Yet it was not so. The tale, on the contrary, was a sure sleep-compeller; indeed, he was never able to reach his own particular contribution to the sum total of heroism before sleep came--except in his own dreams! There he remembered, as he remembered so many things. How to decorate a ham, for instance--though it was an abomination to the Lord!--how to ice champagne--though that also was damnable!--when to say "Not at home," or dismiss a guest by announcing the carriage-- though these were foreign to him, soul and body.
Out there, beyond the skimp verandah, amid the native cots set in the dusky darkness in hopes of a breath of fresher air, old Imân's imagination ran riot in etiquette.
And yet the faint white glimmer of the Grand Trunk Road which showed beyond the cots was not straighter, more unswerving than the khânsâman's creed as to the correct card to play in each and every circumstance of domestic life.
His present mistress, a worthy soul of the most doubtful Portuguese descent, knew this to her cost. It was a relief, in fact, for her to get away at times from his determination, for instance, to have what he called "sikkens" for dinner. But then she did not divide her world into the sheep who always had a savoury second course in their menu, and the goats who did not. To him it was the crux of social position.
So, an opportunity of escape having arisen in the mortal illness of a distant relation, she had gone off for a weeks holiday full of tears and determination, while away, to eat as much sweet stuff as she chose, leaving Imân Khân in charge of the quaint little bastion of the half-ruined caravanserai in which she was allowed free quarters in addition to her pension.
He was relieved also. He had, in truth, a profound contempt for her; but as this was palpably the wrong game, he covered his disapproval with an inflexible respect which allowed no deviation from duty on either side. Yet it was a hard task to keep the household straight. Sometimes even Imân's solid belief in custom as all-sufficing wavered, and he half regretted having refused the offers of easier services made him by rich natives anxious to ape the manner of the alien. But it was only for a moment. The claims of the white blood he had served all his life, as his forbears had before him, were paramount, and whatever his faults, the late E-stink Sahib, conservancy overseer, had been white--or nearly so! Did not his name prove it? Had not Warm E-stink Sahib (Warren Hastings) left a reputation behind him in India for all time? Yea! he had been a real master. The name was without equal in the land--save, perhaps, that which came from the great conqueror, Jullunder (Alexander).
Undoubtedly, E-stink Sahib had been white; so it was a pity the children took so much after their mother; more and more so, indeed, since the baby girl born after her father's death was the darkest of the batch. It was as if the white blood had run out in consequence of the constant calls upon it. For Elflida Norma, the eldest girl--they all had fine names except the black baby, whom that incompetent widow had called Lily--was. …
Ah! what was not Elflida Norma? The old man, drowsing in the darkness after a hard day of decorum, wandered off still more dreamily at the thought of his darling. She did not sleep out on the edge of the high road. Her sixteen years demanded other things. Ah! so many things. Yet the Incompetent one could perceive no difference between the claims of the real Miss-Sahiba--that is, E-stink Sahib's own daughter by a previous wife--and those of the girl-brat she herself had brought to him by a previous husband, and whom she had cheerfully married off to a black man with a sahib's hat! For this was Imân Khân's contemptuous classification of Xavier Castello, one of those unnecessarily dark Eurasians who even in the middle of the night are never to be seen without the huge pith hats, which they wear, apparently, as an effort at race distinction.
The Incompetent one was quite capable of carrying through a similar marriage for the Miss-Sahiba. Horrible thought to Imân; all the more horrible because he was powerless to provide a proper husband. He could insist on savouries for dinner; he could say "the door is shut" to undesirable young men; he could go so far in weddings as to provide a suffer (supper) and a wedding cake (here his wrinkles set into a smile), but only God could produce the husband, especially here in this mere black-man's town where sahibs lived not. Where sahibs did not even seek a meal or a night's rest in these evil days when they were whisked hither and thither by rail trains instead of going decently by road.
Through the darkness his dim eyes sought the opposite bastion of the serai. In the olden days any moment might have brought someone. …
But those days were past. It would need a miracle now to bring a sahib out of a post carriage to claim accommodation there. Yea! a real heaven-sent car must come.
Still, God was powerful. If he chose to send one, there might be a real wedding--such a wedding as--there had been--when--he. …
So, tired out, Imân was once more in his dreams decorating hams, icing champagne, and giving himself away in the intricacies of sugar-piping.
When he woke, it was with a sense that he had somehow neglected his duty. But no! In the hot dry darkness there was silence and sleep. Even Lily-baba had her due share of Horatio Menelaus' bed. He rose, and crept with noiseless bare feet to peep in through the screens of Elflida Norma's tiny scrap of a room that was tacked on to the one decent-sized circular apartment in the bastion, like a barnacle to a limpet. One glance, even by the dim light of the cotton wick set in a scum of oil floating on a tumbler of water, showed him that she was no longer where an hour or two before he had left her safe.
Without a pause he crept on across the room and looked through the door at its opposite end, which gave on the arcaded square of the serai.
All was still. Here and there among the ruined arches a twinkling light told of some wayfarer late come, and from the shadows a mixed bubbling of hookahs and camels could be heard drowsily.
She was not there, however, as he had found her sometimes, listening to a bard or wandering juggler; for she was not as the others, tame as cows, but rather as the birds, wild and flighty. So he passed on, out through the massive doorway, built by dead kings, and stood once more on the white gleam of the road, listening. From far down it, nearer the town, came the unmelodious hee-haw of a concertina played regardless of its keys.
"Hee, hee, haw! Haw, hee, hee!"
His old ear knew the rhythm. That was the dance in which the sahib-logue kicked and stamped and laughed. This was Julia Castello's doing. There was a "nautch" among the black people with the sahib's hats, and the Miss-Sahiba--his Miss-Sahiba--had been lured to it!
Once more, without a pause, the instinct as to the right thing to do coming to him with certainty, he turned aside to his cook-room, and, lighting a hurricane lantern, began to rummage in a battered tin box, which, bespattered still with such labels as "Wanted on the Voyage," proclaimed itself a perquisite from some past services.
So, ten minutes afterwards, a starched simulacrum of what had once been a Chief Commissioner's butler (even to a tarnished silver badge in the orthodox headgear shaped like a big pith quoit) appeared in the verandah of Mrs. Castello's house, and, pointing with dignity to the glimmer of a hurricane lantern in the dusty darkness by the gate, said, as he produced a moth-eaten cashmere opera-cloak trimmed with moulting swansdown:
"As per previous order, the Miss-Sahiba's ayah hath appeared for her mistress, with this slave as escort."
Elflida Norma, a dancing incarnation of pure mischief, looked round angrily on the burst of noisy laughter which followed, and the pausing stamp of her foot was not warranted by the polka.
"Why you laugh?" she cried, passionately. "He is my servant--he belongs to our place."
Then, turning to the deferential figure, her tone changed, and she drew herself up to the full of her small height.
"Nikul jao!" she said, superbly; which, being interpreted, is the opprobrious form of "get you gone."
The old man's instinct had told him aright. There, amid that company, the girl in the white muslin she had surreptitiously pinned into the semblance of a ball dress, her big blue