But Glory-of-Woman heard nothing save those responsive sighs, saw nothing but the orthodox beatings of the breast with which one or two of the elder men gave in to custom.
The last ameen left her still blind, still deaf. Then came a laugh. "With half her years I'd take the saint before the sinner," said the man with the evil face.
Glory-of-Woman stood for a second as if turned to stone. Then she threw up her hands with a cry and sank in a huddled heap upon the white curves of her fallen veil.
"God smite your soul to eternal damnation!" cried a man's voice.
But Glory-of-Woman was to hear no man's voice again. She had kept her promise, and the last pair of curly shoes behind the screen was vacant. In due time Noor-bânu slipped into them, for the eleven old ladies and Juntu made peace with her for the sake of Fakr-un-nissa.
"Lo! the ways of Providence are not our ways," said Khâdjiya Khânum piously over her horn spectacles. "And she was ever in a hurry. For my part I wait on the will of the Lord."
Maimâna Begum cackled under her breath. "Hair-oil is wasted on a bald head," she said in a whisper to Humeda-bânu. "Her time is near, hurry or no hurry. Who comes, must go."
[AT THE GREAT DURBAR]
He sat, cuddled up in a cream-coloured cotton blanket, edged with crimson, shoo-ing away the brown rats from the curved cobs of Indian corn. The soft mists of a northern November hung over the landscape in varying density. Heavy over the dank sugar-cane patch by the well, lighter on the green fodder crop, dewy among the moisture-loving leaves of the sprouting vetches, and here, in the field of ripening maize, scarcely visible between the sparse stems. He was an old man with a thin white beard tucked away behind his ears and a kindly look on his high-featured face. Every now and then he took up a little clod of earth from the dry, crumbling ridge of soil which divided the field he was watching from the surrounding ones, and threw it carefully among the maize, saying in a gentle, grumbling voice, "Ari, brothers! Does no shame come to you?"
It had no perceptible effect on the rats, who, owing to the extreme sparsity of the crop, could be seen every here and there deliberately climbing up a swaying stem to seat themselves on a cob and begin breakfast systematically. In the calm, windless silence you could almost hear the rustle and rasp of their sharp white teeth. But Nânuk Singh--as might have been predicted from his seventy and odd years of life in the fields--was somewhat hard of hearing; somewhat near of vision also. For when so many years have been spent watching the present furrow cling to the curves of the past one, in sure and certain hope of similar furrows in the future, or in listening to the endless lamentations of a water-wheel ceasing not by day or night to proclaim an eternity of toil and harvest, both eyes and ears are apt to grow dull towards new sights and sounds. Nânuk's had, at any rate, even though the old familiar ones no longer occupied them; fate having decreed that in his old age the peasant farmer should have neither furrows nor water-wheel of his own. How this had come about needs a whole statute book of Western laws to understand. Nânuk himself never attempted the task. To him it was, briefly, the will of God. His district-officer, however, when the case fell under his notice by reason of the transfer of the land, thought differently; and having a few minutes' leisure from office drudgery to spare for really important work, made yet one more representation regarding the scandalous rates of interest, the cruelty of time-foreclosures, and the general injustice of applying the maxim "caveat emptor" to transactions in which one party is practically a child and the other a Jew. A futile representation, of course, since the Government, so experts affirm, is not strong enough to attack the Frankenstein monster of Law which it has created.