'Send it back! It is hers; it is not mine! He gave it her! I stole it. Don't tell. Oh! send it back! send it back!'

Over and over again, through the long hot days and nights, the murmur, in its monotonous hurry, blent with the hum of the potter's wheel. The old man had removed the latter to the farther courtyard, where he sat working feverishly, yet without avail, so far as the village people could see through the door, beyond which they were forbidden to go. The simple folk were agog at the potter's strange looks and strange ways. He never seemed to cease working, for even when the familiar sound of the wheel was hushed something like an echo of it rose from within. Those were the times when he stood wistfully in the dark airless hut beside a restless head turning itself from side to side on the hard pillow, and keeping time to the monotonous rhythm of the murmur, 'Send it back, send it back.'

'Yea! dear heart, I will send it.' Then there would be silence for a while; but only for a while, since the fever strengthened day by day. Small wonder, when all Nature seemed in the grip of heat. The thermometer, we are told, is accurately divided into degrees. If so, the fallacy of such classification is self-evident, since every one with experience knows that the difference between eighty-four degrees and eighty-six degrees of Fahrenheit's instrument embraces the difference between comfort and discomfort. Between these two points that engine of torture, the punkah, trembles ere it begins the steady swing which is only one degree less awful than the unsteady swing necessitating the occultation of boots and other light articles of furniture with a human head. Doubtless to the uninitiated it seems a trivial affair to loop a parti-coloured rope through hooks in the rafters, and to attach to it a whitewashed board with a newly starched frill tacked to its lowest edge, thereinafter making mysterious dispositions of a leathern thong, the neck of an old whisky bottle thrust through the mud wall, and a circumambient flask of evil-smelling oil. But those who know what it is, on returning from a morning ride, to find the punkah in possession of your home, feel a chill at the very thought, such as the thing itself will never produce by legitimate means. The hot weather is upon one, and God only knows if fever, cholera, home-sickness, sheer deadly ennui, will allow you to pass through it unscathed as an honest gentleman.

George Keene, however, over in the branded bungalow, knew nothing of the horrors of a hot weather in the jungles, and, while poor little AzÎz lay moaning out her impotent repentance, was actually superintending the swinging of his punkahs; which is equivalent to a man personally conducting his own hanging. He even, after the manner of engineers, took pride in a device which was to secure a perfect silence in the infernal machine. All unwitting of a time when, in the scorched darkness, it might be preferable to curse a monotonous scroop giving tangible excuse for wakefulness, than to lie visualising the unseen swoop, as of some vampire eager to suck your heart's-blood.

Those two degrees of heat bring a thousand other changes. Even at Hodinuggur, arid as it always was, they intensified the drought till a drop of water seemed as visionary a consolation to the parched horizon as it must have been to poor Dives in the fires of hell. The very canal denied its nature as it slipped past yellow and thick with silt from the clayey defiles of the lower hills, each little swirl and eddy looking as if streaked and pitted in mud. Yet the chill of its snowy birth came with the flood, so that in the red-hot evenings George's factotum used to call through the yellow-dust haze to the groom who sat on the edge of the canal, apparently moored to his place by a soda-water bottle tied to a string, and then Ganesha would haul in the strange buoy and scramble up the bank with it rapidly, so as to give the master's dinner-drink a chance of being cool.

All this amused George Keene hugely at first. He drew caricatures of it for the rectory, and sent a very impressionist sketch of his world to Mrs. Boynton. It consisted of a dust-storm, a caper-bush, and a rat-hole. She put it on the mantelpiece of the pretty drawing-room in the little house among scented pine-woods, where she was just beginning to appreciate the soothing effect of having a decent balance at your banker's. Her lady-visitors laughed and said it was very clever, but some of the men looked queer and muttered 'poor devil' under their breath. Not that George looked on himself in that light. On the contrary, Hodinuggur amused him. Its dreary antiquity was all new to him, and as he went through the cool, dark passages of the old palace on his way to play chess with the DiwÂn, he learnt to admire some things about it; notably the thickness of its walls, through which the sun never filtered, though it soaked piteously into his red-brick bungalow. Upon the roof Zubr-ul-ZamÂn shrivelled under the heat almost as much as a certain figure which still lay huddled up on the landing of the secret stair in the thickness of the tower beneath him as he sat at chess. Below that again Khush-hÂl Beg lay stark naked, like a huge baby, in a swinging cradle, which was pulled to and fro by a drowsy coolie, while a bheestic supplied the fat carcass alternately outside and inside with tepid water from his skin bag, and as the latter shrank, Khush-hÂl swelled visibly--horribly.

Yet further, in the bazaar by the Mori gate, Dalel Beg, abandoning Europe-fashion under the stress of climate, slept all day and waked all night, doing both more viciously than before, like a snake rendered lively and dangerous by the heat. But ChÂndni, from her cool arches, smiled calmly, even when 'Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay' rose from the opposite balcony, which was now occupied by some one who could dance as well as sing. To tell truth, she was glad to be quit of Dalel's amusement for a time. Such deviations from her control never lasted long, and this time she knew that the DiwÂn himself was on her side. So she lounged about in the shadows, watching the pigeons in the niches, and rubbing her soft palms together. Sometimes a pellet of opium lay between them; sometimes nothing at all, for it was a trick of hers. Sometimes, on the other hand, it was a great deal; neither more nor less than one of the Hodinuggur pearls, which were as well known to all the jewellers of that part of the country as the Koh-i-nur diamond is to the keeper of the regalia. That was why ChÂndni on her return from Delhi, whither she had gone ostensibly to learn new music-hall songs for Dalel's benefit, had laughed so triumphantly at her own cleverness as she sat at the DiwÂn's feet telling him what she had done.

'It was easy, with my cousin a jeweller; and we of the bazaar know a trick or two with goldsmiths. Manohar LÂl hath the pearls, sure enough. All thou hast to do is to offer him a rupee more than he gave the mem (which will not be half their value). The Hindu pig will take it, seeing it is better than having the yellow-trousered ones^[3] set on him as a receiver of stolen goods.'

Zubr-ul-ZamÂn looked at her approvingly from under his bushy eyebrows. She was a clever woman, but he would improve on her plan. He would put the screw tighter on the Hindu pig, and get the pearls back in exchange for a promise to pay. So far, however, ChÂndni's plot had been unexpectedly successful. Both George Keene, by giving the AyÔdhya pot to the mem, and Dan Fitzgerald, by taking the jewels himself to Manohar LÂl, as ChÂndni's spies said he had done, were mixed up in the affair. There was sufficient foundation for an esclandre, of course, but how would that help them? They did not merely want revenge, as is so often the case, they wanted the key of the sluice-gate. The courtesan standing with wide-spread arms to fold her veil around her decently ere she left the DiwÂn's presence, laughed shrilly at his difficulties.

'How? sayest thou. Who can tell? Save this. The mem will send for more if she get the chance. That is our way. One rupee claims another. Bid the vakeel at Rajpore go to her and suggest a marrow to the pot. All things go in pairs, and we could send it through Keene sahib. For the rest we must wait. There is a time yet, and if we are to work by fear of exposure, that comes ever at the last moment. I play for a high stake, as I have told thee, O my father! and I mean to win.'

Then it was that the old man, with regretful thoughts of his past youth, had promised her one of the pearls in pledge for a future, when, if she succeeded, she could wear the whole necklace as Dalel's wife. That was how she came to be rolling the pearl against her palm lazily one moonlit night, when George, who began to find the long empty evenings coming at the end of a long empty day rather wearisome, strolled over for the first time since his return from Rajpore to see the potter, and while away half an hour in hearing some of his tales. Rather to his surprise--since he knew nothing of the novel freak for solitude--he found the outer palisade barred by thorn bushes, and going a little farther along to where it joined the mud wall, vaulted over the latter lightly into the inner courtyard. It was empty, and the door of the hovel closed. Supposing the old man to be absent, he turned to go, when a low cough from within made him pause and knock.

The next instant the potter burst out on him with eyes ablaze. 'Devils! wilt not leave me in peace?' he began before recognising his visitor. Then his manner changed; he drew the door to behind him, saying hurriedly, 'This slave mistook; the children tease. But if the Huzoor wants songs he must come to the outer court. The wheel is there now. Will not the Huzoor come?'

He moved away like a plover luring an intruder from its nest, but George paused again to listen to a repetition of the quick, low cough.

'Who is that ill?' he asked unwarily. The potter echoed the sound instantly.

'It is I who cough, Huzoor,' he went on, still moving away. Pity of God, how I cough! And I have fever, too. Mercy of the Most High! fever always with mutterings hard to understand. But 'tis no matter. The potters of Hodinuggur do not die; we go and come, we come and go.'

He had reached the wheel and set it a-spinning. But it seemed pivoted askew in its new place and whirled in fitful ovals. Then he looked up with a foolish laugh.

'My thumb will slip often now, Huzoor. Maybe 'twere better Fuzl turned no more pots.'

The thought made him slacken the wheel to silence. He sat staring at it vacantly, while George looked at him, wondering at the change in the old man. His face had the weary, over-strained expression of those who have wilfully forsaken sleep; the look which comes to those who are on the rack day and night beside a sick-bed, and George, remembering the cough, jumped to the conclusion that the potter had an invalid in the hut. Most likely some female relation; whence his desire for secrecy. To be sure, the old man had often said he lived alone, but in India one never could be sure how far modesty interfered with truth. So, being accustomed to such vicarious prescribings, the young man suggested he should send some medicine for the cough.

His companion brightened up immediately, 'It is not all a cough, Huzoor,' he replied hurriedly. 'It is fever. God! what fever. It is only a little cough, with a rattle, as of dead wheat-straw under my bosom as I draw breath; quick, quick, with curving nostrils like a horse galloping fast.'

The vivid accuracy of the word-picture made George realise an idea which had of late haunted his fancy. The idea of a hand-to-hand fight with death alone, unaided, as the beasts of the field meet the destroyer. Here was some one doing it; dying, perhaps, of pneumonia, when others were being nursed through a finger-ache. The pity, the injustice of it struck him fairly. Then the potter's voice going on softly gave inconsequent answer to the vague doubt surging against the boy's youthful content.

'Not that it matters, as I tell myself in the night season when I am worst. We of Hodinuggur do not die. We go and come, we come again and go.'

Something in his own words, perhaps, seemed to arrest the old man's attention, and he paused.

'Huzoor!' he cried suddenly, 'I have something which belongs to the mÂdr mihrbÂn. If the Huzoor would write an address.'

'Belonging to Miss Tweedie,' echoed George in surprise.

'Do not thanks belong to those who earn them!' replied the potter evasively. 'If the Huzoor could write. I have pen and ink. Lo! it is naught but potter's work, and the miss was kind.'

He fumbled in the niche beside his seat, and drew out a parcel done up in waxcloth. Evidently a pot of some sort, thought George, beginning to print boldly, as one of his profession should, with the slant-cut native pen. The moonlight shone full on the potter seated at his wheel, and the young Englishman pencilling Rose Tweedie's name. What was that rising on the stillness of the night? A murmur from the hut? George could not say for certain, as the old man set his wheel a-humming instantly, but once more the feeling of injustice, the flash of pity came to disturb his self-complacency. The feeling lasted longer this time, and as he walked home his thoughts were full of that uncertainty which is so hateful to the young. The Mori gate showed black and white in the moonshine; a clash of silver bells rose from the shadows as he passed; a pomegranate blossom fell at his feet. He took a step aside to crush it fiercely, passionately; it lay between that and picking it up he felt uneasily. Life here, at Hodinuggur, was so simple, so confusing in its simplicity. To live and to die. Was that all?

He spent the remainder of the evening in writing to Mrs. Boynton, putting his heart into reserved, half-jesting hints at his own puzzles. And as he wrote, the potter, standing at the door of his hut, was listening to a murmur coming from the darkness within.

'It is sent, dear heart! She has it. No one shall know,' he answered softly. Then there was silence for a while. But only for a while. The murmur came again and again through the hot night, to be stilled by the same reply.

The post in due time brought Mrs. Boynton her letter. She read it with great interest, and then promptly put it into the fire; her favourite maxim being, that the keeping of letters was, at any rate, one reason for the slow progress of humanity; since improvement was dangerous when you were tied down in black and white to past opinions. And the postman, after leaving the snug little house in the pine-woods, came on to Colonel Tweedie's with a packet for Rose. Half-an-hour afterwards the girl was sitting with the contents of the parcel on the table in front of her, puzzling her brains why any one should have sent her back the AyÔdhya pot, or one exactly like it. There could be no doubt about it, however. She took up the wrapper more than once; but the clear print, if unmistakable, was also unrecognisable. She felt carefully inside, hoping for a scrap of paper, a hint of any kind; but there was nothing save a few bits of crumbling clay, leaving a rough rim near the bottom of the pot. And all the time her first impression remained unaltered. There was a mistake; it had been meant for Mrs. Boynton. Undoubtedly it was meant for her. Under ordinary circumstances Rose would most likely have taken the AyÔdhya pot over to the little house without more ado, but, though she did not acknowledge it to herself, she could not treat its occupant in an ordinary way. Besides, there was an element of mystery in the whole affair, and Rose hated mystery. The memory of her dream on the night of the storm at Hodinuggur annoyed her. She had slurred it over at the time, merely mentioning it as part of a feverish attack; but now she wondered if the DiwÂn, or some one else, could really have arranged a theft. And gradually there grew up in her one distinct dislike to the whole business. She would have nothing to do with it. She would say nothing, but simply send the thing back whence it came. She would not even suppose that George had sent it; she would return it straight. After all, it might be another pot, and if she made a mistake in thinking this, they would know the truth at Hodinuggur. A knock at the door roused her, and she slipped the vase behind another on the mantelpiece ere she said 'come in.'

'Only to say, Miss Tweedie,' came in Lewis Gordon's voice from the threshold, 'that I shall not be in to lunch. Your father has given me a half-holiday, and, like a good little boy, I am going to spend it with my relations. You will be at the Graham's tennis, I suppose? We shall.'

'No. I shall utilise my half-holiday with my relations also,' she replied. 'Father and I will go for a ride. I don't often get him to myself.'

'Then au revoir till dinner. How comfortable your little snuggery is! It and Gwen's drawing-room are the two prettiest rooms in Simla.'

There was a hard, almost angry look on Rose's face as she repacked the parcel. Gwen's pretty room should at least be none the prettier for the AyÔdhya pot.

The result being that three days after this ChÂndni sat at the DiwÂn's feet once more, holding it in her hands.

'So I am right, O father!' she cried, with that shrill laugh of hers; 'the mem hath sent for more. Lo! I shall wear the pearls ere long.'

'If they are sent again, thou mayest lose them this time,' retorted the old man, but there was no warmth in his warning. He had begun to believe in her luck, and the two sat in the purgatorial heat on the roof, imagining evil as unconcernedly as if the universe could hold no fiercer fire for the wicked. The pearls must be sent again, of course, and the parcel given to be addressed by Keene sahib. So much was clear. And Manohar LÂl might be told to offer a less sum this time.

'Thy father was the devil!' remarked Zubr-ul-ZamÂn again--this time more suavely, 'and pearls or no pearls thou shalt have Dalel. For look you, Khush-hÂl is a waterbutt, a grease jar, and Dalel hath forgotten how to deal fair, even by himself; but thou hast brains. So bring thine ear within reach of a whisper. There is much to tell of Hodinuggur ways ere I forget with age.'

She bent her head back till it almost rested on the old man's breast and brought her flower-decked ear close to his mouth. One elbow touched his knee, the hand giving light support to her chin: the attitude of one all ears to hear. The DiwÂn, still as a statue, nothing but a voice. A queer couple up there on the roof overlooking the red-hot, red brick house, where George Keene was being introduced to what is familiarly called a go of fever.

Even that was to begin with somewhat of an amusement, for a certain feeling of self-complacency comes with the first intermission. After the tortures and fires of the damned for some hours, the sudden and complete escape from them seems to rebound to the credit of your constitution, and you are confirmed in the impression that you are a fine fellow. But it is not long before the fever fiend can knock that sort of conceit out of a man if it chooses. In George's case it did choose, and, having got him well in its grip, refused, after a day or two, to let him go again.

The factotum lingered round with something he called beef-tea, and another thing he called barley-water. Which was which, the patient, with his mouth full of Dead Sea apples and quinine, could not say; nor after a time did he very much care. He cared for nothing; unless indeed it was to get rid of that vision of the schoolroom in the rectory--a schoolroom with a cheery-cheeked boy roasting blackbirds at the fire. If you didn't twist the bit of brown worsted stolen from your sister's work-basket, then the birds slackened--slackened like the potter's wheel. Oh! it was a lifetime of twisting, or there you were plumb, burning with a horrid smell. When the factotum sat in the room the blackbirds didn't; but then he breathed. Wasn't it rough that a man could not stop breathing for half-an-hour just to oblige a friend? Yet if the breathing beast sat outside, a 'whittering, beast came in its place. 'Whitter! Whitter!' under the bed; behind the boxes. That was the worst of a musk rat; no one could possibly tell where it would 'whitter' next. It wasn't its fault, of course; it meant no harm. Poor little beggar! what a rummy sight it must be, if the yarn was true, taking its kids out for a walk, tail by tail, in a string! And then to George's infinite surprise and discomfiture, the feeble laugh ended in a flood of tears; tears like a woman's, drenching the dry, hot pillow. That was one comfort, they were as good as a water-cart! So they came again between the laughs; for George, seventy miles away from a white face, was down with the worst type of jungle fever.

Sometimes when he felt a little better the factotum brought out the medicine-chest and between them they made wonderful compounds, which the latter administered when his master had gone back to the blackbirds.

It is a common enough experience, and George, not being a whit behind many another young Englishman, fought his way through it pluckily, while Ganesha, the groom, fished for soda-water bottles all day long, and the water carrier circled round the house, cooling the dust with sprinklings, and keeping an eye on the punkah coolie during the factotum's absence over more barley-water or beef-tea.

Scorching nights, blistering days, devils in sparrow shape, the fringe of the towel pinned to the punkah, flicking your nose, yet sparing the mosquito battening on your cheek. All this George knew, till discomfort itself grew dim, and he ceased to care for anything in this world or the next.

Then after a time there was something dead cold--cold as ice--trickling down his nose, and that surely was Dan's face. At any rate it was Dan's voice.

'It's all right, dear boy. Sure the doctor's ridden out too, and you'll be round in a jiffy.'

It is an Eastern record of life which tells us of a love passing the love of women, and, even in these latter days one sees it more often East than West; perhaps, paradoxically, because men have so often to play a woman's part towards each other in India. Dan Fitzgerald in particular was as gentle as any sister of mercy, and stronger than most. To be sure he sat on the bed smoking, and after a day or two his language over the barley-water was simply disgraceful. But by this time George had come back from No-man's-land and could remember a little booklet called 'Home Comforts Abroad,' which had been given him by his grandmother. So Dan ferreted it out from the bottom of a box full of canal records, and ordered the charcoal brazier into the verandah. Then he stirred diligently while George, propped up by pillows, read out the directions weakly. The result being that the factotum bore away a deadly mixture in triumph, because even with this surpassing love in his heart for the compounder, the boy could not swallow it.

Nevertheless, wearied out by feeble laughter, he slept the first real sleep of recovery and woke to extol the factotum's beef-tea. That functionary being thus appeased, the little red brick furnace out in the wilderness became a home indeed; that is to say, an abode of love, and peace, and a great contentment.

It was on the very day of promotion to an arm-chair and a cigarette that George received a letter from Colonel Tweedie, enclosed in one from Rose. His eyes grew moist as he read it; he had to pause ere he could turn to where his companion sat busy over his share of the post, and even then his voice faltered.

'You--you beast, Dan!'

The words were uncomplimentary; the tone was a caress. His hearer did not affect to misunderstand.

'Well, it will be jolly for you at Simla. The gayest fortnight of all just before the rains, and there is nothing like a whiff of hill air for killing the microbes. Besides, the Tweedies' house is awfully jolly to stay in.'

'But you?--you will be here,' said George remorsefully, despite the eager pleasure in his eyes.

Dan laughed.

'It isn't the first time I've been in a jungle station. Are you thinking of the whisky bottle again? Sure I'll take a temperance ticket for the fortnight, if it would make my keeper easier.'

'Don't be a fool, Dan.'

He came round to lean over the back of George's arm-chair.'

'Is that the thanks I get for warming a viper in my bosom? But I must get back to the office for a day or two first. Then I'll start you off with my blessing and all the boiled shirts you have in the world. And more, by token, that picture of the girl with the AyÔdhya pot that's lying underneath them. Why didn't you show it me before? It's the best thing you ever did, and must go to the exhibition. Always put your best foot foremost up at Simla among the big-wigs. That is my advice.'

'Which you don't follow yourself.'

'But I do!--only my foot's a beetle-crusher, and the worms don't like it. So that is settled, and we will tell the washerman about the white ties. And look here, George, I'll bring the duplicate of that key back with me. Then you can take yours, and I shall know----'

George's hand went up to the back of his chair as if to find another to clasp; then he changed the venue with an odd little laugh.

'Give me a light, old man. I--I can't keep this cigarette going, somehow.'

As Dan stooped over him their eyes met, and that was enough.