"May your grave be spat upon!" shouted the Chief Eunuch. "So none were poisoned by it what matters the food? Pass on----"
"The Most Exalted then said his appointed prayers," gasped the reader. "The Light-of-the-World then slept his usual sleep. On awakening, the physician Ahsan-Oolah----"
Mahboob sat up among his cushions. "Ahsan-Oolah! he felt the Royal pulse at dawn also----"
"The Most Noble forgets," interrupted a voice with the veiled venom of a partisan in its suavity. "The King--may his enemies die!--took a cooling draught yesterday and requires all the care we can give him."
"The King, Meean-sahib, needs nothing save the prayers of the holy priest, who has piously made over long years of his own life to prolong his Majesty's," retorted Mahboob, scowling at the speaker, who wore the Moghul dress, proclaiming him a member of the royal family. There was no lack of such in the palace-fort, for though Bahâdur Shâh himself, being more or less of a saint, had contented himself with some sixty children, his ancestors had sometimes run to six hundred.
The Meean-sahib laughed scornfully as he passed inward, and muttered that those who went forth with the dog's trot might return with the cat's slink, since the great question had yet to be settled. Mahboob's scowl deepened; the very audacity of the interruption rousing a fear lest the king's eldest son, Mirza Moghul, whose partisan the speaker was, might have some secret understanding with Civilization. All the more need for haste.
"Read on, fool! Who told thee to stop?"
"The Princess Farkhoonda Zamâni entered by the Delhi gate."
Mahboob gave a scornful laugh in his turn. "To visit the Mirza's house, no doubt. Let her come--a pretty fool! Yet she had wiser stay where she hath chosen to live, instead of being princess one day and plain Newâsi the next. There are enough women without her in the palace!"
So it seemed, to judge by the stream of female names and titles belonging to the curtained dhoolies, which had passed and repassed the barriers, upon which the editor launched his tongue. But Mahboob, as Chief Eunuch, knew the value of such information and cut it short with a sneer.