And thou shalt grope at noonday.-The
Bible.
Jan Cuxson, hurt to the quick at Leonie’s
refusal to marry him, also at her rejection of his
offer to accompany her upon her travels, shut his
hurt away, and set his mind to the completion of his
task.
His suspicions had been aroused by
the finding of that orange and silver scrap of sari
near the temple, when the ayah had presumably been
left miles behind on the launch; and fully realising
the futility of employing the methods of the West
against the subtlety of the East he decided to pit
native craft against native cunning.
The only result of the investigation,
however, was that Leonie’s present ayah had
been traced back via the Ranee’s house to the
days when she had been in the service of the Colonel-Sahib
Hetth, V.C., but beyond that was a blank wall.
She had suddenly left the Ranee’s
service to become body-woman to Leonie; without a
single reference to the time when she had been nurse
to Leonie as a baby.
Who was keeping her silent, and why?
And what was she doing, and who was she with in the
deserted temple in the jungle?
Whose tool was she?
Certainly not the Ranee’s.
She was wrapped up in her duties toward the fast
ageing Rajah, and her only son, who seemed much the
same as other sons of princes.
Having finally decided that the answer
to the problem lay in the temple, to the temple he
decided to go, more with the intention of having a
look round than with any definite plan.
The decision was made with the fixed
though unspoken determination that if the solving
of the problem should involve a sojourn of ten years
in India, for ten years he would remain.
He hired a guide and a coolie, both
of whom looked exactly like any other guide and coolie,
and having much to think out, and sure thinking being
anything but a rapid process with him, also because
he did not wish to draw too much attention to his
movements, he chose as a means of conveyance the ugly
flat-bottomed public paddle-boat which floats unconcernedly
down the Hoogli from Calcutta, through the bigger creeks
of the Sunderbunds, and up the Pusaka River to Kulna.
If you want a few days’ rest,
or time in which to unravel a knot, pray take that
means of locomotion; you can be dropped anywhere into
a nukur or native boat which will deposit you
for a few annas on any island you choose, but don’t
do it if you are in a hurry, or are filled with a
desire to see the lesser creeks, and the quite small
ones, where tigers are supposed to sit in rows upon
the water’s edge, monkeys to swing across the
water by means of the creepers interlacing the dark
and dismal trees, and crocodiles to lie in tumbled
masses waiting to be turned into portmanteau, dressing-case,
or shoes.
Cuxson’s method and brain were
rather like his gait; as he had said in Rockham cove,
he was slow! He could not and never had,
even at Harrow, been able to run a hundred yards without
becoming most uncomfortably blown; but he could walk
anyone to death at a set plodding steady tramp, accomplishing
twenty miles without turning a hair; while after a
series of terrific spurts, and enforced periods of
rest, his companions would give up dishevelled, sweating,
and unpleasantly mortified miles away from the desired
goal.
Problems, mathematical or medical,
were treated in just the same way. The more brilliant
of his fellow-students would seize upon a pen, fill
reams of paper and slap the result down triumphantly
at the end of an hour, to find themselves later, and
again with mortification at the bottom of the list,
or not on it at all; whereas Cuxson, after hours of
searching here and there in the convolutions of his
grey matter, would light on a thread, a grain or a
speck of dust which he would proceed to turn inside
out, or tear to pieces; the outcome of which process
would be printed at length in the Lancet or
some such-enlivening journal.
So he lay on the long chair in the
corner reserved for sahibs, and was not too uncomfortable,
nor in any way uneasy as to the result of his investigations,
although all that he had to build his hopes upon was
the word of a native, and a piece of orange silk picked
out in silver with the dust of a sundri breather adhering,
which lay in his pocketbook with a ring of seaweed,
and some glistening strands of tawny hair.
The serang, meanwhile, parleyed with
certain gatherers of golaputtah which is a
special palm leaf growing in the Sunderbunds for the
express purpose of thatching boats and suapatti
huts; and having discussed the ins and outs, and pros
and cons of the situation with every male upon the
boat, had transferred the sahib with his guide and
coolie to a native boat, after a gratifying give and
take in silver rupees which are so much nicer to handle
than dirty notes.
And an old priest made sacrifice of
a black kid unto his god, having been apprised in
the mysterious native way of the approaching arrival
of the last person on earth he wished to see.