"Hushmut?" answered an older man who lounged smoking in one of the marble-fretted balconies of the dead King's pleasure-house. "Oh, yes! he is quite a character. A scoundrel, I believe; at least he knows all the worst lots in the city. They come to the garden at night, you see, and the bazaar women get all their essences from him. So I expect he knows at any rate of all the devilry that's going on. I wish I did." The speaker's face looked a trifle harassed.
"Is it true, sir, what they say?" asked another voice, "that Hushmut is really the King's son. That his mother was a Brahmin girl they kidnapped, who cried herself to death in one of these rooms. Then, when the child was a cripple, the King--by Jove, he was a brute!--disowned it."
"Is that about Hushmut?" asked the girl, who had joined the group in time to hear the last words.
The men looked at each other, and the older one said: "Yes, my dear; they say he was deserted by his parents because he was a cripple. Rather rough on him. Now I think I'll go and get your mother to come home. It's getting late. You'll follow, I suppose?"
"Yes, father, with him," she said, with a rose-blush.
So, by degrees, in couples, as a rule, but sometimes with a pale-faced child tucked into the carriage between father and mother, the pleasure-seekers left the garden of dead Kings to the scent of the roses. Left it cheerfully, calling back to their friends times and places where they were to meet again, as English men and women did on those fatal evenings in May, '57.
Only the girl in the pink frock and her lover lingered; while the dogcart in which he was to drive her home waited under the blossoming trees.
And as they stood talking, as lovers will, Hushmut the essence-maker, thinking the coast was clear, came shuffling down the scented shadow of the path--for the sun had left the garden--pushing his basket of rose-leaves before him, dragging his crippledom behind him.
"Do you think he would show us his still?" said the girl, suddenly. "I've never seen one. Ask him, will you?"
Hushmut's big, bold black eyes twinkled. Certainly the Miss-sahiba might see. There was no secret in his work. He took the scent as he found it, as wise men took love. Again there was that faint suspicion of raillery only to be pardoned by the girl's ignorance, and also by a conviction that Hushmut counted on that ignorance, and meant the remark only for the young Englishman. And so, oddly, the latter became conscious of a distinct antagonism between himself and the crippled essence-maker. It was absurd, ludicrous; but it existed, nevertheless.