"Your crops won't ripen long on those fields, I'm afraid, my poor Peru! The sahib wants land, here, everywhere, for this new factory of his. The men who will not pay will see what befalls. A little will go this year, a little more next. If I were alone 'twould be a different matter, for I was ever faithful to my friends."
Shunker's air of virtuous distress was admirable, but Peru laughed; the rough peasant laugh full of broad toleration. "As vermin to the Pathan, so are the grain-dealers to the farmer! We warm you, and you feed on us till you grow troublesome, then--off goes the coat! One buniah is like another; why then dost change?"
"I change not, dunderhead!" cried Shunker enraged at a certain slow superiority in the other. "'Tis Raby sahib claims payment."
"Then tell Raby sahib I will pay when the river comes. It will come this year perhaps, if not, next year; if luck be bad, it may tarry twain, not longer. It comes ever sooner or later; then, let us talk of payment."
Shunker leaned forward, his evil face kindling with malice. "But what, Peru, if the river never returns? What if Raby sahib's new dam is built to prevent the water coming, so that he may have a grip on the land? What if the seed-grain thou sowest springs green, to die yellow, year after year?"
Pera Ditta's ox-eyes opened helplessly. What if the river never returned? The idea was too vast for him, and yet it remained with him long after Shunker had gone to sow the same seed of mischief in other minds. He did it deftly, taking care not to turn the screw too tightly at first, lest he should bring down on himself the villagers' final argument of the stick. The reason given by the Laird of Inverawe for hanging the Laird of Inverie, "that he just didna like him," has been given before now as fair cause for doing an unfortunate usurer to death with quarterstaves. So Shunker did not disturb primeval calm too rudely. Nevertheless as he paused for a night ere returning to Faizapore, in the empty house at Saudaghur, where Kirpo had passed the months of Râmu's captivity, he felt content with his labours. He had started a stone of unpopularity on its travels, which by and by would bring down an avalanche on his enemy.
As he lounged on the string bed, set for coolness on the flat roof, he told himself, not without a measure of truth, that sooner or later all his enemies perished. Ah, if it were only as easy to keep those you loved in life, as it was to drive those you hated down to death! But it was not; and the thought of frail, sickly Nuttu came, as it often did, to take the savour even from revenge. The memory of deserted Kirpo's sons,--those strapping youngsters whom he had often seen playing on that very roof--made him groan and roll over on his fat stomach to consider the possibility of marrying yet another wife. He had married so many only to find disappointment! As his face came back, disheartened, to the unsympathetic stars which fought against him, he started as if he had been shot. For there was Kirpo herself tall and menacing standing beside the bed. The veil wrapped tightly round her body, left her disfigured death's-head face visible.
"Don't be more of a coward than need be," she said scornfully, as the Lâlâ, after shooting up like a Jack-in-the-box, began to sidle away from her, his dangling legs swinging wildly in his efforts to move his fat form. "I've not come to beat the breath from thy carcase. 'Twill die soon enough, never fear; and just now there is a son to perform the obsequies. There won't be one by and by."
The indifference of her voice, and the aptness of her words to his own thoughts, roused the Lâlâ's rage. "What dost want, hag of a noseless one?" he shrieked, "she-devil! base-born!--"
"Not bad words, Lâlâ," she interrupted calmly. "I've had enough of them. I want money. I'm starving; thou knowest it. What else could I be?"