LITMIR.BIZ

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'To cover what?'

      'You.'

      'What do you mean?' she inquired, with a look in her eyes which made him uncomfortable.

      'The Indian Government allows no one to remain in the State without a definite purpose. I couldn't tell Colonel Nolan that I had come courting you, could I?'

      'I don't know. But you could have avoided taking the Maharajah's money to carry out this--this plan. An honest man would have avoided that.'

      'Oh, look here!' exclaimed Tarvin.

      'How could you cheat the King into thinking that there was a reason for your work, how could you let him give you the labour of a thousand men, how could you take his money? O Nick!'

      He gazed at her for a vacant and hopeless minute. 'Why, Kate,' he exclaimed, 'do you know you are talking of the most stupendous joke the Indian empire has witnessed since the birth of time?'

      This was pretty good, but it was not good enough. He plunged for a stronger hold as she answered, with a perilous little note of breakdown in her voice, 'You make it worse.'

      'Well, your sense of humour never was your strongest point, you know, Kate.' He took the seat next her, leaned over and took her hand, as he went on. 'Doesn't it strike you as rather amusing, though, after all, to rip up half a state to be near a very small little girl--a very sweet, very extra lovely little girl, but still a rather tiny little girl in proportion to the size of the Amet valley? Come--doesn't it?'

      'Is that all you have to say?' asked she. Tarvin turned pale. He knew the tone off finality he heard in her voice; it went with a certain look of scorn when she spoke of any form of moral baseness that moved her. He recognised his condemnation in it and shuddered. In the moment that passed, while he still kept silence, he recognised this for the crisis of his life. Then he took strong hold of himself, and said quietly, easily, unscrupulously--

      'Why, you don't suppose that I'm not going to ask the Maharajah for his bills do you?'

      She gasped a little. Her acquaintance with Tarvin did not help her to follow his dizzying changes of front. His bird's skill to make his level flight, his reeling dips and circling returns upon himself, all seem part of a single impulse, must ever remain confusing to her. But she rightly believed in his central intention to do the square thing, if he could find out what it was; and her belief in his general strength helped her not to see at this moment that he was deriving his sense of the square thing from herself. She could not know, and probably could not have imagined, how little his own sense of the square thing had to do with any system of morality, and how entirely he must always define morality as what pleased Kate. Other women liked confections; she preferred morality, and he meant she should have it, if he had to turn pirate to get it for her.

      'You didn't think I wasn't paying for the show?' he pursued bravely; but in his heart he was saying, 'She loathes it. She hates it. Why didn't I think; why didn't I think?' He added aloud, 'I had my fun, and now I've got you. You're both cheap at the price, and I'm going, to step up and pay it like a little man. You must know that!'

      His smile met no answering smile. He mopped his forehead and stared anxiously at her. All the easiness in the world couldn't make him sure what she would say next. She said nothing, and he had to go on desperately, with a cold fear gathering about his heart. 'Why, it's just like me, isn't it, Kate, to work a scheme on the old Maharajah? It's like a man who owns a mine that's turning out $2000 a month, to rig a game out in this desert country to do a confiding Indian Prince out of a few thousand rupees?' He advanced this recently inspired conception of his conduct with an air of immemorial familiarity, born of desperation.

      'What mine?' she asked, with dry lips.

      'The "Lingering Lode," of course. You've heard me speak of it?'

      'Yes, but I didn't know----'

      'That it was doing that? Well, it is--right along. Want to see the assay?'

      'No,' she answered. 'No. But that makes you----Why, but, Nick, that makes you----'

      'A rich man? Moderately, while the lead holds out. Too rich for petty larceny, I guess.'

      He was joking for his life. The heart-sickening seriousness of his unseriousness was making a hole in his head; the tension was too much for him. In the mad fear of that moment his perceptions doubled their fineness. Something went through him as he said 'larceny.' Then his heart stopped. A sure, awful, luminous perception leaped upon him, and he knew himself for lost.

      If she hated this, what would she say to the other? Innocent, successful, triumphant, even gay it seemed to him; but what to her? He turned sick.

      Kate or the Naulahka. He must choose. The Naulahka or Kate?

      'Don't make light of it,' she was saying. 'You would be just as honest if you couldn't afford it, Nick. Ah,' she went on, laying her hand on his lightly, in mute petition for having even seemed to doubt him, 'I know you, Nick! You like to make the better seem the worse reason; you like to pretend to be wicked. But who is so honest? O Nick! I knew you had to be true. If you weren't, everything else would be wrong.'

      He took her in his arms. 'Would it, little girl?' he asked, looking down at her. 'We must keep the other things right, then, at any expense.'

      He heaved a deep sigh as he stooped and kissed her.

      'Have you such a thing as a box?' he asked, after a long pause.

      'Any sort of box?' asked Kate bewilderedly.

      'No--well, it ought to be the finest box in the world, but I suppose one of those big grape boxes will do. It isn't every day that one sends presents to a queen.'

      Kate handed him a large chip box in which long green grapes from Kabul had been packed. Discoloured cotton wool lay at the bottom.

      'That was sold at the door the other day,' she said. 'Is it big enough?'

      Tarvin turned away without answering, emptied something that clicked like a shower of pebbles upon the wool, and sighed deeply: Topaz was in that box. The voice of the Maharaj Kunwar lifted itself from the next room.

      'Tarvin Sahib--Kate, we have eaten all the fruit, and now we want to do something else.'

      'One moment, little man,' said Tarvin. With his back still toward Kate, he drew his hand caressingly, for the last time, over the blazing heap at the bottom of the box, fondling the stones one by one. The great green emerald pierced him, he thought, with a reproachful gaze. A mist crept into his eyes the diamond was too bright. He shut the lid down upon the box hastily, and put it into Kate's hands with a decisive gesture; he made her hold it while he tied it in silence. Then, in a voice not his, he asked her to take the box to Sitabhai with his compliments. 'No,' he continued, seeing the alarm in her eyes. 'She won't--she daren't hurt you now. Her child's coming along with us; and I'll go with you, of course, as far as I can. Glory be, it's the last journey that you'll ever undertake in this infernal land. The last but one, that's to say. We live at high pressure in Rhatore--too high pressure for me. Be quick, if you love me.'

      Kate hastened, to put on her helmet, while Tarvin amused the two princes by allowing them to, inspect his revolver, and promising at some more fitting season to shoot as many coins as they should demand. The lounging escort at the door was suddenly scattered by. a trooper from without, who flung his horse desperately through their ranks, shouting, 'A letter for Tarvin Sahib!'

      Tarvin stepped into the verandah, took a crumpled half-sheet of paper from the outstretched hand, and read these words, traced painfully and laboriously in an unformed round hand:--

      'DEAR MR. TARVIN--Give me the boy and keep the other thing. Your affectionate FRIEND.'

      Tarvin chuckled and thrust the note into his waistcoat pocket. 'There is no answer,' he said--and to himself: 'You're a thoughtful girl, Sitabhai, but I'm afraid you're just a little too thoughtful. That boy's wanted for the next halfhour. Are you ready, Kate?'

      The princes lamented loudly when they were told that Tarvin was riding over to the palace at once, and

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