The Daughter of Brahma, I. A. R. Wylie [carter reed txt] 📗

have any plan. His first thought was to get away from the prying, contemptuous eyes, and hide himself from their mockery for ever. But then he seemed to remember something, and, turning down a narrow path, made his way to the servants' quarters at the back of the bungalow. He found the Hindu boy, seated crosslegged in the shade, an untouched bowl of milk and rice before him, his right arm bound in a sling. His eyes had been closed, but they opened as David approached, and lighted with the frantic distrust of a trapped animal. For a moment the two boys, divided by an unbridgeable gulf of race, but linked in that moment by an equal misery, stared silently at each other. Then David Hurst spoke. His voice was still rough, but the violence had gone, and beneath the roughness there was an anxious note of appeal and pity.

"I saved you," he said slowly and carefully in Hindustani. "I thought I ought to --that you would be glad. I thought that that afterwards I would be able to make it all right. I didn't know. I'm very, very sorry. I hope you will forgive me."

He did not wait for an answer, but turned and limped back the way he had come.

BOOK II_CHAPTER I (AFTER TWELVE YEARS)

 

DAVID HURST had arrived in Kolruna. The stifling, exasperating journey from the coast lay behind him, and he stood on the low platform and listened to the confused clamour of tongues as an exile listens to long-lost but familiar music. Excited native bearers, laden with wooden bales, jostled past him, and he showed no annoyance. Passengers, native and European, shouted and gesticulated in the desperate search for their belongings, and he remained tranquilly in their midst, and waited he scarcely knew for what. He felt himself a passive spectator in a scene in which he had as yet no part, but which was in some strange way part of himself. The noise, the vivid colours, the very heat and dust, belonged to his innermost treasure-house of dreams and memories. The drab years of his English life fell away from him, and he picked up the threads of his existence where they had once been broken off with a strong sense of almost physical comfort and relief. A group of white-clad English officers from a native regiment excited his attention. They were congregated round a returned comrade, a pleasantlooking man, whose fresh complexion spoke of a recent experience of English climate, and the sound of their laughter came to the solitary observer over the heads of the crowd. Presently they drove off in the two carriages which had been kept waiting for them by their native orderlies, and a few minutes later, with a shriek of warning, the train steamed out of the station on its way northwards, leaving behind a sudden and startling quiet. The dust, which had been raised in clouds by the momentary bustle, sank drowsily through the still air, and the few native porters who lingered over their work had the appearance of having been left behind by a miniature cyclone.

David Hurst looked round him and realised that he shared his loneliness with an equally desertedlooking European at the farther end of the platform. He was a tall, stoutly built man, immaculately dressed, and with a certain air of exaggerated alertness which seemed out of place in his sleepy surroundings. David Hurst stared at him with a growing sense of recognition. The stare was frankly returned, and, after a slight hesitation, his companion in distress came towards him.

"It's David," he said abruptly, holding out his big hand. "Or, if it isn't David, I'm making a confounded fool of myself. Not that that would be anything new, but it's a nasty feeling whose variety custom never seems to succeed in staling; so put me out of suspense. It is David, isn't it?"

"Yes, it's David all right. And you--you're the judge, aren't you?"

Hurst spoke with an almost boyish diffidence. He was feeling very young in that moment. The atmosphere, and, above all, the florid-faced man beside him, had swept twelve years out of his life.

"I was the judge," came the good-humoured answer. "The Lord knows what I am now. But come along! I have my buggy outside, and my syce will look after your things. We have a bit of a drive before us, as perhaps you remember."

Hurst remembered. As they rattled along the straight white road which led out of Kolruna to his mother's bungalow, he was conscious of a remembrance that was not without pain. Instinctively he kept eyes turned steadily away from the distant hills.

"I suppose my mother is all right?" he asked presently.

"In the best of health--never ill," was the laconic answer. "She would have come to meet you this afternoon, but your telegram arrived rather late. She had some friends to tea, and she asked me to fetch you."

David nodded. He had had no expectations, or, if he had, their constitution had been too feeble for their death to cause him any particular pain.

"It's very kind of you to bother about me, Judge," he said gratefully. "I've always remembered you best, somehow, and it did me good to see you. It was like meeting an old friend."

"H'm yes. I'm glad of that--always had a weakness for you, David. Are you pleased to be back?"

"Very." He answered the abrupt question almost passionately. "I've always wanted to come back. I've always felt I should be more in my element--less of an outsider here. I seem to belong to it, somehow, you know."

"Yes, that's a feeling most people have who fall into her clutches," the judge observed thoughtfully. "You will notice I give India the feminine pronoun. It's obviously correct. She's a woman all over--inscrutable, fascinating, dangerous. Women are dangerous, you know, David infernally dangerous."

"Yes, I suppose so."

"Go on supposing, and don't try to find out." The judge flicked his whip carelessly across the horse's back.

"You'll miss your friends out here," he added in his abrupt fashion.

"My friends? I have none to miss."

"My dear fellow your school chums, college acquaintances, London acquaintances. Good Lord, you don't mean to tell me you've got through twelve years all by yourself?"

"Pretty well." He met the judge's amazed questioning with unstudied simplicity. "You see, I'm not very popular."

"Why the devil not, sir?"

"Oh, I don't know. As a kid I was delicate--always bad at games and that sort of thing--and afterwards, when I got stronger, I tried to make up for lost time with my books."

"H'm!" The judge sat grim and silent for a few minutes, then he shot a quick glance at the composed face beside him.

"How do you like your cousin, Harry Hurst?" he asked.

"I admired him. He is a fine type of Englishman--sound of mind and limb. And very chivalrous. He and his father were most good to me."

"Indeed?" with a touch of sarcasm.

"Yes. I came somewhat as a shock to them. As my mother's son, they expected something different. But they hid it splendidly. They never showed me what they really felt."

"David, you're a d--- fool, with hypersensitive feelings that are always getting hurt. I don't believe a word of it. Mrs. Chichester told me that she had heard from Diana that you were always in the thick of everything--a regular society lion."

Hurst lifted his head, smiling faintly.

"That was only for a month or two before I began to work," he explained. "I wanted to try my hand at everything, you see, and to give myself a fair chance all round. Then, afterwards, I felt it was waste--I wasn't made to loaf, though Heaven knows what I was made for."

"Don't be cynical. I'm not cynical, and I doubt if even Heaven knows what my job on this confounded earth consists of. However, revenons a nos moutons, as the French say. You know, I suppose, that Diana is arriving next week?"

"Yes."

"We rather expected you would come over on the same boat."

"I have not seen Di for two years."

"Oh!" Then, after another contemplative silence, "How long do you propose staying out here, David?"

"I don't know. As long as my job lasts."

"Oh, you mean with our Teutonic neighbour? H'm, you'll have trying times if you stick to it. He's the queerest fellow, and his friend is a shade queerer. Kolruna has been trying to puzzle them out for the last two years, and has given them up as a bad job. I suppose you know all about it?"

"I know next to nothing. Professor Heilig apparently wanted a secretary with some knowledge of Hindustani, and my mother told me about it. She knew pretty well I was no good for anything else, and when Professor Heilig wrote to me, I accepted. It gave me some excuse to come out here."

The judge coughed and glanced sharply at the set and resolute face beside him.

"H'm, yes. Well, I hope you'll like it. He has a friend Father Romney, as he calls himself -- a Roman Catholic missionary -- and between them they set Kolruna by the ears. The Professor snuffles among ruined temples, and Father Romney amongst lost souls. The latter proceeding is especially resented by your old friend Mr. Eliot, who regards soul-snuffling as his special province. By the way, I suppose you remember him?"

"Yes," David answered. His tone was sharp and repressed, but he went on with a seeming carelessness. "I have often wondered what became of that boy -- the one I rescued--in my imagination, at least. Do you know anything of him?"

The judge burst into a short laugh of vexation.

"Rama Pal, you mean? My dear David, there is no chance of not knowing about him. He has turned out a marvel, a sort of enfant prodigue. Mr. Eliot regards him as his best example of the regenerate heathen. He has passed Heaven knows what exams., is going to study the law in England, if he can find some philanthropist to pay his expenses, and goes to chapel twice on Sunday. What more could you want? Personally, I distrust the fellow. But there, you will see him for yourself."

Both men were silent for some minutes. Unknown to each other, their thoughts had reverted to a certain morning twelve years before, and the judge's face wore, as it had done then, an expression of vague discomfort. Suddenly he turned to his companion.

"I told Professor Heilig about you and that--that temple affair," he blurted out. "He was immensely interested. I think it was probably that which made him want to see you. He knows more about the religious part of this country than all our wise-heads put together."

"Then the workings of my childish imagination will scarcely help him," was the coldly deliberate answer.

They had left the last huts of the native quarter behind them, and already the white outline of Mrs. Hurst's bungalow showed itself through the trees. Hurst drew himself upright and his face paled, though with what emotion the judge, who watched him narrowly, could not tell.

"You don't look very strong, David," he said with a friendly concern. "You'll have to take care. This climate plays tricks with one."

"You have stood it a good number of years," the young man returned, but with a sudden softening in his tone. "Why