"Oh come, all ye faithful Joyful and triumphant."
The words echoed confidently into the heart of the great Mohammedan stronghold, within earshot almost of the rose-red walls of the palace; that survival of all the vices Christianity seeks to destroy.
"They have a new service to-night," yawned the chaplain's groom to others grouped round a common pipe. "I, who have served padrés all my life--the pay is bad but the kicks less--saw never the like. 'Tis a queer tree hung with lights, and toys to bribe the children to worship it. They wanted mine to go, but their mother is pious and would not. She says 'tis a spell."
"Doubtless!" assented a voice. "The spell Kali's priest, who came from Calcutta seeking aid against it, warned us of--the spell which forces a body to being Christian against his will."
A scornful cluck came from a younger, smarter man. "Trra! a trick that for offerings, Dittu. The priest came to me also, but I told him my master was not that sort. He goes not to church except on the big day."
"But the mem?" asked a new speaker enviously. "'Tis the mems do the mischief to please the padres; just as our women do it to please the priests. My mem reads prayers to her ayah."
"Paremeshwar be praised!" ejaculated the man to whom the pipe belonged. "My master keeps no mem, but the other sort. Though as for the ayah it matters not, she has no caste to lose."
There was a grunt of general assent. The remark crystallized the whole question to unmistakable form. So long as a man could get a pull from his neighbor's pipe and have a right to one in return, the master might say and do what he chose. If not; then----?
An evil-faced man who still smarted from a righteous licking, given him that morning for stealing his horse's grain, put his view of what would happen in that case plainly.
"Bullah!" sneered a bearded Sikh orderly waiting to carry his master's prayer-book. "You Poorbeahs can talk glibly of change. And why not? seeing it is but a change of masters to born slaves. Oil burns to butter! butter to oil!"