"Well, 'tis done, anyhow," said the woman decisively. "We can't have it said in our family, Dhyân, that the vermilion on a girl's head came save from her husband's fingers. He! he! he! Couldst but have seen them. 'This is my wife,' quoth he. 'And we've been married every way we could think of,' pipes she. 'Haven't we, Nâno?' The prettiest pair--Lord! I shall laugh for ever."
"And--and Gunga?" faltered the armourer.
"Gunga's brain is not addled," retorted her sister-in-law sharply. "Who bruises a plum before taking it to market? What's done is done. We must cook the wedding feast without delay, have in the barber, and keep a still tongue."
So, ere many days were over, Pertâbi and Nânuk, as bride and bridegroom, watched the fire-balloons go up into the cloudless depths of purple sky. The boy watching them shyly, yet with absorbing interest; for did not their course denote the favour or disfavour of the gods?
"The omens are auspicious," he said contentedly; but Pertâbi was in a hurry for the sugar-throwing, in which she aided her bridesmaids with such vigour that Nânuk had a black eye for several days.
"If you were to ask me, and ask me, and ask me to lift you on old Pinky-nose again, I'd never do it--never!" he declared vindictively.
"Oh, yes! you would, Nâno," replied his wife with the utmost confidence, "you would if I asked you; besides you really wanted to be married, you know you did. And then there was the fresh molasses."
[A BIT OF LAND]
He stood in the hot yellow sunshine, his air of modest importance forming a halo round his old rickety figure, as with one hand he clung to a plane-table, old and rickety as himself, and with the other to one of those large-eyed, keen-faced Indian boys who seem to have been sent into the world in order to take scholarships. The old man, on the contrary, was of the monkey type of his race, small, bandy-legged, and inconceivably wrinkled, with a three days' growth of grey beard frosting his brown cheeks; only the wide-set brown eyes had a certain wistful beauty in them.
In front of those appealing eyes sat a ruddy-faced Englishman backed by the white wings of an office tent and deep in the calf-bound books and red-taped files on the table before him. On either side, discreetly drawn apart so as to allow the central group its full picturesque value, were tall figures, massive in beards and wide turbans, in falling folds of dingy white and indigo blue; massive also in broad, capable features, made broader still by capable approving smiles over the old man, the boy, and the plane-table. So standing they were a typical group of Jât peasantry appealing with confidence to English justice for the observance of Indian custom.