The Achmed Abdullah MEGAPACK ®. Achmed Abdullah

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      Something like a shudder of apprehension passed over Thorneycroft, but he kept sturdily on his way, returning the salutations with which the hook-nosed, saber-rattling, swaggering Rajputs greeted him because of his Brahman garb. He went up a steep ascent that led to the chowk, the outer courtyard of the palace, and the soldiers salaamed and stepped aside:

      “Enter, O holy one!”

      Like a man sure of his way, he passed through a low gate, through another courtyard crammed with human life, and into still another, which was lifeless except for the whir and coo of hundreds of blue-winged pigeons and for the figure of a very old priest, squatting on a goat’s-skin rug and deep in the perusal of a massive Sanskrit tome.

      Chapter V

      The old priest looked up when Thorneycroft approached, and the latter gave an involuntary start, though rapidly suppressed.

      In former years, pursuing his vague, mysterious diplomatic career in different parts of that immense block of real estate called the British Empire, but a good half of the time in India, he had heard about this priest, the Swami Pel Krishna Srina. He knew that the man was the prime minister, that before him his father held the same position, before his father his grandfather, and thus back for many generations. For the Brahmans of the house of Pel Srina were cousins in blood and caste to the reigning house of Oneypore, and like them descendants of the gods.

      Neither the maharaja nor his prime minister had ever taken much interest in the muddy, coiling politics of India. It was indifferent to them what particular foreign barbarian—English or Afghan or Mogul or Persian—was overlord of the great peninsula. They seemed satisfied with ruling the little rocky, barren principality, with the faded glory of the dead centuries, and with the decidedly theological and just as decidedly unworldly fact that the Oneypores were considered the living representatives of the gods by the vast majority of Hindus.

      Thus Thorneycroft had never taken the trouble of meeting Swami Pel Srina, and now, seeing him for the first time, he was startled out of his customary English calm.

      Nor was it a psychic impression. Here, in this sheltered courtyard—and for the first time since that day when the Maharaja of Oneypore had made his appearance in the salon of the Duchess of Shropshire—he was unaware, quite unaware of the silent, gigantic whirring of wings.

      What made him suck in his breath was the face of the swami.

      “I wish I could picture it to you as I saw it,” he said afterward. “It would take the hand of some mad cubist sculptor to clout the meaning of it. The features? No, no. Nothing extraordinary about them. Just those of an elderly, dignified, rather conceited Brahman. But the expression of the thin, compressed lips, the great staring, gray eyes! Gad! I am an Englishman, a Christian—and a public school product. Thus I’m a jolly good Episcopalian, take me all round. But when I saw those eyes—oh—the whole cursed thing seemed suddenly rational, possible—inevitable even! Right then—Christian, Englishman, and public school product—I believed the absurd claim of the rajas and prime ministers of Oneypore that they were the descendants of Rama and Vishnu. It was all in those eyes that were staring at me. They looked—oh—unearthly—that’s the word!”

      Perhaps the whole sensation, the whole flash of superstitious emotions lasted only a moment. Perhaps it was contained in the short time it took the swami to look up, to drop his book, and to raise a thin, high-veined hand with the words:

      “Greetings, brother priest!”

      At all events Thorneycroft was himself again. He bowed over the withered old hand and said—he had thought it all out carefully beforehand—that he had come to Oneypore to hear with his own ears, to see with his own eyes, the great miracle which the swami had performed.

      “Ah!” breathed the swami, and he did not altogether hide a faint accent of nervousness—“then—it has been talked about—in the south?”

      “No!” Thorneycroft replied quickly. “Not talked about. I do not even know what it is. But a voice came to me in the night—whispering, whispering; it was like the whirring of wings, and I followed, followed, followed! Straight on I followed until I came here, to Oneypore, to the palace, the courtyard, your presence, O swami! And now”—he really spoke the truth there, and he used to say afterward that it was doubtless the fact of his speaking the truth which made him so utterly convincing—“now the whirring of wings has stopped. Now there is sweetness and peace as there was”—he shot the words out suddenly—“that day, a few weeks back, on the 15th of January!”

      “At what hour?” as suddenly asked the priest.

      “At twenty-eight minutes to midnight!” replied Thorneycroft, who had never forgotten the day nor the hour when the Raja of Oneypore had died in the salon of Her Grace of Shropshire.

      “Good!” said the swami, rising slowly and leading the way to a massive door.

      He drew a foot-long, skewerlike key from his waist-shawl, opened the door, and motioned Thorneycroft to enter.

      The gate clicked behind them.

      “Good!” he said again, stopped, and faced the other squarely. “You have wondered,” he went on, “as to the why and wherefore—you, to whom the voice of the miracle came in the night?”

      “Yes,” replied Thorneycroft in low accents, his heart beating like a trip-hammer. “I have wondered indeed. I knew the thing—was done. I heard the whirring of wings. I knew the raja died—”

      “But did he die, brother Brahman?” The swami looked at the Englishman, deep, brooding melancholia in his gray eyes. “Ahi! Did he die?” And he made a hopeless gesture and led on again through empty suites of rooms supported by double rows of pillars, past balconies which clung like birds’ nests to the sheer side of the palace, again through more rooms and up and down steep steps. Once in a while they encountered liveried, turbaned officials. But always the latter would salaam deeply and step aside.

      Finally he stopped in front of a door which was a great slab of tulip-wood inlaid with nacre and lac. He lifted his hand, and Thorneycroft noticed that it was trembling violently.

      “Brother Brahman,” he said, “Martab Singh was my kinsman, my friend, my king. He was cousin to me, and cousin to the gods. I loved him greatly, and for years, with me by his side, he stepped in the footsteps of his ancestors, in the way of salvation, the way of the many gods. Then one day—shall I ever forget it?—madness came to him. He, the Maharaja of Oneypore, he, the incarnation of Rama and Vishnu and Brahm himself, declared that the desire was in his nostrils to leave India. To leave the sacred soil! To go traveling in the far lands and see the unclean witchcraft of the foreigners, the Christians, the English, the mlechhas! Gently I spoke to him as I might to a child. This and that I told him, quoting the sacred books, the words of Brahm, our blessed Lord. ‘This is lust,’ I quoted, ‘born of the quality of rajas. Know this to be a great devourer, great sin, and the enemy on earth. As by smoke fire is enveloped, and the looking-glass by rust, as the womb envelops the unborn child, so by this it is enveloped. By this—the eternal enemy of the wise man, desire-formed, hard to be filled, insatiate—discrimination is enveloped. The senses and organs, the thinking faculty, as well as the faculty of judgment, are said to be its seat. It—enveloping the discriminative faculty with these—deludes the lord of the body!’ Thus I spoke to him, often, gently!”

      “And he? Martab Singh?”

      “Would laugh in his beard. He would say that, if Vishnu was his kinsman, so was Indra—and Indra was the god of travel. And so—”

      “He traveled? He went to England?”

      “No!”

      “No?” echoed Thorneycroft. He felt his hair rise as if drawn by a shivery wind. His thought swirled back, and he remembered how the maharaja had entered the salon of the Duchess of Shropshire, how he had bowed over the withered old hand, how Sir James Spottiswoode, of the India Office, had vouched for him, how—

      “No?” he said again, stupidly.