The Achmed Abdullah MEGAPACK ®. Achmed Abdullah

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

      “No, by Shiva!” came the swami’s hushed voice. “He did not travel. He did not leave the sacred soil of India. He is—in here!” At the same time opening the door, drawing Thorneycroft inside, and shutting the door behind him.

      Chapter VI

      For a moment the Englishman was utterly lost, utterly confounded. He had thought. He had imagined. He had conferred with the babu and had spoken to him of priest-craft. But this—this—

      The whirring of wings, which he had not heard since he had entered the inner courtyard, was once, more, suddenly, upon him with terrific force, with the strength of sun and sea and the stars. He felt himself caught in a huge, invisible net of silent sound that swept out of the womb of creation, toward death, and back toward throbbing life. The whirring rose, steadily, terribly, until it filled the whole room from floor to ceiling, pressing in with ever-deepening strength. It was like the trembling of air in a belfry where bells have been ringing ceaselessly for days—but bells without sound, bells with only the ghost of sound—

      He feared it.

      It seemed to strike, not at his life, but at the meaning, the plausibility, the saneness of life.

      It took possession of his body and his soul, and forged them into something partaking of neither the physical nor the spiritual, yet at the same moment partaking of both—something that was beyond the power of analysis, of guessing, of shivering dread even.

      Quite suddenly it stopped, as caught in an air-pocket, and he became conscious of the swami’s pointing finger, and his low words:

      “Look there, Brother Brahman!”

      And, stretched on a bed of state in the far corner of the room, he saw the figure of Martab Singh, Maharaja of Oneypore, as he had seen him that first day in London, with his large, opaque eyes, the melancholy, childlike smile, the split, curled beard, the crimson caste mark.

      The figure was rigid. There wasn’t a breath of life. It was like a marvelously painted, lifelike statue—yet Thorneycroft knew that it was not a statue. He knew that it was the maharaja—the same maharaja whom, on the 15th of January, he had seen die in Marlborough House, whom he had seen buried in an English cemetery, with twenty files of Horse Guards flanking the coffin and all the gentry of the India Office rolling behind in comfortable carriages.

      “But—what—”

      He stammered. His voice seemed dead and smothered. He began to shake all over, feverishly; and again the whirring of wings rushed upon him, and again, a minute, an hour, a day, a week, an eternity later, he became conscious of the swami’s low, sibilant voice:

      “He wanted to travel. Nor could I dissuade him, and I—I loved him. Thus I said to him: ‘You yourself cannot leave the sacred soil of India. СКАЧАТЬ