So Jehâdpore brought up its troopers, and paid or did not pay its debts in peace. And when Mool Raj died, the folk wagged their heads, saying, "Well, he was not much to speak of as a man, but he was a first-rate monkey."
[SHAH SUJAH'S MOUSE.]
He had no name. The village folk, it is true, called him Baba; but so they called all such as he. Nor did he ever show that he identified the word as anything more personal than the rest of the strange sounds to which he listened serenely as if he had no part or lot in them. Perhaps he was deaf, perhaps he was dumb. Perhaps he was neither. Nobody knew, nor for the matter of that cared. He was one of Shah Sujah's mice; no more, no less. In that lay the difference between him and other men. A small difference in some ways; in others illimitable. To the level of the brows he was as fine a young fellow as you could meet; of middle height, with clean, straight limbs. Above that nothing--nothing but a skull narrowed to the contours of a new-born babe's, conical, repulsive, like a rat's. Whence the name Shah Sujah's mouse.
The learned among us call such poor creatures microcephalous, and talk glibly of joined sutures and osseous formation. The natives of upper India have a different theory. These mouselike ones belong to Shah Sujah's shrine, because they are the firstlings of barren women made fruitful by the saints' intercession. Therefore, from their birth they bear the token of the mother's vow, dedicating them to his service. The seal is set on them from the beginning in mute witness to the truth.
Whatever that truth may be; whether, as some say, the new-born babes brought to be reared, like Samuel in the temple, are born as other babies, and the typical distortion produced by slow pressure--as in lesser degree the coveted bomblike foreheads of the Sindhi women are produced--or whether, as others hold, a tradition favourable to the wealth of the shrine is kept up, and additional gain assured by the secret exchange, through agents all over India, of the normal babies for that percentage of microcephalous infants which Nature makes--this much is certain: all children dedicated to Shah Sujah are his mice. There are hundreds of them; growing up at the shrine, dying there, and during the cold months spreading over the length and breadth of India begging with unvarying success of all women, fruitful and unfruitful; living meanwhile on the broken food given them, but hoarding the money with an odd unconsciousness of all save that in some mysterious way it belongs to the saint; then, as the heat returns, wandering back like a homing pigeon to the insignificant little shrine at Gujrât, which means so much to so many.
Most of the mice are repulsive; some are more or less deformed, more or less idiotic, making idiotic noises as they dawdle through the village alleys carrying their hollow gourds in their outstretched hands. He was not repulsive, and he made no sound of any kind; whether from inability, or from some lingering consciousness that his sounds would not be as those he heard, no one knew. In fact, no one knew anything about him, save that he was a mouse; too naked to be dirty in that country of canals and tanks, and seemingly quite content with a beggar's staff and gourd as his only tie to this world. Here to-day, gone to-morrow, secure of a meal, and of a sand blanket to sleep in if the nights were cold.
Perhaps he had more sense than others of his kind. Perhaps the theory of deliberate distortion was true, and his fine physique had struggled against it more successfully than some. But all such things were idle speculations, and there was nothing to be learned even from the big, luminous eyes, somewhat over-prominent, which looked at everything so serenely. At the children running out to him with their mother's dole, at the lean dogs following him in hopes of a scrap, at the birds and squirrels watching for the crumbs he might leave behind. Down by some water-cut, his feet buried in the warm sand, his naked body covered with the fairy garments made of sunbeams, the very minnows and sticklebacks gathered round him in radiating stars, expectant of bread cast on the water beneath the arching plumes of the date-palm thickets--plumes almost touching the surface, and sending lanceolate shadows, like the fishes themselves, through the sliding water as the breeze stirred the leaflets.
It sounds idyllic viewed from our standpoint. From his, with that osseous formation of the learned closing in like an egg-shell round the embryon, God knows what it was. Until one day something happened.
Sonny baba went amissing. Fuzli, the ayah, prone on her stomach, beating her palms in the dust, called God to witness that he had never been out of her sight except for one single minute when she took a pull at the gardener's pipe. This was down in the Taleri Bagh, where the English roses blossomed madly beneath the mango-trees, and the well-wheel under the big peepul-tree had the oddest habit of creaking the first two bars of "Home, Sweet Home" as the slow zebus circled round and round--
"'Mid pleasures and palaces."