Read CHAPTER XXXV of Leonie of the Jungle, free online book, by Joan Conquest, on ReadCentral.com.

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.