Part 11 (1/2)

”All the same,” said the big man with an air of decision. ”Our Collector is a great symbol of authority in countless villages through which he drives or rides leisurely, smoking his eternal cheroot, halting to dispense justice with unrivalled sagacity and kindliness. I'm often with him, so I know. The people wors.h.i.+p him, and he has a wonderful bird's-eye view of the whole region, I a.s.sure you”; and the jailer glanced admiringly at the man he was defending as he strolled along the lawn, his arm linked in the little Judge's.

”'A bird's-eye view'! Yes, I grant you he may possess that, but he has a terribly cavalier way of dealing with caste prejudices, for instance.

And you know, Samptor, what a standing grievance that omsque is.”

”Ay, well, that perhaps was a pity,” said the big man, looking down at his boots. ”But everybody makes a mistake at times,” he added, glancing at the doctor's face, on which a cloud rested.

”The Collector should have known that trouble was bound to come when he granted a site for that mosque so near the Hindu burning ground. And now, though the Mussulmans are the intruders, they, forsooth, are pet.i.tioning to have the burning ground removed to another spot.

Infamous plotting, I call it!”

”Yes, there seems to be a good deal of bad feeling between the Hindus and the Mahomedans just now, I notice,” said the engineer.

”Fanned by Zynool and his crew,” returned the doctor, with an impatient gesture. ”Can't think how the Collector favours that Mussulman so much.

They have his ear somehow, some say through that clever butler of his.

As for the disturbance the Hindus make with their processions during the hours of prayer in the mosque, anyone who has listened to a Mahomedan yelling with a cracked voice. 'Allah eh-eh-eh,' must admit that his outward forms of wors.h.i.+p are quite as disturbing as a tom-tom and the blowing of the conch.”

”Well, doctor, if you had stood at the door of the Mosque as I've done on duty, and heard the Hindu population out with their G.o.ddess Mariyamina and listened to the howling and tom-toming fit to break the drum of your ear, and that when the place was filled with Mussulmans at their prayers during the sacred feast of Ramazan, you would have felt that they had good reason to complain. Why, though their lips were moving in prayer, they were itching to be at the throats of the Hindus!

If it had not been for the Collector's courage that day in standing at the Mosque door all the time the procession was pa.s.sing, there must have been bloodshed, and he did that in the interest of the Hindus even more than for the other side. I can tell you, Campbell, there's many a Hindu in Puranapore remembers that day and knows what the Collector saved them from. It would have made a picture to see him as he stood there,” ended the jailer, with a look of admiring recollection in his eyes; and Mark Cheveril felt as if he, too, had seen that picture.

”Well, they're warming up for riots again down there, sure enough,” said the doctor, shaking his head. ”No saying what you may come in for, Mr.

Cheveril. See you keep an open mind, anyhow.”

”And don't, like the doctor, be wholly given over to a belief in the mild Hindus _versus_ the Mussulmans,” said Samptor with a laugh, as he laid his big palm on the doctor's shoulder.

Mark had found the foregoing conversation a little enigmatical. His hero--born of two hours ago--was not evidently quite without flaw, but as evidently he was able to inspire many of those nearest him with a liking and a loyalty which is not always the portion of the ruler of an Indian territory.

As he walked by his side between the cactus hedges on the darkening road and listened to his talk, Mark felt that whatever his faults might be, Felix Worsley, Collector of Puranapore, had become to him already a fascinating personality.

CHAPTER XII.

The houses of the English official residents in Puranapore were all in fairly close neighbourhood, though each was surrounded by its own ample compound. They were mostly thatched bungalows with deep verandahs. The Judge's house was the only ”up-stair” house, as the natives call a house of two storeys. It was also the largest in the station, being usually appropriated by the Collector; but Mr. Worsley, being solitary, had given it to the Goldrings, and elected to live in a small flat-roofed bungalow, grey and colourless, with a pillared verandah unrelieved by creepers like those which adorned Mrs. Samptor's entrance. The Government office stood a little further down the road, a group of grey stone buildings of the Georgian period, surrounded by a grove of cocoanut palms. At one end a great banyan tree, with its branches growing downwards on the brown gra.s.s and its dense foliage of glossy green, made a chosen retreat for the various native witnesses and the police peons in attendance at the Court House. There they squatted, ate betel-nut, and chattered in their native Tamil; while a group of crows perched near listened to all with their heads to one side, always ready to pounce on any food within their reach.

The ancient town itself was quite a mile distant from the European quarter, not even a mud village intervened, so the English residents were more divided than usual from the native population. To none was this topographical isolation more welcome than to the Collector.

”It is, in fact, my reason for preferring to camp in this sleepy hollow,” he explained to his new a.s.sistant as they walked homewards after Mrs. Samptor's tea-party. ”You don't know what a relief it is to be out of reach of all the tom-toms and shrill street cries and the constant hum of the bazaars, not to speak of the vile odours.”

”I quite took a liking to the scent of the charcoal fumes of the little native villages studded about the Madras roads,” said Mark.

”I loathe them and all Indian scents--even the scent of the garlands they bedeck one with at their _tomashas_ are odious to me, and I hasten to seek relief in a cheroot. But I confess I have a liking for my Kutchery on horseback. One can mow down a lot of cases, listen to scores of grievances in the open, under a good spreading tree. Everything comes before one on tour, you will find. In fact, we are reckoned a kind of terrestrial providence, expected to redress every grievance from a murrain among the cattle to a rival claim on a water-spout in the bazaar. Our territory includes many thousand square miles. It's no joke!

But being obliged to itinerate is, after all, the saving grace of a civilian--it's a sort of vagabondage which I like--or did before the spring went out of me,” added the Collector with a gloomy air. ”Take my advice, Cheveril, choose the Revenue in preference to the Judicial side of the civilian's life. I can see it will suit you best. I believe our good little Judge there would grow several inches taller if he went on tour, and was not so devoted a slave to his cases and abstracts and his blue books. Much of that red-tape business will be your bitter portion for some time to come, young man, I warn you!”

”My apprentices.h.i.+p, no doubt! I expect these files are useful to beginners, though they seem to spell drudgery later on.”

”Very neatly put, they do spell drudgery with a vengeance! They ought not to be piled on the shoulders of Indian officials as they are. In fact, they're more often like the lash of the slave-driver than decent business. I wish some of our young reformers would organise a big bonfire of them--say simultaneously throughout the length and breadth of India--a sort of red-tape mutiny! But remember, some men live and move and have their being in those said files! They are poetry to Goldring, for instance, and to some of the younger men, I notice. I suspect it is the old sinners like me that chafe most against that side of the work.”

”Well, I'm curious to know what my experience of it all will prove,”

said Mark. ”I don't think I'll ever find much poetry in files, though, after all, it depends on their subject-matter.”