A MOTHER'S DIRGE

But little Sa'adut was of a different opinion. He had found that question as to which of his fingers came nearest to filling the gold circle of the ring an absolutely entrancing one; the more so because, from some reason or another, those fingers had suddenly taken to wasting away. Thus, the two which fitted best one day might not be the two which fitted best on the next.

'Lo! the ring hath bewitched him!' whimpered Aunt KhÂdjee, when the child could scarcely be distracted from the puzzle to take the food which only Auntie KhÔjee could coax him to eat.

Patient Auntie KhÔjee, who would have sate all day and all night beside the string cot like that other woman's figure, if there had not been so many things which only she could do, now that they had no servant at all. So Noormahal alone, her face half hidden in her veil, watched the child hungrily; since from some reason or another, as mysterious as the sudden wasting away which had come to the poor little body, a fretful intolerance of clasping arms and caressing hands had come to the poor little mind. The child cried when his mother held him, and only lay content among the cushions of state which KhÔjee brought out for daily use recklessly, so that the little Heir's resting-place should be as soft as a King's.

There was nothing, indeed, of such care and comfort as these women could compass, that Sa'adut lacked; nothing, in fact, of any kind which even richer folk of their sort could have given him; for they too would not have had the least elementary knowledge of what nursing could or could not do for such sickness as his. Before that mysterious slackening of grip on life, these women, the one who watched, the one who worked, the one who whimpered beside that cot set in the sunshine, were absolutely helpless. They knew nothing. They could not even tell, day by day, if the child were worse or better. If he slept a while, or drank a spoonful of milk, they praised God; and once when they had propped him up with pillows, and set a gay new cap jauntily on his damp hair, they almost wept for joy to think he was better. And when the consequent fatigue made it all too evident that they were mistaken, they never recognised that the change for the worse was due to the sitting-up.

It was after this that KhÂdjee, with floods of tears, gave the only jewels she did not wear to be pawned in order that a hakeem might be called in. And then she cried herself sick over the loss, so that, when the medicine-man did come, he had two patients instead of one. He was a smiling old pantaloon who had been court physician, and as such had attended Sa'adut's great-grandfather; who talked toothlessly of the yunÂni system of medicine, and of things hot and things cold, of things strong and things weak, to Aunt KhÂdjee's great delight. Indeed, she took up most of the time in detailing her own complaints, so that, in the end, he reassured them hastily as to the child, by saying that all he needed was a conserve, a mere conserve! But it proved to be a conserve of palaces, containing thirty-six ingredients, the cheapest of which was beaten silver leaf! So what with it and Auntie KhÂdjee's emulsion, poor KhÔjee's housekeeping purse was empty after a few doses. But she sate up o' nights spinning, and so gathered enough to call in another medicine-man. This one was of a different sort; long-bearded, solemn, with sonorous Arabic blessings. He had ordered paper pellets with the attributes of the Almighty inscribed on them.

These, at least, were not expensive; these, at least, were within the reach of poverty--even the abject, helpless poverty of these high-born ladies. So Auntie KhÂdjee, forsaking her tinsel cap-making, recalled the teachings of her youth, and by the aid of the smoke-stained Koran, from which she chanted her portion like a parrot every morning, traced the words on to tissue paper with difficulty--she suffered from rheumatic gout, though she did not know it was anything but old age--and KhÔjee rolled them into pills, and covered them with silver leaf and sugar, and put them in the sweeties, which were the only thing the child cared for. So he would swallow Mercy, and Truth, and Charity, and Justice, and Strength, as he lay in the sunshine on the cushions of state playing with the ring on which was scratched, 'By the Grace of God, Defender of the Faith.'

The courtyard was very quiet, very empty, as yet, for the child was not yet near enough to death to be an attraction to the neighbours. He had been ill so long, and now was a little worse; that was all those three women told themselves. They had no means of realising that the disease, long-sluggish, had roused itself to fierce energy; that the days, almost the hours, were numbered.

So Noormahal watched the child's least movement day and night, and KhÂdjee wrote the attributes of God for the paper pills, while KhÔjee worked her old fingers sore, or tramped about openly to do the marketing. But no matter how pressed for time she was, no matter how far from home, her old hands or feet hurried up, so that they should be free for another task at sunset; a task which, so long as they had had a servant, had never been omitted, and must not be omitted now--must never be omitted so long as these crumbling walls and the wide empty courtyard held the heir to a Kingship. And this task was the sounding of the naubut from the gateway where the stucco peacocks still spread their plaster tails.

In the old days, this ceremony of sounding the royal kettledrums as a sign that majesty lived within, had been quite an imposing one. Then, a posse of liveried servants and soldiers had gone up into the naubat khana, and whacked away at a whole row of slung kettledrums, and blared away at the royal nakÂrahs, until all the city knew that sunset had found the King still on his throne. But for some years back it had been very different; a half-hearted apologetic drubbing on one dilapidated drum, a breathless blowing of an uncertain horn had been all. And now, when only one poor tired old woman limped up the broken stairs, it was a very feeble claim to royalty, indeed, that echoed into the courtyard below, though KhÔjee drummed valiantly for all she could, and blew her withered cheeks plump as a cherub's over the nakÂrah. Feeble as it was, however, it could be heard, and it brought comfort even to Noormahal's hungry heart; for it meant that the child was still on his throne at sunset. And that was all the world to those lonely women, shut up inconceivably, helplessly, from all hope, almost from all desire for help from that outside world, into which only Aunt KhÔjee ventured at times timorously; and only to return poorer, more helpless than she went out.

Once, however, when--at the risk of a fit of hysterics, which might incapacitate Aunt KhÂdjee from even the writing of paper pellets--KhÔjee had persuaded her to allow the little knot of silver earrings without which no court lady could be considered decently clothed, to pay a temporary visit to the pawnbroker, KhÔjee had come back from that outside world with a new look of hope on her face.

A piece of luck had befallen her. She had met, quite by chance, an old servant of her mother's, who, when the court had been broken up, had taken service as ayah with the mems. And this old dame happened to have in her possession a priceless European medicine for just such delicate children as Sa'adut.

A mem had given it to her, she said, when her child needed it no more. She did not add that the child, despite the Brand's essence of beef and the care of three doctors, had wasted away into its grave quite as quickly as Sa'adut was doing with neither, and that the unopened tins had been part of her perquisites when the stricken parents had sought distraction from grief in three months' leave. She only said that they were worth rupees on rupees, but that KhÔjee might have them for three, because it was for the little Heir. So the patient bent figure and the limp had come back to that cot set in the sunshine, with the feeling that now, at last, the child who lay among the faded cushions of state must pick up strength, since all the world knew that whatever faults the Huzoors had, they were clever doctors--all too clever perhaps!

But there could be no danger of poison here. This was the actual medicine a mem had given her own child. This must be the real thing. Still, to make sure, they continued the paper pellets, since Mercy and Truth, and Justice and Charity must counteract any nefarious intent!

Even with this mixed diet of the East and West, of essence of faith and essence of beef, Sa'adut gained nothing. He continued to lose, though the women refused to see it.

For the courtyard was still quiet. Perhaps once or twice a day some gad-about neighbour in passing would look in, and for half an hour or so after she had left, Noormahal's big brooding black eyes would be on the door of the women's courtyard, with a fierce fear in them. The fear lest she should see the shadow of another new-comer on the angled brick screen before the door; the screen built on purpose to show such warning shadows. In other words, the fear that those strange eyes should have thought it worth while to send other eyes to look on a sight that would not be long seen, either in sunshine or shadow.

But the stillness would remain unbroken, and her gaze would go back to Sa'adut, ready for her to smile assent when he should smile up at her and say, 'Look! Amma-jÂn,' because he had managed to jam the ring hard and fast over some combination of fingers.

The days and nights were cloudless, the air kindly and warm, and in the silence which comes with the darkness--even to a large town when there is no wheeled traffic in it, and the footsteps of men have ceased from going up and down the city--the only sound which came to disturb the courtyard was the shriek of the railway whistle,--an almost incredible sound in that environment.

So the days and nights following on JehÂn's vow never to set foot in the house again, dragged by.

'Were it not best to tell his father?' suggested KhÔjee, the peace-maker, one evening when she came down breathless from that futile beating of kettledrums and blowing of horns, to find Sa'adut without his usual smile for her efforts. 'He is fond of his father, and it might rouse him.'

Noormahal leant forward, and gripped the cot with both hands. 'No!' she said passionately. 'May I not keep this myself? He is no worse, fool! Thou didst not sound the naubut well, that is all. I could scarce hear it myself.'

That might well be, Aunt KhÔjee thought humbly, seeing that she was not used to the beating of drums and the blowing of horns, and that both were cracked and dilapidated almost past beating and blowing. Still, even she would not allow the child to be worse, not even in the watches of the night, when a body's thoughts cannot always stay themselves on the will of God, when railway whistles and other strange sounds set the mind questioning what will come, and why it should come.

And this night, just at the turn of twelve, when the night of a past day turns into the night of a coming one, a voice rose on the darkness as it sometimes did; the voice of a telegraph peon seeking an unknown owner for a telegram.

'O Addum! O Addum KhÂn! dweller in the Place of Sojourners in the quarter of Palaces! Awake! Arise! O Addum! a message hath come for thee. Awake! Arise! O Sleepers! awake and say where is Addum KhÂn for whom a message to go on a journey hath come.'

So, on and on insistently, the man Addum--quaintly namesake of the man in whose name all men go on the great journey--was sought; until the rattle of a door-chain being unhasped brought silence, and the knowledge that Addum had received his message from the darkness.

'La illÂha--il UllÂho-bism'-illÂh-ur-rahmÂn-ur-raheem,' murmured KhÔjee under her breath as she sate by the cot trimming the smoky little rushlight. For the cry on Addum had roused Sa'adut from a half-doze and brought opportunity for more paper pellets.

'Bismillah-ur-rahmÂn-ur-raheem,' he echoed in his cracked little voice quite cheerfully; for these words, the assertion that God is a merciful and a clement God, are the Mohammedan grace before meat as well as a prayer, and the four years, four months, and four days, at which age children are taught them as their initiation into the Church, were still close enough to Sa'adut's sum-total of life, to give the repetition a pleasurable importance.

'Heart of my heart! Eye of my eye! Life of my life! murmured old KhÔjee again. 'Lo! swallow it down, my uttermost beloved, and sleep.'

She had the child to herself for the moment, since Noormahal at her earnest entreaty had hidden her face altogether in her veil, and, with her head on the foot of the bed, had gone off into a brief slumber of exhaustion. So the old arms and the old lips could show all the tenderness of the old heart, which for nearly seventy years had beat true to every womanly sympathy within those four prisoning walls.

By the light of the rushlight Sa'adut's big black eyes showed bright from the cushions of state. So did the emerald in the ring.

'Why didst not sound the naubat to-day, lazy one?' he said suddenly, as if the omission had just struck him. 'Go! sound it now--dost hear? Sa'adut wants it.'

He had not spoken so clearly for days, and KhÔjee's smile came swift.

'Nay, sonling, it was sounded,' she answered caressingly. 'Thou didst sleep, perchance. Sleep again, Comfort of my heart! It will come, as ever, at sunset.

'But Sa'adut wants it now!--he will have it! he will be asleep at sunset. Sound it now! Sound it now, I tell thee, thou ugly one. Sound the King's naubat for Sa'adut.'

The old vehemence, the old imperious whimper brought delight and dismay in a breath to the listener.

'Yea, yea, sweetest!' she began breathlessly as the old signs of tears showed themselves--'have patience, pretty. Old KhÔjee 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. KhÂdjee'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 tassels and tinsels; that were now cracked, mouldering, the parchment rent and gnawed. One still hung dejectedly at the farther end, and towards it she passed 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 KhÔjee, 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 nakÂrah.

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 KhÂdjee from the archway gave pitiful shrieks of alarm.

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

The cracked, hoarse 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 jÂn--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 KhÔjee 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-rahmÂn-ur-raheem,' came drowsily from the child's lips, finishing that new-taught grace, asserting 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?

KhÔjee, 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 KhÂdjee was still writing out the attributes of God, and Noormahal scraping 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 JehÂn.'

She made the assertion calmly, and though Aunt KhÔjee looked up, doubtful of its ambiguity, no one denied or contradicted it. So the tailor's wife passed 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 muffled 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 passionately; '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--

Old KhÔjee 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 KhÂdeeja KhÂnum; 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 pass that when JehÂn returned with Lateefa from cantonments to the evil-smelling courtyard in which his bachelor quarters jostled DilarÂm'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.

JehÂn 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. KhÔjee and KhÂdjee--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 JehÂn'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 principal. 'Best thank God they sent for thee at all,' he muttered as he passed 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 KhÔjee's forlorn face--struck home.

'Best thank God 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.

KhÔjee paused in an 'Ameen' with a gasp, KhÂdjee 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 passing from the cold world.

An hour afterwards she was still lying so, face downwards, unrewarding, though they had moved her to the bed where KhÂdeeja KhÂnum 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.

KhÔjee 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. KhÂdjee had succumbed to sorrow, and sought seclusion. Even JehÂn had gone; the last to go, save Lateefa, who lingered half-indifferent, half-compassionate, impatient of poor KhÔjee'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 KhÔjee'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 KhÔjee--ugly KhÔjee! Lo! I have asked naught of men, nor husband, nor child; for I had naught to give. Yet I ask this--have pity--brother!'

He stooped to unclasp her hands with an almost tender look.

'Thy like has more to give mine than thou dost think, sister,' he said; 'God knows even Lateef----' He broke off with a half-impatient gesture. 'But this is past hoping for. If JehÂn wishes----' He paused again, and shook his head. 'Tell her thou hast put it by for safety--she will be too full of grief to prove thy words--that will give time, see you----'

KhÔjee, still on her knees, looked up doubtfully. 'Time,' she echoed, and then her face lit up with hope. 'Time--then thou wilt try! thou wilt speak to JehÂn! thou wilt bring it back if thou canst! Yea, I will tell her--I will tell the lie if thou wilt promise. Lateef! this much thou wilt do, promise to try. On the Koran, on thy head, thou wilt swear, if thou canst do this thing.'--Her old lips were on his feet, kissing them passionately, and he gave an uneasy, almost bitter laugh.

'Not on the Koran, sister,' he said evasively, 'nor on my head. Those be God's work. Lateef had naught to do with the making of either. He hath no hold on them, or their vagaries, and I swear by naught that is not sure.'

'Then swear by what thou likest,' she put in swiftly. 'Lo! it is not much I ask--not even that thou wilt bring it back, but that thou wilt try--for me who cannot try, for helpless KhÔjee shut in these four walls. Promise, Lateef, that if thou hast the chance--nay! I will not let thee go till thou dost promise.'

There was a pause, and then he laughed--his own contemptuous, musical laugh. 'If the chance comes! Yea! I will promise that. On my kites I promise, since they be my creatures to fly or fail as I choose. Let be, good KhÔjee. If I am to do aught, thou must let me go.'

She rose reluctantly. 'On thy kites, Lateef? That is a light oath.' She spoke in vague wonder.

'Heavy for me, sister,' he replied gaily, 'since they be all Lateef has for children--all of his own fashioning to leave behind him when he dies!'

So, with a nod towards the dead child, he passed out of the courtyard where the shadows were lengthening for sunset.

But there would be no naubat to sound that evening, so KhÔjee crouched down between the two beds where the mother and the child lay both silent, both unheeding, and covering her face with her veil, thought how best to tell the lie when Noormahal should rouse to ask the question.