Outside the parallelograms of white roads centred by brown stretches of stubbly grass, and bordered by red and blue houses wherein the European residents of Faizapore dwelt after their kind, and our poor Belle lay dreaming, a very different world had been going on its way placidly indifferent, not to her only, but to the whole colony of strangers within its gates. The great plains, sweeping like a sea to the horizon, had been ploughed, sown, watered, harvested: children had been born, strong men had died, crimes been committed, noble acts done; and of all this not one word had reached the alien ears. Only the District Officer and his subaltern, John Raby, bridged the gulf by driving down every day to the court-house, which lay just beyond the boundaries of the cantonment and close to the native city; there, for eight weary hours, to come in contact with the most ignoble attributes of the Indian, and thence to drive at evening heartily glad of escape. In the lines of the native regiment Philip Marsden went in and out among his men, knowing them by name, and sympathising with their lives. But they too were a race apart from the tillers of soil, the hewers of wood and drawers of water, who pay the bills for the great Empire.
Even old Mahomed Lateef came but seldom to see the Major sahib since he had been forced to send his Benjamin to Delhi, there, in a hotbed of vice and corruption, to gain a livelihood by his penmanship. The lad was employed on the staff of a red-hot Mahometan newspaper entitled "The Light of Islâm," and spent his days in copying blatant leaders on to the lithographic stones. Nothing could exceed the lofty tone of "The Light of Islâm." No trace of the old Adam peeped through its exalted sentiments save when it spoke of the Government, or of its Hindu rival "The Patriot." Then the editor took down his dictionary of synonyms, and, looking out all the bad epithets from "abandoned" to "zymotic," used them with more copiousness than accuracy. Sometimes, however, it would join issue with one adversary against another, and blaze out into fiery paragraphs of the following order:
We are glad to see that yet once more "The Patriot," forgetting its nonsensical race-prejudice for the nonce, has, to use a colloquialism, followed our lead in pertinently calling on Government for some worthy explanation of the dastardly outrage perpetrated by its minions on a virtuous Mahometan widow, &c, &c.
And lovers of the dreadful, after wading through a column of abuse, would discover that the ancestral dirt of an old lady's cowhouse had been removed by order of the Deputy Commissioner! Yet the paper did good: it could hardly do otherwise, considering its exalted sentiments; but for all that the occupation was an unwholesome one for an excitable lad like Murghub Ahmed. While his fingers inked themselves hopelessly over the fine words, his mind also became clouded by them. The abuse of language intoxicated him, until moderation seemed to him indifference, and tolerance sympathy. He took to sitting up of nights composing still more turgid denunciations; and the first time "The Light of Islâm" went forth, bearing not only his hand-writing, but his heart's belief on its pages, he felt that he had found his mission. To think that but four months ago he had wept with disappointment because he was refused the post of statistical writer in a Government office! Between striking averages, and evolving Utopias, what a glorious difference! He thanked Providence for the change, though his heart ached cruelly at times when he could spare nothing from his modest wage for the dear ones at home. He had a wife waiting there for him; ere long there might be a child, and he knew her to be worse fed than many a street-beggar. It seemed to him part of the general injustice which set his brain on fire.
"Words! Nothing but words," muttered old Mahomed Lateef as he lay under the solitary nim tree in his courtyard and spelt out "The Light of Islâm" with the aid of a huge horn-rimmed pair of spectacles. "Pish! 'The pen is mightier than the sword!' What white-livered fool said that? The boy should not have such water in his veins unless his mother played me false. God knows! women are deceitful, and full of guile."
This was only his habit of thought; he had no intention of casting aspersions on his much respected wife Fâtma Bibi, who just then appeared with a hookah full of the rankest tobacco. "I shall send for the boy, oh Fâtma Bi!" said the stern old domestic tyrant. "He is learning to say more than he dare do, and that I will not have. He shall come home and do more than he says--ha! ha!" Fâtma Bi laughed too, and clapped her wrinkled hands, while the shy girl, dutifully doing the daughter-in-law's part of cooking, turned her head away to smile lest any one should accuse her of joy because he was coming back.
So Mahomed Lateef covered a sheet of flimsy German note-paper, bought in the bazaar, with crabbed Arabic lettering, and the women rejoiced because the light of their eyes was coming back. And after all the lad refused stoutly to return. He wrote his father a letter, full of the most trite and beautiful sentiments, informing his aged parent that times had changed, the old order given place to the new, and that he intended to raise the banner of jehâd (religious war) against the infidel. The women cried Bismillah, and Mahomed Lateef, despite his annoyance at the disobedience, could not help, as it were, cocking his ears like an old war-horse. Yet he wrote the lad a warning after his lights, which ran thus:
God and His prophet forbid, oh son of my heart, that I should keep thee back, if, as thou sayest, thou wouldst raise the banner of jehâd. If a sword be needed, I will send thee mine own friend; but remember always what the mullah taught thee, nor confound the three great things,--the Dur-ul-Islâm, the Dur-ul-Husub, and the Dur-ul-Ummun.[[2]] Have at the Hindu pigs, especially any that bear kindred to Shunker's fat carcase; he hath cheated me rascally, and built a window overlooking my yard for which I shall have the law of him. But listen for the cry of the muezzin, and put thy sword in the scabbard when its sound falls on thine ear, remembering 'tis the House of Protection, and not the House of the Foe. If thou goest to China, as perhaps may befall, seeing the sahibs fight the infidel there, remember to cool thy brother's grave with tears. Meanwhile, play singlestick with Shâhbâz Khân the Mogul, and if thou canst get the old Meean sahib, his father, on his legs, put the foils into his hand, rap him over the knuckles once, and he will teach thee more in one minute than his son in five.
Then the old Syyed lay down on his bed under the nim tree, and Fâtma Bi fanned the mosquitoes from him with a tinsel fan, and talked in whispers to Nasibun, the childless wife, of the deeds their boy was to do, while Haiyât Bi, the young bride, busy as usual, found time to dry her tears unseen. A fire burning dim in one corner of the courtyard was almost eclipsed by the moon riding gloriously in the purple-black sky overhead. From the other side of the high partition wall came the dull throbbing of the dholki (little drum) and an occasional wild skirling of pipes. The marriage festivities in Shunker Dâs's house had begun, and every day some ceremony or other had to be gone through, bringing an excuse for having the marânsunis (female musicians) in to play and sing. High up near the roof of the sugar-cake house with its white filigree mouldings gleamed the objectionable window. Within sat the usurer himself conferring with his jackal, one Râm Lâl, a man of small estate but infinite cunning. It was from no desire of overlooking Mahomed Lateef's women that Shunker Dâs frequented the upper chamber. He had other and far more important business on hand, necessitating quiet and the impossibility of being overheard. Even up there the two talked in whispers, and chuckled under their breath; while in the courtyard below the delicate child who stood between Shunker and damnation ate sweetmeats and turned night into day with weary, yet sleepless, eyes.
The moon, shining in on the two courtyards, shone also on the church garden, as Major Marsden after going his rounds turned his horse into its winding paths. A curious garden it was, guiltless of flowers and planted for the most part with tombstones. Modern sanitation, stepping in like Aaron's rod to divide the dead from the living, had ceased to use it as a cemetery; but the records of long forgotten sorrows remained, looking ghostly in the moonlight. The branch of a rose-tree encroaching on the walk caught in the tassel of Major Marsden's bridle, and he stooped to disentangle it. Straightening himself again, he paused to look on the peaceful scene around him and perceived that some one, a belated soldier most likely, was lying not far off on a tombstone. The horse picked its way among many a nameless grave to draw up beside a figure lying still as if carved in stone.