Transcriber's Notes:

1. Page scan source:

http://books.google.com/books?id=OmcpAQAAIAAJ
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IN THE PERMANENT WAY

In the

Permanent Way

BY

FLORA ANNIE STEEL

AUTHOR OF "ON THE FACE OF THE WATERS," ETC.

New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd.
1897

All rights reserved

Copyright, 1897,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Set up and electrotyped, October, 1897.
Reprinted November, 1897.

Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing & Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

CONTENTS

Shub'rât.

In the Permanent Way.

On the Second Story.

Glory-of-Woman.

At the Great Durbar.

The Blue-throated God.

A Tourist Ticket.

The King's Well.

Uma Himavutee.

Young Lochinvar.

A Bit of Land.

The Sorrowful Hour.

A Danger Signal.

Amor Vincit Omnia.

The Wings of a Dove.

The Swimmers.

The Fakeer's Drum.

At Her Beck and Call.

Music Hath Charms.

SHUB'RÂT

I

The church-gong hung from the level branch of a spreading sirus tree, whence the slight breeze of dawn, rustling the dry pods of a past summer and stirring the large soft puff-blossoms of the present, seemed to gather up a faint whisper and a fainter perfume to be upborne into space--further and further and further--by the swelling sound-waves of the gong as it vibrated to old Deen Mahomed's skilful stroke.

More like a funeral knell, this, calling the dead to forgetfulness, than a cheerful summons of the living to give thanks for life, for creation and preservation. You could hear each mellow note quiver into silence, before--loud and full with a sort of hollow boom--the great disc of bronze shook once more to its own resounding noise; seeming in its agitation to feel the strangeness of the task more than the striker; though, to say sooth, few things in earth or heaven were more incongruous than this church chime and the man who rang it. For Deen Mahomed, as his name implies, was of the faith of Islâm; fierce-featured, hawk-eyed, with the nameless look of his race; a look suiting the curved sword he wore, in virtue of his office as watchman, better than the brass badge slung over his shoulder proclaiming him to be a member of the Indian Church Establishment--that alien Church in an alien land.

And yet the old man's figure fitted close with the building he guarded; for despite the new title of St. John's-in-the-Wilderness, the church remained outwardly what it had been built to be--a Mahomedan tomb. Its white dome and corner cupolas rose familiarly into the blue sky beyond the sirus trees, where, even at this early hour, a hint of coming heat was to be seen in a certain pallidness and hardness. Within, beneath that central dome, encircled now by pious Christian texts, lay buried a champion of another God, whose name, interlaced into a thousand delicate traceries, still formed the decoration of each architrave, each screen; lay buried, let us hope, beyond sight or sound of what went on above his helplessness.

How this change had come about is of no moment to the story. Such things have been, nay, are, in India, seeming in truth more fantastic when set down in pen and ink