The Hosts of the Lord Part 1

The Hosts of the Lord.

by Flora Annie Steel.

CHAPTER I

A SHADOW

"Understand! Of course you don't. I don't, though I've been here two years. And what's more, I don't want to," retorted a rather undersized Englishman, whose white drill suit made him look like a stem to the huge mushroom of a pith hat which he wore. Despite this protection his face was brown exceedingly, and faintly wrinkled through sheer exposure to sun-bright, sun-dried air. The fact enhanced the monkey type of his features, and made his clear, light-blue eyes--so set that they were shadowless below and cavernous above--look quite aggressively cool, inquisitive, intelligent.

"So long as we don't understand them," he went on, "and they don't understand us, we jog along the same path amicably, like--well! like the pilgrims to the 'Cradle of the G.o.ds,' and the telegraph-posts to the Adjutant General's office up the road yonder--and I'll trouble you to cram more s.p.a.ce than that between two earthly poles! No! It is when we begin to have glimmerings that the deuce and all comes in--" He paused in the molten gold of sunlight, which made the yellow sand, the corn-coloured tussocks of tiger-gra.s.s still yellower and still more corn-coloured, to glance round, as if measuring the distance between the long, low line of mud enclosure they had left but a few hundred yards behind--yet which, already, was losing itself in an illimitable sand stretch beyond--and a bigger tuft in the sand stretch ahead; a tuft of spear-points and horses, bayonets and men, waiting beside the first faint semblance of a reed-paved road. Then he took out his watch.

Apparently he found leisure at his disposal, for he walked on. "There's a nursery rhyme they taught me," he continued, "when my moral nature was at the mercy of any fool who chose to take an interest in it--'_But if poor p.u.s.s.y understood, she'd be, indeed, a naughty creature!_' It didn't run so consecutively, of course; in fact 'creature' rhymed to 'teach her'--but I learnt it that way. Children do that sort of thing a sight deal oftener than their elders think."

The younger of the two men in uniform with whom he was walking laughed--the honest, elated, conscious laugh of one who has not many good stories about himself, and happens on an opportunity for telling one of them.

"_I_ used to say, '_Six days shalt thy neighbour do all that thou hast to do, and the seventh day shalt thou do no manner_--'"

"Shut up, Lance!" interrupted his elder companion with a laugh. "It is a ripping excuse for your intolerable laziness, but I don't believe--"

"Fact, I a.s.sure you," protested Lance Carlyon aggrievedly, "and considering I really thought that was the proper version for ten years of my life, I--"

Dr. George Dillon took off his mushroom hat suddenly, and wiped his forehead as if to smooth away the wrinkles which his smiles had brought to it. "Lordy! It's a queer world," he put in. "There is really no good in understanding most things. As for this place--! Great Scott! What would happen if my fifteen hundred scoundrels, whom you saw digging like babes in the open just now, were to understand that I--one Englishman in charge--had virtually no _force majeure_--"

"Don't insult us, Dillon!" remonstrated Captain Vincent Dering, a certain swagger underlying his jest. "Eshwara is a garrison town, remember, now; I'm commandant, and Carlyon's staff--"

He had, in fact, ridden that morning as far as Dr. Dillon's house in charge of a troop of native cavalry and some Sikh pioneers who had gone on, under a native officer, to take up their temporary quarters in the half-ruined Fort, just beyond the old town of Eshwara. And now, having thus secured their breakfasts, he and his lieutenant were on their way towards the horses and escort they had bidden await them at the boat bridge which lay between them and their destination. For George Dillon was in control of a large industrial gaol, whose inmates had for months been digging the head works of a ca.n.a.l, which was to take off just below the town, on the farther side of the river.

"Are you?" replied the doctor, with a look of pity; "then I hope you'll both forget the fact. We've got on all right without you, hitherto. So if you'll stick to marking out the Viceroy's camp, and generally preparing the way of the Lord-sahib, I'll be obliged to you. By the way, is he coming to open the ca.n.a.l on the 10th, really?"

"So they say. That is, if you are ready for the show by then. I believe he could put it off till the 11th or 12th. Dashwood said something to that effect."

"Then Dashwood's an a.s.s. The 10th is bad enough. The place will be filling up even then."

"Filling up! How?"

"Pilgrims. But on the 11th and 12th! By George! you should see them!

The 'a.s.syrians came down like a wolf on the fold,' is nothing to it; only these are the Hosts of the Lord, I suppose. And so Dashwood suggested the 11th or 12th--the _Vaisakh_ festival, did he? Well, he is an a.s.s! But that's always the way. We try to understand feelings, instead of trying to know facts. However, we shall be ready for the opening, never fear. Smith expects his C. S. I. over it, he says, and that's enough guarantee. You know Smith, don't you, Dering? Walsall Smith--I think his wife said she knew you."

"Yes," he interrupted, with rather unnecessary decision, "Mrs. Walsall Smith is a great friend of mine, a very great friend."

"Jolly for you, having friends in Eshwara," a.s.sented Lance, in uneasy haste. "I suppose they are about the only people here, eh, doctor?" he went on, changing the subject; but the latter's clear eyes and brain were occupied for a moment in taking stock of Captain Dering's singular, if a trifle _voyant_ personal attractions; one of the most noticeable of which was the perfect curve of his throat and cheek.

"I beg your pardon--people, did you say?" asked Dr. Dillon, after the pause. "Plenty of people, if you count _padres_--the place swarms with missions, you know. But if you mean polo--" He shook his head.

Lance Carlyon's honest young face clouded, then grew cheerful again.

"Well! there must be a lot of black partridge, and I expect there's fish in the river. Besides, it's an awfully picturesque place--By Jove!

it is, Dering, isn't it?"

They had reached the tuft of spear-points and horses, men and bayonets, and before them lay Eshwara, sun-saturate, shadowless, in the April noon.

So seen, across the still lagoon of water formed by the junction of the two streams, the Hara and the Hari, which edged the low-lying triangular spit from which its fortified, temple-set walls rose, Eshwara seemed at the very foot of the blue barrier of hill behind it, whose serrated edge, paler than the blue sky above it, claimed three-quarters of all things visible for this world.

That, indeed, was the noticeable point in the picture presented to the eye. As a rule Heaven claims the larger half of all perspectives. Here, the three elements, earth, air, water, lay across the view in three broad bands of blue, curiously similar in tint; for the sky was pale with excess of light, the hills with excess of heat, and the water paler than either by reason of a white silt which it brought with it from the snows; a white silt which a recent flood had left in a fine film upon the sand stretches that showed here and there in the broad basin.

"It is a gypsum _detritus_," explained the doctor--"from the 'Cradle of the G.o.ds'--the cave, you know, where the rivers rise. The pilgrims go, in fact, for this very stuff. Find it in the ice crannies, call it 'the clay of immortality,' smear themselves with it, and then die happy, in hundreds, of pneumonia! Those are the facts. I don't profess to understand them; and as I told you I don't want to. It's dangerous. As that cracked old Jesuit, Father Narayan, admitted, with that unfathomable smile of his, when all the other parsons were at me for refusing to allow them access to a postulate or a catechumen, or someone of that sort, who was sent to my jail '_the Church has always admitted the value of invincible ignorance_.'"

"Father Narayan!" interrupted Lance Carlyon eagerly, "I suppose that's the Father Ninian Bruce who has lived here fifty years, and has a sort of Begum in tow, a descendant of General Bonaventura's, who was the Nawabs' favourite. I want to see that old chap; he must be a character.

My grandmother, old Lady Carewe, used to tell me about him; long yarns, though she hadn't met him since she was in her teens in a convent at Rome, and he was father confessor, I suppose--she's a Holy Roman, you know, and was a desperate flirt too."

"So am I," said Vincent Dering quickly. "I mean a Catholic--at least my people are. So I can tell you one thing, Dillon; Father Ninian isn't a Jesuit. I was talking about him at the Club, when I knew I was coming here, and Father Delamere was indignant at the idea--said he was a disgrace to his cloth."

George Dillon's dry face grew dryer. "Did he, indeed! I quite agree that _he_ is, but I didn't think Delamere would have admitted the fact himself! As for Pidar Narayan, as the natives call him, he--he--" here the dry face melted. "Bless the man," he continued, and the dry voice grew soft, "he thinks he knows more about doctoring than I do, and the worst of it is--" here a perfectly charming smile took possession of every wrinkle--"he does, in a way; for the natives believe in him, and the 'saffron bag' is the best of all remedies. You see, when he was younger, he used often to go with the pilgrims and try to pull some of the poor devils out of the fire--or rather out of the snow--for the 'Cradle of the G.o.ds' lies yonder."

He pointed to where, faint and far, a peak showed paler than the rest.

"Why don't they smear themselves here?" asked Lance stolidly.

"Why? Because they don't. Besides, there isn't much to come and go upon for a robe of righteousness here. Look! the breeze is blowing it away already!"

In truth the sun, which with the other three elements of earth, and air, and water, give us, in all religions, the whole spiritual life of man,--the world of his probation, the heaven of his hopes, the means of his purification, and the fire of his retribution--had scorched the fine film to dust, and the wind, blowing where it listed, was sweeping it away, leaving the sand stretches unregenerate as ever.

"An extra touch of pipe-clay!" laughed Vincent Dering, dusting his knee as he settled himself in his saddle. "Well! good-by, old chap. I shall see you again soon, for I shall be coming over to the Smiths' pretty often, and I suppose your regiment of ruffians leaves you off duty sometimes. Carlyon, make Dillon an honourary member of the headquarters mess!"

George Dillon, leaning with his hands in his pockets against the rail of the first pontoon, watching the little cavalcade start, nodded.

"Thanks. I'm over pretty often at the Palace. Pidar Narayan plays the fiddle, and the Begum,--as you call her,--Miss Laila Bonaventura, has a voice. Besides, Babylon--I mean Eshwara--amuses me."

"Why Babylon?" asked Captain Dering, stooping to straighten his stirrup.

The doctor laughed, as his lounge changed to a start homeward. "Means the same thing. Esh-dwarra--or in another tongue, Bab-y-lon,--is 'the Gate of G.o.d,' though Babylon stands for something else nowadays, doesn't it? That's why I say it's never any use to find out the meanings of things. They change so. Stick to facts; they don't. Well, ta-ta. I'll see you to-morrow, most likely, at the Palace. They have a sort of concert-practice-afternoon on Wednesdays--some of the Mission ladies sing jollily in parts--and the old man is sure to ask you. He sets great store on his ward's position; besides, I told him you were a nailer at the piano."

Vincent Dering made a wry face. "The deuce you did! My dear fellow, I couldn't play hymn tunes to save my life. I shall refuse."

"Pity," replied Dr. Dillon over his shoulder, as he swung off in strides which emphasized the undue shortness of his trousers, "for I heard Mrs. Smith say they wanted a good accompanist. She sings _alto_--rather well."

"Oh, does she?" said Captain Dering, in a different tone.

As they set their faces different ways, there was a smile on both, but the doctor's was scarcely a pleasant one; it would, in fact, have been wholly sardonic but for the touch of impatient weariness it brought with it.

So, through the sun-bright, sun-dried air, while George Dillon walked back to his fifteen hundred malefactors, the little trail of spear-points and bayonets, men and horses, drifted at a foot-pace across the frail bridge towards the town; drifted unsteadily, the yielding boats swaying, the wooden girders giving and groaning over their burden. Seen so, with but a plank between it and the milky water creased by the faint current, there was something unreal in the gay troop of colour and glitter making its way to the quaint, storeyed town, ablaze in the sunlight, which turned each golden temple-spike to a star. A cool breeze fluttered the lance-pennants, and brought that faint film of white to horse and man, warm flesh, and cold steel.

And far away on that pale peak, a little white cloud had rested, hiding the "Cradle of the G.o.ds."

"There must be fish here," remarked Lance dogmatically. "I'll get out my rods to-morrow and try for a '_mahseer_.'" And the earnestness of his face, as he lifted his eyes skyward to watch a couple of cormorants, would have suited a knight-errant of old on the quest of the Holy Grail.

"It won't be half bad, I expect--for a time, at any-rate," a.s.sented Vincent Dering, still with that content upon his face. "We will get up some fun while the camp is here, of course; and after that--" he paused, and the content became greater--"we'll manage for the month or so we have to stop. At least I shall."

His voice was soft. He might have been another knight-errant of old, riding across to the enchanted castle of his beloved.