"With due deference," she went on composedly, "it is in the blood. His great-grandfather----"
Aunt Rosebody caught her up fiercely. "But never clown-drunk like this boy! When my father of blessed memory was drunk, he was as the Archangel Gabriel,--of the most entertaining--the most exhilarating--And he gave it up! Does he not say in his blessed book of memoirs: 'Being now thirty-nine and having vowed to abandon wine in my fortieth year, I therefore drank to excess.' What would you more? And his recantation! 'Gentlemen of the army! Those who sit down to the feast of life must end by drinking the cup of death!' It stirs one like the Day of Resurrection! But this boy--'tis all his Hindu mother's fault."
"And his grandfather took opium," continued Râkiya, relentlessly.
Lady Hamida looked up with chill dignity. "Let the earth of the grave cover the dead, daughter-in-law. What my husband did is known to me better than to you."
Râkiya Begum put the spectacles on her pinched nose once more.
"I offer excuse," she replied ceremoniously. "I was but going to remark that both blessed saints, despite these habits, were good enough kings. It is the unprecedented abstemiousness of the present Lord of the Universe, who looks neither at wine nor women, which throws the Prince's indiscretions into relief."
Her words brought solace. After all who could expect a boy of eighteen to be Akbar?--who, in truth, scarcely slept or ate. And this brought the remembrance that if Salîm was sick--as he invariably was after a drinking bout--the pile of good dishes which the Beneficent Ladies had been preparing these many days back against this feast might as well not have been made! The thought was depressing.
"I wonder," sighed Aunt Rosebody, "what 'Dearest Lady' would have advised."
A hush fell over the company. It seemed as though the sweet wise presence of a dead woman filled the room. A dead woman who even in life had earned for herself that title, who lives under it still in the pages of her niece's memoirs.
"She would have counselled patience as ever," answered the Lady Haimda. "Lo! Elder-Sister-Rose! Such tangled skeins can be but disentangled by Time. I remember when my marriage----" She broke off and was silent. Elder-Sister-Rose might know the story, might even remember for her memoirs the very words of the pitiful little tale of girlish refusal overborne; but these others? No! sufficient for them the fact that the unwelcome marriage had made her mother to the King-of-Kings.