Lâlu gathered the boy closer and half mechanically hummed the chorus he had so often heard Fâtma use as a lullaby. Yes, one and one made two, and two and two made four. But only if God willed it so; not otherwise.
"Stoop down, little mother, and I will lift the boy to thee," he said, when Fâtma, feeling her way through the dark, paused as her fingers touched Lâlu's knee. She felt his fine hands linger as he drew them from the burden he laid in her arms--linger almost caressingly.
"One and one, and two and two, are what He chooses to make them. Remember that, my sister."
"Not so, Lâlu. In school they are ever the same. The big teacher said so. One and one is two all the world over."
He sighed, sitting crouched up in the dark; then he called after her, "Peace go with thee, Mussumat Fâtma."
"And peace be thine, Lâlu," echoed back from the stairs.
The next morning the whole alley was being censed. A group of policemen were standing round a bonfire of beds and clothes over which the flames licked blue and clear as the brimstone was scattered on it.
Fâtma's room was empty, so was Lâlu's. So were several others in the high pestilential tenements of the quarter. The cholera had grown tired of playing at school. It had taken arithmetic and education and creeds and customs all into its own hands and settled the problem its own way. Two and two were not four, but none; and only Chundoo called Heaven to witness that she had been defrauded of the remuneration justly due to those who possess a marriageable female relation. The rest of the neighbours said it was God's will.
[IN A CITRON GARDEN.]
This is a very idle tale--only the record of five minutes in a citron garden. Not a terraced patch set like a puzzle with toy trees, such as one sees on the Riviera, but a vast scented shade, unpruned by greed of gain, where sweet limes, mandarins, shaddocks, and blood-oranges blended flower and fruit and leaf into one all-sufficing shelter from the sun. There are many such gardens in India, lingering round the ruined palaces or tombs of bygone kings. This particular one hid in its perfumed heart a white marble mausoleum, where the red and green parrots inlaid themselves like mosaic among the tracery. For they are decorative birds, and, being untrammelled by prejudice regarding the position of their heads, lend themselves to many a graceful, topsy-turvy pattern. Girding the garden was a wall twenty feet high, bastioned like a fort, but, despite its thickness, crumbling here and there from sheer old age; invisible, too, for all its height from within, by reason of the tall thickets of wild lemon on its inner edge. Four broad alleys, sentinelled by broken fountains, converged to the mausoleum, high above a marble reservoir where the water still lingered, hiding its stagnation beneath a carpet of lotus-leaves. From these, again, narrower paths mapped the garden into squares, each concealed by the dense foliage from the next. It was a maze of shadowy ways edged by little runnels of water and bordered by roses and jasmine, with here and there a huge white dræcena usurping the path. Day and night the water ran clear and cool, to flood each square in turn, till it showed a shining lake, wherein the roof of fruit and blossom lay reflected as in a mirror.