The White Wolf | Page 9

proposed, had named at random a price which was about
double what he had given for the place. The Rajah closed with the sum
at once, asked him to make a list of everything in the house, and put a
price on whatever he cared to sell. Terrell made a full list, putting what
seemed to him fair prices on most of the furniture, and high ones--
prohibitive he thought--on the sticks he had a fancy to keep. The Rajah
glanced over the paper in his grand manner, and says he, "I'll take it
all." "Stop! stop!" cried Terrell, "I bain't going to let you have the bed I
was married in!" "As you please; we'll strike out the bed, then," the
Rajah answered. That is how he took possession.
Burrator House, as I daresay you know, faces across the Meavy upon
Burrator Wood; and the wood, thanks to Terrell, had always been a
sure draw for a fox. I had tramped over from Tavistock on this
particular morning,--for I was new to the country, a young man looking
around me for a practice, and did not yet possess a horse,--and I sat on
the slope above the house, at the foot of the tor, watching the scene on
the opposite bank. The fixture, always a favourite one, and the Rajah's
hospitality--which was noble, like everything about him--had brought
out a large and brightly-dressed field; and among them, in his black
coat, moved Terrell on a horse twice as good as it looked. He had
ridden over from his new home, and I daresay in the rush of old
associations had forgotten for the while that the familiar place was no
longer his.
The Rajah, a statue of a man, sat on a tall grey at the covert's edge,
directly below me; and from time to time I watched him through my
field-glass. He had lately recovered from a stroke of paralysis, and was
(I am told) the wreck of his old self; but the old fire lived in the ashes.
He sat there, tall, lean, upright as a ramrod, with his eyes turned from

the covert and gazing straight in front, over his horse's ears, on the
rushing Meavy. He had forgotten the hounds; his care for his guests
was at an end; and I wondered what thoughts, what memories of the
East, possessed him. There is always a loneliness about a great man,
don't you think? But I have never felt one to be so terribly--yes,
terribly--alone as the Rajah was that morning among his guests and the
Devonshire tors.
"Every inch a king," said a voice at my elbow, and a little man settled
himself down on the turf beside me. I set down my glasses with a start.
He was a spare dry fellow of about fifty, dressed in what I took for the
working suit of a mechanic. Certainly he did not belong to the moor.
He wore no collar, but a dingy yellow handkerchief knotted about his
throat, and both throat and face were seamed with wrinkles--so thickly
seamed that at first glance you might take them for tattoo-marks; but I
had time for a second, for without troubling to meet my eyes he nodded
towards the Rajah.
"I've cut a day's work and travelled out from Plymouth to get a sight of
him; and I've a wife will pull my hair out when I get home and she
finds I haven't been to the docks to-day; and I've had no breakfast but
thirty grains of opium; but he's worth it."
"Thirty grains of opium!" I stared at him, incredulous. He did not turn,
but, still with his eyes on the valley below us, stretched out a hand. It's
fingers were gnarled, and hooked like a bird's claw, and on the little
finger a ruby flashed in the morning sunlight--not a large ruby, but of
the purest pigeon's-blood shade, and in any case a stone of price.
"You see this? My wife thinks it a sham one, but it's not. And some day,
when I'm drunk or in low water, I shall part with it--but not yet. You've
an eye for it, I see,"--and yet he was not looking towards me,-- "but the
Rajah, yonder, and I are the only two within a hundred miles that can
read what's in the heart of it."
He gazed for a second or two at the stone, lifted it to his ear as if
listening, and lowering his hand to the turf, bent over it and gazed again.
"Ay, he could understand and see into you, my beauty! He could hear

the little drums tum-a-rumbling, and the ox-bells and bangles tinkling,
and the shuffle of the elephants going by; he could read the lust in you,
and the blood