Voices in the Night Part 29

'Yea, yea, sweetest!' she began breathlessly as the old signs of tears showed themselves--'have patience, pretty. Old Khojee will surely obey--no tears, darling--she will sound the _naubat_ even now.'

She glanced round in her consolations hurriedly. Noormahal still slept at the bed's foot. Khadjee's snores--she had wept herself into the physical discomfort of a cold in the head--rose regularly from an archway. All else was silence. Every one slept! Even the city! Yes! she would risk it--risk disturbing the neighbours--risk unknown penalties from the breach of unknown by-laws. The child must be saved from tears.

So, hastily, she caught up the rushlight, and leaving the courtyard to the moonlight, stumbled, fast as her limp would let her, up the narrow stairs to the _naubat khana_. The rats scuttled from it as she picked her way through the fallen kettledrums that had once swung from the roof, brave in ta.s.sels and tinsels; that were now cracked, mouldering, the parchment rent and gnawed. One still hung dejectedly at the farther end, and towards it she pa.s.sed rapidly. Even on it, however, a rat, driven to extremities in that hungry house, had been attempting to dine; its eyes showed like specks of light as it ran a little way up the tarnished tinsel rope on which the drum swung, and awaited her oncoming.

Now Aunt Khojee, like many another woman East and West, was desperately afraid of rats; yet the _naubat_ had to be sounded. She shut her eyes to give her greater courage, and put all her little strength into her blow.

It was too much for the rotten rope. The kettledrum clashed to the ground with hollow reverberations worthy of the old days, and the old woman's frightened cry did duty as the _nakarah_.

But behind both sounds came a child's laugh, an elfin, uncanny laugh; and, as she paused--in her flight downwards--at the stair-head, she saw in the moonlight below an elfin, uncanny figure sitting bolt upright among the cushions of state, clapping the little hands that held the glistening signet of royalty, and chuckling to itself gleefully, while Noormahal, roused, yet still bewildered, looked about her for the cause, and Aunt Khadjee from the archway gave pitiful shrieks of alarm.

'The _naubat_! the King's _naubat_! My _naubat_! Sa'adut's _naubat_!'

The cracked, hoa.r.s.e little voice went on and on till it became breathless, and after it ceased, the sparkle of the ring still showed in the little applauding hands.

'What is't?--what didst do?' asked Noormahal reproachfully. 'Thou hast made him in a sweat. Lo! heart's delight, let me wipe thy forehead--'tis only _Amma jan_--thy _Amma_,' she added coaxingly. But there was no need for that. Sa'adut lay cuddled up on his pillows, smiling, complaisant, both hands clasped over his ring.

'Sa'adut's ring,' he whispered as if it were a great joke, a splendid childish secret that was his to keep or tell, 'and Sa'adut's _naubut_.

His own. He will keep them himself.'

'Lo! _bibi_,' faltered old Khojee apologetically--'it will do him no harm. See! it was of himself he rose, and now he would sleep. He is better, not worse. _Bismillah!_'

'_Ur-rahman-ur-raheem_,' came drowsily from the child's lips, finishing that new-taught grace, a.s.serting that new-found dignity. So, with that look of possession on his face, he fell asleep again.

He was still sleeping when, an hour or two after dawn, the tailor's wife from over the alley came in on her way bazaarwards, to see how the child had fared through the night, and ask what the noise might have been which had awakened her house. Had more of the old palace fallen?

Khojee, who was already spinning for dear life, set the question by. A great fear was in her old heart, because of the evil portent of the falling drum; but none because of the truth, writ clear on that sleeping figure, that it would never wake again.

So Khadjee was still writing out the attributes of G.o.d, and Noormahal sc.r.a.ping out another dose of the wonderful western medicine from the bottom of a tin of Brand's essence against the wakening that would never come.

'He is more like his grandfather than his father,' remarked the tailors wife as she looked at the child, 'If he had been King, he would have been better than Jehan.'

She made the a.s.sertion calmly, and though Aunt Khojee looked up, doubtful of its ambiguity, no one denied or contradicted it. So the tailor's wife pa.s.sed out of these four walls, leaving them empty of all things strange.

For the very shadows they threw were familiar. All her life long, Noormahal's big black eyes had watched the purple one of the eastern wall lessen and lessen before the rising of the sun, and the purple one of the western wall grow behind the setting of the sun. Only on the angled screen at the door the shadows were sometimes new; these shadows of some one coming from outside.

There was one on it now; clear, unmistakable. No! not one; there were two! The shadows of two strange women m.u.f.fled in their veils, coming in as if they had the right to enter.

A quick terror flew to Noormahal's eyes at the sight!

The tailor's wife had not been long in spreading her news.

In an instant Noormahal was on her feet fighting the air wildly with her hands.

'It is not true!' she cried pa.s.sionately; 'it is not true!' And then the mockery of her own denial, the certainty that it was so, came to her even without a look at the child, and her voice rose piercingly in the mother's dirge--

'O child! who taught thee to deceive?

O child! who taught thee thus to leave?'

Old Khojee was at her side in a second, beating down her hands. 'Not yet! Not yet! Noormahal! Oh! wait a while. It cannot be yet! He sleeps--he is not dead.'

True, he slept still, cuddled into the cushions of state. But the look of possession had gone from the childish face, though the signet of royalty had found its proper place; for it hung loose on the forefinger of his right hand.

'Some one must call his father,' whimpered Khadeeja Khanum; even amid the tempest of grief she was mindful, as ever, of etiquette. 'He must be here to receive the last breath.'

So it came to pa.s.s that when Jehan returned with Lateefa from cantonments to the evil-smelling courtyard in which his bachelor quarters jostled Dilaram's balcony, he found the call awaiting him. It had come two hours before, the messenger said, so it might be too late.

But it was not.

Jehan entering, found the courtyard half full of women. The sun was pouring down into it, showing the stolid yet watchful faces of the circle of those--unveiled by reason of their lower rank--who were gathered round the bed set in the centre. Khojee and Khadjee--the former with the tears chasing each other down her cheeks forlornly as she shaded the child with the royal fan and said '_Ameen_' to the old mullah who was chanting the death chapter of the Koran, the latter with unreserved sobbings--crouched at the head.

But Noormahal neither sobbed nor said '_Ameen_.' Half on the ground, half on the low bed, she lay still, her face hidden about the child's feet.

She did not stir even when Jehan's voice rose in unrestrained--and for the time being sincere--lamentation, in piteous upbraidings of all and everything. Why had he not been told? Why had he not been sent for sooner?

Lateefa, who had entered with him, gave a quick look of absolute dislike and contempt at his princ.i.p.al. 'Best thank G.o.d they sent for thee at all,' he muttered as he pa.s.sed to the head of the cot. He had gibed and laughed at the tragedy till then, treating it--as he treated his kites--as a mere nothingness. But this--above all, old Khojee's forlorn face--struck home.

'Best thank G.o.d they let thee be in time to claim thy son,' he muttered again, adding, as he bent his keen face closer to the child's, 'and thou art but just in time!'

But just in time! Even as he spoke one of the stolid watching women nodded and looked at her neighbour interrogatively. The neighbour looked at the face on the cushions, and nodded also.

So, as if by common consent, the first faint whimper which heralds the true wailing began.

Khojee paused in an '_Ameen_' with a gasp, Khadjee let her sobs grow into a cry.

But Noormahal neither stirred, nor uttered sound. Only as she lay over the child's feet a little shiver ran through her limbs as if she, too, were pa.s.sing from the cold world.

An hour afterwards she was still lying so, face downwards, unrewarding, though they had moved her to the bed where Khadeeja Khanum had spent so many hours in making tinsel caps.

One of them, which she had made for Sa'adut's four years, four months, and four days' reception into the church of the Clement and Merciful, was on the child's head now; for the tenders of the dead had prepared him for his burial.

Khojee had brought out the few treasures of faded brocade the ruined palace still held, to fold about him softly, and with a sob which seemed to rend her heart, had bidden the signet of royalty be left on the little Heir's forefinger against the time when his mother should rouse herself to take her last look at him.

The wailers had departed to return later on. Khadjee had succ.u.mbed to sorrow, and sought seclusion. Even Jehan had gone; the last to go, save Lateefa, who lingered half-indifferent, half-compa.s.sionate, impatient of poor Khojee's tears over a loss that had been inevitable for months, yet not liking to leave them to be shed in absolute solitude.

'Thou art kind, Lateef,' she said at last. ''Tis woman's work, not man's: yet without thee, brother----' Her soft old eyes met his, and the tears in them seemed to find their way into his heart and melt it.

'Thou art welcome, sister,' he said gravely. 'I think all is as it should be now--I see naught amiss.'

His eyes, as he stood at the foot of the bed whereon the dead child lay, travelled approvingly upwards, and Khojee's followed suit. But hers went no further than the little waxen hands resting so straightly, so demurely on the brocade; for the lack of something on them made her start forward incredulously, search in wild haste in the folds beneath the still fingers, and then fall with a cry at Lateefa's feet, clasping them, kissing them.

'Give it back--it was there but now! If thou hast it--if he bade thee take it--gave it back!'

He stood looking down at her with a curious expression of shame on his face. 'It,' he echoed. 'What is it?'

'Thou knowest,' she pled piteously. 'The ring--she will die if it is not there. She cannot lose both, she cannot lose all. Give it back for these first days--give it for comfort, if for naught else, or she will die. O Lateef! do this for old Khojee--ugly Khojee! Lo! I have asked naught of men, nor husband, nor child; for I had naught to give. Yet I ask this--have pity--brother!'