Caravans By Night Part 2

Muhafiz Ali's brain did not function normally for some time after this announcement. He felt frightened--nauseated.

The Pearl Scarf stolen. Suppose the copy was found in his possession, and the police, who had strange ways, connected him with the robbery?

The house in Peshawar dwindled; he saw the jail looming before him. He was innocent, but how could he explain?

He remembered vividly the incident of the jade necklace. Could it be that Venekiah, that mountain of corruption, had spied upon him?... O Allah, Allah, he wailed in silence, it was written that his lot should be misfortune from the moment he lost the Sulaimaneh ring!

Inwardly, he writhed while Mohammed Khan talked on. He was in no mood for more gossip, but Mohammed Khan stayed--stayed until late afternoon when little spirals of dust began to rise from the street, when clouds materialized out of nowhere and blotted out the sun.

After Mohammed Khan took his leave, Muhafiz Ali tried to reason with himself. The sahib had said the scarf was for the Raj, and was not that a.s.surance enough? No. And he strove to press behind the veil and find an explanation for the affair; but his Kismet decreed that he should be a p.a.w.n, and he dug at the mystery in vain.

A dark sky, threatening rain, hastened the dusk; and when, one by one, lights appeared in the street, like yellow sentinels, Muhafiz Ali uttered a sigh of relief and rose and entered the shop. A moment later he heard a soft patter and inhaled the fresh, cool smell of rain upon dusty air.

"Please buy my nickla.s.s!" shrilled Venekiah's voice, and he looked over his shoulder to see a Memsahib clatter by on horseback.

Behind her walked a man in a Punjabi head-dress, swinging along at a leisurely gait despite the rain.

4

The usual heavy downpour following a break in the monsoon drenched the bazaar. It came with a high wind, and doors strained at their locks and windows rattled as legions of rain rode through the streets. The torrent rumbled upon tin roofs and roofs of corrugated iron; reduced the dust in alleys to mud; lashed the thirsty, sun-scorched trees.

Muhafiz Ali sat on a cus.h.i.+on in the inner room of his shop with a copy of the Koran open in his lap, more intent upon the eerie sounds than the book. Frequently his eyes left the pages and sought the door as gusts of wind smote its panels, and when sudden draughts made the lamp-flame flicker and sent the shadows shuddering over the walls, a chill dread spread through him. Not until that accursed thing of imitations had been taken away would he feel safe. Surely the devils were hard besetting him for losing the Sulaimaneh ring!

The door shook--as though impatient with the lock and hinges that held it. Outside, the storm wrung wails and groans from the bazaar. Again the door rattled, furiously.

Muhafiz Ali set aside the book, rose and crossed the room. He unlocked the door. A spray was blown into his face. No one was there. Rain poured over the street-lamps in gauzy, iridescent ribbons; it wove spumy lace upon the black roadway and trailed, fuming, into the gutters.

He shut the door and locked it. He had taken no more than two steps before a pounding brought him to a halt. He stood there for a moment, tense; then turned and pressed his lips to the crack of the door.

"Leroux Sahib?"

Faintly, from out the chaos of sounds, came--"Yes."

He turned the key. The door opened violently and slammed behind the drenched figure of the yellow-bearded sahib. Water dripped from his helmet; streams of moisture trickled down his rain-cape and gathered in pools upon the floor.

"Allah be praised!" Muhafiz Ali murmured fervently.

Leroux Sahib flung aside his cape, and the native saw that he carried a flat package under one arm. The white man shook the water from his helmet and mopped his face with a khaki handkerchief.

"Mother of G.o.d! What a night!" he exclaimed, smiling grimly. Then: "Is it ready?"

Muhafiz Ali hastily opened one of his chests and removed several trays.

The sahib joined him. His eyes shone feverishly as the Mussulman drew forth a thing that tinkled musically. Strands of nacreous spheres reflected a soft radiance from the lamp; l.u.s.ter of cream-colored satin.

The imitation diamonds that inset the clasp burned like star-splinters.

Leroux Sahib swore under his breath and chuckled; swore in a tongue Muhafiz Ali did not understand.

"What a joke! What a colossal joke! And they think it is for them....

_Bon Dieu!_"

The door rattled; the lamp-flame rippled threateningly.

"I shall place it in a tin box, Sahib," Muhafiz Ali said, for the sooner the thing was gone the sooner he would feel at ease. "See, a box no larger than the one you carry."

He moved the lid. Pearls rattled coolly. Meanwhile, the sahib counted out several banknotes.

"Count them," he instructed as Muhafiz Ali handed him the tin box, wrapped and tied.

The Mussulman obeyed. The door shook again. A sudden burst of wind almost carried the notes out of his hand. The lamp gasped. A slam followed.

Muhafiz Ali looked up quickly to behold a strange tableau--a tableau that for the while suspended all thoughts from his brain and drew from his limbs the power to move.

A man had entered--a blue-eyed Punjabi. The face was vaguely familiar, and Muhafiz Ali's memory groped.... A string of _ferozees_.... The Punjabi stood with his shoulders pressed against the door, his feet planted wide apart. His soaked garments clung to his body; his turban dripped water into his eyes. But that did not quench the fire in them.

How they burned! Blue sapphires! In his hand he held a thing that glittered like an evil eye.

Leroux Sahib had swung about. His feet, too, were planted well apart, as though he were steadying himself for an impact. The muscles of his throat stood out like white cords in the shadow of his beard. There was a hard gleam in his eyes; more than ever they resembled black chalcedony.

Afterward, Muhafiz Ali never quite remembered how it all happened. At the time he was too stupefied to observe details. The blue-eyed Punjabi laughed. It was a challenge. Leroux Sahib, suddenly smiling, answered it; lunged toward the lamp. The ring of shattered gla.s.s--and darkness wiped out the scene. Followed the thudding jar of muscle and bone against yielding flesh; swift, staccato breathing. The door was flung wide. Muhafiz Ali, crouching in a corner, saw a figure faintly silhouetted in the door-frame, an amorphous shadow upon the paler darkness of the street. It vanished. Another figure lurched out after it, and was swallowed by the storm.

Energy flashed into the Mussulman. He ran to the door. The incandescent lamps gleamed through a crystal curtain of rain. The street was deserted. For a moment he stood there, s.h.i.+vering. Then he shut the door; locked it; lay weakly against the panels. When he had recovered, he groped his way to where he knew a lantern hung. He lighted it, and a mellow radiance played upon bits of broken gla.s.s.

He rapidly counted the banknotes. Satisfied, he returned to the door and pressed his ear to the crack. Only the slush and drench of rain. He s.h.i.+vered again.

Whither had they gone, this Leroux Sahib and the blue-eyed Punjabi?

Their eyes! Black chalcedony and blue sapphires! The Punjabi had a pistol.... Over imitation pearls! Strange were the ways of these white barbarians, stranger still the ways of the Raj. On the morrow would the police come and ask him all manner of confusing questions? Or had the hurricane spent itself? Was this the last he would ever see of the yellow-haired Sahib or the Punjabi?

He turned back, looking half abstractedly upon the gleaming particles of gla.s.s. He s.h.i.+vered for the third time. Devil-business!

And so the G.o.ds, having no further use for Muhafiz Ali, merchant and loyal servant of the Raj, left him to wonder at the source of these ripples that had touched him; left him to grope behind the drop that had suddenly fallen upon this bewildering interlude; left him to dream of the house in Peshawar and the azure-necked peac.o.c.k that strutted and shrilled like an angry Rajput.

CHAPTER II

DELHI

Several days after Muhafiz All delivered the imitation Pearl Scarf to the sahib in Indore, the young woman who was marked of Destiny sat in a first-cla.s.s carriage of the East Indian Railway, her attention divided between a green vellum volume propped against a gray-clad knee and the sun-blistered scenery that unreeled past the window.

An elderly gentleman from Devons.h.i.+re who occupied the same carriage found himself wondering why his eyes invariably returned to the girl.

This particular gentleman was past youthful sentimentalizing and not yet in those riper years when age casts regretful glances over its shoulder; therefore, being no psychometric, it puzzled him that this girl should compel his gaze. Was it the hair, in whose bronzen waves a slantwise ray of sunlight ignited little glints of red-gold? Or the white throat, full with young maturity? Suddenly she looked up, and he fathomed the secret of magnetism. Brown eyes that brought to mind a deep, rich wine held to the light--or poplar leaves just before snow. He felt something of cathedral-largeness behind those eyes, something vital and alive yet intensely spiritual. The warm strength of sunlight in great forests; tapers in altar-gloom. These things were there. And the gentleman from Devons.h.i.+re thought of a daughter in Britain and smiled to himself, and forgot hot, heart-aching India.

The lights which he had glimpsed in the girl's eyes were the very beacons that had drawn her across leagues of water--lights that were first kindled in some voyaging ancestor whose frigate dropped anchor off old New Orleans, in the gilded days of Bienville; that grew dim in the tiresome process of heredity, and flamed anew, generations later, in this girl who sat in the railway carriage--lights that were almost smothered by the snuffers of Aristocracy and Tradition.

For Dana Charteris came of a Louisiana family whose name was as old as the state itself, and who lived in a great, pillared house and had black servants and drank blacker coffee. Custom and pride and chivalry were the G.o.ddesses of the family penetralia, and debt maintained the vestal-fires. Her father was called "Colonel" for the same reason that no less than one third of the gentlemen of his plane were given that t.i.tle. Her mother, who carried an air of fragrant and faded aristocracy, read Cable and regarded him as some subaltern's wives in India regarded Kipling. And her brother, Alan--Dana hardly knew Alan. When his name was spoken in the house, it was in a hushed voice. They called him "black sheep," but Dana could never a.s.sociate dark fleece with the slim boy she remembered. Alan ran away when little more than fifteen--ran away to sail the Seven Seas and to find the end of the rainbow. Every few months letters came from him, bearing post-marks that were, to her, stamps of glamour.