Yet he did not regret the deed, though he had always, even as a boy, been tender of life.
"I will fight a whole enemy, I will not slay a wounded one."
The very words of his refusal when his tutor had bidden him whet his maiden sword on the rebel Hemu came back to him, and led him on to remembrance of the day when this feeling for the sanctity of life had risen in him not toward man only but toward all creatures. That was a later memory, and the scene reproduced itself before his mind's eye complete in every detail.
The long laborious encircling of game drawing to its close--the opposing ends of the great arc of thousands upon thousands of men who for two days had been sweeping across the country driving all wild things before them, were narrowing, closing in--and he, the man called King, was watching, luxuriously posted, his court about him, for his first shot.
And then? Then close beside him a chinkara fawn, looking at him with great soft dim eyes, startled, but not afraid!
"His Majesty was seized suddenly with an extraordinary access of rage such as none had ever seen the like in him before, and the battue was given up; nor has he since, so pursued game, but prefers to go out alone and spend hours in arduous chase."
That is how his quick, almost despairing remorse, regret, pity, anger with himself had appeared to the outside multitude. To him it had been a crisis in his life; one of the few things which had left an indelible mark on his mind.
Aye! few things. For love had not touched him as, for instance, it had touched his grandfather.
"To-night at midnight after three long years, I met Mâham again."
Babar had set that down in his memoirs, after--according to Aunt Rosebody's tale--he had run out on foot from the palace on hearing of the near approach of the long expected caravan from Kabul and met his dearest dear six miles out along the road. Even his father's more passionate love for the fourteen year old Hamida, seen when Humâyon was five and thirty, had not been his. If it had been, perhaps his sons might have been different!