“My Mother is dead, and at my hands: have I leave to carry her to the waters of oblivion?”
Leave, of course: but let the blame be rightly fixed; not the worshipper, but the Huzoor, she who ordered, carried the sin. This did not satisfy, as I would have wished: and it was not till many days later that the faithful slave brought me a cleared brow, and his mountain top of philosophy.
“But to him who does not deem it sin it is not sin.”
Now is that what the sacred plant will now say henceforth and for ever to my lover of ceremonies in his garden, and am I responsible for the dangerous doctrine? I wonder.
XIII
A CHILD OR TWO
In an orthodox Hindu house of mine acquaintance are to be found two darling Babies, aged four and five. They are girls, one named “Lightning-Beloved,” the other after a Greek Goddess.
I made their acquaintance first in the Summer, and they were most seasonably dressed in gold waist-bands and an amulet a-piece—for the Goddess of Learning, a bear’s claw, and for “Lightning-Beloved,” a little gold box of mystic “spare-me-s” against the blue sword of her tempestuous Lord.... I was much in request for games, and daily beguiled into longer and longer visits; how could one resist Babies who were just being introduced to the joys of childhood? And, when I left the “Inside,” there would be one Baby on my hip—they taught me that, and it is quite easy, I assure you—and one clinging to leg and hand as I walked downstairs.
But joy was at the full when I invited them to come and see me. The hour fixed was at a distance of a week, and every day I was asked “has it come?” When it did come I was sitting at my window, and seeing the Raj carriage and pair, with all its pomp of liveried attendants, dash up the drive, I smiled to myself, thinking of the semi-nude atoms which would presently issue thence. Little did I know. The atoms, my very own Baby friends of the waist-band and necklet, were translated. At the door, hand in hand and very shy, stood two of the quaintest oddities I have ever seen—my Babies, sure enough, but dressed as English widows, crêpe veil and all, with long false curls of rusty black hair adown their poor little black-gowned backs. Oh! but how I laughed! And they stood by, rueful and disappointed, while I stripped them, even to their natural clothing.
“Then the Miss Sahib loved not the English clothes; nor” (with a gasp of wonder) “the hair of another.”
“No! No!”