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The faces of two women stood out vividly against the misty formless void before his eyes: the face of Naraini and that of Sophia Farrell. He looked from one to the other, stupidly contrasting them, trying to determine which was the lovelier, until their features blurred and ran together and the two became as one and ...
And Naraini, the herd-girl, will hang her head and cover her dusky face with her rag of a veil, if you put the question to her; or little Ram Jas shake his bald shaven poll in denial; but not one of the dark-skinned, bare-limbed village children will yield to your request for a story.
"So I have told thee," she assented equably. "He will come, because Naraini bids him." "It may be so. If not, another lure shall draw him." She started with annoyance. "The Englishwoman of the picture?" "Have I named her?" He lifted his heavy brows in affected surprise. "Nay, but " "Secret for secret," he offered: "mine for thine. Is it a bargain, O Pearl of Khandawar?"
He twisted brutally the wrist that held the weapon, and the woman dropped it with a cry of pain. "You would!" he cried, and threw her from him, putting a foot upon the pistol. She reeled back against the wall and crouched there, trembling, her cheeks on fire, her eyes aflame with rage. "You dog!" she shrilled in Hindi and spat at him like a maddened cat. Then he recognised her. "Naraini!"
He laughed, not quite as successfully as he could have wished, and, "Not I, Naraini," he returned in English: a tongue which seemed somehow better suited for service in combating the esoteric influences at work upon his mind. "What's the next turn on the programme?" "I like not that tone, nor yet that tongue." The woman shivered. "Even as the Eye seeth, my lord, so doth the Ear hear.
The eunuch bowed submissively to his demand to be shown out, and silently led him down through the echoing marble corridors and galleries of the many-tiered palace. They took a different way from that by which Amber had ascended; had his life depended on it, he could not have found his way back to the garden of Naraini, but by accident.
Rowan and Labertouche leaped forward and fell short, so lightning swift she moved; only Amber stood between her and her vengeance. Choking with horror, he put the girl behind him with a resistless hand, and took Naraini to his arms. "Ah, hast thou changed thy mind, Beloved?"
As he disappeared the disturbance abated somewhat. "False alarm," Amber guessed. "I fancy not," said Labertouche. "If I'm not mistaken our friend Naraini left for the special purpose of raising the hue and cry. This should be the vanguard of the pursuit." Amber looked upward.
"No; he was quite suited to his master. But the bazaar says Naraini took a dislike to him for one reason or another." "Naraini?" queried Amber. "The genius of the place." Raikes nodded toward the Raj Mahal, shining like a pearl through the darkness on the hill-side over against the Residency. "She's Salig's head queen. At least that's about as near to her status as one can get.
A dark hive teeming with the occult life of unnumbered men and women Salig Singh the inscrutable and strong, Naraini the mysterious, whose loveliness lived a fable in the land, and how many thousand others living and dying, working and idling, in joy and sadness, in hatred and love, weaving forever that myriad-stranded web of intrigue which is the life of native palaces ...
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