The Potter's Thumb Part 5

Zubr-ul-Zaman nodded approval. 'True, he favoured the Ayodhya pot; but he returned it.'

Chandni's eyes sparkled, then fell. 'So! that is one thing to begin with. Then he is of those who watch flowers grow and birds build their nests; who paint colour an paper for the love of it. Again, when the fowler fails in all else he baits the snare with pity, and sets a decoy-bird a-fluttering within the net. This boy gives quinine to the old wives, and fish-oil to the babes born with the Potter's thumb-mark.' Her laughter crackled joylessly.

'Words--words,' muttered the old man impatiently. What wouldest thou do?'

She drew closer, and the movement sent a wave of perfume from the jasmine chaplets into the air.

'Lend me Azizan for a week, and thou shalt see.'

Scent, so people say, is the most powerful stimulant to bygone memories; perhaps that was the reason why her words brought such a pulse of fierce life to the old face. 'Aziz! Nay! she is of the house.'

'Why not say of the race, father?' retorted Chandni coolly. 'Nay! in such talk as ours truth is best. Thinkest thou I am a fool when I go to dance and sing in the women's quarter? Is it not sixteen years since the potter's daughter disappeared on the night of the great storm'--hath not this fifteen-year-old the potter's eyes--Heaven shield us from them!' Her hand went out in the two-fingered gesture used to avert the evil eye in West as well as East.

Zubr-ul-Zaman scowled at her.

'There be other girls and plenty; take them,' he began. 'Besides, she is betrothed. I will not lose the dower.'

'Wherefore shouldest lose it? I said a week, and Zainub, the duenna, will see to safety. He will but paint her picture.'

The Diwan spat piously. 'And what good will such accursed idol-making do?' he asked more calmly.

''Twill bring the quarry within reach; he lives too far away now. Give me the girl, my lord, else will I know that the Diwan Zubr-ul-Zaman Julal-i-dowla Mustukkul-i-jung is afraid of the potter's eyes.'

'As thou art, daughter of the bazaars,' he retorted fiercely. 'Shall I set them on thee and thine?'

Chandni essayed an uneasy laugh. 'I will do her no harm,' she muttered sullenly. 'I will not even speak to her if thou wilt. Zainub shall do all.'

Half-an-hour afterwards Chandni, wrapped in her white domino, paused on her way home at the door leading to the women's quarters and knocked.

After a while an old woman appeared at the latticed shutter. The courtesan whispered a word or two, the door opened, and the two disappeared down a dark pa.s.sage.

''Tis Chandni come to dance.' The whisper ran through the airless, squalid rooms, causing a flutter among the caged inhabitants. Out of their beds they came, yawning and stretching, to sit squatted in a circle on the bare floor, and watch Chandni give a spirited imitation of the way the mem-sahibs waltzed with the sahib-logue. It was not an edifying spectacle, but it afforded infinite satisfaction to the audience. An audience which has to take its world at second-hand, and in the process has grown careless as to abstract truth. The young women t.i.ttered, the old ones called Heaven to witness their horror, and then they all sat without winking an eye while the courtesan sang the songs of her profession.

But little Azizan's light eyes saw nothing at which to smile or to cry in either performance. She was young for her years, and very sleepy; besides, she was betrothed to an old man whom she had never seen, because, as all the other girls took care to tell her, she really was too ugly to be kept in the family. And that sort of thing takes the zest from life.

When the entertainment was over, Chandni sat and talked with Zainub, the duenna, until dawn, with that careless disregard of bed-time, which makes it quite impossible to foretell at what hour of the day or night a native of India will be asleep or awake.

But George Keene, over the way in the branded bungalow, was safely tucked up in sheets and blankets, whence nothing short of an earthquake would have roused him.

An earthquake, or else a prescience of the hideous caricature Chandni had been making of the _trois temps_ over in the palace.

CHAPTER IV

George Keene was trying to translate the cloth-of-gold sunlight into cadmium yellow, with the result that the blue of the tiles in his sketch grew green, and the opal on the pigeon's b.r.e.a.s.t.s as they sidled along the cornice, was dimmed to dust colour.

The courtyard with its blind arcades of Saracenic arches surrounding the mosque, lay bare and empty, as it always did save at the hours of prayer. He looked across it with a dissatisfied expression, noting the intense colour of certain tiles which were mixed up with those more modern ones bearing the Arabic letterings. The former reminded him of the Ayodhya pot, and set him a-wondering if he should ever have an honest chance of procuring one like his first bribe. The old potter, his authority in such matters, had told him they were still to be found, more or less broken, in the digging of graves, or the sinking of wells. Hitherto, however, he had failed to hear of one. Yet, the possibility remained, since those tiles, which must be centuries older than the _cafe chantant_ sort of proscenium on which they were inlaid, had survived. The latter he saw clearly, now he came to draw it, had been added on to an older building behind; probably a Hindu temple. So, when all was said and done, that figure of a grave and reverend Mohammedan moulvie, which he had intended to put in the foreground, might not have so much right to be there as a priest of Baal. It was a confusing country!

When he looked up again from his work, he gave a start; for a totally unexpected model was squatting on the flags of his foreground. A mere slip of a village girl; and yet was she of the village? More likely a stranger--perhaps one of the southern tribes of whom the potter told tales--since her dress was odd.

It consisted of a reddish purple drapery, more tike wool than cotton in texture, with a st.i.tched border in browns and creams such as the desert folk embroider on their camel trappings. It was an admirable piece of colouring against that blue background, and he began upon it at once, reckless of the averted face; for he was accustomed to be thus watched furtively from afar, and knew that the least notice would end in instant flight, as of a wild animal. Besides, the faces were apt to be disappointing. This one, however, was not, and his first glimpse of it gave him quite a shock. Without being beautiful, it was most peculiar; a golden brown face, with a long straight nose, and a wide, curved mouth; golden brown hair under the reddish purple of the veil; golden brown eyes, and a golden brown arm circled with big bronze bracelets stretched out so that the hand rested on----!

He gave an irrepressible exclamation and half rose from his seat. Down fell his box and brushes, and over went the dirty water streaming across his hard-won sunshine. He mopped at it hastily with his handkerchief--as hastily as he dared; but when he looked up the girl had gone. He sat down and eyed the spot where she had been suspiciously; not because of her disappearance--there had been time for that--but because he was doubtful of his own eyes in thinking that her hand had rested on an Ayodhya pot. If so, what a rare chance he had lost; if not, he must be going to have fever, and had better go home and take some quinine. Go home, however, _via_ the potter's house, and ask that inveterate gossip if he knew anything of an odd-looking child with light eyes--here George gave a low whistle, paused in his packing up of paint-boxes, and looked round again to where the girl had squatted, feeling that it was foolish of him not to have noticed the resemblance before. Doubtless the girl was a relation of some sort, though the old man had always strenuously a.s.serted that he had none living. Perhaps he had meant no male ones; yet, strangely enough, Fuzl Elahi did not seem to share that contempt for girls which all the other natives of George Keene's acquaintance professed. He often talked about his dead daughter, and whenever he talked he became excited and restless; indeed, the fear of thus arousing him made George somewhat reticent in his description of the girl he had seen, which he confined as far as possible to the dress.

'She is not of Hodinuggur, Huzoor,' declared the old man confidently.

'They who wear wool live far to the south. They never leave the hearthstone where their fathers lie buried. 'Tis the old way, Huzoor, and we of this place did it also long ago.' Suddenly his eyes lit up, he let the wheel slacken and clasped his hands closely over the dome of clay in its centre. It shot up under the pressure like a fountain.

'Perhaps the Huzoor hath seen one of the old folk; they come and go, they go and come. I see them often; my fathers and their fathers, but never my daughter. She will not come, she will not come.' As his voice died away the cadence of the wheel recommenced, only to stop with a jar. 'Huzoor! Have _you_ seen her? A slip of a girl with a fawn face tinted like a young gazelle's? Not black like these people--but sun colour and brown--all sun colour and brown with little curls on her forehead----'

For the life of him George could not help acknowledging the thrill that ran through him. The man was mad, of course, hopelessly mad; yet if he had seen the girl he could scarcely have given a better description.

Perhaps he had seen her, knew all about her, and only pretended ignorance, to serve his own ends; that overweening desire, for instance, to pose as one apart from commonplace humanity, at which George alternately laughed and frowned.

'Your daughter is dead, potter-ji, how can I have seen her?' he said rather brutally; yet what else was there to say with that glaring daylight shining down remorselessly on the squalid reality of the scene? It was an ordinary potter's yard, no more, no less; the kneaded clay on one side of the wheel, the unbaked pots lying on the other. In the outer yard a couple of children were playing in the dust, while their mother sought a satisfactory ring in one of the pile of ready-baked water-pots before bringing it with her to haggle and bargain over the price. Overhead a kite or two wheeled in circles, and down the slope, of course, lay the palace and its inhabitants; who were very ordinary examples of impoverished native n.o.bility in its worst aspect. So George Keene meant to be brutal, his common-sense demanded it of him. But that evening, as he sat smoking as usual in the verandah, he saw a light flickering about the ruins, and told himself that, despite his reticence, the potter was in one of his restless moods, when he would seek for his daughter all night long, returning at dawn with a handful of dust, which he would knead to clay and mould upon his wheel into odd little nine-pins. Sometimes he would bury these in pairs upon the mound--George had seen him doing it--more often he would give them to the village children as toys. George had seen them, too, with sticks for arms and bits of charcoal for eyes, doing duty as dolls. He had laughed at the oddity of it all; but now in the soft darkness the thought sent that thrill through his veins once more. This would never do! He had been too long mooning about Hodinuggur sketching and playing chess. It was time to ride down the ca.n.a.l, bully the workman at the brick-kilns, and have a day or two at the bustard in the desert; so then and there he called to the factotum and gave his orders for breakfast to be ready twenty miles off the next morning. That would settle his nerves.

When he returned, after four days, absence, he set to work rationally to finish his sketch. The cloth-of-gold sunshine was brilliant as ever, the blue tiles glowed, the prismatic pigeons sidled along the cornices.

He told himself that Hodinuggur was not such a bad place if you refused to allow imagination----

'The Huzoor gives medicine to the poor,' came a voice behind him.

'Mother is ill; I want quinine.'

It was the girl with the Ayodhya pot in her hand. George Keene laughed out loud in the satisfaction of his heart at his own wisdom.

'What is the matter with your mother?' he asked judiciously.

'She is sick, I am to get quinine,' repeated the girl. 'I came once before, but the Huzoor jumped up; so I became frightened and ran away.

Since then I have come often, but the Huzoor was not here.'

George felt vaguely that he too had run away before something ridiculously commonplace and simple, and in the effort to bolster up his dignity, his tone became pompous and condescending.

'You are not frightened now, I hope?'

The queerest demure look came to her downcast eyes.

'Wherefore should I be afraid? The Huzoor is my father and mother.'

George had heard the saying a hundred times. Even now, incongruous as it was, it pleased him by its flattering recognition of the fact that his benevolence and superiority were undeniable.

'But, unfortunately, I don't carry quinine with me,' he began.

'If the Huzoor were to bring it to-morrow when he comes to put paints on paper, his slave could return and fetch it,' she interrupted readily. He looked at her more sharply, wondering what her age might be. 'Shall I come, Huzoor?' she continued, with a certain anxiety in her grave face.

'What else?' he answered quickly. It would suit him admirably, since he could come armed with rupees wherewith to bribe the Ayodhya pot from her, and with canvas and oil-colour more suitable to the portrait which, as he looked at her golden brown face and reddish purple draperies, he resolved to have. He would paint her against the dark mound of the ruins rising formless and void upon a sunset sky, and he would call it----

'You had better tell me your name,' he said suddenly, 'then I shall know to whom I have to send the quinine in case you can't come.'

Her white teeth flashed between the long curves of her mouth.

'I am Azizan, Huzoor. I am quite sure to come, and I will bring the pot for the medicine.'