The Flower of Forgiveness Part 14

Even Julia shook her head over Feroza's thin face. "You work too hard, dear," she sighed. "Ah! if it were the one thing needful; but I have failed to teach you that."

"Dear Miss! don't look sad; think of the difference you have wrought.

Oh, do not cry," she went on pa.s.sionately, for the mild blue eyes were filling with tears. "Come, we will talk of his return, full of n.o.ble resolutions of self-sacrifice to find--oh dear, dear, Miss! I am so happy, so dreadfully happy!" As she buried her face in the gingham dress her voice sank to a murmur of pure content. But some unkind person had poisoned Julia's peace with remarks of the mixing of unknown chemicals. After all, what did she know of this absent husband, save that dear Mrs. Cranston had met him at a conversazione?

"I suppose the Meer is really an enlightened man?" she asked dubiously.

The gingham dress gave up a scared face. "Dear Miss! why, he is a barrister-at-law!"

Her teacher coughed. "But are you sure, dear, that he wanted you to learn?"

"Not everything; because he did not think I could; but he spoke of many things. I have learnt all,--except--"

"Except what?"

Feroza hesitated. "I was not sure,--Inaiyut said he would teach it, but he died-- 'Tis only a game called whist."

"Whist!"

"Do I not say it right? W-h-i-s-t--_wist_. Oh, Miss! is it a wicked game? Is it not fit? Ought I not to learn it?"

The fire of questions reduced Julia Smith's confusion to simple tears.

"I don't know," she moaned, "that is the worst! I thought it was the finger of Providence, and--ah, Feroza! If I have done you harm!"

"You have done me no harm," said Feroza, with a kind smile. "You have harmed yourself with cinnamon tea and greasy fritters in the other zenanas, and you shall have some, English fashion, to take away your headache."

So grumbling Mytab brought an afternoon tea-tray duly supplied with a plate of thin bread-and-b.u.t.ter from within, and Feroza's small brown face beamed over Julia Smith's surprise. "He will think himself back amongst the _mems!_ won't he?" she asked with a happy laugh.

Would he? As she jolted home in her palanquin Julia's head whirled. Old and new, ignorance and wisdom!--here was a jumble. A stronger brain than hers might well have felt confusion. For it was sunset in that heathen town, and from the housetops, in the courtyards, in the very streets, men paused to lay aside their trivial selves and worship an ideal. Not one of the crowd giving place to the mission-lady but had in some way or another, if only by a perfunctory performance of some rite, testified that day to the fact that religion formed a part of his daily round, his common task. And on the other side of the world, whence the missions come?--

Meanwhile Kareema, bewailing the useless cards, found herself backed up by old Mytaben. Such knowledge, the old woman said, would have been more useful than learning to be cleaner than G.o.d made you. 'Twas easy to sneer at henna-dyed hands; but was that worse than using scented soaps like a bad one, and living luxurious? Sheets and towels, forsooth! Why, Shah-jehan himself never dreamed of such expenses.

"I like them, for all that," cried Kareema gaily; "and I think the _mems_ are wise to have big looking-gla.s.ses. It is hateful only seeing a little bit of one's self at a time. And Feroza and I are going out to be admired like the _mems_, aren't we, Feroza?"

"If the Meer wishes it," replied her sister-in-law gravely.

Mytab looked from one to the other. "Have a care, players with fire!"

she said shrilly. "Have a care! Is the world changed because it reads books and washes? Lo! the customs of the fathers bind the children."

"Mytab hath been mysterious of late," remarked Kareema, giving a queer look, as the old lady moved away in wrath. "Ah me! if I had but my handsome Inaiyut dicing in the vestibule 'twould be better for all of us, maybe."

Feroza laid her soft hand gently on the other's shoulder. "I am so sorry for thee, dear! but we will love thee always and be a sister and brother--"

Kareema's look was queerer than ever, and she laughed hysterically.

The day came at last when Feroza sat in the sunlit courtyard holding another unopened letter in her hand, knowing that ere a week was over the writer would be prisoned in her kind arms, surrounded by friendly faces, caught in the meshes of familiar custom. She was not afraid, even though his letters gave her small clue to the man himself. Her own convictions were strong enough to supply him with opinions also, and even if she did not come up to his ideal at first, she felt that the sweet satisfaction of a return to home and kindred would count for, and not against her. So she sat idly, delaying to read, and dreaming over the past, much as she had dreamt over the future nearly two years before. Only she sat on a chair now, and her white stockings and patent-leather shoes twisted themselves tortuously about its legs. She thought mostly of the childish time when she, their cousin, had played with Ahmed Ali and Inaiyut; it seemed somehow nearer than those other days, when the studious lad's departure for college had been prefaced by that strange, unreal marriage.

And Kareema watched her furtively from the far corner where she and Mytab were making preserves.

Suddenly a loud call, fiercely imperative, made them come sheepishly forward to where Feroza stood at bay, one hand at her throat, the other crushing her husband's letter. "What is this? What have you all been keeping from me? What does he mean?--this talk of duty and custom.

Ah-h-h--!"

Her voice, steady till then, broke into a ringing cry as a trivial detail in Kareema's reluctant figure caught her eye. The palms and nails of those delicate hands were no longer stained with henna. They were as her own, as nature made them, as the Meer _sahib_ said he liked them! She seized both wrists fiercely, turning the accusing palms to heaven, while a tempest of sheer animal jealousy beat the wretched girl down from each new-won foothold, down, down, to the inherited nature underneath.

"Then it is true," she gasped. "I see! I know! Holy Prophet! what infamy to talk of duty. He is to marry,--and I who have slaved--He is mine, mine, I say! Thou shalt not have him!"

Mytab's chill old hand fell on the girl's straining arm like the touch of Death. "_Allah akhbar wa Mohammed rasul!_[19] Hast forgotten the faith, Feroza Begum, Moguli? Thine? Since when has the wife a right to claim all? Since when hast thou become a _mem?_"

The girl glared at her with wild pa.s.sion, and Kareema gave a whimper as the grip bit into her tender wrists. "Don't; you hurt me!"

Feroza flung them from her in contemptuous loathing. "Fool! coward! as if he would touch you. I will tell him all. He will know--Ah G.o.d! my head! my head!--" She was in the dust at their feet stunned by her own pa.s.sion.

"I warned the Moulvie to break it by degrees," grumbled Mytab, dragging the girl to some matting; "but he said 'twould make no more to her than to the Meer. Books don't seem to change a man, but women are different."

"It's not my fault," whimpered Kareema. "I don't want to marry the Meer; he was ever a noodle. Prating of its being a duty, forsooth!"

"So it is! a bounden duty. Never hath childless widow had to leave this house, and never shall, till G.o.d makes us pigs of unbelievers."

"I wish my handsome Inaiyut had lived for all that," muttered the girl, as Feroza showed signs of recovery. She resisted all attempts at explanation or comfort, however, and made her way alone, a solitary resolute figure, to her windowless room, where, when she shut the door, all was dark. There she lay tearless while the others, sitting in the sunlight, talked in whispers as if the dead were within.

"The Moulvie must bid her repeat the creed," was old Mytab's ultimatum.

"G.o.d send the Miss has not made a Christian of her, with all those soapings and washings!" She had no spark of pity. Such was woman's lot, and to rebel was sacrilege.

"Don't make sure of my consent," pouted Kareema, her pretty face swollen with easy tears. "If he is really the noodle Feroza deems, I'd rather be a religious. 'Twould be just as amusing."

Mytab laughed derisively. "Thou a religious! The gossips would have tired tongues. Besides, choice is over. Had the child lived, perhaps; but now the Moulvie hath a right to see Inaiyut's children on his knee."

The sunshine had given place to shadow before Feroza appeared.

"Bring me a _burka_;[20] I am going to see the Miss. Follow if thou wilt," she said; and though her voice had lost its ring, the tone warned Mytab to raise no objection. Ere she left the sheltering walls she stood a moment before her sister-in-law, all the character, and grief, and pa.s.sion blotted out by the formless white domino she wore.

"I could kill you for being pretty," she said in a hard whisper, as she turned away.

She had never been to the mission-house since that eventful night, and the sight of its familiar unfamiliarity renewed the sense of injury with which she had last seen it. "Miss _Eshsmitt sahib_," they told her, was ill; but she would take no denial, and so, for the first time in her life, Feroza entered an English lady's bedroom. Simple, almost poor as this one was in its appointments, the sight sent a throb of fear to the girl's heart. What! Was not Kareema's beauty odds enough, that she must fight also against this undreamed-of comfort? She flung up her arms with the old cry, "_Dohai! Dohai!_" The fever-flushed face on the frilled pillows turned fearfully. "What is it, Feroza? Oh! what is it?"

The question was hard to solve even in the calm sessions of thought, well-nigh impossible here. Why had she been lured from the old life in some ways and not in all? Was their boasted influence all words? Then why had they prated of higher things? Why had they _lied_ to her?

Poor Julia buried her face in a pocket-handkerchief drenched in _eau-de-Cologne_, and sobbed, "Ah, take her away! Please take her away!"

So they led her gently to the text-hung drawing-room with a cottage piano in one corner, and shook their heads over her pa.s.sionate appeals.

They could do nothing, they said,--nothing at all,--unless she cast in her lot with them absolutely; so she turned and left them with a sombre fire in her eyes.

She never knew how the days pa.s.sed until, as she watched the sunlight creep up the eastern wall of the court, it came home to her that on the next evening Meer Ahmed Ali would watch it also. She seemed not to have thought, and it was Kareema, and not she, who had shed tears. On that last night the latter came to where her cousin lay still, but sleepless. "Why wilt be so foolish, Feroza?" she said petulantly.

"Nothing is settled. If he is a noodle, I will none of him, I tell thee. If not, thou art too much of one thyself to care. G.o.d knows he may not look at either, through being enamoured of the _mems_. And oh, Feroza," she added, her sympathy overborne by curiosity, "think you he will wear the strange dress of the Miss _sahib's_ sun-pictures? If so I shall laugh of a surety."

A gleam of consolation shot through poor Feroza's brain. Men disliked ridicule. "Of course the Meer dresses Europe-fashion," she replied stiffly. "Thou seemest to forget that my husband is a man of culture."

A man of culture! undoubtedly, if by culture we mean dutiful self-improvement. That had been Meer Ahmed Ali's occupation for years, and his gentle, high-bred face bore unmistakably the look of one stowing away knowledge for future use. He was really an excellent young man; and, during his three years at a boarding-house in Notting Hill, had behaved himself as few young men do when first turned loose in London. He spoke English perfectly, and it would be difficult to say what he had not learnt that could be learnt by an adaptive nature in the s.p.a.ce of thirty-six calendar months spent in diligent polishing of the surface of things. He learnt, for instance, that people looking at his handsome, intelligent face, said it made them sad to think of his being married as a boy to a girl he did not love. Thence the idea that he was a martyr took root and flourished, and he acquiesced proudly in his own sacrifice on the altar of progress. For him the love of the poets was not, and even in his desire for Feroza's education he told himself that he was more actuated by a sense of duty than by any hope of greater happiness for himself. The natural suggestion that he should marry his brother's widow he looked on merely as a further development of previous bondage; and he told himself again that, not having swerved a hair's breadth from his faith, he was bound to set his own views aside in favour of a custom desired by those chiefly concerned.

Besides, in the atmosphere of surprised sympathy in which he lived it was hard, indeed, not to pose as a victim.