The Sirdar's Oath: A Tale of the North-West Frontier

“It delays everything so,” went on the grievance-monger. “The servants can’t clear away, or get to their work. Herbert knows we have breakfast at half-past eight and now it’s after nine, and there’s no sign of him. I can’t keep the house going on those lines, so it’s of no use trying.”

“Well, you’ll soon be in a position to reform him to your heart’s content,” said the Vicar with a twinkle in his eye – and there came a grim, set look about the other’s rather thin-lipped mouth which augured ill for Raynier’s domestic peace in the future.

Cynthia Daintree had just missed being pretty. Her straight features were too coldly severe, and her grey eyes a trifle too steely, but her brown hair was soft and abundant, and there were occasions when her face could light up, and become attractive. She was tall, and had a remarkably fine figure, and as she managed to dress well on somewhat limited resources, the verdict was that she was a striking-looking girl. But she had a temper, a very decided temper – which, it was whispered, was accountable for the fact that now, at very much nearer thirty than twenty, her recent engagement to Herbert Raynier was by no means her first.

Now the offender entered, characteristically careless.

“Morning, Cynthia. Hallo, you look disobliged. What’s the row? Morning, Vicar.”

This was not the best way of throwing oil upon the troubled sea, but then the whole thing was so incomprehensible to Raynier. He could not understand how people could make a fuss over such a trifle as whether one man ate a bit of toast, and played the fool with a boiled egg, half an hour sooner or half an hour later. There was no train to catch, no business of vital importance to be transacted, here in this sleepy little country place. His fiancée could have had precious little experience of the graver issues of life if that sort of thing disturbed her.

“You’ve only yourself to thank if everything’s cold,” answered Cynthia, snappishly.

“I don’t mind – even if there isn’t anything to get cold. Feeding at this end of the day isn’t in my line at all. I hardly ever touch anything between chota hazri and tiffin over there.”

“Well, but over here you might try to be a little more punctual.”

“Too old. Besides, I’m on furlough,” returned Raynier, maliciously teasing. It was the only way of veiling his resentment. He did not take kindly to being perpetually found fault with, and still less so the first thing in the morning. “Don’t you agree with me, Vicar? A man on furlough should be allowed a few venial sins?”

“Oh, I think so,” said Mr Daintree, with a laugh. And then he began to discuss the war news in that morning’s paper, which soon led round to the events wherewith our story opens.

“That must have been after the fashion of our old Town and Gown rows at Oxford,” said the Vicar. “They are a thing of the past now, I’m told.”

“And a good thing too,” struck in his daughter. “What horrid savage creatures men are. Never happy unless they are fighting.”

“Don’t know. I much prefer running away,” said Raynier.

“Pity you didn’t carry out your preference. Then you wouldn’t have come down here looking such a sight,” with a glance at his somewhat disfigured visage.

“And there’d have been one Oriental the less in the world. Phew! that was a vicious mob if ever there was one. By the way there’s a saying that if you rescue anybody he’s bound to do you a bad turn. Wonder if it’ll hold good here, and if in the order of fate that chap and I will meet again out there. Stranger things have come off.”

“Only in books,” said Cynthia, contemptuously.

“No – in real life. I could tell you of at least three remarkable if not startling circumstances of the kind that have come to my knowledge, but I won’t, for two reasons – one that they wouldn’t interest you – two, that you wouldn’t believe a word of them.”

“What are you going to do to-day, Herbert?” said the Vicar.

“Fish. You coming with me, Cynthia?”

“No.”

“Meaning I’m not fit to be seen with,” answered Raynier, interpreting her glance.

“If you will go getting yourself disfigured in common street brawls you must expect to suffer for it. So low, I call it.”

She was in a horrible humour that morning – so much was evident. Raynier wondered how she would receive the news of the loss of the malacca cane, and felt steeled to tell her about it then and there. In another moment he would have done so when an interruption occurred. A girl’s voice came singing down the passage, and its owner burst into the room.

“Hallo, Herbert. You’re jolly late again. I expect you have been catching it,” with a glance at the thunder-cloud on her elder sister’s face. This was the Vicar’s youngest daughter, aged nineteen; there were two between her and the other, both married, likewise sons, helping to buttress up the Empire in divers colonies.

“Right you are. I have. I’m going to try for a trout or two, Silly. Feel like coming along?”

“I sha’n’t if you call me that,” answered the girl, with a shade of her sister’s expression coming over her face; “that,” however, not being an epithet but a teasing abbreviation of her own name – Sylvia.

“All right. I withdraw the Silly.”

“Then I’ll go. But isn’t Cynthia going?”

“She says I’m too ugly just at present,” returned Raynier, tranquilly. “And I believe I am.”

“Yes. You’re rather a sight,” with a deliberate glance at his damaged figurehead. “Never mind. There’s no one to see us here. Where are we going?”

“How about the hole below Blackadder Bridge?”

“That’s it,” returned Sylvia. “There was a regular ‘boil’ on there the day before you came, but that was in the evening. I took out seven trout in twenty-five minutes. Then the ‘boil’ stopped and you couldn’t move a fish. But we’d better start soon.”

“All right. I’ll go and get my rod.”

The Vicar went out on to the lawn to see them off, and smoke his after-breakfast pipe.

“Cynthia, my dear,” he called. “Come outside and walk up and down a bit.”

She made some excuse about seeing to the things being cleared away. However she soon joined him.

“That nest of young thrushes is gone,” he said, peering into the ivy which hid the garden wall. “Some cat has found them, I expect. By the way, Cynthia, do you really intend to marry Herbert Raynier?”

“Why, what on earth do you mean, father?” she answered, resentment and astonishment being about evenly divided in her tone.

“Precisely what I say, dear – no more and no less. Because if you don’t you’re going the right way to work to let him see it.”

“If I don’t. But I do – of course I do. I can’t think what you’re driving at.”

“Oh, it’s simple enough. Couldn’t you manage now and then, if only for a change, to give him a civil word? Men don’t like to be perpetually found fault with and hauled over the coals,” pronounced the Vicar, speaking with some feeling, moved thereto by sundry vivid recollections of his own, for he was a widower. Cynthia coloured.

“But they require it – and – it’s only for their good,” she answered.

“No deadlier motive could be adduced,” returned her father, drily. “Because, you see, if you use the whip too much they’re apt to kick. And I descry symptoms of such a tendency on the part of Herbert I thought I’d give you a hint, that’s all. It would be a pity to lose him. His position is excellent and his prospects ditto; besides, he’s a thoroughly good fellow into the bargain.”

The pool beneath Blackadder Bridge was wide enough for a rod on each side, so that neither interfered with the other, but Raynier and his future sister-in-law had met with scant sport. The surroundings, however, were lovely: the soft roll of the wooded hills resounding with the joyous shout of the cuckoo, the blue haze of spring beneath the cloudless sky, and meadows spangled with myriad butter cups; while, hard by, skipping perkily in and out of their knob-like nest against the hoary mossiness of the buttressed bridge, a pair of water-ouzels took no count whatever of their human disturbers. The bleating of young lambs was in the air, mingling with the tuneful murmur of the brown water purling out from the breadth of the deep pool into a miniature rapid.

“Well, you two? What have you got to show for yourselves?”

Raynier looked up, almost startled, so amazed was he. For the voice was Cynthia’s – and it was quite pleasant, even affectionate. And there was Cynthia herself, looking exceedingly attractive in her plain, and therefore tasteful, country attire. In her hand was a basket.

“I thought I’d bring you something better for lunch than those dry old sandwiches,” she said, smilingly, as she proceeded to unpack its contents. And Raynier, wondering, thought, could this be the same Cynthia whom he had last seen, acid and disagreeable, who, indeed, had scarcely had a civil word to throw to him since his arrival.

“Beastly bad luck,” screamed Sylvia, from the other side, reeling in her line, preparatory to coming over to join in the lunch.

This proved quite enjoyable. What on earth had happened to Cynthia between then and breakfast time, thought Raynier. No trace of acidity was there about her now. Her manner was soft, indeed affectionate, and she looked up into his disfigured countenance quite delightfully, instead of turning from it in aversion as heretofore. Why on earth couldn’t she be like this always, he thought regretfully, feeling softened and relenting, under the combined influence of the soothing surroundings and an excellent lunch.

In the afternoon sport mended, and more than once a “boil” came on the water, for a few minutes only, but so lively while it lasted that they took out trout almost with every cast, and then he noticed how carefully in the background Cynthia kept, and when he hung up his cast in that confounded elder tree just as the rise began, she it was who came to the rescue of his impatience, and so deftly and quickly disentangled the flies. Why on earth could not she always be like that? And then, during the two-mile walk home together in the glowing beauty of the cloudless evening there was simply no comparison between the delightful attractiveness of this woman, and the frowning, shrewish scold of the opening of the day, and again and again he thought, – “If only she were always like this!”

Chapter Four

A Timely Reconsideration

For a few days matters ran smoothly enough. The weather was lovely, ideal May weather, in fact, and Raynier keenly appreciated the soft beauty of this typical English landscape, seen at its best at the loveliest time of the year – the fresh green of the foliage and the yellow-spangled meadows; the cool lanes, shaded with hawthorn blossoms; the snug farmhouses with their blaze of glowing flower-beds and the background of picturesque ricks; the faint hum of the mill at the end of the village, and the screech of swifts, skirring and wheeling round the church tower, seen beyond the wall of the Vicarage garden. Such homely sights and sounds appealed to him the more by contrast to the brassy skies and baked aridity for which he would so soon be bound to exchange them. For his furlough was drawing very near its end.

Strange that, under the circumstances, it should be almost entirely this that constituted his regret. Cynthia seemed to forget her chronic ill-temper, and became quite affectionate; yet the recollection of her outbursts remained. Even when at her best Raynier could not for the life of him rid his mind of such recollections. That sort of nature does not change, he told himself, and the prospect of spending his days with the life-long accompaniment of such was as a very weight. And his was not one of those easy-going, quickly-forgiving dispositions; far from it.

For one circumstance, as time went on, he felt devoutly thankful, although at first he had reproached her with it, and that was that Cynthia was not of a demonstrative temperament, and to this extent the necessity of make-believe was spared him. He observed, too, in the course of their conversations she seldom spoke of the future, or dwelt upon their life together, and, observing it, he more than met her half-way; and as they went about together, both in speech and demeanour they were more like two people of very recent and ordinary acquaintance than a betrothed couple whom a few days more were to separate by nearly half the width of the globe.

At the actual state of things the Vicar, for his part, shrewdly guessed, but being a sensible man forebode to interfere. Cynthia was quite old enough to manage her own affairs, and so too was Raynier. Possibly, when the thing was irrevocable they would hit it off together as well as most people did under the circumstances, which, to be sure, was not saying much. Cynthia, with her faults, had her good points, and of Raynier he entertained a very high opinion. It would turn out right enough, he decided, but if he had any misgiving, the Vicar was forced to own to himself that it was not on behalf of his daughter.

“Curious thing that will of old Jervis Raynier’s,” he said one day, when he and his son-in-law elect were walking up and down smoking their pipes. “He left a good deal, and all to a girl who was hardly any relation at all. You only come in after her.”

“Which is tantamount to not at all. But the same holds good of myself in the matter of relationship. I’m only a distant cousin – so distant as hardly to count.”

“You’re a Raynier, at any rate. But she – By the way, do you ever think about it, Herbert? My advice to you is not to. The chances are too slight. The girl is young, they tell me, and attractive. She’s bound to marry, and then where do you come in?”

“Nowhere, unless I were to marry her myself,” laughed Raynier. “But that’s scratched now. By the bye – who is she, Vicar – ?”

“Herbert! Oh, there you are,” shrilled the voice of Sylvia at this juncture, followed by its owner, somewhat hot, and armed with two trout-rods. “They told me you had gone on, and I got half-way down the village before I found out you hadn’t. Here’s your rod. Come along. We’re losing the best part of the morning.”

There was no gainsaying the crisp decisiveness of these orders, and with an apology to the Vicar, he started off. He was forced to own to himself that these expeditions with the younger girl constituted his best times. It never occurred to Cynthia to be jealous of her sister, not in the ordinary sense, although once or twice she was rather acid on the subject of his preferring so much of the latter’s society. The fact was, Sylvia was lacking in feminine attractions, being plain and somewhat angular. But she was always lively and good-natured, and to that extent a positive relief from the other, albeit an effective foil to her in looks.

Sunday had come round, and Cynthia had got up in a bad temper – we have observed that upon some people the first day of the week has that effect – consequently, when Raynier hinted at the possibility of his not going to church it exploded. The idea of such a thing! Why, of course he must go, staying at the Vicarage as he was. What would be said in the parish?

“But it didn’t matter what was said in the parish last Sunday. You wouldn’t let me come then because I was too ugly,” he urged, with a mischievous wink at Sylvia.

“Well, so you were, but your face is nearly all right again now,” answered Cynthia, briskly, and with acerbity, for she had no sense of fun.

“Not it. You’ll see it’ll keep all the choir boys staring, and they can’t warble with their heads cocked round at right angles to the rest of them.”

Sylvia spluttered.

“All the more reason why you should come, Herbert,” she said. “I want to see that. It’ll be good sport.”

“If you were a boy you’d be a typical parson’s son, Silly,” he laughed.

“Shut up. I’ll throw something at you if you call me that.”

“Do, and you’ll keep up the part,” he returned.

Worthingham Church was in close resemblance to a thousand or so other village churches of its size and circumstance, in that it was old and picturesque, and gave forth the same flavour of mould and damp stones. There was the same rustic choir with newly-oiled heads and clattering boots and skimpy surplices, singing the same hackneyed hymns, and the Vicar’s sermon was on the same level of prosiness, not that he could not have done better, but he had long since ceased to think it worth while taking the trouble. But Cynthia Daintree, seated in the front pew, well gowned and tastefully hatted, and withal complacently conscious of the same, was the presiding goddess, at whom the rustics aforesaid never seemed tired of furtively staring – in awe, which somewhat outweighed their admiration – therein well-nigh overlooking the discoloured countenance of her fiancé.

“Cynthia always looks as if she’d bought up the whole show,” pronounced Sylvia, subsequently and irreverently.

Raynier had answered one or two inquiries after his “bicycle accident” – Cynthia having deftly contrived to let it be understood, though not in so many words, that such was the nature of his mishap – and they were re-entering the garden gate. Suddenly she said, —

“Where’s your stick, Herbert? The malacca one. Why, you haven’t used it at all this time.”

It was all up now, he thought. As a matter of fact his main reason for endeavouring to avoid going to church that morning was that it would be one opportunity the less for her to miss that unlucky article.

“No, I haven’t. The fact is I’ve lost it.”

“Lost it? Oh, Herbert!”

She looked so genuinely hurt that he felt almost guilty.

“Yes. I’m awfully sorry, Cynthia. I wouldn’t have lost it for anything, but even as it is I’m sure to get it back again. I’m having inquiries made, and offering rewards, in short doing all I can do. It’ll turn up again. I’m certain of that.”

“But – how did you lose it, and where?”

He told her how; that being a detail he had purposely omitted in previous narration of the incident. It was but frowningly received.

“I didn’t think you would attach so little value to anything I had given you, and yet I might have known you better.”

What is there about the English Sunday atmosphere that is apt to render contentious people more quarrelsome still, and those not naturally contentious – well, a little prickly? Raynier felt his patience ebbing. She was very unreasonable over the matter, and, really – she was quite old enough to have more sense.

“I don’t think you’re altogether fair to me, Cynthia,” he answered, his own tone getting rather short. “The thing was unavoidable, you see. Unless you mean you would rather the man’s brains had been knocked out by that bestial mob than that I should have given him some means of defending himself. I value the stick immensely, and am doing all I can to recover it, but I should have thought even you would hardly have valued it at something beyond the price of a man’s life.”

“Only a blackamoor’s,” she retorted, now white and tremulous with anger.

“Sorry I can’t agree with you,” he answered shortly, for he was thoroughly disgusted. “I have seen rather too much of that sort of ‘blackamoor,’ as you so elegantly term it, not to recognise that he, like ourselves, has his place and use in his own part of the world. I repeat, I am as sorry as you are the stick should have been lost, but I should have thought that, under the circumstances, no woman – with the feelings of a woman – would have held me to blame.”

“That’s right. Sneer at me; it’s so manly,” she retorted, having reached the tremulous point of rage. “But why didn’t you tell me of it at first? Rather underhand, wasn’t it?”

“Oh, no. I don’t deal in that sort of ware, thanks. I did not tell you, solely out of consideration for your feelings. I had hoped the thing might have been recovered by this time – then I would have told you. And look here, Cynthia. Would it surprise you to learn that I am getting more than a little sick of this sort of thing. I am not accustomed to being found fault with and hectored every minute of the day. In fact, I’m too old for it, and much too old ever to grow used to it. And since I’ve been down here this time there’s hardly a moment you haven’t been setting me to rights and generally finding fault with me. Well, if that’s the order of the day now, what will it be if we are to spend our lives together? Really, I think we’d better seriously reconsider that programme.”

She looked at him. Just her father’s warning. But she was too angry for prudent counsel to prevail.

“Do you mean that?” she said, breathing quickly.

“Certainly I do. It is not too late to warn you that mine is not the temperament to submit to perpetual dictation.”

“Very well, then. It is your doing, your choice, remember.” And turning from him she passed into the house.

Chapter Five

Murad Afzul, Terror

Peaks – jagged and lofty, peaks – stark and pointed, cleaning up into the unclouded but somewhat brassy blue. Rock-sides, cleft into wondrous, criss-cross seams; loose rocks again, scattering smoother slopes of shale, where the white gypsum streaks forced their way through. Beneath – far beneath – winding among these, a mere thread – the white dust of a road. Of vegetation none, save for coarse, sparse grass bents, and here and there a sorry attempt at a pistachio shrub. A great black vulture, circling on spreading wing, over this chaos of cliff and chasm, of desolation and lifelessness, turns his head from side to side and croaks; for experience tells him that its seeming lifelessness is but apparent.

“Ya, Allah! and are we to wait here until the end of the world? In truth, brother, we had better seek to serve some other chief.”

Thus one dirty-white-clad figure to another dirty-white-clad figure – both resembling each other marvellously. The same bronze visage, the same hooked nose and rapacious eyes, the same jetty tresses on each side of the face, and the same long and shaggy beard, characterised these two no less than the score and a half other precisely similar figures lying up among the interstices of this serrated ridge, watching the way beneath. The dirty-white turbans had been laid aside in favour of a conical dust-coloured kulla, the neutral hue of which headgear blended with the sad tints of the surrounding rocks and stones.

“I know not, brother,” rejoined the second hook-nosed son of the wilderness. “Yet it seems that since the Sirkar1 has been changed at Mazaran, a great change too has come over our father the Nawab.”

“Nawab!” repeated the first speaker, with disgust. “Nawab! How can our chief take such a dirty title, only fit for swine of Hindu idolators. It is an insult on the part of the accursed Feringhi to offer such a title to a freeborn son of the mountains; and such a one as the chief of the Gularzai. Nawab!” and the speaker spat from between his closed teeth, with a sort of hiss of contempt.

“Yet, if it serves to place him higher in the estimation of the Feringhi and of the tribes our neighbours, what matter?” returned the other. “The Nawab Mahomed Mushîm Khan sounds great in the ears of such.”

The sneering laugh which rattled from the other’s throat was checked, for now the attention of all became concentrated on a cloud of dust coming into view, and advancing along the thread of road winding beneath. Eagerly now, thirty pairs of fierce eyes were bent on that which moved beneath their gaze – a passing of men, mounted and armed, to the number of about three score; and fierce brows bent in hatred, as they scowled upon the representative of that irresistible Power, which, with all its failings and errors of judgment, yet in the long run held in salutary restraint the excesses of their wild and predatory race. For this was the escort of the British Political Agent, returning from an official visit to their tribal chieftain.

A squad of Levy Sowars rode in front, and a larger one of Native Cavalry, the official himself, with two or three attendants being between; the servants with camp necessaries and furniture bringing up the rear, yet taking apparent care to keep somewhat close upon the heels of the armed escort. Upon this array the wild hillmen gazed with many a muttered curse. The time for that might come, in the orderings of Allah and His Prophet; but it was not to-day – was the thought that possessed several of their minds.

The cavalcade held on its way, winding round a high precipitous spur, to reappear again further on, small and distant, then to vanish entirely where a great tangi cleft the heart of the mountain. And look! Below, once more, in the direction whence it had first appeared, whirled another cloud of dust, insignificant this time compared with before.