His voice stopped for ten or twelve breaths, and then
he began mumbling a prayer of some kind in Greek.
The native woman cried very bitterly. Lastly,
he rose in bed and said, as loudly as slowly—“Not
guilty, my Lord!”
Then he fell back, and the stupor held him till he
died. The native woman ran into the Serai among
the horses, and screamed and beat her breasts; for
she had loved him.
Perhaps his last sentence in life told what McIntosh
had once gone through; but, saving the big bundle
of old sheets in the cloth, there was nothing in his
room to say who or what he had been.
The papers were in a hopeless muddle.
Strickland helped me to sort them, and he said that
the writer was either an extreme liar or a most wonderful
person. He thought the former. One of these
days, you may be able to judge for yourselves.
The bundle needed much expurgation and was full of
Greek nonsense, at the head of the chapters, which
has all been cut out.
If the thing is ever published, some one may perhaps
remember this story, now printed as a safeguard to
prove that McIntosh Jellaludin and not I myself wrote
the Book of Mother Maturin.
I don’t want the Giant’s Robe to
come true in my case.
“Brother to a Prince and fellow to a beggar
if he be found worthy.”
The Law, as quoted, lays down a fair conduct of life,
and one not easy to follow. I have been fellow
to a beggar again and again under circumstances which
prevented either of us finding out whether the other
was worthy. I have still to be brother to a Prince,
though I once came near to kinship with what might
have been a veritable King and was promised the reversion
of a Kingdom—army, law-courts, revenue and
policy all complete. But, to-day, I greatly fear
that my King is dead, and if I want a crown I must
go and hunt it for myself.
The beginning of everything was in a railway train
upon the road to Mhow from Ajmir. There had been
a Deficit in the Budget, which necessitated traveling,
not Second-class, which is only half as dear as First-class,
but by Intermediate, which is very awful indeed.
There are no cushions in the Intermediate class, and
the population are either Intermediate, which is Eurasian,
or native, which for a long night journey is nasty,
or Loafer, which is amusing though intoxicated.
Intermediates do not patronize refreshment-rooms.
They carry their food in bundles and pots, and buy
sweets from the native sweetmeat-sellers, and drink
the roadside water. That is why in the hot weather
Intermediates are taken out of the carriages dead,
and in all weathers are most properly looked down upon.
