I.

An old man dreaming of a past day and night as he sat waiting, and these were his dreams.

* * * * *

Darkness, save for the light of the stars in the sky and the flare of blazing roof-trees on earth. Two shadowy figures out in the open, and through the parched silence of the May night a man's voice feeble, yet strenuous in appeal.

"Dhurm Singh?"

"Huzoor!"

The kneeling figure bent closer over the other, waiting.

"The mem sahiba, Dhurm Singh."

"Huzoor--dhurm nÂl."^[9]

Then silence, broken only by the long howl of jackals gathering before their time round that scene of mutiny and murder.

* * * * *

Darkness once more. The darkness of daylight shut out by prisoning walls. The sweltering heat of July oozing through the shot-cracked walls; the horrors of starvation, and siege, and sickness round two dim figures. And once again a strenuous voice--this time a woman's.

"Dhurm Singh!"

"Huzoor."

The answer came as before--broad, soft, guttural, in the accent of the north--

"Sonny baba, Dhurm Singh!"

"Huzoor--dhurm nÂl."

Then silence, broken only by the whist-ch-t of a wandering bullet against the wall of the crumbling fort, where one more victim had found peace.

* * * * *

Both the May night and the July day were in old Dhurm Singh's thoughts as he sat on his heels looking out from the Apollo Bunder at Bombay across the Black Water, waiting, after long years, for Sonny baba's ship to loom over the level horizon. A stranger figure among the slight, smooth coolies busy around him with bales and belaying pins than he would have been among the dockers at Limehouse. Tall, gaunt, his long white beard parted over the chin and bound backwards over his ears, his broad mustache spreading straight under his massive nose, his level eyebrows like a white streak between the open brown forehead and the open brown eyes. A faded red tunic, empty of the left arm, a solitary medal on the breast, and above the unseen coils of white hair--long as a woman's--the high wound turban bearing the sacred steel quoit of the Sikh devotee.

Such was Dhurm Singh, AkÂli; in other words, Lion of the Faith and member of the Church Militant. Pensioner to boot for an anna or so a day to a Government which he had also served dhurm nÂl as he had served his dead captain, his dead mistress, and, last of all, Sonny baba!

Twenty years ago. Yes! twenty years since he had answered those strenuous appeals by his favourite word-play on his own name. He had used it for many another promise during those long years; as a rule, truthfully. For Dhurm Singh, as a rule, did things dhurm nÂl--partly because a slow, invincible tenacity of purpose made all chopping and changing distasteful, partly because fidelity to the master is sucked in with the mother's milk of the Sikh race: very little, it is to be feared, from conscious virtue. Twenty years ago he had carried Sonny baba through the jungles by night on his unhurt arm, and hidden as best he could in the tiger-grass by day, because of his promise. And now, as he sat waiting for Sonny baba to come sailing over the edge of his world again, the broad simple face expanded into smiles at the memory. He passed by all the stress and strains of that unforgotten flight in favour of a little yellow head nestling back in alarm against the bloodstains on the old tunic, when the white mems in the big cantonment of refuge had held out their arms to the child.

Sonny baba had known his friends in those days; ay! and he had remembered them all these years: he and the mem's sister, who had taken charge of the boy in the foreign land across the Black Waters whence the masters came--a gracious Miss who wrote regularly once a year to ex-duffadar Dhurm Singh, giving him the last news of Sonny baba and as regularly urging her correspondent to safeguard himself against certain damnation by becoming an infidel. For this, briefly, crudely, was the recipient's view of the matter as he sat staring at the little picture texts and tracts in the PunjÂbi character which invariably accompanied the letters. They puzzled him, those picture cards in the sacred characters which were printed so beautifully in the far off land by people who knew nothing of him or his people, and who yet wrote better than any mohunt.^[10] Puzzled him in more ways than one, since duty and desire divided as to the method of their disposal. Respect for the captÂn-sahib, whom he had left lying dead at the back of the native lines on that May night, forbade his destroying them; respect for his own religious profession forbade his disseminating the pictures, irrespective of the letterpress, as playthings among the village children. So he tied them up in a bundle with his pension papers, and kept them in the breast pocket of the old tunic under the bloodstains and the solitary medal which was beginning to fray through its parti-coloured ribbon--an odd item in that costume of a Sikh devotee which he had assumed when the final loss of his arm forced him into peace and a pension. As a rule, however, the tunic was hidden under the orthodox blue and white garments matching the turban, just as the huge steel bracelets on his arms matched the steel quoit on his head; but on this day loyalty to the dead had spoken in favour of the old uniform. It may seem a strange choice, this of devoteeship, but to the old swash-buckler it was infinitely more amusing, even in these degenerate days when AkÂli-dom had lost half its power, to go swaggering about from fair to festival, from festival to fair, representing the Church Militant, than to lounge about the village watching the agricultural members of the family cultivate the ancestral lands. They did it admirably without his help, as they had done it always; so Dhurm Singh, at a loose end now legitimate strife was over, took to cultivating his hair with baths of buttermilk instead, adopted the quoit and the bracelets, and used the most pious of Sikh oaths as he watched the wrestlers wrestle, or played singlestick for the honour of God and the old regiment. And there were other advantages in the profession. A man might take a more than reasonable amount of opium occasionally without laying himself open to a heavier accusation than that of religious enthusiasm; since opium is part of the AkÂli's stock in trade.

As he sat among the tarred ropes with his back against a consignment of beer and rum for the British soldier, he broke off quite a large corner of the big black lump he kept in the same pocket with the tracts, and swallowed it whole. Sonny baba's ship was not due, they told him, for some hours to come, so there would be time for quiet dreams both of past and future. The latter somewhat confused, since the Miss-sahib's letters had not always been adequately translated by the village schoolmaster. Only this was sure: Sonny baba was three and twenty, and he was coming out to Hindustan once more as an officer in the great army. In fact, he was a captÂn already, which was big promotion for his few years. So Dhurm Singh--who to say sooth, was becoming somewhat tired of the Church Militant now that younger men began to beat him at singlestick--had returned to the old allegiance and made his way down country, like many another old servant, to meet his master's son and take service with him. You see them often, these old, anxious-looking retainers, waiting on the Apollo Bunder, or coming aboard in the steam launches with wistful, expectant faces.

And some beardless youth, fresh from Eton or Harrow, says with a laugh, "By George! are you old Munnoo or Bunnoo? Here! look after my traps, will you?" And the traps are duly looked after, while the Philosophical Radical on the rampage is taking the opportunity afforded by baggage parade to record in his valuable diary the pained surprise at the want of touch between the rulers and the ruled, which is, alas! his first impression of India. In all probability it will be his last also, since it is conceivable that both rulers and ruled may be glad to get rid of him on the approach of the hot weather. Mosquitoes are troublesome, and cholera is disconcerting, but they are bearable beside the man who invariably knows the answers to his own questions before he asks them.

Dhurm Singh's dreams, however, if confused, were pleasant; full of strong meats and drinks, and men in buckram. He could not, of course, serve the SirkÂr again with the chance of batta and loot, but he could serve the chota sahib and wear a badge. After all, a badge-wearer had his opportunities of hectoring. And then, how he could talk round the camp fires! What tales he could tell!--bearing in mind, of course, the advancement of God and the Gurus. He fell asleep finally in the sunshine, blissfully content. The tide ebbed in the backwaters, the guardship lay white and trim in the open, the tram horses clattered up and down, the Royal Yacht Club pennant flew out against the blue sky, a match was being played on the links hard by, and the very coolies, as they hauled and heaved, used a polyglot of sailors' slang. Only the palm-trees on the point over the bay gave an Oriental touch to the scene.

* * * * *

"Dhurm Singh! my dear, dear old friend! Look, comrades, this is the man who carried me to safety in his arms even as the Good Shepherd carries His lambs."

The speech had that unreal sound which is the curse of the premeditated, except in the mouth of a born actor, which Sonny baba was not. And yet the young curves of the lips quivered. Perhaps the commonplace exclamation of the British boy mentioned before would have come more naturally to them, but Staff-captain Sonny baba of the Salvation Army was on parade, and bound to keep up his character. Nevertheless there was no lack of warmth in the grip he got of the old man's reluctant hand.

"Huzoor," faltered Dhurm Singh, taken aback at this condescension, and letting the sword he was about to present fall back on its belt with a clatter. The fact being that the said sword had been an occasion of much mental distress; as an actual ex-duffadar it was irregular, but as a possible bodyguard it was strictly de rigueur. Perhaps, however, times had changed in this as in other ways during those twenty years. The very uniform worn by the score or so of men drawn up on the deck was strange; and what did that squad of mem sahibs mean? Their dress did not seem so strange to the old AkÂli, since in those palmy days before the Mutiny the fashions were not so far removed from the costume of a Salvation lass; but the tambourines!

"Come and speak to the General," said Sonny baba somewhat hurriedly. He spoke in English; but just as the formula, "Look after my traps" is "understanded of the common people" at once, so the word "General" brought a relieved comprehension to the old Sikh's face. There were blessed frogs on this one's coat also, which, like the word Mesopotamia, were charged with consolation.

The General looked at him with that curious philanthropic smile which, while it welcomes the object, has a kind of circumambient beam of mutual congratulation for all spectators of the benevolence.

"You have seen service, my good old friend," he exclaimed in fluent Urdu, as he pointed with a declamatory wave of his hand to the solitary medal, "but it was poor service to what we offer you now. Come to us, be our first-fruit, and help to carry the colours of the Great Army in the van of the fight."

A speech meant palpably for the gallery.

Dhurm Singh, however, took it at attention, and saluted--

"Pension-wallah, Huzoor, unfit for duty," he replied with modest brevity, indicating his empty sleeve.

The General caught at the occasion for even greater unction with a complacency which could not be concealed.

"The Great Army is recruited from those who are unfit for duty, from those who are sinners. Is it not so, comrades? Are we not all maimed, halt, blind, yet entering into life?"

"Hallelujah! Hallelujah!" cried the company, bursting into the refrain of a hymn, in which Sonny baba joined with an angelic voice. The voice, in fact, was largely responsible for the position in which he found himself. The old swash-buckler's eyes grew moist as he looked at him, thinking that he was the very image, for sure, of his dead father, who had been the pride of the regiment. Nevertheless the effervescence of song left the old man still deprecating and fumbling in his tunic.

"The General-sahib mistakes; these are my pinson papers."

That proved a climax. When, just as you are setting foot on a country which you have sworn to conquer, an old warrior comes aboard and produces a bundle of Scripture texts and Salvation hymns out of his innermost breast pocket, naturally nothing is left but to enthuse. What followed Dhurm Singh only dimly understood, but he stuck manfully to his intention of following Sonny baba to the death if needs be. The result being that at four o'clock in the afternoon he took part in a procession round the town of Bombay--mortal man of his mould being manifestly unable to resist the temptation of marching in step behind a big drum, with the colours of a whole army on his shoulders; especially when unlimited opportunity for scowling defiance at hostile crowds is thrown into the bargain. By eight o'clock, however, matters had assumed a different complexion; so had Dhurm Singh, as he sat in the lock-up, vastly contented with his black eye and an ugly cut on the nose, which he explained gleefully to Sonny baba put him in mind of old times. The latter, through the medium of a fellow-passenger who knew PunjÂbi, was meanwhile trying to make the old sinner understand that he had got the whole army into trouble, and that personally he must stand his trial for a breach of the peace.

"And tell him, please," said Sonny baba with grieved diffidence, "that we all think he must have been drunk."

An odd smile struggled with the gravity of Dr. Taylor's interpretation of the reply.

"He says, of course he was drunk, as you all were. In fact, he bought a bottle of rum instead of taking his opium, so that the effects might be uniform--I'm telling you the sober truth, my dear boy. You see you don't know the people or the country, or anything about them. I do. Besides, the Tommies--the regular soldiers I mean--always make a point of getting drunk if they can when they go down or come up to the sea in ships. Perhaps it's the connection between reeling to and fro, you know. I beg your pardon; no offence--but really, what with the tambourines--"

Dr. Taylor paused with his bright eyes on the boy's face. They had been cabin companions, and despite an absolute antagonism of thought, chums. It is so sometimes, and as a rule such friendships last.

"Did you tell him the General was greatly displeased? It is such a terrible beginning to our campaign; so unscriptural," mourned Sonny baba evasively.

"I don't know about that; wasn't there some one who smote off some one else's ear? and that, I believe, is what the old man is accused of doing. I beg your pardon again, but the coincidence is remarkable."

"And what is he saying now?" put in the other hurriedly.

Dr. Taylor paused.

"He is calling down the blessing of the one true God upon your head, now and for all eternity," he answered slowly, and there was a sort of hush in his voice.

Sonny baba's eyes grew suspiciously moist, but he shook his head dutifully. "How--how sad," he began.

"Very sad that you can't understand what he says," interrupted Dr. Taylor curtly, "because as I've only just time to catch my train I must be off. Salaam, AkÂli sahib!"

Dhurm Singh, standing to salute, detained the doctor for a minute with eager questioning.

"What is it?" asked Sonny baba again. "What is it he wants to know?"

Dr. Taylor gave a short laugh. "He wants to know who the General's papa and mamma were, because he isn't a gentleman. You needn't stare so, my dear fellow. That is the first thing they find out about an Englishman, and it needs a lot of grit and go in a man to get over the initial drawback. Well, good-bye, and if you will take my advice, come up north, see the people, learn their language, and appreciate their lives before you try to change them. And look here! don't go taking an AkÂli about in a religious procession with drums and banners. It isn't safe, especially if you are going to Bengal."

"Why Bengal more than other places?"

"Accustomed to lick them, that's all--hereditary instinct. Well, good-bye again, and take my advice and come north. The old swash-buckler might be of some use to you there. He'll be in the way down country."

II.

Some eighteen months afterwards, the doctor, being busy over that great hunt for the comma-shaped bacillus, which, as is told elsewhere, ended in a full stop for the seeker, saw a man come into his verandah with a note.

"The old swash-buckler, by all that's sinful," he said to himself. "Now, what can he want?" According to the superscription of the letter, it was a "Civil Surgeon"; according to a few almost illegible words inside, help for a suspected case of cholera in the European room of the serai.

Dr. Taylor, with grave doubts as to being able to supply either of these desires, went into the verandah.

"Is it Sonny baba?" he asked.

Dhurm Singh's delight was boundless; since a sahib to whom you have once spoken is not as other sahibs; just as a sahib whom you have once served becomes a demi-god--transfigured, immortal. Undoubtedly it was the Baba-sahib^[11]--for unto this semi-religious title the old man had compounded his memories and his respect; who else was it likely to be, seeing that he, Dhurm Singh, had taken service with the master's son? Undoubtedly also he was ill, though, in the poor opinion of the dustlike one, it was not cholera--at least it need not have been if the Baba-sahib had only taken the remedy proposed to him.

"Opium? hey!" asked Taylor, who in a huge pith hat which made him look like an animated mushroom, was by this time walking over to the serai, which was but a few hundred yards off.

The old AkÂli grinned from ear to ear, the massive curves of his lips stretching like india-rubber. "The Huzoor knows the great gift of God in the bad places of mind and body. But the Baba-sahib will not have it so. He understands not many things through being so young. But he learns, he learns!"

There was a cheerful content in the apology, suggestive of the possibility that Dhurm Singh had something to do with the teaching. If so, he had been an unsafe guide in one point; for it was cholera; cholera of the type which merges into a dreary convalescence of malarial fever, during which Dr. Taylor saw a good deal, necessarily and unnecessarily, of his old cabin companion; thus renewing a friendship which, like the majority of those struck up on board ship, would have been forgotten but for an accident--the accident of his doing civil duty for a colleague during ten days' leave.

"Civil Surgeon, indeed!" he would say, as he sat on the edge of the bed amusing Sonny baba when the latter began to pull round. "Deuce take me if I could be that to save my life! One of my patients the other day said I was the most uncivil person calling himself a gentleman she ever came across, just because I told her she couldn't expect her liver to act if she lived the life of a Strasburg goose. 'Liver!' she cried, 'why, doctor, it's all heart that is the matter with me.' Now, my dear boy, can you tell me why that unfortunate viscera, the liver, has got into such disrepute? You may tell a patient every other organ in the body is in a disgraceful state of disrepair, but if you hint at bile it's no use trying to be a popular physician. Stick to the heart! that's my advice to a youngster entering the lists. Both for the healer and the healed it is ennobling. Now you, for instance! you will put it all down to your ardent affection for your fellow-man; but what the devil have you done with your muscle, my dear fellow? Oh, I know! you have been doing the dÂl-bhÂt^[12] trick, in order to show your sympathy with the people, and to assimilate your wants to theirs, so that in some occult way they are to assimilate their religious beliefs to yours. Lordy, Lordy, what an odd creature man is! But you didn't get old Dhurm Singh to give up his kid pullao, I'll go bail. Now, he looks fit--more like your Church Militant business than you do."

"I've--I've given up the Army," said Sonny baba after an embarrassed pause.

And Dr. Taylor actually refrained from asking why, or from saying he was glad to hear it; for there was a puzzled, pained look in his patient's face, which, like any other unfavourable symptom, had to be attended to at once. In the verandah, however, he commented on the news to Dhurm Singh, who with his turban off and his long white hair coiled round the high wooden comb like any woman's, was putting an extra fine polish to his sword to while away the time.

"Huzoor! it is true. It did not suit us. I told the Baba-sahib so from the beginning. They were not of his caste. As the Protector may see, I did all in my power. I set aside the steel bracelets and the quoits. I refrained myself to humility and carried a tambourine, but to no purpose. It did not suit. So now, praise be to the Lord, we have taken 'pinson' again, and the Baba is to serve the Big LÂt-padre (bishop) according to hukm (orders), as all the padre sahibs do."

As he drove home, the doctor decided that he would gladly give a month's pay to know the history of the past year and a half. The very imagination of it made him smile. Yet there must have been more than mere laughter in his thoughts, for even when the lad grew strong enough to resume the arguments which had begun in the cabin, the doctor never tried to force his confidence. And Sonny baba was reserved on some points. But the enthusiasm, and the fervour, and the faith were strong in him as ever, though the angelic voice now busied itself with Hymns Ancient and Modern; especially the Ancient. For, face to face with the Rig-Vedas, the advantages of unquestioned authority had begun to show themselves.

There is no need to repeat the arguments on either side; they are easily imagined, given the characters of the arguers. Nor is it difficult to imagine the grip of hands when they parted. One of them, no doubt, said something about the other not being far from a certain kingdom, and the saying was not resented, though, no doubt, the hearer laughed softly over the comma-shaped bacillus as he watched Sonny baba and the old swash-buckler set off together to the wilderness again. The former to itinerate from village to village, learning the language and lives of the people he hoped by and by to convert; the latter, presumably, to complete the education he had begun. They were an odd couple.

"Ten to one on the swash-buckler," thought the doctor; "he is a fine old chap."

Christmas had come and gone ere Sonny baba reappeared in civilised society. When he did so he looked weather-beaten and yet spruce--the natural result on a healthy young Englishman of combined exposure to sunshine and a good washerman.

"Hullo!" cried the doctor cheerily, "back again in boiled shirts, I see! Find 'em a bit stiff, I expect, after kurtas and dhotees. The natives know how to dress comfortably at any rate."

Sonny baba blushed under his bronze and hesitated. "The fact is," he said with an effort, "I did not, after all, adopt native costume as I intended, or perhaps"--here a faint smile obtruded itself--"I might say it wouldn't adopt me. You see, to enter into details, I couldn't exactly give up--a--a night shirt, or that sort of thing, you know--now could I? And what with being a very sound sleeper, and sleeping in public places--serai's and dhurmsÂlas--or out in the open--somehow my day clothes were always being stolen. As soon as ever I got a new outfit it disappeared, until at last Dhurm Singh said,--"

"Yes! what did Dhurm Singh say?"

"That it was very peculiar, and that as the thieves didn't seem to fancy my English clothes it might be--more economical--" Here a half-embarrassed laugh finally interrupted the sentence. "I don't think I was sorry," went on the speaker hastily; "I found out afterwards that the people don't understand it. One old fellow asked me why it was that though a native convert always had to wear trousers like the sahib-logue, the 'missen' people preferred to preach without them? Of course it was an exaggeration both ways, but the more I see of these people, the more necessary it seems to me that we should be ourselves armed at all points before beginning the attack. And then their poverty, their patience, the insanitary conditions--the needless suffering! Surely before we can touch their minds--"

"I know," broke in the doctor cynically. "Medical missions, et cetera; so it has come to that already, has it, old chap?"

"I don't know what you mean by its having come to that," retorted Sonny at a white heat; "but if you think it right to live in the lap of luxury while these brothers and sisters of ours--"

So the arguments began again, more fiercely than ever, for the two fought at closer quarters--so close that ofttimes the doctor had to retreat from his own position and seek another, because Sonny baba had already entrenched himself therein; the which is a direful offence, rousing determined resistance in a real argufier.

Despite this, Sonny baba rented a room in the doctor's house, and shared the doctor's dinners and library and hospital after the easy Indian fashion, while Dhurm Singh swaggered about among the dispensary badge-wearers, explaining at full length why he did not wear a badge like the rest of them. His sahib had not yet settled which branch of the public service he would exalt by his presence. He was young, doubtless, as yet, but he made strides. Two years ago he had found him in a very poor "naukeri" (service), in which he paid all the rupees and no one gave him anything; a topsy-turvy arrangement: not that his sahib needed the paisas. He was rich as a nawab. Then he thought of being a padre sahib; now it was doctorÉ department, but in his, Dhurm Singh's opinion, that was not much either. Personally he would just as soon wear no badge, as one of those with "Charitable Dispensary" on it. But only God knew where the Baba-sahib might end; at Simla, as "burra LÂt sahib," no doubt. Till then it was more dignified to refrain from ignoble badges of which afterwards one might be ashamed.

And while he talked in this fashion he sat in the sunshine combing his long hair, and piously wondering how folk could defile their insides with tobacco. Then he would stroll off into the shadow and bring out the black lump of dreams. Yet if Sonny baba came out into the verandah calling after the Indian fashion for some one, the broad northern accent was always ready with its "Huzoor!"

So the months passed in preparations, and the angelic voice might have been heard to sing "Lead, kindly Light" more often than any other hymn in the book. About this time, also, Sonny baba speaking of Dhurm Singh and his ways, used to quote in rather a patronising manner a certain text regarding those who might expect to be beaten with few stripes--a speech which roused the doctor to vigorous retort. He had observed, he said, that the remark held good about most honest, healthy men who could play singlestick.

The fact being, however, that Sonny baba was beginning to get obstinate, as is only natural when a man passes five and twenty. It was time, he felt, to begin work in earnest; for the enthusiasm and the faith and the fervour were as hot as ever in him still. Looking back on the last three years he hardly understood why he had done so little.

"There seems so much to learn before one can even begin on the problem," he sighed, "and then, dear as the old man is, I really think Dhurm Singh is a drawback. I hoped when we left the Army--but indeed, Taylor, I think even you will allow that he is hardly the sort of man for a missionary's servant."

"Well, I don't know that I should classify him under that head; but then," he paused, thinking, perhaps, that when all was said and done the master was no more fit for the place than the servant.

"I'm glad you agree with me," put in Sonny eagerly, "for I've quite made up my mind to a change. You have no idea how the old fellow hectors over getting me a pint of milk or a couple of eggs. You would think I was about to loot a whole village. I must own that I invariably get what I want--that, too, without the least unpleasantness; but it is not edifying. Not the sort of thing that ought to go on. Then his habit of eating opium. It does not seem to hurt him, I own; but that again is not what it ought to be. It is bad enough to belong to a race who, while they go about with words of condemnation on their lips--"

"Pardon me," murmured the doctor, "I pass--"

"--on their lips, are at the same time battening on the proceeds of an infamous monopoly of a drug dealing death and disease to a whole continent."

"One-third of one per cent of the total population," murmured the doctor again.

"You forget the opium grown in China," put in Sonny with great heat.

"My dear fellow, isn't there a story somewhere about the Emperor of China's clothes? If I remember right he forgot to put 'em on, and then every one was afraid to tell him he was naked. It appears to me that in this opium business the good gentleman hasn't a rag of reason for complaint, but that you are all afraid to say so. If we can prevent our subjects from growing poppy except under supervision, why can't he? It isn't Jonah's gourd, but a three month crop."

Sonny baba began to walk up and down the room excitedly. "It is perfectly inexplicable to me how a man like you--"

"Excuse me," interrupted the doctor. "I'll explain. I'm forty-four years of age. Two and twenty years of that I lived in a parish in Scotland where every decent, respectable body would have thought shame to himself if he didn't have more whisky than he could carry on market days. The other two and twenty I've spent in India. Out of cantonments, where they've learnt the trick from us, I only remember having met two drunken men in all those years, and though I see more of the natives than most people, I can only call to mind three who might be said to have suffered seriously from the effects of opium.^[13] But it is a subject which it is quite useless to discuss. It turns on a question of heredity, like most things. The Indo-Germanic races never have taken and never will take to narcotics, so naturally they abuse them--and drink instead. Chacun À son gout."

"And mine is to give poor old Dhurm Singh an extra pension when I go itinerating, and send him back to end his days in peace in his village."

The doctor whistled. "Don't you wish you may get him to do it?"

"He must if he is a hindrance to the work--"

"And if your work is a hindrance to him? That's what it comes to all round. He was put in charge of you, and mark my words, Dhurm Singh will do it dhurm nÂl until he goes to settle the vexed question."

"What vexed question?"

"Whether his work or yours was the better."

III.

"Dhurm Singh?"

"Huzoor."

After five and twenty years the same appeal--the same reply. But on that May night and July day neither the man nor the woman had any doubt as to what was to come next; the universe held no possibility save "the mem sahib" or "Sonny baba But the latter, now it came to his turn, hesitated; even while he was conscious that to a well-balanced mind capable of weighing advantage and disadvantage fairly, there ought to be no difficulty in telling any one that you had no further need for his services. The recollection of certain thin-lipped, dignified, self-respecting conversations overheard at home sprang to memory obtrusively. "Then, Mary Ann, it had better be this day month." "Yes, ma'am, this day month, if you please; and if you please, ma'am, Wednesdays and Saturdays from eleven till one, if convenient, for a character."

But things were different somehow in this heathen country, which was so backward in education, so ignorant of liberty, equality, and--ahem!

"Dhurm Singh," began Sonny once more rather hurriedly.

"Huzoor."

"I--I am going to make a complete change of plan, Dhurm Singh. I--I am going to begin work on a new principle. I--I am going to start in another part of the country where I shall not require--er--many things I have hitherto required." He paused, well satisfied at his plunge in medias res.

Dhurm Singh, standing attention at the door, smiled approvingly. "It is a good word, Huzoor. So said the Gurus also. When do we start?"

Half an hour afterwards Sonny baba in rather a shamefaced manner, told the doctor that, after all, he had come to the conclusion it would be better not to dismiss Dhurm Singh. To begin with, the village children delighted in his tales, and then--it was a triviality, no doubt, perhaps in a measure a giving in to prejudice--the elders certainly set store by position; for instance, they were always more ready to listen to him if the old swash-buckler had had an opportunity of giving the family history, embellishments and all. In addition, Dhurm Singh had promised to amend his ways generally; to spend his days in compounding pills and potions instead of hectoring about. Finally, he had agreed to an allowance of opium, swearing dhurm nÂl to take no more than was served out by the master.

"Of course," said Sonny baba at this juncture, with a considerate superiority which raised every atom of the doctor's original sin, "I shall be careful, I shall not dock it too much at once; but in the course of a year or two I hope to break him entirely of this most pernicious habit."

"Which has never done him or his surroundings the least harm," growled Taylor savagely. "Upon my soul, I begin to wish I were five and twenty again, if only that I might be as cock-sure of being right about everything as you are. As it is, even the bacillus--" He wrinkled his eyes over the microscope once more, and did not finish his sentence.

After this Dhurm Singh might have been seen any day of the week in the dispensary verandah grinding away vigorously with pestle and mortar at unsavoury medicaments, rolling pills under his flexible brown fingers, or polishing up surgical instruments with all the fervour bestowed of yore on the old sword.

"Lo! if the Baba-sahib cares not for being a big HÂkm (magistrate, ruler), sure the next best thing is to be a big HÂkeem (doctor)," he would say, smiling simply at his own wit. "And doth not the Guru say, 'Fight with no weapon but the sword of the Spirit'? Besides, when I feel like fighting I can put an edge to the knives or pound harder with the pestle. God knows they may both do more damage than a sabre. Then the rolling of pills is ever the first step towards dream-getting. Thus in all ways, I, Dhurm Singh, Sikh, ex-duffadar, pinson-wallah, and AkÂli, am consoled. But there! God is good to the Sikh. Know you that He never made an ugly one yet?"

This was a favourite boast of the old man's, backed always, should doubts be expressed, by a modest appeal to his own looks, joined to an assertion--which, by the way, was perfectly true--that he was the meanest looking of ten brothers.

So, in due season, the doctor once more watched the odd couple pass out together into the wilderness; and this time, noticing the change in Sonny baba and remembering the raw lad who had been his cabin companion, he, so to speak, put his whole pile on Dhurm Singh--unless the boy killed him with philanthropy.

The rains, after an unusually heavy fall, had ceased early, the result being an epidemic of autumnal fever. Now the cholera may kill its thousands, but year by year, with every now and again a sort of jubilee over its own strength, malaria kills its tens of thousands quietly, unostentatiously; so quietly, that it is only when the officer in charge of a district finds himself during his cold weather camp deciding the rival claims to hereditary offices day after day in village after village, that even he realises how widely the archangel Azrael has spread his wings over the people. The doctor, however, judging simply by the weather, sent Sonny into the jungles well supplied with that carmine-tinted quinine which carries the fact of its being Government property in its colour: a useless attempt to prevent the sale of charity in a land where the regulation five grain powder is as much a part of the currency as a two anna bit. Well supplied, yet at the same time with cautions not to be over generous except in genuine cases. Let him stick to the country medicines as prophylactics. Opium and aconite were to be had for the buying; and if he did wander into the low jungles close to the hills, and if he could be tolerant and learn not to despise old wisdom, let him prescribe the former in preference to the latter--though perhaps that was too much to expect from a five-and-twenty-year old who was cock-sure he knew best.

"I know nothing of myself," replied Sonny in all seriousness. "The Eternal Right decides. There lies the difference between you and me--pardon me if I say between the Christian and the Unbeliever. You trust to your finite mind, I to Something which is and was, which cannot err."

And Dhurm Singh, gleefully employed in turning a cash transport mule with its fixings into a perambulating dispensary, was keeping up his character of devotee by repeating verses from the Adhee Grunt'h^[14] in sing-song; his round, mellow voice echoing out through the sunshine--

"Remember, oh man, the primal truth--the Truth ere the world began.

The Truth which is and the Truth which must remain.

How can this Truth be told, save by doing the will of the Lord?"