In the Permanent Way

by Flora Annie Webster Steel

So she showed it to him. The chumpak blossoms were but yellow shreds upon a string, scentless, unrecognisable; here and there clogged black with the blood of sacrifice which had stained them as he fell.

"Take it away!" he cried fiercely, thrusting it from him. "Take it away! Oh! curses on the cruelty--curses on the----"

"Jai Kâli ma!" interrupted his mother as she laid the relic back in the little casket whence she had taken it. "Jai Kâli ma! for She stayed the sickness."

Ramanund looked at her in dull dazed wonder. But it was true what she said. The cholera had slackened from that very time when he had been found lying at the Goddess' feet.

[GLORY-OF-WOMAN]

This is the story of a backwater; one of those still nooks sheltered by sedges whither the sere and yellow leaves drift and rest, while the current beyond slips by swift as ever. Why this particular backwater should have called itself a Technical School of Art-needlework has nothing to do with the story. Briefly it was a sort of almshouse where twelve old Mohammedan ladies drew a poor monthly pittance of some few rupees, and sat contentedly enough year after year twining gold thread on to fine net. What became of the work when it was done has also nothing to do with the story. Perhaps it was sold to eke out the funds of a charity which did its fair share of solacing sorrow in keeping twelve pairs of small, soft, high-bred hands from the quern-handle; that last resource of the poor in India now, as it was when the Great Mogul refused to allow the importation of Western machinery on the ground that God's best gift to the poor was the millstone about their necks.

It was in this odd little courtyard, packed away decorously in the very heart of the loose-living, gambling, gold-worker's quarter, that Glory-of-Woman found shelter after many years of patient, peaceful privation; for Fakr-un-nissa (that was how her name ran in the soft courtly tongue of the most brutal of cities) was a Syyedani; in other words, of the poorest and proudest, too poor to bring a dowry to a husband of her own rank, too generous to take one without it, too proud to stoop to a partner beneath her--or rather too gentle, too conservative. There are hundreds such women in Delhi, and Fakr-un-nissa had been more fortunate than most, seeing that being learned in the Koran she had kept body and soul together by recitations at fast and festival in the zenanas, and so been spared hard labour. Perhaps it was this which made her look younger than her fifty and odd years; at all events there was scarcely a wrinkle on her small oval face, and her tall, slender figure showed no sign of age.

She was the youngest of the scholars, and every evening when the gold thread and the filmy net had been locked away in a queer little carven coffer, she was the last to slip her small feet into one of those twelve pairs of curly shoes which all day long had been ranged against the slip of wall doing duty as a screen at the door, and the last to use the rickety dhooli which the charity provided for the modest conveyance of the fair ones to their homes. It provided a chaperone too, in the shape of a big lump of a girl about twenty, who sat on the steps all day chattering to the passers-by, giggling at their jokes, and chewing pân. It was a queer arrangement seeing that Khâdjiya Khânum, the eldest of the scholars, was past eighty; but then age had nothing to do with the fact that she was a Syyedani, and Juntu only a gad-about. There was another pair of shoes, however, placed in a corner apart from the rest; for it had come to be a recognised custom in the backwater that there should always be a thirteenth pair of feet ready to slip into any vacancy made by the sure decay which comes alike to rest as to unrest. And so, five years before, when Fakr-un-nissa had stepped into the last pair of shoes left by a deserted wife who had gone down into the grave leaving one forlorn daughter behind her, the old ladies had cast about to choose a suitable aspirant. Not that they really had the right to appoint any one, but because experience showed them that the claims of a gratuitous worker were seldom overlooked when opportunity came for urging them. This time the choice fell, naturally enough, on the daughter of the dead scholar. Just in her teens, she was hopelessly alone in the world; for her mother, after estranging her own people by a marriage with a Mohammedan Râjpoot, had quarrelled with her husband's family; but not before little Yâsmin had been married, and had, according to the Rânghar custom, become a widow for life by the death of her childish bridegroom. For race is stronger than religion and the old Râjpoot ideas have survived conversion. So Yâsmin in her turn waited for a vacancy in the shoes; or rather Noorbânu waited, since the old ladies would have nothing to do with the flowery, half-heathen name, and set themselves diligently to transform her into a "Lady-of-light." It was not altogether a successful attempt, for the girl's wild Râjpoot blood waxed rebellious sometimes; but as a rule Fakr-un-nissa's soft voice with its polished periods and careful intonation would bring her back to obedience.

"Lo! thou shouldst mind me, Heart's Delight," Glory-of-Woman would say with a smile. "Do I not stand in Thy mother's shoes? Thou art young now, Yâsmina; so was I once; yet thou wilt be as I am, some day."

And Yâsmina would make a face. "Well! that is better than being like Khâdjiya Khânum, or Maimâna Begum with her little eyes."