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Updated: June 19, 2025
A hand-lamp on the mantelpiece diffused a yellow twilight through the room; a twilight flavoured with kerosine: and across the twilight the shadow of the punkah flitted, like a whispering ghost. Zyarulla, crouching at the bedside, slid a cautious knotted hand between the buttons of the sleeping-coat, and laid it lightly on his master's heart.
"The Captain Sahib where is he?" Richardson demanded in the vernacular. "At Desmond Sahib's bungalow for dinner. By eleven o'clock he returneth. Your Honour will await his coming?" "Decidedly." Zyarulla turned up the lamp, and proceeded to set whisky, soda-water, and a tumbler among his master's scattered papers.
Among the verandah roof-beams, three grey squirrels argued, with subdued chitterings, over a kipper's head stolen from a breakfast plate; and at intervals a piteous wailing came from the servants' quarters, where, as all knew, Nizam Din, kitmutgar, was beating his pretty wife, Miriam Bibi, for the third time that week, because she had grown careless in the matter of covering her face, since the coming of Zyarulla, whose arrogant magnificence had created a flutter in more than one respectable household.
The man from Yasin salaamed and departed; but at the tent door Zyarulla paused, a glitter of triumph in his eyes. "Captain Sahib, was it well done?" "Excellently done," Lenox answered, smiling. "Thou art worth thy weight in tobacco of the first quality!"
Zyarulla salaamed profoundly; and Desmond, dropping with fatigue, flung himself, even as he was, on to a chair-bed in the adjoining dressing-room, and slept the dreamless sleep of exhaustion. Before six he was over at Meredith's bungalow, sitting on the edge of his wife's bed, drinking tea with an egg in it, her own prescription, and enjoying her delight at his news.
And throughout the night he worked, and smoked, and finally slept as he had not slept since the Bachelors' Ball. Before dawn he was up, and out: a gun on his shoulder, field-glasses slung across his back. He had given orders for a party of beaters to be requisitioned, in his name, from the Rajah's camp; and Zyarulla could be trusted to see to it that he should not starve.
I must send Zyarulla off at once to get my traps together. It means starting first thing." She looked at him in surprise. "Yes. But not you, surely. You're hardly fit for duty yet." "Nonsense. Barring my arm, I'm fit for anything. And if we're in for cholera, I don't see myself leaving Dick to handle the Battery without me." "You're bound to ask Dr O'Malley's permission, though."
To force his little contingent forward in the face of such news seemed nothing less than murder and suicide of an elevated type. But Lenox, gritting his teeth on a curse, despatched Zyarulla in search of more precise information, and ordered his tent to be set up without delay.
In that first moment of consciousness he understood why men of proven honour and courage have been known to take liberties with the laws of life and death. Zyarulla, entering soundlessly, set down the chota hassri on a small table at his master's elbow without betraying his surprise and concern by so much as the flicker of an eyelash.
"Not that I know of. But Zyarulla will shake things down in no time." "All the same, as your luggage is handy, why not stop on here? You'd be uncommonly welcome; and I know Honor would be glad to keep an eye on you for a while longer." The invitation, given on the spur of the moment, took Lenox aback. "But, my good chap, . . . you've got Wyndham coming over." "Yes. Thank God.
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