Part 21 (1/2)

Could anything be more opportune for the decorous presentation of a retaining fee?

So next day, while Lateefa Khanum st.i.tched, repenting not at all yet, still with a flutter of her heart, and Khulasa Khanum, with an odd flutter at her heart also, which kept the colour even from her lips, worked and prayed, Aftaba used the privacy of a tiny kitchen for the preparation of other things than a scanty dinner of herbs. It meant the loss of her only silver bangle, sold on the sly through the market woman who came every morning. It was quite the most valuable thing in the house; yet there was but a farthing or two left by the time the pumpkin preserve, covered with silver leaf, lay in a tinselled rush basket with the precious brocaded bag on the top, and the market woman, bribed to return for it in the afternoon, had received a generous douceur which would surely ensure its due delivery.

All this took time, and was tiring, to boot; so it was nigh sunset when, after a sleep which had taken her almost unawares in the little cook room, Aftaba came out again to the limited life on the roof. As she did so, the familiar tentative cough of Shamira the _bhisti_ on his rounds, accompanied by the squelching of his water-skin, made her step back into the screening wall.

”_Bismillah!_” she said, wondering not to hear the familiar greeting.

But old Shamira was staring helplessly at something he had never seen before. It was old Khulasa Khanum.

”She must be dead,” he said, simply, to Aftaba's horrified disbelief.

”See! She sits with face unveiled.”

And she was dead. Her retaining fee had brought justice swiftly. And Lateefa?

Aftaba, when she realised the emptiness of the roof save for herself and the dead woman, wondered if it was the sight of one who belonged to it slipping downstairs from its virtue that, by its terrible confirmation of wantonness, had sent Khulasa to seek to a higher tribunal.

As for herself!

That night, when the waiters had gone, promising to return at dawn, and she was left really alone for the first time, she sat wondering what fate her preserved pumpkins would bring. And then she did something she had never done in all her life before. She, too, used the hole left by the displaced brick to gain a glimpse of the world which was doing honour to dead heroes, and to the Queen for whom they died. As she did so the first rockets rose from the unseen Residency to commemorate its brave defenders, and set their stars of glory in high heaven.

Up and up, valiantly, higher and higher, full of the best intentions, they went, typical, so far, of the hands that sent them on their mission. And then?

Then old Aftaba stepped down from her vain vantage, and creeping back to where Khulasa lay waiting the dawn, put her head down beside hers and wept.

For the stars had fallen, but the dead woman's retaining fee had reached the Mercy Seat.

HIS CHANCE

He sate biting his nails viciously. It was not a habit of his, but, at the moment, the tangle of his nineteen years of life had been too much for him, and he sate before it, helpless yet resentful.

He was trying to write a letter to his mother, his widowed mother far away over the black water in England, to tell her that he had been placed under arrest for cowardice--since that was what it came to in the end!--and yet not to hurt her, not to blame her, whom every bit of his being blamed. Why had she brought him up a nincomp.o.o.p? Why had she been so afraid of him?--poor little mother whose nerves had been shattered once and for all by her hero husband's death ere her child was born. Yet that father had been brave to recklessness....

The boy's head went down on his arm. Something like a sob quivered through the hot air. For it was hot, though the sun was but an hour old, in the little gra.s.s-thatched bungalow which boasted of but one room, two verandahs, and two corresponding slips of dark enclosed s.p.a.ce; one a bathroom, the other full of saddles, corn, empty boxes--briefly, the factotum's go-down. The whole house being nothing but a square mushroom set down causelessly in a dusty plain and guarded by two whitewashed gate-pillars, one of which bore the legend, on a black board, ”Ensign Hector Clive, 1st Pioneers.”

A good name, Hector Clive, and yet the boy's head was down on his arm.

Why had he been such a cursed fool?

A brain-fever bird was hard at work in a far-off _sirus_ tree. He could see it in his mind's eye--green, with its red head held high among the powder-puff flowers, as it gave its incessant cry with the regularity of a coppersmith's hammer--for, though he had been but one year in the country, he knew all its birds, and beasts, and flowers; aye! and had a good smattering of its lingo also--it was that, partly, which had made him--what was it--afraid--or--or cautious?

His brain was in such a whirl he could not tell which. And he had no one to whom he could talk; not a friend in the whole regiment, for he was shy. That was why he was living alone in this cursed shanty where the centipedes and snakes, too, sometimes (but he was not afraid of them, or of any animal, thank heaven), fell from the cloth ceiling, and the sparrows (poor devils, after all they were only making their nests) dropped straws over one's letters. That one had made a blot--like a tear-mark--or was it, indeed...?

He cursed again under his breath, and a rigid obstinacy came to his face.

Like his name, it was a good enough face, though curiously young even for his young age. The great height of his forehead, it is true, took away from its breadth, and the short-sighted blink of the eyes set so close upon the high narrow nose prevented their piercing clearness from being seen. On the lower part of his face, hair had scarcely begun to show itself. All was callow, immature; yet the square chin showed stiff and strong enough.

There should, at least, be no suspicion of tear marks, so he took a fresh sheet: and then the thought struck him. He would write two letters. One to the dear little Mother who had devoted herself to him--him only--ever since he was born; the other to the woman who had spoiled him and his life, whose timidity had accentuated his birth-legacy of fear. It would do him good to have it out with himself and with Fate--not with Her--no! never with Her!