The Mercy of the Lord Part 17

His dependence on the elder man showed in his helplessness; he asked as a child might have asked.

There was almost a sob in his throat, but the voice which answered was firm.

"They are on the wall, Huzoor; but we cannot fight here; the sentry would hear, and----"

"D--n the sentry," said the Boy again, helplessly. "What can we do?"

Hoshyari thought for a moment. "There is light enough in the storehouse under the Great Hedge----" he began.

The Boy leapt up, fire in his eyes. "By G.o.d in heaven, it shall be there--and, mind you, it's to the death, you cursed smuggler."

"To the death, Salt of the Earth." A minute later the false back to the record cupboard swung to its lock with a click, and the office was empty.

The cactus flowers bloomed and faded; the violet-scented mimosa puff-b.a.l.l.s fell in gold showers on the green lobes, the aloe bells withered in silence, the waiting, watching eyes waited and watched in vain. If the snakes, as they slid over the netting-covered round hole in the thickness of the great Salt Hedge, had looked down into the widening sunlit circle below them, what would they have seen?

Who knows, since Suchet Singh the Sikh lay dead at his post.

AN APPRECIATED RUPEE

She was a poor Mahomedan widow, and lived in an unconceivable sort of burrow under the tall winding stair of a big tenement house, which in its turn was hidden away in a long, winding, sunless alley. The stair centred round a sort of shaft, barred at each storey by iron gratings, narrow enough to admit of refuse being thrown down--the shaft being, briefly, the rubbish shoot of the building, so that old Maimuna--who seldom left her seclusion till the evening--had, in pa.s.sing to and fro, to step over quite a pile of radish parings, cauliflower stalks, fluff, rags--a whole day's sweepings and leavings of the folk higher up in the world than she.

And even when she reached the odd-shaped cell of a place, whose only furniture consisted of a rickety bed with string--halt in two of its emaciated legs, a low stool and a spinning wheel, she was not free from her neighbours' off-scourings; for down the wall beside the low latticed window, where, perforce, she had to set her spinning wheel, crept a slimy black streak of sewage from above, which smelt horribly, on its way to join the open drain in the middle of the alley. Yet here Maimuna Begam, Patha-ni from Kasur, had lived for fifteen years of childless widowhood; lived far away from her home and people, too poor to rejoin them, too ignorant to hold her own among strangers. For she had been that most intolerable of interlopers--the wife of a man's old age. Not a suitable wife bringing a dower into the family; but one who, as a widow, might--unless the other heirs took active measures to prevent it--claim her portion of one-sixth for life. A wife, too, without a pretence of any position save that of the strictest seclusion; a seclusion so untouched by modern lat.i.tude as to be in itself second-rate. Without good looks also, and married simply and solely because old Jehan Latif had fancied some quail curry which he had eaten when business called him to Kasur, and, as the best way of securing repet.i.tion of the delicacy, had married the compounder and carried her back to Lucknow; where, to tell truth, he found more attractions in the cook than he had antic.i.p.ated when he paid a good round sum for his middle-aged bride. For Maimuna was a good woman--kindly, gentle, pious--who had lived discreetly in her father's house, and helped to cook quail curry for that somewhat dissolute old swashbuckler ever since, as a girl of twelve, her husband had died before she had even seen him.

So, while she pounded the spices and boned the quails (since that was one of the refinements of the _bonne-bouche_) for old Jehan Latif, Maimuna used sometimes to think, with a kind of wondering regret, what life would have been like if the husband of her youth had not died of the measles; but, being conscientious, she never allowed the tears to drop into the quail curry!

It was no carelessness of hers, therefore, which led to fat Jehan Latif falling into a fit shortly after partaking of his favourite dish, which for ten years she had dutifully prepared for him. None-the-less, his heirs (who had had all these years in which to cook their accounts of the matter) treated her as if it were. There is no need to enter into details. Those who know India know how unscrupulous heirs can oppress a strange lone woman--ignorant, secluded; a woman whose position as wife has from the first been cavilled at, resented, impugned. It is sufficient to say that Maimuna, after a few feeble protests, found herself in the little cell under the stairs, earning a few farthings by her spinning wheel, and thankful that her great skill at it kept her from that last resort of deserted womanhood in India--the quern. Even so, it was hard at times to wait till there was sufficient thread in the percentage she got back for her spinning, to make it worth while for the merchant to buy it from her, or for her to break in, by a cash transaction, on the curious succession of cotton bought, and thread returned, without a coin changing hands. And this winter it was harder than ever, for the unusual cold made her fingers stiff, and sent shoots of rheumatism up her arm as she sat spinning in the ray of light which came in with the smell.

It was very cold indeed that New Year's afternoon, and Maimuna felt more than usually down-hearted; for there had been a death upstairs, and she knew that the stamping and shufflings she could hear coming rhythmically downwards over her head were the feet of those carrying a corpse. Now, weary and worn as she was, Maimuna--between the fifties and sixties--did not yet feel inclined to fold her hands and give in.

Even now it needed a very little thing to bring a smile to her face; and once, when a child had fallen downstairs, she had surprised the neighbours by her alert decision. So that when she heard girls' shrill voices in half-giggling alarm through her door--which was ajar--she guessed at the cause, and called to the owners to come in until the stairs should be clear.

One (a slip of a thing ten years old) she knew as the daughter of a gold-thread worker higher up the stairs; the other (not more than five or six) was a stranger; a fat broad-faced morsel, with a stolid look, and something held very tight in one small chubby hand. She was dressed in the cleanest of new clothes, scanty of stuff, but gay, with a yard or two of tinsel on her sc.r.a.p of a veil. Maimuna paused in the whirr and hum of her wheel to look at the children wistfully; her own childlessness had always seemed a crime to her.

"It is Fatma, the pen-maker's girl, _Mai_," said the gold-worker's daughter, patronisingly. "She is just back from the Missen School, where they have been having a big festival because it is the _sahib log's_ big day."

"Tchuk," dissented the solemn-faced baby, clucking her tongue in emphatic denial. "It is not the Big Day. It is because _Malika_ Victoria is--is----" The solemnity merged in confusion, finally into a sort of appealing defiance: "Is--is--_that_----"

She unclasped her fist, and held out a brand new shining silver two-anna bit. It was one of those struck when her Majesty the Queen a.s.sumed the Imperial t.i.tle.

The gold-worker's daughter giggled. "She means Wictoria _Kaiser-i-hind_, you know. What the guns were about this morning. They are to go off every year, they say. That will be fun!"

"But why?" asked Maimuna, puzzled. Her life for close on five-and-twenty years had been spent in the cooking of quail curry and spinning of cotton--the very Mutiny had pa.s.sed by unknown to her. She had heard vaguely of the Queen, and knew that it was her head on the rupee which, despite the hard times, she always wore on a black silk skein round her neck, because she had worn it since her babyhood, when the parents of the boy who had died of the measles had sent it her; but what the Queen had to do with John Company Bahadar, or he to her, was a mystery.

"Why," giggled the elder girl, "because she is going to be the King, and turn all the men out. That is what father says. He says she is sure to favour the women, and I think that will be fun. But Fatma knows it all. Come! dear one! Sing Maimuna that song the _miss sahibs_ made the schools sing to-day. Sing it soft, close, close up to her ear, so that no one may hear it--for they don't like her singing, you know, at home, _Mai_: it isn't respectable."

So, standing on tip-toe, steadying herself against Maimuna's arm by the hand which held the two-anna bit, Fatma began in a most unmelodious whisper to chant a Hindee version of "G.o.d Save our Gracious Queen." The words as well as the tune were a difficulty to the fat, solemn-faced child, but the old woman sat listening and looking at the two-anna bit with a new interest, a new wonder in her weary eyes.

"Bismillah!" she said, half way through, when the gold-worker's daughter, becoming impatient, declared the corpse must have pa.s.sed, and dragged Fatma off incontinently. "And she is a woman--only a woman!"

The girls paused at the door; the elder to nod and giggle, the younger to stand sedate and solemn, wagging one small forefinger backwards and forwards in negation.

"Tchuk! you shouldn't say that, Mai! Little girls are made of sugar and spice. It is little boys that are made nasty--the _miss_ says so."

"She should not say so," faltered Maimuna, aghast. The very idea was preposterous, upsetting her whole cosmogony; but when they had closed the door, she sat idle, too astonished to work. Then, suddenly, she took off the black silk hank with its precious rupee, and looked at the woman's head at the back.

It was a young woman there; young and unveiled--strange, incomprehensible! But that other on the two-anna bit had been an old woman, more decently dressed, and with a crown on her head.

"Frustrate their knavish tricks."

Fatma's song returned to memory. So the Queen, too, had enemies; and yet she was Kaiser-i-hind, and, what is more, she made men like the gold-thread worker upstairs tremble!

"On thee our hopes we fix!"

Maimuna sat, and sat, and sat, looking at that rupee.

It was a day or two after this that an English official was sitting smoking in his verandah, when he became aware of a whispered colloquy behind him. It was someone, no doubt, trying, through the red-coated _chaprasi_, to gain an audience of him; and he was newly back from office, tired, impatient, perhaps, of the hopelessness of doing justice always. So he took no notice till something roused him to a swift turn, a swifter question. "What's that, _chaprasi?_" _That_ was the unmistakable c.h.i.n.k of fallen silver, the unmistakable whirr of a running rupee, the unmistakable buzzing ring of its settling to rest.

And there, midway between a giving and a taking hand, lay the rupee itself--the Queen's head uppermost.

"_Hazoor!_" explained the _chaprasi_, glibly, "your slave was virtuously refusing; he was sending this ill-bred one away. Hat!

_budhi!_[2] Hat!"

But the sight of that head on the precious rupee, which, after many heartsearchings, poor Maimuna had determined to risk in this effort to gain justice from a _budhi_ like herself, whose enemies also had knavish tricks, brought courage to the old heart, and the old woman stood her ground.

"_Gharibparwar!_" she said quietly, with her best salaam--and in the old Pathan house they had taught manners, if nothing else--"Little Fatma, the pen-maker's daughter, says that Wictoria Kaiser-i-hind is an old woman like me, and so I have fixed my hopes on her. There is my rupee. It is all I have, and I want my widow's portion."

And she got it. It happened years ago, but the story is worth telling to-day, when women can no longer sing "G.o.d Save the Queen."