Flora Annie Steel

“ They had come on early that morning, the father on his way further afield, the mother and child to remain in the little bungalow till his return. Then all in a minute the accident; and then the only servant had been sent forth wildly for help whilst the wretched woman waited alone. Yes! that must have been it. So clear, so simple, so awful in its very simplicity.
There was not a sound in the house save at intervals the woman's moan, “Will no one ever come! Oh, God! will no one ever come!” and always distinct above it the child's gasping sigh with a soft rattle in it. ”

“ The memory of Phooli-jân came back to me as she had sat in the sunshine nodding and beckoning.
"Phooli-jân?" echoed the old patriarch who came out to welcome me as I crossed the plank bridge to the village. "Phooli-jân, the herd-girl? Huzoor, she is dead; she died from picking flowers, A vain thing. It was at the turn beyond the murg, Huzoor, half-way between Chuchchu's hut and Goloo's drying stage. There is a big rhododendron tree hanging over the cliff, and she fell down. It must be three years gone." ”

“ Would it be bungalow Number Two, at noon, I wondered? As there were five patrol houses in all, it would most likely be Two, or Four; but if I liked any of the others better I could easily find some excuse for getting rid of the servant.
This may seem unnatural, but I was really quite mad with a sort of rage and spite against everything and everybody; so utterly absorbed in myself that I felt as if I were taking a revenge on life by quitting it. My own pain being the axis of the universe, the world must surely be the loser by its removal. ”

“ How interminable the sunlight! Ah! would no one shut out the light, and why did Sonnie move his hand——?
"Huzoor! salaam!"
Oh! God in heaven! were they going? Was the door closing? Was the blessed darkness coming?
It was utter darkness as, her strength giving way, she fell on her knees beside the bed, burying her face upon her children, her husband.
"Will! Will!" she whispered. ”

“ A shuffle in the bushes made the lovers pause; a curious shuffle such as a wounded bird makes in its efforts to escape.
"If the most noble will tarry, this slave will at least make the luck-offering to the bride," came the voice again, and to point its meaning the delicate brown hand held up a circular shallow basket heaped with rose-petals—heaped so lightly that the hand held it level, and it seemed to glide on the top of the bushes, heralding the grizzled head which slid after it with a faintly undulating movement. ”

“ Bannerman's body was never found; but some months after, when I was inspecting foundations, I heard the kingfisher's cry, and the familiar cloop of a dive at the further side of the pier. Then Sambo, Rudra, Nilkunta—whatever you please to call him—showed his yellow-brown face above the yellow-brown flood bearing a ring in his mouth. A Palais Royal affair—two diamond hearts transfixed by a ruby arrow.
I had seen Bannerman wear it a hundred times, but I had never seen the inscription engraved inside.
“Thy lips, oh! beloved Life, are nectar.” ”

“ I said, pointing to a patch of green sword-leaves, where the white and lilac blossoms were beginning to show.
She gave a perceptible shudder.
"What? Sit on a grave! Not I. Does not the Huzoor know that those are graves? It is true. All our people are buried here. We plant the iris over them always. If you ask why, I know not. It is the flower of death."
A sudden determination to paint her, the Flowerful Life against the Flowerful Death, completely obliterated the knowledge of my own incompetence; but I urged and bribed in vain. Phooli-jân would not stir. ”

“ The Honourable John Dacre and Tonio were chief mourners at the funeral. The former brought a magnificent wreath of lilies to lay on the little heap of new-turned earth whence, for a time, the black wooden cross had disappeared; but Tonio stuck to a two-lire offering of immortelles. They would last longer, he said, and the dear dead were always content in Paradise; even the Signorina would not care now what lay above her and her brother. ”

“ I had to ride twenty miles to headquarters that night, and be back by dawn if poor Graham was to find decent Christian burial.
The doctor, too, was anxious to be off, knowing that he might be required else where at any moment. Just as we were starting a thought struck me, and I went once more into the room where the dead man lay. The chicks had been tied up, and the four faintly glimmering squares of the windows only served to show the dark beyond. Night had fallen, and the heavy clouds seemed to smother all breath of life in the world. ”

“ So I did what I do ever when life and death are at issue, when even the mighty skill of medicine has to stand on one side and do nothing.
"I took my stylus and I wrote all over that paper the attributes of the Most High—His mercy. His truth. His wisdom. His great loving-kindness. And then, Huzoor, I crushed it into the form of a bolus, I covered it with silver foil, and swallowed it as a pill.
"It hath done me much good. I am now free from anxiety. The decision of all things rests with the Most Mighty." ”

“ His face was pale as death, his hands twitched nervously, but in the semi-darkness his eyes blazed, his chin looked square and set.
"No, sir," he said quietly; "this is my chance. Look here! I ran and hid in the passage-way when the others died like men. I couldn't help it. Perhaps if they had had the chance I had—but that's nothing—nothing! I heard—I understand their lingo. They don't know you're here, sir—only a man—let me be a man—for once. It is my chance!" ”

“ Then with his strong hands he broke the loaves in pieces, and gave a portion to each kneeling trooper with the words: "Take, eat, and live for King and country."
So he strained the wondering child to his breast, and kissed and blessed him.
"It is such as thou that make us invincible, child," he said briefly, as, mounting his horse, he gave the word of command. There was a jingling through the mist, and little Marko was alone.
He did not understand, altogether, but his hero—his name-hero—had bidden him give the blackbirds bread, and he had obeyed. ”

“ A faint curiosity came to her worn face.
“It's funny you should say so—just as if you had seen our Dot. So like—so wonderfully like. Sometimes it seems as if she had come back again, yet it is five and twenty years since I lost her.”
“That is a long time.”
“A long, long time to remember, isn't it? And I've had so many and lost so many. But I never forgot Dot—she was so pretty! Ah, well! I daresay it would have been against her, poor lamb. 'Favour is deceitful and beauty is vain.'”
She lulled the child on her lap to deeper slumber with a gentle rocking. ”

“ They did not, anyhow; but as they passed the door the girl's muslin flounce caught hard on its lintel hasp, and as in frantic haste she stooped to rip it free, the scent of those rose-leaves Hushmut had given her, still lingering in the ruffles at her breast, seemed to pass straight back into those same rose-leaves in his own.
That was all. Nothing more. But it brought back his last words to her: "May He who knows the secret of the rose protect the bride!" ”

“ One might as well fish with that ridiculous fetish at once,” came Bannerman's jeering voice. “What was it Chuckerbutty drivelled about? eight attributes—tall order for any god. Well! here they go. No, Sambo, you may keep one—the soul of a man, if there be such a thing.”
He had torn off seven of the crab's legs, leaving three; two of them the nipping claws, which, with gaping jaws, swayed about seeking reprisals.
“There! take your offering, Siva! snakes, and souls, and all!” He flung the maimed creature full in the idol's face as we sculled past it. I shall never forget Sambo's look. ”

“ There was that indefinable tone of conviction in her voice which comes with the constant repetition of any formula of faith.
"I suppose one must," replied Jack Dacre politely, though it was years since he had been of those who recess at Easter. The recollection made him return to his previous occupation of frowning out of the window at a blank wall, though you cannot expect a view, even at Monte Carlo, in a four-lire pension! Not that he would have cared for one, his chief wants in life being a cheap bed and breakfast, and proximity to a gambling-table. ”

“ Dear Mother,—It has come at last! I always knew it must come if you would make a soldier of me, just because my father was one! Why didn't you think? Why didn't you know? Poor mother! I'm sorry to write all this. How could you dream I have felt more or less a coward all my life when he was so brave? ”

“ One, darker and cooler than the rest, lay eastward of the solitary kikar tree. Here it was that the little grave was to be dug if the mother's wish were fulfilled. Quite mechanically I strolled to the spot impelled by sad curiosity.
As I approached, the fragments of a low railing, half-standing, half-lying, in a small oblong, made me wonder if the inclosure had already been a resting-place. That might account for the mother's wish. Yes! there was a grave; a tiny grave no bigger than little Dot's would be, with a roughly-hewn cross as a headstone. ”

“ Out of the yellow-brown flood a grave yellow-brown face crowned by a curious brass pot not unlike a tiara, then two yellow-brown arms, reminding me unpleasantly of snakes, curved up in the overhead stroke as the swimmer slipped down to where a rope hung from one of the huge ribs. He swarmed up it like a monkey, to sit still as a carven image on the outermost buttress of the pier. ”

“ Windows set wide open to the summer air, let in the noisy vitality of London streets, yet memory grasped many of us with her resistless hand, leading us back to silent, solitary days when the punkah throbbed intermittently in darkened rooms, and we sat wondering—more with a vague curiosity than fear—what havoc the cholera fiend was wreaking outside in the blaze of yellow sunlight. ”

“ She had meant to ask Tonio; but it would be far nicer if he did not mind, for he was one of themselves, as it were, and Charley had always been so sensitive.
Jack Dacre found the suicide's grave this time. There was a dead two-lire wreath hanging on one of the arms of the plain black cross, and he felt uncertain whether to say it was good enough for the memory of the man who lay underneath it, or admire himself for the superior merits of the new one which had prevented him from paying his bill! For, naturally, a man must have a margin for cigarettes and absinth! ”

“ He was so long settling himself in a chair, pulling up his trousers in his careful economical way, and poking the fire that our attention had begun to waver, when his opening words startled us into renewed curiosity.
“I don't suppose,” he began, “that any of you know I am a widower; but I am. My wife died a year after our marriage; and the child too—a girl. If you search the whole wide world through you won't find a more desolate creature than a boy of two-and-twenty coming back alone in a strange country from the grave of his wife and child. ”

“ If it had been the darkness of Egypt I had no choice but to follow, and half an hour afterwards I was stumbling along after Sambo. Even by daylight the hills, heat cracked, rain seared, strewn with sharp rocks, were bad walking; on a dark, hot night, with the snakes' eyes gleaming from the stones, horrible—most horrible. The straight fingers of the stiff candelabra bushes pointing up and up, the gnarled stunted trees growing into strange shapes, reminding one involuntarily of those antediluvian animals whose bones lie buried all along the Siwaliks. ”