"Public?" he echoed with a leer of malice. "Sure there is no more private place than the Court Mosque since the King started his Divine Faith! Hast heard, Most Holy, what the idolatrous pig Birbal jested last Friday when the King, for a marvel, put in an appearance at prayers--that he came not in order to listen to what you preached as of God, but to hush the slanders you borrowed of the Devil."
The Makhdûm spat solemnly, the senior canon let loose a thundering "God roast him," which echoed and re-echoed through the wide arches.
"Except," remarked Budaoni with a sneer, "when his Majesty reads prayers himself; then he comes to stutter!"
This allusion to the day not so far past when Akbar, assuming the Headship had--whether from nervousness or emotion history sayeth not--broken down in repeating the kutba composed for the occasion by Faiz, the poet-laureate, produced snorts and smiles of assent.
"Yes! yea!" assented the sour-visaged elder fiercely "he stuttered indeed--mayhap because the words were by Faiz, the dog poet--may God rot him for defiling His Holy Place."
The old man with the white beard looked up suddenly.
"Yet, sirs, was there ought wrong with the words?" he asked; so stretched out his lean old hand, and his wavering old voice rang out through the sunshine:
Lo! from Almighty God I take my Kingship
Before His Throne I bow and take my Judgeship
Take Strength from Strength and Wisdom from His Wiseness
Right from the Right, and Justice from His Justice
Praising the King I praise God near and far
Great is His Power, Al-la-hu Akbar.
The echoes died away and there was silence. Then Ibrahîm indulging in a yawn of contempt for the digression his words had caused, said patronisingly, "The question we ask is not of kutbas; it is of a marriage, most Enlightened-One."
But Budaoni's virulence was incorrigible. "His Majesty hath propounded not a few such problems to this poor court already," he remarked caustically; "doth he perchance propound another?"