‘I heard,’ I answered. ‘Imray
made a mistake.’
’Simply and solely through not knowing the nature
of the Oriental, and the coincidence of a little seasonal
fever. Bahadur Khan had been with him for four
years.’
I shuddered. My own servant had been with me
for exactly that length of time. When I went
over to my own room I found my man waiting, impassive
as the copper head on a penny, to pull off my boots.
‘What has befallen Bahadur Khan?’ said
I.
‘He was bitten by a snake and died. The
rest the Sahib knows,’ was the answer.
‘And how much of this matter hast thou known?’
’As much as might be gathered from One coming
in in the twilight to seek satisfaction. Gently,
Sahib. Let me pull off those boots.’
I had just settled to the sleep of exhaustion when
I heard Strickland shouting from his side of the house—
‘Tietjens has come back to her place!’
And so she had. The great deerhound was couched
statelily on her own bedstead on her own blanket,
while, in the next room, the idle, empty, ceiling-cloth
waggled as it trailed on the table.
There came to the beach a poor exile of
Erin,
The dew on his wet robe hung heavy and chill;
Ere the steamer that brought him had passed out of
hearin’,
He was Alderman Mike inthrojuicin’ a bill!
American
song.
Once upon a time there was a King who lived on the
road to Thibet, very many miles in the Himalayas.
His Kingdom was eleven thousand feet above the sea
and exactly four miles square; but most of the miles
stood on end owing to the nature of the country.
His revenues were rather less than four hundred pounds
yearly, and they were expended in the maintenance
of one elephant and a standing army of five men.
He was tributary to the Indian Government, who allowed
him certain sums for keeping a section of the Himalaya-Thibet
road in repair. He further increased his revenues
by selling timber to the railway-companies; for he
would cut the great deodar trees in his one forest,
and they fell thundering into the Sutlej river and
were swept down to the plains three hundred miles
away and became railway-ties. Now and again this
King, whose name does not matter, would mount a ringstraked
horse and ride scores of miles to Simla-town to confer
with the Lieutenant-Governor on matters of state,
or to assure the Viceroy that his sword was at the
service of the Queen-Empress. Then the Viceroy
would cause a ruffle of drums to be sounded, and the
ringstraked horse and the cavalry of the State—–two
men in tatters—and the herald who bore the
silver stick before the King would trot back to their
own place, which lay between the tail of a heaven-climbing
glacier and a dark birch-forest.
Now, from such a King, always remembering that he
possessed one veritable elephant, and could count
his descent for twelve hundred years, I expected,
when it was my fate to wander through his dominions,
no more than mere license to live.
