Caravans By Night Part 18

The remainder of the morning he spent in making arrangements for his departure. While he was having his luggage removed from his room he saw the bronze-haired girl--a glimpse of white and gold as she crossed the portico. She did not even glance at him.

Two-thirty, with a sun glaring down implacably upon the dusty Cantonment, found him pacing the platform of the railway station.

Suddenly he caught a glimmer of bronze, a familiar face among many unfamiliar ones. It may have been the advent of the train, roaring up in a cloud of heat, that made her turn quickly--and it may not. She hurried into a carriage, followed by a porter in a flowered chintz coat.

As the train puffed out, Trent drew from his pocket the envelope Sarojini Nanjee had given him and tore off the end; read the closely written pages; reread them; made a few notes; memorized certain pa.s.sages, and consigned the packet to ashes. One sentence stood out in his brain, in raised lettering:

... Thursday night to the house of his Excellency the Mandarin Li Kwai Kung, in the Street of the River of the Moon, which is in the Chinese colony at Calcutta.

It was Wednesday now.

CHAPTER V

INTERLUDE

Calcutta was luxuriating in the amber and blue of a clear day when Trent detrained in the Howrah Station the following morning; detrained as Mr.

Robert Tavernake of London, in light gray tweeds, instead of Major Arnold Trent of Gaya, whose military trappings, with his ident.i.ty, were secreted in a trunk.

As he neared the front arches of the building, with a porter in tow, he was hailed by a drill-clad officer.

"h.e.l.lo, Trent!" exclaimed the uniformed one, whom he recognized as a former messmate. "_Quo vadis_, you old mummy?"

Trent, not blind to the fact that he was being eyed by a native in horn-rimmed spectacles and a pink turban, returned the greeting with a polite smile.

"Sorry," he said; "You must be mistaken"--and walked on.

"Crazy?" wondered the surprised officer, "or am I?"

He stared at Trent's gray back and sunburnt neck--and he was not the only one, for at least two others did.

As the porter put Trent's luggage into an automobile, the expected happened: the spectacled, pink-turbaned native approached, beamed upon him and spoke in suave tones, in English.

"You are Tavernake Sahib?"

Trent nodded. "Tambusami?"

The pink turban inclined forward as he salaamed. "I have a communication for the Presence!" he announced, extending an envelope that distilled an unmistakable perfume.

Trent did not open it, but thrust it into his pocket and instructed:

"Get in."

The motor car rolled across the Hoogly and deposited Trent and his involuntarily acquired servant at a hotel off the Maidan. There he dismissed his bearer.

"I sha'n't want you this morning," he told the pink-turbaned Tambusami, resolving to experiment with him.

And the native departed with a most profound salaam.

A half hour later, over breakfast, Trent read the note from Sarojini Nanjee. It wished him welcome to Calcutta and urged him to listen well when he visited his Excellency the Mandarin Li Kwai Kung--"who lives in that very poetic Street of the River of the Moon," as she put it. "I regret that it will be impossible for me to see you in Calcutta," she concluded. "Meanwhile, I trust you will find Tambusami an excellent bearer."

"Hmm," he thought, "if she won't be able to see me in Calcutta, where the deuce will she see me?"

Then he turned his attention to the "Daily Indian News," perused the closely-set columns while he finished his meal, and, after breakfast, set out for a stroll. He moved north along Chowringhee, past green-grown gardens, and into a quarter where the streets swam in intense white sunlight and men and women of every caste and color pressed close to the flanks of harnessed beasts. It did not disturb him in the least when a backward glance showed him a pink turban following at a discreet distance; he smiled. When he had filled his pipe, he turned toward the riverfront. He felt rather in the mood for a tramp, so he increased his pace--strode on. He reached the Hoogly Bridge; followed Harrison Road. After an hour of steady walking he of the pink turban showed signs of weakening. Trent, perspiring freely yet not uncomfortable, suddenly plunged into a side street, made a series of turns and came out, eventually, near the Secretariat--without the pink turban. There he encountered the officer he had met in the Howrah Station earlier that morning.

"h.e.l.lo, Ayrton," was Trent's genial greeting. "Sorry I couldn't speak to you this morning--but too many ears were listening."

"So!" commented the officer, wisely. "You're doing _that_ now!" He shook his head with a.s.sumed gravity. "Government's gone mad--madder 'n a March hare!" A laugh. "I suppose you're shadowing Ghandi!"

Trent grinned and made an inconsequential remark.

"Here permanently?" he queried.

"End of my life, I daresay," was the gloomy reply.

"You can do me a favor, then"--thus Trent. "I've a uniform I want to rid myself of temporarily; don't object if I send it around for you to keep?... Thanks."

They chatted for a few minutes; then the officer entered one of the buildings facing the square, and Trent returned to his hotel.

He arrived hot and perspiring, and sat down upon the veranda to wait.

And before long the pink turban appeared in the street below. Their glances met and Trent motioned to him.

"Why did you follow me?" he demanded, as Tambusami, sweat flowing from every pore of his brown face, salaamed.

"My orders, O Presence!"

"Whose orders?"

"The Presence knows!"

Trent thought a moment. Then: "I object to it."

Tambusami smiled broadly. "But, O Presence, it is for your good that I follow--to protect you!"

And knowing it was useless to tell him he lied, the Englishman dismissed him curtly.

Trent spent an idle afternoon. He did not leave the hotel, for he feared that he would encounter other acquaintances, as he had met Ayrton, and with Tambusami tracking him it might make more insecure his position. To be sure, Sarojini Nanjee knew he was Arnold Trent--but did Tambusami?

As he lay sprawled across his bed, enjoying the inactivity and listening abstractedly to the sounds from the street, a recollection of the bronze-haired girl insinuated itself into his thoughts. Subconsciously, he wondered why the remembrance of her came to him. He hadn't seen her since she entered the carriage at Benares Cantonment; didn't know whether she left the train along the route or in Calcutta. Queer that this girl should have crossed the border of mere observation. Yet, had he a.n.a.lyzed it, he would have known the reason. The world, that is, the great firmament of existence around his immediate sphere, was to him a scroll of faces. Now and then some countenance was lifted from the mult.i.tude--a swift glimpse of eyes in the dusk, eyes he would never see again, and for many nights afterward, when he sat alone with his pipe and the stars, he would spin webs of glamour. A quixotic person, this Trent.... The girl, then, was one of the lifted faces. Skin of old ivory hue, he mused, and hair--now, just what color was it? His imagination supplied a simile. Golden, with little flickerings of auburn--like firelight on bronze. The figure rather pleased him. Firelight on bronze.

A contrast to Sarojini Nanjee. One the jungle orchid, blossom of purple shadows; the other ... well, the type one liked to picture at a piano in a dusk-deepened room, with hands gleaming pale as moonlight....

Sentimentalism, he concluded. And dropped off to sleep.

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