On the face of our mother earth;
There are ever sorrows and tears
At the gates of birth."
The mere thought of the land lying fallow had been too much for him; so safe in the usurer's strong-box lay a deed with the old man's seal sitting cheek by jowl beside Anunt Râm's brand-new English signature. And Jaimul knew, in a vague, unrestful way, that this harvest differed from other harvests, in that more depended upon it. So he wandered oftener than ever over the brown expanse of field where a flush of green showed that Mother Earth had done her part, and was waiting for Heaven to take up the task.
The wedding fire-balloons rose from the courtyard, and drifted away to form constellations in the cloudless sky; the sound of wedding drums and pipes disturbed the stillness of the starlit nights, and still day by day the green shoots grew lighter and lighter in colour because the rain came not. Then suddenly, like a man's hand, a little cloud! "Merry drops slanting from west to the east;" merrier by far to Jaimul's ears than all the marriage music was that low rumble from the canopy of purple cloud, and the discordant scream of the peacock telling of the storm to come. Then in the evening, when the setting sun could only send a bar of pale primrose light between the solid purple and the solid brown, what joy to pick a dry-shod way along the boundary ridges and see the promise of harvest doubled by the reflection of each tender green spikelet in the flooded fields! The night settled down dark, heavenly dark, with a fine spray of steady rain in the old, weather-beaten face, as it set itself towards home.
The blue sky was on the side of labour this time, and, during the next month or so, Târadevi's young soldiers made mud pies, and crowed more lustily than ever over the bunniah's boys.
Then the silvery beard began to show in the wheat, and old Jaimul laughed aloud in the fulness of his heart.
"That is an end of the new seal," he said boastfully, as he smoked his pipe in the village square. "It is a poor man's harvest, and no mistake."
But Anunt Râm was silent. The April sun had given some of its sunshine to the yellowing crops before he spoke.
"I can wait no longer for my money, O baba-ji!" he said; "the three years are nigh over, and I must defend myself."
"What three years?" asked Jaimul, in perplexity.
"The three years during which I can claim my own according to the sahib-logue's rule. You must pay, or I must sue."