Rudyard Kipling : The Complete Novels and Stories. Редьярд Джозеф Киплинг

woman of the desert, and hand in hand they went out from the hospital together.

      The sturdy Rajput woman caught her up like a child when they were outside, and set her upon her horse, and tramped doggedly alongside, as they, set off together toward the house of the missionary.

      ‘And whither wilt thou go?’ asked Kate, in the woman’s own tongue.

      ‘I was the first of them all,’ answered the patient being at her side; ‘it is fitting therefore that I should be the last. Where thou guest I will go—and afterward what will fall will fall.’

      Kate leaned down and took the woman’s hand in hers with a grateful pressure.

      At the missionary’s gate she had to call up her courage not to break down. She had told Mrs. Estes so much of her hopes for the future, had dwelt so lovingly on all that she meant to teach these helpless creatures, had so constantly conferred with her about the help she had fancied herself to be daily bringing to them, that to own that her work had fallen to this ruin was unspeakably bitter. The thought of Tarvin she fought back. It went too deep.

      But, fortunately, Mrs. Estes seemed not to be at home, and a messenger from the Queen Mother awaited Kate to demand her presence at the palace with the Maharaj Kunwar.

      The woman of the desert laid a restraining hand on her arm, but Kate shook it off.

      ‘No, no, no! I must go. I must do something,’ she exclaimed almost fiercely, ‘since there is still some one who will let me. I must have work. It is my only refuge, kind one. Go you on to the palace.’

      The woman yielded silently, and trudged on up the dusty road, while Kate sped into the house and to the room where the young Prince lay.

      ‘Lalji,’ she said, bending over him, ‘do you feel well enough to be lifted into the carriage and taken over to see your mother?’

      ‘I would rather see my father,’ responded the boy from the sofa, to which he had been transferred as a reward for the improvement he had made since yesterday. ‘I wish to speak to my father upon a most important thing.’

      ‘But your mother hasn’t seen you for so long, dear.’

      ‘Very well; I will go.’

      ‘Then I will tell them to get the carriage ready.’

      Kate turned to leave the room.

      ‘No, please; I will have my own. Who is without there?’

      ‘Heaven-born, it is I,’ answered the deep voice of a trooper.

      ‘Achcha! Ride swiftly, and tell them to send down my barouche and escort. If it is not here in ten minutes, tell Saroop Singh that I will cut his pay and blacken his face before all my men. This day I go abroad again.’

      ‘May the mercy of God be upon the heavenborn for ten thousand years,’ responded the voice from without, as the trooper heaved himself into the saddle and clattered away.

      By the time that the Prince was ready, a lumbering equipage, stuffed with many cushions, waited at the door. Kate and Mrs. Estes half-helped and half-carried the child into it, though he strove to stand on his feet in the verandah and acknowledge the salute of his escort as befitted a man.

      ‘Ahi! I am very weak,’ he said, with a little laugh, as they drove to the palace. ‘Certainly it seems to myself that I shall never get well in Rhatore.’

      Kate put her arm about him and drew him closer to her.

      ‘Kate,’ he continued, ‘if I ask anything of my father, will you say that that thing is good for me?’

      Kate, whose thoughts were still bitter and far away, patted his shoulder vaguely as she lifted her tear-stained eyes toward the red height on which the palace stood. ‘How can I tell, Lalji?’ She smiled down into his upturned face.

      ‘But it is a most wise thing.’

      ‘Is it?’ asked she fondly.

      ‘Yes; I have thought it out by myself. I am myself a Raj Kumar, and I would go to the Raj Kumar College, where they train the sons of princes to become kings. That is only at Ajmir; but I must go and learn, and fight, and ride with the other princes of Rajputana, and then I shall be altogether a man. I am going to the Raj Kumar College at Ajmir, that I may learn about the world. But you shall see how it is wise. The world looks very big since I have been ill. Kate, how big is the world which you have seen across the Black Water? Where is Tarvin Sahib? I have wished to see him too. Is Tarvin Sahib angry with me or with you?’

      He plied her with a hundred questions till they halted before one of the gates in the flank of the palace that led to his mother’s wing. The woman of the desert rose from the ground beside it, and held out her arms.

      ‘I heard the message come,’ she said to Kate, ‘and I knew what was required. Give me the child to carry in. Nay, my Prince, there is no cause for fear. I am of good blood.’

      ‘Women of good blood walk veiled, and do not speak in the streets,’ said the child doubtfully.

      ‘One law for thee and thine, and another for me and mine,’ the woman answered, with a laugh. ‘We who earn our bread by toil cannot go veiled, but our fathers lived before us for many hundred years, even as did thine, heaven-born. Come then, the white fairy cannot carry thee so tenderly as I can.’

      She put her arms about him, and held him to her breast as, easily as though he had been a three year-old child. He leaned back luxuriously, and waved a wasted hand; the grim gate grated on its hinges as it swung back, and they entered together—the woman, the child, and the girl.

      There was no lavish display of ornament in that part of the palace. The gaudy tilework on the walls had flaked and crumbled away in many places, the shutters lacked paint and hung awry, and there was litter and refuse in the courtyard behind the gates. A queen who has lost the King’s favour loses much else as well in material comforts.

      A door opened and a voice called. The three plunged into half darkness, and traversed a long, upward-sloping passage, floored with shining white stucco as smooth as marble, which communicated with the Queen’s apartments. The Maharaj Kunwar’s mother lived by preference in one long, low room that faced to the north-east, that she might press her face against the marble tracery and dream of her home across the sands, eight hundred miles away, among the Kulu hills. The hum of the crowded palace could not be heard there, and the footsteps of her few waiting-women alone broke the silence.

      The woman of the desert, with the Prince hugged more closely to her breast, moved through the labyrinth of empty rooms, narrow staircases, and roofed courtyards with the air of a caged panther. Kate and the Prince were familiar with the dark and the tortuousness, the silence and the sullen mystery. To the one it was part and parcel of the horrors amid which she had elected to move; to the other it was his daily life.

      At last. the journey ended. Kate lifted a heavy curtain, as the Prince called for his mother; and the Queen, rising from a pile of white cushions by the window, cried passionately—

      ‘Is it well with the child?’

      The Prince struggled to the floor from the woman’s arms, and the Queen hung sobbing over him, calling him a thousand endearing names, and fondling him from head to foot. The child’s reserve melted—he had striven for a moment to carry himself as a man of the Rajput race: that is to say, as one shocked beyond expression at any public display of emotion—and he laughed and wept in his mother’s arms. The woman of the ‘desert drew her hand across her eyes, muttering to herself, and Kate turned to look out of the window.

      ‘How shall I give you thanks?’ said the Queen at last. ‘Oh, my son—my little son—child of my heart, the gods and she have made thee well again. But who is that yonder?’

      Her eyes fell for the first time on the woman of the desert, where the latter stood by the doorway draped in dull-red.

      ‘She carried me