In the Next Room and Other Ghostly Tales
Date: 1891-12-31T22:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Ghost Stories; Supernatural Fiction; Paranormal fiction; Horror
Description: Stories touched with the uncanny; set in British colonial India during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Publisher: MobileRead.com
Rights: Public domain where copyright is “Life+80” or less, and in the USA.

IN THE NEXT ROOM
and Other Ghostly Tales

ALICE PERRIN

MobileRead Edition
2021

Alice Perrin (née Robinson, 15 July 1867 – 13 February 1934) was a British novelist who wrote about the British in colonial India. She became successful after the publication of her short ghost story collection East of Suez. Her writing has sometimes been compared to that of Rudyard Kipling.

Compilation by ECM. Contents originally published 1892 ~ 1917. This book is in the public domain where copyright is “Life+80” or less, and in the USA.

CONTENTS:

- In the Next Room
- Caulfield’s Crime
- The Packet of Letters
- The Bead Necklace
- The Tiger Charm
- Old Ayah
- The Miniature
- “Thirty Acres”
- The Impress
- The Admiral’s Dog
- The Palace of Snakes

IN THE NEXT ROOM

Long years after I had shaken the sandy soil of Usapore from my feet, I met a lady on board a P. & O. steamer to whom I told the story of Arnold.

“I could tell you a story about Usapore, too,” she said, “only nobody ever believes a word of it.”

“I would believe anything you told me,” I replied, “and anything about Usapore that was unpleasant. Tell me the story now, we have half-an-hour before dinner, and your husband is still playing whist.”

So she allowed herself to be persuaded, and it appeared that only the previous year “George,” her husband, who was a Bengal civilian, had been suddenly ordered to Usapore in the middle of the hot weather, and she, being a model wife, made prompt preparations to accompany him.

“And would you believe it,” she said, still sore at the recollection, “my cook and butler refused to come with me! I had been so kind to them, given them good wages, and clothes, and medicine, and everything they wanted, and I imagined they would never leave us. However, they did, and we had to rely on picking up others at Usapore. We had an awful journey, the heat, flies, and dust simply indescribable, and the dâk bungalow to end with. You must know what a ghastly little building that is.”

“Indeed, I do, ” I sighed in sympathy.

“Well, then, we could not get a house, every bungalow was occupied, and our predecessor had been a bachelor and chummed with some other men. So at last we had to take a ruin belonging to a native, that had been built in the old days long before the Mutiny. Perhaps you remember it? Down by the river.”

“I think I do,” I said, searching my memory; “but it was only occupied by natives then as far as I recollect.”

“It is pulled down now, I believe, and a good thing, too, for, in spite of what George or anyone else may say, that house was haunted!”

“Really!”

“Yes, and you shall hear all about it if you have the patience to listen.”

•   •   •   •   •

It was a rambling old stone building, with fairly good verandahs, but filthy dirty and very much out of repair. However, three of the rooms were quite habitable, which were really all we needed, as we only expected to remain in the place for about three months. We had brought our camp furniture with us, and were soon able to leave the miseries of the dâk bungalow. I had got a cook, but no khansamah (butler), and had almost made up my mind to do without one, when a man suddenly presented himself and his written characters and requested to be taken into our service. The characters were good and the man’s appearance respectable, so I engaged him.

The first night in our new quarters passed quietly enough, but the next morning, just after George had started for office, my ayah entered my room crying.

“Mem-sahib,” she whimpered, “do not keep the new khansamah. The watchman’s wife tells me—”

I interrupted her and said I would not listen to tales of the other servants, so she said no more, but all the same I felt a little curious, and in consequence observed the new man closely when he came for orders. There certainly certainly was something rather peculiar about him, though what I could not exactly say, and as I had no fault to find with him I dismissed him from my thoughts.

A fortnight passed away, and then one night I awoke very suddenly with a conviction that something had roused me. I first thought that the punkah had stopped, but found I was mistaken, and gradually I became aware of a sound in the drawing-room, out of which our bedroom opened, and I sat up to listen.

An indistinct murmur of two voices was going on in the next room, with something in the sound that was oddly familiar to me, though at the moment I could not name what it recalled to my mind. Thinking that for some reason the servants must have come into the house, I called out, but received no answer, neither did the low murmur cease.

I got out of bed, and, taking the hand-lamp from the dressing-table, I peered with it into the drawing-room. All was dark, and the noise suddenly stopped. I called two or three times, and the watchman, hearing me, came into the verandah. He declared nobody had been about, that all the servants, with the exception of himself and the punkah-coolies, were asleep in their quarters, and no one had entered the bungalow. I concluded I must have been dreaming, and went back to bed puzzled and restless.

The incident worried me so that I told my husband about it in the morning, and as he only said that it must have been the punkah-coolies talking, I dropped the subject to avoid argument. I saw him drive off to the Courts, and then sent for the khansamah to bring me his daily accounts.

He began reading them out in the usual nasal monotone, “soup – eggs – fowls,” etc., when it flashed across me in a second that this was what the sounds had reminded me of the previous night – a servant and his mistress going through the daily accounts. The murmur of the voices came back to me with redoubled distinctness, and I could only imagine that I had dreamt I was listening to myself taking down the items.

Two or three nights afterwards the same thing happened again. I woke up with a start, and instantly my thoughts reverted to my dream, but this time I was positive I was wide awake. Nevertheless, there was a low murmur of voices in the drawing-room. I could have sworn to its being a native giving in his accounts to his mistress, and I could even distinguish the woman’s voice as she acknowledged each item.

I woke George, then sprang out of bed, and rushed with the lamp to the drawing-room door, followed sleepily by my husband, but directly I entered the room not a sound was to be heard except the chirrup of a musk-rat as it scuttled round the walls.

“Dreaming again,” said George.

In spite of his unbelief I insisted on his going through all the rooms and verandahs with me, and even out into the garden, where we found the watchman asleep, and while the unlucky sleeper was being shaken and abused I went back to bed feeling somewhat small, but at the same time determined to leave no stone unturned until the mystery was solved.

With great difficulty, I persuaded George to stay awake for an hour, but to my intense annoyance we heard nothing. I began to doubt my own senses, and George made idiotic jokes about my having eaten cheese toast at dinner.

News came the next day of a disturbance in the district, and George was obliged to hurry off at a moment’s notice, making the best arrangements he could, as he did not expect to get back for the night.

The same evening I went for a long ride by myself, and returned rather late. I paused on my way through the drawing-room to turn up the shaded lamps, and as I did so I was surprised to see Eli Bux, the new khansamah, standing by my writing-table with a kitchen knife and an old account book in his hands. Then I saw him walk into my bedroom, and, calling his name, followed him. But when I entered the room he was not there.

I knew my eyes had not deceived me, or I particularly remarked that the man seemed to stoop a good deal, which I had never observed in him before. I called the ayah, and asked if Eli Bux had passed through my room, but she declared he had not. I sent her into the kitchen to inquire what he had been doing in the drawing-room, but she returned with the startling announcement that the khansamah had gone to the city early in the afternoon and had not yet returned.

The ayah naturally concluded that I should be vexed at the idea of his absenting himself just when dinner should have claimed his attention, and, seizing the opportunity, she once more burst forth into abuse of Eli Bux, but I snubbed her again, as in any case, it was none of her business.

I felt a little nervous when I went to bed that night, and lay sleepless for a long time, half expecting to hear the voices in the drawing-room, and hardly knowing whether I hoped or dreaded that I should do so. I wondered again if I had really heard them, or if they simply existed in my imagination. If the former, I felt that there must be something strange in connection with the house; if the latter, that I must be out of sorts and require a doctor’s advice.

I must at last have fallen into a doze, for I suddenly opened my eyes to see by the dim, lowered light of the lamp, the figure of a native man standing by my dressing-table with his back towards me. I caught sight of his face reflected in the glass. It was Eli Bux!

I watched him for about a minute, and saw that he was ransacking my dressing-table drawers and opening the various little boxes in which I kept pins and scraps of jewellery. He put his hand under the looking-glass, and I knew he was feeling for the rings and brooch I wore every day.

I was literally paralysed with fright, and felt as if I had been turned to stone, when the man looked into the mirror, and caught sight of my reflection, open-mouthed and horror-struck, watching him from the bed. He turned slowly round, and in his hand was a long, sharp knife.

I tried to scream, but my voice failed me, and we remained motionless, staring at one another. The punkah was still, and the mosquitoes were buzzing savagely round my bed. The man took a step towards me. Then another. His eyes glittered, and his fingers felt along the edge of the knife—

Suddenly a sound broke the stillness. The voices were in the drawing-room, and this time louder and clearer than they had ever been before. Eli Bux started, and looked wildly round. So he, too, could hear the voices. He listened for a second. Then an expression of abject terror crossed his face, and with a hoarse yell he rushed out into the verandah. I heard a muffled cry as of someone choking, followed by a heavy fall.

I felt sure he was murdering the punkah-coolies, and then my presence of mind returned. I sprang out of bed and ran into the drawing-room; all was quiet there again, not a sound to be heard. I ran through the hall and into the front verandah, where I called and shouted at the top of my voice, and stepped down on to the gravel path, meaning to make my way to the servants’ quarters. But I had hardly gone two yards when my heart again stood still with fear. I saw something moving in the deep shadow of the trees, and a pariah dog flitted past me in the moonlight, uttering a long, dismal howl.

It was more than my over-strung nerves could bear. Scarcely knowing what I was doing, I fled like a hunted creature back into the house, and had barely reached my room when I fell to the floor in a dead faint.

When I recovered consciousness it was broad daylight, and George and the doctor were bending over my bed, while the ayah stood weeping copiously in the background, expressing her firm conviction that I was quite dead.

When I had swallowed some brandy, and been made to keep quiet for an hour, I was strong enough to tell George my story, not forgetting the part that “the voices” had played. He heard me to the end with a grave face, and then told me that Eli Bux had been discovered dead in my verandah.

The watchman and the two coolies had been drugged, and on the ayah coming to call me in the morning, she had found the two coolies still in a heavy sleep, with the dead body of Eli Bux between them. My watch and rings were found in his pocket, and it was subsequently proved on examination that he had died from heart disease, from which he must have been suffering for years previously.

When I was better I called the ayah and gave her leave to tell me all she knew about the khansamah, and, delighted at obtaining a hearing, she poured forth a voluble tale as to Eli Bux having been an accomplished scoundrel, and added that his father had been a great deal worse. Then she paused, and I impatiently told her to continue.

“Surely the mem-sahib has heard what happened in this house?” she said, and when I shook my head she told me that the father of Eli Bux had been khansamah to a lady in that very bungalow when the Mutiny broke out, that her husband was shot while he was at his office, and that the butler cut his mistress’ throat in the drawing-room and ran off with all the jewellery and money he could find.

“And the watchman’s wife,” continued the ayah with relish, “says that Eli Bux had lots of that poor mem-sahib’s jewellery buried somewhere, given him by his old father when he lay dying.”

After this I felt I could stay in that horrible bungalow no longer. George did not believe the ayah’s story, and declared t was all a native yarn, but I know it was true, for I heard the spirit voices of that unfortunate woman and her murderer, and the man I saw in the drawing-room was the ghost of Eli Bux’s father. Those voices saved my life, for if Eli Bux had not heard them, and, knowing what they were, died of fright, he would have cut my throat.

My husband is still sceptical about the voices, for though he lived in the house for three months after I had gone, he never heard anything unusual.

CAULFIELD’S CRIME

Caulfield was the worse-tempered fellow I ever met, or even heard of, which is saying a good deal.

He was sulky and vindictive, as well as passionately violent; and yet he was a great friend of mine. People in Koorwallah said it didn’t speak well for me, and made remarks about “birds of a feather,” with much appreciation of their own discernment.

I suppose, now I come to think of it, that it perhaps may have looked odd for a young civilian like myself, newly landed in India, to be seen so constantly with a man who was senior major in his regiment, and getting on for twenty years older than I was.

Everyone wondered openly what we could find in common to make us such friends; they were sure we could not think alike on any one subject, and it afforded them food for a little uncharitable gossip, which is always a godsend in a second-class up-country station in the North-West Provinces.

No one in Koorwallah knew Caulfield well. Everybody seemed half afraid of him except myself, and there was no denying that he certainly was not the kind of man whose rooms one could walk into without asking and say “Hallo!” pick up a book or a paper, wander round, looking at the photographs of his sisters, or other fellows’ sisters, and then go out again. Not one of the subalterns in his regiment ever spoke to him voluntarily, none of the ladies liked him, they said he was so rude and disagreeable, and never accepted their invitations, and they were sure he had a history, which was very probable and not unusual.

As a matter of fact, he had only lately exchanged into the ——th Foot from a cavalry regiment, nobody knew why, nor did he volunteer any information, which deepened the air of mystery surrounding him.

As for myself, I had struck up a friendship with him almost immediately after my arrival in the station. His bungalow was next to mine. They were both ordinary little thatched and whitewashed bachelor’s houses, with narrow strips of verandah in front, where a servant was generally to be seen, either washing up plates and throwing the dirty water into the drive, or cleaning the lamps and anointing the floor with kerosene oil.

We each had an untidy square of compound, divided from the others by a dusty aloe hedge, in the roots of which lurked pink-nosed little mongooses, with their numerous and ever-increasing families.

There was very little work for me to do during the first two months while I was getting used to the language and the people, and I had ample time for sauntering over to Caulfield’s bungalow to examine, with intense interest, his enormous collection of skins and horns and other sporting trophies, which were enough to make any youngster who knew how to handle a gun turn green with envy. He would sit quietly smoking in his chair, and watch me wander round, touching all his favourite treasures, and listening to my voluble chatter with irritating stolidity. He never asked me to come, or pressed me to stay, and yet, in some inexplicable manner, I felt that my visits were not unwelcome to him, except on one or two memorable occasions, when I found him in his worst mood, and he turned me out with a promptitude which caused me to show my face at his door somewhat cautiously the next time I invaded his privacy.

He certainly could not have been called an agreeable companion, and, looking back over the stretch of years which divides those young days_ of mine from the present, I often wonder what strange fascination drew me so persistently to seek his company. He attracted and interested me, I had a craving to be thought well of by him. I told him petty details concerning my home and family, I read him my people’s letters, I confided to him that there was “a girl at home,” and I cannot remember receiving anything in the way of encouragement to continue, save an occasional grunt of acquiescence, and sometimes contempt.

He never asked me questions or told me anything about himself, and yet there was a quiet strength in his manner which gave one a secure feeling that whatever confidence was thrust upon him, it would not be betrayed, however ungraciously he might choose to receive it.

Caulfield never went to church. He generally spent his Sundays out shooting, always going off by himself, and returning with a magnificent bag. He had never been known to invite anyone to accompany him, for he was madly jealous on the subject of sport, and nothing made him more angry than to hear of another fellow having shot anything that might be called game. He seemed to look upon each jheel (a large tract of marsh) and every patch of hunting-ground, in the neighbourhood of Koorwallah as his own particular property.

So it may be understood that I was fully alive to the honour conferred on me, when he unexpectedly asked me to go out with him for a three days’ shoot. “I know of a string of jheels,” he said, “about thirty miles from here, where the duck and snipe ought to swarm. I saw the spot and marked it down, when I was out black-buck shooting, last week. I’ve made all arrangements for going out Saturday morning. You can come, too, if you like.”

Needless to say, I jumped at this offer. Caulfield had the reputation of being the best shot in the North-West Provinces. He knew instinctively where game was likely to be found. Good sport was almost a certainty in his company, and, as far as I knew, I was the only fellow he had ever voluntarily invited to go with him.

I boasted about it in the club that evening, and was mercilessly squashed by two or three men who would have given their ears to know the whereabouts of the string of jheels, but who jealously warned me to be careful that Caulfield wasn’t after big game, and that he did not begin the expedition by shooting me.

“He’d as soon shoot a man as anything else,” said our doctor, looking over his shoulder to make sure that Caulfield was not in the room. “I never met such a nasty, bad-tempered chap. I believe he’s mad!”

And the doctor went on with his billiards, feeling that this speech had wiped off a few old scores he had treasured up against Caulfield for sundry disagreeables which had passed between them.

I left all the arrangements of our expedition to Caultield. He requested me not to interfere when I began suggesting various things I considered might be useful; and after giving me to understand that I was to be his guest for the three days in question, he despatehed a couple of carts on the Friday with a tent wherein we were to eat and sleep, various provisions and cooking utensils, a pair of camp beds, and some servants, my bedding and bearer being my only contributions to the arrangements.

We rode out the thirty miles on Saturday morning, each having sent a fresh pony on half way, and by this means did the distance in about three hours and a half. Our tent was pitched in the midst of a patch of what is called dâk jungle, clusters of stunted-looking trees with thick, dry bark, and flat, shapeless leaves that clattered noisily against each other when stirred by the wind.

It was not a cheerful spot. The soil was principally usar, that is to say largely mixed with bitter salt which works its way to the surface, and prevents anything but the coarsest of vegetation growing in it. The ground was low and marshy, and the stillness of the air was only broken now and then by the discordant cries of the large jheel birds as they waded majestically in the patches of water in search of their breakfast of small fish.

Caulfield was a different man out there from what he had been in the station. He talked and laughed and acted showman with the most intense satisfaction. He led me away from amongst the stunted trees, and showed me a great sheet of water in the distance, broken in places by little bushy islands and dark patches of reeds, and a mud-coloured native village on the top of is mound overlooking the water at the extreme left.

It was still early, as we had started before six o’clock, and the sun had barely cleared away the thick, heavy mist, which was still rising here and there, and rapidly dispersing as the heat increased.

“Isn’t it a lovely spot!” said Caulfield, laughing. “Beyond that village the snipe ought to rise from the rice fields in thousands. There’s another jheel away to the right of this, and another joining that. We shan’t be able to shoot it all in three days, worse luck, and besides it’s too big really for only two guns. Come in to breakfast, we mustn’t lose time.”

An hour later, and we had started. Our guns over our shoulders and a couple of servants behind us carrying the cartridge bags and our luncheon.

We were both in good spirits. We felt we had the certainty of an excellent day’s shooting in prospect. But, alas! Luck was against us. The birds were unaccountably wild and few and far between. Someone had been there before us, was Caulfield’s verdict, delivered with disappointed rage, and after tramping and wading all day, we returned weary and crestfallen with only six teal and a mallard between us.

It was undoubtedly very provoking, but Caulfield seemed to take the matter much more to heart than there was any occasion to do. He was filled with hatred of the “scoundrels,” who had discovered his pet place and played havoc among the birds, and after dinner sat cursing his luck and the culprits who had spoilt our sport until we were both too sleepy to keep awake any longer, and after our long day of exercise in the open air we neither of us moved in our beds till we were called the next morning.

We had breakfast, and started off, taking a different direction from the previous day, but with no better luck. On and on, and round and round we tramped, with only an occasional shot here and there, scarcely worth mentioning.

At last, about three o’clock in the afternoon, we sat wearily down to eat our luncheon. I was ravenously hungry, and greedily devoured my share of the provisions, but Caulfield hardly ate a mouthful; he sat moodily examining his gun, and taking long pulls now and then at his flask of whiskey.

We were seated on the roots of a huge tamarind-tree, close to the village I had noticed on our arrival the morning before. We had been a very long round and had kept the yellow mud walls, on the top of the little mound, in sight as a landmark. The village was a mile or so from our camp, but there was still a good deal of ground to be shot over between the two.

The place seemed but poorly inhabited, and had a dreary, deserted look about it. Two very old women were sitting watching us with dim, weary eyes, leaning their bent backs against the crumbling mud wall, and a few naked children were playing near them, while one or two bigger boys were driving a herd of lean, bony cattle down towards the water.

Presently another figure came slowly in sight, and advanced towards us. It was a fakir or holy man, as was evident by the tawny masses of wool which were plaited in amongst his own black locks, and allowed to hang down on either side of his thin, sharp face, the ashes which covered his almost naked body, and the hollow gourd for alms which he held in one hand. His face was long and dog-like, and his pointed yellow teeth glistened in the sun as he demanded money in a dismal, monotonous kind of chant.

Caulfield flung a pebble at him and told him roughly to be off. The fakir fixed his wild, restless eyes on him for one moment with a look of bitter animosity, and then walked away, disappearing behind a clump of tall, feathery grass.

I felt in my pocket. I had no coins, or I should certainly have given the poor wretch whatever I might have had about me.

“Did you notice that brute’s face?” said Caulfield as we rose, preparatory to starting off again. “If there’s any truth in the doctrine of the transmigration of souls, he must have been a pariah dog in his former state. He was exactly like one!”

“A jackal more likely,” I said carelessly. “It was the face’ of a wild beast.”

Then we walked on again, skirting round the village, and plunging into the damp, soft rice fields. We put up a wisp of snipe which we followed till we had shot them nearly all, and then presently, to our joy, we heard a rush of wings overhead, and a lot of duck went down into a corner of the jheel ahead of us.

“We’ve got them,” whispered Caulfield in excitement, and we cautiously crept on till the birds were in sight, floating lazily on the still, cold water, pluming their feathers, and calling to one another in their fancied security.

“Now,” said Caulfield, crouching down behind the rushes. “Fire into the brown!”

We both raised our guns, and as our fingers were actually on the trigger, there was a mighty splash in the middle of the ducks,and rising with a whir-r-r, they were out of shot in a second.

Caulfield swore. So did I. And then we both turned to see what had caused the splash.

A little way behind us stood the fakir we had seen at luncheon-time. In one hand he was still holding the fragments of the clod of earth he had thrown into the water to warn the ducks of our approach.

Caulfield shook his fist at the man, and abused him freely in Hindustani, but without moving a muscle of his face he turned slowly and disappeared into the jungle.

Words would not describe Caulfield’s rage and disappointment.

“They were pintail, nearly all of ’em,” he said, “and the first decent chance we’ve had today. To think of that beastly fakir spoiling it all l What a devilish thing to do!”

“They hate anything being killed, you know,” I remarked consolingly, “and I expect there was some spite in it too, because you threw a stone at him.”

“Bosh!” said Caulfield. “Come along, we must make haste, it’ll be dark soon. I should like to try a place over by those palms before we knock off, but we may as well let the servants go back now, they’ve had a hard day. Have you got some cartridges in your pocket?”

“Yes, plenty,” I answered, and after despatching the two men back to the camp with what little game we had got, we turned to the right and walked in silence till we saw more water glistening between the rough stems of the palms, and in it, to our surprise and delight, a multitude of duck and teal.

With our guns in our hands, we quietly crept towards the water, holding our breath, and fearing that the slightest noise might awake the ducks’ suspicions.

The sun had begun to sink in a red ball, and there was a hush over the land as the air became heavy with damp, and the mist stole over the cold, still waters of the jheel. Overhead came the first faint cackle of the wild geese, returning home for the night.

Caulfield raised his gun first. He was taking a very steady aim into the middle of the fluttering brown mass of feathers.

Splash! Whir-r-r! A cloud of wings rose in front of us, and wheeled bodily to the right, and the air resounded with the cries of the startled birds.

Someone had thrown a heavy stone in amongst them just as Caulfield had been going to fire.

He turned round very deliberately and looked behind him. Following the direction of his eyes, I saw the long, lanky figure of the fakir, his yellow, jagged teeth and white eyeballs glistening in the pink glow of the setting sun, and a look of fiendish triumph and exultation on his face.

Then there was a loud report, and the next thing I saw was a quivering body on the ground, and wild, terrified eyes staring wide open at me in the agony of death. Caulfield had shot the fakir.

I shudder when I recall what followed.

The man had been shot through the heart, and died almost immediately, without a sound, save one long, harrowing sigh.

Caulfield stood looking down at what he had done, while I knelt by the body trying hopelessly to persuade myself that life was not extinct. He seemed half-dazed, and it was fully ten minutes before I was able to make him realize what had happened, and the necessity for prompt action.

“You know what it means,” he said, touching the body with his foot, “killing a native is no joke in these days. I should come out of it badly. You were witness that I deliberately shot that poor devil. What do you intend doing?”

He spoke in a hard, defiant voice, but there was anxiety written on every line of his features.

“Of course I’ll stick by you,” I said, after a moment’s silence, “nobody need ever know about – about this but ourselves, but we shall have to get rid of it.”

I gazed at the body with horror. The face, which was becoming rigid, looked more like that of an animal than ever. Caulfield shivered, and glanced uneasily round him.

“Look here,” I said, with an effort, “we can’t do anything this minute. We’d better hide it in that grass, and come back after dinner. We must get a spade or something of the kind.”

“Very well,” said Caulfield humbly. All his old masterful manner had disappeared, and he obeyed me like a child.

Then, when we had performed the repugnant task, and the body had been thrust into the thick grass and covered with clods of hard, dry soil, we walked back to our camp in silence.

I looked at Caulfield as we entered the lighted tent, and could not but feel compassion for him.

His diabolical temper had led him to commit this atrocious deed, and very bitter was the reaction.

He was white and shaking, and looked ten years older than when we had started out that morning.

I gave him some whiskey, and we both sat down and pretended to eat our dinner. We waited for half an hour afterwards, to prevent the servants noticing anything peculiar in our manner, and then I sent my bearer outside to see if the moon had risen.

“Yes, sahib,” he answered, coming back, “it is as light as day.”

During the few seconds of his absence, I had hastily filled the deep pocket of my overcoat with a stout hunting-knife, which I had packed amongst my traps in case we should get any buck shooting, and also a small kitchen chopper left lying on the floor by the bearer after hammering a stiff joint of my camp bed together. I dared not ask the servants for any kind of implement with which to dig.

We left the tent carelessly, as if we were going for a stroll, and found that it was, as the bearer had reported, “as light as day.” People who have never been out of England cannot readily imagine the brilliancy of Eastern moonlight. It is almost possible to read by it.

We walked slowly at first, but rapidly quickened our pace as we left the tent behind us, and we both breathed hard as we neared the spot we were making for. Caulfield stopped once or twice, and I half thought he meant to turn back and leave me to do the ghastly business alone. But he came on by my side and never spoke a word until we were close to the tall, coarse grass which hid the fakir’s body. Then he suddenly clutched my arm.

“God in Heaven!” he whispered, pointing forwards, “what is that?”

I thought he had gone out of his mind, and it was with difficulty that I refrained from shouting aloud.

The next moment I distinctly saw something moving exactly over the spot where we had concealed the body. I am not what is called a coward, but I must confess that I burst out into a cold perspiration.

There was a rustling in the grass, accompanied by a scraping sound, and Caulfield and I stepped forwards in desperation. I parted the grass with my hands and looked down. There, lying on the fakir’s body was a large jackal, grinning and snarling at having been disturbed over his hideous meal.

“Drive it away,” whispered Caulfield hoarsely.

But the brute refused to move. Silently it sat there showing its yellow teeth, and reminded me horribly of the wretched man that lay dead beneath its feet. I turned sick and faint.

Then Caulfield shouted at it, and shook the grass, and lifted one of the clods of soil to throw at it.

The jackal rose slowly, and began to slink away. It passed close enough for us both to notice that it was an unusually large animal for its kind, and moreover had lost one of its ears. Its coat was plentifully besprinkled with grey, and was rough and mangy.

For more than an hour we worked as if our lives depended on it, using the chopper and my hunting-knife, and being helped by a rift in the ground where the soil had been softened by water running from the jheel, and at last we stood up and stamped down the earth which now covered all traces of Caulfield’s crime, with the sweat pouring off our faces.

We had filled the grave with large stones which were lying about on the ground, remnants of some ancient Buddhist temple, long ago forgotten and deserted, so we felt secure that it could not easily be disturbed by animals.

The next morning we returned to Koorwallah, and the secret between Caulfield and myself drew us closer together than before. I suppose what I had seen him do ought to have repulsed and alienated me from him, but the night of that terrible burial we had sat up, one on each side of our little camp table, until daylight crept across the jheels, and Caulfield had told me the story of his life.

It cannot be written down here, but there was the burden of a cruel sorrow in it that explained much to me in his behaviour which I had never understood before.

I passionately pitied the lonely, unloved man, who had brought much of his misery on himself, both now and in the past, through his own ungovernable anger.

He shut himself up more than ever after this, and entirely gave up his shooting trips, which before had been the pleasure of his life, and the only person he ever spoke to, unofficially, was myself.

He took to coming into my bungalow in the evening and sometimes in the middle of the night,_and would walk restlessly up and down my rooms, or sit in an easy-chair with his face buried in his hands. At times I feared his mind was going, and I dreaded the effect upon him of the long hot-weather days and nights that were creeping gradually nearer.

The end of April came, with its plague of insects and scorching wind. The hours grew long and heavy with the heat, and the dust storms howled and swirled over the baking little station, bringing perhaps a few tantalizing drops of rain, or more often leaving the air hotter than ever and thick with copper-coloured dust.

I grew more and more anxious about Caulfield, especially when he came over to me one night when it was too hot to sleep, and asked me if he might stay in my bungalow till the morning.

“I know I may seem an ass,” he said, “but I can’t stay by myself. I get all sorts of beastly ideas.”

I thought he meant that he was tempted to take his own life, and began to try to cheer him up, telling him scraps of gossip, and encouraging him to talk, when a sound outside made us both start. It was only the weird, plaintive cry of a jackal, but Caulfield sprang to his feet, shaking all over.

“There it is!” he exclaimed hoarsely, “it’s followed me over here. Jack,” he continued, turning his haggard, sleepless eyes on me. “every night for the last week that brute has come and howled round my house. You know what I mean. It’s the one we saw that night.”

He was terribly excited, and, I could see, almost off his head.

“Nonsense, my dear chap,” I said, pushing him back into the chair, “you’ve got fever. Jackals come round my house and howl all night, and all day too. That’s nothing.”

“Look here, Jack,” said Caulfield, very calmly, “I’ve no more fever than you have, and if you think I’|n delirious you’re mistaken.” Then he lowered his voice, “I saw it one night, and I tell you it had only one ear.”

In spite of my own common sense, and the certainty that Caulfield was not himself, my blood ran cold, and, after I had succeeded in quieting him and getting him to sleep on my bed, I lay on the sofa going over every detail of that fearful night in the jungle again and again, try as I would to chase it from my thoughts.

Once or twice after this Caulfield came to me and repeated the same tale. He swore he was being haunted by the jackal we had driven away from the fakir’s body, and took it into his head that the soul of the man he had murdered had entered into the animal, and was trying to obtain vengeance in that form.

Then he suddenly stopped coming near me, and when I went to see him he would hardly speak, and seemed to take no pleasure in my visits as formerly.

I thought perhaps he was offended because I had always laughed at his hallucinations, and treated them as, what they undoubtedly must have been, mere fancies.

I urged him to see a doctor or take leave, but he angrily refused to do either, and declared I should very soon drive him mad altogether if I bothered him much more.

After this I left him alone for a couple of days, and on the third night, when my conscience was pricking me for having neglected him, and I was preparing to go over to his bungalow, his bearer came rushing in with a face of terror and distress, and begged me to come at once. He had already sent a man off for the doctor, as he feared his master was very ill. I arrived at Caulfield’s bungalow just as the doctor, who lived only across the road, appeared, and together we entered the queer museum of a house, literally lined with horns and skins and curiosities. Caulfield was lying unconscious on his bed.

“He had a kind of tit, sahib,” said the trembling bearer, and proceeded to explain how his master had behaved.

The doctor bent over the bed.

“Do you happen to know if he’s been bitten by a dog, or anything lately?” he said, looking up at me.

“Not to my knowledge.” I answered, but the faint wail of a jackal out across the~plain struck a superstitious chill to my heart.

For twenty-four hours we stayed with him, watching the terrible struggles we were powerless to avert, and which lasted until the end came, and brought a merciful peace to the poor, harassed mind and body.

He was never able to speak after the first paroxysm, which had occurred before we arrived, so we could not learn from him whether he had ever been bitten or not, neither could the doctor discover any kind of scar on his body which might have been made by the teeth of an animal, and yet there was no doubt that Caulfield’s death was due to hydrophobia.

As we stood in the next room after all was over, drinking the dead man’s whiskey and soda (which we badly needed), we questioned the bearer again and again, but he could tell us little or nothing. His master did not keep dogs, and he did not know of his ever having been bitten by one, but there had been a mad jackal about the place nearly three weeks before, though he did not think his master had known of it.

“It couldn’t have been that,” said the doctor, “or we should have heard about it.”

“Nu,” I answered mechanically, “it couldn’t have been that.”

It was nearly three weeks ago that Caulfield had ceased to come near me and had taken such a strange dislike to my going to his house. I began to think I must be going off my head too, for nobody but a lunatic could for a moment have seriously entertained such a notion as crossed my brain at that moment.

I went into the bedroom to take a last look at poor Caulfield’s thin, white face, with its ghastly, hunted expression, and to give a farewell pressure to his cold, heavy hand before I left him, for the doctor had urged me to go home, saying that there was now nothing more that I could do to help him. I picked up a lantern after this, and stepped out into the dark verandah.

As I did so, something came silently round the corner of the house, and stood in my path.

I raised my lantern, and caught a glimpse of a mass of grey fur, two fiery yellow eyes, and glistening teeth. I saw that it was only a stray jackal, and struck at it with my stick, but instead of running away it passed silently by me and entered Caulfield’s room. The light fell on the animal’s head as it entered the open door – one of its ears was missing.

In a frenzy I rushed back into the house, calling loudly for the doctor and the servants.

“I saw a jackal come in here!” I exclaimed excitedly, searching round Caulfield’s room. “It must be in this room – I saw it go in this very minute. Hunt it out at once!”

Every nook and corner was examined, but there was no jackal, not even a trace of one.

“Go home to bed, my boy,” said the doctor, looking at me kindly. “This business has shaken your nerves. Keep quiet for a bit. Your imagination’s beginning to play you tricks. Good-night.”

“Good-night,” I answered wearily, and I went slowly back to my bungalow, trying to persuade myself that he was right.

THE PACKET OF LETTERS

“Now you, who have made fifteen voyages—”

“Seventeen,” she corrected.

“Seventeen voyages to and from India; you must have had some queer cabin experiences. Which was the most remarkable voyage of them all?”

She looked at her husband, and at first she did not answer.

They were retired Anglo-Indians, tanned by years of Eastern sunshine, worn with hot seasons, the unrest of exile, anxieties concerning the large family that had grown up away from them, and the struggle to keep clear of debt. Now they lamented their Indian life in a comfortable suburban villa, and were entertaining me at dinner because, thirty years ago, my people had been in the same station with them, and they said they recollected me as a child before I was sent home. They also talked of my old bearer, and the white pony I used to ride! Anglo-Indians always seem to have such astonishing memories.

“I know which voyage you are thinking of,” said the Colonel: “tell the story, memsihib. Perhaps you have found somebody who will believe in it.”

She gave him a look of reproach, then turned towards me, and hesitated. “It seems rather unfair to tell it.”

“I’ll forget it directly afterwards, if you like,” I urged with eagerness; “but do let me hear it.”

So she told me that one autumn, not many years ago, she had taken her passage out to India in a very crowded ship, and therefore she considered herself unusually lucky when she got on board to find that she was to share her two-berthed cabin with a lady who had no infant, and who seemed peaceably inclined.

•   •   •   •   •

She was in the cabin when I went down to unpack, (continued my hostess) but she had not begun to open her boxes, and she offered to absent herself till I had settled my belongings, as she thought we should only hamper each other if we attempted to unpack at the same time. Her voice was clear and soft; she was a little woman, young, with pretty yellow hair and violet eyes. She had a shy, gentle manner, and she was dressed quietly, almost to dowdiness. Being an old and seasoned traveller, I had no scruples about taking advantage of her offer, and when she had gone I proceeded to appropriate the most convenient hooks, to annex the looking-glass nearest the light, and to hang my cabin tidy in the best space. I had engaged the top berth, for I was a good sailor, and never cared to run the risk of having my face trodden on. My number was 14, and as I arranged my things I wondered idly whether Mrs. Duke (the name painted on the luggage waiting to be unpacked) was of a superstitious nature, her berth being No. 13. I also congratulated myself on having such an apparently amenable companion for the voyage. I had travelled with invalids, with a missionary’s wife who had twin babies and no servant, with girls going out to be married (and these are generally the most inconsiderate of all fellow-passengers). Once I had a lunatic in my cabin, and another time a woman who drank. Hut with Mrs. Duke there seemed no prospect of any disagreeables, and when I went to bed that night to find her asleep, and the cabin clear for me to undress comfortably, I felt that there was even a possibility of my enjoying the voyage.

“Who is her husband?” I inquired of an acquaintance on board; and I was told that he belonged to some obscure and uncovenanted department up in the Punjab, was twenty years older than his wife, and that he adored her.

“And she?”

“Oh! a pattern of all that a wife should be, and devoted to him. But she’s rather stupid, and hasn’t very good health. I never saw much of her when we were in the same station; she has to go home for the hot weather whenever they can afford it.”

Mrs. Duke was not very sociable with the other passengers on board: the only person she talked to much besides myself was a young civilian who gave himself airs because he happened to be private secretary to a Lieutenant-Governor; but though she sometimes let him read poetry to her on deck in a loud and patronising voice, and he sat next to her at meals, she was invariably discreet in her behaviour, and never made herself conspicuous.

Mrs. Duke was evidently a reserved little person, and this was a characteristic that pleased me, for I detest the responsibility of unnecessary confidences, and we became very good friends before we reached Port Said. She was always good-tempered and considerate, and she spoke little of her own affairs beyond regretting the fact that she had no children, occasionally speaking with the utmost affection of her husband, and sometimes she mentioned how much she looked forward to their meeting at Bombay. The only approach we made to any intimate conversation was one night in the Red Sea, when I went down to the cabin rather earlier than usual, and found her seated on her box poring over what looked like a packet of letters. She locked it away in her trunk when I entered, and began to brush out her pale golden hair with energy.

“I’m so sorry I’m not in bed,” she said sweetly. She always behaved as if she were in my cabin on sufferance.

“Oh, it’s all right,” I assured her; and while I undressed she plaited her beautiful hair into a gleaming rope.

“Do you think,” she said suddenly, “that under some circumstances one is justified in deceiving a person one is very fond of?”

“Well, if knowledge of the truth would only give pain and do no good—”

“But I mean – supposing now you had done something that wasn’t exactly right, though you had meant no harm, would you feel justified in concealing it from a person who would certainly think it very wrong indeed?”

I looked at Mrs. Duke in some surprise. “It would depend so entirely on who the person was.”

“Well, your husband, for instance?”

I thought of my husband, growing furrowed and grey with years of hard work, intent on his profession, proud in the consciousness that he had given his children a good education, that he had risen high in his department and had a comfortable old age before him, and a wife who agreed with him in everything: I could not imagine myself concealing from him a pleasure that I might think harmless and that he would consider wrong. The idea was too psychological for my matter-of-fact brain.

“I think deception under any circumstances is a mistake between husband and wife,” I said loftily; “perhaps it might be necessary to conceal something that would worry your husband, but in that case it would hardly be anything you had done yourself.”

“I can’t explain,” she sighed, and with her pathetic blue eyes, pink dressing-gown and yellow plait she reminded me of a coloured picture in a Christmas Annual.

The next morning we reached Aden, and she landed to lunch with some friends and have a few hours on shore. She tried to persuade me to go with her, but I refused, preferring even a steamer coaling to the “barren rocks,” and from the deck I watched Mrs. Duke start off in a boat with the private secretary in attendance. She turned and waved to me, and that was the last time I saw her alive.

Two hours later the young civilian came back with a white face and horror in his eyes.

“Where is the captain?” he stammered, as he stepped from the gangway: “something awful has happened!”

“What is it?” I asked, and followed him along the deck. “Where is Mrs. Duke?”

He shivered and turned round; his boyish face was drawn and old with the shock.

““She is dead,” he whispered. “I hardly know what happened, it was all so sudden; but she walked up to her friend’s house in the sun, – s he was so delicate, you know – and I suppose the heat and exertion … anyway, just as I was leaving her at the door she was taken ill: we thought she had only fainted, but when the doctor came he said she was dead – quite dead! My God – I can’t believe it! I must find the captain at once.”

“Yes, the captain must telegraph to her husband before the ship sails,” I said; and with my mind stunned by the awful news I went to my cabin to try and realise the truth.

The poor little woman’s things were all so tidy, her box was pushed well under her berth (ill-fated No. 13!), her toilet trifles, so neat and unostentatious, were lying in their places. I thought of the fair hair and wistful eyes, and my heart ached for the husband in the sorrow that was coming to him.

There was no doubt about the melancholy fact. Before the ship started the captain was in possession of all details from shore; a telegram had been despatched to Mr. Duke, the dead woman’s belongings had been removed and sealed up by the captain, and the voyage continued with a gloom over us all. I was asked if I should prefer to change my quarters, but I refused : I was not afraid to be alone with memories of my poor little cabin companion, though for the first two nights I slept badly, thinking of the young life so suddenly checked, and of the husband’s grief.

On the third night I went to bed early; I was tired and in need of rest, and I soon slept soundly. But later on in the night something woke me up, and as I lay and listened my travelling-clock struck two. I wondered what had roused me, and presently I became conscious that someone was in my cabin; it sounded as though a hand were groping under the lower berth.

“Who is it?” I asked, loudly.

There was no answer, and I turned on the electric light, which was close to my head, raised myself on my elbow, and looked down. A figure was kneeling on the floor by the lower berth, and the white face that was slowly uplifted towards me was the face of Mrs. Duke.

At first I was breathless with astonishment, and then a cold terror crept over me as I lay and stared; but when she stood up and I saw into her eyes, my fear melted into pity for a soul in trouble. Her slender hands grasped the rail at the side of my bed, her hair shone faintly in the light, and her pale cheeks were wet with tears. “Oh, do help me!” she sobbed, and despair was in her voice: “my box is gone – where is it?”

I forced myself to speak. “The captain has got all your things,” I said gently; “he will take care of them.”

“Oh! but I want my box! – it was here: why did they take it? Oh! go to the captain in the morning, I implore you; ask him to let you open my box. You will find a packet of letters just inside my writing-case: throw them into the sea – all of them. No, burn them, for they might float and be picked up! My husband – he must never see them – he must never know—”

“But what are they?” I whispered: “why mustn’t he know? What had you been doing?”

She wrung her hands and cried bitterly. “I meant no harm; I was only vain and foolish. I was so dull at home all alone, and I thought it wouldn’t matter. I meant to destroy the letters before we got to Bombay. Oh, take them out of the box; never let him know: will you promise – promise—”

“I will do all I can,” I said solemnly.

Then, wailing like a tired child, she slid to the floor, and as I looked down she faded from my sight.

I cannot describe my feelings during the rest of that dreadful night. I can only say that the next morning I went to the captain and under promise of secrecy I told him the story. As I had anticipated, he was polite but incredulous.

“You had a very vivid dream or delusion, my dear lady, and it was not altogether surprising, considering the recent sad circumstances; but it is quite impossible for me to open Mrs. Duke’s box or anything that belonged to her, though I appreciate the kindliness of your motive in desiring me to do so. It would be against all regulations, and I could not undertake the responsibility. I am very sorry to have to refuse, but I think you must see that the poor lady’s property could not be opened and a packet of letters destroyed on such a pretext as the dream or vision of a fellow-passenger! Everything must be handed over to her husband just as it is.”

It was useless to say more. I had fulfilled my promise to do my best, and I knew that the captain was only doing his duty in refusing my request, which must have sounded to him preposterous; but now I dreaded the night-time, and I changed my cabin after all. I had no more “dreams” or “visions,” to quote the captain, and two or three days later we reached India.

Before we landed I heard that Mr. Duke had not come down to Bombay to meet the ship, but had sent instructions that his wife’s luggage should be forwarded to him through his agents.

I went up country and joined my husband. When I told him the story of Mrs Duke, he was, like the captain, polite but incredulous, and he would not listen to my tentative suggestion that I should write to Mr. Duke on the subject.

“For goodness’ sake don’t think of such a thing,” he cried: “you dreamt or imagined it all, of course, and you’d only make the wretched man more miserable than he is already by putting it into his head that his wife had concealed something from him!”

So we spoke no more of the matter then, but it was constantly in my mind, for I knew that I had had neither dream nor delusion; and one morning, some three weeks later, I took up the paper and read in it the announcement of a Mr. Duke’s sudden death. In another part of the paper I found a sad little paragraph setting forth that Mr. Duke had been suffering from depression since the death of his wife on her way out from England, and that he had shot himself whilst temporarily insane. I showed it to my husband.

“You see,” I said, “her boxes would just about have reached him – and he did it because he had found the packet of letters.”

•   •   •   •   •

There was a short silence. The Colonel pushed the port decanter towards me.

“Fill up the mem-sahib’s glass,” he said kindly; “it always makes her miserable to speak of that business.”

THE BEAD NECKLACE

When it became known in the village of Hayfield that Adela Roscoe was engaged to be married, everyone inquired if the man had money; nobody thought of asking if he were nice till afterwards, because the Major had repeatedly shouted abroad the fact that he intended his daughter to marry a rich man or to be an old maid. Only a few months ago he had sworn himself voiceless and turned the colour of a beetroot for the reason that Chris Mortimer, who was merely the son of a poor clergyman in the next parish, had dared to propose to Adela.

“What! Marry my daughter to a beggarly puppy in the Merchant Service!” he roared at the culprit “What do you take me for? Let me tell you that the man who marries her must be able to keep a father-in-law in style as well as a wife. Do you hear? The girl’s an investment, and one that is going to pay me a thousand per cent too. You dear out of this, you young jackanapes, and if I catch you hanging round, or trying to speak to her, I’ll break every bone in your wretched body,” etc. etc.

And with such rigid precaution did the unpleasant old gentleman guard his treasure for the next fortnight, that young Mortimer was forced to join his ship and sail away to the South Sea Islands without the opportunity of a word or a look from Adela; and the farewell note he tried to smuggle in via the garden boy, was returned to him by post, torn to shreds, in an envelope (unstamped) which bore the Major’s crest. The note had contained a passionate assurance of his undying love, and entreaty that she would be true to him, a vow that he would come back with a fortune to claim her – a fortune so large that even her father would be satisfied.

“There is money to be made where I am going,” he wrote; “a pal of mine has let me into a secret – it’s a dead certainty. Only wait for me and love me, and never think that I shall not return.”

But, as we know, Adela did not receive her letter, and the garden boy, who had failed in his best endeavours to deliver it, would have summonsed the Major for knocking out his front teeth, only that Mortimer’s bribe had rendered him impervious to suffering. \ Then one day, when the ineligible suitor had long been safely on the ocean, a tall, black-haired stranger suddenly appeared in company with the Major and his daughter, and the interested public subsequently discovered that he was a baronet, that he was staying with the Roscoes, and that he had been a friend of the Major’s before debt and discredit had driven the latter to a remote and cheap country district.

Adela detested their guest – the first they had entertained since her return from the inexpensive French boarding-school where she had been educated, and where she had spent all her holidays from the time of her mother’s death. Sir Bennet Falcon frightened and disgusted her, he would stare into her face with his heavy bloodshot eyes until her cheeks grew crimson, and then he would laugh and say it was so refreshing to see a blush. When he was not playing cards or drinking with her father, he would follow her about, talking to her in a way that she did not understand; or he would tease her as if she were a child – pull her bright hair, pinch her cheeks, and chuckle with evil satisfaction when she flew into a rage. He always smelt of whisky; his very clothes seemed to have been steeped in spirit, his face reminded her of a gargoyle; his husky voice rasped her nerves; his odious touch made her shiver. But his presence apparently had a soothing effect upon the Major, who now assumed a fatherly attitude towards his only child, sent for a new hat and parasol for her from London, made a fuss about her health and comfort, and insisted that she should retire to bed early. This she was quite ready to do, for as the evening advanced Sir Bennet’s attentions grew increasingly nauseating, and she was thankful to escape to her room, though the loud voices and coarse laughter below invariably kept her awake till long after midnight.

The girl was thoroughly miserable. She had given her love to Chris Mortimer, and her tender heart ached for a sight of the young sailor’s frank face and direct grey eyes. The future without him seemed dark and hopeless, and she was also tormented with a fearful suspicion, which was justified one sunny morning, when her father called her into the dining-room and said that Sir Bennet wished to marry her.

“Oh! I couldn’t,” she cried, with horror in her brown eyes. “I couldn’t – I couldn’t!” She put out both her hands as though to ward off the revolting suggestion.

“Now, my good girl,” – the Major began to walk up and down the room blowing out his loose red cheeks, and flapping behind him the tail of his rough shooting coat – “I’m not going to have any nonsense. Sir Bennet is waiting for you at the bottom of the garden, and you’ll just go straight and tell him you will be his wife, and say ‘Thank you’ as well. What the devil can a miserable chit like you want more? You’ll be My Lady; he stinks of money; even he can’t get through his income, and if you let him go on as he’s doing now, you’ll be a rich widow in no time, and free to marry your fool of a cabin-boy, or whatever he may be.”

But Adela only sank into a chair and cried despairingly. She was gentle and timid by nature, and utterly incapable of openly defying her father’s orders.

“Get up and stop that noise,” he continued, halting before her. “What do you suppose I asked the man down here for? Why have I let him drink me out of house and home? Why have I allowed him to dear me out at poker? Because I meant him to marry you, of course, and now he’s hooked, you’ve got to keep him. Gad! To think what this marriage means@” the Major slapped his thigh, shut his eyes, and drew a long breath. “It means Life and the World once more! Do you think I’m going to stay and rot in this infernal hole, when there’s an easy way out like this? No; I’ve made a damned good bargain, and you’re not going to upset the apple-cart, my lady, I can tell you. Come along@”

He dragged her to her feet, giving her an impatient shake, and with a storm of bad language he drove her before him through the little hall and out of the front door, then he stood in the porch, his legs apart, and menace in his attitude, while with bowed head and faltering footsteps the girl went blindly towards the figure that waited in the distance.

There followed a week of misery for Adela. She felt as though she had committed some horrible crime; she had broken her promise to the man she loved; she was Sir Bennet’s promised wife, and there was no chance of escape – for Chris was hundreds of miles away across the seas and could not help her. What would he think when he came back and found she was Lady Falcon? Would he ever understand and forgive? The wedding day was fixed; Sir Bennet wrote by every post for presents for his fiancée; he was even paying for her trousseau, a proceeding that gratified the father as much as it annoyed the daughter, the two men were boisterous and triumphant, and apparently quite unaffected by the white face, despairing eyes, and spiritless manner of their victim.

Then it became necessary for Sir Bennet to go to London that he might interview lawyers and tailors, arrange about settlements, and the opening of his town and country houses. He was away for three weeks, and Adela felt almost happy by contrast when relieved of his hateful company, though the thought of the future hung like a dark cloud over her mind. The days flew by, and the end of her respite was at hand, this evening Sir Bennet would return with his evil face, his atmosphere of dissipation, and his noxious love-making. She sat at the open window of her little drawing-room, her hands lying limp in her lap, her wistful eyes gazing out at the wealth of summer flowers, the hovering butterflies, the happy birds; she was thinking of Chris as one thinks of a dear, dead friend, with a dumb regret, a finality of sorrow, an absence of hope.

The garden gate clicked and the village postman hurried up the drive. She took the letters from him through the window and nodded pleasantly as the man touched his cap and turned away. There were some bills for the Major, and a curious-looking packet for herself sewn up with red cotton in dirty wax-cloth. The address was blurred and indistinct, but the handwriting brought the colour flooding over her face and neck, and she put it to her lips with a gasp of pleasure. Then she tore it open with shaking fingers and searched desperately for the letter that she felt convinced would be inside, but only a barbaric-looking necklace of faded beads fell on to her lap, and apparently Chris had sent it to her without a word. It was a bitter disappointment, and the tears ran down her cheeks as she examined again and again the wrappings of her strange present She held the necklace up, and wondered why Chris had wanted her to have it, the beads were common glass, and were strung on to something that looked like stiff brown thread, but they were arranged in squares with curious lines and patterns, and she had certainly never seen anything quite like it before. At any rate it had come from Chris, his dear fingers had held it, his hands had packed it up; she would treasure the wrapper on which he had written her name, and tonight she would wear the necklace, hideous though it might be, as a charm to give her strength for the ordeal of Sir Bennet’s return.

She looked enchanting when she came down to the drawing-room that evening before dinner – her cheeks were flushed with emotion; her eyes dreamy with memories of her lost lover; her white gown threw up the brilliance of her hair and added to the shapeliness of her slight figure; the quaint bead necklace lay round her delicate throat. Sir Rennet stood on the hearth-rug – he had asked for a fire, though the summer night was warm to closeness, and he spread his shaking fingers over the flames; his eyes were dull, and his swollen lips twitched as he greeted the girl and kissed her unwilling face. He had evidently been drinking more heavily than usual during his absence.

“What’s that ugly thing round your neck?” he asked, and as he peered at the beads a look came into his face as though some unpleasant recollection had been awakened. Adela murmured an incoherent reply. She wished now she had not worn the necklace, and she felt relieved that her father was not in the room to ask further questions. She could hear him in the dining-room drawing corks.

“Come and sit here,” said Sir Rennet, flinging himself into a corner of the sofa. She tried to evade his clutch, but he pulled her down into the vacant place by his side. “See what I’ve brought for my little white bird.” He fumbled in his pocket and produced a long morocco case. “Open it! I’ll bet you’ve never seen anything to equal what’s inside.”

She pressed the spring without any feeling of pleasurable curiosity, and beheld a diamond necklace that startled her with its brilliance – it seemed to be made of captive lightning.

“There!” croaked Sir Rennet. “What d’ye think of that? Take that dirty little bead thing off your pretty neck and put this on.”

He dragged at the beads as though he would break the fastening, but it held firm.

“Oh! don’t,” cried Adela; “you’ll break it.”

“Well, and what then? Who gave it to you?” he asked with sudden fierceness.

Adela, fearful of being pressed on the subject, nervously undid the string and let him take her treasure from her, and again the look of uneasy recollection, almost fear, came into the man’s eyes.

“I’ve seen these things before,” he said shortly; “natives wear ’em in the South Sea Islands@” He put it in his pocket, then clasped the diamonds round her neck and regarded the effect with satisfied complacence. “There!” he added, “that’s better.”

“May I have my beads back?” she asked timidly, when she had thanked him for his gift with forced gratitude.

“No,” he answered, and set his jaw. “I don’t want to see a thing like that on your neck again; it’s only fit for savages, and it reminds me of a deuced bad time I had once in my life which I prefer to forget There’s the gong.” He rose and offered her his arm.

During dinner he was inclined to be sullen and quarrelsome; he ate little, but drank freely of the Major’s whisky; and when Adela left the room he got up with difficulty to open the door for her. She passed him swiftly, avoiding his gaze, and fled to her room, where she railed in helpless bitterness against the cruelty of her lot, cried over the loss of her necklace, and kissed the wrapping it had travelled in.

Later, she heard the two men leave the dining-room and come stumbling up the staircase. Her father was laughing, foolishly, and Sir Rennet was talking fast in a curious high-pitched tone.

“But didn’t you see the fellow, Roscoe?” he was saying as they passed her room, and his voice reminded her of a day when she had visited a large hospital and the raving of a delirious patient had reached her ears through a half-closed door. “He looked into the dining-room twice, and then, when we came out, he was hiding behind the curtain in the hall – Lord! he’s coming up the stairs now – keep him back, Roscoe, for the love of Heaven – stop him – give me time to lock my door@”

There was a rush of unsteady footsteps down the passage, a loud slam, a helpless giggling laugh from the Major as he blundered into his own room, and then all was quiet Adela shuddered and turned wearily to the open window. She leaned out and inhaled the fragrance of the flowers beneath, the cool sweetness of the night air. Little white moths brushed past her face, and now and then a bird called from the trees at the end of the garden. A faint hint of the rising moon was stealing over the sky, and Adela sat motionless and inert while the weird light slowly increased and clove the darkness into blocks of shadow.

Suddenly the sound of a muffled cry within the house made her start and draw back her head. Again she heard it, and her heart beat quickly with apprehension. She opened the door and listened; in his room at the end of the passage Sir Rennet seemed to be running violently to and fro and calling hoarsely for help, but before she could dart across to rouse her father, a dishevelled figure with a white terrified face and wild eyes rushed past her and down the stairs. She heard the hall-door bang, and the thud of running feet over the lawn.

In a moment she was at her father’s bedside. “Get up – get up!” she shouted, shaking him desperately, “Sir Rennet must have gone mad – he has rushed out of the house half dressed – Father! Father!”

But the Major snored on; she was powerless to rouse him from his heavy stupor, and she ran in bewilderment back to her open window. The moonlight was streaming over the smooth grass; and, in and out among the bushes, as though pursued by a relentless enemy, ran Sir Rennet, stooping, doubling, dodging. His heavy steps and panting breath throbbed on the night air, and once or twice he half fell, recovering himself with a low hunted cry.

It was a sickening sight, but the girl’s courage rose unexpectedly, as sometimes happens with timid natures in a sudden crisis. She leant out of the window and called to him. At the sound of her voice he stopped, then hurried towards her and held up his hands. His face, in the moonlight, drawn with terror and delusion, was ghastly.

“Come down!” he called, “come down and help me drive him away – he is waiting there under the trees. If you are with me perhaps he will go, but alone I cannot escape from him, and he will hunt me to my death. After all these years he has come for his revenge – Adela! Adela!”

The fear and supplication in his voice were pitiable; she braced her nerves and prepared to go down. Perhaps her presence would soothe and influence him – even if he should kill her in his delirium it would be better than living to be his wife.

“Wait,” she cried softly, “I am coming.” And presently her hand was on his trembling arm, and she was firmly reassuring him that he was safe from his imaginary pursuer. She led him to a garden bench under the dining-room window, and he sat down a shaking, huddled heap.

“It was that cursed necklace you were wearing,” he stammered; “it made me think of him – the natives on the island used to wear them@” He stopped and drew his hand across his wet forehead. “Of course I didn’t really see him – he has been dead for years,” he glanced about him fearfully, “and yet he looked into the dining-room, he followed me up the stairs – he was in my room.” His voice rose and he gripped her hands, “I am going to tell you all about it – the whole truth – perhaps that will keep him away and satisfy him?”

“Yes,” said Adela soothingly, “yes – tell me.”

His grasp tightened on her hands, and he began to speak in a harsh, monotonous key, staring intently all the while into the surrounding shadows.

“Years ago I had a friend – a friend who stuck to me when I was under a cloud and people were cutting me; we went away together yachting – he sacrificed a lot to go with me. We cruised about in warm climates and stopped at ports we had never heard of, and at last we got among the South Sea Islands. Then there was a storm – my God; what a storm! – it was like the end of the world – and the yacht went down. All night Horsley and I clung to the same piece of wreckage, and in the morning we were washed ashore, the only survivors. It was a long low island, and the natives were cannibals – we saw them at it one night, watched them through the coconut palms by the light of the fire they had made, and then we knew what they were keeping us for. We were guarded day and night, though they let us wander within certain limits, and gave us a hut to live in. We saw no ships, we had no chance to build a boat, or escape by swimming, and day by day we waited for our death. Then Horsley ran a poisonous thorn into his foot and had to stay in the hut, and one morning when I went down as usual to the shore in the hope of seeing a sail, there seemed to be no natives on the watch. All night they had been singing and tom-toming, and I suppose the guards had got careless and were asleep, for I saw none of them about. Just as I was thinking of going back through the palm grove to the hut to tell Horsley there might be a chance to take to the sea, a ship came round the corner of the island. She was only a small trading vessel that had got out of her course, but she meant rescue if the natives didn’t spot her. I looked all round – there wasn’t a soul in sight, the ship was only a few hundred yards off, the water was calm, and I could swim well. I thought if I went back for Horsley, who couldn’t walk with his bad foot, the natives would have time to see the ship, and the chances were we should be intercepted and killed. The ship’s captain would never send a boat ashore and risk the lives of his crew, I knew that – and I knew if I got away I should be leaving Horsley to a cruel death. I swear I fought the temptation, but all the same I took off my clothes and swam for my life. I reached the ship, I told them about Horsley, but they refused to do more than give me shelter, because the natives of that island were known to be savagely hostile; and we steamed away into safety while Horsley was left there alone@”

He ceased abruptly, his mouth open, his breath coming in quick gasps; he pointed towards the trees:

“There! Don’t you see him? Over by the bushes – he hasn’t gone, I’ve done no good by telling the truth – he is coming out into the moonlight on the lawn – Ah! I can’t bear to see his face. Go back, Horsley!” he shouted; “I never meant to leave you, I meant to get the ship’s boat and fetch you – I swear I did”; he pushed past Adela’s restraining hand, and ran with superhuman swiftness down the path.

She heard him crash through the old wooden gate, and his rapid footsteps rang clear on the hard road; faster, faster they sped into the distance, until the echo died away on the still night air.

Extract from a local paper:

An inquest was held yesterday on the body of Sir Bennet Falcon, Baronet, who was found drowned in a pond two miles from the village of Hayfield, where he had been staying on a visit to his friends, Major and Miss Roscoe. The jury returned a verdict of suicide whilst temporarily insane; and much sympathy is felt in the neighbourhood for Miss Roscoe, to whom the deceased gentleman was engaged to be married. We regret to learn that the young lady is at present lying dangerously ill from the effects of the shock, and grave doubts are entertained as to her recovery.

But Adela was called back from the borders of death by news which gave her the promise of a happy future. The secret that had been imparted to Chris Mortimer by his obliging friend had lived up to its character of “a dead certainty”, and Chris would be arriving home in a few months’ time a comparatively rich man. The precious life-giving letter rested day and night beneath Adela’s pillow, but in it there was one paragraph which shocked and startled her, and which she never willingly re-read:

“I wonder if you ever received a rum kind of necklace I sent you? I know you didn’t get the letter I wrote at the same time, because the fellow who took it on shore confessed afterwards that he had lost the letter, though he swore he posted the little parcel. I saw an old native wearing the necklace, and it struck me as being rather curious, so I persuaded him to sell the thing, though he made an awful fuss about parting with it, and said it was a most powerful charm against ill-luck, so, being a superstitious sailor, I thought I’d send it to you! – but I’m sorry I did, because I heard later that it had a nasty history. The beads were supposed to be strung on the sinews of a white man who was killed some years ago on one of these islands before the savages were muted out and taught better manners, and though it’s probably only a yarn, you’d better throw it away to someone who has a taste for gruesome curiosities. You shall have pearls instead, my darling, and soon I shall be home to fasten them round your neck myself…”

THE TIGER CHARM

The sun, the sky, the burning, dusty atmosphere, the waving sea of tall yellow grass seemed molten into one blinding blaze of pitiless heat to the aching vision of little Mrs. Wingate. In spite of blue goggles, pith sun-hat, and enormous umbrella, she felt as if she were being slowly roasted alive; for the month was May, and she and her husband were perched on the back of an elephant, traversing a large tract of jungle at the foot of the Himalayas.

Colonel Wingate was one of the keenest sportsmen in India, and every day for the past week he and his wife and their friend, Captain Bastable, had sallied forth from the camp with a line of elephants to beat through the forests of grass that reached to the animals’ ears; to squelch over swamps, disturbing herds of antelope and wild pig; to pierce thick tangles of jungle, from which rose peafowl, black partridge, and birds of gorgeous plumage; to cross stony beds of dry rivers – ever on the watch for the tigers that had hitherto baffled all their efforts.

As each “likely” spot was drawn a blank, Netta Wingate heaved a sigh of relief; for she hated sport, was afraid of the elephants, and lived in hourly terror of seeing a tiger. She longed for the fortnight in camp to be over, and secretly hoped that the latter week of it might prove as unsuccessful as the first. Her skin was burnt to the hue of a berry; her head ached perpetually from the heat and glare; the motion of the elephant made her feel sick; and f she ventured to speak, her husband only impatiently bade her be quiet.

This afternoon, as they ploughed and rocked over the hard, uneven ground, she could scarcely keep awake, dazzled as she was by the
vista of scorched yellow country and the gleam of her husband’s rifle-barrels in the melting sunshine. She swayed drowsily from side to side in the howdah, her head drooped, her eyelids closed…

She was roused by a torrent of angry exclamations. Her umbrella had hitched itself obstinately into the collar of Colonel Wingate’s coat, and he was making infuriated efforts to free himself. Jim Bastable, approaching on his elephant, caught a mixed vision of the refractory umbrella and two agitated sun-hats, the red face and fierce blue eyes of the Colonel, and the anxious, apologetic, sleepy countenance of Mrs. Wingate as she hurriedly strove to release her irate lord and master. The whole party came to an involuntary halt, the natives listening with interest as the sahib stormed a the mem-sahib and the umbrella in the same breath.

“That howdah is not big enough for two people,” shouted Captain Bastable, coming to the rescue. “Let Mrs. Wingate change to mine. It’ s bigger, and my elephant has easier paces.”

Hot, irritated, angry, Colonel Wingate commanded his wife to betake herself to Bastable’s elephant, and to keep her infernal umbrella closed for the rest of the day, adding that women had no business out tiger-shooting, and why the devil had she come at all? – oblivious of the fact that Mrs. Wingate had begged to be allowed to stay in the station, and that he himself had insisted on her coming.

She well knew that argument or contradiction would only make matters worse, for he had swallowed three stiff whisky-and-sodas at luncheon in the broiling sun, and, since the severe sunstroke that had so nearly killed him two years ago, the smallest quantity of spirits was enough to change him from an exceedingly bad-tempered man into something little short of a maniac. She had heedlessly married him when she was barely nineteen, turning a deaf ear to warnings of his violence, and now, at twenty-three, her existence was one long fear. He never allowed her out of his sight; he never believed a word she said; he watched her, suspected her, bullied her unmercifully, and was insanely jealous. Unfortunately, she was one of those nervous, timid women who often rather provoke ill-treatment than otherwise.

This afternoon she marvelled at being permitted to change to Captain Bastable ‘s howdah, and with a feeling of relief scrambled off the elephant, though trembling, as she always did, lest the great beast should seize her with his trunk or lash her with his tail, which was like a jointed iron rod. Then, once safely perched up behind Captain Bastable, she settled herself with a delightful sense of security. He understood her nervousness; he did not laugh or grumble at her little in voluntary cries of fear; he was not impatient when she was convinced that the elephant was running away or sinking in a quicksand, or that the howdah was slipping off. He also understood the Colonel, and had several times helped her through a trying situation; and now the sympathy in his kind eyes made her tender heart throb with gratitude.

“All right?” he asked

She nodded, smiling, and they started again, ploughing and lurching through the coarse grass, great wisps of which the elephant uprooted with his trunk and beat against his chest, to get rid of the soil before putting them in his mouth. Half an hour later, as they drew near the edge of the forest, one of the elephants suddenly stopped short, with a jerky, backward movement, and trumpeted shrilly.

There was an expectant halt all along the line, and a cry from a native of “Tiger! Tiger!” Then an enormous striped beast bounded out of the grass and stood for a moment in a small open space, lashing its tail and snarling defiance. Colonel Wingate fired. The tiger, badly wounded, charged, and sprang at the head of Captain Bastable’s elephant.

There was a confusion of noise – savage roars from the tiger, shrieks from the excited elephants, shouts from the natives, banging of rifles.

Mrs. Wingate covered her face with her hands. She heard a thud as of a heavy body falling to the ground, and then she found herself being flung from side to side of the howdah, as the elephant bolted madly toward the forest, one huge ear torn to ribbons by the tiger’s claws.

She heard Captain Bastable telling her to hold on tight, and shouting desperate warnings to the mahout to keep the elephant as clear of the forest as possible. Like many nervous people, in the face of real danger she suddenly became absolutely calm, and uttered no sound as the pace increased and they tore along the forest edge, escaping overhanging boughs by a miracle. To her it seemed that the ponderous flight lasted for hours. She was bruised, shaken, giddy, and the crash that came at last was a relief rather than otherwise. A huge branch combed the howdah off the elephant’s back, sweeping the mahout with it, while the still terrified animal sped on, trumpeting and crashing through the forest.

Mrs. Wingate was thrown clear off the howdah. Captain Bastable had saved himself by jumping, and only the old mahout lay doubled up and unconscious amongst the débris of shattered wood, torn leather, and broken ropes. Netta could hardly believe she was not hurt, and she and Captain Bastable stared at each other with dazed faces for some moments before they could collect their senses. Far away in the distance they could hear the elephant still running.

Between them they extricated the mahout, and, seating herself on the ground, Netta took the old man’s unconscious head on her lap, while Captain Bastable anxiously examined the wizened, shrunken body.

“Is he dead?” she asked.

“I can’t be sure. I’m afraid he is. I wonder if I could find some water? I haven’t an idea where we are, for I lost all count of time and distance. I hope Wingate is following us. Should you be afraid to stay here while I have a look round and see if we are anywhere near a village?”

“Oh, no; I shan’t be frightened, ” she said steadily. Her delicate, clear-cut face looked up at him fearlessly from the tangled background of mighty trees and dense creepers; and her companion could scarcely believe that she was the same trembling, nervous little coward of an hour before.

He left her, and the stillness of the jungle was very oppressive when the sound of his footsteps died away. She was alone with a dead or dying man, on the threshold of the vast, mysterious forest, with its possible horrors of wild elephants, tigers, leopards, snakes. She tried to turn her thoughts from such things, but the scream of a peacock made her start as it rent the silence, and then the undergrowth began to rustle ominously. It was only a porcupine that came out, rattling its quills, and, on seeing her, it ran into further shelter out of sight.

It seemed to be growing darker, and she fancied the evening must be drawing on. She wondered if her husband would overtake them. If not, how were she and Jim Bastable to get back to the camp? Then she heard voices and footsteps, and presently a little party of natives came in sight, led by Jim, and bearing a string bedstead.

“I found a village not far off, ” he explained, “and thought we’d better take the poor old chap there. Then, if the Colonel doesn’t turn up by the time we’ve seen him comfortably settled, we must find our way back to the camp as best we can.”

The natives chattered and exclaimed as they lifted the unconscious body on to the bedstead, and then the little procession started. Netta was so bruised and stiff she could hardly walk; but, with the help of Bastable’s arm, she hobbled along until the village was gained. The headman conducted them to his house, which consisted of a mud hovel, shared by himself and his family with several relations, besides a cow and a goat with two kids. He gave Netta a wicker stool to sit on and some smoky buffalo’s milk to drink. The village physician was summoned, and at last succeeded in restoring the mahout to consciousness and pouring a potion down his throat.

“I die,” whispered the patient feebly.

Netta went to his side, and he recognized her.

“A-ree! mem-sahib!” he quavered. “So Allah has guarded thee. But the anger of the Colonel sahib will be great against me for permitting the elephant to run away, and it is better that I die. Where is that daughter of a pig? She was a rascal from her youth up; but today was the first time she ever really disobeyed my voice.”

He tried to raise himself, but fell back groaning, for his injuries were internal and past hope.

“It is growing dark.” He put forth his trembling hand blindly. “Where is the little white lady who so feared the sahib, and the elephants, and the jungle? Do not be afraid, mem-sahib. Those who fear should never go into the jungle. So if thou seest a tiger, be bold, be bold; call him ‘uncle’ and show him the tiger charm. Then will he turn away and harm thee not—” He wandered on incoherently, his fingers fumbling with something at his throat, and presently he drew out a small silver amulet attached to a piece of cord. As he held it toward Netta, it flashed in the light of the miserable native oil-lamp that someone had just brought in and placed on the floor.

“Take it, mem-sahib, and feel no fear while thou hast it, for no tiger would touch thee. It was my father’s, and his father’s before him, and there is that written on it which has ever protected us from the tiger’s tooth. I myself shall need it no longer, for I am going, whereat my nephew will rejoice; for he has long coveted my seat. Thou shalt have the charm, mem-sahib, for thou hast stayed by an old man, and not left him to die alone in a Hindu village and strange place. Some day in the hour of danger thy little fingers may touch the charm, and then thou wilt recall old Mahomed Bux, mahout, with gratitude.”

He groped for Netta’s hand, and pushed the amulet into her palm. She took it, and laid her cool fingers on the old man’s burning forehead.

“Salaam, Mahomed Bux,” she said softly. “Bahut, bahut, salaam.” Which is the nearest Hindustani equivalent for “Thank you.”

But he did not hear her. He was wandering again, and for half an hour he babbled of elephants, of tigers, of camps and jungles, until his voice became faint and died away in hoarse gasps.

Then he sighed heavily and lay still, and Jim Bastable took Mrs. Wingate out into the air and told her that the old mahout was dead. She gave way and sobbed, for she was aching all over and tired to death, and she dreaded the return to the camp.

“Oh, my dear girl, please don’t cry!” said Jim distressfully. “Though really I can’t wonder at it, after all you’ve gone through today; and you’ve been so awfully plucky, too.”

Netta gulped down her tears. It was delicious to be praised for courage, when she was accustomed only to abuse for cowardice.

“How are we to get back to the camp?” she asked dolefully. “It’s so late.”

And, indeed, darkness had come swiftly on, and the light of the village fires was all that enabled them to see each other.

“The moon will be up presently; we must wait for that. They say the village near our camp lies about six miles off, and that there is a cart-track of sorts toward it. I told them they must let us have a bullock-cart, and we shall have to make the best of that.”

They sat down side by side on a couple of large stones, and listened in silence to the lowing of the tethered cattle, the ceaseless, irritating cry of the brain-fever bird, and the subdued conversation of a group of children and village idlers, who had assembled at a respectful distance to watch them with inquisitive interest. Once a shrill trumpeting in the distance told of a herd of wild elephants out for a night’s raid on the crops, and at intervals packs of jackals swept howling across the fields, while the moon rose gradually over the collection of squalid huts and flooded the vast country with a light that made the forest black and fearful.

Then a clumsy little cart, drawn by two small, frightened white bullocks, rattled into view. Jim and Netta climbed into the vehicle, and were politely escorted off the premises by the headman and the concourse of interested villagers and excited women and children.

They bumped and shook over the rough, uneven track. The bullocks raced or crawled alternately, while the driver twisted their tails and abused them hoarsely. The moonlight grew brighter and more glorious. The air, now soft and cool, was filled with strong scents and the hum of insects released from the heat of the day.

At last they caught the gleam of white tents against the dark background of a mango grove.

“The camp,” said Captain Bastable shortly.

Netta made a nervous exclamation.

“Do you think there will be a row?” he asked with some hesitation. They had never discussed Mrs. Wingate’s domestic troubles together.

“Perhaps he is still out looking for us,” she said evasively.

“If he had followed us at all, he must have found us. I believe he went on shooting, or came back to the camp.” There was an angry impatience in his voice. “Don’t be nervous,” he added hastily. “Try not to mind anything he may say. Don’t listen. He can’t always help it, you know. I wish you could persuade him to retire; the sun out here makes him half off his head.”

“I wish I could,” she sighed. “But he will never do anything I ask him, and the big game shooting keeps him in India.”

Jim nodded, and there was a comprehending silence between them till they reached the edge of the camp, got out of the cart, and made their way to the principal tent. There they discovered Colonel Wingate, still in his shooting-clothes, sitting by the table, on which stood an almost empty bottle of whisky. He rose as they entered, and delivered himself of a torrent of bad language. He accused the pair of going off together on purpose, declaring he would divorce his wife and kill Bastable. He stormed, raved, and threatened, giving them no opportunity to speak, until at last Jim broke in and insisted on being heard.

“For heaven’s sake, be quiet,” he said firmly, “or you’ll have a fit. You saw the elephant run away, and apparently you made no effort to follow us and come to our help. We were swept off by a tree, and the mahout was mortally hurt. It was a perfect miracle that neither your wife nor I was killed. The mahout died in a village, and we had to get here in a bullock-cart.”

Then, seeing Wingate preparing for another onslaught, Bastable took him by the shoulders. “My dear chap, you’re not yourself. Go to bed, and we’ll talk it over tomorrow, if you still wish to.”

Colonel Wingate laughed harshly. His mood had changed suddenly.

“Go to bed?” he shouted boisterously. “Why, I was just going out when you arrived. There was a kill last night only a mile off, and I’m going to get the tiger.” He stared wildly at Jim, who saw that he was not responsible for his words and actions. His brain, already touched by sunstroke, had given way at last under the power of whisky. Jim’s first impulse was to prevent his carrying out his intention of going after the tiger. Then he reflected that it was not safe for Netta to be alone with the man, and that, if Wingate were allowed his own way, it would at least take him out of the camp.

“Very well,” said Jim quietly; “and I will come with you.”

“Do,” answered the Colonel pleasantly, and then, as Bastable turned for a moment, Mrs. Wingate saw her husband make a diabolical grimace at the other’s unconscious back. Her heart beat rapidly with fear. Did he mean to murder Jim? She felt convinced he contemplated mischief; but the question was how to warn Captain Bastable without her husband’s knowledge. The opportunity came more easily than she had expected, for presently the Colonel went outside to call for his rifle and give some orders. She flew to Bastable’s side.

“Be careful,” she panted. “He wants to kill you – I know he does. He’s mad! Oh, don’t go with him – don’t go—”

“It will be all right,” he said reassuringly. “I’ll look out for myself, but I can’t let him go alone in this state. We shall only sit up in a tree for an hour or two, for the tiger must have come and gone long ago. Don’t be frightened. Go to bed and rest.”

She drew from her pocket the little polished amulet the mahout had given her.

“At any rate, take this,” she said hysterically. “It may save you from a tiger, if it doesn’t from my husband. I know I am silly, but do take it. There may be luck in it – you can never tell; and old Mahomed Bux said it had saved him and his father and his grandfather – and that you ought to call a tiger ‘uncle’ – ” She broke off, half laughing, half crying, utterly unstrung.

To please her he put the little charm into his pocket, and after a hasty drink went out and joined Wingate, who insisted that they should proceed on foot and by themselves. Bastable knew it would be useless to make any opposition, and they started, their rifles in their hands; but when they had gone some distance and the tainted air told them they were nearing their destination, Jim discovered he had no cartridges.

“Never mind,” whispered the Colonel. “I have plenty, and our rifles have the same bore. We can’t go back now; we’ve no time to lose.”

Jim submitted, and he and Wingate tiptoed to the foot of a tree, the low branches and thick leaves of which afforded an excellent hiding-place,, down-wind from the half-eaten carcass of the cow. They climbed carefully up, making scarcely any noise, and then Jim held out his hand to the other for some cartridges. The Colonel nodded

“Presently,” he whispered, and Jim waited, thinking it extremely unlikely that cartridges would be wanted at all.

The moonlight came feebly through the foliage of the surrounding trees into the little glade before them, in which lay the remains of the carcass, pulled under a bush to shield it from the carrion birds. A deer pattered by toward the river, casting startled glances on every side; insects beat against the faces of the two men; and a jackal ran out, his brush hanging down, looked round, and retired again with a melancholy howl. Then there arose a commotion in the branches of the neighbouring trees, and a troop of monkeys fought and crashed and chattered as they leaped from bough to bough. Jim knew that this often portended the approach of a tiger, and a moment afterward a long, hoarse call from the river told him that the warning was correct. He made a silent sign for the cartridges; but Wingate took no notice : his face was hard and set, and the whites of his eyes gleamed.

A few seconds later a large tiger crept slowly out of the grass, his stomach on the ground, his huge head held low. Jim remembered the native superstition that the head of a man-eating tiger is weighed down by the souls of its victims. With a run and a spring, the creature attacked its meal, and began growling and munching contentedly, purring like a cat, and stopping every now and then to tear up the earth with its claws.

A report rang out. Wingate had fired at and hit the tiger. The great beast gave a terrific roar and sprang at the tree. Jim lifted his rifle, only to remember that it was unloaded.

“Shoot again!” he cried excitedly, as the tiger fell back and prepared for another spring. To his horror, Wingate deliberately fired the second barrel into the air, and, throwing away the rifle, grasped him by the arms. The man’s teeth were bared, his face was distorted and hideous, his purpose unmistakable – he was trying to throw Bastable to the tiger. Wingate was strong with the diabolical strength of madness, and they swayed till the branches of the tree cracked ominously. Again the tiger roared and sprang, and again fell back, only to gather itself together for another effort. The two men rocked and panted, the branches cracked louder, with a dry, splitting sound, then broke off altogether, and, locked in each other’s arms, they fell heavily to the ground.

Jim Bastable went undermost, and was half stunned by the shock. He heard a snarl in his ear, followed by a dreadful cry. He felt the weight of Wingate’s body lifted from him with a jerk, and he scrambled blindly to his feet. As in a nightmare, he saw the tiger bounding away, carrying something that hung limply from the great jaws, just as a cat carries a dead mouse.

He seized the Colonel’s rifle that lay near him; but he knew it was empty, and that the cartridges were in the Colonel’s pocket. He ran after the tiger, shouting, yelling, brandishing the rifle, in the hope of frightening the brute into dropping its prey; but, after one swift glance back, it bounded into the thick jungle with the speed of a deer, and Bastable was left standing alone.

Faint and sick, he began running madly toward the camp for help, though he knew well that nothing in this world could ever help Wingate again. His forehead was bleeding profusely, either hurt in the fall or touched by the tiger’s claw, and the blood trickling into his eyes nearly blinded him. He pulled his handkerchief from his pocket as he ran, and something came with it that glittered in the moonlight and fell to the ground with a metallic ring.

It was the little silver amulet : the tiger charm.

OLD AYAH

A May morning in the Himalayas, crystal clear, golden with sunshine. Honeysuckle, passionflower, roses, clung in a perfumed tangle to the red roof of the veranda; and opposite, across the lower hills and the deep purple valley, against the wondrous blue of the sky, the dazzling range of snow peaks looked deceptively, startlingly near. The air was charged with strong scents and gentle sound – voices of the hill-people as they climbed the steep pathway with burdens on their heads and shoulders; strains of the band that practised in a remote compound.

Only within the veranda did there seem to be gloom and distress. An old ayah stood crying helplessly in the corner, and a little English boy danced before her in frenzied concern and remonstrance.

“Must not go, Ayah! Must not go!” he shrieked in Hindustani.

Then he rushed into the dining-room where his mother was breakfasting. “For Ayah a letter has come,” he wailed, still in Hindustani, “and she says today she must go – today! Mamma, give an order that she stays. Give it now, at once.”

Mrs. Dring hurried out, but she checked her words of impatience when she saw the trouble in the old woman’s faithful eyes, and the pathetic trembling of the hand that held out a flimsy piece of yellow paper scrawled across with Hindi characters.

“Mem-sahib! pardon, my son is very ill – surely he dies. They have written for me, he calls for me, his mother. I must go to him. But quickly will I return. For a certainty, mem-sahib, will I return when my son is better – or maybe dead.” She turned away.

The mem-sahib tried to smother her own annoyance and dread of the inconvenience that lay before her. “Poor Ayah!” she said, kindly, “it is very sad for you. Of course you must go. But how am I to get another ayah for Jackie-sahib while you are away – what am I to do? We have only just come up to the hills, and you will be leaving us altogether when we go to England after the rains!”

Old Ayah wept afresh. She was sorely loath to vex her dear mem-sahib and cause her worry; she could not bear the thought of leaving Jackie, the “babba” she had tended from his birth. The final parting was already too near, and every day seemed precious. Yet she must go to her only son, the son who had never given her trouble or anxiety, who had supported her so bravely, when years ago, his father, bitten by a mad dog, had died a cruel death before she herself went into service; the clever, hard-working son, who at last had risen to the honourable post of chief sweeper to a down-country bazaar, and was such a good father, such a good husband, as well as a model son. All Old Ayah’s savings, invested in the heavy silver ornaments that she wore day and night round her neck, and wrists, and ankles, were to go to him and his children at her death as a token of her pride and affection; and now it was he who lay dying. He was calling for her, and she must go, wretched as the separation from Jackie would make her, painfully conscious as she was of the inconvenience her absence would cause her beloved mistress.

As usual, the mem-sahib was kind and good, and said she would manage all right for herself and Jackie, and Ayah was not to worry. She advanced the unhappy old woman a month’s wages, and sent her down to the railway station at the foot of the hills in her own dandy; and, if possible, enslaved Ayah’s heart to her more than ever.

Jackie saw his nurse off with howls and tears. “Must not go, Ayah! Must not go!” he bellowed to the last.

“Ayah will come back, my little one,” she answered. “Ayah will come back quickly.”

But Jackie only wept with greater violence until the dandy and its awkwardly seated burden had disappeared down the hill path, and nothing but the promise that he should carry the bearer’s lantern about when it grew dark gave him any comfort for the rest of the day.

Old Ayah was terribly missed in the little house with the red veranda roof facing the snows. Jackie felt strange and forlorn without her indulgent yet experienced care, and consequently became a trial to everybody. He bullied the other servants and was naughty and exacting; he defied his mother and screamed himself purple when she corrected him; he would not to go bed, he would not get up, he would not eat what was good for him, and he was continually in mischief. No satisfactory substitute could be found to take Ayah’s place for such a short period, and Mrs. Dring counted the days till the old woman should come back. She wrote pages to her husband in the plains, chronicling her woes, and declared that native servants really ought to be born without relations. But a month went by and still Ayah did not come back, neither did she send a line of explanation to her mistress, which caused Mrs. Dring to enlarge on the ingratitude of even the best of native servants. At the same time her experience of India, comparatively short though it was, had familiarized her with the dilatoriness of the people where letters are concerned, and in her heart she excused Ayah, for she knew that the adored son’s illness would occupy the old woman’s time and attention completely. Also that if the man died the funeral ceremonies and arrangements must be a long and engrossing business. The mem-sahib did not really doubt but that Ayah would come back the moment she was free to do so, only it was certainly very vexing that her absence should last so much longer than anyone had anticipated.

But one day Jackie ceased to be defiant and unmanageable. He played listlessly all the morning and then declared, with little whimpers of self-pity, that he felt tired and wished only to sit on his mother’s lap with his head against her shoulder. Mrs. Dring took his temperature, with the result that she put him to bed at once and sent for the doctor, who said it was impossible to tell at present if the fever were ordinary malaria or the prelude to a serious illness.

The doctor came back again late that night, also early the next morning. Jackie had not slept, his mother reported anxiously, and had cried continually for his Ayah, who was away on leave.

“Can’t you recall her?” the doctor suggested. “You must have a woman to help you if this goes on, and it would be better to have someone he knows.”

So Mrs. Dring telegraphed to Old Ayah, urging her, if possible, to come back, as the child was ill and wanted her. She also telegraphed to Major Dring to hold himself in readiness to take leave if Jackie should grow worse. Then she sat by the little boy’s bed through the long hours, fighting the fever according to the doctor’s directions, praying that the blue eyes, so unnaturally bright, might close in healing sleep, listening to the ceaseless moan of “Ayah, Ayah! come back; must not go, Ayah!”

Next morning the doctor stayed on and on – he only left the sick child for a still more urgent case – and when he had gone Mrs. Dring telegraphed the necessary summons to her husband.

The hours that followed seemed endless. Now and then she crept into the veranda to see if Ayah, could by any chance be coming up the pathway. She dreaded the night-time. Her husband could not possibly be with her before sunrise. The doctor, overworked, single-handed though he was, stayed late again that evening, and when he left he looked worried and apprehensive. “If the child could only get to sleep naturally,” he said.

The mother arranged the room for the night’s vigil, set medicine ready, saw that milk and chicken essence were at hand, noted with a sick foreboding that, save for his heavy breathing, Jackie was lying unnaturally still, with eyes wide open yet glazed and unseeing. She sat by the shaded lamp alert and miserable, listening to the tick of the clock, the rustle of the fir-trees outside the window, the thick, difficult breathing that shook the fragile little form on the bed.

Of a sudden a sharp sound rang through the room: “Ayah! Ayah!”

Jackie was holding out his arms and gabbling hoarsely in Hindustani. “Ayah must not go any more. Ayah stay and sing Jackie to sleep. Why did you go? Naughty Ayah!”

Mrs. Dring flew to the bedside, but Jackie paid no heed to her. He mumbled happily in Hindustani, and pushed her hand away when she laid it on his forehead. Reluctantly she sat down again by the shaded lamp, and then, to her everlasting bewilderment, she thought she heard a low, faint sound of singing, the sound of the quaint little crooning chant with which ayahs soothe children to sleep.

Years afterwards, when Mrs. Dring was telling me this story herself, she said that she should never forget the feeling that came over her as she listened to the sound, the feeling of awe and mystery, the conviction that she was listening to something not earthly. She tried to persuade herself that it was one of the servants in the compound, or that the sound came from the public footpath below the house; but all the time she knew that someone who she could not see was there, beside Jackie’s bed, singing and soothing him to sleep; and that the voice, though so faint and thin and uncertain, was surely the voice of Old Ayah.

“Ayah!” came from her lips, involuntarily, in a loud whisper.

The singing ceased abruptly, as though startled into silence, and Jackie set up a peevish cry. His mother bent over him, and laid her fingers lightly on his forehead. Was it her fancy, or did the skin feel less dry and burning?

“Ayah must not go! Sing, Ayah, sing,” he murmured, and nestled his cheek drowsily into his pillow. “Sing!” he whimpered with impatience; and Mrs. Dring crooned as she had heard Old Ayah croon so often at Jackie’s bedtime, and then patted the small shoulder softly.

“No! No!” the child wailed, and flung out his arms. “Ayah, sing—”

Then Mrs. Dring stole back to her seat by the lamp and waited, waited breathless and expectant till the fluttering sound that was more like the echo of a voice, returned, as she had known instinctively that it would return, and hung, hovering, over the bed.

How long it went on she could never say. She thinks she may have fainted, she does not know; she can only remember opening her eyes to find the room full of the yellow dawn-light, and Jackie sleeping quietly, naturally, his breathing regular and easy, his skin moist and cool. Hardly daring to believe the happy truth, she lingered long beside the bed, then slipped quietly into the veranda. Before her rose the chain of white mountains burnished with the crimson and gold of daybreak, glowing and glistening high into the radiant sky.

She stood there, weary, and dishevelled, yet with heart and soul uplifted in thankfulness. All the dread and suspense and longing now might yield to a glad relief. The ghostly fancies of the night had rolled away like a dark cloud; she believed she must have slept – to her shame – and dreamed of that faint, crooning song, dreamed that it had soothed the sick child into life-giving rest….

The sound of hoofs on the gravel made her turn, and she saw her husband riding up the pathway. The next moment she was clinging to him. “He is better – the fever has gone – he is asleep,” she half sobbed.

Together they tiptoed into the room, and bent over the softly sleeping little figure. Then they stole into the next room, where the sound of their voices could not disturb the child, but where Mrs. Dring’s strength failed her suddenly; and just as the doctor’s voice was heard outside, she slipped from her husband’s arm to the ground a huddled, senseless heap.

•   •   •   •   •

Before midday a nurse from the hospital was in temporary command of the little house, for though Jackie was practically out of danger, his mother lay on her bed weak and exhausted, forbidden to move for the present, forbidden to talk. So it was not until the next morning that she was able to tell her husband of the weird lullaby that had soothed Jackie to sleep.

“I’m certain I didn’t dream it,” she added nervously.

“Dearest,” he argued, “of course you either dreamt or imagined it.”

But Mrs. Dring would not listen to reason. “Something must have happened to poor Old Ayah,” she persisted tearfully. “I believe she came back when Jackie called her, and saved his life.”

“My dear child, what nonsense!” he interrupted.

“I wish you would write,” she urged. “Do write and make inquiries about her; write to the cantonment magistrate of the place where the son lives.” She began to cry.

“Yes – yes, I’ll write, of course,” Major Dring promised hastily. “But I’m sure you needn’t worry yourself. You know what natives are – time means nothing to them. She’ll turn up in a day or two.”

“But I telegraphed to her—”

“Very likely she never got it. Her relations would see to that if they wanted her to stay on. But, anyway, we’ll find out. She’s been away far too long.”

“Something must have happened to her,” Mrs. Dring repeated with tearful obstinacy. “Old Ayah would never take advantage.”

“Well, I’ve no doubt she’ll turn up the moment I’ve posted the letter,” said the Major cheerfully.

But before the promised letter of inquiry had even been written there came an answer to Mrs. Dring’s telegram, signed with the name of Old Ayah’s son. It had been sent the cheapest way – “Deferred” – which means in India that the message must take its chance of delay, and may possibly reach its destination no sooner than a letter.

“Mother not come,” was the message.

“There now,” said Major Dring, “they’re not going to let her come back at all, the rascals! and they’ve got her month’s pay into the bargain. I don’t suppose that son of hers was ever ill at all. It was just a trick.”

Mrs. Dring was looking at the telegram with thoughtful attention and troubled eyes. “I think,” she said slowly, “it means that Old Ayah never even arrived!”

Her husband scoffed and contradicted, but was obviously disturbed by the suggestion. He went off and wrote to the proper authority at the place where Old Ayah’s son was head sweeper to the bazaar, and asked that the matter might be investigated.

When the answer came, three or four days later, they were all out in the veranda: Major and Mrs. Dring, Jackie, thin and pale but hourly growing stronger, and the pleasant hospital nurse.

The postman came up the path and handed the letters to Major Dring. In anxious silence his wife watched him open them. She was afraid to ask before Jackie if there was news of Old Ayah. Since his recovery the child had not mentioned her; he was engrossed with the hospital nurse, who could draw pictures, and make things out of paper, and play all sorts of games. He found her far more interesting than Old Ayah had ever been.

Presently Major Dring got up and went into the house. A moment later he called his wife, and she joined him hurriedly.

“I’m afraid,” he said, “you were right. It seems Old Ayah never did arrive at her son’s house. The son was certainly ill, and his mother was sent for, but when she did not come they concluded she was unable to get leave, and, just like natives, never thought of writing again. They had no idea she was not still with us till they got your telegram. The cantonment magistrate says the son is well known and respected, and there’s no doubt his story is true. I’m afraid—” he hesitated significantly.

“Oh! I knew something had happened,” cried his wife in sore distress, “Oh! poor Old Ayah! She had her month’s pay with her, and all her jewellery. Of course she was murdered on the way down. You know how many cases there are like that in India – people who are never traced, never discovered. Why didn’t I think of it – I shall never forgive myself – and she came back to Jackie just to save his life – she came back and sang him to sleep—” She burst into a storm of tears.

“Hush! Hush!” said the Major. “Don’t talk like that. We will do all we can to trace her.”

And he went off at once to set inquiries in train, while Mrs. Dring stood at the window staring out with wet eyes at the glittering snows. She felt a sad conviction that Old Ayah would never be seen or heard of again in the flesh or the spirit; and indeed time proved that she was right.

THE MINIATURE

It was at a pleasant, but rather prosaic dinner party in South Kensington that I was told this story – not at all the kind of occasion on which one would expect to hear anything out of the common. The little chronicle struck me as being so curious and complete that when I got home I put it down on paper just as I had heard it, and if it seems too improbable, I can only assert I did not invent it either.

We were all up in the drawing-room after dinner admiring the pale green wallpaper, and the white paint and the furniture; for our host and hostess had but lately retired and were as proud of their new home as if they had been a bride and bridegroom instead of old Anglo-Indians, with thirty years of married life in the Punjab behind them. Mixed up with a maple suite were beautiful hand-made rugs and carvings, chased brass and copper work, quaint ornaments of silver, ivory, and ebony, and multitudes of photographs of friends, and bungalows, and favourite animals – reminiscences of their Indian days. In spite of these incongruities it was a pleasant, homelike jumble, and we were all enjoying ourselves, examining this accumulation of years, and talking India to repletion, when somebody picked up a little leather case from a Jeypore table and said: “What’s this?” At the same moment, in the pause that followed, the only non-Anglo-Indian present was heard to ask: “But are the natives so very occult? Do they see ghosts, and all that sort of thing?”

Our hostess, with plump figure, white hair, quick blue eyes, and skin so wonderfully delicate in spite of all the “hot weathers” she had spent in the plains, rustled from a group of contemporaries in the corner.

“If you want a proof of that,” she said, in answer to the “outsider,” and took the leather case from her other friend, “here you are!”

She opened it, and held up a miniature of a young woman in high-waisted muslin gown and mob cap, a picture that seemed to live and breathe and speak. Our interest was aroused, and presently we were all listening to the strange history of the miniature.

“That is my great-grandmother,” she said, and looked affectionately at the delicately tinted little portrait. “She died of cholera in India as a young woman, and it was believed that my great-grandfather, her husband, committed suicide, insane with grief at her loss. At any rate he died just about the same time, but exactly where it all happened, or in what station, there was no proof. In the old days news from India took long to travel, particulars were hard to obtain, and even when secured were often lost or forgotten. As children, we used to hear vaguely of our ill-fated ancestors in the East, and we knew that the only child, afterwards my grandfather, had been sent home as a baby about a year before the death of his parents; but after we grew up we never found any letters or written records of the tragedy, neither could we discover any clue as to what had become of the miniature that was said to have been painted of my great-grandmother before she sailed for India to be married. How that miniature was eventually found I am going to tell you – for this is the very picture itself!”

Again she held up the little gilt-framed portrait for us all to see; and then continued her story.

•   •   •   •   •

Often as a girl I thought of my poor little ancestress and her sad fate, and wondered what had become of her picture; and I thought of her still more when I married and went out to India. In the course of our official wanderings I always visited the cemeteries of the stations we lived in, or passed through, in the hope of finding her name among the old monuments and gravestones. My husband used to chaff me about my graveyard mania as he called it; but still I looked, and asked questions, and read old books about the English in India, and kept up my search diligently though without success, until, at last, a curious thing happened.

We had been transferred to a small station on my husband going into civil employ; it was miles from the railway, very lonely, very neglected, and all the more melancholy in that it had once been a large military station in the old days of John Company, as the palatial bungalows, many of them in ruins, and the empty crumbling barracks testified. There the cemetery was very crowded, but no trace did I discover of the name that, of course, I went to look for without delay.

We settled down in our vast and rather dilapidated bungalow, built, perhaps, a century and a half ago, for some official who must have lived in semi-native state with much pomp and display and waste of money. There was a great courtyard at the back with little rooms all round it; the servants’ quarters would have accommodated several hundred natives; there were elephant stalls, a swimming bath, and a compound of ten acres. It was impossible to keep the whole place in repair, for even in my young days the rupee had begun to depreciate in value and prices were rising, so we decided to occupy only a part of the house and just keep the lawn and a portion of the garden in good order. The rows of tumble-down out-houses and the rest of the compound had to be left to decay and jungle growth.

I was not at all unhappy in that out-of-the-way spot; the few people in the station were nice, we rode a great deal, and had a big shooting party at Christmas, and I had a piano and my flowers and large, cool rooms. My bedroom opened on to a broad flight of steps that led into the garden, and just beyond the foot of the steps grew a great pipal-tree, probably hundreds of years old. Beneath the tree stood a little stone tomb without ornament or inscription, not an uncommon object in an old Indian garden, or on the roadside, or even in the depths of the jungle. From its shape we judged it to be the tomb of a Mahomedan, in all likelihood some holy man whose life and good works had long since been forgotten. Before the bungalow was built or the compound enclosed he might have been buried there, in the shade of the tree whose roots had begun to split and crack the masonry of his tombstone. I used to look out on the little monument all the time I was dressing, and I often wondered what had been the life-story of the one who lay beneath it. I little thought I was soon to know – and in a most strange and unbelievable manner!

My ayah had taken herself off on a month’s leave, and I was trying to manage without a substitute, for in such a remote quarter it would have been impossible to find a trained woman, and the expense of getting one from a large station for so short a time was not to be thought of. So I got along with the help of my husband’s old bearer though not very comfortably, and when the washer-man came to me one morning and begged that I would allow his wife to try and wait upon me I agreed with a certain amount of relief.

“She knows nothing about sahibs and mem-sahibs or the ways of sahibs’ houses,” the man explained frankly, “but she is anxious to learn, and she is intelligent, and if she may come she will ask small wages and do all that the mem-sahib orders.”

It did not sound encouraging, but the man was so urgent and anxious, and as I knew him to be honest and respectable I felt that, at least, there could be no harm in allowing the wife to gain a little experience as my ayah. The bearer would show her what to do; and in many ways she might be useful. So she came; a mere child according to English ideas, with a clear, nut-brown skin, large dewy eyes like the eyes of a fawn, and a little, delicate, pointed face. She seemed quick and intelligent, and soon learned how to get my bath ready, to dust the room, and to remain within call at certain hours. I disliked an ayah in my room unless I wanted her for anything, and so I bade her sit outside under the pipal-tree, where it was cool and shady, while she was on duty, where she would hear me at once when I called.

For two or three days she obeyed. Then she came to me in great embarrassment, standing on one leg, drawing her wrapper over her face, twiddling her toes, betraying all the little native signs of nervousness that I had come to know so well.

“What is the matter?” I asked, rather with impatience for I was tired after a long ride.

“Mem-sahib, is it an order that I always sit under the pipal-tree? May I not sit on the steps?”

“Certainly if you prefer to do so you may sit on the steps. I thought the shade of the tree would be pleasanter for you. Why do you dislike sitting under the tree?”

She hesitated, coughed, and looked away, fidgeting. Suddenly I recollected the native superstition, that every tree forms a refuge for spirits good or bad.

“Is there a ghost in the tree?” I asked, in a matter-of-fact tone.

Her wrapper slid from her head. She gazed at me eagerly, and with relief.

“Yes, yes, mem-sahib, that is it! The ghost!” she said quickly.

I was interested – and forgot my fatigue after the long ride. I advised her, gravely, to follow the native plan of hanging bits of rag on the branches to propitiate the spirit. But she shook her head.

“Why won’t that do?” I urged, feeling now a strong curiosity.

Again she hesitated, glanced at me, and apparently gained confidence, for she burst out: “Because it is an English ghost, mem-sahib! and it sits on the tomb and I am afraid. My liver turns to water when I behold it!”

“Oh! of course that is a different matter,” I said judicially. “I know you people have a great fear of English ghosts. Is this one a man or a woman?”

“A sahib!” she whispered.

“And what is he like? ” I spoke in a level voice, for I was afraid if her shyness returned, or if she suspected I was laughing at her, I should hear no more.

The little woman glanced furtively out of the window, as though fearing that the ghost might be there, watching her.

“He is not like your honour’s sahib,” she said, “he is not like any sahib that I have seen. He has white hair, and it is long and tied behind his head.” She put her two hands to the nape of her neck. “And his trousers are buttoned at the knee and he wears stockings, and shoes with silver ornaments on them – he is not like the sahib or any other sahib that I have seen…”

My heart beat fast. The washer-man’s wife, a girl who had never been out of her native village, had never, till she came to me, been inside a European dwelling, was describing an Englishman in the dress of the last century! And yet she could never have seen such a costume, or even the picture of one; besides, all we Anglo-Indians know that to the uneducated native a picture conveys nothing. It seemed incredible, and even my husband, the most unimaginative being on earth, was puzzled, though he scoffed at my suggestion that the tomb under the tree might be the tomb of an Englishman whose ghost the ayah had seen. Then an idea darted into my mind, and I almost shouted: “What if it should be the grave I am always looking for?”

“Nonsense – don’t be so silly,” he said. “Besides you are always looking for your great-grandmother’s grave, and you say this ghost of the ayah’s is a man!”

“But it might be the great-grandfather,” I went on in excitement, unsubdued by these snubs. “You know he was supposed to have committed suicide when his wife died of cholera. Perhaps this was the very place where it all happened, and they buried him in the compound under the tree because they couldn’t put him in the cemetery. Depend upon it – she is in the cemetery, and her gravestone, if there ever was one, has crumbled away or been destroyed somehow.”

I stopped to breathe, and was told not to be too foolish, that even if the grave under the tree were opened, and even if the remains inside were those of my great-grandfather, how were we to prove it? The whole idea was too crazy and preposterous to be entertained for a moment.

I said no more at the time, but I questioned the little ayah frequently as to the details of the ghostly sahib’s appearance, and I daresay she drew on her imagination to a large extent, seeing my interest in the subject. I even went so far as to sit under the tree myself, just about the hour when the ayah said she had always seen him, but no gentleman with powdered hair, knee breeches, and buckled shoes presented himself. The notion that perhaps it might indeed be my own ancestor who lay beneath the big pipal-tree, so near my bedroom doors, became almost an obsession with me at last. I yearned to open the tomb, to see if there might not be some relic that would give me a clue as to whose grave it was. Perhaps he had been buried in his clothes – there might be buttons with initials on them or something that had survived insects and decay.

Finally I determined to satisfy my longing, and the next time my husband went for a flying tour of inspection I made an excuse and said I thought I would rather stay at home this time. I dare say it was very deceitful and disloyal, but I felt I had arrived at the pitch when I could no longer live in that bungalow looking out every day at the broken little tomb and not know what was inside it … and I felt sure I should never open it with my husband’s sanction and approval!

He agreed that it was rather late for me to go into camp; the hot weather was almost upon us, the sun had begun to blaze with determined force, and the wind and dust were very unpleasant. Feeling guilty yet impatient I saw him off in the morning, and that afternoon, directly the sun had slackened a little, I called the garden coolies together and bade them break up the masonry of the tomb under the tree.

To my anger and astonishment the men stood obstinately reluctant, and began to make absurd excuses, whereupon I called the head peon who looked doubtful and said it was a dangerous thing to do, to meddle with a grave; misfortune might fall on the lot of us. The peon’s advice, delivered with firm politeness, was to let it alone, or at least to wait till the sahib returned, for if anything terrible were to happen to the mem-sahib during the master’s absence would they not all be blamed? I perceived that they all knew about the ghost under the tree, probably they had all seen it and were as much afraid of it as was the little wife of the washer-man. But of course to wait till my husband’s return was just what I had no intention of doing – I knew he would never give his consent to the opening of the grave, but once done without his knowledge he would no doubt reproach me for my foolishness, and then dismiss the matter from his mind – supposing, of course, I found nothing that could identify the remains. On the other hand, should I discover anything of importance, and I felt a conviction that I should do so, what a triumph would be mine!

In the meantime there stood the silent row of sulky coolies, and the disturbed peon, and I felt that it was impossible to press the point. With a few sarcastic remarks I waved them away, and then proceeded to inspect the tomb most carefully in the hopes that I might find it possible to break the masonry apart unaided. The stone-work was frightfully split and ruined. In places the roots of the pipal-tree had forced their way right through, and I could put my hand into the cracks. One corner of the little monument had fallen away altogether and left a gaping hole. I went indoors and fetched a hog-spear, with which I jabbed and dug at the crumbling stone, and in about half an hour I had broken away a large portion of the masonry. I peered into the cavity; it was hollow, and the floor seemed to be covered with rough brickwork also torn and displaced by the roots of the tree. Feverishly I began hacking away at these loose bricks. My hands were soon sore, I was wet with perspiration, my throat and tongue felt parched, but still I worked on. Now and then one of the servants passed furtively – pretending not to see me; but I paid no attention to their curiosity. I only felt furiously annoyed with them for not offering to help. They looked apologetic, all the same, and I knew it was only their superstitious fear that held them back. Once the head peon came and remonstrated respectfully with me. He was sure I should tire myself unduly, such exertion might bring on an attack of fever, I might be bitten by a snake, or some poisonous insect – I paused at this warning; certainly there was danger of snakes especially at this time of year. I gave one more prod as I considered the risk, and the hog-spear went through the brick-work, almost overbalancing me. I had penetrated into the actual grave at last!

I ordered the peon to fetch a lamp, and by the time he returned with it I had made the hole large enough to look, with ease, down into the cavity beneath. The peon seemed to have no objection to holding the light, though he advised investigation with the hog-spear first, in case of reptiles. I followed the suggestion, and we waited, listening. We heard no sound of hiss or rustle, and, cautiously we lowered the lamp into the dark space below. Nothing was to be seen but a confused mass of something that looked like bits of wood and dried sticks and, seemingly, a thick heap of cobwebs. Again I widened the hole, tearing away the bricks with almost unnatural strength while the peon guarded the lamp. Then again we peered down and I disturbed the ‘cobwebs’ gently with the point of the spear. I thought it clinked against something, and my excitement rose high.

I sent the peon for a pair of tongs, feeling thankful I had kept the useless set of fire-irons somebody had given me as a wedding present, ignorant that a coal fire is practically unknown in India. The first time I lowered the tongs they closed on nothing but a wisp of something that crumbled to dust the moment it met the air. The second time a bone came up, black and brittle, which I let fall with a shudder while the peon groaned with apprehension. Then I hardened my nerves and felt about carefully till at last the tongs gripped a small metallic object and there came to the surface a little rusted tin case that had been soldered down all round – something, evidently, that the dead man had prized very greatly. I hurried with it into the house and called for a tin opener. The thing was very difficult to open – hard and unyielding – but at last I succeeded, and there, smiling up at me as fresh and bright as the day it was painted, was this little miniature!

•   •   •   •   •

The entire company gasped, and the hostess smiled round upon us in naive pleasure at our astonishment.

“Your great-grandmother of course?” said one of us.

“Of course,” she replied, “and if my washer-man’s little wife hadn’t been able to see ghosts I should never have found it.” She turned to the non-Anglo-Indian who had started the story by his question as to the occult powers of the native. “Isn’t that sufficient proof for you?” she asked.

But the General interrupted and spoilt everything.

“Why should it be the wife’s great-grandmother?” he said teasingly, with a wink at his guests. “There’s no picture of her to corroborate the fact. It may have been the grave of a gallant killed in a duel with his lady love’s portrait on his heart, sealed up beforehand in case of the worst; it may have been some old gentleman who wished his favourite daughter’s portrait buried with him – it may have been a native who had got hold of the tin case as it was and thought it might contain a charm and was afraid to open it, and naturally it would be buried with him. But at any rate whatever it was it cured my wife of messing about in cemeteries, and apparently she laid the ghost, for though I restored the tomb with all respect not even the washer-man’s wife ever saw him again!”

“THIRTY ACRES”

“A change to the country and absolute quiet is what you want,” said the doctor. “Take my advice, and get off without delay.”

Being a Cockney to the backbone, my already drooping spirits sank lower. “The country” to me only meant a round of visits to friends and relations during August and September, enjoyable enough when the weather kept good, but from which I invariably returned to my flat in London rejoicing that I could once more go to bed when I chose, get up when I felt inclined, and make no effort to be agreeable and adaptable; that I could again revel in pictures, lectures, concerts, and semi-Bohemian gatherings.

“The ‘seaside,’” I murmured.

The doctor smiled. He had known me for many years.

“You don’t want bands, and a crowd, and a pier, and acquaintances at every step,” he said. “That’s what your ‘seaside’ would mean! You want rest – real rest – with plenty of new milk and fresh eggs, and no excitement whatever. Vegetation – for three weeks or a month.”

I was worn out and run down, after nursing an aged relative through a long illness. Now the old lady had been removed to a nursing home, where it seemed probable that she would enjoy bad health for many years to come, and I was free to think of myself. I knew the doctor was right. I did need a restful change, but I had not the energy left to set about seeking the sort of haven I could afford.

As it happened, there lay on my table an invitation that had arrived only yesterday. It was from an old schoolfellow who lately had broken a vow of perpetual spinsterhood to marry the elderly vicar of a small West-country parish. Judging by her rapturous accounts of her husband and her home, the experiment seemed likely to prove successful.

She was anxious that I should witness (and perhaps envy) her happiness, and had written beseeching me to pay them a visit as soon as possible.

I took up the letter and read it again, this time with attention.

“And Little Todbury is the loveliest village,” wrote Fanny; “full of picturesque buildings. There is an old farm within sight of our windows that I know you will want to sketch the moment you see it. They say Oliver Cromwell slept in one of the rooms. I get all my butter and eggs and chickens from the widow who lives there…”

Here she launched off into domestic details that may be omitted.

I hesitated. Should I accept the warm-hearted invitation? Probably if I did, I should be bored with Little Todbury before three days were over. At the same time, I realized that if peace and quiet were not obtainable there, I should get them nowhere else.

Yet, supposing the vicarage breakfast was at a quarter to eight, and I was given no early morning tea? If I were expected to attend all the services in the parish church that would smell of school-children and dusty hassocks? The weather would change, and rain would fall persistently – in which case I saw myself imprisoned with Fanny in the drawing-room, helping her to make disfiguring garments for the poor, and listening to gruesome details of the village folks’ diseases.

Again I read the letter, and an idea seemed to dart like a little gleam of light from my brain across the pages … the farm within sight of the vicarage windows, where Oliver Cromwell had slept! If only Fanny could persuade the widow to receive me as a lodger, I should be owner of my time, free to read and write or idle as I pleased, while yet within comfortable reach of Fanny, my old friend.

I seized my pen and wrote that I was really not in a fit state to inflict myself on anyone as a visitor, my nerves being on edge and my temper unbearable; but, as the doctor had ordered me into the country, would it be possible for her to get me a room in the farmhouse she had mentioned?

Therefore, one warm spring evening, a few days later, I arrived at the Manor House Farm as it was now called, for the older and more aristocratic portion of the building had long since fallen into decay.

Still, the inhabited portion was delightful, with oak panelling, low ceilings, and a wide staircase. So also was the old-fashioned bit of garden in front, with stumpy lavender bushes, sweet-scented herbs, homely perennials, and turf such as only centuries can produce.

Now fowls pecked and scratched on the lawn where doubtless cavaliers and powdered dames had dallied in bygone days, and at the back of the house pigsties and rubbish heaps, sheds and barns covered what had evidently been a terraced pleasure ground.

Fanny was there to welcome me, beaming and voluble, and I felt genuinely glad to see her again. She had procured me an airy bedroom, substantially furnished, with clean chintz hangings and a monstrous four-poster bed. My landlady, Mrs. Russell, seemed ready to do all she could for my comfort, though she said very little, and was utterly unlike the bustling, buxom, farmer’s widow my imagination had pictured.

She interested me from the first – a tall, pale woman, past middle age, who must in her youth have been beautiful. She had a resolute mouth and curious eyes that conveyed an expression of patient endurance combined with tenacity of purpose. I was not surprised to hear from Fanny how successfully Mrs. Russell had conducted the business of the farm since her husband’s death.

I remarked on her appearance that night when dining at the vicarage, and inquired if Mrs. Russell had a history.

“She looks,” I said, “as if she were bearing some secret burden, or was suffering in silence from an incurable disease!”

The vicar – a commonplace, kind little man, with a bald head, a beard and spectacles – admitted that Mrs. Russell had a history.

“But,” he added, “she is so reticent, so hard, that I have given up trying to help her spiritually or bodily. Poor soul, she is much to be pitied!”

I tormented my host to tell me the woman’s story, and at last, reluctantly, he did so, his wife gazing at him with such genuine admiration and respect as would have been laughable but for its pathos. How could Fanny?

However, to return to the reason of Mrs. Russell’s tragic demeanour. Margaret Russell, in her youth, had been the village beauty, and had rejected many eligible suitors for the reason that she had set her affections perversely on Russell, who owned the Manor House Farm, and was already engaged to be married to another young woman. Eventually Russell jilted his sweetheart to marry Margaret, and the girl who was to have been his wife consoled herself with another young farmer named Iles, who had been long her admirer, and whose farm, as it happened, marched with the Manor House land.

“You can see how it is,” explained the vicar, as we strolled out on to the lawn in the warm evening air. “There is the Manor House, separated from Iles’s farm by the field known as ‘Thirty Acres,’ which belongs to Iles, so that his land may be said to run up to Mrs. Russell’s very door. Of course, any friendship between the two households was hardly to be expected, but there was no open hostility until Russell met his death. One day Iles brought home from market a bull that was notoriously dangerous, and he shut the animal up in the shed that you can see at the top of the field. Russell was missing at dinner-time the following day, and later was discovered gored to death by the bull just outside the shed. The explanation generally accepted was that the door of this shed had not been properly bolted, and that the bull had escaped, with fatal results to poor Russell. But Mrs. Russell, distracted with grief, publicly accused Mrs. Iles of having unbolted the door on purpose just before Russell would be crossing ‘Thirty Acres’ on his way home to dinner. Mrs. Iles indignantly denied the charge, and a scene followed between the two women that has never been forgotten in the village. From that day Mrs. Russell relapsed into the hard, sullen reserve that struck you on seeing her for the first time…. Nothing will convince her that Mrs. Iles was not the cause of Russell’s death. My own theory is that her conscience had always reproached her for stealing Russell’s affections from the girl he was going to marry, and that the shock of his terrible death affected her brain, so that she fastened on the fantastic idea that Mrs. Iles had deliberately murdered Russell by letting the bull loose.”

“But,” I exclaimed, “imagine Mrs. Russell living on there for all these years within sight of the shed and of her enemy’s very door!”

“Yes,” said the vicar, “but these country people are the most extraordinary mixture of sentiment and callousness. Mrs. Russell could quite easily have moved, for she was left comfortably off; but instead she sublet some of the land and stayed on. I cannot help suspecting that she derives a certain amount of unnatural satisfaction from the fact that she is living in touch with the Iles, though wild horses would not make her speak to them. Except on that one point she is a most estimable woman, and I can only look upon it as a sort of obsession. I have tried my best to bring about a reconciliation, but though the Iles are willing Mrs. Russell is not.”

I smiled politely, and he went on:

“At any rate, I hope you will not allow your mind to dwell upon this sordid little story. Perhaps I have been unwise to relate it to you, since I understand you have come here for reasons of health in addition to your desire to see my wife.”

“Oh, that’s all right!” I said to reassure him; but, all the same, my mind did dwell upon Mrs. Russell and her “sordid little story.” I felt an intense pity for the lonely woman who was convinced, rightly or wrongly, that her husband had been killed by treachery. I now understood the look in her eyes; it meant a consuming, unsatisfied craving for vengeance.

As the days went by, I attempted to draw Mrs. Russell into conversation. At first she resisted my blandishments, but gradually she took to exchanging a few genteel remarks with me after breakfast, and so seemed to gain confidence, until one morning she showed me her husband’s likeness – a terrible photograph of poor Russell, clad in uncomfortable Sunday raiment, leaning on a sham balustrade, with his feet crossed and one finger supporting his chin. Later on, with a queer, hard glitter in her eyes, she told me the pitiful story I had already heard from the vicar, asserting fiercely that Ann Iles had let the bull out of the shed in the hope, which was fulfilled, that the beast would attack Russell on his way across “Thirty Acres.” “She hated my John because he fancied me best, and she hated me worse. Well, she’s had her turn, and maybe mine’ll come yet!”

I made no attempt to argue with her, or to shake her dreadful conviction; I felt it would be useless. I listened quietly, as though I accepted her statement, and probably I was the only person who had ever done so, for as we sat on the window-seat, looking out over “Thirty Acres,” her self-control suddenly gave way. All the pent-up rage and bitterness of years against the woman she hated, and against those who denied her belief, poured from her lips like a flood that had burst a barrier. She looked “possessed,” her language was frightful. I thought she was going mad. Then she ceased as abruptly as she had begun, and left me without another word. When I saw her next morning the storm of emotion had passed; she was again the pale, self-repressed woman who moved about quietly, and spoke in a low, level voice. Neither of us alluded to what had occurred.

But for this painful scene, and its effect on my mind, my time at Little Todbury was passing pleasantly enough. My health improved; the weather was bright and warm, and though I had to submit to expeditions with Fanny and the vicar to the inevitable ruins, the Roman camp, the wishing well, and so forth, I was rather enjoying my exile.

The day came, however, when something happened that revived all my old antipathy to the country.

Fanny and her husband had driven to a sale of work some miles distant, and I, having firmly refused to accompany them, set off for a solitary ramble with my red parasol and a novel under my arm. I strolled along by the hedge that bounded “Thirty Acres,” watching the birds that fluttered among the leaves, and the butterflies skimming over the rich grass, amused at the sheep that stamped defiance as I approached, only to flee in a panic when I waved my parasol at them.

At the top of “Thirty Acres” I came to the historic shed that was so bound up with Mrs. Russell’s tragic story. It had recently been repaired, and shone with a still strong-smelling coat of tar. I passed the erection with nervous haste, though I saw that the door was shut and bolted outside. Skirting around it, I found myself confronted with a five-barred gate that led into an adjoining and much smaller field, bordered at the farther end by a row of magnificent elm-trees. It was my intention to sit and read in their pleasant shade. But the gate was padlocked; I should have to climb over it. After glancing about to make certain that no one was in sight, I pushed my book and parasol through the bars and, gathering up my skirts, proceeded to clamber over laboriously. Not until that moment had I ever realized how difficult it might be for a lady past her first youth to climb over a five-barred gate. I hung and clung, presenting, I was aware, an absurd spectacle, and finally dropped down on the other side, catching my dress on a nail and tearing it lamentably. Once over, I picked up my belongings and stepped out, feeling quite proud of my acrobatic achievement. The sun was hot, and I unfurled my parasol; but I had hardly got into the middle of the field when I heard a savage bellow, and was horrified to see a great red bull, with his head down and his tail on end, making straight for me from the line of elms.

Never shall I forget my terror, and never before or since have I run as I ran that afternoon back towards the gate I had climbed but a few moments before. Hideous recollections of Russell’s fate rushed through my mind as I ran; I remember wondering if Mrs. Russell would again blame Mrs. Iles if I was killed by this bull. I felt my knees giving way, my breath failing me; a mist blinded my eyes, and I threw out my hands in helpless despair….

Someone grasped my hands, and I found myself being hauled over the gate, then supported by strong arms in safety on the other side.

For a space I was hardly conscious; when I opened my eyes, a stout, red-faced man was gazing at me with awkward concern. I recognized Iles, who had been pointed out to me in the village by the vicar; and when I inquired furiously why he allowed such a dangerous brute to be loose in his fields, he humbly assured me that the bull had seemed perfectly harmless, and that my red parasol must have upset him.

“You be the lady as is stopping at Manor House Farm,” he said respectfully. “Her did ought to have warned you that this ’ere gate allus be kept locked when I’ve a bull in this meadow. But there, that ’oman – she wouldn’t lift a finger to do no one a good turn.”

“I don’t suppose she knew,” I answered, in angry defence of Mrs. Russell. “How long have you had the bull in this field?”

He admitted that he had only bought the bull the day before, but added that “had he a-known” he would have shut the bull up in the shed.

“He come along like a lamb, and there warn’t nothing against him; he’s young; he didn’t mean no harm.” And he looked affectionately at the bull that now was grazing peacefully, as though no thought of pursuing a defenceless female had ever entered his shaggy, handsome head.

“Well, the sooner you shut him up the better,” I said with what dignity I could maintain in my dishevelled condition; and Iles agreed, touching his hat. Then, seeing that I was fit to walk home alone, he slouched off towards the back of his own farm. I did not envy him the pleasure of conducting the bull to the shed!

Feeling shaken and upset, angry with Iles and the country and the bull, and because I had left my book and parasol in the next field, I walked back unsteadily to the Manor House Farm. It was abominable that one could not take a harmless country walk in moderate safety. I would go back to London for rest and security.

I burst into Mrs. Russell’s kitchen, full of my grievous adventure. She was seated at the table shelling peas, and suddenly the sight of her face arrested my excited tongue. She had turned deadly white, her lips were drawn back, and she was staring at me with unseeing eyes, her breath coming in short gasps.

“What is the matter?” I cried, hastening to her side.

She could not answer, and I tore up to my room for my brandy flask. When she revived and rose weakly from her chair, I remembered what the vicar had said as to the state of her health, and I implored her to let me send for the doctor. But she refused.

“It isn’t anything new, miss. I’ve had these attacks on and off, but they’re coming more frequent. No, miss, thank you. I don’t want the doctor this time. He told me himself that he couldn’t do nothing much for me. I’m sorry I was took bad this afternoon when you’ve had such a fright and all.”

It was useless; she would not have the doctor, and, indeed, in about an hour she was so far recovered that there seemed no necessity. But next morning she did not get up, and the little servant-maid told me in a scared whisper that she was “afeared Mrs. Russell were mortal bad.” I went at once to her room, and found her evidently very ill; thereupon I sent for the doctor on my own responsibility, who, after he had seen her, told me she would not live long, and would have to remain in bed till the end.

“She has aggravated the disease by mental worry,” he said. “In fact, I’m inclined to think that worry may have begun it. I only wonder she has kept going so long. I will send somebody in to look after her.”

I volunteered to look after her myself. I knew a good deal about nursing, and I felt I should like to make the poor soul’s end as peaceful and comfortable as possible.

Fanny and the vicar tried hard to persuade me to give up the idea and come to them, but I held to my intention; and for the next few days I and the willing little servant-maid, with occasional help from good-natured neighbours and constant kindness from Fanny, did all in our power to ease the poor woman. For the most part she lay quiet and seldom spoke. Sometimes she had sharp attacks of pain, but she bore them without a cry; only her agonized eyes and the writhing of her body betrayed how terribly she suffered.

One evening she asked me suddenly if I thought she would die soon. I answered evasively, and she laughed, turning her face to the latticed window near the bed. She was looking out over “Thirty Acres” towards the Iles’s farm, and the venomous expression in her sunken eyes appalled me.

“Oh, Mrs. Russell!” I cried on an impulse, “don’t – don’t look like that!” And I tried to preach eloquently of peace and forgiveness; to persuade her to put all harsh thoughts of Ann Iles out of her mind, to try and believe that it was not Ann Iles who had caused Russell’s death; and, even if it was, to forgive – to forgive! I felt I could not let her die with such anger, probably such unjust anger in her heart.

That night I met with no success. She only smiled at me as if I had been the feeblest of teachers in a Sunday school. Next day she was so much worse that, after the doctor had looked in during the late afternoon, I redoubled my efforts, and at last she showed signs of yielding, for her face grew soft and the angry light died out of her eyes that were turned always towards “Thirty Acres.” Just before sunset, with stiff, white lips, she whispered to me, “Send for her – send for Ann Iles.”

I rose gladly to do her bidding, but as I rose she put out her hand. “Not just yet,” she whispered. “Tell her to come in an hour; I shall be ready for her – in an hour.”

I wrote the message and sent it off by a small boy who worked about the place; and then I sat by the bedside holding the chill, damp hand in mine. She was breathing very lightly, almost imperceptibly. The moments passed, and all at once I knew that the breathing had ceased. The room had darkened, though the afterglow of sunset still lingered outside. I lit a candle and bent over the quiet form on the bed. Mrs. Russell’s sufferings were over, and on her face, beautiful now in death as it had been beautiful in her youth, was a splendid, triumphant smile. She had died, thank God! I thought, with forgiveness in her heart, though the woman she had wanted to forgive would arrive too late to hear the words.

I sent for the doctor, also for Fanny and the vicar, and afterwards I remembered about Mrs. Iles, and told them about Mrs. Russell’s message to her.

“She is long overdue,” said the vicar; “are you sure she got the note? She isn’t the sort of woman to disregard such a summons.”

I went to the kitchen and questioned the small boy I had entrusted with the note. Yes, he had given it to Mrs. Iles herself, and she had said she would be over.

The vicar decided to walk up to the Iles’s farm, and find out if any mistake had been made. We went to the door together. It was now almost dark. We saw lights moving in “Thirty Acres”; shouts rose in the air.

“Something must have happened,” said the vicar uneasily. “I will go and see.”

When he came back, to find Fanny and myself awaiting him in the kitchen, his short-sighted eyes were full of horror.

“Such an awful accident!” he said, and sat down heavily by the table. “Mrs. Iles has been killed by a bull!”

Fanny cried: “Oh, how shocking! How did it occur?”

I could have shaken her for saying “occur” instead of “happen.” It is so odd how trifles can effect one in the midst of an atmosphere of disaster.

“It seems that – that she left the farm,” said the vicar with an effort; “she was coming here in answer to the message. There was a bull shut up in the shed, and somehow it had got out.” He shivered. “No one knows how the door could have come unfastened, it had a new bolt.”

I found my voice. “Then,” I cried, and started to my feet, trembling with a strange excitement, “after all, she had not forgiven! And that was why – oh, that was why she died with such a smile of triumph on her face. I feel it – I know it! It was she who unbolted the door – it was she who let out the bull, just as she always believed Mrs. Iles had done when Russell was crossing the field. Perhaps it was true, perhaps all the time she was right.”

“Hush! Hush!” interrupted the vicar in alarm. “Calm yourself, my dear friend. Fanny, quick! Get some water, she is overstrung, and no wonder!”

Next morning I went back to London. The vicar saw me off from the little station. He was greatly concerned over my health, and kept urging me “to take care of myself.”

I knew perfectly well what he was trying politely to convey – that my impossible theory concerning the death of Mrs. Iles was the outcome of overwrought nerves – and I said so with ruthless candour. The good little man walked by the open window of my compartment as the train began to move, entreating me to put the unholy idea from my mind – to believe, as he did himself, that Mrs. Russell had indeed gone to her Maker free from all thought of revenge – forgiving, repentant.

I smiled and nodded, and waved my hand. I did not believe it, and I never shall.

THE IMPRESS

John Fleming, aged four, lay on the dining-room carpet screaming convulsively. The other children turned from their cakes and crackers to stare with self-righteous interest at the little boy who was being so naughty. The mothers of the other children gathered round the point of disturbance and endeavoured to discover the cause of the scene.

“Good heavens!” they said, “what has happened to the child? Hush, hush, darling! Have you got a pain? What is the matter? Where is his mother? Who brought him?”

A fat little girl who had been John Fleming’s neighbour at the tea-table stolidly volunteered the information that it was all because of a snake.

“A snake!” chorused the ladies in alarm, and glanced apprehensively about the floor.

The agitated giver of the children’s party hurried from the next room, where she had been attending to the Christmas tree.

“A snake!” she echoed. “Oh, poor little fellow! Perhaps it was one of those crackers – they are rather startling.”

Yes, it was a cracker. The fat little girl had pulled it with the little boy, and a paper snake had jumped out, whereupon John Fleming had fallen from his chair in a paroxysm of terror.

“He is old Mrs. Fleming’s grandson,” the hostess explained in concerned distress. “He came with his nurse, who is downstairs at tea with the servants.

I will send for her.” She dispatched a parlourmaid and set herself to pacify her small guest, who clung to her, his sobs abating.

“Perhaps it’s because he comes from India,” suggested the mother of the fat little girl. “I have a horror of snakes myself.”

“Oh, he can’t remember India!” said Mrs. Colebrook over the curly yellow head on her shoulder. “He was sent home as an infant. I think his mother died when he was born.” She patted and rocked the still quivering little body.

Then “Nanny” arrived, anxious, alarmed; a stout woman with a dark skin and dull black eyes, their whites tinged with yellow. John was transferred to her arms.

“I will take him upstairs,” said Nanny in curious, jerky tones, which Mrs. Colebrook, who had lived in India, knew to be the typical Eurasian accent.

She led the way from the large London dining-room, and took nurse and child upstairs to the nursery, empty now save for the furniture and some scattered toys. She bade Nanny sit in the rocking-chair by the fire.

“He will be all right soon, nurse. It was just a sudden fright – one of those paper snakes jumped out of the cracker he was pulling, and I suppose he thought it was a real one. Poor little fellow! My children love them, but probably he had never seen one before. Perhaps he was over-excited too. It’s his first party, I think?”

The child lay exhausted in his nurse’s arms, soothed by the warmth of the fire, the absence of noise, and the gentle rocking movement of the chair.

“Yess, yess, he is a nervous,” said Nanny in apology for the behaviour of her charge. Then, encouraged by the lady’s compassionate countenance, she added confidentially: “And what else, when his poor mother died so frightened?”

“Frightened?” The lady looked with combined curiosity and pity at the sensitive face of the child, now in repose, with long lashes lying on the pale cheeks. “How was she frightened?”

Nanny answered low. “It was a snake, ma’am, and I was with her when it happened – in India, at Cawnpore. It was one night in the rains, a snake fell on her – and then the child, this one here, he was born too soon and she died.”

“Dear, dear, how sad! I did not know.” Mrs. Colebrook had only lately settled in the South Kensington house with gardens at the back shared by her neighbours, John Fleming’s grandmother among them. Her two children had made friends with little John in these gardens, and at their urgent petition Mrs. Colebrook had written a polite note to old Mrs. Fleming inviting the little boy to their Christmas party.

“He is asleep now,” said Nanny. Her dull eyes rested fondly on the yellow curls. Then she looked up, and the sympathetic understanding in the lady’s face encouraged her tongue. She spoke rapidly under her breath as though utterance gave her relief.

“Always – always will he fear anyt’ing that is like a snake,” she said, “and Mrs. Fleming, his grandmother, will not believe. I said when we went to the Zoo Gardens, ‘Do not take him to the snake-house.’ But, no, no, she take him, and he was altogether ill for two weeks after. He will not go into one room in the house because of the candlesticks on the mantelpiece that are snakes made in brass. And if he sees a worm he cries and cries and trembles. His grandmother say: ‘Little coward; do not give way to him. His father never was afraid of anyt’ing.’ You see his father was her son, and he was killed fighting in some wild part, I think by Assam.”

“I see. So poor little John has no father or mother?” She spoke in pity, regarding the Eurasian nurse with interested attention. She could picture the hard old grandmother’s unsympathy with any form of fear. Had she not observed her walking in the gardens – a forbidding figure, with hooked nose, hawk’s eyes, her personality breathing of intolerance. He was to be pitied, this delicate, highly strung little child, committed by Fate to the old woman’s charge. Mrs. Colebrook divined the nurse’s antagonism to the tyranny of her mistress by the woman’s appreciation of this opportunity to voice her grievance. It was obvious that devotion to the child she had tended from his untimely birth was all that induced the half-caste woman to remain in Mrs. Fleming’s service. Probably kindred, country, inclination called her eastward, yet love for the child held her captive in uncongenial surroundings, companionship, servitude.

“It will be always the same,” Nanny went on, still in a husky whisper with jerky intonation. “Always! See, ma’am – he has a mark.”

With gentle caution she unbuttoned the left sleeve of the child’s blouse and bared the little thin arm to the elbow. On the tender flesh was a curious blemish, that with a little self-persuasion might have been likened to the imprint, in miniature, of a snake – the diamond-shaped head, the undulating body, the tapering tail.

Mrs. Colebrook gazed at the mark in mingled doubt and fascination. Surely the thing was only an unusual form of mole, an odd coincidence – not the impress of the mother’s terror that had forced the babe into the world before his due time? She had an idea that science did not recognize the possibility of such outward signs of pre-natal impressions.

“What does his grandmother say to that?” she inquired.

“Oh, she laugh and say it is nothing – just a mole – nothing to do with a snake. But, all the same, I know. It is a snake-mark – what else? The fear is marked on his mind too, and it will be there always.”

The little boy, John Fleming, who had screamed at his first party, grew up. From his early school-days he was told continually that his brains were his only asset for the future, which was true. The income of his grandmother, who educated him without stint, was derived from a pension and an annuity. Nothing had he inherited from his ill-fated parents in the way of material possessions. India, he was also told, must naturally be his ultimate goal. His claim to an Indian cadetship was clear. But there his father’s name would help him, provided he proved himself as good a man. In India his mother’s people, too, had not yet been forgotten.

But, perversely, he admitted a reluctance to enter the army. How tiresome of him, said his grandmother and her friends, when he was good at games and so clever, too! Well, what his was own idea – the Civil Service, the police, the public works – what? Desperately, realizing his position, he elected to try for the Civil Service, because, he told his grandmother, it was the best paid profession in India. Certainly a flawless and definite reason.

But to Mrs. Colebrook, whose motherly friendship had been his since the memorable day of the Christmas party, so many years ago, he revealed the true motive of his choice.

“I hate the very thought of India,” he told her in difficult, shamefaced confidence, “but I quite realize the sense of granny’s arguments, and I couldn’t go against her wishes. She has done so much for me – sent me to Oxford at a real sacrifice to herself. She gave up her carriage to be able to do it, and she insured her life long ago, so that if anything should happen to her before I am launched, I should have just enough to carry me on to get through my exams. I chose to try for the Civil Service, because, if I work awfully hard, I might pass high enough for the English Civil instead of the Indian. Do you see?”

It was the time of the winter vacation, and John Fleming had been dining with Mrs. Colebrook, who still lived in the South Kensington house with the gardens at the back wherein her son, now a soldier, and her daughter, lately married, had played as children with John. Since then, as John passed from dame school to preparatory tuition, to Marlborough and to Oxford, he had always been welcome in Mrs. Colebrook’s house during holidays spent in London. Always had he shown her an affectionate regard that had never lessened with the years.

The two now sat by the fire in the drawing-room, a curiously contrasted couple – she with white hair and widow’s cap, he a tall, fair youth with anxious blue eyes, sensitive mouth, and long slender hands.

“But why do you so hate the idea of India, John?” she asked.

He moved restlessly, then rose and stood by the mantelpiece, looking down at her, troubled, hesitating.

“That’s the worst of it,” he said. “I can’t quite explain. It sounds so silly. But – but – I think it’s something to do with snakes.”

He laughed self-consciously, turned his back to her, and played with a china ornament by the clock.

Her thoughts flew back over the years, and in her mind she saw a little boy screaming on the dining-room floor in terror because a paper snake had jumped out of a cracker. Often since had she remembered the curious mark on the child’s arm, and the fond Eurasian “Nanny,” who, soon after the memorable Christmas party, had returned to India. Sometimes she had wondered if the boy himself knew the circumstances of his mother’s tragic end; wondered, too, if the mark still remained on his arm, and, if so, how he regarded it.

Now she said “Snakes?” with sympathetic curiosity, and he turned again towards her.

“Yes. I’ve always had such an unbearable horror of them. I can’t help it.”

“Well, they are certainly very unpleasant, as well as dangerous creatures. I can’t imagine any normal person liking them.”

“But this is more than a normal dislike, Mrs. Colebrook. I can’t even think of them without shivering. And when I have nightmare, it’s always a snake!” A shrinking shudder ran the length of his young form. “Of course the fellows at school found it out, and I can’t describe to you what I’ve endured. At Oxford there’s peace from that kind of torment – I don’t find snakes in my bed or suffer perpetual practical jokes connected with them. But last summer, playing golf, I nearly stepped on a grass snake, and I was literally sick with fright. The idea of going to a country where I may often see them, and see the very worst kind, too, nearly drives me mad; and I can hardly bring that forward as a reason for refusing to go to India! I should be ashamed to tell anybody but you. I’ve been ashamed even to tell you till now! And who would take it seriously if I did speak of it to anyone else?”

“But, John, many people pass the best part of their lives in India and often never even see a snake. I think I only saw two the whole time I was out there. They aren’t all over the place, you know, as people imagine!”

“I know. But there they are. And I should always be looking and thinking. I’m sure I should never be able to eat or sleep for the terror that I might come across one. It’s not fancy,” he added earnestly, “it’s like a disease – like the horror some people have of cats, only ten thousand times worse. It seems to be in my very being – and—” Suddenly he undid the link in his shirt cuff, and bared his forearm. “Look at that! What does it mean?”

Mrs. Colebrook leaned forward. On the boy’s white flesh, just below the bend of the elbow, was the mark she had seen so many years before, a brown mark, perhaps three inches long, recalling unmistakably the likeness of a snake.

Evidently John was ignorant of the cause of his own premature birth and his mother’s death. To tell him would increase rather than relieve his weakness, however uncertain might be the evidence concerning the true origin of such marks.

“Why should you imagine it necessarily means anything?” she murmured reassuringly. “It’s only a mole. Lots of people have them. It’s just an accident that yours should be that shape. You must fight against this unfortunate feeling, dear boy, or it may hamper your whole career.”

“I do fight against it,” he said quietly, and drew down his sleeve. “Nobody could ever realize how I fight against it.”

“Well, let us hope you will pass high enough to get into the English Civil,” she soothed, “and then it will be all right, won’t it?” She gave him a comforting smile.

John Fleming did pass high enough for the English Civil. But all the same, he chose to go to India, because in the meantime he fell in love; and his desire to marry the girl he loved, the penniless daughter of a major retired from the army on account of age, forced into abeyance the secret terror of his existence. In India he could marry within a reasonable period, and give his wife a home with comparative comforts, and provision for the future; whereas in England it must be years before they could afford matrimony, and then, without interest or private means, how discouraging the prospects.

The death of his grandmother just then gave him money that he needed for his outfit and initial expenses on joining the service. He was sent to a little station far up country, miles from a railway, where he shared a thatched bungalow of six rooms with the Police Officer and the Engineer for roads and buildings. In a year’s time Amy was to come out to him, and he would be able to take the little house standing empty in the next compound, that, with judicious improvement, could be made quite habitable. He regarded the rather forlorn-looking little building with affectionate sentiment whenever he passed it.

Soon he began to think Mrs. Colebrook was right – that snakes were the exception and not the rule in India. For the first six months he saw no trace of any snake, nor even heard the reptile mentioned, and he almost ceased to look fearfully under his furniture, on the bed and chairs, behind the doors, and all about the floor. The thought of Amy filled his heart to the exclusion of fear, and even the sinister mark on his arm seemed to grow fainter, less insistent, to be “only a mole,” as Mrs. Cole-brook had said.

Then one midday when the hot weather had begun, and they were sitting at breakfast, a thin plaintive piping arose outside the dining-room veranda, a fascinating little minor sound, and it set all Fleming’s nerves vibrating.

“What’s that?” he looked up from the chicken cutlet on his plate and listened.

The Police Officer glanced out of the long, open door. “Only a snake charmer,” he said carelessly, and added to the servant behind his chair: “Tell him to go away and take his snakes with him.”

The man went out, and the piping ceased. The Police Officer and the Engineer began to talk about snake charmers, but Fleming sat silent, neither eating nor speaking.

“Clever humbugs,” they said. “They’ll pretend to draw a snake from any spot you like to indicate, but of course it’s hidden in their loin cloths, or in their hair, or even in their mouths….” Then they agreed that the wonderful part of the profession was the catching of the snakes in the first instance, which must entail the swiftness of the mongoose. Once caught, the reptiles could soon be rendered harmless by the drawing of their fangs, or by squeezing out the poison, or by sewing up the lips. The two men reminded each other of a servant they had engaged last year who claimed to be the son of a snake charmer, and of how curious it was that they were perpetually worried with snakes about the place until they got rid of him.

“Why, we saw eleven snakes either in or just outside the bungalow in the course of a fortnight,” the Engineer said, turning to Fleming, “which was a bit too thick. It’s an old bungalow certainly, and I daresay there are plenty of snakes in the roof, on the other side of the ceiling cloths! But even then, one doesn’t bargain for a plague of them.”

Fleming got up. “I think I felt the sun rather this morning,” he said jerkily. “I can’t eat any more breakfast. I’ll go and lie down.”

The others offered remedies and gave advice, but the young civilian barely answered, and disappeared through his bedroom door.

“If he feels the sun now, what will he do later on?” was the comment on Fleming’s indisposition. “The fellows they send out nowadays seem to have no stamina – a weak, overworked lot,” etc., etc.

The two men, superior in the consciousness of their own acclimatization, could not have known that it was their conversation, not the sun, that had caused their companion to turn sick and faint, so that he fled from their presence to throw himself on his bed quivering in nerve and limb. Otherwise, a few nights later, when they were all sitting outside, smoking, on the round platform of masonry that is to be found in most old Indian compounds, they would not, being excellent fellows, have talked about snakes so persistently. As it was, they told terrible tales of the dread king cobra, the fiercest and most deadly of the serpent kind, that is said to attack without provocation, to grow to a length of thirteen feet – that will drive all other living creatures from the dense jungles it inhabits, and is forced, in consequence to devour most of its own eggs for food. They spoke of the rare little dust snake, whose bite is swifter, more instantaneous death even than that of the karait; and the policeman quoted the horrid verse that begins:

“And death is in the garden awaiting till we pass,

For the karait is in the drain-pipe, the cobra in the grass.”

The man, deeply interested in native lore, went on to recall proverbs such as “The snake-bite goes in like a needle, but comes out like a ploughshare.” And he declared he himself had beheld the rare and extraordinary spectacle of two snakes, cobras, twined together, reared upright, swaying in weird enchantment. His father, he said, used to tell of spots in remote quarters of India where, when the floods were out, black cobras could be seen coiled together in multitudes upon the trees and bushes in horrible festoons and ropes, torpid, slow stirring. …

Fleming shivered audibly. He feared his self-control would leave him. A little more of such talk and he might leap, yelling, from his chair and make a fool of himself. The shiver turned the attention of the other men. They hoped he was not going to have fever? Otherwise surely he couldn’t be feeling cold in this infernal heat? It must be well over a hundred even out here. Fleming said he did feel rather cheap and would go to bed. He stood up unsteadily.

“Wait a second,” said the Engineer, “the bhisti has been watering the ground round the house to cool it. You’d better call for another lantern, or take this one and send it back.”

He meant that the wet ground might possibly have attracted a snake, so that it was safer to walk across to the house with a light. Fleming understood and winced. He called to a man squatting in the veranda to bring another lantern to him.

Once in his room he turned up the lamps hanging on the wall, then, lantern in hand, he searched every corner, looked under every piece of furniture, raked beneath the cupboards with a stick, and passed the stick along the tops of the doors, holding it at the very end, standing well away, ready to spring aside.

When a lizard ran down the wall and dropped on to the matting with a clammy thud, though he saw what it was, he yet started and cried out involuntarily. The sound of his own voice shamed him into partial self-control. Trembling, with every nerve and muscle racked, he ceased the frenzied search, and stood still, gripping both stick and lantern. He found he was dripping with perspiration. The atmosphere felt thick and heavy, mosquitoes were shrilling all about the room, disturbed by his investigations, otherwise the silence seemed leaden. Exhausted, he had undressed and thrown himself on the bed before he realized that the punkah was not working. Then he shouted “Punkah!” two or three times, and heard the scraping of an empty packing case on the veranda floor – the punkah-coolie’s seat – heard a few hoarse exclamations, and the white frill with the red border began to flap to and fro above his head. The relief of the moving air was definite, it calmed his nerves and soothed his tired body. Yet, in spite of the waving punkah and the open doors the heat seemed unendurable, the very sheets felt warm, the pillow like a poultice. He tossed from side to side in a semi-doze. Then the punkah stopped and the rope hung slack.

Fleming woke and found himself staring up at the rope in the dim light. It was like a great snake swinging in mid-air. Loudly he shouted to the coolie to pull, pull, pull, and with a jerk and a flap the frill waved to and fro once more with renewed energy.

Again John Fleming dozed, but he dreamed that he was still searching his room that he might feel satisfied there was no snake, large or small, concealed within it. Round and round he groped, peering, tapping…. Then in his dreams he got into bed, only to remember with dismay that he had omitted to pass the stick along the top of the punkah. A little karait, even a cobra, might so easily drop from the ceiling cloth and find refuge along the bar or amid the thick folds of the frill. He must get up, must feel sure. But nightmare-wise, he could not move, he lay paralysed, and then distinct against the white material of the punkah-frill he noticed a dark streak that began to descend, lower, lower, till it hung directly above him, swaying, writhing, gradually falling.

With a yell he awoke as something dropped on his chest. Frenzied, he leapt from the bed, flinging off the coiling, moving thing, and ran blindly, madly out of his bedroom door, through the warm veranda into the dark, stifling night. The border of broken bricks around the house cut his feet, but he felt no pain. Insane with fear he ran, stumbling, gasping, on and on, into a patch of coarse, dry grass. Then under his foot wriggled the hard, scaly body of a cobra seeking rats for food in the darkness, and in an instant it had wound itself up the man’s bare leg and struck its fangs into the flesh just above the knee.

•   •   •   •   •

Afterwards the Police Officer and the Engineer blamed themselves for “talking snakes” in that way to a nervous fellow lately out from home like poor young Fleming. But, they protested, how were they to know that the punkah rope was going to break and fall on his chest, and that, waking in a horrible funk, he would rush into the compound with bare feet and tread on a cobra in the grass? That was what had happened. He told them, when they ran out and found him, that a snake had fallen from the punkah on to his chest, and it turned out to be only the broken rope! What wicked luck, poor chap! He must have been a frightfully nervous beggar – overworked, probably, getting into the Civil Service.

Fleming was buried next day, according to the obligation of the climate, and nobody noticed the odd little blemish on his arm except his Hindu bearer, who salaamed to it when unobserved. But Mrs. Colebrook, when she heard of poor John’s death from snake-bite, thought of the fatal impress and of the day when John, as a little child, had screamed on the floor at sight of a paper snake; and while she grieved sorely, she yet knew that she was not surprised.

THE ADMIRAL’S DOG

“The Admiral is just the type of man your poor Uncle Henry would have appreciated,” said my poor Uncle Henry’s widow. “I find his companionship exceedingly agreeable.”

I wondered if the Admiral found my Aunt Julia’s companionship equally pleasant – for I perceived that she had destined him to succeed Uncle Henry. In any case she would probably carry out her intention; what Aunt Julia designed she seldom failed to accomplish, as her nephews and nieces were aware to their cost. For example she had determined that I should be the first of her nieces to stay with her at Bath, where she had but lately settled, and though I detested Aunt Julia and was particularly anxious to pay a visit elsewhere at the time, and so had struggled desperately to escape, here I was seated opposite to her at dinner in the stiff, handsome residence in Queen’s Square, having arrived from Paddington an hour ago.

We were occupied with a rechauffe which she called, with an ultra French accent, miroton. I remembered the dish of old, and how Uncle Henry had hated it. I also recalled with inward amusement my youngest brother’s description of a typical Aunt Julia menu: “Brown soup; hashed mutton; and a beastly pudding” (Pouding au lait!).

Over the miroton she discussed, without charity, the various old friends she had met, and the new acquaintances she had made, since her move to Bath. Only the Admiral escaped calumny.

“He often looks in as he passes,” she said with elaborate nonchalance; “he is lonely, I fancy, living in rooms by himself. If I am at the window when he goes by I always tap and beckon him in, and even occasionally open the door to him myself that he may feel confident he is not intruding. Perhaps it causes a little gossip in a place of this kind, but, as I said to the Admiral only the other day, surely we are old enough to please ourselves.”

Aunt Julia gave a side glance into the long mirror that embellished the wall to her right, and the reflection of a stout lady in a tight purple gown seemed to afford her the nicest satisfaction.

I looked forward to beholding her manoeuvres at the window the following morning, but soon after breakfast she dispatched me on various errands which kept me employed till nearly luncheon-time. On my way back to the house, laden with parcels, I experienced one of those absurd little encounters when two people dodge each other distractedly in polite endeavours to pass. My vis-a-vis was a picturesque old gentleman with fluffy, snow-white hair, a thin, beautiful nose, eyes the colour of a turquoise, and an expression so courteous and gentle as to be almost pathetic. He raised his old-fashioned hat with the most enchanting little smile of amused apology as he stood aside and allowed me to pass on. Could he by any chance be the Admiral? I felt unable to resist turning to look after him, and then I noticed that he was followed with jealous devotion by a brown spaniel, elderly, judging from gait and figure, but well preserved, well groomed, well bred like the master. If it was indeed the Admiral, there was no possibility of “Love me, love my dog,” with Aunt Julia, whose abhorrence of dogs amounted almost to a mania.

She was not at the window when I reached the front door. I found her upstairs in the spacious drawing-room, working impossible objects on a cashmere cushion-cover.

“Has the Admiral been in to see you this morning?” I inquired briskly.

She glanced at me with some suspicion. “He passed by about half an hour after you went out; but I did not attract his attention, or permit him to catch sight of me, because I observed that his odious dog was with him.”

“Perhaps it was the Admiral I met just now – on his way back? A charming old gentleman with white hair, followed by a brown spaniel?”

“Yes, an objectionable animal, and yet he adores it in the most foolish way, having no one else to love, I suppose, poor fellow! He brought it in here once, and it behaved in an alarming and ill-tempered manner towards me, growling and snarling, and attempting to bite me – besides leaving its hairs on the carpet. The dear Admiral was quite vexed and upset; he said he could not understand it, but he never kicked the creature, or gave it the beating it deserved, and of course common civility obliged me to be pleasant and pretend it was of no consequence. I consider that such a dangerous beast should be shot.”

She paused and stabbed a few vicious stitches into the cushion-cover. I made no reply and presently she continued in a calmer tone: “If ever the Admiral should marry, his wife would, of course, insist on his getting rid of that dog. In fact she would have to insist on a good many reforms which would be entirely for the dear man’s benefit. For one thing he smokes. Now your poor Uncle Henry never smoked; I stopped that after we were married! I suspect that the Admiral seldom goes to church; I have never seen him there. I also fear that for a man of his gouty tendencies he is too fond of rich food; I observed it at the dinner-party I gave in his honour when I had the best of everything.” (Aunt Julia could give a right good meal when she had an object in doing so!) “He has no one to check such indiscretions; and he actually mentioned to me once that, next to champagne, his favourite beverage was gin!” She cast her eyes up and shuddered.

“What did you say when he told you that?” I inquired with interest. “Did you remonstrate with him?”

“Certainly not! I made no comment. But it was, to me, an additional proof of how much the dear creature needs someone to look after him.”

“Is he badly off? How does he live?” I asked.

“He has his pension, and ever since he retired he has lived in the same rooms – close here. He says they are quite comfortable, but I do not believe it. I imagine he has private means, but that his relations impose upon him. There, again, he needs protection. It would be most salutary for them, as well as beneficial for him, that they should be told a few home truths.”

What a prospect for the Admiral – who was doubtless in complete ignorance of the fate that awaited him. Probably Aunt Julia impressed him as a rich, kind-hearted widow who might perhaps be inclined to render the existence of a rather lonely old man happy and comfortable, feed him well, be kind to his poor relations, and give him an excellent home. I recalled, with concern, the kind, diffident old face and courtly manner. What possible chance would such a nature have against the masterful disposition of Aunt Julia? For a certainty she would marry him, and then proceed to stop his smoking; prohibit his favourite beverages; doom him to frequent church-going; to plain food (and miroton); estrange him from his relations; banish his dog. Ah! – with the dog lay his only chance of safety! Aunt Julia would wait till the Admiral was her husband before she dealt with such questions as food and tobacco, gin and relations, but the dog would have to go before a courtship could be conducted with any success. Should the Admiral remain firm on this point he would in all probability escape Aunt Julia’s rule and protection.

Interference was impossible; matters could only be left to take their course. All the same I had great hopes of the brown spaniel – surely the Admiral would never consent to part with his devoted companion for all the rich widows in Bath!

He came to tea the following day – the same dear old person before whom I had chasséed in the street. We laughed over our first meeting, and while Aunt Julia was entertaining a lady who had come to call he told me stories of the sea, described the treasures he had accumulated, and talked of Bess, the brown spaniel, with the warmest affection.

“I suppose you would never part with her?” I said tentatively.

At that moment Aunt Julia ceased talking, and heard my question as well as the Admiral’s reply.

“Part with Bess? – with my faithful brown friend?” he retorted with spirit and energy, “not for anyone or anything under the sun!”

Aunt Julia’s other visitor, who had a local reputation for intellect, turned and gazed earnestly at the Admiral.

“Do you believe,” she said, in a deeply serious tone, “that animals have souls?”

“I’m certain my Bess has as much mind, and heart, and soul as most human beings!” assented the Admiral stoutly, “and just as much chance of going to heaven.”

Aunt Julia turned purple, and began to tell dreadful stories about mad dogs, and dogs that had been known to devour children, and commit other atrocities; and she dilated at length on the treachery of the canine race. The Admiral neither argued nor contradicted, he listened with deference, but was obviously relieved when I succeeded in changing the subject.

Then Aunt Julia overwhelmed him with attentions, with playful flattery, with interested concern for his welfare, till the simple old gentleman was humbly gratified, and rather bewildered. When he rose to take his leave she followed him to the door.

“Now remember,” she said archly, shaking her finger at him, and putting her head on one side, “when you come to see me you must leave the dog outside. The creature detests me, and I don’t want to die of hydrophobia!”

“My dear lady, who could detest you?” protested the Admiral gallantly. “Poor old Bess is jealous, that’s what it is – ha! ha!”

“Ha! ha!” echoed Aunt Julia consciously; and she simpered back into the room in the most complacent of moods.

•   •   •   •   •

When the Admiral passed the window next morning Bess was at his heels. Aunt Julia had been peeping out, smiling and eager, but the moment she saw the dog she darted back with an angry flush on her face; and there was silence between us as we heard the Admiral’s footsteps pass by on the pavement. Then Aunt Julia sniffed and told me to put on my hat and go into the town to do some commissions for her, and I went readily.

The streets were clean and cheerful, and I dawdled outside the shops, having little desire to return to Queen’s Square sooner than was necessary.

Just as I realized that I had only time to get back for the one o’clock luncheon I saw the Admiral cross the street at the lower end. Bess was a little way behind him, and, all in a moment, a motor-car swung round the corner, and ran over the dog! I heard a piteous cry, the car stopped, a crowd collected instantly, and I saw the Admiral dash into the middle of the group of people. Sick with apprehension I stood on the pavement; the crowd parted, and the old man tottered out with a limp brown object held tenderly in his arms – poor Bess, bleeding, dusty, mangled, her faithful brown eyes half closed, her head hanging lifeless over her master’s arm.

“She is quite dead,” I heard him say sadly, in answer to a sympathetic inquirer.

He had not seen me; and I turned and ran home to warn Aunt Julia not to look out of the window.

“The dog killed?” she echoed, starting up from the cashmere cushion-cover, “You don’t say so! are you sure?”

“I saw the poor creature run over, and I heard the Admiral say she was dead.”

“I wish you would not use the feminine gender when alluding to an animal,” said Aunt Julia, “it is most indelicate.”

All through luncheon she was silent and preoccupied, though I could see she was elated at the news; she appeared to be thinking over some plan, but what it was she did not announce till the following afternoon, when she dressed herself in her new mauve foulard, with the toque to match, and a feather boa, and stated that she was going to call on the Admiral.

“He will become morbid over the dog’s death if someone does not look after him. He must realize that the animal was not his only friend!” she said. “No, thank you, you need not accompany me. I prefer to go alone. Of course I am aware that I am doing something unconventional, but,” she concluded significantly, “under the circumstances—” and opened the front door.

Half an hour later she returned, panting and speechless, her face white, her toque crooked, her feather boa hanging over one shoulder. I followed her into the dining-room, but she waved me aside, and sank into an armchair, limp and exhausted.

“Aunt Julia – what is the matter?” I cried in real alarm.

“It was the dog!” she said faintly.

“The dog – but the dog is dead!” I exclaimed.

“Yes, the Admiral said it was dead!” she spoke rapidly, and with growing excitement. “He told me he had buried it with his own hands in the garden last evening! – and while he was telling me, actually while he was telling me – the creature came out from beneath his chair and snarled! Of course I was excessively angry and asked how he dared tell such lies. He feigned to misunderstand me, and repeated that there was no dog – that the dog was dead and buried. We had a most painful scene.

“Naturally I was indignant at his attempt to deceive me, and he became exceedingly unpleasant, not to say rude in his manner. Never will I see him or speak to him again. He requested me to leave his rooms, he – oh! – one might almost have imagined that he suspected me – me – of not being sober!”

Aunt Julia almost shrieked at the last word and then threw herself back in the chair on the verge of hysterics. I sat silent, completely mystified. What could it all mean? The dog was dead without a doubt, and Aunt Julia must have imagined she had seen it emerge from under the Admiral’s chair. I turned to her again as she called my name in a stifled voice from behind her handkerchief.

“Tell me,” she whispered hoarsely, “what did that woman say about animals – you remember? – the day he came to tea.”

“She only asked him if he believed that animals had souls—” I began; then I stopped short, dumbfounded for the moment by the fantastic suggestion the words presented to my mind. Aunt Julia was gazing at me with horrified interrogation in her eyes. Then she rose, unsteadily, to her feet.

“Do not speak of the subject to me again,” she said, and shivered.

I obeyed her; but as the hours went by, I could see that her mind was occupied with nothing else. She would not go out, she could not settle down to the cushion-cover, constantly she approached the window and then drew back as though fearing to look out.

The following morning she remained in the dining-room after breakfast, to “look over some bills” she said; and I was sent upstairs to dust china locked away in cupboards in the drawing-room. Presently I heard her calling me in a loud, excited voice. I rushed down, and found her standing at the window. “Quick! quick!” she cried, “come here!” and pointed into the street with a shaking hand. I hastened to her side and looked out. The Admiral had just passed by, and was walking slowly along the pavement.

“There!” cried Aunt Julia, “don’t you see it? – the dog, the brown dog, following him as usual!”

I stared after the retreating figure, and felt frightened, for there was no dog, that I could see, at the heels of the Admiral!

“Don’t you see it? don’t you see it, you idiot?” demanded Aunt Julia sharply.

“No,” I said slowly, and with reluctance, “I don’t see it.”

For a moment she glared at me, and her face grew deathly pale. Then she turned away from the window.

“It is evident that I require a change,” she said abruptly. ““Bath does not suit me. I shall go to Dawlish tomorrow.”

Not only did Aunt Julia go to Dawlish the following day, but eventually she remained there altogether, having all her possessions sent after her. We are forbidden to mention Bath in her presence; and I am not sorry, for though common sense reproaches me severely, I always feel creepy and uncomfortable whenever I think of the Admiral’s dog!

THE PALACE OF SNAKES

I

Upon the hazy horizon of the Barnard family history there hovered legends concerning a certain great-uncle Jasper Barnard, who was said to have been a reprobate character, remarkable for his daredevil deeds. He was supposed to have dissipated the family fortune, and to have fled the country in order to escape the consequences of some particularly nefarious act. It was also believed that he had amassed a fortune in India as Commander-in-Chief and adviser to a powerful native prince, though what had become of his wealth, or of himself, was a mystery to the present generation of Barnards, beyond a vague tradition that he had become entangled with a lady of the royal household, and had eventually been murdered.

That great-uncle Jasper was no myth was proved by his portrait that hung on the wall of an upper landing in the red-brick villa at Streatham inhabited by the Barnards of the day, viz., the long-widowed Mrs. Barnard, who had been a Miss Hopkins and took a pride in the fact; her two daughters, both given to good works; and an unsatisfactory son, who was a good deal younger than his well-conducted sisters – true Hopkinses in appearance and disposition.

No Barnard relations remained alive as far as was known, but Hopkinses abounded, and, as Mrs. Barnard frequently remarked, no Hopkins had ever disgraced the name, though their origin might have been less exalted than that of the Barnards. The last Barnard connection, an aged spinster, had died years ago when young Barnard was a child; she was his godmother, and had bequeathed him her most treasured possession – the portrait of his ancestor, after whom she had requested that he might be christened. All the old lady had ever heard concerning the portrait was that it had arrived from India on a John Company’s sailing ship, without explanation, and that Jasper Barnard failed to follow it, as was imagined must have been his intention.

Unwillingly Mrs. Barnard had complied with the old lady’s desire that the boy should be called Jasper, and as a sort of antidote to the distasteful associations with the name she had added that of her own family; but as time went on she could not counteract young Jasper Hopkins Barnard’s physical resemblance to his profligate forbear. It was chiefly on this account that the picture hung where it did, away from the light by the box-room door, neglected, uncleaned, and ignored, though the reason Mrs. Barnard advanced when young Jasper urged that it should be hung in the dining-room was that she could not be expected to eat her meals in company with so unpleasing an object.

Had Jasper been of a vain disposition the excuse might have rankled, for he was well aware of his likeness to the picture. He knew he possessed the same blue eyes, the bold, irregular features, and the dent in the chin of wicked old Uncle Jasper Barnard; but he recognized also that there was some excuse for his mother’s contempt of the painting. It was flat, crudely coloured, badly executed – evidently, as a casual guest who hailed from the East had pronounced, the work of an Indian artist. Moreover, it was cracked and dirty, and, save as a family curiosity, hardly worth the price of the tarnished gilt frame, or of the strips of wood with which it was boarded up at the back.

Young Jasper was “in business.” A Hopkins relation had, with reluctance, obtained for him a clerkship in a City office, and poor Mrs. Barnard was always being told that sooner or later, if the young fool didn’t look out, he would find himself booted. Apparently he was careless, unpunctual, and without respect of persons, and he had a demoralizing effect upon his fellow-clerks. All the same, to his mother’s scant comfort, no one could say he was vicious, and even with his dissatisfied employer he was a favourite. But here he was, getting on for three-and-twenty, and if ever he meant to succeed he must mend his ways.

The crash ever dreaded by Mrs. Barnard and her daughters came about from a totally unanticipated direction. Jasper fell in love, not with an actress, a shop-girl, or any undesirable female, but with the motherless daughter of the vicar of the church whereat the Barnard ladies worshipped. The clandestine attachment was discovered and denounced. The girl’s people were indignant – young Barnard, they said openly, was good enough neither socially nor financially, and he was an idler into the bargain. Mrs. Barnard declared herself equally displeased. Nancy la Touche was flighty and fast, and too young, hardly more than a schoolgirl; the whole thing was absurd. One or two uncomfortable interviews and a stiff correspondence ensued between the vicar and Mrs. Barnard, and the Barnards cancelled their sittings at the church, while Nancy and Jasper continued to meet on the sly, smuggled notes to each other, and finally – oh, horrors! – eloped!

The vicar pursued, and caught the young couple on the very threshold of a registry office, but it was too late to stop scandal; everybody knew, everybody talked; and the only thing for it was to send Nancy away in disgrace to a dragon aunt in London, and for young Barnard to be banished from the country.

The young man’s employer good-naturedly suggested that as the firm had business connections with the East, and as “our Mr. Preston,” who managed a property in India (the name of which sounded to Mrs. Barnard so like the vulgar word “manure” that she hardly liked to pronounce it), could do with another assistant, young Barnard should be offered the chance. Not that he deserved it, but the life was suited to a high-spirited youth, and in all probability Jasper would do well.

To the distracted mother, whose mind had not travelled beyond Canada, the notion of India for Jasper came as a shock; it seemed to her a sort of ill-omen, and she almost wished he might rebel and refuse to go; but, perversely, of course, he jumped at the offer.

“That’s all right!” he said cheerfully, “and I’ll make my fortune, like bad old Uncle Jasper before me, and you bet I shall stick to it, and come home to marry my angel Nancy!”

“It’s to be hoped, for her own sake, that your angel won’t count upon that,” observed his eldest sister unamiably.

“Puss, puss! Miau-pht!” was Jasper’s insulting response, and he clawed the air.

•   •   •   •   •

The night before he was to sail for India, Jasper sat up late. His heavy baggage was gone, his cabin box packed. He had contrived a secret meeting with Nancy in the afternoon, and they had vowed eternal fidelity, also they had concocted an ingenious scheme for the receipt of his letters to her. Now he had just written to her, telling her again and again how he meant to work for her, that no longer should anyone have occasion to call him a waster, and that he would send for her to India, or come home to marry her, the instant he was in a position to do so.

Then he sat thinking. Yes, he was glad to be going, even though it meant parting from Nancy; it would have been difficult in England to shake off old habits, to carry out new resolutions, and he had no sort of doubt but that Nancy would be true to him as he would be true to her. He wondered what India was like; he knew nothing about the country, had never thought of it till lately, and he imagined a land of palms and elephants, peacocks and snakes; he remembered old Jasper Barnard, and the whim suddenly seized him to hang his ancestor’s portrait in his room, which his mother had tearfully promised him should be kept as it was until his return.

He lighted a candle, and went stealthily along the passage, and in the silence of the sleeping household he stood and gazed at the picture that seemed to smile at him in friendly fashion from beneath the dirt that dimmed it. Cautiously he lifted it down and carried it to his room; its boarded back made it a heavy burden, and he was glad to prop it on a chair where the electric light shone full on its surface. He laughed as it occurred to him that perhaps great-uncle Jasper would like to have his face washed, and he set to work with soap and water until the highly coloured countenance and gay blue eyes stared out at him as clean and fresh as when they had been painted over a hundred years ago. Old Jasper wasn’t such a bad-looking chap after all. Young Jasper glanced involuntarily at his own reflection in the glass; yes, they were undoubtedly alike – it might have been himself in fancy dress.

As he worked farther down the figure, an object came to light that had hitherto been hidden by dirt. It was a flat gold locket that hung from a fob at the waist. He wondered whose portrait the old fellow had carried about with him; perhaps that of the Indian charmer who was supposed to have been the cause of his death. How romantic! Jasper wished the locket had been sent home with the picture – then he would have given it to Nancy with his own photograph inside.

Subsequently something else was revealed down in the right-hand corner of the picture, a little symbol or sign that looked like a snake with the face of a woman beneath the distended hood; but Jasper could not decide as to what it was actually intended to represent. He hung the picture on the wall so that next morning the sun should shine on old Jasper’s face and powdered hair and on the locket and – the snake!

II

At the end of the first three years on the Manura estate, Jasper Barnard found himself no nearer to making a fortune than when he had sailed from England. The life was congenial to a youth of his temperament; he enjoyed the riding and the sport, and “our Mr. Preston” was an ideal boss for whom no one could help working most wholeheartedly; but the climate was bad, the pay disappointing, promotion slow, and the cost of living unexpectedly heavy. So that the outlook was not altogether hopeful, and Jasper had begun to grumble and chafe.

Mr. Preston, who had gauged the young man’s adventurous nature, noted the signs of restless discouragement in his assistant. So far young Barnard had done well; he had picked up the language with ease; he was popular with the natives of all classes, and had a good grasp of his work. It would be a thousand pities if, in a mood of boredom and impatience, he should throw away his chances and embark upon some fresh venture that might only lead him to disaster. Besides, Mr. Preston had no wish to lose the services of one whom he had trained with particular care, not only for the sake of the firm, but also because he liked young Barnard sincerely. The boy was straightforward, clean-minded, clever, but he lacked ballast and perseverance – both of which qualities there was no reason why he should not acquire if he would but allow himself time.

Therefore, when a representative was required to conduct a responsible piece of work away from Manura, Mr. Preston selected young Barnard for the undertaking.

“You will start tomorrow,” Mr. Preston decided, “and stay there just long enough to get an idea of the value of the land that is for sale, and whether it’s a bargain at the price. You’ll have to camp in the palace, though it’s more pigsty than palace I expect – it’s been deserted for years. The Naga Raj is now extinct.”

“Isn’t there a rest-house I could go to?” Jasper inquired, rather ruefully; he did not enjoy discomfort.

“No; nothing that a European could use. It’s all native territory, and the town is nothing to speak of. Take a servant and your camp things, and make up your mind to rough it. You will be able to get certain supplies, but you’d better fill your tiffin basket. You needn’t be there for more than a few days.”

Jasper sulked. He was not feeling fit; the heat tried his temper; there had been no letter from Nancy this week, and he did not want to leave Manura before the next mail was in.

“Old-man-Preston’s” flattering faith in his aptitude for this particular job gave him no self-satisfaction just then; altogether he was out of tune.

At dinner that night, when Mr. Preston prosed about the property he was to investigate, he could have thrown a plate at the grey head of his chief; he felt he did not care whether the land was purchaseable or not. The ice had failed, the drinks were warm; Jasper was sick of India and of Manura and of Mr. Preston, and everything else. And at first he paid scant attention to the odd bits of information Mr. Preston was imparting. But presently, in spite of his ill-humour, he found himself listening.

“They were of the snake caste,” said Mr. Preston, who knew a good deal about the people of the country, their histories, customs, religious beliefs, and superstitions.

“Who were?” inquired Jasper reluctantly.

“The Rajahs of Naga. They were said to retain affinity with snakes as the descendants of the Great Serpent, and to have the power of controlling and taming the more venomous kind.”

“Rather they than me!” put in Jasper flippantly.

Mr. Preston rambled on:

“The popular beliefs about snakes are very curious and interesting. They are supposed to be long lived, and to renew their existence periodically. They are guardians of treasure, and when a rich man dies without an heir he comes back as a snake to watch over his wealth. Snake charmers have told me some very queer things as corroboration of this idea.”

Then he digressed a little on the subject of snake charmers, and told Jasper how some of them burned dried snake venom that caused clouds of smoke and rendered the reptiles harmless; how others were said to allow themselves to be bitten once a year as an inoculation, and that when the time came round they felt a sort of intoxication and could not evade the operation. One well-known snake charmer had told him that an infallible charm against snake-bite was to smoke one of the tail feathers of a peacock in a tobacco pipe. And then there was the ancient belief in Snake Women, who were snakes by day to deal death, and women by night to deal destruction, unless they were properly propitiated.

“And it is curious,” he added, “that what you might call the coat of arms of the Rajahs of Naga was a cobra with a human face under the distended hood.”

Jasper started, mentally and physically. At first he did not know why. It was like the flash of a gun that is seen in the distance before the report is heard. Then his memory discharged a vision of great-uncle Jasper’s portrait, beginning with the rubicund visage, continuing with the gleam of the flat gold locket, ending with the little symbol in the corner of the picture – a cobra, with the face of a woman beneath the outspread hood.

Puzzled, almost frightened, he rose unsteadily from the table. His limbs felt heavy, and his head ached; he thought perhaps the tepid whisky-and-soda he had just swallowed had been too strong. He muttered something about going to bed, as he had to start so early tomorrow morning, and he went to his quarters on the farther side of the bungalow. But he did not sleep well. It was a very hot night, a brain-fever bird shrieked with hideous persistence from a tree close to his bedroom veranda; there was a dog in the stables that howled as if it saw ghosts. He rose at dawn with his head still aching and pulses that throbbed, yet he was possessed by a strange eagerness to start, a feverish desire to find himself in the ruined palace of the Naga princes.

III

Pir Khan, Jasper’s Mahomedan servant, gazed about him with disgust.

“Sahib,” he expostulated, “how can we remain in a place like this? Where is the watchman? Where is the bazaar? How am to obtain water and charcoal, and where is your honour to sleep? Give me but leave to go forth and seek better lodging – if, indeed, there is a town at all in this jungly neighbourhood.”

It had been a tedious journey, concluding with a drive of many miles in an ekkah, the cab of the country. Now master and man had arrived at their destination – a huge pile, half palace, half fort, built on a mound overlooking a wild tract of country; it stood silent and desolate in the hot midday sunlight, crumbling to ruins, yet impressive even in its mournful decay.

Jasper and Pir Khan had entered a vast empty hall, pillared, with an inlaid marble floor, and a wonderful ceiling; but the pillars were cracked, the slabs of marble were broken, bats hung from the ceiling; and dust was everywhere. However, at least it was cool, and the silence and the absence of glare were welcome to the Englishman, who felt that all he needed at the moment was rest.

He agreed with Pir Khan that the place as a habitation was discouraging, and he gave the man permission to seek better accommodation, though in the face of Mr. Preston’s warning such would scarcely seem obtainable. But first, he stipulated, the tiffin basket must be unpacked, the camp-bed and table and chair set up, and the bedding unrolled. After which Pir Khan could do as he liked.

Pir Khan served him a rough meal from the supplies they had brought with them, and then, to the sound of his servant’s hurried departure, Jasper laid himself down for a much-needed sleep.

When he awoke it was late afternoon; something had disturbed him. He sat up and stretched his stiff limbs, and listened. All he could hear was the soft, monotonous cooing of doves, and somewhere in the distance a thin, harsh sound, a teasing little noise, something like bagpipes badly played, that rasped his nerves. Where was Pir Khan? He called, but there came no response save the echo of his own voice in the lofty hall, and the tiresome piping, plaintive and high. His bones still ached, he was thirsty and feverish, and he drank some soda-water before setting out, with an effort, to explore the domain.

What a labyrinth of halls and chambers and holes and hovels, with a great square in the centre open to the sky! He saw lines of stables and elephant sheds, and quarters for soldiers and servants and guests; a separate building also, with slits in the walls and secluded balconies, presumably the apartments of the royal ladies. It all breathed of lost power and splendour, of long past indulgence and feasting and lavish display; and now only ruin and desolation remained. Rank weeds sprang from fissures in the walls, a few brown monkeys chattered on a broken balustrade, a little cloud of green parrots flew with shrill screams from one perching point to another. An almost ominous melancholy hung in the hot yellow haze of the dying day. Jasper felt oppressed by it to the verge of misery; and the whole time the little piping went on, now fainter, now more distinct, sometimes in one direction, again in another, till, maddened by its ceaseless plaint, he returned to the hall where he had rested, hoping to find Pir Khan awaiting him.

But Pir Khan had not come back, and he sat down on his camp-bed conscious of an unpleasant sense of solitude. Then, all at once, the piping grew louder, came near; it seemed to be just outside the doorway through which he had re-entered the hall. He sprang to his feet, and as, for a moment, he stood in puzzled hesitation, he saw something move on the floor close to the wall. From a gaping hole, where the slabs of marble had subsided, a large black cobra was slowly emerging; the thing seemed to be endless as it slithered its long length from its lair. Once it lay out on the broken floor it paused, motionless; then, as the piping shrilled higher it reared its head, and with hood distended swayed to and fro as if in response to the horrible music.

Jasper watched it, spellbound, till suddenly it shot across the room, almost touching his feet, and disappeared through the doorway. On an impulse Jasper dashed after it, and caught a glimpse on the terrace outside of a very old man, wizened and small, like a mummified monkey; he held an earthenware vessel in one hand, and in the other a small yellow gourd with a couple of reeds attached. The piping had ceased abruptly, and the next instant the figure disappeared round a piece of projecting masonry.

Jasper went forward, sure of overtaking the snake charmer, but when he turned the corner of the crumbling wall, neither the old man nor the cobra were visible.

He stood staring into space; his head swam, and suddenly he felt cold. The sound of Pir Khan’s voice behind him was more than welcome, and he turned back, thankful for human companionship.

Pir Khan was in a very bad temper.

“There is a kind of bazaar,” he said contemptuously, “though it is more like a village of sweepers – jungly people, without manners; and as for accommodation that would be suitable for the sahib, or even this slave—” Words failed Pir Khan at this juncture.

However, he had purchased some charcoal and a chicken and some oil – luckily they had brought a lantern with them. Pir Khan supposed matters might be worse, and there was enough food in the tiffin basket to go on with. Now and then, as he talked, he glanced apprehensively over his shoulder.

“This place,” he told his master, “has a bad name; they say it is full of ghosts, and that no one but an old snake charmer dwells in this large building.”

Jasper felt relieved, yet half ashamed of the sensation. Then he really had seen an old man on the terrace, and not an apparition as he had been almost inclined to imagine.

“I saw him – before you returned” he told Pir Khan; but he said nothing about the cobra that had been lured from its hole by the piping. There was nothing to be gained by alarming Pir Khan.

Valiantly he endeavoured to eat the food that Pir Khan cooked under difficulties, but fever was upon him, and finally he took a large dose of quinine, and had his bed placed outside the hall beneath the portico. He threw himself down on it as he was, in his flannels, only trusting that by the morning he would be well enough to make his inspection of the land. Pir Khan, much disturbed as to the sahib’s state of health, withdrew reluctantly to a safe sleeping-place within call; and then Jasper lay wide awake, turning from side to side in his efforts to find a position that might ease the ache in his limbs and head.

There was no moon, and the darkness was oppressive; mosquitoes tormented him; his thirst was maddening. Pir Khan had left a bottle of soda-water beside his bed, and it was very soon finished. He felt afraid to draw too freely upon his supply, though he felt he could have drunk gallons without a pause. The hours dragged on, till at last he fell into a fitful sleep, harassed by dreams.

How long he had slept he did not know when he heard the faint, persistent piping of the snake charmer in the distance; it drew nearer, nearer, and he became conscious of a strong light somewhere at hand. He raised himself on his elbow, and looked through the open doors into the great hall. What on earth had happened? The hall looked different; there was furniture in it, divans, a carpet, and light blazed from a chandelier hung from the ceiling. And on the floor the old snake charmer was squatting; he was throwing something, some sort of powder, onto a brazier of live charcoal. Jasper wondered if the old rascal had helped himself to the charcoal Pir Khan had brought from the bazaar.

He lit a cigarette to keep off the mosquitoes and watched. The smoke from the brazier was so thick that he could not see clearly what the old man was about; so very cautiously he slipped off the bed and sidled into the hall. P’ff! what a smell, and what luminous fumes! Who said dried snake venom?

Now the piping began again, and presently, to his unbounded amazement, the form of a woman appeared. She seemed to rise from the smoke, a lissom, beautiful being, hung with jewels, who danced and swayed to the sound of the piping, waving her exquisite arms; and then, one by one, there rose snakes, large black cobras, that twisted about her body and limbs, their hoods distended, their forked tongues flickering in and out of their mouths; writhing, hissing, they danced – danced as the woman was dancing, with a grace diabolical.

Jasper could stand it no longer; he sprang forward, and as he did so he found himself shouting: “A snake woman – a snake woman!”

In an instant the vision was gone; he was standing alone in the centre of the hall, on the bare, cracked slabs of marble; the charmer, the woman, the snakes were gone, only the bright yellow light remained, and by it he beheld a long black streak disappearing into the crevice by the wall from which he had seen the cobra escaping the evening before.

What was it Preston had said? – that snakes guarded treasure? In a frenzy he rushed to the spot, and began to tear up the broken slabs. He would kill the snake – he would find the treasure. Wildly he scraped at the stones and rubbish. Here already was something that shone in the light; a flat, round object, a locket! And it was just like the locket that great-uncle Jasper wore in his picture! Now he would know whose face was inside it. But there was no face – nothing but an oval scrap of paper. Something was written on the paper, but the writing was so faded he could hardly make it out. Only three words were legible, “Back of picture.” What could that mean? As he turned the locket about in his hands there came a rustle at his feet, the sharp sound of a hiss, and slowly from the hole in the floor rose the evil black head of a cobra – the guardian of the treasure.

Then Jasper lost his nerve; he turned and ran – ran blindly, stumbling, shouting – into darkness and oblivion.

IV

People were talking. Jasper wished they would be quiet and let him go on sleeping. He tried to call out in Hindustani: “Shut up – you!” Then he opened his eyes, and was astonished to see “Old-man Preston” standing at the foot of the bed looking at him, and beyond was the doctor who attended Manura Estate; also a stranger, a white-capped female, who came to his side and made him drink something from the spout of a sort of little teapot! He felt very queer. What did it all mean, and why was he back at Manura instead of at Naga? He began to grope about the coverlet of his bed.

“Where is the locket?” he demanded with feeble impatience. It was a question he asked perpetually during the next few days while his senses slowly returned; but he could get no one to answer it satisfactorily. They were all ready enough to explain that he had been at death’s door for the last three weeks, to tell him that now he was going to get well, and that he was on no account to worry about anything. That was all right; but he wanted to know what had become of the locket? There was no locket, they assured him, and they brought him his watch and chain, and the little box in which he kept his links and studs. Further, to convince him, they questioned Pir Khan. Pir Khan was indignant; he had seen no locket, the sahib had no locket. Was he, Pir Khan, a rascal that he should have failed to report the matter if aught belonging to the sahib had been lost or stolen?

“Look here, my boy,” said Mr. Preston, when Jasper was more than usually pertinacious on the subject of the imaginary trinket that he insisted he had found at Naga, “do remember that you must have arrived at the palace with fever on you – sickening for typhoid, the doctor says – though, of course, I had no suspicion of any such thing, or I should never have let you go. Whatever you think happened at Naga – and I must say your ravings were like the Arabian Nights! – was purely imaginary. Pir Khan says you were off your head that night, and he had no end of a business with you. The fellow behaved splendidly; how he ever got you back here alive is a marvel to us all. You will have to go home on sick leave directly you are fit to stand the voyage, and the firm will pay your passage. So just look forward to that, and to seeing your people, and give over bothering about lockets and things that never existed.”

Jasper tried to obey him; at any rate he ceased to speak of the locket, but he could not prevent himself from thinking of it. He could still see the thing, gleaming and flat, and the words on the piece of paper yet haunted his mind: “Back of picture.” Perhaps there had been a portrait behind the paper in the locket? He could believe that the vision of the woman dancing, entwined with snakes, was no more than delirious fancy, but not the locket. The locket had been real; he had seen it, and held it in his hand. Of that he felt convinced, whatever “Old-man Preston” or anyone else might say.

V

Some weeks later, Jasper, still more or less of an invalid, sat in his bedroom at home, in the red-brick villa at Streatham. His mother had kept her promise – everything was just as he had left it some three years ago. The morning sun shone on old Jasper Barnard’s face, and in the heart of his young descendant there was sunshine also, for this afternoon Nancy was to be there! Constancy had conquered opposition; they were to be allowed to meet as an affianced pair, though marriage must still be in the far future.

Thin and white and weak, he lay back on his cushions and gazed at old Jasper’s portrait, with the locket dangling from the fob and the sinister little symbol in the corner of the picture. If only he could look inside the locket! He felt certain, if he could, that he should see the piece of paper and the scrawl in faded ink, “Back of picture.” Now he would never know what the words meant.

But as he gazed and wondered, a sudden and wild suggestion shot into his mind. He dragged himself up from his chair, and staggered across the room. With an immense effort he lifted the picture down and placed it on a chair, as he had done the night before he sailed for India; only this time he turned old Jasper’s face towards the wall. Then, with shaking hands, he searched for some tools that he knew he had left in a drawer, and one by one, the sweat bursting out on his forehead, he drew forth the rusty nails that held the strips of wood to the back of the picture. “Back of picture – back of picture!” the words raced to and fro through his brain. Should he find anything? He could hardly breathe for excitement and fatigue; but still he worked on till the strips of wood were removed, and dust flew forth in a cloud, blinding and choking him. Something fell at his feet, a long, heavy packet like a sand-bag, sewn up in brown canvas, and rotting with age.

Jasper picked it up; it seemed to be full of coarse gravel that dribbled out and fell with little sharp taps about the floor; some of it rolled under the furniture. Though dulled with dust the stones were plainly of different colours, red and blue, white and green, like blurred bits of broken glass thrown up by the sea that he used to find among the pebbles on the beach as a child. He stared at them stupidly, wonderingly.

“Good heavens, Jasper!” cried a horrified voice at the door. “What on earth are you doing? You know you ought not to exert yourself! What a horrible mess!”

His eldest sister came forward, fussy and fault-finding as usual. For a space Jasper did not answer; he was looking intently at some of the stones that remained in his hand. Then he said, provokingly:

“Keep calm! For all we can tell this horrible mess may be composed of diamonds and rubies and sapphires and emeralds. There may be some cat’s eyes among them; if so, I will give them to you. I shouldn’t be surprised if old Uncle Jasper’s fortune hasn’t been bottled up behind his picture all this time. In which case I shall never go back to India, and Nancy and I can be married just as soon as I’m able to hobble to a church! Just crawl under the bed, will you, old girl, and scrape up some of the mess?”

•   •   •   •   •

Afterwards, whenever Miss Barnard related the romantic circumstance to her friends, which she never tired of doing, she always concluded the recital with the trite remark that many a true word was spoken in jest. Of course, Jasper had been joking when he said he believed that great-uncle Barnard’s fortune had been hidden all the time behind the picture; and yet, strange to relate, it had actually turned out to be true!