The Mercy of the Lord Part 8

The goatherd smiled. "The Presence is welcome to keep it if he likes. I can get plenty more in the old city."

Once again, in speaking to the man, his eyes, askance, were on the girl.

She started. "In the old city," she echoed, "Jim! do you hear that--then you know where the old city is?"

The goatherd almost laughed. "Wherefore not, malika sahiba (queen-lady). Have I not lived in it always?"

"Lived in it! Then where is it?"

He swept a bronze hand in a circle which clipped her and him and the distant horizon.

"Here, queen-lady."

"Here," echoed Jim Forrester, incredulously; "but there are absolutely no signs of a city here."

"Plenty, Huzoor!" replied the goatherd, "if the Protector of the Poor will only use his eyes. Look yonder, how the ground rises to meet the curve of the sky; yonder, sahib, where the sunset red dyes deepest."

The young Englishman looked and frowned, but the girl gave a quick exclamation, and laid a hasty, surprised touch on her lover's arm. "He is right, Jim," she said; "why didn't we notice it before? It stands out quite clear--an even rise all round centring on the unseen sun. How very curious! Ask him his name, Jim, and all that, so that father may be able to get hold of him. Fancy if we find the buried city--it would be as good almost as the gold coin, though somehow it makes me feel creepy." She gave a faint s.h.i.+ver as she spoke.

"The queen-lady should not remain in the wilderness when the sun has set," came in swift warning from the goatherd; "there is a fever fiend lurks in it and brings strange dreams."

Something almost of familiarity and command in the liquid yet vibrant voice made Jim Forrester frown again and say, shortly, "Yes; we must get back; it grows quite cold."

The girl looked half bewildered first to one and then to the other of the two tall figures that stood between her and the fast-fading light, against which she still saw clearly that faint swelling domed blue shadow, as of some other world forcing its way through the crust of the visible one.

So she stood silent, vaguely disturbed while the few questions necessary to identify the man who answered them were asked.

She did not speak, indeed, until with faces set on the right path for their camp and civilisation generally, they paused on the top of the first sand-rippled wave to look back. The shadowy dome was still there, swelling towards the vanished sun, and from its side the figure of the young goatherd rose into the darkening dust haze. He was calling to his flock, and the words of his old-time chant were clearly audible:

"O, seekers for Life's meat, Your course is run!

Come home with weary feet, Rest is so sweet.

What though one day be done?-- Another has begun.

The flock, the fold are one, Where long years meet!"

"I hope he told us his real name!" she said, suddenly.

II

"My dear child, all your geese are swans--and so were your poor mother's before you," said her father. And then his eyes grew dreamy, perhaps over the intricacies of some new coins he was cla.s.sifying; though, in truth, the memory of the young wife who had left him alone with a week-old baby in the days of his youth had somehow come harder to him during the last few happier, more home-like years since his daughter had returned to take her mother's place as mistress of the house; for the girl was very like the dead woman.

She had brought her father his afternoon cup of tea to the office-tent, cleared for that brief recess of the cloud of clerks and witnesses, who through the wide canvas-wings, set open to let in the air, could be seen huddled in groups among the spa.r.s.e shadows of the stunted kikar trees amid which the camp was pitched. They could be heard also, since in the limited leisure at their disposal they were hubble-hubbling away at their hookahs conscientiously; the noise in its rhythmic, intermittent insistency seemed like a distant snore from the sleepy desert of sand that stretched away to the horizon on all sides.

"Of course," he went on, "you could hardly be expected to know--though really, my dear, you have all your mother's quickness of perception regarding people and places--but the mere fact of that goatherd fellow giving his name as Khesroo, and admitting he was low-caste, should have made you doubt his a.s.sertion. I confess I had little hope, for such knowledge as he professed to have is generally in the keeping of the priesthood only."

"But Jim was there--I mean Mr. Forrester," she began. Her father coughed uneasily.

"Because I call my personal a.s.sistant, whom I have known as a child, Jim, that is no reason, my dear Queenie, why you should contract the habit. I don't think your poor mother would have liked it. Besides, though he is an able young man--very much so, indeed, and when he grows older will make an excellent officer--Mr. Forrester--ahem!"

(he made a violent effort over the name) "has no genius for antiquities. He utterly fails, for instance, to realise the far-reaching importance--for it would, of course, alter the whole chronology of the Graeco-Bactrian era--of my contention concerning what Hausmann and the German school generally venture to designate a post-Vicramaditya. Yet some day, I feel sure, the gold coin of which Kapala gives so exact a description in B.C. 200, with the date under the legend and a double profile on the obverse, will turn up, and then the point will be settled, even if I do not live to see it."

He was fairly off on his hobby and had risen to pace the tent, his hands behind his back. Many a time and oft she had listened to him patiently, almost eagerly, for the story of India's golden age always fired her imagination, but to-day she was thinking of other things--of her engagement for one, which she must break to him sooner or later. So she went up to him and tucked her arm into his coaxingly.

"You may, father. It might be found any day. Do you know, I believe you would give almost anything--even your daughter--for that ducat.

Wouldn't you?"

Absolute jest as it was, her voice trembled over the trivial words, as voices often do unconsciously when Fate means to turn them to her own purposes.

He smiled and patted her hand. "Undoubtedly, I would, my dear. But, nice as you are, no one is likely to offer me that exchange. To begin with, the coin, as a simple unique, would be worth a fortune, and then there is the fame. Think of it! Half the philologists, most of the historians, and all those German fellows routed on their own ground!"

"Who knows?" she said, and then a frown dimmed the amus.e.m.e.nt in her eyes. "Though I can't understand," she added, "why that man Khesroo denied--as you say he did--having met Jim--I mean, us--yesterday. He can't be the wrong man, can he?"

"Mr. Forrester thinks he is not. But you can see for yourself," replied her father, returning to his tea and his treasures, "for he is still over in the orderlies' tent. They had such trouble hunting him out of the jungles and persuading him to come here that they said they must keep him overnight, anyhow, in case he was wanted."

An hour or so afterwards, therefore, a yellow-legged constable escorted the goatherd who had answered to the name of Khesroo into the verandah of the Miss-Sahiba's drawing-room tent. It, also, was set wide to the cool of the desert evening, and its easy-chairs and low, flower-decked tables strewn with books and magazines struck a curiously dissonant note from that sounded by the wilderness of sandy waste which on all sides hemmed in the little square of white-winged camp with a certain hungry emptiness.

"He is the man, Jim," said the girl, in an undertone (for her father had come over from office and was seated within, reading the daily papers which the camel-post had just brought). "And yet--he looks different somehow--and so ill, too."

He did look ill, with the languid yet hara.s.sed air which follows on malarial fever. The buoyancy of his carriage was replaced by an almost dejected air. Yet it was unmistakably the goatherd they had met the evening before, who, in obedience to a sign, squatted down midway, as it were, between the culture inside the tent and the savagery without it.

"You look as if you had been having fever--have you?" asked the girl abruptly, for her years of authority had made her knowledgeable in such things.

"The malika sahiba says right," replied Khesroo, indifferently. "I have had it much--this long while back."

"And you had it yesterday or the day before?"

"It was yesterday. I was put past by it all day. And yet----" here a vague perplexity came to the dulled yet anxious face as he looked first at the girl, then apologetically at Jim Forrester. "What the Presence said about meeting me is perhaps right after all. Yes! it is right. I did see the Huzoor. I have remembered from the graciousness of the queen-lady and the gold crown of her hair."

The young Englishman frowned angrily. "You work miracles in memory, my dear Queenie," he said, and there was quite an aggrieved tone in his voice as he turned shortly on the speaker. "Why on earth didn't you tell the truth before, then? And the old city? I suppose you remember all about that, too?"

"The old city," echoed Khesroo, doubtfully. "No, Huzoor! What should I know about it beyond what all know--that there was a city, and that it is lost? Such as I know only what the wise tell them----" he paused, and even to his deprecation came a half-resigned self-a.s.sertion, "And yet I had more chance than most, seeing that my mother was twice-born."

"She was, was she?" put in his hearer, and then looked round towards his chief. "Do you hear that, sir? His mother was a Brahmani--that may account for his profile, which you said this morning puzzled you in a low-caste man."

"I said it was Scythic in type, and so it is," was the answer, as the speaker laid down his paper and came forward for further inspection.

"So your mother was twice-born," he continued, addressing the goatherd; "a child-widow, I suppose?"

Khesroo stretched his hand out, the fingers wide-spread in a dignified a.s.sent, which suited him better than his former almost cringing humility.

"Huzoor, yes! Her people, however, did not find her till I was nigh six; but after that, of course, I was alone."

A hush fell on the group, for--to those three listeners who understood them--the simple words told of a common enough tragedy in India; of a life denied all natural outlet, of unworthy love, of outraged pride of race followed by sure, if slow, revenge.

"And your father--who was he?"

Kresroo shook his head. "I had no one but my mother, Huzoor."