? It was taken in London a year ago. I sent copies only to personal friends who, I know, would not give them away." She thought it over and added: "The Quains had no copy; it's quite impossible that one should have got to America."

"None the less," he maintained stubbornly, "it's mine, and I got it in America."

"I can hardly be expected to believe that."

"I'm sorry."

"You persist in saying that you got it in America?"

"I must."

"When?"

"After you left the Quains."

"How?" she propounded triumphantly.

"I can't tell you, except vaguely. If you'll be content with the substance of the story, lacking details, for the present——"

"For the present? You mean you'll tell me the whole truth—?"

"Sometime, yes. But now, I may not.... A dear friend of mine owned the photograph. He gave it me at my request. I came to India, and on the steamer lost it; in spite of my offer of a reward, I was obliged to leave the boat without it, when we got to Calcutta. My friend here knew how highly I valued it——"

"Why?"

"Because I'd told him."

"I don't mean that. Why do you value it so highly?"

"Because of its original." He took heart of despair and plunged boldly.

She looked him over calmly. "Do you mean me to understand that you told this friend you had followed me to India because you were in love with me?"

"Precisely.... Thank you."

She laughed a little, mockingly. "Are you, Mr. Amber?"

"In love with you?... Yes."

"Oh!" She maintained her impartial and judicial attitude admirably. "But even were I inclined to believe that, your whole story is discredited by the simple fact that through no combination of circumstances could this picture have come into your possession in America."

"I give you my word of honor, Miss Farrell."

"I wish you wouldn't. If you are perfectly sincere in asserting that, you force me to think you——"

"Mad? I'm not, really," he argued earnestly. "It's quite true."

"No." She shook her head positively. "You say you obtained it from a man, which can't be so. There were only a dozen prints made; four I gave to women friends in England and seven I sent to people out here. The other one I have."

"I can only repeat what I have already told you. There are gaps in the story, I know—incredible gaps; they can't be bridged, just now. I beg you to believe me."

"And how soon will you be free to tell me the whole truth?"

"Only after ... we're married."

She laughed adorably. "Mr. Amber," she protested, "you are dangerous—you are delightful! Do you really believe I shall ever marry you?"

"I hope so. I came to India to ask you—to use every means in my power to make you marry me. You see, I love you."

"And ... and when is this to happen, please—in the name of impudence?"

"As soon as I can persuade you—to-night, if you will."

"Oh!"

He was obliged to laugh with her at the absurdity of the suggestion. "Or to-morrow morning, at the very latest," he amended seriously. "I don't think we dare wait longer."

"Why is that?"

"Delays are perilous. There might be another chap."

"How can you be sure there isn't already?"

He fell sober enough at this. "But there isn't, is there, really?"

She delayed her reply provokingly. At length, "I don't see why I should say," she observed, "but I don't mind telling you—no, there isn't—yet." And as she spoke, Farrell called "Sophia?" from the window of the drawing-room. She stood up, answering clearly with the assurance that she was coming, and began deliberately to move toward the house.

Amber followed, deeply anxious. "I've not offended you?"

"No," she told him gravely, "but you have both puzzled and mystified me. I shall have to sleep on this before I can make up my mind whether or not to be offended."

"And ... will you marry me?"

"Oh, dear! How do I know?" she laughed.

"You won't give me a hint as to the complexion of my chances?"

She paused, turning. "The chances, Mr. Amber," she said without affection or coquetry, "are all in your favour ... if you can prove your case. I do like you very much, and you have been successful in rousing my interest in you to an astonishing degree.... But I shall have to think it over; you must allow me at least twelve hours' grace."

"You'll let me know to-morrow morning?"

"Yes."

"Early?"

"You've already been bidden to breakfast by Mr. Raikes."

"Meanwhile, may I have my photograph?"

"Mine, if you please!... I think not; if my decision is favourable, you shall have it back—after breakfast."

"Thank you," he said meekly. And as they were entering the Residency he hung back. "I'm going now," he said; "it's good-night. Will you remember you've not refused me the privilege of hoping?"

"I've told you I like you, Mr. Amber." Impulsively she extended her hand. "Good-night."

He bowed and put his lips to it; and she did not resist.



CHAPTER XIV

OVER THE WATER

Ram Nath, patient and impassive as ever, had the tonga waiting for Amber before the Residency. Exalted beyond words, the American permitted himself to be driven off through Kuttarpur's intricate network of streets and backways, toward a destination of which he knew as little as he cared. He was a guest of the State, officially domiciled at the designated house of hospitality; without especial permission, obtained through the efforts of the Resident, he could sleep in no other spot in the city or its purlieus. He was indifferent, absolutely; the matter interested him as scantily—which is to say not at all—as did the fact that an escort of troopers of the State, very well accoutred and disciplined, followed the tonga with a great jangling of steel and tumult of hoofs.

He was in that condition of semi-daze which is the not extraordinary portion of a declared lover revelling in the memory of his mistress's eyes, whose parting look has not been unkind. Upon that glance of secret understanding, signalled to him from eyes as brown as beautiful, he was building him a palace of dreams so strange, so sweet, that the mere contemplation of its unsubstantial loveliness filled him with an exquisite agony of hope, a poignant ecstasy of despair. It was too much to hope for, that she should smile upon him in the morning.... Yet he hoped.

Unconscious of the passage of time, he was roused only by the pausing of the tonga and its escort before the Gateway of the Elephants—the main octroi gate in the northern wall of the city. There ensued a brief interchange of formalities between the sergeant of his escort and the captain of the Quarter Guard. Then the tonga was permitted to pass out, and for five minutes rattled and clattered along the border of the lake, stopping finally at the rest-house.

Alighting in the compound, Amber disbursed a few rupees to the troopers, paid off Ram Nath—who was swift to drive off city-wards, in mad haste lest the gates be shut upon him for the night—and entered the bungalow. An aged, talkative, and amiable khansamah met him at the threshold with expressions of exaggerated respect, no doubt genuine enough, and followed him, a mumbling shadow, as the Virginian made a brief round of inspection.

Standing between the road and the water, the rest-house proved to be moderately spacious and clean; on the lake-front it opened upon a marble bund, or landing-stage, its lip lapped by whispering ripples of the lake. Amber went out upon this to discover, separated from him by little more than half a mile of black water, the ghostly white walls of the Raj Mahal climbing in dim majesty to the stars. A single line of white lights outlined the topmost parapet; at the water's edge a single marble entrance was aglow; between the two, towers and terraces, hanging gardens and white scarp-like walls rose in darkened confusion unimaginable—or, rather, fell like a cascade of architecture, down the hillside to the lake. A dark hive teeming with the occult life of unnumbered men and women—Salig Singh the inscrutable and strong, Naraini the mysterious, whose loveliness lived a fable in the land, and how many thousand others—living and dying, working and idling, in joy and sadness, in hatred and love, weaving forever that myriad-stranded web of intrigue which is the life of native palaces ...

The Virginian remained long in rapt wondering contemplation of it, until the wind blowing across the waters had chilled him to the point of shivering; when he turned indoors to his bed. But he was to have little rest that night. The khansamah who attended him had hardly turned low his light when Amber was disturbed by the noise of an angry altercation in the compound. He arose and in dressing-gown and slippers went to investigate, and found Ram Nath in violent dispute with the sergeant of the escort—which, it appeared, had builded a fire and camped round it in the compound: a circumstance which furnished food for thought.

Amber began to suspect that the troops had been furnished as a guard less of honour than of espionage, less in formal courtesy than in demonstration of the unsleeping vigilance of the Eye—kindly assisted by the Maharana of Khandawar.

A man who, warmed by the ardour of his first love, feels suddenly the shadow of death falling cold upon him, is apt to neglect nothing. Amber considered that he had given Ram Nath no commission of any sort, and bent an attentive ear to the communication which the tonga-wallah insisted upon making to him.

Ram Nath had returned, he asserted, solely for the purpose of informing Amber in accordance with his desires. "The telegraph-office for which you enquired, sahib, stands just within the Gateway of the Elephants," he announced. "The telegraph-babu will be on duty very early in the morning, should you desire still to send the message."

"Oh, yes," said Amber indifferently. "I'd forgotten. Thanks."

He returned to his charpoy with spirits considerably higher. Ram Nath had not winked this time, but the fact was indisputable that Amber had not expressed any interest whatever in the location of the telegraph-office.

Wondering if the telegraph-babu by any chance wore pink satin, he dozed off on the decision that he would need to send a message the first thing in the morning.

Some time later he was a second time awakened by further disputation in the compound. The troopers were squabbling amongst themselves; he was able to make this much out in spite of the fact that the sepoys, recruited exclusively from the native population of Khandawar, spoke a patois of Hindi so corrupt that even an expert in Oriental languages would experience difficulty in trying to interpret it. Amber did not weary himself with the task, but presently lifted up his voice and demanded silence, desiring to be informed if his sleep was to be continually broken by the bickerings of sons of mothers without noses. There followed instantaneous silence, broken by a chuckle and an applausive "Shabash!" and nothing more.

Amber snuggled down again upon his pillow and soothed himself with the feel of the pistol that his fingers grasped beneath the clothes.

A bar of moonlight slipped through the blinds and fell athwart his eyes. He cursed it bitterly and got up and moved his charpoy into shadow. The sibilant lisping of the wavelets against the bund sang him softly toward oblivion ... and a convention of water-fowl went into stormy executive session out in the middle of the lake. This had to be endured, and in time Amber's senses grew numb to the racket and he dropped off into a fitful doze....

Footfalls and hushed voices in the bungalow were responsible for the next interruption. Amber came to with a start and found himself sitting up on the edge of the charpoy, with a dreamy impression that two people had been standing over him and had just left the room, escaping by way of the khansamah's quarters. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes and went out to remonstrate vigorously with the khansamah. The latter naturally professed complete ignorance of the visitation and dwelt with such insistence upon the plausibility of dreams that Amber lost patience and kicked him grievously, so that he complained with a loud voice and cast himself at the sahib's feet, declaring that he was but as the dust beneath them and that Amber was his father and mother and the light of the Universe besides. In short, he raised such a rumpus that some of the sepoys came in to investigate and—went out again, hastily, to testify to their fellows that the hazoor was a man of fluent wrath, surprisingly versed in the art and practice of abuse.

Somewhat mollified and reflecting, at the same time, that this was all but a part of the game, to be expected by those who patronise rest-houses off the beaten roads of travel, the Virginian returned to his charpoy and immediately lapsed into a singularly disquieting dream.... He was strolling by the border of the lake when a coot swam in and hailed him in English; and when he stopped to look the coot lifted an A.D.T. messenger-boy's cap and pleaded with him to sign his name in a little black book, promising that, if he did so, it would be free to doff its disguise and be Labertouche again. So Amber signed "Pink Satin" in the book and the coot stood up and said, "I'm not Labertouche at all, but Ram Nath, and Ram Nath is only another name for Har Dyal Rutton, and besides you had better come away at once, for the Eye thou dost wear upon thy finger never sleeps and it's only a paste Token anyway." Hearing which, Amber caught the coot by the leg and found that he had grasped the arm of Salig Singh, whose eyes were both monstrous emeralds without any whites whatever. And Salig Singh tapped him on the shoulder and began to say over and over again in a whisper...

But here Amber another time found himself wide awake and sitting up, his left hand gripping the wrist of a native and his right holding his pistol steadily levelled at the native's breast. While the voice he heard was real and no figment of a dream-mused imagination; for the man was whispering earnestly and repeatedly:

"Hasten, hazoor, for the night doth wane and the hour is at hand."

"What deviltry's this?" Amber demanded sharply, with a threatening gesture.

But the native neither attempted to free himself nor to evade the pistol's mouth. "Have patience, hazoor," he begged earnestly, "and make no disturbance. It is late and the sepoys sleep; if you will be circumspect and are not afraid—"

"Who are you?"

"I was to say, 'I come from you know whom,' hazoor."

"That all?"

"In the matter of a certain photograph, hazoor."

"By thunder!" Labertouche's name was on Amber's lips, but he repressed it. "Wait a bit." He gulped down the last dregs of sleep. "Let me think and—see."

This last was an afterthought. As it came to him he dropped the pistol by his side and felt for matches in the pocket of his coat, which hung over the back of a bedside chair. Finding one, he struck it noiselessly and, as the tiny flame broadened, drew his captive nearer.

It was a fat, mean, wicked face that stood out against the darkness: an ochre-tinted face with a wide, loose-lipped mouth and protruding eyes that blinked nervously into his. But he had never seen it before.

"Who are you?" He cast away the match as its flame died and snatched up his weapon.

"I was to say—"

"I heard that once. What's your name?"

"Dulla Dad, hazoor."

"And who are you from?"

"Hazoor, I was not to say."

"I think you'd better," suggested Amber, with grim significance.

"I am the hazoor's slave. I dare not say."

"Now look here—"

"Hazoor, it was charged upon me to say, 'I come from you know whom.'"

"The devil it was.... Well, what do you want?"

"I was to say, 'Hasten, hazoor, for the night—"

"I've heard that, too. You mean you're to lead me to somebody, somewhere—you can't say where?"

"Aye, hazoor, even so."

"Get over there, in the corner, while I think this over—and don't move or I'll make you a present of a nice young bullet, Dulla Dad."

"That is as Allah wills; only remember, hazoor, the injunction for haste."

The man, a small stunted Mohammedan, sidled fearsomely over to the spot indicated and waited there, cringing and supplicating Amber with eloquent gestures. The Virginian watched him closely until comforted by the reflection that, had murder been the object, he had been a dead man long since. Then he put aside the revolver and began to dress.

"Only Labertouche would have to communicate with me by such stealth," he considered. "Besides, that reference to the photograph—"

He slipped hurriedly into his clothing and ostentatiously dropped the pistol into his right-hand coat-pocket. "I'm ready," he told the man. "Lead the way; and remember, if there's any treachery afoot, you'll be the first to suffer for it, Dulla Dad."

The Mohammedan bowed submissively. "Be it so, my lord," he said in Hindi, and, moving noiselessly with unshod feet, glided through the door which opened upon the bund, Amber close behind him.

That it was indeed late was shown by the position of the moon; and the sweet freshness of early morning was strong in the keen air. The wind had failed and the lake stretched flawless from shore to shore, a sheet of untarnished silver. Over against them the palace slept, or seemed to sleep, in its miraculous beauty, glacier-like with its shining surfaces and deep, purple-shadowed crevasses. There were few lights visible in the city, and the quiet of it was notable; so likewise with the wards outside the walls and the lakeside palaces and villas. Only in a distant temple a drum was throbbing, throbbing.

In the water at their feet a light boat was gently nosing the marble bund. Dulla Dad, squatting, drew it broadside to the steps and motioned Amber to enter. The Virginian boarded it gingerly, seating himself at the stern. Dulla Dad dropped in forward and pushed off. The boat moved out upon the bosom of the lake with scarce a sound, and the native, grasping a double-bladed paddle, dipped it gently and sent the frail craft flying onward with long, swift, and powerful strokes, guiding it directly toward the walls of the Raj Mahal.

Two-thirds of the way across the Virginian surrendered to his mistrust and drew his pistol. "Dulla Dad," he said gently; and the man ceased paddling with a shudder—"Dulla Dad, you're taking me to the palace."

"Yea, hazoor; that is true," the native answered, his voice quavering.

"Who awaits me there? Answer quickly!"

"Hazoor, it is not wise to speak a name upon the water, where voices travel far."

"Dulla Dad!"

"Hazoor, I may not say!"

"I think, Dulla Dad, you'd better. If I lose patience—"

"Upon my head be your safety, hazoor! See, you can fire, and thereafter naught can trouble me. But I, with a single sweep of this paddle, can overturn us. Be content, hazoor, for a little time; then shall you see that naught of harm is intended. My life be forfeit if I speak not truth, hazoor!"

"You have said it," said Amber grimly, "Row on." After all, he considered, it might still be Labertouche. At first blush it had seemed hardly credible that the Englishman could have gained a footing in that vast pile; and yet, it would be like him to seek precisely such a spot—the very heart of the conspiracy of the Gateway, if they guessed aright.

The boat surged swiftly on, while again and again Amber's finger trembled on the trigger. Though already the white gleaming walls towered above him, it was not yet too late—not too late; but should he withdraw, force Dulla Dad to return, he might miss ... what? He did nothing save resign himself to the issue. As they drew nearer the moonlit walls he looked in vain for sign of a landing-stage, and wondered, the lighted bund that he had seen from over the water being invisible to him round an angle of the building. But Dulla Dad held on without a pause until the moment when it seemed that he intended to dash the boat bows first against the stone; then, with a final dextrous twist of the paddle, he swung at a sharp angle and simultaneously checked the speed. Under scant momentum they slid from moonlight and the clean air of night into a close well between two walls, and then suddenly beneath an arch and into a cavernous chamber filled with the soft murmuring of water—and with darkness.

Here the air was sluggish and heavy and dank with the odour of slime. Breathing it, seeing nothing save the spectral gleam of moonlight reflected inwards, hearing nothing save the uncanny lapping and purring of the ripples, it was not easy to forget the tales men told of palace corruption and crime—of lovers who had stolen thus secretly to meet their mistresses, and who had met, instead, Death; of assassins who had skulked by such stealthy ways to earn blood-money; of spies, of a treacherous legion who had gained entry to the palace by such ways as this—perhaps had accomplished their intent and returned to tell the tale, perhaps had been found in the dawn-light, floating out there on the lake with drawn, wan faces upturned to the pallid skies....

"Hazoor!"

It was Dulla Dad's voice, sleek with fawning. For all the repulsiveness of the accents, Amber was not sorry to hear them. At least the native was human and ... this experience wasn't, hardly.... He leaned toward the man, eyes aching with the futile strain of striving to penetrate the blackness. He could see nothing more definite than shadows. The boat was resting motionless on the tide, as if suspended in an abyss of night, fathomless and empty.

"Well, what now?" he demanded harshly. "Be careful, Dulla Dad!"

"Still my lord distrusts me? There is naught to fear, none here to lift hand against you. Your servant lives but to serve you in all loyalty."

"Indeed?"

"My lord may trust me."

"It seems to me I have—too far."

"My lord will not forget?"

"Be sure of that, Dulla Dad.... Well, what are you waiting for?"

"We are arrived, hazoor," said the native calmly. "If you will be pleased to step ashore, having care lest you overturn the boat, the steps are on your left."

"Where?... Oh!" Amber's tentative hand, groping in obscurity, fell upon a slab of stone, smooth and slippery, but solid. "You mean here?"

"Aye, hazoor."

"And what next?"

"I am to wait to conduct you back to your place of rest."

"Um-m. You are, eh?" Amber, doubtful, tried the stone again; it was substantial enough; only the boat rocked. He struck a match; the short-lived flame afforded him a feeble, unsatisfactory impression of a long, narrow, vaulted chamber, whereof the floor was half water, half stone. There was a landing to the left, a rather narrow ledge, with a low, heavy door, bossed with iron, in the wall beyond.

Shaking his head, he lifted himself cautiously out of the boat. "You stay right there, Dulla Dad," he warned the native, "until I see what happens. If I catch you trying to get away—the boat'll show up nicely against the opening, you know—I'll give you cause for repentance."

"I am here, hazoor. Turn you and knock upon the door thus"—rapping the gunwale of the boat—"thrice."

Amber obeyed, wrought up now to so high a pitch of excitement and suspense that he could hardly have withdrawn had he wished to and been able to force Dulla Dad to heed him. As he knuckled the third signal, the door swung slowly inward, disclosing, in a dim glow of light, stone walls—a bare stone chamber illumined by a single iron lamp hanging in chains from the ceiling. Across the room a dark entry opened upon a passageway equally dark.

By the door a servant stood, his attitude deferential. As the Virginian's gaze fell upon him he salaamed respectfully.

Amber entered, his eyes quick, his right hand in his pocket and grateful for the cold caress of nickelled steel, his body poised lightly and tensely upon the balls of his feet—in a word, ready. Prepared against the worst he was hopeful of the best: apprehensive, he reminded himself that he had first met Labertouche under auspices hardly more prepossessing than these.

The clang of the door closing behind him rang hollowly in the stillness. The warder moved past him to the entrance of the corridor. Amber held him with a sharp question.

"Am I to wait here?"

"For a moment, Heaven-born!" He disappeared.

Without a sound a door at Amber's elbow that had escaped his cursory notice, so cunningly was it fitted in the wall, swung open, and a remembered voice boomed in his ears, not without a certain sardonic inflection: "Welcome, my lord, welcome to Khandawar!"

Amber swung upon the speaker with a snarl. "Salig Singh!"

"Thy steward bids thee welcome to thy kingdom, hazoor!"

Dominating the scene with his imposing presence—a figure regal in the regimentals of his native army—the Rajput humbled himself before the Virginian, dropping to his knee and offering his jewelled sword-hilt in token of his fealty.

"Oh, get up!" snapped Amber impatiently. "I'm sick of all this damned tomfoolery. Get up, d'you hear?—unless you want me to take that pretty sword of yours and spank you with it!"

A quiver, as of self-repression, moved the body of the man at his feet; then, with a jangle of spurs, Salig Singh leaped up and stood at a distance of two paces, his head high, his black eyes glittering ominously with well-nigh the sinister brilliance of his vibrating emerald aigrette.

"My lord!" he cried angrily. "Are these words to use to one who offers thee his heart and hand? Is this insolence to be suffered by a Rajput, a son of Kings?"

"As for that," returned Amber steadily, giving him look for look, "your grandfather was a bunia and you know it. Whether or not you're going to 'suffer' what you call my insolence, I don't know, and I don't much care. You've made a fool of me twice, now, and I'm tired of it. I give you my word I don't understand why I don't shoot you down here and now, for I believe in my heart you're the unholiest scoundrel unhung. Is that language plain enough for you?"

For an instant longer they faced one another offensively, Amber cool enough outwardly and inwardly boiling with rage that he should have walked into the trap with his eyes open, Salig Singh trembling with resentment but holding himself in with splendid restraint.

"As for me," continued Amber, "I suspect I'm the most hopeless ass in the three Presidencies, if that's any comfort to you, Salig Singh. Now what d'you want with me?"

A shadowy smile softened the blackness of the Rajput's wrath. He shrugged and moved his hands slightly, exposing their palms, subtly signifying his submission.

"Thou art my overlord," he said quietly, with a silky deference. "In time thou wilt see how thou hast wronged me. For the present, I remain thy servant. I harbour no resentment, I owe thee naught but loyalty. I await thy commands."

"The dickens you do!" Amber whistled inaudibly, his eyes narrowing as he pondered the man. "You protest a lot, Salig Singh. If you're so much at my service ... why, prove it."

By way of reply Salig Singh lifted his sword in its scabbard from its fastenings at his side and, with a magnificent gesture, cast it clanking to the floor between them. A heavy English army-pattern revolver followed it. The Rajput spread out his hands. "Thou art armed, my lord," he said, "I, at thy mercy. If thou dost misjudge my purpose in causing thee to be brought hither, my life is in thy hands."

"Oh, yes." Amber nodded. "That's very pretty. But presuming I chose to take it?"

"Thou art free as the winds of the morning. See, then." Salig Singh strode to the outer door and threw it open. "The way of escape is clear—not even locked."

The lamplight fell across the stone landing and made visible the waiting boat with Dulla Dad sitting patiently at the oar.

"I see," assented Amber. "Well?"

Salig Singh shut the door gently. "Is there more to say?" he enquired. "I have shown thee that thou art free."

"Oh, so far as that goes, you've demonstrated pretty clearly that you're not afraid of me. Of course I know as well as you do that at the first shot Dulla Dad would slip out to the lake and leave me here to die like a rat in a corner."

"Thou knowest, lord, that no man in Khandawar would do thee any hurt. Thy person is sacred—"

"That's all bosh. You don't expect me to believe that you still stick to that absurd fiction of yours—that I'm Rutton?"

"Then mine eyes have played me false, hazoor. Shabash!" Salig Singh bowed resignedly.

"Well, then, what do you want? Why have you brought me here?"

"Why didst thou come? There was no force used: thou didst come of thine own will—thine own will, which is the will of the Body, hazoor!"

"Oh, damnation! Why d'you insist on beating round the bush forever? You know well why I came. Now, what do you want?"

"My lord, I move, it seems, in the ways of error. A little time ago the words of the Voice were made known to thee in a far land; thou didst answer, coming to this country. A few days agone I myself did repeat to you the message of the Bell; thou didst swear thou wouldst not answer, yet art thou here in Kuttarpur. Am I to be blamed for taking this for a sign of thy repentance?... Hazoor, the Body is patient, the Will benignant and long-suffering. Still is the Gateway open."

"Is that what you wanted to tell me, Salig Singh?"

"What else? Am I to believe thee a madman, weary of life, that thou shouldst venture hither with a heart hardened against the Will of the Body? I seek but to serve thee in thus daring thy displeasure. Why shouldst thou come to Bharuta [Footnote: India.] at all if thou dost not intend to undergo the Ordeal of the Gateway? Am I a fool or—I say it in all respect, my lord—art thou?"

"From the look of things, I fancy the epithet fits us both, Salig Singh. You refuse to take my word for it that I know nothing of your infamous Gateway and have no intention of ever approaching it, that I have not a drop of Indian blood in me and am in no way related to or connected with Har Dyal Rutton, who is dead—"

"I may not believe what I know to be untrue."

"You'll have to learn to recognise the truth, I'm afraid. For the final time I tell you that I am David Amber, a citizen of the United States of America, travelling in India on purely personal business."

The Rajput inclined his head submissively. "Then is my duty all but done, hazoor. Thrice hath the warning been given thee. There be still four-and-twenty hours in which, it may be, thou shalt learn to see clearly. My lord, I ask of thee a single favour. Wilt thou follow me?" He motioned toward the arched entrance to the passageway.

"Follow thee?" Amber at length dropped into Urdu, unconsciously adopting the easier form of communication now that, he felt, the issue between them was plain, that the Rajput laboured under no further misunderstanding as to the reason of his presence in Khandawar. "Whither?"

"There is that which I must show thee."

"What?"

"My life be forfeit if thou dost not return unharmed to the rest-house ere sunrise. Wilt thou come?"

"To what end, Salig Singh?"

"Furthermore," the Rajput persisted stubbornly, his head lifted in pride and his nostrils dilated a little with scorn—"furthermore I offer thee the word of a Rajput. Thou are my guest, since thou wilt have it so. No harm shall come to thee, upon my honour."

Curiosity triumphed. Amber knew that he had exacted the most honoured pledge known in Rajputana. His apprehensions were at rest; nothing could touch him now—until he had returned to the bungalow. Then, he divined, it was to be open war—himself and Labertouche pitted against the strength of the greatest conspiracy known in India since the days of '57. But for the present, no pledge of any sort had been exacted of him.

"So be it," he assented on impulse. "I follow."

With no other word Salig Singh turned and strode down the corridor.



CHAPTER XV

FROM A HIGH PLACE

The passageway was long and dark and given to sudden curves and angles, penetrating, it seemed, the very bowels of the Raj Mahal. It ended unexpectedly in a low arch through which the two men passed into an open courtyard, apparently given over entirely to stables. Despite the lateness of the hour it was tenanted by several wideawake syces, dancing attendance upon a pair of blooded stallions of the stud royal, who, saddled, bridled and hooded, pawed and champed impatiently in the centre of the yard, making it echo with the ringing of iron on stone and the jingling of their silver curb-chains.

Salig Singh paused, with a wave of his hand calling Amber's attention to the superb brutes.

"Thou canst see, hazoor, that all is prepared!"

"For what?"

But Salig Singh merely smiled enigmatically, and shaking a patient head, passed on.

A second arch gave upon a corridor which led upwards and presently changed into a steep flight of steps, of ancient stone worn smooth and grooved with the traffic of generations of naked feet. At the top they turned aside and passed through a deserted hanging garden, and then, through a heavy door which Salig Singh unlocked with a private key, into a vast, vacant room, with a lofty ceiling supported by huge, unwieldy pillars of stone, sculptured with all the loves and wars of Hindu mythology. At one end the fitful, eerie flare of a great bronze brazier revealed the huge proportions of an ivory throne, gorgeous with gems and cloth of gold, standing upon a dais and flanked by two motionless figures which at first sight Amber took to be pieces of statuary. But they quickened, saluting with a single movement and a flash of steel, as the Maharana drew nearer, and so proved themselves troopers of the State, standing guard with naked swords.

"There is no need, perhaps, to tell thee, hazoor," Salig Singh muttered, bending to Amber's ear, "that sitting upon this throne, in this Hall of Audience, for generations thy forefathers ruled this land, making and administering its laws, meting out justice, honoured of all men—and served, my lord, for generations by my forebears, the faithful stewards of thy House; even as I would prove faithful...."

"Interesting," Amber interrupted brusquely, "if true. Is this what you wanted to show me?"

"Nay, hazoor, not this alone. Come."

The Rajput led him out of the hall by way of a small doorway behind the throne, and after a little turning and twisting through tortuous passages they began to ascend again, and so went on up, ever upwards, the flights of steps broken by other corridors, other apartments, other galleries and gardens, until at length they emerged into a garden laid out in the very topmost court of all—the loftiest spot in all Kuttarpur.

It was a very wonderful garden, a jungle of exotic plants and shrubs threaded by narrow walks that led to secluded nooks and unsuspected pleasaunces, and lighted by low-swung festoons of dim lamps, many-coloured. A banian grew curiously in its midst, and there also they found a great tank of crystal water with a bed of brilliant pebbles over which small golden gleaming fish flashed and loitered. Here, where the walls of acacia, orange, thuia and pepal shut out every breath of wind, the air was dense with the cloying sweetness of jasmine, musk and marigold....

"My lord," said the Maharana, pausing, "if thou wilt wait here for a little, permitting me to excuse myself—?"

"All right," Amber told him tolerantly. "Run along."

Salig Singh quietly effaced himself, and the American watched him go with an inward chuckle. "I presume I'll have to pay for my impudence in the end," he thought; "but it's costing Salig Singh a good deal to hold himself in." He was for the time being not ill-pleased with this phase of his adventure; he had a notion that this must be a sort of very private pleasure-ground of the rulers of Khandawar, and that very few, if any, white people had ever been permitted to inspect it. What the Maharana's next move would be he had not the least suspicion; but since he must be content and abide the developments as they came, he was minded to amuse himself. He moved away from the cistern, idling down a path in a direction opposite that taken by Salig Singh.

An abrupt turn brought him to the outer wall, and he stopped to gaze, leaning upon the low marble balustrade.

From his feet the wall fell away sheer, precipitous, a hundred feet or more, to another hanging garden like that which lay behind him. From this there was another stupendous drop. On all sides the marble walls spread over the hillsides, descending it in great strides broken by terraces, gardens, paved courts, all white and silver and deep violet shadow, with here and there a window glowing softly yellow or a web of saffron rays peeping through the intricacies of a carved stone lattice. Far below, on the one hand, the lake lay like a sheet of steel; on the other the city stretched, a huddle of flat roofs not unlike an armful of child's building blocks. At that great height the effect was that of peering over the upper lip of an avalanche of masonry on the point of tumbling headlong down a mountainside to crush all beneath it.

In the hush there rose to Amber a muted confusion of sounds—the blended voices of the multitude that inhabited the hidden chambers of the palace: the pawing and shrill neighing of the stallions in the lower courtyard, a shivering clash of steel against steel, somewhere the tinkle of a stringed instrument and a soft voice singing, a man's accents weighty with authority, the ripple of a woman's laugh—all relieved against an undertone like a profound sigh, waning and waxing: the breathing of the Raj Mahal ...

Amber turned away to rejoin Salig Singh by the cistern. But the Rajput was not there; and, presently, another path tempting him to unlawful exploration, he yielded and sauntered aimlessly away. A sudden corner cloaked with foliage brought him to a little open space, a patch of lawn over which a canopy had been raised. Beneath this, a woman sat alone. He halted, thunderstruck.

Simultaneously, with a soft swish of draperies, a clash of jewelled bracelets, dull and musical, and a flash of coruscating colour, the woman stood before him, young, slender, graceful, garbed in indescribable splendour—and veiled.

For the space of three long breaths the Virginian hesitated, unspeakably amazed. Though she were veiled, it were deep dishonour for a woman of a Rajput's household to be seen by a stranger. It seemed inexplicable that Salig Singh should have wittingly left him in any place where he might encounter an inmate of the zenana. Yet the Maharana must have known.... Amber made an irresolute movement, as if to go. But it was too late.

With a murmur, inaudible, and a swift, infinitely alluring gesture, the woman swept the veil away from her face, and looked him squarely in the eyes. She moved toward him slowly, swaying, as graceful as a fawn, more beautiful than any woman he had ever known. His breath caught in his throat, for sheer wonder at this incomparable loveliness.