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"Your hand.... Mine is cold? No? I fancied it was," said the man drowsily. And later: "Sophia. You will be kind to her, David?" "On my faith!" Rutton's fingers tightened cruelly upon his, then relaxed suddenly. He began to nod, his chin drooping toward his breast. "The Gateway ... the Bell...." The words were no more than whispers dying on lips that stilled as they spoke.
The heavy brown hand returned to the spot it had sought soon after the babu's entrance, within the folds of silk across his bosom, and groped therein for an instant. "Even here," he iterated with a maddening manner of supreme self-complacency, producing the bronze box and waddling over to drop it into Rutton's hand. "My lord is satisfied?" he gurgled maliciously.
"No Englishman incapable of living up to a disguise has ever tried it more than once in India; few, very few, have lived to tell of the experiment." "You're connected with the police?" Amber's brows contracted as he remembered Rutton's emphatic prohibition. But Quain had not failed to mention that. "Officially, no," said Labertouche readily.
The Virginian stood over him for several minutes before he could bring himself to the point of awakening the man to the news of Rutton's death. Aware of that steadfast loyalty which Doggott had borne his master through many years of service, he shrank with conceivable reluctance from the duty. But necessity drove him with a taut rein; and finally he bent over and shook the sleeper by the shoulder.
In one corner near Rutton's trunk, a bed-hammock swung from a beam. The few chairs were plain and rude. There were two deal tables, a plate-rack nailed to the partition, and a wall-seat in the chimney-corner. On the centre table, aside from the lamp, were a couple of books, some out-of-date magazines, and a common tin alarm-clock ticking stolidly.
"What have you ever really known about me, David, save that I am myself?" "Well when you put it that way little enough nothing." Amber laughed nervously, disconcerted. "And I? Who and what am I?" No answer was expected so much was plain from Rutton's tone; he was talking to himself more than addressing his guest.
"I knew 'e was tryin' to dodge somethin', sir; but 'e never told me aught about it. What kind of a person was 'e, sir, and what made Mr. Rutton go aw'y with 'im?" "He didn't; he went after him to...." Amber caught his tongue on the verge of an indiscretion; no matter what his fears, they were not yet become a suitable subject for discussion with Rutton's servant.
When he had himself in more control Amber told him as briefly as possible of the head at the window and of its sequel Rutton's despairing suicide. Doggott listened in silence, nodding his comprehension. "I've always looked for it, sir," he commented.
Where in Rutton's bearing burned an inextinguishable, almost an insolent pride, beneath an ice-like surface of self-constraint, in Amber's one detected merely quiet consciousness of strength and breeding his inalienable heritage from many generations of Anglo-Saxon forebears; and while Rutton continually betrayed, by look or tone or gesture, a birthright of fierce passions savagely tamed, from Amber one seldom obtained a hint of aught but the broad and humourous tolerance of an American gentleman.
Rutton's instructions had, moreover, been explicit upon one point: Amber was to enter India only by the port of Calcutta.
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