Page:Quartette - Kipling (1885).djvu/100

 heard the voice before; but when and where I could not at once determine. In the short space it took to cover the road between the path from Hamilton's shop and the first plank of the Combermere Bridge I had thought over half a dozen people who might have committed such a solecism; and had eventually decided that it must have been some singing in my ears. Immediately opposite Peliti's shop, my eye was arrested by the sight of four jhampanies in "magpie" livery, pulling a yellow-panelled, cheap, bázár 'rickshaw. In a moment my mind flew back to the previous season and Mrs. Wessington with a sense of irritation and disgust. Was it not enough that the woman was dead and done with, without her black and white servitors reappearing to spoil the day's happiness? Whoever employed them now, I thought I would call upon and ask as a personal favour to change her jhampanies' livery. Nay, I would hire them myself, and, if necessary, buy their coats from off their backs. It is impossible to say here what a flood of dead and buried memories their presence evoked. "Kitty," I cried, "there are poor Mrs. Wessington's jhampanies turned up again! I wonder who has them now?" Kitty had known Mrs. Wessington slightly last season, and had always been interested in the sickly woman.

"What? Where?" she asked. "I can't see them anywhere." And, even as she spoke, her horse, swerving from a laden mule, threw himself directly in front of the advancing 'rickshaw. I had scarcely time to utter a word of warning when, to my unutterable horror, horse and rider passed right through men and carriage as if they had been thin air. "What's the matter?" cried Kitty; "what made you call out so foolishly, Jack? If I am engaged I don't want all creation to know about it. There was lots of space between the mule and the verandah; and if you think I can't ride—There!" Whereupon wilful Miss Kitty set off with her dainty little head in the air at a hand-gallop in the direction of the Band-stand; fully expecting, as she herself afterward told me, that I should follow her. What was the matter? Nothing, indeed. Either that I was mad or drunk, or Simla, prosaical every-day Simla, was haunted with devils. I reined in my impatient cob, and turned round. The 'rickshaw had turned too, and now stood immediately facing me, near the left railing of the Combermere Bridge. "Jack! Jack, darling!" (there was no mistake about the words this time: they rang through my brain as if