So much the better, perhaps. Less time, at any rate, for expectation of the new King who was to fall from the sun and sweep away existing kingdoms. Less time to notice the white horse led out ostentatiously by the Brahmins at the biggest temple, sign that such talk was true, that one aeon had pa.s.sed away, and another--in which Vishnu should appear in his final incarnation--had begun.

"Have patience! Have patience!"

That was the burden of the cry from the few white faces dotted among the dark ones, and it was caught up and echoed by the connecting links of yellow-legged policemen stationed every ten yards along the lowest step.

"Have patience! Have patience!"

A hard saying indeed.

Broon-_sahib_ slipped down from the plinth and collared an old pantaloon just as he fell, hefted him up like a baby, and set him squatting in safety above. Then an old woman, gasping, gurgling from the first mouthful of the water into which, regardless of depth, she had literally been propelled.

"Have patience, brethren! Have patience!"

A harder saying, now that all things had grown grey; though still--weird, uncanny, beyond belief--not a shadow had shifted.

Hopelessly grey, and hopelessly cold--so cold. So curiously quiet, too; for the great roar of voices seemed to have severed itself from things earthly, and was like a mighty wind from heaven.

"Have patience, brethren! Have patience! There is time!"

A harder saying still, when in the greyness, the coldness, a flock of scared pigeons overhead sent a weird flight of faint grey shadows down that long length of angled curve, packed by expectant humanity.

Was He coming indeed?--that new ruler? Were these the heralds?

There was quite a little row, now, of rescued old dodderers on Mai Kali's plinth, whence the blood had dropped forty years ago.

What was that? Had some one withdrawn a veil? Had some one said, "Let there be light"?

The greyness, the coldness, lost their character in an instant. There was promise in them now--promise of light to come! The sun was rea.s.serting its sway, and--not half of humanity had bathed!

"Have patience, brethren! Have patience!" shouted Broon-_sahib_, and there was a certain fierce determination in his tone.

Hardest saying of all, when the precious moments were going--going so fast!

"_Huzoor!_" came a piteous, confused voice behind him from the plinth, "it is my last chance. I am old--I forget. I have forgotten so much--only this remains. For pity's sake--for the sake of forty years ago--let old Bishen, the flower-seller, find salvation!"

Even in his hurry, in his breathless recognition that here was the crucial instant--that a single mistake might bring disaster--Broon-_sahib_ flung a quick look behind him.

He saw a pathetic old face, humble even in its grief.

"It's all right, _Baba_; there's plenty of time!" he said swiftly.

"Here! look through this bit of gla.s.s--you'll see for yourself."

It only took a moment, those quick words; he was back, ready with hand and voice of command, almost without a break; but they did more for peace and order than a regiment of soldiers. For old Bishen, after one look through the smoked gla.s.s, rose to his feet and salaamed again and again, set, as he was, on high, in sight of all.

"Yea! it is true," he cried, in his thin old voice. "There _is_ time.

Let us wait, brethren; for they know--the G.o.ds have told them."

Half-an-hour afterwards, with its table laid with flowers and silver, the sliding barge held Englishmen as well as Englishwomen; and one of them was drinking deep draughts of iced beer, while a little girl with yellow hair watched him admiringly, and a woman, still rather pale of face, stood looking at him with evident relief.

"I told you it would be all right, my dear," he said, smiling. "There never was any rush to speak of but once; and then I gave a bit of smoked gla.s.s to an old chap, and he saw through a gla.s.s darkly what was up, and told the others. So we squared 'em--G.o.ds and Brahmins and all-as I told you we should, in spite of all the talk and the telegrams."

THE KEEPER OF THE Pa.s.s

The low hills, as they lay baking in the sunshine of noon, showed in scallops of glare against the light-bleached sky. A fine dust, reddish but for that same bleaching of light, hid every green thing far and near, making them match the straggling camel-thorns, the stunted wormwood, the tufts of chamomile, and many another nameless aromatic herb which in these low hills come into the world ready dressed in dust, as it were, against the long rainless months.

Yet it was not hot here in the uplands, and so the district officer's tent was opened at one side and propped up by bamboos more for the convenience of its occupant holding an open-air audience than from any quest after coolness. The upward tilt gave the tent a quaintly lopsided look, as if it were some gigantic bird flapping one wing in its attempt to rise and fly away from the little hollow in which it stood.

It was a motley crowd, indeed, which awaited the fiat of the Dispenser of Justice in these fastnesses of the central hills of India; those climbing, rolling upward sweeps of sandstone where the ripple mark of the tides that built them remains to tell of the vanished sea which had once covered this dry and thirsty land, where no water is for nine long months of the year.

It was a curious crowd also. It could not fail of being that, since it struck the two extremes of that vast Indian scale of so-called culture, so-called civilisation. For a land case involving several miles of country was in dispute, and the semi-Europeanised, wholly clothed lawyers engaged on it stood cheek by jowl with the semi-clothed wholly aboriginal witnesses in it; representatives for the most part of the wild tribes belonging to these waste lands and forests. Rude iron-smelters, almost touching the bronze age in absolute savagery; or wandering fowlers, barbaric even to the extent of eating their poor, old, undesirable relations!

In one group, however, consisting of an old man and a young one, a quick observer might have noticed a palpable discrepancy between the dress (or the lack of it) and the address of the wearers. A discrepancy which made the magistrate of the district look up with a smile.

"Hullo! Nagdeo!" he said. "On the warpath after a tiger?" The old man salaamed down to the ground. His skin was very dark, so that his white moustache and thin white whiskers, brushed out to stand, each hair singly, in a forward curve, like the whiskers of a cat, seemed to glisten against it. For the rest, he was small, slight, but extremely muscular, and he carried himself with no little dignity and importance.

"Not so, _Huzoor_," he replied, and his speech rose higher in that scale of culture and civilisation than his dress, which was no more than a waistcloth, a string of tiger claws, and a ta.s.selled spear--"I come to put another foot on it. This is my grandson, _Huzoor_."

The dignity, the importance grew fifty-fold as he turned to the lad by his side. A good head taller, fairer of skin, infinitely better looking, there was yet something about the figure which made the eye turn back to the smaller, older one, as it stood before authority with a certain authority of its own.

He was, as all knew, explained Nagdeo, the keeper of one of the wildest pa.s.ses in that wild country, as his father and his father's father had been. Who could deny it? Was not their very caste name, to distinguish them from others, _Ghatwal_, or pa.s.s-keeping ones?

He had had to keep his a long time, because the Old G.o.d had decreed that his son should be defeated by a tigress and her cubs; which might happen to the best of pa.s.s-keeping ones, since those things feminine were untrustworthy. Consequently he (Nagdeo) had had to go on beyond the years of greatest activity until his grandson reached them.

But here the boy was now. Of age, twenty; than most, taller; as any, learned in jungle law; with the spear, nimble; to keep the pa.s.s, ready; to be enrolled, present, the Old G.o.d before--

With his subject the old man's words had returned to the idiom of a wilder tongue, and he drew out of his waistcloth a little iron image of a tiger, not three inches long, to which he salaamed reverently.

For this was the Old G.o.d.

"What is your grandson's name?" asked the district officer.

It was Baghela (tiger cub), said Nagdeo.

It had seemed a suitable name for one born six months after his father had been found lying dead on the top of a dead tigress, his dead lips close to the teats that would suckle her dead whelps no more.

That had been a misfortune, deplorable yet without shame, and due, possibly, to the dead youth's over-soon marriage to a thing feminine; such things being notoriously untrustworthy! Therefore he had refrained from entangling _this_ one with such things feminine, the more so because there were already sufficient of them in the house, what with Baghela's mother and grandmother. Briefly, the worship of two female things was sufficient for any lad without adding to the adulation by a third!

So, in the evening, when the magistrate's legal work was over, the old man and the young one came up to the tilted tent again, and, after a curious little oath of fealty to the Old G.o.d--in the shape of the three-inch tiger--and a vow of war till death against live things that mimicked his shape had been taken from his grandfather's dictation by Baghela, the latter's name was duly enrolled as hereditary guardian of the Jadusa Pa.s.s, and the two struck a bee-line towards home over the low jungle as if it belonged to them.

As indeed it did; since few travellers, save the keepers of the pa.s.ses, ventured to brave the tigers dreaming in their lairs, or pacing the trackless wastes hungrily, after dark.

But old Nagdeo was jubilant over the mere chance of coming across one; not that it was likely, since what tiger ever was whelped which would dare to face him and his grandson? "Men"--here he gave a sidelong glance of pure adoration at Baghela's height--"who had no backs; who, if they failed, as even pa.s.s-keepers must sometimes, were found face up to the sky, face up to the claws, face up to the teeth!"

Of course, sometimes, the accursed brutes who a.s.sumed the shape of the Blessed Budhal Pen--the Old G.o.d of G.o.ds--would, out of sheer spite, roll a dead man over and claw at his back; but that also was without shame, since dead men had no choice.