THE HOSTS OF THE LORD
CHAPTER I
A SHADOW
"Understand! Of course you don't. I don't, though I've been here two years. And what's more, I don't want to," retorted a rather undersized Englishman, whose white drill suit made him look like a stem to the huge mushroom of a pith hat which he wore. Despite this protection his face was brown exceedingly, and faintly wrinkled through sheer exposure to sun-bright, sun-dried air. The fact enhanced the monkey type of his features, and made his clear, light-blue eyes--so set that they were shadowless below and cavernous above--look quite aggressively cool, inquisitive, intelligent.
"So long as we don't understand them," he went on, "and they don't understand us, we jog along the same path amicably, like--well! like the pilgrims to the 'Cradle of the Gods,' and the telegraph-posts to the Adjutant General's office up the road yonder--and I'll trouble you to cram more space than that between two earthly poles! No! It is when we begin to have glimmerings that the deuce and all comes in--" He paused in the molten gold of sunlight, which made the yellow sand, the corn-coloured tussocks of tiger-grass still yellower and still more corn-coloured, to glance round, as if measuring the distance between the long, low line of mud enclosure they had left but a few hundred yards behind--yet which, already, was losing itself in an illimitable sand stretch beyond--and a bigger tuft in the sand stretch ahead; a tuft of spear-points and horses, bayonets and men, waiting beside the first faint semblance of a reed-paved road. Then he took out his watch. Apparently he found leisure at his disposal, for he walked on. "There's a nursery rhyme they taught me," he continued, "when my moral nature was at the mercy of any fool who chose to take an interest in it--'But if poor Pussy understood, she'd be, indeed, a naughty creature!' It didn't run so consecutively, of course; in fact 'creature' rhymed to 'teach her'--but I learnt it that way. Children do that sort of thing a sight deal oftener than their elders think."
The younger of the two men in uniform with whom he was walking laughed--the honest, elated, conscious laugh of one who has not many good stories about himself, and happens on an opportunity for telling one of them.
"I used to say, 'Six days shalt thy neighbour do all that thou hast to do, and the seventh day shalt thou do no manner--'"
"Shut up, Lance!" interrupted his elder companion with a laugh. "It is a ripping excuse for your intolerable laziness, but I don't believe--"
"Fact, I assure you," protested Lance Carlyon aggrievedly, "and considering I really thought that was the proper version for ten years of my life, I--"
Dr. George Dillon took off his mushroom hat suddenly, and wiped his forehead as if to smooth away the wrinkles which his smiles had brought to it. "Lordy! It's a queer world," he put in. "There is really no good in understanding most things. As for this place--! Great Scott! What would happen if my fifteen hundred scoundrels, whom you saw digging like babes in the open just now, were to understand that I--one Englishman in charge--had virtually no force majeure--"
"Don't insult us, Dillon!" remonstrated Captain Vincent Dering, a certain swagger underlying his jest. "Eshwara is a garrison town, remember, now; I'm commandant, and Carlyon's staff--"
He had, in fact, ridden that morning as far as Dr. Dillon's house in charge of a troop of native cavalry and some Sikh pioneers who had gone on, under a native officer, to take up their temporary quarters in the half-ruined Fort, just beyond the old town of Eshwara. And now, having thus secured their breakfasts, he and his lieutenant were on their way towards the horses and escort they had bidden await them at the boat bridge which lay between them and their destination. For George Dillon was in control of a large industrial gaol, whose inmates had for months been digging the head works of a canal, which was to take off just below the town, on the farther side of the river.
"Are you?" replied the doctor, with a look of pity; "then I hope you'll both forget the fact. We've got on all right without you, hitherto. So if you'll stick to marking out the Viceroy's camp, and generally preparing the way of the Lord-sahib, I'll be obliged to you. By the way, is he coming to open the canal on the 10th, really?"
"So they say. That is, if you are ready for the show by then. I believe he could put it off till the 11th or 12th. Dashwood said something to that effect."
"Then Dashwood's an ass. The 10th is bad enough. The place will be filling up even then."
"Filling up! How?"
"Pilgrims. But on the 11th and 12th! By George! you should see them! The 'Assyrians came down like a wolf on the fold,' is nothing to it; only these are the Hosts of the Lord, I suppose. And so Dashwood suggested the 11th or 12th--the Vaisakh festival, did he? Well, he is an ass! But that's always the way. We try to understand feelings, instead of trying to know facts. However, we shall be ready for the opening, never fear. Smith expects his C. S. I. over it, he says, and that's enough guarantee. You know Smith, don't you, Dering? Walsall Smith--I think his wife said she knew you."
"Yes," he interrupted, with rather unnecessary decision, "Mrs. Walsall Smith is a great friend of mine, a very great friend."
"Jolly for you, having friends in Eshwara," assented Lance, in uneasy haste. "I suppose they are about the only people here, eh, doctor?" he went on, changing the subject; but the latter's clear eyes and brain were occupied for a moment in taking stock of Captain Dering's singular, if a trifle voyant personal attractions; one of the most noticeable of which was the perfect curve of his throat and cheek.
"I beg your pardon--people, did you say?" asked Dr. Dillon, after the pause. "Plenty of people, if you count padrés--the place swarms with missions, you know. But if you mean polo--" He shook his head.
Lance Carlyon's honest young face clouded, then grew cheerful again. "Well! there must be a lot of black partridge, and I expect there's fish in the river. Besides, it's an awfully picturesque place--By Jove! it is, Dering, isn't it?"
They had reached the tuft of spear-points and horses, men and bayonets, and before them lay Eshwara, sun-saturate, shadowless, in the April noon.
So seen, across the still lagoon of water formed by the junction of the two streams, the Hara and the Hari, which edged the low-lying triangular spit from which its fortified, temple-set walls rose, Eshwara seemed at the very foot of the blue barrier of hill behind it, whose serrated edge, paler than the blue sky above it, claimed three-quarters of all things visible for this world.
That, indeed, was the noticeable point in the picture presented to the eye. As a rule Heaven claims the larger half of all perspectives. Here, the three elements, earth, air, water, lay across the view in three broad bands of blue, curiously similar in tint; for the sky was pale with excess of light, the hills with excess of heat, and the water paler than either by reason of a white silt which it brought with it from the snows; a white silt which a recent flood had left in a fine film upon the sand stretches that showed here and there in the broad basin.
"It is a gypsum detritus," explained the doctor--"from the 'Cradle of the Gods'--the cave, you know, where the rivers rise. The pilgrims go, in fact, for this very stuff. Find it in the ice crannies, call it 'the clay of immortality,' smear themselves with it, and then die happy,