"Tell her, spy! if thou wilt," replied the woman carelessly. "We have friends on our side now, as thou mayst understand mayhap ere nightfall, when the answer comes."
Hâfzan laughed. "Thou hast more faith in friends than I. Loh! I trust none within these four walls. And out of them but few."
So saying she limped back into the garden, giving a glance as she passed it into the Pearl Mosque, which showed like a carven snowdrift against the blue of the sky, the green of the trees. Finding none there, she went straight to the Queen's favorite summer-house on the northern bastion.
It was a curious fatality which made Zeenut Maihl choose it, since all her arts, all her cunning, could scarcely have told her that it would ere long be a watch-tower, whence the chance of success or failure could be counted. For the white road beyond the bridge of boats, and trending eastward to the packed population of Oude, to Lucknow, to all that remained of the vitality in the Mohammedan dream, was to be ere long like a living, growing branch to which she, the spider, hung by an invisible thread, spinning her cobwebs, seemingly in mid-air.
"Hush!" The whispered monition made Hâfzan pause in the screened archway till the game was over. It was a sort of dumb-crambo, and a most outrageous double entendre had just brought a smile to the broad heavy face of a woman who lay among cushions in the alcoved balcony. This was Zeenut Maihl, who for nearly twenty years had kept her hold upon the King, despite endless rivals. She was dark-complexioned, small-eyed, with a curious lack of eyebrows which took from her even vivacity of expression. But it was a man with experience in many wives who remarked that favor is deceitful and beauty is vain; he knew, no doubt, that in polygamy, the victory must go to the most unscrupulous fighter. Zeenut Maihl, at any rate, secured hers by ever-recurring promises of another heir to her octogenarian husband; a flattery to which his other wives either could not or would not stoop. But the trick served the Queen's purpose in more ways than one. Her oft-recurring disappointments could have but one cause: witchcraft. So on such occasions, with her paid priest, Hussan Askuri, saying prayers for those in extremis at her bedside, Zeenut Maihl's enemies went down like nine-pins, and she rose from her bed of sickness with a board cleared of dangerous rivalry. For none in the hot-bed of shams felt secure enough to get into grips with her. Ahsan-Oolah, the physician, might have; she had cried quarter from his keen fence before now; but he did not care to take the trouble. For he was a philosopher, content to let his world go to the devil its own way, so long as it did not interfere with his passionate greed of gold. And this master-passion being shared by Zeenut Maihl they hoisted the flag of truce for the most part against mutual spoliations. So the Queen played her game unmolested, as she played dumb-crambo; at which her servants, separated like their betters into cliques, tried to outdo each other.
"Wâh!" said the set, jubilant over the double entendre. "That is the best to-day."
"If you like it, a clod is a betel nut," retorted the leader of another set. "I'll wager to beat it easily."
The Queen frowned. There was too much freedom in this speech of Fâtma's to suit her.
"And I will be the judge," she said with a cruel smile. "Fâtma must be taught better manners."
Fâtma--a woman older than the rest--salaamed calmly; and the fact made the other clique look at each other uneasily. What certainty gave her such confidence as she plucked a gray hair from her own head and placed it on the black velvet cushion which lay at the Queen's feet?