A Prince of Dreamers Part 26

"Yea! even at _chaugan_ thou hast no chance," she went on maliciously.

"'Tis a pity he was not killed. Lo! being so stunned thou couldst not realise what the mere rumour of his death meant, or thou wouldst regret thy failure still more. The bazaar rang with the news for half-an-hour, half groaning, half cheering. _Then_ was the time for action, not now, when the blind giant of India, formed of fools like my friends here, is ready once more to drive home Akbar's javelin head where it lists to go! G.o.d! did you but hate him as I, Woman, hate him the Man!"

"What wouldst thou do, harlot?" asked Ibrahim turning on her sharply.

"What couldst thou do?"

She half-closed her sleepy-looking eyes, and stared out into the sunshine in which the lane below lay festering. Not a hundred yards away, in the sunshine also, lay the high road from the great stretches of fields where the peasants toiled uncomplainingly, to the palace where the King dreamt his dream that was born out of due time, and along it the workers were pa.s.sing bringing in the fruits of their labour. Piled baskets of green-skinned melons, red earthenware pots of milk, creaking wains of corn. For them life was simple, untouched by the imagination of either evil or good. For them even the gossip of their town-bred neighbours was unreal, fantastic.

"What would I do, pandar," replied the courtesan slowly, her eyes brightening in measure with her words, her voice gaining strength from her evil fancies, "If I believed that the Luckstone of Akbar brought luck as thou dost, it should be _mine!_ Stay! It should be mine and bring discredit on the beast Birbal to whose charge 'tis given. Hold!

interrupt me not! I see further--such thoughts come with the thinking.

Aye! I would make Prince Salim the thief, and so force him to revolt!

See you not? See you not? Akbar's every thought of empire is bound up in the boy--that would be revenge indeed! There is no tie so strong as the tie of blood; loose that and the ship of a man's mind may go adrift. Make his son the thief I say, by guile if thou willst; but make Salim the thief!"

Her large eyes had grown larger with her evil dreamings. They sate and looked at her as the fascinated bird looks at the snake.

"Impossible!" murmured the Lord Chamberlain, feeling nevertheless an answering quiver of a.s.sent.

"Naught is impossible to ultimate guile," she went on, every atom of her seeming to gain in vitality as her dream of deceit unfolded itself to her ready mind. "Where is the diamond kept--dost know?"

Khodadad spoke then; he was gathering initiative from her malice. "He knows," he said, nodding his head at Ibrahim, "as Chamberlain he must know."

"Where it cannot be touched," retorted the palace official, sullenly.

"In the Hall of Labour, guarded, besentinelled, day and night. No chance of theft--save by deep treachery. And there is none to bribe.

Shall I offer a price to virtue-ridden Budaoni, court preacher, who works there at his translations? Or blazon our attempt abroad by approaching the Rajput soldiery or the King's paid artizans?"

Khodadad's face fell. In truth bribery in such a stronghold of the King's as the Hall of Labour where the best workmen were employed at fabulous wages, seemed hopeless. But Siyah Yamin's took on a sudden expression of amused contempt.

"So!" she began, "but they are men; that is enough for me. And one of them is Diswunt--Diswunt the King's crippled painter----"

"Aye!" a.s.sented the Lord Chamberlain still more sullenly. "Diswunt who is devoted to his master. 'Tis next his studio the Englishman's lathe is set up; farthest therefore from the door, farthest from treachery."

Siyah Yamin stretched her beautiful arms in an all-embracing gesture and leant back against the wall that was grimed by a hundred, a million such contacts with vicious humanity.

"What wilt give me for the diamond, Ibrahim?" she said suddenly, "a thousand golden pieces? I will not take a dirrhm less. 'Twill serve to pay the crazy painter for his likeness of me. Hast seen it? No?" She clapped her hands, and sate up with an odd expression of doubt, dislike, and desire on her small, childish face. "Then thou shalt see, and--and condemn it. What? Drum-banger?" she went on sharply as Deena's wicked old face showed at the stair-head in answer to her call. "How now? Where is Nargiz?"

"Gone out, Princess, leaving me the while devising a new devil's dance for my Lord Chamberlain's delectation this evening. He entertains the King's friends!"

Siyah Yamin interrupted a malicious leer at Ibrahim with scant courtesy.

"Peace, fool! Go fetch the portrait of me Diswunt painted, these gentlemen would see it."

"Well?" she added when, a minute or two afterward four pairs of Eastern eyes were gazing at a picture which offended every canon of Eastern art. Here were no tiny smooth surfaced stipplings, no delicate dottings of jewellery no faultless complexion, no plastered hair. Even its size, its composition were unconventional. This was a life-sized face--the face and no more--peering out of a white swathing veil which filled up the small oval panel on which it was painted. But it stood there, propped against the humanity-grimed wall, a veritable marvel in the fierce determination to be quit of all convention which showed in its every touch.

The fighting quails called from their shrouded cages below, the sounds of the bazaar drifted upward, and on these sounds came Ibrahim's sudden contemptuous laugh.

"Thou shouldst keep it as a scarecrow for unwelcome lovers," he said idly. "By G.o.d! Even hot l.u.s.t would fly from such a _churail_."[11]

[Footnote 11: A very dreadful female ghost.]

Siyah Yamin flushed angrily and bent forward to look at the picture more closely. Something there was even in its outrageous originality which she, as woman, recognised as true.

"The lad meant well, being my lover," she murmured softly, then her eyes turned to Mirza Ibrahim with a whole world of malice in them.

"Thou shouldst get him to paint such an one for thee of atma Devi, friend; it might serve to heal thee of--of her scant courtesy--to say nothing of her bruises!"

The Lord Chamberlain grew purple with rage. "Curses on her!" he cried.

"How didst hear? Did the jade dare to tell----"

The courtesan interrupted him with absolute contempt. "Truly thou hast a poor purblind brain concerning women, Mirza. Couldst not see, man, with half an eye that ato is not of those who speak of insult? Nay!

'Twas old Deena yonder--who spends half his time with vice and half with virtue--who, when thou wast attempting to thrust thyself upon her, saw thee put through the door, and trundled down the stair like a bad baby! Fie upon thee, sonling!"

The raillery of her voice matched the derisive shaking of her jewelled finger as he rose sullenly, muttering curses and swearing to stop the old drum-banger's loose lip. "Aye! Thou canst do it with a handful of gold," yawned Siyah Yamin. "Deena's mouth just holds twenty good gold pieces. I have had to gag him myself ere now. Farewell then, conspirator! I will take a thousand of those same myself for the King's Luck, not one dirrhm less!"

Mirza Ibrahim stood arrested at the stair head. Angry as he was, he knew her wit, and a glance at Khodadad's face showed that he knew it also.

"How wilt thou compa.s.s it?" he asked sullenly.

She looked at him jeeringly. "By my wits, friend. Have I not all the vice of all India at my finger tips? Is not Pahlu the subtlest thief in Hindustan amongst my brethren? Do not the stranglers, and poisoners, and beguilers rub shoulders with virtuous gentlemen as ye, in this my house? Nay! Leave it to me, Mirza, leave it to me, the courtesan!"

She lay softly laughing to herself when they had gone, until Deena the drum-banger coming up the stairs with laboriously secret creakings whispered: "Mistress atma Devi hath been waiting below for a private interview this hour past. Shall she come?"

Then she sate up, suddenly serious.

"ato!" she said. "Yes! let her come--let her come!"

There was an almost malicious content in her tone, for she realised that here was metal worthy of her steel, that in the coming interview she would have no cra.s.s, heavy man's brain and heart to deal with, but a woman's. Dull they might be, it is true, yet would they be full of intuitions, of sudden unexpected grip on motive, and sudden clarities of vision. Yet for this alone, atma Devi might be useful to her in the immediate future; since she would need every atom of knowledge, every possible fulcrum, ere she could lay hands on the King's Luck. Aye!

atma might help, though she was for the King; but that made it all the more imperative, all the more worthy skill, that she should be bent from her purpose, and be made unconsciously to work for the King's disadvantage.

So once more the whole vitality of the courtesan leapt up toward evil.

Woman against Woman! Aye! That was it! Woman glorying in her serpent-bruised heel against Woman treading on the serpent's head.

Woman the Temptress, against Woman the Saviour.

Dimly she saw this--the unending conflict of the World--as she gave greeting with a mysterious smile on her baby-face to the tall somewhat gaunt figure with the hara.s.sed, perturbed look in its great grave dark eyes.

In truth, no imagination could have conceived a more subtle antagonism than lay between those two women as they sate for a second in silence, looking at each other across Diswunt the crippled painter's picture which still stood against the wall.

Something there seemed to be, indeed, in this man's ideal of the woman he loved, of his endeavour to solve the mystery of woman's dual nature which jarred upon the nerves of both these types of Womanhood; for as their eyes met, Siyah Yamin laughed hurriedly and pointed. "Dost recognise it?" she asked.

atma Devi's straight brows showed level and steady as she looked.

"Aye!" she answered, then added swiftly: "Lo! Siyah, with that before thee, I marvel thou canst be so unkind--to a poor lad who loves thee."

The last words came softly, lingeringly, for love was still to atma the one thing worth having in the world, though she denied it strenuously. The craving for it lay behind all her claims to Charanship. Vaguely she knew it, vaguely she was ashamed of it.