No single, individual circumstance, but a chain of happenings in very quick succession, brought about a climax, forcing the hand of Howrah and his brother and for the moment drawing the McCleans, father and daughter, into the toothed wheel of Indian action. As usual in India, the usual brought about the unexpected, and the unexpected fitted strangely into the complex, mysteriously worked-out whole.

Two days after Joanna left the mission house, through a hole made in the thatch, the spirit of revolt took hold of Rosemary McClean again. The stuffy, narrow quarters—the insolent, doubled, unexplained, but very obvious, guard that lounged outside—the sense of rank injustice and helplessness—the weird feeling of impending horror added onto stale-grown ghastliness—youth, chafing at the lack of liberty—stirred her to action.

Without a word to her father, who was writing reports that seemed endless at the little desk by the shaded window, she left the house—drew with a physical effort on all her reserve of strength and health—faced the scorching afternoon wind, as though it were a foe that could shrink away before her courage, and walked, since she had no pony now, in any direction in which chance or her momentary whim might care to lead her.

“I won't cry again—and I won't submit—and I'll see what happens!” she told herself; and the four who followed her at a none-too-respectful distance—two of the Maharajah's men in uniform and two shabby-looking ruffians of Jaimihr's—grinned as they scented action. Like their masters they bore no love for one another; they were there now, in fact, as much to watch one another as the missionaries; they detected the possibility of an excuse to be at one another's throats, and gloated as they saw two messengers, one of either side, run off in a hurry to inform the rival camps.

It was neither plan nor conscious selection that led Rosemary McClean toward the far end of the maidan, where the sluggish, narrow, winding Howrah River sucked slimily beside the burning ghats. When she realized where her footsteps were leading her she would have turned in horror and retreated, for even a legitimately roasting corpse that died before the Hindoo priests had opportunity to introduce it to the flames is no sight for eyes that are civilized.

But, when she turned her head, the sight of her hurrying escort perspiring in her wake—(few natives like the heat and wind one whit better than their conquerors)—filled her with an unexpected, probably unjustifiable, determination not to let them see her flinch at any kind of horror. That was the spirit of sahibdom that is not always quite commendable; it is the spirit that takes Anglo-Saxon women to the seething, stenching plains and holds them there high-chinned to stiffen their men-folk by courageous example, but it leads, too, to things not quite so womanly and good.

“I'll show them!” muttered Rosemary McClean, wiping the blown dust from her eyes and facing the wind again that now began to carry with it the unspread taint—the awful, sickening, soul-revolting smell inseparable from Hindoo funeral rites. There were three pyres, low-smouldering, close by the river-bank, and men stirred with long poles among the ashes to make sure that the incineration started the evening before should be complete; there was one pyre that looked as though it had been lit long after dawn—another newly lit—and there were two pyres building.

It was those two new ones that held her attention, and finally decided her to hold her course. She wanted to make sure. The smell of burning—the unoutlined, only guessed-at ghastliness—would probably have killed her courage yet, before she came close enough to really see; but the suspicion of a greater horror drew her on, as snakes are said to draw birds on, by merely being snakes, and with red-rimmed eyes smarting from smoke as well as wind she pressed forward.

The ghats were deserted-looking, for the funeral rites of those who burned were practically over until the time should come to scatter ashes on the river-surface; only a few attendants hovered close to the fires to prod them and occasionally throw on extra logs. Only round the two new pyres not yet quite finished was anything approaching a crowd assembled, and there a priest was officiously directing the laying of the logs. It was the manner of their laying and the careful building of a scaffold on each side of either pyre that held Rosemary McClean's attention—called all the rebellious womanhood within her to interfere—and drew her nearer.

Soon the priest noticed her—a cotton-skirted wraith amid the smoke—and shouted to the guards behind; one of them answered, laughing coarsely, and Rosemary understood enough of the dialect he used to grit her teeth with shame and anger. The men left off building, and, directed by the priest, came toward her in a ragged line to cut her off from closer approach; she stood, then—examined the new pyres as carefully as she could—walked to another vantage-point and viewed them sideways—then turned her back.

“Oh, the brutes!” she ejaculated. There were tears in her voice, as well as helpless anger. “There is not one devil, there are a million, and they all live here!”

She looked back again once, trembling with an overmastering hate, directed less at the priest who grinned back at her than at the loathsome rite he represented. In two actual words, she cursed him. It was the first time she had ever cursed anybody in her life, and the wickedness of doing it swept over her as a relief. She revelled in it. She was glad she had cursed him. Her little, light, graceful body that had been quivering grew calm again, and she turned to hurry home with an unexpected sense of having pulled some lever in the mechanism that would bring about results. She neither knew nor cared what results, nor how they were to happen; she felt that that curse of hers, her first, had landed on the mark!

But she had come further than she thought. Distance, hot wind, and emotion had exhausted her far more, too, than she had had time to realize. Before a mile of the homeward journey had been accomplished, she was forced against her stubborn Scots will to sit down on a big stone by the roadside and rest, while the four that followed came up close, grinning and passing remarks in anything but under-tones. If the meaning of the words escaped her, their gestures left little to be misunderstood. A crowd of stragglers drew together near the four—laughed with them—took sides in the coarse-worded argument about Jaimihr's known ambition—and shamed her into pressing on homeward.

But she was forced to rest again, and then again. Physical sickness prevented her from obeying instinct, reason, will, that all three urged her on. No false pride now told her to dare the insolence of the guards; nothing appealed to her but the desire to hurry, hurry, hurry, and do whatever should appear to need doing when she reached the mission house. She had no plan in her head. She only knew that she had cursed a man, and that the curse was potent. But her feet dragged, and her vitality died down. It was sundown when she reached the mission house, and she could hear the rising, falling, intermittent din of drums before she saw her father in the doorway.

“Father!” She ran to him, and he caught her in his arms to save her from falling headlong. “Father, there is going to be a suttee tonight! Hear the drums, father! Hear the drums! It'll be tonight! That's to stop the screams from being heard! Listen to them, father—two suttees, side by side—I've seen the pyres and the scaffolds—do they jump into the flames, father, from the scaffolds?—tell me! No-don't tell me—I won't listen! Take me away from here—away—away—away—take me away, d'you hear!”

He carried her inside, and laid her on the caned couch in the living-room, looking like a great, big, helpless, gray-haired baby, as any man is prone to do when he has hysteria to deal with in a woman whom he loves.

“I cursed a man, father! I cursed a man! I did! I said 'Damn you!' I'm glad!”

“Don't, little girl—don't! Lassie mine, don't! Never mind what you saw or what you said—be calm now—there is something we must do; we must act; I have determined we must act. We must act tonight. But we can't do anything with you in this state.”

Slowly, gradually he calmed her—or probably she grew calm, in spite of his attentions, for he was too upset himself to exercise much soothing sway over anybody else. At last, though, she fell into a fitful sleep, and he sat beside her, holding rigid the left hand that she clutched, letting it stiffen and grow cold and numb for fear of waking her.

Outside a full moon rose majestically, pure and silvery as peace herself, bathing the universe in blessings. And each month, when the full moon rose above the carved dome of Siva's temple, there was a ceremony gone through that commemorated cruelty, greed, poisoning, throat-slitting, hate, and all the hell-invented infamy that suckles always at the breast of stagnant treasure.

Since history has forgotten when, at each full moon, the priests of Siva had gone with circumstantial ceremony to view the hoarded wealth tied up by jealousy and guarded jealously in Howrah's palace. With them, as the custom that was stronger than a thousand laws dictated, went the Maharajah and his brother Jaimihr—joint owners with the priests.

There had not been one Maharajah, since the first of that long line, who would not have given the lives of ten thousand men for leave to broach that treasure; nor, since the first heir apparent shared the secret with the priests and the holder of the throne, had there been one prince in line-son-brother-cousin—who would not have drenched the throne with his relation's blood with that same purpose.

Heir after heir could have agreed with Maharajah, but the priests had stood between. That treasure was their fulcrum; the legacy, dictated by a dead, misguided hand, intended as a war reserve to stay the throne of Howrah in its need, and trebly locked to guard against profligacy, had placed the priests of Siva in the position of dictators of Howrah's destiny. A word from them, and a prince would slay his father—only to discover that the promises of Siva's priests were something less to build on than the hope of loot. There would be another heir apparent to be let into the secret—another man to scheme and hunger for the throne—another party to the bloody three-angled intrigue which kept the Siva-servers fat and the princes lean.

Past masters of the art by which superstitious ignorance is swayed, the priests could swing the allegiance of the mob whichever way they chose—even the soldiers, loyal enough to their masters under ordinary circumstances, would have rebelled at as much as a hint from holy Siva. It was the priests who made it possible for Jaimihr to dare take his part in the ceremony; without them he would not have entered his brother's palace-yard unless five thousand men at least were there to guard his back—but, if there was danger where the priests were, there was safety too.

As the custom was, he rode to the temple of Siva first with a ten-man guard; there, when the priests had finished droning age-old anthems to the echoing roof, when his brother, the Maharajah, also with a ten-man guard, had joined him, and the two had submitted to the sanctifying rites prescribed, eleven priests would walk with them in solemn mummery to the palace-entrance—censer-swinging, chanting, blasphemously acting duty to their gods and state.

The moon—and that, too, was custom-rested with her lower rim one full hand's breadth above the temple dome as viewed from the palace-gate, when a gong clanged resonantly, died to silence, music of pipes and cymbals broke on the evening quiet, and the strange procession started from the temple door, the Maharajah leading.

Generally it passed uninterrupted over the intervening street to the palace-entrance, between the ranks of a salaaming, silent crowd, and disappeared from view. This time, though, for the first time in living memory, and possibly for the first time in all history, the unforeseen, amazing happened. The procession stopped. Moon-bathed, between the carved posts of the palace-gate, two people blocked the way.

The music ceased. The sudden silence framed itself against the distant thunder of a hundred drums. The crowd—all heads bowed, as decreed—drew in its breath and held it. A sea of pugrees moved as brown eyes looked up surreptitiously—stared—memorized—and then looked down again. There was no precedent for this happening, and even the Maharajah and the priests were at a momentary loss—stood waiting, staring—and said nothing.

“Maharajah-sahib!—I must interrupt your ceremony. I must have word with you at once!”

It was Duncan McClean, bareheaded, holding his daughter's hand. They had no weapons; they were messengers of peace, protesting, or so they looked. No longer timid, but resigned to what might happen—they held each other's hands, and blocked the way of Siva's votaries—Siva's tools—and Siva's ritual.

Jaimihr whispered to his brother—the first time he had dared one word to him in person for years—the high priest of the temple pressed forward angrily, saying nothing, but trying to combine rage and dignity with an attempt to turn the incident to priestly advantage. Surely this was a crisis out of which the priests must come triumphant; they held all the cards—knew how and when rebellion was timed, and could compare, as the principals themselves could not do, Howrah's strength with Jaimihr's. And the priests had the crowd to back them—the ignorant, superstitious crowd that can make or dethrone emperors.

But some strange freak of real dignity—curiosity perhaps, or possibly occasion—spurred desire to act of his own initiative and keep the high priest in his place—impelled the Maharajah in that minute. Men said afterward that Jaimihr had whispered to him advice which he knew was barbed because it was his brother whispering, and that he promptly did the opposite; but, whatever the motive, he drew himself up in all his jewelled splendor and demanded: “What do you people wish?”

The McCleans were given no time to reply. The priests did not see fit to let the reins of this occasion slip; the word went out, panic-voiced, that sacrilege to Siva was afoot.

“Slay them! Slay them!” yelled the crowd. “They violate the sacred rites!”

There were no Mohammedans among that crowd to take delight in seeing Hindoo priests discomfited and Hindoo ritual disturbed. There came no counter-shout. The crowd did not, as so often happens, turn and rend itself; and yet, though a surge from behind pressed forward, the men in front pressed back.

“Slay them! Slay the sacrilegious foreigners!” The yell grew louder and more widely voiced, but no man in the front ranks moved.

The Maharajah looked from the company of guards that lined the palace-steps to the priests and his brother and the crowd—and then to the McCleans again.

He remembered Alwa and his Rangars, thought of the messenger whom he had sent, remembered that a regiment of lance-armed horsemen would be worth a risk or two to win over to his side, and made decision.

“You are in danger,” he asserted, using a pronoun not intended to convey politeness, but—Eastern of the East—counteracting that by courtesy of manner. “Do you ask my aid?”

“Yes, among other things,” Duncan McClean answered him. “I wish also to speak about a Rangar, who I know is held prisoner in a cage in the Jaimihr-sahib's palace.”

“Speak of that later,” answered Howrah. “Guard!”

He made a sign. A spoken word might have told the priests too much, and have set them busy fore-stalling him. The guards rushed down the steps, seized both McCleans, and half-carried, half-hustled them up the palace-steps, through the great carved doors, and presently returned without them.

“They are my prisoners,” said the Maharajah, turning to the high priest. “We will now proceed.”

The crowd was satisfied, at least for the time being. Well versed in the kind of treatment meted out to prisoners, partly informed of what was preparing for the British all through India, the crowd never doubted for an instant but that grizzly vengeance awaited the Christians who had dared to remonstrate against time-honored custom. It looked for the moment as though the high priest's word had moved the Maharajah to order the arrest, and the high priest realized it. By skilful play and well-used dignity he might contrive to snatch all the credit yet. He ordered; the pipes and cymbals started up again at once; and, one by one—Maharajah, Jaimihr, high priest, then royal guard, Jaimihr's guard, priest again—the procession wound ahead, jewelled and egretted, sabred and spurred, priest-robed, representative of all the many cancers eating at the heart of India.

Chanting, clanging, wailing minor dirges to the night, it circled all the front projections of the palace, turned where a small door opened on a courtyard at one side, entered, and disappeared.