The Elephant God - Gordon Casserly (which ebook reader txt) 📗

another took their places and began a single. Mrs. Rice, with Dermot and several other men, came up the steps of the verandah, and, sitting down, ordered tea for the party.

Noreen looked at her with angry eyes, and, rising, walked along the verandah to where she was sitting surrounded by the group of men.

Her enemy looked up as she approached.

"Are you coming to have tea, dear?" she said sweetly. "I haven't ordered any for you, but I daresay they'll find you a cup."

Dermot rose to offer the girl his chair; but, ignoring him, she confronted the other woman.

"Mrs. Rice, will you please tell me if it is true that you said I was engaged to Mr. Chunerbutty?" she demanded in a firm tone.

It was as if a bomb had exploded in the club. Noreen's voice carried clearly through the building, so that everyone inside it heard her words distinctly. The only two members of their little community who missed them were her brother and his opponent on the tennis-court.

Mrs. Rice gasped and stared at the indignant girl, while the men about her sat up suddenly in their chairs.

"I said so? What an idea!" ejaculated the planter's wife. Then in an insinuating voice she added: "You know I never betray secrets."

"There is no secret. Please answer me. Did you say to any one that I had told you I was engaged to him?" persisted the girl.

The older woman tried to crush her by a haughty assumption of superiority.

"You absurd child, you must be careful what accusations you bring. You shouldn't say such things."

"Kindly answer my question," demanded the angry girl.

Mrs. Rice lay back in her chair with affected carelessness.

"Well, aren't you engaged to him? Won't even he—?" she broke off and sniggered impertinently.

"I am not. Most certainly not," said Noreen hotly. "I insist on your answering me. Did you say that I had told you we were and asked you to keep it a secret?"

"No, I did not. Who did I tell?" snapped the other woman.

"Me for one," broke in a voice; and Dermot took a step forward. "You told me very clearly and precisely, Mrs. Rice, that Miss Daleham had confided to you under the pledge of secrecy—which, by the way, you were breaking—that she was engaged to this man."

There was an uncomfortable pause. Noreen glanced gratefully at her champion. The other men shifted uneasily, and Mrs. Rice's husband, who was standing at the bar, hastily hid his face in a whiskey and soda.

Noreen turned again to her traducer.

"Will you kindly contradict your false statement?" she asked.

The other woman looked down sullenly and made no reply.

"Then I shall," continued the girl. She faced the group of men before her, Payne and Travers by her side.

"I ask you to believe, gentlemen, that there never was nor could be any question of an engagement between Mr. Chunerbutty and me," she said firmly. "And I give you my word of honour that I never said such a thing to Mrs. Rice."

She waited for a moment, then turned and walked away down the verandah, followed by Payne and Travers, leaving a pained silence behind her. Mrs. Rice tried to regain her self-confidence.

"The idea of that chit talking to me like that!" she exclaimed. "It was only meant for a joke, if I did say it. Who'd have ever thought she'd have taken it that way?"

"Any decent man—or woman, Mrs. Rice," said Dermot severely. Then, after looking at Rice to see if he wished to take up the cudgels on his wife's behalf, and failing to catch that gentleman's carefully-averted eye, the soldier turned and walked deliberately to where Noreen was sitting, now suffering from the reaction from her anger and frightened at the memory of her boldness.

The other men got up one by one and went to the bar, from which the hen pecked Rice was peremptorily called by his angry wife and ordered to drive her home.

After the Dalehams had returned to their bungalow the girl told her brother of what had happened at the club. He was exceedingly angry and agreed that it would be wiser for her to keep Chunerbutty at a distance in future. And later on he had no objection to her inviting Dermot to pay them a flying visit when he was again in their neighbourhood. For the incident at the club had brought about a resumption of the old friendly relations between Noreen and Dermot, who occasionally invited her to accompany him on Badshah for a short excursion into the forest, much to her delight. She confided to him the offer of the necklace and learned in return his belief that the Rajah was the instigator of the attempt to carry her off. When her brother heard of this and of Chunerbutty's action in the matter of the jewels he was so enraged that he quarrelled for the first time with his Hindu friend.

Dermot was kept informed of whatever happened in Lalpuri by the repentant Rama through the medium of Barclay. For the Deputy Superintendent had been appointed to a special and important post in the Secret Police and told off to watch the conspiracy in Bengal. This he owed to a strong recommendation from Dermot to the Head of the Department in Simla. Rama proved invaluable. Through him they learned of the despatch of an important Brahmin messenger and intermediary from the Palace to Bhutan, by way of Malpura, where he was to visit some of his caste-fellows on Parry's garden. The information reached Dermot too late to enable him to seize the man on the tea-estate. So he hurried to the border to intercept the messenger before he crossed it. But here, too, he was unsuccessful. Certain that the Brahmin had not slipped through the meshes of the net formed by his secret service of subsidised Bhuttias, Dermot returned to the jungle to make search for him along the way. But all to no avail, much to his chagrin; for he had reason to hope that he would find on the emissary proof enough of the treason of the rulers of Lalpuri to hang them. He went back to Malpura to prosecute enquiries.

To console himself for his disappointment Dermot determined to have a day's shooting in the jungle, a treat he rarely had leisure for now. He invited the Dalehams to accompany him. Noreen accepted eagerly, but her brother was obliged to decline, much to his regret. For Parry was now always in a state bordering on lunacy, and his brutal treatment of the coolies, when his assistant was not there to restrain him, several times nearly drove them into open revolt. So Dermot and his companion set off alone.

As they went along they chanced to pass near a little village buried in the heart of the jungle. A man working on the small patch of cleared soil in which he and his fellows grew their scanty crops saw them, recognised Badshah and his male rider, and ran away shouting to the hamlet. Then out of it swarmed men, women, and children, the last naked, while only miserable rags clothed the skinny frames of their elders. All prostrated themselves in the dust in Badshah's path. The elephant stopped. Then a wizened old man with scanty white beard raised his hands imploringly to Dermot.

"Lord! Holy One! Have mercy on us!"

The rest chorused: "Have mercy!"

"Spare thy slaves, O Lord!" went on the old man. "Spare us ere all perish. We worship at thy shrine. We grudge not thy elephants our miserable crops. Are they not thy servants? But let not the Striped Death slay all of us."

Dermot questioned him and then explained to Noreen that a man-eating tiger had taken up its residence near the village and was rapidly killing off its inhabitants.

"Oh, do help them," she said. "Can't you shoot it?"

He reflected for a few moments.

"Yes, I think I know how to get it. Will you wait for me in the village?"

"What? Mayn't I go with you to see you kill it? Please let me. I promise I'll not scream or be stupid."

He looked at her admiringly.

"Bravo!" he said. "I'm sure you'll be all right. Very well. I promise you you shall see a sight that not many other women have seen."

He borrowed a puggri—a strip of cotton cloth several yards long—from a villager, and bade them show him where the tiger lay up during the heat of the day. When they had done so from a safe distance, he turned Badshah, and, to Noreen's surprise, sped off swiftly in the opposite direction.

Suddenly the girl touched his arm quietly.

"Look! I see a wild elephant. There's another! And another!" she whispered.

"Yes; I've come in search of them," he replied in his ordinary tone. "It's Badshah's herd."

"Is it really? How wonderful! How did you know where to find them?" she cried, thrilled by the sight of the great beasts all round them and exclaiming with delight at the solemn little woolly babies, many newly born. For this was the calving season.

Dermot uttered a peculiar cry that sent the cow-elephants huddling together, their young hiding under their bodies, while from every quarter the great tuskers broke out through the undergrowth and came to him in a mass. Then, as Badshah turned and set off at a rapid pace, the bull-elephants followed.

When he arrived near the spot in which the man-eater was said to have his lair, Dermot stopped them all. Despite her protests he tied Noreen firmly with the puggri to the rope crossing Badshah's pad. Then he drove his animal into the herd of tuskers, which had crowded together, and divided them into two bodies. The tiger was reported to lie up in a narrow nullah filled and fringed with low bushes. From the near bank to where Badshah stood the forest was free from undergrowth, which came to within a score of yards of the far bank.

Badshah smelled the ground, and the other elephants followed his example and, when they scented the tiger's trail, began to be restless and excited. A sharp cry from Dermot and the two bodies of tuskers separated and moved away, branching off half right and left, and disappeared in the undergrowth.

Dermot cocked his double-barrelled rifle. There was a long pause. A strange feeling of awe crept over Noreen at the realisation of her companion's strange power over these great animals. No wonder the superstitious natives believed him to be a god.

Presently there was a loud crashing in the undergrowth beyond the nullah, and Noreen saw the saplings in it agitated, as if by the passage of the elephants. The tiger gave no sign of life. The girl's heart beat fast, and her breath came quickly. But her companion never moved.

Suddenly Noreen gasped, for through the screen of thin bushes that fringed the edge of the nullah a hideous painted mask was thrust out. It was a tiger's face, the ears flattened to the skull, the eyes flaming, the lips drawn back to bare the teeth in a ghastly snarl. The brute saw Badshah and drew quietly back. A pause. Then it sprang into full view and poised for a single instant on the far bank. But at that very moment the line of tuskers burst out of the tangled undergrowth and the tiger jumped down into the nullah again.

Then like a flash it leaped into sight over the near bank, bounding in a furious charge straight at Badshah. Noreen held her breath as it crouched to spring. Dermot's rifle was at his shoulder, and he pressed the trigger. There was a click—the cartridge had missed fire. And the tiger sprang full at the man.

But as it did so Badshah swung swiftly round—well for Noreen that she was securely fastened—for he had been standing a little sideways. And with an upward sweep of his head he caught the leaping tiger in mid-air on the point of his tusk, hurling it back a dozen yards.

As the baffled brute struck the ground with a heavy