Part 23 (1/2)

'Goodbye,' he said, taking his hand from the pony's neck, and she rode buoyantly away. He, turning to breast the road again, saw darkness gathering over the end of it, and drawing nearer.

At eleven o'clock next morning Brookes rose from her packing to take a note addressed to her mistress from the hand of a messenger in the Imperial red and gold. It ran:

'Dear Miss Anderson--I write to tell you that I have obtained three weeks' leave, and I am going into the interior to shoot, starting this afternoon. You spoke yesterday of leaving Simla almost immediately. I trust you will not do this, as it would be extremely risky to venture down to the Plains just now. In ten days the rains will have broken, when it will be safe. Pray wait till then.

'Yours sincerely,

'Horace Innes.'

Involuntarily the letter found its way to Madeline's lips, and remained there until she saw the maid observing her with intelligence.

'Brookes,' she said, 'I am strongly advised not to start until the rains break. I think, on the whole, that we won't.'

'Indeed, miss,' returned Brookes, 'Mrs. Sergeant Simmons told me that it was courting cholera to go--and nothing short of it. I must say I'm thankful.'

Chapter 3.X.

A week later Colonel Innes had got his leave, and had left Simla for the snow-line by what is facetiously known as 'the carriage road to Tibet.'

Madeline had done as she was bidden, and was waiting for the rains to break. Another day had come without them. To write and tell Innes, to write to tell Violet, to go away and leave the situation as she found it; she had lived and moved and slept and awakened to these alternatives. At the moment she slept.

It was early, very early in the morning. The hills all about seemed still unaware of it, standing in the greyness, compact, silent, immutable, as if they slept with their eyes open. Nothing spoke of the oncoming sun, nothing was yet surprised. The hill world lifted itself unconscious in a pale solution of daylight, and only on the sky-line, very far away, it rippled into a cloud. The flimsy town clinging steeply roof above roof to the slope, mounting to the saddle and slipping over on the other side, cut the dawn with innumerable little lines and angles all in one tone like a pencil drawing.

There was no feeling in it, no expression. It had a temporary air in that light, like trampled snow, and even the big Secretariat buildings that raised themselves here and there out of the huddling bazaar looked trivial, childish enterprises in the simple revelation of the morning.

A cold silence was abroad, which a crow now and then vainly tried to disturb with a note of tentative enterprise, forced, premature. It announced that the sun would probably rise, but nothing more. In the little dark shops of the wood-carvers an occasional indefinite figure moved, groping among last night's tools, or an old woman in a red sari washed a bra.s.s dish over the shallow open drain that ran past her door.

At the tonga terminus, below the Mall, a couple of coughing syces, m.u.f.fled in their blankets, pulled one of these vehicles out of the shed. They pushed it about sleepily, with clumsy futility; nothing else stirred or spoke at all in Simla. Nothing disturbed Miss Anderson asleep in her hotel.

A brown figure in a loin-cloth, with a burden, appeared where the road turned down from the Mall, and then another, and several following. They were coolies, and they carried luggage.

The first to arrive beside the tonga bent and loosed the trunk he brought, which slipped from his back to the ground. The syces looked at him, saying nothing, and he straightened himself against the wall of the hillside, also in silence. It was too early for conversation. Thus did all the others.

When the last portmanteau had been deposited, a khaki-coloured heap on the shed floor rose up as a broad-shouldered Punjabi driver, and walked round the luggage, looking at it.

'And you, owls' brethren,' he said, with sarcasm, addressing the first coolie, 'you have undertaken to carry these matter fifty-eight kos to Kalka, have you?'

'Na,' replied the coolie, stolidly, and spat.

'How else, then, is it to be taken?' the driver cried, with anger in his argument. 'Behold the memsahib has ordered but one tonga, and a fool-thing of an ekka. Here is work for six tongas! What reason is there in this?'

The coolie folded his naked arms, and dug in the dust with an unconcerned toe.

'I, what can I do?' he said, 'It is the order of the memsahib.'

Ram Singh grunted and said no more. A rickshaw was coming down from the Mall, and the memsahib was in it.

Ten minutes later the ponies stood in their traces under the iron bar, and the lady sat in the tonga behind Ram Singh. Her runners, in uniform, waited beside the empty rickshaw with a puzzled look, at which she laughed, and threw a rupee to the head man.

The luggage was piled and corded on three ekkas behind, and their cross-legged drivers, too, were ready.

'Ch.e.l.lao!' she cried, crisply, and Ram Singh imperturbably lifted the reins. The little procession clanked and jingled along the hillside, always tending down, and broke upon the early grey melancholy with a forced and futile cheerfulness, too early, like everything else. As it pa.s.sed the last of Simla's little gardens, spread like a pocket-handkerchief on the side of the hill, the lady leaned forward and looked back as if she wished to impress the place upon her memory. Her expression was that of a person going forth without demur into the day's hazards, ready to cope with them, yet there was some regret in the backward look.