A chuckle ran round the squatting grooms at this home-thrust at Rujjub the grumbler--Rujjub the agitator. The sweet high voices of English women singing a missionary hymn came floating out through the open doors. A hovering kite, far in the blue, swooped suddenly, startling the green and gold parrots--inlaid like a mosaic pattern on the white dome--to screaming flight for shelter towards the sirus trees. Little Rahmut, forgetting his tears, built fresh walls of sand to his garden and watered the fading rosebud anew.
Then a sort of murmurous silence, born of the measured cadence of one voice from within and the lazy, listless gossiping without, settled down over the glare and the shade. Only from the hut came no sound at all. No sound even from the little tomb where the old watchman knelt, his hands on his knees in the attitude of prayer, his keen eyes staring straight into the soft darkness--for the only entrance was so small that the crouching figure blocked out the day. But darkness or light were alike to Deen Mahomed, lost as he was to the present in a dull memory and hope. Perhaps, when, years before, he had first begun to hold his service in defiance of that other worship, he may have put up some definite petition. Now there was none. Only the cry so seldom heard by human ears, yet whose echoes so often resound like thunder through the world--
How long, O lord! how long?
So he knelt, paralysed by the very perplexity of his own prayer, until a louder burst from the harmonium and a sudden hubbub among the carriages warned him that the service was over. He rose indifferently, and came out into the sunlight. It lay now like a yellow glaze over the white stucco of St. John's-in-the-Wilderness, over the gaily dressed congregation hurrying to escape from it in their cool homes, over Rujjub whipping his horses viciously, obedient to a sharp order from the Englishman who had just handed a delicate woman into the carriage, over Rahmut's garden with its white rosebud. And then----!
The whole thing was past in a moment. A plunge--a swerve! a little naked imp making a dive before those prancing feet with an eager, childish cry; then a shriek from the pale-faced lady standing up in the barouche, a small figure, crushed and bleeding, in an old man's arms, and a shout seeming to fill the air.
"Rahmut! Ah, mercy of the Most High! Justice! Justice!"
"Don't look, my dear," said an English voice; "please remember that you--you had better drive home. It was the child's own fault. Doctor, hadn't we better drive home?"
"Yes, yes. Drive home, dear lady!" said another English voice in hurried approach to the scene. "You are not fit. Now then, good people, stand back, please. Carmichael, make those niggers stand back. I must see the boy."
It was easy enough to ensure compliance so far as the pale faces, made paler by shocked sympathy, went; easier still to enforce it from the darker ones accustomed to obey orders given in that foreign accent. But how about the old man standing like a stag at bay, clutching the child to his breast, and backing towards his hut with a loud, fierce cry?
"Touch him not! Touch him not! Touch him not!"