A Prince of Dreamers Part 27

"Not more unkind than he who would fain thrust deformity upon _my_ love," retorted the courtesan airily. "Lo! ato! even thou, with all thy fine feelings, couldst not love crooked legs and a hunchback--the King hath neither! Then wherefore should I be kind?"

"Wherefore indeed," a.s.sented atma, disdaining her own flush. "So why not give him dismissal instead of keeping him, as thou dost, on the rack? See you, I speak warmly, in that he had his food from my father's house for service done before the King found him drawing dogs upon a white wall with a burnt bone, and reft him from us for teaching. Thus it grieved me to see him, but now, so distraught, so----"

"But now?" echoed Siyah Yamin sharply. "What! Hast been at the Hall of Labour?"

atma's face fell. "Nay! Not there. No woman finds entry there! Else had I seen for myself and not come to thee, seeking news." Her troubled eyes sought Siyah Yamin's almost resentfully.

"News?" echoed the latter, craft growing to her face. "What news?

Somewhat that Diswunt would not tell thee? Out with it ato? Tell me thy end--G.o.d knows but it may fit mine, since, so they say, extremities meet."

"Aye," a.s.sented atma sombrely. "That is why I seek thee. Hate and love are not far distant with us womenkind."

Then, suddenly she reached out a tense, nervous hand to lay upon Siyah Yamin's smooth round arm.

"Lo! Sister! thou hearest all things here, and I--I hear nothing! What news is there of the King's Luck? Hath he in truth yielded it to the Englishman?"

Siyah Yamin stared for a second, then burst into a perfect cascade of high-pitched laughter.

"Said I not truly," she gurgled, "that extremes meet! See! I will send for a cooling sherbet, and I will tell thee all!"

It was not all, it did not even approach the truth, but it served her purpose. So she sate, watching the effect of each word, and atma Devi listened, weighing each word, both with the same indescribable intuitions of their s.e.x, appraising this, discounting that, until at last the latter rose, tall, dark, menacing, to look down on the other, crouching like a coiled snake among her cushions.

"Yea! as thou hast said, Siyal, true loyalty would lend itself even to theft, or rather to the s.n.a.t.c.hing of luck from ill luck, and the protection of the King from evil magic; and so I will tell Diswunt--I, his mistress by inheritance. And to give it to the keeping of the Beneficent Ladies as I have said were well done. The Lady Hamida, the King's mother, carries his honour close day and night, even as she once carried him. And Khanzada Gulbadan Begum hath wit more than most men, so I will aid if I can, being bound also to the King's honour.

But hearken, Siyah! Lo! draw thy veil so--let me have it." She sank to her knees and leaning forward caught the loose end of the courtesan's tinsel veil and flung it round her own head also. "Now let us swear once more, as sisters of the veil, to be true to each other until the death--until the death--dost hear?"

Taken by surprise Siyah Yamin shrank back from those blazing eyes, paled, faltered; finally, compelled thereto by the grip of a nature stronger than her own, muttered faintly:

"I swear."

"Till the death?"

"Till--death."

After atma had gone the courtesan sate for a while as if half-paralysed; she had gone further than was safe, seeing that she was to use atma as a tool; a half-crazed tool. Then she looked about her. The heat of the day was waxing. Below her the bazaar, becoming drowsy, was leaving a thousand wickednesses to welter and fester under the noon-tide sun while it slipped from them for a while in sleep; leaving them restlessly active, ceaselessly on the move like molecules in a sunray; thought hustling thought, intention seeking desire, making evil ready for the awakening of men to find a new stimulus to wrongdoing in the coolness of the afternoon. It was always so. Evil grew day by day. There was nothing else alive in the whole world.

So by degrees courage and confidence returned.

"Send for Pahlu, the prince of thieves," she said "and bid Pooru, the false gem-maker, be here when I awaken. Meanwhile, let Deena take this to Diswunt at the Hall of Labour."

She sate for a second, pen in hand, cogitating half amusedly; then with a sudden smile wrote in delicate curvings a verse from Sa'adi's "Lamp and the Moth":

Oh! fearful tearful lover! Cease to sigh, Pa.s.sion's worst pangs thou knowest not--as I.

Leave pining, leave lamenting and be bolder Woman yields readiest to those who hold her.

So, swallowing a perfumed pill of opium all sugar coated and silvered, she, too, slept in her balcony.

CHAPTER XII

Live in the living hour, Fortune is fickle.

To thy lips, laughing flower, Let good wine trickle.

Who h.o.a.rdeth wealth to leave He is a ne'er-do-well.

Who lives to rail and grieve He is an infidel.

Rest in thy cypress shade, Fill the cup higher, Drink to each merry maid, Drink to desire.

So saith the cup bearer, So sings the lyre.

--Hafiz.

The Hall of Labour lay deserted as if the artificers who worked in its surrounding arcades had taken profit by the wisdom of Hafiz which came trilling from the furthermost, sun-saturated end of the long parallelogram of roof in which Akbar's especial artificers laboured at especial tasks.

It was a quaint place this Hall or rather Roof of Labour, for it was set high between the higher palaces which rose around it on three sides. The fourth was arcaded as were the others, but in dummy fashion, that is to say with the shallow archways filled in with brick work--and gave on the wide plains of India, which were, however, invisible because of the height of the wall. Most things, indeed of the outside world were invisible from the Hall of Labour; you had to go through the sentry-guarded door opposite the hidden plains before you could get rid of a certain sense of imprisonment, of absorption in duty. The artificers in the cell-like workshops on the left hand of the doorway, were, however, better off in this case than those on the right, since the superstructure above these was but cell wide, and so from their farther ends, high, unattainable windows, partially bricked up, let in a cross light on lathes and crucibles, paint-brushes, and even inkpots; for in one of them near the door Budaoni, the historian, used to sit most days engaged on his uncongenial task of translating the Hindu scriptures, and glaring at another writer over the way who was copying the translation of the Gospels for which Akbar had paid the Jesuits a round sum of money. Money not quite honestly earned, since the text was deftly doctored to suit Jesuit dogma! But even if this had been known it would have mattered little to the jealousies of the rival writers.

Farther down this left hand side worked a chemist employed in testing atomic weights, an engraver busy over a ruby intaglio, an experimentalist attempting to prove the properties of quicksilver in the trans.m.u.tation of metals, a worker in gold on crystal, and so on; till at the end came an empty arcade with shut door, then William Leedes's workshop, and on the other side the studio of Diswunt the crippled painter. He was especially favoured, for in addition to the high window which, like those in the other cells gave on the Court of Dreams--on the opposite side of which stood the King's Sleeping Palace--he had a corbeilled balcony overlooking the Indian plain; at least so much of it as could be seen by reason of the towering Arch of Victory which thrust itself skyward from its great plinth of steps.

Looking downward, one could see them receding in sharp angles almost to the bottom of the rocky ridge. No place here, therefore, for escape or entry, so Diswunt was allowed the luxury of light, even when his great wide door was shut. He kept it so constantly; for he was morose by birth, embittered by the accident of it.

And yet the idle rhymes of Hafiz came to his lips as he sate irresolute, thinking of the paradise one woman had promised him if he did something--a mere trifle!--for her; of the h.e.l.l with which another woman had threatened him should he fail to do the same thing. It was too bad to have duty and pleasure on the same side; and against them--what? Only loyalty to the man who seeing him--then a mere beast of burden--as he paused in the bazaar to make, with a bit of the charcoal he was carrying and a white-washed wall, a spirited sketch of a dog gnawing a bone, had sent him for training to the Court School of Painting. That, after all, had been but a sorry action! Diswunt looked distastefully at his work--a portrait of Akbar small enough to go into a ring--and his whole soul went out to charcoal and a white wall.

For the misshapen lad whose face had the brilliant, bizarre beauty of strongly marked feature which so often goes with physical deformity, was without doubt part of the sixteenth century crop of genius, of which so much has remained to the world, so much more has pa.s.sed out of it, unwitting even of itself.

His eyes, as he sate listlessly, were dull with the hemp he drank habitually to deaden the depth of his discontent.

For Akbar had not been able to uphold, against the whole artistic verdict of his court, his own opinion that the "portrayal of real life gave special facilities for true education since every touch that went toward the likeness of reality must make the painter feel his own impotence to bestow life, and so lead him to a right appreciation of the immeasurable dignity of the Creator."

They had been brave words, but they had ended in stipplings and blobs of white paint to imitate pearls!

Yet there were some who thought as he, Diswunt the King's crippled painter thought. He shivered as he remembered the day but a week ago, when the infidel jeweller next door, with whom he had sc.r.a.ped up an acquaintance, had replied to a question he had asked in the lingua franca of mixed Portuguese and Arabic which served as court jargon for strangers.

"Nay friend! such missals, such pictures as these Jesuits bring are but monkish work. There be other painters over the black water. Lo! I studied for a while under one in Italia. Stay! I bethink me to have backed yonder chart on the wall with a copy. Turn it round and see!"

See! Diswunt had seen little else since! It was only a bad copy in red chalk of a torso by Michael Angelo, all blurred and half effaced, but it had been a master key, opening the door of real art to the lad, driven half crazy by dreams and drugs. Since then he had closed his door, and the stippled face of Akbar had not received a single touch; but the back of that closed door, which was made after Indian fashion, of plain whitewashed wood nailed to a strong outside frame-work, showed the cloudy smearings of much charcoal.

Should he, or should he not? It was close on noon. The silence told that the artificers were putting by their tools. Stay, they were beginning again! How was that?

He set the door wide open and carefully fastened it back, then looked out. The reason of this brisking up to business was evident, for the King, followed as usual by Birbal and Abulfazl, was crossing the court. Not that he noticed the general activity; his objective was William Leedes's workshop; for it having been notified that the first facet of the diamond had been duly cut, he was keen to see it. But the sight of his protege Diswunt at his door made him forget his hurry, to pause and say kindly:

"Come thou, with the artist's eye, and help Akbar hold his own with these ignorant ones who have it that dulness equals G.o.d's luck." He flashed round half-contemptuous raillery even at Birbal.

"Nay sire!" retorted the latter, "If the Light of the World will pardon his slave, we do but hold that the King's Luck equals Brightness."

But Akbar's quick imagination was already caught by the angular speck of clear dark sheen which showed like a shadow on the dull radiance of the uncut diamond, as it lay matrixed in the cutter's lathe. So dark, but so clear.

"It is like a door," he cried exultantly. "Look! Diswunt, is it not as a door through which one might pa.s.s and see what other folks see not."

"And therefore desire not!" put in Birbal quickly. "My liege it is not yet too late. Let yonder flaw made of man remain as an outlet or inlet for Akbar's dreams; but let the remainder be, as it has always been, a sign of sovereignty to the people. Ask Abulfazl here. What thinkest thou Diwan-jee, is there danger in this thing or no?"