Part 17 (1/2)
My love! my love! have you come at last?
Drop the pitcher and hold me fast!
There are my lips before we fly Out to a new world--you and I.
”And now for India!” Babar would cry when the applause was over. ”I want to hear about the size of it, and the fruit and flowers of it, and all about it. See you, grandmother, begin and tell me of the young woman thy man met at Lah.o.r.e--then thou wilt remember to a nicety!”
So the summer pa.s.sed, until old Isan-daulet arriving from Samarkand with news of Dearest-One, set Babar's mind a-jogging once more over his enemy Shaibani. But there was nothing to be done in winter time: such a bitter cold winter, too. More than one man died of it, and even Babar himself admitted that, after diving sixteen times in swift succession into a river that was only unfrozen in the middle by reason of its swift current, the extreme chilliness of the water quite penetrated his bones; as well it might.
Then early spring brought a great grief which gave pause to energy.
Nevian-Gokultash was done to death, by a scoundrel who was jealous of Babar's affection for him, and who had the temerity to say that faithful creature had fallen over a precipice when he was drunk.
Nevian, who adhered so strictly to the law of Islam! Nevian, who had always sided for sobriety, who had been to the full as urgent as old Kasim Beg against a King giving himself up to wine. Babar, helpless to follow the murderer, felt deeply the death of his playmate in childhood, the companion of his boyhood. There were few persons for whose loss he would have grieved so much or so long. For a week or ten days, he thought of nothing else and the unbidden tears were ever in his eyes.
After this, a great restlessness set in, fostered by old Isan-daulet, whose whole life had been one long succession of battles and murders and sudden deaths, and whose belief in Moghul troops never wavered.
Why, she suggested, not go to his uncles the Khans at Tashkend? His mother had been ill; she would like to see him once more. And if his tongue was sufficiently careful amongst his thirty-two teeth, he might get substantial help.
”For what?” gloomed Babar--”to get back aks.h.i.+ and lose Andijan or get Andijan and lose aks.h.i.+? 'Tis all one in the end.”
”Not the fine fighting, child!” replied the old lady craftily. ”That is the same, be it in _Gehannum_ or _Bihisht_.” (h.e.l.l or Heaven.)
That was undoubtedly true; and there was no good to be gained by rambling from hill to hill as he had been doing.
So, once more, the young adventurer gathered together a very scanty band of followers; for old Kasim Beg, who till then had never left him, had come to words with Isan-daulet over these same Moghuls, and refused to accompany him.
”I say not, sire,” remonstrated the wise old soldier, ”that these men are bad soldiers for me; but they are for the Most Exalted, who has ideas of discipline. Besides, I care not to risk my own neck for a chance. In obedience to the Most Exalted's commands I beheaded quite a number of these men in the last campaign, for marauding. Wherefore, therefore, should I go amongst their mourning relatives? I will come if there be fighting. Then there is no leisure and little desire for private revenge; blood can be let anywhere and one corpse is as good as another.”
So Kasim went with his immediate adherents towards Hissar; and Babar set off to Tashkend with rather a heavy heart. In a somewhat didactic mood also, for resting for a day or two beside a spring in the lower hills, he caused a verse to be inscribed on a stone slab which formed one side of the well where the water gushed in from the hill above, to disappear into the earth when it had run through a masonry trough.
”Many a man has rested and has drunk Thy water, and like thee, O spring, has sunk Swift to a grave where he lies all forgot, Conqueror or vanquished, libertine or monk.”
He was not, however, at home in the _rubai_, as he had not, at that time, studied with much attention the style and phraseology of poetry.
Indeed, one of his first actions on reaching Tashkend was to submit some of his compositions to the Khan who had pretensions to taste, and who, moreover, wrote verses himself; though his odes, to be sure, were rather deficient in manner and substance. The younger poetaster, however, did not get either explicit or satisfactory criticism, and came to the conclusion that his uncle had no great skill in poetic diction. He did not know, for instance, that in the Turkhi language it was allowable, by poetic licence, to interchange certain letters for the sake of the rhyme.
”He will think thee a nincomp.o.o.p,” stormed Isan-daulet. ”Why did'st not show him thy sword play?”
”He may see that ere long,” quoth Babar, grimly, and went straight away to write the first _ghazel_ of six Couplets he ever composed.
”I have found no faithful friend In the world save my own sad soul.
Dear heart! thou must give and spend On thyself thy confidence whole.
Nightingale sings to the rose, Roses give scent to the bird, Dreams one of the th.o.r.n.y foes?
The other of pa.s.sion deferred?
The exile must live apart, To his coffers none give or lend.
The banished one holds his heart To his soul as lover and friend.”