"He may see that ere long," quoth Babar, grimly, and went straight away to write the first ghazel of six Couplets he ever composed.
"I have found no faithful friend
In the world save my own sad soul.
Dear heart! thou must give and spend
On thyself thy confidence whole.
Nightingale sings to the rose,
Roses give scent to the bird,
Dreams one of the thorny foes?
The other of passion deferred?
The exile must live apart,
To his coffers none give or lend.
The banished one holds his heart
To his soul as lover and friend."
He was quite pleased with this effusion and sang it at a festive party soon after with great gusto; but the next morning he found that the golden clasp of his girdle had been stolen by one of the appreciative audience!
Moghuls again!
CHAPTER X
"A blow or two and then the Fighting ends,
The Sword seeks Scabbard, and the Warrior wends
Through Death's wide Door. Were it not wiser then
To sleep until Retreat its message sends?"
So, vaguely thought Babar as life went on dully with the family party at Tashkend. Most of his servants had left from absolute want; one, or at most two attendants were all that he could muster when he went to pay his compliments to the Khân, his uncle. Once, indeed, he accompanied the latter on a foray; but it was a useless sort of expedition. He, the Khân, took no part, beat no enemy; he simply went out and came back again.
The young man spent much of his time with his mother who was convalescing but slowly; and she naturally, after so many years of absence, saw much of her sisters and cousins; most of them elderly women, inclined to make much of the handsome young King-errant whose melancholy never could withstand the faintest joke.
For all that Babar, at the bottom of his heart, was utterly dissatisfied with himself and his world. Never since the debacle at Samarkand had he found himself again, the light-hearted, intensely vital person, who, taking things as they came, could yet turn them to his own uses. He began to tell himself privately that, rather than pass his life as he was now doing, homeless and purposeless, it would be better to retire into some corner where he might live unknown and undistinguished; that, rather than exist in distress and abasement far better were it to flee away from the sight of man, so far as his feet could carry him. In his infancy he remembered he had always had a strong desire to see China, but had never been able to accomplish his wish because of being a King and having a duty towards his relations and connections.
Now he no longer had a throne. Now, his mother--the only tie left, for Ayesha his wife had never returned to him--was safe with her mother and her brother.