Ghosts by Gaslight - Jack Dann [82]
Yule’s health gave way quite seriously in the spring of 1859 and he took himself home to Scotland for a rest. His older brother George, who had not been out of India for thirty years, went with him. They were gone three months. Since the voyage out and the voyage back took a month each, that left them only a month at home, but he returned greatly invigorated, only to be much distressed and angered by the news that Smithers and Brewster were still unaccounted for.
From time to time the Adjutant’s daughter came to inquire about her fiancé. Of course I had no news for her.
“I love him so!” she cried.
The poor girl.
THEN ONE DAY there was a stir in town, as there often is when a caravan from some distant place arrives, and shortly thereafter Brewster presented himself at my office at the Public Works Department. Not Brewster and Smithers: just Brewster.
I scarcely recognized him. He was decked out not in his usual khakis but in some bizarre native garb, very colorful and strange, flowing robes of rose, magenta, turquoise blue, but that was not the least of the change. The Brewster I had seen off, the year before, had been dark-haired and youthful, perhaps thirty-two years old at most. The man I saw before me now looked forty-five or even fifty. There were prominent streaks of gray in his thick black hair, and the underlying bony structure of his cheeks and chin seemed to have shifted about to some degree, and there was a network of fine lines radiating outward from the corners of his eyes that no man of thirty-two should have had. His posture had changed, too: I remembered him as upright and straight-backed, but he had begun to stoop a little, as tall men sometimes do with the years, and his shoulders seemed rounded and hunched in a way I did not recall. My first thought, which in retrospect shows an amazing lack of insight, was merely that the journey must have been a very taxing one.
“Welcome, old friend,” I said. And then I said, carefully, “And Smithers—?”
Brewster gave me a weary stare. “He is still there.”
“Ah,” I said. And again: “Ah.”
Brewster’s reply could have meant anything: that Smithers had found something so fascinating that he needed more time for research, that he had fallen under the sway of some native cult and was wandering naked and ash-smeared along the ghats of Benares, or that he had perished on the journey and lay buried somewhere in the desert. But I asked no questions.
“Let me send for Yule,” I said. “He will want to hear your story.”
There had been a change in Yule’s appearance, too, since Brewster’s departure. He too had grown bowed and stooped and gray, but in his case that was no surprise, for he was nearly forty and his health had never been strong. But it was impossible not to notice Yule’s reaction at the great alteration Brewster had undergone. Indeed, Brewster now looked older than Yule himself.
“Well,” said Yule, and waited.
And Brewster began to tell his tale.
THEY HAD SET forth in the grandest of moods, Brewster said. Smithers was almost always exuberant and enthusiastic, and it had ever been Brewster’s way, although he was of a different basic temperament, readily to fall in with his friend’s customarily jubilant frame of mind. It had been their plan to go with the Spring Caravan heading for Aurangabad, but in India everything happens either after time or before time, and in this case the caravan departed before time, so they were on their own. Smithers found horses for them and off they went, westward along the Grand Trunk Road, that great long river-like highway, going back to the sixteenth century and probably to some prehistoric precursor, that carries all traffic through the heart of India.
It is a comfortable road. I have traveled it myself. It is perfectly straight and capably constructed. Trees planted on both sides of it give welcome shade the whole way. The wide, well-made middle road is for the quick traffic, the sahibs on their horses, and the like. It was on that