THE HALL OF AUDIENCE

"This, gentlemen and respected sirs," said the blatant specimen of new India whom my friend Robbins had insisted on having as a guide to a ruined Rajput town, "is Hall of Common Audience, in more colloquial phrase, Court of Justice, built two, ought, six before Christ B.C. by Great Asoka, mighty monarch of then united Hindustan, full of Manu wisdoms, and sacred Veda occultations--"

Then I gave in. "For God's sake, Robbins," I said, "take away that fool or I shall kill him. A man who be-plasters even the Deity with university degrees is intolerable here."

Robbins gave me that look of condoling forbearance which had nearly driven me mad for a week and beguiled the babee away promptly, as if I had been a fractious child. I was, however, only a jilted man. A badly jilted man, whose jilting was of the kind which becomes almost comic from sheer excess of tragedy. To be brief, I had gone down on ten days' leave to Bombay to meet and marry the girl to whom I had been engaged for two years. Robbins, who was coming out in the same ship with her, was to have been best man. We had certainly been in love with each other when we last met; at least, if I was not, I have never been in love at all. If she was not, then I have never seen a girl in love. I wish to be absolutely fair in the matter, so I will confess that, as I went to meet her, I knew myself to be less emotional than I had been two years before. I had even vague qualms as to whether this sort of thing was quite wise. I was, to put it curtly, in the mental condition in which every man about to marry a fiancée whom he has not seen for two years must be. Presumably her mental condition was similar. But whereas I had to spend the three weeks preceding the irrevocable step in a jungle station where any novelty must necessarily be attractive, she spent it in an environment which gave her endless opportunities of seeing other men, and comparing them with me, and her ideal. The result being that she found she was in love with some one else. Being frank and honourable she told me the truth, with a kind of blank dismay. She did not offer to fulfil her engagement. How could she? when from the beginning to the end, from her first confession that I was her ideal, to her last letter, then in my breast pocket, the whole fabric of our future lives had been built by us on our belief in the permanence of this selfsame love of ours. We could only look in each other's eyes and wonder what was the matter with the foundations of our round world.

Robbins said I behaved splendidly. In truth I was too much stunned at first to realise what it actually meant, and then a certain contempt for them both, especially for the man who came and offered me a shot at him, made me magnanimous. I merely offered in my turn to be best man at the wedding, and was only deterred from doing so by the feeling that it was theatrical, and by Robbins suggesting that I had better have some ice on the back of my head. He meant well, did Robbins, and insisted on accompanying me on what was to have been my wedding tour; for I had my ten days' leave, and I was in no hurry to go back to the gossiping little station where the bungalow I had furnished for her lay waiting a mistress.

Yes! Robbins meant well, and by sheer counter-irritation kept me going. There was a honeymoon off the same ship which came up country with us stage by stage, and the efforts Robbins made to prevent me from seeing its bliss were pathetically comic. The bride and bridegroom wore neat, new, brown-leather shoes, and she had a new brown-leather handbag, just like one which I had carried for my fiancée before she explained the situation. As I sate opposite them I wondered savagely if my face had worn the idiotic smirk of sheer content visible on the man's, and I tucked my own new brown shoes under the seat. They looked so forlorn beside Robbins' big boots. For all that, I combated all condemnation of the delinquents for the first three days. The only honourable theory of marriage being that based upon a mutual and romantic love, it would be unjust because of a single mistake, to blame any one for acting in accordance with a belief which had made Englishmen and Englishwomen what, thank God, they were. In fact I was badly, brutally moral, until, coming out into the hotel verandah during one of our rests by the way, I happened on the bride and bridegroom looking at the moon.

Then the primeval desire to murder rose up, seized me, and held me. Why hadn't I taken the scoundrel's offer and killed him? I was a good shot; and Robbins, as an army doctor, an excellent second. Then I could have married the bride-widow, or spurned her, as I preferred.

There was really, I told myself, no logical foothold between this and being best man. If marriage was an affair of love, these two were right, and the part designed for me by Providence obviously that of second fiddle. If not, they were wrong, and I had a right to claim redress. To shilly-shally, feeling at once hurt and magnanimous, was absurd. I had lain awake, afterwards, debating half in jest, half in earnest, whether I should send Robbins back to the wedding with my cartel, or go myself with a set of silver salt-cellars in a velvet case. But underneath my jest and earnest lay a keen yet vague desire to understand, to find some solid spot on which to rest. I had still been debating the question, when, to please Robbins, who liked me to have no time for thought, we had driven out next morning to these ruins. The country through which we drove had been the ordinary Rajputana country; flat--or nearly so--dry, rocky. Then we had come to a spiky, spiny, roach-back hillock, over which the dead town sprawled, half buried in its own dust, half lost in the sunshine.

I had been watching Robbins' big boots all the way, so I was in a bad temper. Apart from other causes, however, I had some excuse for threatening to kill the guide. For the Hall of Audience to which we had just climbed was, briefly, one of those places which make some of us nineteenth-century folk remember the warning given long ago to an eager reformer to take the shoes from off his feet, since the ground whereon he stood had already been made holy by other hands than his. Yet it was plain almost to bareness. Devoid utterly of any of that ornamentation telling of human hopes and fears, likings, dislikings, and ideals, which men all over the world strive wistfully, hopelessly, to make permanent by carving them in stone. But it was a miracle of light and shade, with its triple ranks of square stone columns--rose-coloured in the sunshine about their feet, blood red in the gloom of arches about their heads--standing like sentinels round a Holy of Holies which was roofed only by the open sky, and floored level to the marble pavement surrounding the still pool, with clear, cool water. And through the outer arches, on all sides, showed that indefinite glare, and dust, and haze, faintly yellow, faintly purple--that burden and heat of the Eastern day in which millions are born, and toil, and die--which seems to swallow up the real India and hide so much of it from Western eyes.

I had just got so far in my appreciation of the indefinable charm of the place, when Robbins returned to stand beside me and look down on the brimming water.

"Curious!" he said, "at the top of a hill like this. I wonder what's the reason of it?"

"Those of uncultivated mind, sirs," replied New India, promptly, "hold it by reason of Grace-of-God. We who through merciful master's aid have acquired hydraulics prefer system of secret syphons; though the latter belief is optional."

"If that man remains here," I remarked aside to Robbins, "I refuse to be held responsible for my actions. Take him away and see the rest of the ruins. I am going to stop here--this is enough for me."

They went off together, the guide babbling of modern equity. The last words I heard were a quotation: "Boots not to say, O Justice! what asperities have not been committed in Thy name!"

Perhaps. No doubt dreadful things had been done even in this Hall of Audience, though it lay very still now; very silent in the sunshine.

I sate down on the base of a sentinel column and looked at the sky, mirrored at my feet, wondering what other things the water had seen.

So by degrees the question seemed to clamour at me. What had been done there? What was it? What gave the place its charm for me? For it had a charm, an infinite charm.

I gave an impatient shrug of my shoulders at the sound of footsteps. Robbins need not surely watch me as if he feared I might commit suicide; though the water certainly looked inviting. But it was not Robbins. It was an old man with a shaven head, and a very clean saffron-coloured cloth, coming through the pillared ranks with a brass poojah basket like a big cruet-stand in his hand. My mind misgave me instantly. He was far too clean for a real ascetic, and there was a bogus air about him as of one expecting tourists and their alms. In addition he came straight towards me, and squatting down by the edge, within reach absolutely of my contaminating shadow, began to mutter prayers.

I rose disgusted; but my first movement showed me I was at any rate partly mistaken, for he turned his head, startled at the sound. Then I saw he could not have known I was there, for he was blind. I saw also that the basket which he had set down contained nothing but the star-like flowers of the wild jasmine.

"Whom are you going to worship?" I asked instantly, for I was a connoisseur in ceremonies, having spent years of study over the ancient cults of India.

He stood up instantly and salaamed, recognising the accent of the master. "No one, Huzoor," he replied. "I am only going to make Mother Âtma her crown."

"Âtma!" I echoed. "Who was she?"

A half-puzzled, half-cunning look came to his face. "It is a long story, Huzoor; but if the Cherisher of the Poor will give his slave a rupee--"

Returning to my first impression of him, I was about to move away, when he added plaintively: "I tell it better than the baboo, Huzoor, but now-a-days he comes with the sahibs. So my stomach is often empty. May God silence his tongue!"

The desire pleased me. It matched my own. And as I paused, I noticed that the old man, who had squatted down again, had begun to thread the jasmine flowers on some link which was invisible from where I stood.

"What are you using to thread the flowers?" I asked curiously.

"A woman's hair, Huzoor. It is always the hair of a woman who has died, but whose child has lived, that is used for Mai Âtma's crown. Shall I tell the story, Huzoor?"

"Was she beautiful?" I asked irrelevantly, why I know not.

"I do not know, Huzoor," he replied. "Am I not blind?"

The answer struck me as irrelevant also, but I went on idly, feeling, in truth, but small interest in what I was convinced must be some hackneyed tale I had heard a hundred times before, since I was given to the hearing of tales.

"Is it about this place?" I asked.

He shook his head again. "I do not know, Huzoor. It is about Mai Âtma. Shall I tell the story?"

"You seem to know very little about the story, I must say. How do you know it is about Âtma?"

He smiled broadly. "It is about Mai Âtma, sure enough. The Huzoor will see that if he lets me tell the tale."

I clinked a rupee down among the jasmine flowers and bid him fire away, and be quick about it.

He began instantly, plunging without any preface into a curiously rhythmed chant, the very first line of which gave pathetic answer to my irrelevant question, and at the same time showed the cause of the old man's ignorance. It ran thus:--

"O world which she has left, forget not she was fair."

Vain appeal when made in the oldest known form of Arya-Pali--the dialect in which the edicts of Asoka are carved--and of which not one man in ten million, even in India, knows the very existence. I happened to be one of the few, and though at the time I could naturally only gather the general outline of the chant, I subsequently took it down word for word from the old man's lips. Some passages still remain obscure; there are yawning gaps in the narrative, but taking it all in all, it is a singularly clear bit of tradition, preserved, as it were, by the complete ignorance of those who passed the words from lip to lip. Roughly translated, it runs thus:--

"O world she left, forget not she was fair; so very fair. Her small kind face so kind. Straight to the eyes it looked, then smiled or frowned. About her slender throat were gold-blue stones. Gold at her wrists; the gold hem of her gown slid like a snake along the marble floor, coiled like a snake upon the water's edge.

"By night she asked the stars, by day the sun, what they would have her do.

"O world she left, remember she was Queen!

"For Âtma ruled a queen ere she was born, her widowed mother wasting nine long months to give her life ere following the King.

"Hark! how her voice comes echoing through the Hall, 'Who hath a claim to-day 'gainst me or mine?' (There was a dainty jewel at her breast, kept time in sparkles to her lightest word.)

"'Who hath a claim'--her small, kind face so wise!

* * * * *

"See! how her soft feet kiss the marble floor! Âtma, the girl-queen, dancing to herself, close to the pool; the jasmine in her hair falling to fit the rhythm of her feet, and scent their warm life with the scent of death, or sail away upon the water's breast like mirrored stars. Oh, bind from them a crown; a crown for Âtma mâta, who is kind--for Âtma, who hath struck her servant blind."

* * * * *

"Hark! how her voice comes whispering in my ear: 'I see naught but my own face in the deep. No other face but this--my face alone. And there are always stars about my head, or else the sun. Read me the riddle quick.' (There was a tremor in her perfumed hair which matched the tremor of her perfumed breath.) 'Âtma is queen,' I said; 'the stars, the sun, weave crowns as I do. Wear them. Oh! my queen.'

"Hark! how her voice comes echoing through the Hall. (The cold blue stones about her slender waist clipped all her purple robe to long straight folds.) 'Go tell your masters, Âtma needs no King. She is the Queen, her son shall be the King, and not the son to Kings of other lands. So if they seek for beauty, seek not mine--it is not mine to give--it is my son's! My son the gods will send me ere I die.'

"See! how her slim hand grasps the marble throne. See! how her firm feet grip the marble step! Hark how her voice rings clear with angry scorn. (There was a loose gold circlet on her wrist, slid to soft resting as she raised her arm.) 'Oh! shame to brawl like dogs about a bone! Cowards to kill because a woman's fair. Can they not take the promise of a Queen? Go! bid your masters bind fair sons in peace. Âtma will choose a father for her King--she needs no lover.'

"'Hush!'--just a whisper on the water's edge, a faint glow from the sacred censer's fire. 'What dost thou see, my friend, down in the deep? There in the circle of the sacred flowers?' (The incense cloud rose white upon the dark, and hid us from each other, hid all things save water and our hands--her hands in mine clasped in the cold clear pool.) 'Naught, oh my Queen! Naught but thy face--thy face--beside mine own.' (Cold was the water, cold her little hand, cold was her voice.) 'Nay! more than that,' she said, 'thou dost forget the stars about my head.'

"Hark! how her voice goes echoing through the Hall. 'Go, bid your masters sheathe their swords at once, nor spill men's blood because a woman's fair. For I have chosen. I will wed with none, but since God sends the children to the world and asks no questions how they come or why, I will take him as father to my King. The law allows adoption; be it so. From out God's children I have bought a son to be your King and mine. Lo! here he stands.' (Her arm about the sturdy, dimpled limbs drew the child closer to the cold blue stones clipping her purple robe to long, straight folds.) 'Some woman bore him--fair and strong and bold--bore him by God's decree to be a son. That is enough for me who am your Queen. Go, tell the brawlers, Âtma hath her King.' (So stooping, whispered softly to the boy, who straightway lisped to order parrot-wise.) 'Who hath a claim to-day 'gainst me or mine? Who hath a claim?' And as of old came answer: 'None, O King.'

* * * * *

"Hark! how her voice breaks in upon the child's. A claim at last.

"The gold hem round her robe's straight virgin folds coiled like a snake asleep upon the floor, the sparkling jewel fastened on her breast shone bright and steady as a distant star.

"There was no tremor in her perfumed hair, there was no quiver in her perfumed breath; the cold blue stones about her throat and waist, the loose gold circlet on her slender wrist, the jasmine-blossom chaplet in her hair, looked as though carved in stone, so still she stood before the dead man on the marble floor.

"His red blood crept in curves to find her feet and clasp them in a claim for vengeance due, while those around cried 'Justice from the King!'

"Until she smiled--her small, kind face so wise, and her clear voice came echoing through the Hall. 'Vengeance is mine,' she said, 'and not the King's. Send forth no army, spill no blood for me. Search not the water-mirror for a sign. I know the answer of the sun and stars. So send our heralds out, and bid these Kings come as Kings should, and not as murderers to plead their cause before the King, my son. Come with all state as to a wedding feast, come with all hope as bridegrooms to the bride. My son shall choose my lover, so prepare all things in order--music, feasting, flowers.' (Then turned to where I stood, and said aside: 'Forget not thou to make a jasmine crown.')

"Fair, strong, and bold he stood, the little King; the noonday sun above the child's bare head scarce cast a shadow on his small, bare feet, standing so straight beside the water's edge, where, half afloat upon the clear, still depths, a small round raft of jasmine-blossoms lay ready to give the omen.

"Heaped so high, so piled with little scented stars, that I--her servant with the crown she had bespoke--stood wondering what need there was of all. And round about the mirror-pool in rank sat Âtma's lovers waiting the decree.

"Till suddenly the baby raised his hand. (There was a loose gold circlet on his wrist, which smote him on the breast as it fell back, making him wince, so all too large it was.) But the child bit his lip and took no heed, knowing his kingly part right royally; so, parrot-wise, he lisped the ordered words: 'My mother Âtma hath no need for love; since she hath mine. She hath no need, my lords, for you as lovers, but she sends by me, as sister sends her brothers, that which sure should heal the strife and make you brothers too.'

"So at the last he stooped, and with a push sent the flower-raft afloat upon the pool, dipping and dancing on the waves it made, so that the loose, white blossoms of the pile floated to drift like stars upon the depths, leaving what lay beneath them clear and cold.

The old man's song ceased, but he went on without a pause. "The Huzoor will hear that it is all about Âtma. Her name is there always."

He had finished stringing the flowers also, and now with a deft hand set the fragile garland--strung like a daisy chain upon a dead woman's hair and then tied to a circle--afloat upon the water, where it drifted idly, each separate flower separate, and keeping its appointed place.

A crown of scented stars!

I roused myself to answer. "Undoubtedly it is all about Âtma; but you have not told me why you weave the crown?"

"It is always woven, Huzoor," he replied. "Our family belongs to the place, and as one son is always blind, he stays at home--since he cannot earn money at other trades, Huzoor--and makes Mai Âtma's crown as his fathers did."

"One son is always blind?" I echoed curiously.

"Always, Huzoor. It is ever so. One is blind in each generation, so he makes Mai Âtma's crown."

He and his sons for ever! a strange coincidence truly.

"Then no one has ever seen her face 'within the wreath their fingers twine'?" I asked, quoting the words involuntarily and forgetting that he could not understand them. He answered the first part of the sentence.

"How could that be, Huzoor, seeing we are always blind?"

True. But if one was not blind? My thought was interrupted by Robbins' voice from behind.

"Hope you haven't found it long, old chap; but the baboo really knows a lot about Asoka. Fine old beggar he must have been. And then he has got a chant about some female called Âtma who had a lot of lovers, don't you know." Robbins pulled himself up hastily, and, to cover his confusion, protested that it was just the sort of unintelligible gibberish which interested me, and thereupon bade the baboo give me a specimen.

Before I could stop him, the brute had got well into the first line; but even in my wrath I was relieved to find that it was indeed absolutely unintelligible. New India evidently did not understand the old. I came to this conclusion before I got my fingers, as gently as I could, inside his rainbow-hued comforter and choked him off.

"I cannot help it, Robbins," I said as I tendered the baboo five rupees as hush-money. "If you knew all you would excuse me."

Robbins gave me one of his most sympathetic looks and said he quite understood.

Did he? Did I? I asked myself that question over and over again, until in the dead of the night I could ask it no longer. The desire for an answer grew too strong.

It was still night when I stood once more beside the water's edge. The moon had paled the red ranks of the sentinel pillars, the dust and heat and burden of the day was gone. All things were clear and flooded with cool, quiet, passionless light. And on the water lay the crown of starry flowers. It had drifted close to the edge, at the extreme end of the pool, beside a square projection in the marble floor, whence you could look clear into the depths. No doubt the place of divination. I went over to it moved by an irresistible impulse, and, kneeling down, thrust my hand into the cool water.

Was it fancy, or did I feel a cold, soft hand in mine? Was it a passing dizziness, or did a white, scented vapour close round me like a cloud, hiding all things save the water framed in that crown of jasmine?

Âtma! Mai Âtma!!

* * * * *

There was no need so far as I am concerned for the appeal--

"Forget not she was fair."

I have never forgotten it, though it is years since I saw, or fancied I saw, her face in the water.

But I have forgotten other things. Indeed, I forgot them so speedily that I saw poor old Robbins was quite puzzled and hurt in his feelings. So, before my wedding tour came to an end, I thought it kinder to give him something definite as an excuse for my cheerfulness. I told him, therefore, that I had fallen in love with some one else.

He gave a low whistle, said, "By Jove!" then added heartily, "Upon my soul, old chap, I believe it's the wisest thing you can do."

Perhaps it was. But I am not yet married. I am waiting for a woman who does not want a lover.

IN A FOG

A great flock of fleecy white clouds were browsing up the steep hillside like sheep, and hiding part of the great map of India which lay spread out five thousand feet below one of the isolated peaks which rise, in sheer masses of granite, from the dusty deserts of Rajputana.

Even to their dustiness, however, had come a faint tinting of green, since the seasonal rains had begun. For the moment, nevertheless, the incessant deluge had ceased, giving place to one of those brilliantly fine monsoon days--fine with the fineness of gentian skies, and snowdrift clouds, which remind Indian exiles of the cold, crisp North.

But already these same clouds were losing their lightness and beginning to sink earthwards; sure sign that the break in the rains was at an end. Still here, in the little station beside the lake, which looks as if the least tilt would make it brim over and send it rolling like quicksilver to the sun-dry plains below, the sky was all the clearer because of the steady increase of those fleecy flocks among the glens and ravines which spread outwards, downwards, ray-like, star-shaped, from the summit.

The increase was so steady that, after a time, the flocks coalesced, and the likeness passed into that of a rolling sea, through whose waves the knolls and peaks rose like islands; until the whole scene, lake and all, showed as a clustered coral reef shows in the Pacific Ocean--still, dream-like, peaceful utterly.

There was no peace, however, on the face of the Englishman in undress uniform who was sitting at an office table in the verandah of a thatched bungalow, which, fenced in perfunctorily from a sheer precipice on three sides by a frail trellis of bamboo solidified by morning glories, was perched above the now unseen levels below.

"If I could get reliable information," he muttered irritably, "I could be prepared. But I can hear nothing of the relief columns, and it is quite impossible for me to predicate the movements of the mutineers; yet without this it is difficult to know how to receive them."

His voice rose as he went on, for a yawn and a stir from a lounge-chair set in the shade, told him he had a listener.

"Not the laste bit in loife, me dear bhoy," came with the yawn. "Sure we've got to kill them somehow."

The first speaker looked up angrily from the map he was studying.

"Perhaps if I were only directly responsible for fifteen convalescents, as you are, Tiernay, I should be content to--to be in a fog. But I am the Brigade Major, and in the absence on duty of the commanding officer, and, I regret to say, all but a mere handful of native troops, I am responsible for the safety of a hundred and thirty-five helpless women and children--their lives and deaths--"

He was interrupted by the mixed sound of a laugh and the finishing of some brandy and water over which Dr. Tiernay had evidently been snoozing.

"Divvle a bit. Loife and death's my business from wan year's end to the other. There's responsibility for yez. And I kill as many as I cure, as all we pill-boxes do. Sure we haven't a fair chance, for a man keeps well without a doctor. It's when he thinks of dyin' he comes to us--an' nine toimes out of ten we can't help him. For talk of bein' in a fog! Be jabers! it's nothing to the British Pharmacopœia. When I write a prescription I always put D.V., weather permitting, at the tail of it."

The Brigade Major looked at the dishevelled, lazy figure, so different from his own, distastefully.

"Well, I prefer a clearer conception of my line of treatment. Now if this portion of the rebels, which, there seems little doubt, are making for us here"--his finger followed a red line he had marked, "elect to proceed--"

"Elect, is it?" interrupted the doctor. "Sure they won't elect to do anything. It will come to them widout their knowing how, like fayver or catarrh. An' it's no manner of use beginning to physic a patient till ye know what disease fancies him. So lave off wid worrying, me dear bhoy, and just get out the salts and senna--"

"Salts and senna!" echoed the Brigade Major, angrily. "Really, Tiernay, considering you are the only other man in the place--for I don't count your miserable convalescents, of course, and my handful of natives is more an anxiety than a help--I do think you might talk sense."

Dr. Tiernay rose, yawned, and walked over to the office table, a tall, lank figure with a reckless, whimsical face, alert now to the uttermost.

"An' isn't it sinse? Salts and senna is what's generally wanted to begin with. Well, I've collected every lethal weapon I can lay hands on, including the dintistry case and the horse-pistols with which me grand-uncle, Macturk of Turksville, shot his wife's brother; so me salts and senna's ready. And, by the Lord, I'll exhibit it too whin the patient comes along--trust Micky Tiernay for that. But till he does"--here his face took a sudden, almost serious gravity--"ah, just quit cultivating omniscience, and lave the fog alone. Sure only the divvle himself could say what the blackguards will do."

"But Hoshyari Mul, the banker, thinks--"

"Is it that fat, oily brute? Oh, don't belave him. Don't belave what anybody says. They don't know--not even what they'll be at themselves if the mutineers do come. There's only wan thing certain--there's but wan straight road from Nusseerabad up the hill to us. That's the tail end of it yonder through the break in the mist. Oh, I've been kaping an eye on it, I tell yez, even in my sleep. Well, if they come, they'll come that way."

"But Koomar the priest--"

Dr. Tiernay looked across the placid, still sunbright levels of the little lake, at the wonderful Jain temples which made this hilltop one of the holiest spots in all India, and shook his head.

"Don't trust him either, for all his white robes and his piety. He means well; but he's more in a fog than we are, for we know that we don't want the mutineers to come, and he isn't sure. How can he be? I'd just throuble ye to imagine his mental position--if ye can."

So saying, he took up his battered helmet, which looked as if some one had been playing football with it, and strolled over to the hospital. It was perched on another knoll close by, yet the mist now lay almost level between it and him; for the curved waves had given place, like the fleecy flocks, to a new formation of fog. This, far as the eye could see, was a flat plain of cotton-wool, white, luminous, on which the knolls, the temples, the glittering lake, showed like jewels.

He dipped into the cotton-wool as it lay soft in the hollow, and out of it again ere entering the hospital verandah, where a man in the loose uniform of a dresser rose from his task of polishing a pair of horse-pistols and saluted; a trifle unsteadily, for he, though the best of the bunch of convalescents, was somewhat of a cripple. Had he not been so, he would not have been left behind when every man who could hold a rifle tramped down the hill to do the work that had to be done in the plains, if not only Englishwomen, but England herself was to be saved.

"Parade will be a bit short to-day, sir," he said, with cheerful regret, "for Corporal Flanagan 'e 'ave 'ad to 'ave a hemetic, sir, and the fly-blister on Private MacTartan's chest is has big has a hostrich's hegg."

"Dear, dee-ar," commented the doctor in long-drawn sympathy, as he passed into where a dozen or more of men in grey flannel dressing-gowns were lounging about in their cots or out of them. They were an unshaven, haggard-looking lot, though one or two were beginning to show that air of alertness which tells that soul and body are coming back to the bustle of life.

One or two, again, lay cuddled into their pallets with that other hospital expression--impatient patience.

Most, however, were between these two extremes, and one of them asked eagerly: "Any news of the brutes to-day, sir? It would be just my luck when I'm down with another bad turn."

"Bad turn go to blazes," retorted Dr. Tiernay, with a reassuring smile. "News of the varmint would have more therapeutic power than every drug I possess, an' a galvanic batthery wouldn't be in it wid the first shot. Faix even if I'd killed ye, ye'd do old Lazarus to spite me. Oh, Flanagan, there ye are. A bit white about the gills, me bhoy, but it's a foine thing to be in light inarching order. An' as for you, MacTartan, sure you've the illigantest protective pad evver a man wore above his heart. Is there any more of you would like wan?"

Yet as he made merry, the doctor's eye had wandered to where the tail end of the upward road had shown more than once for a second, between a rift in the wet blanket; for that only connection between mutiny and helplessness climbed the hill perilously along a steep funnel-shaped ravine, up which the draught, caused by the cool air above the hot air below, swept like a chimney driving the fog before it.

There was nothing to be seen, however, not even a rift or break; so he went on to dress the leg of a cripple on crutches. He was in the middle of bandaging it when an excited voice called him by name from the verandah, and he rushed out, bandage and all, so that his patient remained attached to him by a fluttering ribbon of linen.

He found the Brigade Major on his pony. There was news at last. The mutineers were coming, but not by the road. They had been seen on the old footpath to the north--they evidently meant to steal a march in the rear.

"What made ye come and tell?" asked the doctor suddenly in Hindustani to the naked figure which had brought the news. It was that of a Jain ascetic with a muslin cloth bound about his mouth, so as to prevent the destruction even of the unseen life around him.

The set brown sanctity of his face wavered. "They come to kill--and I kill nothing."

Dr. Tiernay turned on his heel and faced the man on crutches (who, after vainly begging to be told what was happening, had come crawling on all-fours like a dog to the verandah), and began as it were to haul him in by rolling up the bandage. "Who the divvle tould ye to move, Tompkins?" he said; "come in at wanst and let me finish me job."

"But, doctor," protested the Brigade Major.

The doctor swung round again at the appeal.

"Don't believe his saintship. Don't, for God's sake. If it's killing he objects to, sure isn't he helping us to kill them? That sort of thing doesn't work. See you--he says there are five hundred of them. Sainted Cecilia! if that's so, an' they mean to come and kill us, why come up the back stairs?"

"But he says,--and Koomar also, and even Hoshiari Mul--"

"Well, I'd rather trust the fat little banker if it comes to trustin'," interrupted the doctor, "for, see you, I owe him money, and if I'm killed he won't get it. But if I were you I'd trust none of them. Even Hoshiar, compound interest at a hundred and fifty per cent. to boot, does not know what he'll be at, so take my advice and sit tight where ye are."

The Brigade Major did, very tight and square on his pony.

"I'm sorry you don't agree with me, Dr. Tiernay," he said stiffly, "and, of course, being in independent medical charge of this convalescent depot, you can remain behind if you choose. Indeed I think it would, in a way, be wiser, since your fellows would be of little use."

Dr. Tiernay looked round on the contingent of crippledom which had crowded and crawled to the verandah to listen. "Faix," he said, "their hearts are whole, anyhow, an' that's half the battle. But what's your plan?"

"I have thought out this eventuality before, and am certain that our defence must be at the defile--you know--about four miles from here. I shall take every soul I can--it's better to give every one something to do."

The doctor nodded. "That's sound, anyhow. Satan finds--then I'll stay here."

"If--I fail--you will do what you can for the women and children--I shan't give the alarm now; so--so you might tell my wife by-and-by--if necessary."

Mike Tiernay walked back and patted the pony's neck.

"I'll tell her. And ye may be right--ye can't tell--it's just a fog. Anyhow, the cripples will do what they can for the ladies and the babies--though wanst those murderin' villains set foot on the summit, it's all up--so--so--I'll keep an eye on the road for ye. Well, good-by, me dear bhoy, and good luck to ye."

The sun, that was still shining brightly above the mists, shone on the men's clasped hands for a moment.

After that, Dr. Tiernay finished Tompkins' leg.

It was rather a long job, as it had to be done all over again. Then there were minor hurts to arms and hands, so that an hour must have passed before the doctor, wiping his hands with the curiously minute care of the surgeon who knows what risks he runs, suddenly dropped the towel and said--

"Sainted Sister Anne! they're coming."

Yes. The rift for which he had been watching with the carelessness which comes with custom, had showed that tail end of the road for a moment, and showed something on it--a trail of men and horses, a flashing of bayonets and spear-points.

Ten minutes after the man on crutches was the only one left in the hospital, and he was sitting on the edge of his cot sobbing like a child disappointed of his holiday; but Mike Tiernay had left him the horse-pistols by way of consolation, with instructions to hold the fort as long as he could, and prevent the damned rascals from touching even the drugs.

"Ye'll have the best of it after all, I tell ye," had been the doctor's farewell, "for sure ye'll be sitting at your ease shootin' straight long after we've been silenced; and a last shot is always a last shot." He was wondering what his would be as he led his company of cripples through the hollow of mist which lay between the hospital and the head of that road whose tail had shown the upward gleam of bayonets.

As yet, however, everything was peaceful. The lake, the temples, the isolated houses set on their knolls, even the lower cluster of the bazaar were all bathed in sunshine, with the curious, translucent brilliance which only Indian sunshine can give. Only between them, clinging to every hollow, lay the thick, luminous white fog.

Mike Tiernay took off his helmet, wiped his forehead, and looked around.

"It's no good in life making the poor things anxious," he muttered to himself, "an' if we can keep the divvles at bay he will be back to tell his own story. But I'll just give a look round to hearten them up; there's plenty of time, for I can catch up the cripples in a jiffy." So, bidding his men march slowly down the road (saving themselves as much as possible, since their work would be cut out for them afterwards) until he rejoined them, he set off with swinging strides to the semi-fortified houses, in which, more for the name of safety than for the hope of it, the helpless women and children had been gathered during the last few days.

"Any news, doctor?" asked the Brigade Major's wife, coming out to meet him, her six months' baby in her arms. "Dick isn't back from office yet, and it's such weary work, waiting, waiting."

Dr. Tiernay bent rather abruptly to look at the fretful child, which was teething badly. One or two other women, pale-faced, anxious, their little ones clinging round them, had gathered to listen, and he spoke as it were to all.

"Well, it can't be long now, any more than it can't be long before Dick comes back, or before that troublesome eye-tooth comes through. If all goes well, me dear madam, all the worry will be over by tomorrow."

"And if it isn't you will come with your lancet, won't you?" asked the mother, pleadingly.

Dr. Tiernay frowned portentously. "It's against me principles, madam--but I'll use--well, some kind of lethal weapon, I promise you. An' tell your husband, when ye see him, that my cripples did as well as could be expected, considering the fog."

"Did as well?" she asked. "What have they done?"

"Gone for their first walk down the road," he replied, with a cheerful laugh, "an' I must be affther them to stop them from overtiring themselves. So good-by. Dick'll maybe bring good news."

"How cheerful he is always," said one pale-faced mother to another. "I always feel safer when I've seen him; and, you know, he can't really think there is any immediate danger or he wouldn't have talked of coming to lance the baby's gums, would he?"

Whatever Dr. Tiernay might have thought, he was by this time beginning to realise that in the fog it was impossible to know anything--even the positions of his own cripples. "Are ye all there, wid as many legs an' arms as ye have whole?" he called, after he had given the order for them to fall in; "for, by the Lord that made me, I must take ye on trust; ye might be anybody." He paused; his eyes lit up suddenly; he gave a wild hooroosh.

"I have it, men; let's play the fog on the divvies, an' be damned to them. They can't see us, so let's take them in flank at the zig-zag. Smith, out wid yur engineer's eye an' tell me what's the length of the zig-zag--wan zig of it, I mane."

Smith, in the fog, thought a moment or two. "Close on a mile, sir, more or less, and there's four of them."

"Say three-quarters, and we are fifteen; no, it's fourteen, for we had to leave poor Tompkins wid his crutches an' the horse-pistols. Tompkins absent."

"Beg pardin', sir," came a voice from the fog; "Tompkins present. Come a all-fours down the short cut quite easy."

"Fifteen," corrected the doctor, calmly, "fifteen into twelve hundred yards. Faix, it'll have to be open order."--He paused for an odd catch in his breath, something between a laugh and a sob. "See here, ye gomerauns--English, Irish, Scotch, whatever ye are--that's our game. We're not fifteen; we're fifteen hundred."

The cripples out of the fog broke into a faint cheer.

"You've got it, Mick Tiernay!" they assented wildly. "You've got it, doctor dear! The fog's our game."

"We're fifteen hundred strong, an' we're each of us a hundred men an' two officers," called the doctor back. "Now, d'ye understand, men? open order it is--wan hundred yards or thereabouts, at the top zig-zag, and chargin' down on the divvies in flank--an' the gift of tongues--an' Donnybrook Fair--Hooroosh, Pat! come on, lads."

The next moment, hirpling, hobbling, unseen even of each other until sometimes a jostle would bring a low-toned witticism--"Now, then, Cap'n, keep your regiment orf mine, will ye?" or, "I'll throuble you, sorr, to respect me formation!"--the men were making their way, fast as crippledom would let them, towards their forlorn hope. And despite the witticisms, their haggard lean faces, hidden, like all else, in the fog, were stern and strained. Men's faces are so, when each man has to find place in his body for a hundred souls.

"Quiet's the word. Let them come on almost to the turn," was the doctor's last injunction as he posted his men; the strongest at the narrowest end of the zig-zag because they would the soonest come upon the enemy, and so on in varying gradations of convalescence, till the line of the supposed battalion stopped at the widest end with Tompkins, who was given as much ammunition as they could spare, and told to fire freely, regardlessly.

The doctor himself, with MacTartan close beside him ("so as," he said, "to increase the illushion"), were at the extreme angle. The unseen road lay below them, not fifty yards off, and below that again, the doctor knew, was an almost precipitous grass slope down to the next zig.

"We must start them on that short cut, if we can," he said to his supporter, "an' if we do, they'll rowl and rowl and rowl to perdition, please the Lord!" So they waited, the jest forgotten in earnest.

Then suddenly through the fog came a jingle.

"Tenshion, B Company," whispered the man who had had a bad turn (his name was Brown) to himself, and steadied his shaking hands on his musket as he listened. Another jingle. A sound of voices first; then, as suddenly as the jingle had come, came a thud of many feet.

Thud, thud, thud.

Then all along the hillside, all along that three-quarters of a mile or more, a volley--not of rifles, but orders--orders familiar to those below, and suggestive of colonels and majors, regiments and wings, and companies. Finally, at the narrowest end, a call to fire and charge; a reckless volley into the fog, and then two reckless figures flinging themselves into the uttermost void, God knows how, God knows where, save that it was downwards on that climbing foe.

MacTartan first; remembering his Highland corries and half bursting his lungs in his effort to give the Highland yell of a whole regiment. Yet beneath the grim joke a grimmer earnest lay, as in the fog he and his bayonet found something.

"Hech, now! Is that you?" he said grimly, and the something was a man no more!

"Steady, men. Follow me!" shouted Dr. Tiernay. Once more the mist produced something, and two men in deadly earnest hacked at each other with swords.

"Go on, brothers! run! they are behind us! run! Go back, brothers! they are ahead!" came the cry. And above it rose those orders. From close at hand a dropping fire; and from the far end--Tompkins' end-- quite a respectable volley.

"Come on! come on! and let them have the bayonet!" shouted the doctor again; and with the shout one or two more men grew to sight from the mist upon one side of the climbing road. But the men who had been on the road first were disappearing into the fog on the other side; disappearing down the grass slope to the next zag. Only at the turn where the doctor and MacTartan fought side by side, the difficulty of escape made resistance fierce from a knot of troopers, till, with a curse, MacTartan caught one horse by the bridle, and deliberately backed it over the edge; but not before, in his desperate effort to be strong as he once had been, he had stumbled and fallen before the flash of a sabre that passed in mad flight downwards. "Gorsh me, I've spoilt myself," he murmured sadly, as he rose with difficulty.

"What is it, man? Are you wounded?" cried the doctor, rushing up.

"Bruk me blister, sir," replied MacTartan, stolidly, reaching for his bayonet and going on.

That upper zig-zag was clear now; but below in the fog lay another, and another, and another, where the fugitives might be caught. So the battalion charged again and again, while Tompkins coming down quite easily, "a all-fours," fired volleys steadily.

The jest and the earnest of it, what pen can tell?

Till through the fog rang a faint hurrah. The last of the zig-zags had blindly been reached, and neither far nor near upon the hillside down which the battalion had charged in open order, was foe--not to be seen, but felt! The uttermost void was void indeed.

"We've got no dooleys, men," said Dr. Tiernay, wiping his forehead once more, "so the wounded must crawl back to hospital as best they can."

So they crawled. All but Tompkins; the doctor insisted upon carrying him pick-a-back, on the ground that he, the doctor, was the only whole man in the battalion, and was bound to do double work.

And the next morning, when he went his rounds, he stood for a minute or two beside a fretful baby, and then took out his lancet.

"It's against me principles, me dear madam," he said, with a shrug of his shoulders; "for there's a toime for everything, and everything in its toime; and no one, not even a tooth, knows what it would be at till that toime comes. But as I said the throuble would be over, and the rest of it is;--why, I'll keep my word!"

And it was over; for a message saying he was close on the heels of his messenger came from the general in command of relief.

The fog had lifted by this time, lifted for steady rain; so the English troops coming up found the foes more easily than the battalion had done. But the foes were dead. Those random shots, those reckless charges from nothingness to nothingness had done some work.

And part of it was on the naked body of a Jain ascetic, with a bit of muslin swathed about his mouth, lest, inadvertently, he should bring death to the smallest of God's creatures.