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- Author: Talbot Mundy
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“I wonder what it all can mean?” McClean sat back and tried to summarize his experiences of months and fit them into what Joanna said.
“What does that mean?” asked his daughter, leaning forward. She was staring at Joanna's forearm and from that to a dull-red patch on the woman's loin-cloth. Joanna answered nothing.
“Are you wounded, Joanna? Are you sure? That's blood! Look here, father!”
He agreed that it was blood. It was dry and it came off her forearm in little flakes when he rubbed it. But not a word could they coax out of Joanna to explain it, until Rosemary—drawing the old woman to her—espied the handle of her knife projecting by an inch above the waist-fold of her cloth. Too late Joanna tried to hide it. Rosemary held her and drew it out. Beyond any shadow of a doubt, there was blood on the blade still, and on the wooden hilt, and caked in the clumsy joint between the hilt and blade.
“'Joanna—have you killed any one?”
Joanna shook her head.
“Tell me the truth, Joanna. Whose blood is that?”
“A dog's, Miss-sahib. A street dog attacked me as I ran hither.”
“I wish I could believe it!”
“I too!” said her father, and he took Joanna to one side and cross-examined her. But he could get no admission from her—nothing but the same statement, with added details each time he made her tell it, that she had killed a dog.
They fed her, and she ate like a hyena. No caste prejudices or forbidden foods troubled her; she ate whatever came her way, Hindoo food, or Mohammedan, or Christian,—and reached for more—and finished, as hyenas finish, by breaking bones to get the marrow out. At midnight they left her, curled dogwise on a mat in the hall, to sleep; and at dawn, when they came to wake her, she was gone again—gone utterly, without a trace or sign of explanation. The doors, both front and back, were locked.
It was two days later when they found a hole torn through the thatch, through which she had escaped; and though they searched the house from cellar up to roof, and turned all their small possessions over, they could not find (and they were utterly glad of it) that she had stolen anything.
“Thank God for that!” said the missionary.
“I've finished disbelieving in Joanna!” said his daughter with a grimace that went always with irrevocable decision.
“I've come to the conclusion,” said McClean, “that there are more than just Joanna to be trusted. There is Ali Partab, and—who knows how many?”
CHAPTER XVII Against all fear; against the weight of what, For lack of worse name, men miscall the Law; Against the Tyranny of Creed; against the hot, Foul Greed of Priest, and Superstition's Maw; Against all man-made Shackles, and a man-made Hell— Alone—At last—Unaided— I REBEL!
No single, individual circumstance, but a chain of happenings in very quick succession, brought about a climax, forcing the hand of Howrah and his brother and for the moment drawing the McCleans, father and daughter, into the toothed wheel of Indian action. As usual in India, the usual brought about the unexpected, and the unexpected fitted strangely into the complex, mysteriously worked-out whole.
Two days after Joanna left the mission house, through a hole made in the thatch, the spirit of revolt took hold of Rosemary McClean again. The stuffy, narrow quarters—the insolent, doubled, unexplained, but very obvious, guard that lounged outside—the sense of rank injustice and helplessness—the weird feeling of impending horror added onto stale-grown ghastliness—youth, chafing at the lack of liberty—stirred her to action.
Without a word to her father, who was writing reports that seemed endless at the little desk by the shaded window, she left the house—drew with a physical effort on all her reserve of strength and health—faced the scorching afternoon wind, as though it were a foe that could shrink away before her courage, and walked, since she had no pony now, in any direction in which chance or her momentary whim might care to lead her.
“I won't cry again—and I won't submit—and I'll see what happens!” she told herself; and the four who followed her at a none-too-respectful distance—two of the Maharajah's men in uniform and two shabby-looking ruffians of Jaimihr's—grinned as they scented action. Like their masters they bore no love for one another; they were there now, in fact, as much to watch one another as the missionaries; they detected the possibility of an excuse to be at one another's throats, and gloated as they saw two messengers, one of either side, run off in a hurry to inform the rival camps.
It was neither plan nor conscious selection that led Rosemary McClean toward the far end of the maidan, where the sluggish, narrow, winding Howrah River sucked slimily beside the burning ghats. When she realized where her footsteps were leading her she would have turned in horror and retreated, for even a legitimately roasting corpse that died before the Hindoo priests had opportunity to introduce it to the flames is no sight for eyes that are civilized.
But, when she turned her head, the sight of her hurrying escort perspiring in her wake—(few natives like the heat and wind one whit better than their conquerors)—filled her with an unexpected, probably unjustifiable, determination not to let them see her flinch at any kind of horror. That was the spirit of sahibdom that is not always quite commendable; it is the spirit that takes Anglo-Saxon women to the seething, stenching plains and holds them there high-chinned to stiffen their men-folk by courageous example, but it leads, too, to things not quite so womanly and good.
“I'll show them!” muttered Rosemary McClean, wiping the blown dust from her eyes and facing the wind again that now began to carry with it the unspread taint—the awful, sickening, soul-revolting smell inseparable from Hindoo funeral rites. There were three pyres, low-smouldering, close by the river-bank, and men stirred with long poles among the ashes to make sure that the incineration started the evening before should be complete; there was one pyre that looked as though it had been lit long after dawn—another newly lit—and there were two pyres building.
It was those two new ones that held her attention, and finally decided her to hold her course. She wanted to make sure. The smell of burning—the unoutlined, only guessed-at ghastliness—would probably have killed her courage yet, before she came close enough to really see; but the suspicion of a greater horror drew her on, as snakes are said to draw birds on, by merely being snakes, and with red-rimmed eyes smarting from smoke as well as wind she pressed forward.
The ghats were deserted-looking, for the funeral rites of those
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