Part 29 (1/2)

'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 cus.h.i.+ons 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, finis.h.i.+ng 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?'