It was the night before the great Eclipse. A vast, vague expectancy brooded over the length and breadth of India. Of prophesying there had been no lack, for signs and wonders had been as blackberries in September.
So, far and near, east, west, south, and north, the people of Hindustan--many-hued, many-raced, many-faithed--were watching for they knew not what, watching with grave, silent, yet curious composure.
But there was no outward sign of this inward expectation on either side. The millions of dark faces behind which it lay were as inscrutable as the telegraph wires through which the mere fraction of white faces responsible for the safety of those millions of dark ones were flashing silent messages of warning and preparation.
And here, in the Sacred City, beside the Sacred River, in which multitudes of those millions hoped to bathe on the morrow during the fateful moments of the sun's eclipse, the dim curves of the world had never been outlined against a calmer, more restful sky--a sky almost black in its intensity of shadow. Yet the night was clear, full of a starlight that could be seen, which showed the bend of the broad river, angled on one side by the straight lines of its curved sequence of bathing-steps that swept away to the horizon on either side.
The steps themselves, shadowy, vague, were spangled as with stars by the little trembling lamps of the myriads on myriads of pilgrims already gathered on them waiting for the dawn. The reflection of these lamps lay in the water beside the reflection of the stars, making it hard to tell where heaven ended, where earth begun.
Behind this long length of bathing-steps--irregular in height, in slope, in everything save an inevitable crowning by the tall temple spires--lay Benares. Benares, the only city in the world--since the reputation of Rome lives by works as well as faith--whose every stone tells of that search after righteousness which lies so close to the heart of humanity. Benares, with its sunless alleys, full of the perfume of dead flowers and spent incense--alleys which thread their way past shrine after shrine, holy place after holy place; mere niches in a worn stone, perhaps, or less even than that; only the bare imprint of a bloody hand on the tall, blank walls of the crowded tenement houses which seem to narrow God's sky as they rise up toward it. Benares, where the alien master steps into the gutter to let a swinging corpse pass on its way to the Sacred River, but where the priest behind it--his dark forehead barred with white, or smeared with a bold patch of ochre--steps into the opposite gutter, and clings to the shrine-set wall like a limpet, lest he be defiled by a touch, a shadow. Benares, which is, briefly, the strangest, saddest city on God's earth.
It lay this night, far as the eye could reach along the outward curve of the Ganges, dreamful exceedingly, dimly paler than the sky. But on the other side of the river, where the land bulged into the stream, lay a scene as, dreamful; yet dreamful in a different way; for here, almost from the water's edge, the young green wheat stretched away into that level plain of India, the most densely populated agricultural country in the world, where myriads and myriads of men live content as the cattle with which they till the soil.
So a whole world lies between these two banks of the Ganges; between the men of whom pilgrims are made, and the pilgrims made of those men. And spanning them, joining them, aggressively, unsympathetically, is the railway bridge built by the alien "Bridge-builders."
Seen in the starlight, with its lattice of dark girders showing against the sky, its white piers blocking the water-slide at intervals, this bridge looked quaintly like a fell and monstrous hairy caterpillar out for a night-walking, one of those caterpillars with turreted excrescences at its former and its latter end. The hinder one here was clearly outlined against a distant block of greater darkness. This was a dense grove of mango trees; and through its far-off shadow shone twinkling coloured lights, while from it came fitfully, at the wind's caprice, a faint sound of drumming, a twangling of sitaras; for, in the shelter of the grove, some of the white faces who were responsible for the dark ones were in camp--in a pleasure-camp full of guests come to see the show, and whither the telegrams of warning flashed and whence the answers flashed back, even while the nautch, bidden to amuse those guests, went on and on in twanglings, drummings, screechings, posturings.
Such details, however, were hidden even from the nearest point of the angled curve of bathing-steps which swept right away to the starlit horizon on the opposite side of the river. The only movement visible thence by the waiting crowd, as it looked across the river, was a curious dazzling flicker, as if the bridge were shivering, which was caused by the continuous stream on its outer footway of arriving pilgrims, showing now against the dark girders, now against the paler sky.
"Mai Gunga hath her hands full!" murmured one of the group squatting immovable on these nearest steps; "they come, and come."
A face or two, patient, dark, turned to the bridge, and another voice came, calm, passive.
"Ay! 'tis easier for folk to find salvation with 'rails' and bridges than, as of old, with blistered feet and boats." A dark hand nearest the water's lip, as it lapped a lazy, silvery whisper on the worn stone steps, slid into the sacred flood with a sort of tentative caress.
"Yet they said She would revenge Herself for the rending of Her bosom, for the burden of bricks laid on Her; but She hath not. She gives and takes as ever."
The long, dark fingers gathered some of the fallen petals which the river was returning to those who had cast their flower-offering on its surface, and the dark eyes watched a white-swathed corpse that was drifting down stream, a faint streak in the slumbering shadow.
"True!" came another passive voice; "but the time is not past. There is to-morrow yet."
The absolutely unrepresentable chuck! made by the tongue against the roof of the mouth, which is the most emphatic denial of India, echoed suddenly, aggressively, into the peaceful air.
It came from the blackness of a low masonry abutment which, traversing the last three steps, projected a few feet into the river, like a pier. A yard maybe above the water, some three long, and perhaps a couple broad, there was just room on its outer end for a small square temple with a rude spiked spire--the plainest of temples, guiltless of ornament, looking out over the Ganges blankly. For its only aperture, a low arched doorway, faced the steps and showed now as a blot of utter darkness.
"Not She, brethren!" said a cracked voice following on the denial. "She or Her like will never harm the Huzoors! They have paid their toll, see you, they have squared the gods."
A dozen or more faces turned to the voice, the figures belonging to them remaining immovable, as if carved in stone.
"Dost think so really, Baha-jee?" came a question. "I have heard that tale before--and that 'tis done in the 'Magic-houses.'"[2]
The emphatic denial rose again. "Not so! These eyes saw it done--here, in this very place, forty years ago! here, at Mai Kâli's shrine!"
In the pause that followed, a pair of claw-like hands could be seen above the bar of shadow, wavering salaams to the little temple, in the perfunctory manner of priesthood all over the world.
"'Tis old Bishen, the flower-seller," said a yawning voice. "He was here in the Time of Trouble,[3] and he tells tales of it--when he remembers!"
"Then let him tell," yawned another, "since the night is long and the dawn lingers. How was't done, Baha-jee?"
There was a pause.
"Many ways, doubtless. Here and there different ways. But here, one way. Forty years ago, brothers! Yea, forty years ago, these eyes saw the 'squaring of the gods.' In this wise ..."
There was another dreamful pause, and then, from the shadow, came the old thin voice once more.
"Yonder, where the bridge stands now, was Broon-sahib's house--"
"Broon-sahib?" echoed a curious listener. "Dost mean Broon-sahib who built the bridge?"
"Who built the bridge?" hesitated the tale-teller. "God knows! More like his son; for the years pass--they pass, Mai Gunga! and I grow old. Grant me this last cleansing, Mother! Wash me from sin ere I go hence ..."
"Lo! thou hast made him forget the rest," reproved another listener, "as if there were not Broon-sahibs ever! Even now, here in Benares! Yes! Baba-jee, of a certainty, Broon-sahib's house stood here, where the bridge stands now."
The old memory, started afresh, went on.
"It was a boy, the child. A toddler, but with the temper of tigers. Lo! it would scream and yell in the ayah's arms, and beat her face to be let crawl down the steps to pull the spent bosses of the marigolds out of the water and fling them back like balls. A mite of a boy; white as jasmine in the face, yellow as the marigolds themselves in hair. The mem, its mother, had the like face and hair. I used to see her in the verandah over the river, and driving above the steps. There were many sahibs came and went to the house, after their fashion, and she smiled and spoke to them all. There was one of them--so young, he might have been a son almost--who came often; and she smiled on him, too, as he played, like a boy, with the child. He was one of the sahibs who have eyes; so, after a time, he would nod to me and say 'Râm! Râm!' with a laugh as he passed above me, sitting here in the shadow, selling my garlands.
"So, one day, as he came by, there was the baby screaming in its ayah's arms to be let crawl to the water, and she was denying it by the mem's orders. What the young sahib said at first I know not; but after a bit he came running down the steps, the child in his arms, calling back to the woman, in her tongue, 'Trouble not, ayah! I'll square it, never fear!'
"And there he was beside me, the two white faces, the yellow heads--for he was but a boy himself, slim, white, yellow-haired--close together, brother-like, buying a garland of the biggest marigolds I had. So down at the water's edge, he teaching the child how to throw them in like a thrower.
"'No underhand work, brotherling,' he said in our tongue, for the baby, after the fashion of the baba-logue, knew none other. 'So! straight from the shoulder. Bravo! Thou wilt play crickets, by-and-by, like a man.'
"After that once of chance, it came often of set purpose. He would come down from the house with the child, and I had to keep the biggest marigolds for the game, since, see you, they held the bits of brick better with which he weighted them.
"Thus it went on till one day all the sahibs and mems were at the house yonder, for God knows what amusement! and in the cool they strolled down here--the mems dressed so gay, the sahibs all black and smoking--to see how well the toddler, who could scarce speak, had learnt to throw. At least, so it seemed, for they watched and laughed; but after a time they took to throwing the flowers themselves, laughing more and jesting, until not a marigold was left. Then they began on Shivjee's dhatura blossoms, filling their white horns with pebbles, and hurling them far, far into the stream.
"So, when paying time came, the young sahib--he had the child by the hand--flung rupees into my empty basket, and said, 'Lo! Bishen'--for he was one of those who remember names--'those who seek to curry favour with the gods will have no chance to-day. We are beforehand. We have squared them.'
"At this the mem, standing close by, frowned and spoke some reproof; maybe because she was of those who drive to church often. But the boy only laughed, and, catching the child up, cried, 'Lo! brotherling, then are we sinners indeed; since we do it so often, you and I!'
"And with that he raced up the steps with the child, calling 'Râm, Râm!' and 'Jai Kâli Ma!' like any worshipper; so that the mem and the others strolling after could not but laugh. And some echoed the cry as they went up the steps."
The old voice paused in its even sing-song; and when it began again, there was a new note in it which seemed to bring a sense of hurry and stress even to that uttermost peace.
"But they came down again. How long after matters not. I see them so in my old eyes. Going up, laughing in the sunset, then returning. It was starlight when they came down, the mems and the sahibs and the baba-logue. Starlight as it was now, brethren, but not still, like this. There were cries, and flames yonder, and folk running.
"The boats lay here below the temple. And one--a Mahomedan--came with them, promising safety. So they begun to get into the boats, and one moved off, the crowd looking on. Then suddenly, God knows why! it ceased looking on, and began to kill. They were half in, half out of the boat; the sahib-logue and some cried to stop, some to go on. But the mems made no noise; only you could see their faces white out of the shadows.
"And his, the young sahib's, was whiter than any, glittering, it seemed, with a white fire. The mem was in the boat, and Broon-sahib on the bottom step, the baby in his arms. But he, the boy, was above him facing the crowd--making time.
"Then, just as the mem stretched her hands for the child, a bullet--they were firing from the top steps--hit Broon-sahib, and he fell half in, half out of the water, pushing the boat out in his fall. So it began to slide down stream.
"Some in it would have stopped it, but the mem gave a look at those other mems, those other babies, and laid her hand on one that would have gone back.
"'No!'
"That was the cry she gave--a great cry; but a greater one rang out through the shadows and the lights, from the boy who had caught up the child as it fell upon the steps.
"I know not what it was, but it was great, and it echoed out as the boat slipped fast to safety. And he held the child to his breast and waved his sword, so that the mem's white face rose from her hands, where she had hidden it, and she looked back. That was the last thing I saw out of the shadows as the boat slipped to safety; but it held me, so that when I looked round, the boy was no longer on the steps.
"He had leaped to the plinth of the temple, and his arms were empty of his burden. Only he stood in front of the doorway with his glittering white face--his glittering white face, his glittering white sword!
"' Come on, you devils!' he shouted in our tongue. 'Come on! Mai Kâli shall have blood to-night if she wants it.'"
"And she had, brothers!
"It ran from the plinth and trickled to the river; for none could touch him from behind, and his sword was in front.
"There was a method in its hackings and hewings. At least so it seemed to me, watching helpless for good or evil, from my place in the shadow. For ever, as its keenest stroke fell, so another body fell blocking the plinth, until he had to stand almost in the arch itself.
"Then a burly Mahomedan trooper challenged him, and I knew not which way the fight was going, till, with a shout that was almost a laugh, the white face and the white sword showed, lunging back at the big body as they broke past. And it fell sidelong, blocking the doorway quite.
"But none thought of that, of it. None thought of anything save the glittering face and the glittering sword that had burst through the circling crowd, and now, facing it again, was backing up the steps, fighting grimly as it backed.
"Up and up, step by step, and we--even I, brothers, watching helpless--drawn after it perforce, to see--to know ...
"So the steps were left silent in the starlight. I did not see the end, brothers. It was beyond my sight. They told me afterwards it was in the bazaar, with half the town to see; but I had crept away, a great shivering on me, for I had remembered the flowers and the young sahib's words about the gods.
"And I remembered the child. What had become of the child?
"Then suddenly I understood. Then I knew what the method of the sword had been--how it had hidden, had lured!
"It was nigh dawn when I remembered; dawn as it is now. Look! The iron of night's scabbard grows into the steel of day's sword upon the water; and hark! that is the cry of the mallards. The world is waking. So it was when I crept down to Kâli's shrine.
"The blood was still dripping into the water, and when I drew the dead mass of flesh from blocking the doorway, the red of it lay in a pool up to Her feet. But the child had crawled on Her knees, brothers, and had cried itself to sleep there.
"Yet when it wakened at my touch it did not cry, for, see you, it knew me; and so, when it saw the milk, set in a bowl before Her as offering, it stretched its hands for it.
"Thus it was made clear. So I gave it Mai Kâli's milk, knowing it was true what he had said, 'that they had squared the gods.'"
The voice paused, and another asked, "And then?" before it went on dreamily.
"Yea! it was true indeed, for ere the day ended they were back with guns and soldiers. So, since silence is better than speech when nought is sure, I crept in the night to a Colonel's house and left the child in the garden for them to find.
"Forty years ago, brothers! Forty years is it since the boats slipped down to safety with the Huzoors, and now ..."
There was a sudden stir in the waiting crowd.
A boat had slipped up the river shadows from the bridge and was making for the steps.
"That's your station, Brown," said an English voice; "the water is a bit deep about the shrine, remember, and the old women are devilish hard to keep back. All right!" it continued, as a man stepped out. "Go on to the next. We are a bit early on the field; but it is as well to be beforehand, and square things."
As the boat paddled on, another English voice in the stern said in a low tone, "Why did you put Brown there? Just where his father was killed, don't you remember?"
"Just why I did! He won't stand any nonsense, and it is a troublesome job. Besides, he wasn't killed, and there's luck in it. That was a queer story. Some one saved him, of course, but why? and how? Now, Smith! there you are. And, as I said to Brown, for Heaven's sake look after the old dodderers, male and female. When they've nothing left to live for ..."
The rest was lost as the boat went on to a yet farther station.
So, as the sun rose, it rose on that great angled sweep, not of steps, but of humanity; full, pressed down, running over into the spired town behind--on a million and more of dark faces, and a dozen white ones dotted here and there at the most dangerous points.
And Broon-sahib, bearded, a bit burly with his forty and odd years, sat on the plinth, and thought, no doubt, of that past at first, then took out his pipe, and with it some scraps of smoked glass, since the coming eclipse must not be lost, even though one was on duty.
The sun climbed up, brilliantly unconscious, or at least regardless, of its coming fate. And after a time boats began to slide up and down, and a big barge came punting up stream sedately. It was full of English women and children; and under its wide awning a table was laid with flowers and sparkling silver against the champagne breakfast which was to follow on a successful performance of duty.
For not even here could there be allowed hint or sign of that expectancy of possible evil. A little girl holding her mother's hand nodded her yellow curls delightedly, as the barge went past, to Dada sitting swinging his legs just where the blood had dripped into the stream forty years ago; but something in the woman's face made a call echo over the water.
"It's all right. Show going A 1!"
As a show there could be no doubt of that. There was a breathlessness in it, a mighty surge of emotion from one end of that bank of humanity to the other, a curious wail in the ceaseless roar of voices, that struck through eyes and ears to the heart.
And now, what was that?
Broad daylight still; not a shadow had shifted, and yet a sense as if a candle had gone out somewhere.
Broon-sahib put his pipe in his pocket, looked through a glass darkly, stood up, raised his helmet, wiped his forehead, and put it on again.
The time had come--there was a nibble of shadow on the ball of light!--the monster had begun his meal!
As he looked round, unarmed, defenceless, on the hundreds of thousands of dark heads which held this thought, he smiled and nodded with the words.
"Have patience, brethren; there is time!" Doubtless, but not much time to think of other things beyond the mere keeping of that forward crush of bathers, that backward crush of those that had bathed, from inextricable confusion.
So much the better, perhaps. Less time, at any rate, for expectation of the new King who was to fall from the sun and sweep away existing kingdoms. Less time to notice the white horse led out ostentatiously by the Brahmins at the biggest temple, sign that such talk was true, that one æon had passed away, and another--in which Vishnu should appear in his final incarnation--had begun.
"Have patience! Have patience!"
That was the burden of the cry from the few white faces dotted among the dark ones, and it was caught up and echoed by the connecting links of yellow-legged policemen stationed every ten yards along the lowest step.
"Have patience! Have patience!"
A hard saying indeed.
Broon-sahib slipped down from the plinth and collared an old pantaloon just as he fell, hefted him up like a baby, and set him squatting in safety above. Then an old woman, gasping, gurgling from the first mouthful of the water into which, regardless of depth, she had literally been propelled.
"Have patience, brethren! Have patience!"
A harder saying, now that all things had grown grey; though still--weird, uncanny, beyond belief--not a shadow had shifted.
Hopelessly grey, and hopelessly cold--so cold. So curiously quiet, too; for the great roar of voices seemed to have severed itself from things earthly, and was like a mighty wind from heaven.
"Have patience, brethren! Have patience! There is time!"
A harder saying still, when in the greyness, the coldness, a flock of scared pigeons overhead sent a weird flight of faint grey shadows down that long length of angled curve, packed by expectant humanity.
Was He coming indeed?--that new ruler? Were these the heralds?
There was quite a little row, now, of rescued old dodderers on Mai Kâli's plinth, whence the blood had dropped forty years ago.
What was that? Had some one withdrawn a veil? Had some one said, "Let there be light"?
The greyness, the coldness, lost their character in an instant. There was promise in them now--promise of light to come! The sun was reasserting its sway, and--not half of humanity had bathed!
"Have patience, brethren! Have patience!" shouted Broon-sahib, and there was a certain fierce determination in his tone.
Hardest saying of all, when the precious moments were going--going so fast!
"Huzoor!" came a piteous, confused voice behind him from the plinth, "it is my last chance. I am old--I forget. I have forgotten so much--only this remains. For pity's sake--for the sake of forty years ago--let old Bishen, the flower-seller, find salvation!"
Even in his hurry, in his breathless recognition that here was the crucial instant--that a single mistake might bring disaster--Broon-sahib flung a quick look behind him.
He saw a pathetic old face, humble even in its grief.
"It's all right, Baba; there's plenty of time!" he said swiftly. "Here! look through this bit of glass--you'll see for yourself."
It only took a moment, those quick words; he was back, ready with hand and voice of command, almost without a break; but they did more for peace and order than a regiment of soldiers. For old Bishen, after one look through the smoked glass, rose to his feet and salaamed again and again, set, as he was, on high, in sight of all.
"Yea! it is true," he cried, in his thin old voice. "There is time. Let us wait, brethren; for they know--the gods have told them."
Half-an-hour afterwards, with its table laid with flowers and silver, the sliding barge held Englishmen as well as Englishwomen; and one of them was drinking deep draughts of iced beer, while a little girl with yellow hair watched him admiringly, and a woman, still rather pale of face, stood looking at him with evident relief.
"I told you it would be all right, my dear," he said, smiling. "There never was any rush to speak of but once; and then I gave a bit of smoked glass to an old chap, and he saw through a glass darkly what was up, and told the others. So we squared 'em--gods and Brahmins and all-as I told you we should, in spite of all the talk and the telegrams."
The low hills, as they lay baking in the sunshine of noon, showed in scallops of glare against the light-bleached sky. A fine dust, reddish but for that same bleaching of light, hid every green thing far and near, making them match the straggling camel-thorns, the stunted wormwood, the tufts of chamomile, and many another nameless aromatic herb which in these low hills come into the world ready dressed in dust, as it were, against the long rainless months.
Yet it was not hot here in the uplands, and so the district officer's tent was opened at one side and propped up by bamboos more for the convenience of its occupant holding an open-air audience than from any quest after coolness. The upward tilt gave the tent a quaintly lopsided look, as if it were some gigantic bird flapping one wing in its attempt to rise and fly away from the little hollow in which it stood.
It was a motley crowd, indeed, which awaited the fiat of the Dispenser of Justice in these fastnesses of the central hills of India; those climbing, rolling upward sweeps of sandstone where the ripple mark of the tides that built them remains to tell of the vanished sea which had once covered this dry and thirsty land, where no water is for nine long months of the year.
It was a curious crowd also. It could not fail of being that, since it struck the two extremes of that vast Indian scale of so-called culture, so-called civilisation. For a land case involving several miles of country was in dispute, and the semi-Europeanised, wholly clothed lawyers engaged on it stood cheek by jowl with the semi-clothed wholly aboriginal witnesses in it; representatives for the most part of the wild tribes belonging to these waste lands and forests. Rude iron-smelters, almost touching the bronze age in absolute savagery; or wandering fowlers, barbaric even to the extent of eating their poor, old, undesirable relations!
In one group, however, consisting of an old man and a young one, a quick observer might have noticed a palpable discrepancy between the dress (or the lack of it) and the address of the wearers. A discrepancy which made the magistrate of the district look up with a smile.
"Hullo! Nâgdeo!" he said. "On the warpath after a tiger?" The old man salaamed down to the ground. His skin was very dark, so that his white moustache and thin white whiskers, brushed out to stand, each hair singly, in a forward curve, like the whiskers of a cat, seemed to glisten against it. For the rest, he was small, slight, but extremely muscular, and he carried himself with no little dignity and importance.
"Not so, Huzoor," he replied, and his speech rose higher in that scale of culture and civilisation than his dress, which was no more than a waistcloth, a string of tiger claws, and a tasselled spear--"I come to put another foot on it. This is my grandson, Huzoor."
The dignity, the importance grew fifty-fold as he turned to the lad by his side. A good head taller, fairer of skin, infinitely better looking, there was yet something about the figure which made the eye turn back to the smaller, older one, as it stood before authority with a certain authority of its own.
He was, as all knew, explained Nâgdeo, the keeper of one of the wildest passes in that wild country, as his father and his father's father had been. Who could deny it? Was not their very caste name, to distinguish them from others, Ghâtwâl, or pass-keeping ones?
He had had to keep his a long time, because the Old God had decreed that his son should be defeated by a tigress and her cubs; which might happen to the best of pass-keeping ones, since those things feminine were untrustworthy. Consequently he (Nâgdeo) had had to go on beyond the years of greatest activity until his grandson reached them.
But here the boy was now. Of age, twenty; than most, taller; as any, learned in jungle law; with the spear, nimble; to keep the pass, ready; to be enrolled, present, the Old God before--
With his subject the old man's words had returned to the idiom of a wilder tongue, and he drew out of his waistcloth a little iron image of a tiger, not three inches long, to which he salaamed reverently.
For this was the Old God.
"What is your grandson's name?" asked the district officer.
It was Baghéla (tiger cub), said Nâgdeo.
It had seemed a suitable name for one born six months after his father had been found lying dead on the top of a dead tigress, his dead lips close to the teats that would suckle her dead whelps no more.
That had been a misfortune, deplorable yet without shame, and due, possibly, to the dead youth's over-soon marriage to a thing feminine; such things being notoriously untrustworthy! Therefore he had refrained from entangling this one with such things feminine, the more so because there were already sufficient of them in the house, what with Baghéla's mother and grandmother. Briefly, the worship of two female things was sufficient for any lad without adding to the adulation by a third!
So, in the evening, when the magistrate's legal work was over, the old man and the young one came up to the tilted tent again, and, after a curious little oath of fealty to the Old God--in the shape of the three-inch tiger--and a vow of war till death against live things that mimicked his shape had been taken from his grandfather's dictation by Baghéla, the latter's name was duly enrolled as hereditary guardian of the Jâdusa Pass, and the two struck a bee-line towards home over the low jungle as if it belonged to them.
As indeed it did; since few travellers, save the keepers of the passes, ventured to brave the tigers dreaming in their lairs, or pacing the trackless wastes hungrily, after dark.
But old Nâgdeo was jubilant over the mere chance of coming across one; not that it was likely, since what tiger ever was whelped which would dare to face him and his grandson? "Men"--here he gave a sidelong glance of pure adoration at Baghéla's height--"who had no backs; who, if they failed, as even pass-keepers must sometimes, were found face up to the sky, face up to the claws, face up to the teeth!"
Of course, sometimes, the accursed brutes who assumed the shape of the Blessed Budhal Pen--the Old God of Gods--would, out of sheer spite, roll a dead man over and claw at his back; but that also was without shame, since dead men had no choice.
So the old man babbled on garrulously, and the young one listened, till they reached the little village at the foot of the pass. The moon had risen by this time, and showed the upright slabs of sandstone clustering under the wide-spreading tamarind trees on its outskirts. Slabs marking the graves of dead and gone inhabitants.
"I am ready now for the young girls to break their pitchers and cover my emptiness with the shards," said the old man, pausing for a second beside a cluster of these stones. Then he raised his hand and spoke to the unseen: "Fear not, Slumberers! He who comes to join you hath no scratch upon his back."
That was his Nunc Dimittis. After which he made his way to a low shingled stone hut, covered with gourds, which stood on some rising ground outside the hamlet towards the pass; drank to excess--from pure joy--of a nauseous spirit made by the untrustworthy feminine out of wild berries, and then slept as sound as if he were indeed with the Slumberers.
For this question of the due keeping of the pass had been on the old man's nerves for months. The rains would be due ere long, bringing, no doubt, those twinges of lumbago to a grandfather's back which had of late made it difficult, indeed, to keep the pass open for travellers; since to do that a man must give the beasts no rest. He must harry their lairs when they were absent, scare them from the road with strange noises and ringing of bells, and, if they were obdurate, face claws and teeth.
But now there was some one to do all this. Some one of the true race, yet by the fiat of the Old God bigger than most. Ay! and with more personal enmity than most towards the evil ones who stole the Old God's likeness. For must not those six unborn mouths of wrong, of loss, of grief and anger, count for something?
Yes! Baghéla would be a Keeper of the Pass, indeed! That was the old man's thought as he fell asleep, his dream as he lay sound as the Slumberers themselves. And Baghéla slept, too, the badge of his new office, a necklace of tiger claws, round his neck, a tasselled spear, hung with jingling bells, beside him. But the untrustworthy feminine, the mother, the grandmother, still sate by the embers of the fire whispering fearfully; for they knew that those six unborn mouths, translated in their way, might mean something very different.
Baghéla himself, however, had no suspicion of the possibility. He set about his new duties with an immense amount of swagger. The least hint of a marauding intruder about the winding path which led to the fertile valleys towards the south, would send him through the village with boastful jinglings of his bells. And, as luck would have it, that jingling seemed all powerful for a time towards the keeping of the pass.
Nâgdeo, who, now that the necessity for presenting a youthful appearance was over, permitted himself a seat amongst the village elders, a certain stiffness of carriage generally, used to boast of this peace dogmatically. Such a thing as no news, even, of intruders, so far on in the season, was unheard of. He himself, in his palmiest days, had never been so fear-compelling. It was those six unborn mouths of hereditary hatred which did it, no doubt.
And Baghéla thought so too, as long as the rain was slight, as long as the flocks and herds kept to the uplands, and only the shepherds and herdsmen had tales to tell of loss. Then, one day, the clouds broke in slanting shafts of almost solid rain, and the water ran over the rippled sandhills as if it had been a tide once more. Then the sun shone for another day, and at dusk everything but a yard or two of shadow round Baghéla as he patrolled the path was a blank nothingness, blotting out even the darkness with wet, impenetrable vapour, dulling even the sound of the bells, deadening all scent.
So, neither he nor the tiger had an instant's warning.
They were face to face in a moment.
Then Baghéla knew what those unborn mouths had wrought in him. Terror, absolute, uncontrollable, seized on all his young strength; he knew nothing save the desire to escape. The next instant he felt a hot vapour on his back, heard the husky angry cough that sent it there, and all that young strength of his spent itself in a cry like that of the untrustworthy thing feminine, when they had told it of a young husband's death.
Into the mist he fled, feeling the cold vapour in his face, the hot behind; until, suddenly desperate, every atom of him leaped forward from what lay behind, and he fell.
None too soon; for even as he shot downward a shadow shot over him in the mist, and something ripped his bare back lightly, as, with greater impetus than his, that shadow plunged into the void.
A second afterwards a long-drawn howl of rage and spite rose upward through the mist to meet Baghéla's whimpers as he lay, caught above the sheer precipice, by a bush.
After a while he rose and crept carefully up to the verge; then sate and shivered at himself; at this inheritance of fear. And more than once his hand sought that faint scratch upon his back. It was not much; not more than a kitten might have made in play, but he felt it like a brand.
By degrees, however, he began to think. The tiger must be lying dead, or at least helpless, below the rocks. He must get down to it, leave the marks of his spear in it; the mark of its claws ...
A surge of shame swept through him. No! he must go back unscathed; no one must have the chance, in dressing wounds, of seeing that faint mark behind.
So the next morning, old Nâgdeo could scarcely contain himself for pride, as he sate among the village elders. The boy had killed his first tiger without a scratch. Had brought home its skin, the biggest seen for years. True, the lad himself had found the fight too hard, and was even now shivering and shaking with ague; but that only proved how hard the fight had been. And the untrustworthy feminine were dosing him, so he would be afoot again in a day or two. Then the village would see that, ere a month was over, a naked child might go through the pass alone in safety. But it was not so!
Baghéla, it is true, was well enough by day, but as the dusk came on, his strong young limbs always fell a shivering and a shaking. "There is more room for quaking, see you, in him than in me," old Nâgdeo would explain elaborately to his cronies, as he held out an arm, which with the inaction, the sudden cessation of imperious efforts, began to show its age clearly; "but one must pay for size and strength, and courage; and there is no harm done as yet. The mimicking devils had their lesson when he killed their champion without a scratch."
But the harm came in time. A party of salt-carriers, taking advantage of a break in the rains, arrived at the village carrying an extra load; the body of a man killed by a tiger, half eaten by jackals.
"Ague or no ague, sonling," said old Nâgdeo almost coaxingly to the lad half-an-hour after the appearance of this grim visitor, "thy bells must be heard in the pass to-night. They will be all-sufficient, considering the lesson thou hast taught the beasts. And thou art strong enough for the ringing of bells. Thou canst return afterwards to shiver and shake, sonling, since thou art not of those to do that in the pass. No! no!"
The old man's chuckle at his little joke was tenderly triumphant; but, when he had gone, and the untrustworthy feminine alone remained, Baghéla turned with a sob to his mother, who crouched beside him, and hid his face in her clothes, as if he had been a hurt child.
"Mother!" he cried, "I got it from thee!"
"Yes! heart of my heart," she answered passionately, "and from thy murdered father too. Have I not told thee so, often? As for this old man! See you! Since this has come upon us, and the shivering is no longer refuge--go! There is no need to ring the bells--no need to go farther than the little caves. And the old man fails fast. He will not live long. Then, when he is dead, the old tale will be told, and we can tell a new one, like other folk. Why, even now, see you, there is no need for travellers to cross the pass. Let them take the 'rail' which the Huzoors have made! All this old-world talk is foolishness--yesterday's bread has been eaten, its water drunk; 'tis time for a new dinner!"
It was more than a month after this that some one, sitting on the village daïs underneath the tamarind trees in sight of the Slumberers, in trying to use a betel-cutter, said carelessly, "It hath grown rusty, like Baghéla's bells!"
Nâgdeo turned on the speaker like lightning. That month had left him curiously aged, with a wistful, anxious expectancy on his old face. Though when, more than once, folk had commented on his changed looks, and asked what ailed him, he had only replied, almost apologetically, "Death lingers; 'tis time I was with the Slumberers, since Baghéla keeps the pass as his fathers did."
But now his old voice rose haughtily, "Like thy wits rather! Canst not see that the youth hath been overbrave? The mimicking devils will not face the bells. And who can kill a foe that keeps his distance? And if the bells ring not, is it not in hopes to lure the cowards close--to take them unawares?"
The arguments came swiftly, as if they had been rehearsed before; rehearsed without audience; and yet when old Nâgdeo moved off as if in displeasure, his hands crept out towards the stones which marked the Slumberers, his eyes sought them almost pitifully.
And that night, after Baghéla had gone on his rounds, after the untrustworthy feminine had slothfully sought its bed, the old Keeper of the Pass crept out in the rear of the young one, spear in hand; yet without the jingles, since what need was there for two sets?
Two! But where was the one?
The old man's face grew more feline in its watchful anxiety, as he prowled among the bushes in the half moonlit darkness, listening for the challenge. And none came, though more than once in the denser shadow of thick jungle, he saw two spots of green light telling that some one was waiting to be challenged. But where was the challenger?
The night was far spent ere he was found, fast asleep on a bed of dry leaves in the little cave.
The sight seemed to take the finder back, not to his more immediate ancestors, the purely savage hunters of those low hills, but to something older still, to the barbarians who had swept down on them to found principalities and powers; for all the calm dignity of the Indo-Scythic sculptures was in Nâgdeo's pose as he pricked the sleeper with his spear.
"Rise up, Keeper of the Pass; they wait for thee without."
Baghéla was on his feet in a second. He knew the time had come, and something of the old racial courage in him held that new fear in check.
Until, not a hundred yards without the cave, in the faint grey light of the now coming dawn, a paler shadow showed in the darker shadows, long, low, sinuous; and something moved across their path with no sound of footfall; only a crackle of dry twigs, a sudden, soft, short wheeze, and then silence.
"Ring the bells, Keeper of the Pass," came the old man's voice. "There is no fear. Has not the tale of thy prowess spread among the tiger people?"
His prowess! The sting of that slight scratch was as fire on the lad's back; he paused. But a spear from behind reached to his, struck it sideways, and the next instant the challenge echoed through the pass.
And was accepted.
The shadow grew short, showed paler; till two green lights flashed out, and with a roar that rolled among the rocks, the tiger faced them, crouched and sprang.
Old Nâgdeo, his vanished youth returning for a space, sprang too, watching that other spring; so, spear in hand, found himself close to the striped skin of the base usurper of the Old God's shape, into which, with all the force he possessed, he drove his weapon's point. But Baghéla, with no thought but flight, felt the full force of those mighty claws on his back, and fell. Perhaps his neck was broken; anyhow, he lay still, heedless of the piteous cry that followed:--
"Face him, Keeper of the Pass! Face the teeth, face the claws, ere thou seekest the Slumberers!"
Yet the entreaty was not utterly disregarded; since--Baghéla dead--that Keepership passed again to one whose face faced the old enemy bravely.
That face, however, had no triumph of victory in it, when Nâgdeo stooped over his grandson's body, and turned its scored back to be hidden by Mother Earth. There was no mark anywhere else--not a scratch. That, at any rate, must not be. That must be remedied before the villagers saw it; before even the sun saw it. For was not Budhal Pen, the Old God, the Sun-god also?
So he drew the lad's body deliberately within reach of the mighty claws, and used them, slack as they were in newly-come death, for his purpose.
Then he sat down beside the two dead bodies, and looked at his own for scratch or hurt. There was not one; not even a bruise, not a spot of blood. So none need know. The girls might weep as they broke their pitchers over Baghéla bewailing his dead courage.
The courage which had died before he did, though none should know of it. Yet it had died. And who was to blame?
Nâgdeo sat gazing stupidly at his grandson's long length, at his fairer beauty; then suddenly he stood up.
That was it, of course!
And if that were so, then it were best to settle it before dawn, when folk might come prying. He bent curiously over the dead lad, then laid his hand on the dead heart.
"Go! Keeper of the Pass, to the Slumberers without fear. I, Nâgdeo, will punish the intruder."
Half-an-hour after, he stood silently in his hut beside his still sleeping wife. The old woman, blind, deaf, near her end as it was, scarcely stirred as he drove his spear through her heart.
"I doubt thee not, Naolé," he said inwardly, "unless a devil wronged thee; but thy son's son must be avenged. He must take no stranger's blood to the Slumberers."
But Herdâsi, the lad's mother, was awake, and screamed.
"Hold thy peace, fool!" said the old man, fiercely, "if thou wouldst not proclaim thyself harlot. Thy son is dead--face downwards. It came not from me, nor from my son; so that of us which goes to join the Slumberers must be avenged on the vile spirit that took form within thee. Come out from under the bed, woman! if thou wouldst prove he got it not with thy knowledge. Oh! untrustworthy feminine!"
And after a pause the untrustworthy feminine did come out with a curious dignity.
"He got it not from me but from my love. Yet what matter if he be dead!" said Herdâsi, and so died with her face to the foe to save her son's name. Since, if it was a devil's doing, none could blame the lad.
They found the old man sitting beside the two dead women when they came to tell him that the Keeper of the Pass had given his life for its safety.
"Yea, I know," replied Nâgdeo, quietly. "I went and found him before dawn when he returned not. So I came home and slew these useless ones. Since he was dead, and I am nigh death, and there was none to keep the untrustworthy feminine from wandering."
He adhered to this story steadfastly in the district magistrate's court, and when he was condemned to death made but one request--that he might be allowed to face it with the insignia of his office about him. So on the eve of his execution they gave the old man back his necklace of tiger claws, and told him he would be allowed to jingle his bells on his way to the scaffold. But when they came to rouse him in the morning he was lying dead, face upward; his arms, his chest, his throat all rent and ripped by those same tiger claws.
But there was not even a scratch upon the back of the last Keeper of the Pass.