To openly befriend the Christian priests would be to set the whole Hindoo population against himself, for it had been mainly against suttee and its kindred horrors that the missionaries had bent all their energy.
The great palace of Howrah was ahum.

Elephants with painted tusks, and loaded to the groaning-point under howdahs decked with jewels and gold-leaf, came and went through the carved entrance-gates.

Occasionally camels, loaded too until their legs all but buckled underneath them, strutted with their weird, mixed air of foolishness and dignity, to be disburdened of great cases that eight men could scarcely lift; on the outside the cases were marked "Hardware," but a horde of armed and waiting malcontents scattered about the countryside could have given a more detailed and accurate guess at what was in them.
Men came and went--men almost of all castes and many nationalities.
Priests--not all of them fat, but every single one fat-smiling--sunned themselves, or waited in the shade until they could have audience; no priest of any Hindoo temple had to wait long to be admitted to that Rajah's presence, and there was an everlasting chain of them, each with his axe to grind, coming and going by day and night.
Color rioted in the blazing sun and deep, dark shadows lurked in all the thousand places where the sun could never penetrate.

It was India in essence--noise and blaze and flouted splendor, with a back-ground and underground of mystery.

Any but the purblind British could have told at half a glance, merely by the attitude of Howrah's armed sepoys, that a concerted movement of some kind was afoot--that there was a tight-held thread of plan running through the whole confusion; but no man--not even a native--could have guessed what secret plotting might be going on within the acres of the straggling palace.
From the courtyard there was no least hint obtainable even of the building's size; its shape could only have been marked down from a bird's-eye view aloft.