The Hermit Doctor of Gaya: A Love Story of Modern India
what I tell you in a brace of shakes, Siva will be a joke by
comparison."
The panic broke. The old headman crept out and cringed before him,
offering excuses. Tristram waved him on one side.
"Get on with it!" he said, between his teeth.
He went from hut to hut, directing, ordering, disinfecting, patient and
imperturbable, infinitely gentle. And all night soft-footed processions
with their grim burdens made their way out to the monstrous funeral pyre
which grew higher and higher. All that night and all through the
burning, blinding day to another night, and beyond that again, Tristram
drove Death back step by step from his mauled and helpless victims,
bringing peace into a hell of suffering. Three nights and three days.
And on the fourth night he reeled back to the encampment beneath the
trees and dropped down with his face in the long grass, and lay there
inert as death itself.
And for three days and nights again Ayeshi sat beside him, tending him
and listening to the muttered reiteration of a woman's name.
*CHAPTER XII*
*IN WHICH FORTUNE PLEASES TO JEST*
The Rajah Rasaldu was in his element. By sheer force of merit, he
occupied the stage to the almost complete exclusion of every other
player. Gaya hung on his movements, gasped--as much as Gaya ever
gasped--over the reckless twists and turns of his wonderful ponies, and
applauded the grace and apparent ease with which he broke the defence
and sent the ball spinning between the posts. For, strange to relate,
Rasaldu could play polo. Flabby and unheroic as he was on all other
occasions, once in the saddle, he developed into an iron-wristed,
cool-headed strategist. What was more, he played for his side and not
for himself. Men who went into the game disparaging his fatuous conceit
and equally fatuous humility, loved him after the first ten minutes of
brilliant, unselfish play, and the glow of affection usually lasted for
twenty-four hours after he had won for his side. Then they tolerated
him again until the next challenge came along.
Rasaldu revelled like a child in Gaya's good graces. There was something
almost winning in his wide smile of pleasure, as after the first
_chukka_ he came over to the select group under the awning and received
feminine Gaya's congratulations. Had he not played such a daring game
he would have cut rather a comic figure. His riding-clothes, taken in
juxtaposition with his dark chubby face, were wonderfully and terribly
English, and his brown boots, very new and very brown, shone almost too
beautifully. Between him and the turbaned soldiery crowded against the
ropes there was a gulf of false Europeanism of which the latter seemed
curiously conscious. They alone had not applauded, him in his bold
assault on the enemy, and they stared at him now with an
expressionlessness which, translated, equalled distrust and contempt.
Meantime, Rasaldu chatted with the volubility of success and
self-confidence. He chose to address himself chiefly to Mary Compton,
but from time to time his moist brown eyes shot an eager glance at
Sigrid Fersen, seeking her smile, a meed of well-earned admiration. He
was a little afraid of her. She was not in the least beautiful, and she
undoubtedly owed her position in Gaya to his generous patronage, facts
which of themselves should have sustained him in her presence. But the
quiet, imperious self-belief with which she had silenced alike criticism
and opposition and compelled rigid Gaya to accept her and her standards,
shook Rasaldu's self-complacency. It was for that very reason, and also
because Gaya had mysteriously collapsed before her, that Rasaldu hovered
about her with the helpless and protesting infatuation of a moth for a
naked light.
And now today there was added to this emotion the heat and intoxication
of his own prowess, and the consciousness that, if she was not
beautiful, she possessed something much more vital than beauty--the
mysterious force of temperament which through all time has made plain
women more dangerous, more powerful in the destiny of nations than women
endowed with all physical perfection. Rasaldu had no talent for
analysing temperaments, but he could analyse certain obvious factors in
her charm--the pale gold hair, the perfect skin, unprotected by powder,
the svelte, tiger-like grace and strength of her reposing body. Above
all, he could analyse clothes. Gaya's women-folk, none too well blessed
with money, lived in London's last year's creations and the clumsy
imitations of the native tailors. But this simple white dress of some
clinging, shimmering material, unknown to Gaya, and this simple straw
hat almost unadorned, came from Paris. Rasaldu, who knew his Paris,
knew that much. And, as a man worships a token from his native soil, so
he worshipped Sigrid Fersen.
And presently he ventured to address her directly.
"Now you have seen what is best in India!" he said.
"The Rajah Rasaldu playing polo?" she asked, smilingly.
"You are unkind, Mademoiselle," he answered, with the hurt sensitiveness
of a snubbed child.
"I did not mean to be unkind. There are so many wonderful things in
India, Rajah, that I hesitated a moment to endorse your opinion.
Still--yes, it was a fine sight. You should always play polo, Rajah. It
suits you better than feting prima ballerinas in London restaurants."
He looked at her and saw that she was serious, and her seriousness
mitigated the dubiousness of her compliment. He would have preferred it
in the reversed sense, but he had to take what was offered him.
"I was not really alluding to myself at all," he said, naively, "but to
the game. The game's the thing."
"Yes--and the man who plays it," she answered. She was smiling faintly,
and he indulged in a flattered self-consciousness until he realized that
the smile was a reminiscent one, and that she was looking through him to
some invisible picture of her thoughts. Whereupon, Rasaldu hastily
reverted to Mrs. Compton, whom also he feared, but in a lesser degree.
Her tongue was sharp, but at least she did not attract him, and
consequently her powers of offence were of a less painful order.
Sigrid Fersen did not notice his dejection. She was looking at
Meredith, who at that moment had entered the awning. He still wore his
clerical clothes, having come straight from the little chapel, where
every afternoon he held his service. It was rare that more than one
person should represent the congregation. Sometimes he managed to
collect a few convert school-children, but always Anne Boucicault was
there, devout and trembling, her brown eyes following his every movement
with the reverence of a passionate believer in the initiated and
anointed priest. That hour in the day was very dear to Owen Meredith.
He believed that it was a religious ecstasy which flooded him as he
listened to her low voice give the responses--or at least a pure joy in
their fellowship in the one faith. He had not realized how lifeless and
empty his own prayers could be without the inspiration of her presence.
Now a kind of fear oppressed him--a fear of himself, a doubt in his own
spiritual integrity. For this afternoon, she had failed him and he had
failed himself. He had held the service, according to the law which he
had made for himself, sparing no detail, but his heart had been dead.
Now, as he saw her, it started to life again, to the knowledge of pain.
She sat beside Colonel Boucicault, and there was that in her attitude
which reminded Meredith of a frightened animal cowering under the threat
of the lash. All the charm of youth had been twisted out of her by some
invisible, iron-handed suffering. And without that charm, she was a
drab, colourless little soul, almost ugly. But Meredith did not see
that she was ugly, only that she was ill and unhappy. He thought he
understood. As he came and sat beside her, she shot a quick, frightened
glance at him.
"Father did not wish me to come," she said, in a hurried whisper. "He
was fearfully angry about some letter----"
More she could not say. And even that much would have been dangerous,
had not the man beside her been sunk in a sullen, inattentive brooding.
She dared say nothing of the appalling scene which had followed on the
receipt of that ominous official document, and which had left them
stupefied and bruised and sick. In the final phase, Boucicault had
forbidden her chapel attendance, not because he disapproved, or cared,
but because he knew that she wanted to escape him. And all the
afternoon he kept at her side, taking an ugly delight in her wincing,
broken subservience, and in the knowledge that he held her with him in
his self-created atmosphere of fear and hatred.
But Meredith believed he knew more of her pallor than she even hinted
at.
"I met Ayeshi on the way here," he said. "He gave me the news.
Tristram is on his way back."
"Yes--?" she queried, dully.
"He has been very ill. Ayeshi has come on ahead to prepare quarters for
him."
She was looking down at her hands. He could see how she fought to
control their trembling.
"If only we could have put him up--but we can't--father wouldn't--oh, it
is terrible to be so helpless."
"I told Ayeshi to bring him to my bungalow. I will let you know how he
is--and perhaps, later on, you could help. I know what a fine little
nurse you are----"
"You are very, very good, Owen----"
"I would be glad to do anything for him," he answered, without
significance. Then chancing to look up, he found that Sigrid Fersen's
eyes were fixed on him, and guessed that she had heard, or had wanted to
hear badly. For an instant, on behalf of Anne, he hated her again, and
the next he warmed towards her. She met his half-resentful stare as
frankly.
"I am so thankful he is safe," she said.
Mrs. Compton thereupon chimed in.
"If anything happened to Major Tristram, I should die of a broken
heart," she said, "--even if Archie divorced me for it."
She paid no attention to the laugh in which even Anne joined timidly.
She was looking at Colonel Boucicault, who had shifted his position like
a sleeper unpleasantly disturbed, but the remark which seemed on the
edge of her compressed lips was not destined to be uttered.
At that moment a bell announced the next _chukka_; a stir passed round
the enclosure and Mrs. Compton, who, in spirit, played a magnificent
game for Gaya, forgot Boucicault and Tristram in her stern concentration
on the field.
Rasaldu braced himself and turned with a smile to Sigrid. He felt more
confident. In a minute she would be forced to look at him, to admire
him, to acknowledge that he also "played the game."
"Wish me luck!" he begged cheerily.
"Return victorious!" she returned, in mock heroics. "For the victors,
Mrs. Compton and I have prepared a mighty feast in the gardens of the
dak-bungalow, and the vanquished shall sit afar off and partake only of
the crumbs of our graciousness. Be not among the vanquished, O Rajah!"
"To win the place of honour, I will make a goal every five minutes, or
perish," he boasted elatedly.
He swung himself on to the back of the pony which his groom held ready
for him, and with a flourish trotted to his place on the field.
Boucicault awoke then completely from his black brooding. He bent
forward, staring straight into Sigrid Fersen's face, his clenched teeth
shown in a smile that had in its mirthless, contained fury the elements
of insanity.
"You are a very great friend of Rajah Rasaldu, Miss Fersen," he said.
She looked at him steadily, measuring the quality of the challenge which
he had thrown down.
"Does friendship follow on acquaintance?" she questioned back. "In that