A Malay Friend.
Archie Maine’s sensations as he marched beside his chief into the mess-room were such that he would far rather have escaped to his own quarters; but he began to pull himself together as he caught sight of a friend, and the next minute he was being in turn introduced by the quiet, gentlemanly Resident to the Rajah Suleiman, a heavy-looking, typical Malay with peculiar, hard, dark eyes and thick, smiling lips, who greeted him in fair English and murmured something about “visit” and the “elephants and tigers.” And then, as the Eastern chief, who did not look at home in the English evening-dress he had adopted, turned away to smile upon another of the officers, Archie joined hands at once with a slight, youthful-looking visitor also in evening-dress, who as the youths chatted together showed his mastery of the English language sufficiently to address the subaltern as “old chap,” following it up with:
“When are you going to get your boss to give you a day or two’s leave?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” replied Archie. “Not for some time; I’m in disgrace.”
“Disgrace! What do you mean?” was the inquiry.
“Oh, not sticking enough to my duties.”
“Duties?”
“Yes; drill and practice.”
“Oh, nonsense! You don’t want to be always drilling and drilling and drilling. Your men could kill us all off without any more of that. I shall ask the Major to let you come and stay with me a month.”
“No, no, no,” said Archie, though his eyes were flashing with eagerness.
“And I say yes, yes, yes. I haven’t got such a troop of elephants as Rajah Suleiman, but I have got two beauties who would face any tiger in the jungle, and my people could show you more stripes than his could. But perhaps I am so simple at home that you would rather go and stay with His Highness.”
“Look here, Hamet,” whispered Archie quickly; “you said that to me last time, just as if I had slighted you.”
“Beg pardon, old chap. I didn’t mean it; but your people—I don’t know how it is—don’t seem to take to me. I always feel as if they didn’t trust me, and I don’t think that I shall care about coming here any more.”
“What!” cried Archie excitedly, as he found that he had to take his seat at the table beside the young Rajah, whose face was beginning to assume a lowering aspect, as he saw that the Major’s original intentions had been hurriedly set aside and the chair on the latter’s right was occupied by the Rajah Suleiman, that on his left by a keen, sharp-looking gentleman who might have been met in one of the Parisian cafés, so thoroughly out of place did he seem in a military mess-room rather roughly erected in a station on the banks of a Malay jungle river.
“What!” said Archie again, in a low tone; and he noted how his companion was furtively watching the attention paid to his brother Rajah.
“I’ll tell you presently,” said the young Malay. “But who is that gentleman?”
“That? Oh, he’s a traveller. He’s a French count.”
“French count?” said his companion. “A great friend of Suleiman’s, isn’t he?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Yes, he is. So one of my people says.”
“Oh?” said Archie.
“Yes; Suleiman met him when he went to Paris.”
“You seem to know all about it,” said Archie laughingly.
“Oh no; I want to know everything, but there is so much—so much to learn. I wish I had gone to Paris too.”
“What! so as to get to know the French count?”
“Pish!—No, thank you; I don’t take wine,” he added quickly, as one of the officers’ servants was filling glasses.
“Won’t you have a glass of hock?”
“No,” was the quiet reply. “And I don’t want to know the French count. I don’t like him.”
“Why?”
“Because he is Suleiman’s friend.”
“That’s saying you don’t like Suleiman.”
“No. But I don’t like him, and he hates me.”
“Why?”
“Because he likes my country.”
“And I suppose you like his?”
“I? No. I have got plenty of land that my father left me. He sent me—you know; I told you—to England.”
“Yes, I know; to be educated and made an English gentleman.”
“Yes,” said the young man, with a sigh; and his handsome half-Spanish countenance clouded over. “And I did work so hard to make myself like you young Englishmen; but I had not the chance.”
“But you did splendidly. I heard of how high a position you took.”
The young Rajah smiled sadly and shook his head.
“You say that as a sort of compliment,” he said.
“That I don’t. I never pay compliments, for I know you don’t like them. If you did, you and I shouldn’t be such friends.”
The young Rajah turned and gazed fixedly in the speaker’s eyes for a few moments, and then turned hastily to help himself from the dish handed to him.
“No, we shouldn’t,” he said in a low voice as soon as the dish was removed; and he began to trifle with the food. “Yes,” he continued, “those were jolly days at the big school; and it seemed so strange to come back here from studies and cricket and football.” He laughed softly as he turned merrily to look at his companion again. “I say, how I used to get knocked about! The chaps used to say that it got my monkey up, but I suppose it did me good.”
“No doubt,” said Archie merrily. “You got over wanting to kris the fellows, didn’t you?”
“Of course; and it made me so English that I don’t want to kris the poor fellows now that I have come back and am Maharajah here in my father’s stead. But it was all no good,” he added, with a sigh.
“What?” exclaimed Archie wonderingly.
“No good,” repeated the young man. “He sent for me to come home, but it was only to say good-bye and tell me that I was to love the English and be their friend so as to make them my friends. ‘They are a great people, Hamet,’ he said—‘a great people. We are only little chiefs, but they can rule the world.’ I want to be their friend, but somehow they don’t like me but make much of Suleiman.”
“Oh, wait a bit,” said Archie. “I think you are wrong. We English are such blunt people. Why, our Major—he was my father’s schoolfellow—he’s a splendid old chap.”
“Yes; but he doesn’t trust me,” said the young Malay.
“Oh, you wait.”
“I like your doctor.”
“Well, you must like Sir Charles Dallas.”
“What! Suleiman’s Resident? I don’t know him. Your English Queen—I mean Her Majesty—”
“Yes, I know,” said Archie, laughing.
“She has not sent a Resident to live in my country.”
“No. Do you know why?”
“Yes,”