Leonie of the Jungle Part 30

There was the dull thud of a bullet, a snarl, and the animal fell back across the boy's body, twitching convulsively.

Without one moment's hesitation, while the rest of the party stood helpless owing to her position, Leonie, letting fall her rifle and drawing her revolver, walked right up to the writhing brute and fired straight into the terrible mouth.

With one supreme effort the tiger reared itself on its hind legs, gave a choking, strangled cough ending in a spurt of blood and froth which drenched Leonie, and fell back dead; and the entire native staff, shouting in wonder and joy, tore across the clearing and prostrated themselves, in grateful layers around the girl's heavily booted feet.

CHAPTER x.x.xI

"For her house inclineth unto death!"--_The Bible_.

We lie beneath the mosquito net, we undress behind the purdah, we sit on the verandah, or stroll in the compound; we dance, we ride, we eat, we sleep, ever heedless of the eyes watching, and of the hidden form; but above all of that relentless will which causes some of us uncontrollably to do odd things at odd moments under the Indian stars, to our subsequent disgust and wonderment.

Leonie, with Jan Cuxson behind her, stopped outside the temple door, which, hanging upon one hinge, moved slowly to and fro in the night breeze.

And at the side of the altar, in the black shadows of the doorway which led to the secret places of the temple, a pock-marked native woman, draped in an orange coloured _sari_ embroidered in silver, laid one hand upon the priest's arm and pointed with the other.

"Behold the Sahib," she whispered with a snarl of hate at the corners of her mouth, stained crimson with betel juice. "He who seeks her in wife," she continued, pus.h.i.+ng the _sari_ back from about her head so that the thirteen silver rings she wore in her crumpled left ear tinkled faintly, and her nose-ring of gold set with small but real turquoise gleamed dully, "and once wedded she will return across the Black Water. O father of the people, O wise one, I love her and thou didst promise."

She suddenly beat her breast, and the heavy silver bracelets jingled faintly, then shrank back against the painted wall as a young man, even the jungle guide, and beautiful to the verge of unseemliness, stealing from the shadows, smote her fiercely across the mouth, and pulled the _sari_ roughly over her head.

"Hold thy peace and watch," he whispered, with a swift movement of the arm, most suggestive of a cobra uncoiling itself with intent to strike, as Leonie turned away from the doorway with a shudder.

She took two steps and stopped irresolute, with the rays of the full moon s.h.i.+ning upon her upturned perplexed face.

Then she stared down at the myriad things which crawled and hopped in and out of the gleaming bones which lay about in little heaps, or scattered in ones and twos, even up to the door and into the dim interior.

Too absorbed, neither Jan nor Leonie noticed the murmur of voices from the far end of the court, nor the reek of the tiger's blood which came from her stained dress and the carcase of the dead beast which was in the process of being skinned, and around which hovered the native staff awaiting the distribution of the coveted tiger's fat.

Which more by faith, than any medicinal property it contains, is supposed to work miracles in stressful times of rheumatism, and cattle sickness.

Jan Cuxson, trying to grasp and knot together the tag ends of a dawning knowledge, stood behind his beloved, patiently awaiting her next desire, instead of picking her up in his arms as he should have done, and carrying her off to safety, a good wash and a better dinner at the other end of the court.

He was surprised when she spoke quickly and below her breath.

"Take me away," she whispered hoa.r.s.ely as he caught her outstretched hands and pulled her fiercely into his arms. "Take me away, the place is evil--evil I tell you--and"--she raised her hand and pa.s.sed it across his face, laughing softly, "I think I am bewitched--something is--is--pulling--is------"

She looked back over her shoulder, stared hard for a moment, and then, tearing herself free, ran like a hunted deer through the crumbling doorway into the blackness of the temple.

"Who fears, O Woman?" whispered the man, whose beauty touched the unseemly as he sank to the ground. "Who fears?"

Half-way up the temple Leonie stopped, standing in a silver pool of moons.h.i.+ne which blazed like the blade of a knife through a hole in the roof; lighting up the ruined altar, the gra.s.s-grown stones, and the image of a female deity carved in bas-relief upon a huge block of granite.

Nude was the woman carved out of stone, and of so dark a blue as to be almost black; with tongue protruding and hair in waving ma.s.ses, through which were thrust four arms; garlanded with skulls she danced wantonly upon the body of a man, with two hands raised in blessing, in the third a knife, in the fourth a bleeding head.

Kali! Kali! Kali!

If only Jan Cuxson had been able to do something, anything, what a mint of trouble he would have saved himself and others, but instead, he stood rooted to a spot just inside the door, incapable of moving hand or foot, held by a force he did not even guess at, and therefore could not fight, watching Leonie as she moved slowly forward, as though she were walking in her sleep towards the blood-stained altar.

"So will she always come," murmured the old priest as he laid his hand caressingly upon his well-beloved pupil. "So will she always come.

Love? Pah! who fears the love of man in the Black One's temple? Who?"

And there was no answer from the shrouded future.

Leonie stood still, quite still, unconscious of the eyes about her, and everything save the terrible problem she was trying to solve.

Then suddenly she cried aloud, and the words, like wings, beat against the roof and walls.

"I know!" she cried, "I know! I know!"

And whirling round towards the spell-bound man, she turned her hands, palm downwards, with a wonderful eastern gesture of renunciation, and crumpled into a heap before the altar, and the three watching figures stole noiselessly back into the secret places of the temple as Cuxson, freed, strode hastily up to his beloved.

He gathered up the unconscious girl as tenderly as a woman, oh! a good deal more so, and turning her face to his shoulder, carried her out of the temple; stopping for a second to hold her more securely in his left arm as he bent to pick up something which glittered in the moonlight: a piece of orange silk heavily embroidered in silver, for which Leonie had ransacked the Old, the New, and the Lal Bazaars; a bit of her ayah's _sari_ torn and caught in a sundri breather. "And she stayed behind on the boat," said Jan to himself, with a flash of inspiration as he turned the thing over in his hand, and slipped it into his pocket.

And though his heart ached over his beloved's mental and physical distress, he inwardly rejoiced at the untoward occurrences of the day which had supplied his solid, trustworthy brain with the outline of a key to the problem.

Dear, stolid old Jan, who, given the time, could beat anyone at unravelling the hardest, hard-tied, knotted problem.

With a tale of sudden faintness he gave her into the care of Edna Talbot, who cooed and fluttered over her like the woman she was, in spite of her workmanlike appearance and her outrageous craving for a big meal. And she herded the sahibs to the far end of the court, where lay the sick man, after the big meal in which Leonie had joined right heartily; a little white about the face, truly, and shadowed about the eyes, but normal and content, with not the vaguest recollection of what had happened after the killing of the tiger.

"Oh! don't be dense," Edna Talbot said quite brusquely when Guy Dean, having brutally ignored the suffering native, suggested returning to the others. "You surely don't want to make a triangle."

"Triangle--what!"

"Well, you know the old saying about two being company, don't you?"

"Of course I do--that's where it comes in," replied the lad not over lucidly, "_I_ want to make the two!"

The major laughed at the rueful countenance, as he clapped the boy on the shoulder.

"You'll get over it all right, old fellow; it's just like inoculation, a feeble taste of something which might have been ever so much worse.

Trust me, you'll get over it!"

"_Never_!" stoutly maintained young Dean as he heaved a stone at something which fled across the court, his mental vision failing to register a picture of the future in which Jill Wetherbourne, daughter of Molly and Jack, occupied the princ.i.p.al position.

Later, Leonie, sitting with Jan Cuxson on a block of fallen masonry, smiled sweetly upon the head _s.h.i.+kari_, who, salaaming, prayed her to honour him by accepting a little memento of the _s.h.i.+kar_ which had terminated so successfully upon the slaying of the tiger.

In his open palm he held two small bones about two and a half inches in length, two little superst.i.tious tokens which ensure sons to the woman who treasures them, and which, he told her in his broken English, were only found in the tiger, one on each side of the chest, unconnected with any other bone at all.

"It is a charm, O! Mem Sahib, defender of the poor, which will a.s.suredly bring you happiness.

"And may the sons of the sahib grow straight as the pine tree," he added slowly in his own tongue, as he felt the sahib's eyes fixed steadily upon him.

"What did he say to you, Jan?"

As the s.h.i.+kari turned away Cuxson caught the girl's hands and crushed them up against his heart.