"I know nothing of myself," replied Sonny in all seriousness. "The Eternal Right decides. There lies the difference between you and me--pardon me if I say between the Christian and the Unbeliever. You trust to your finite mind, I to Something which is and was, which cannot err."
And Dhurm Singh, gleefully employed in turning a cash transport mule with its fixings into a perambulating dispensary, was keeping up his character of devotee by repeating verses from the Adhee Grunt'h[[14]] in sing-song; his round, mellow voice echoing out through the sunshine--
"Remember, oh man, the primal truth--the Truth ere the world began.
The Truth which is and the Truth which must remain.
How can this Truth be told, save by doing the will of the Lord?"
"Listen!" said Taylor, and Sonny baba moved uneasily in his chair.
When these same preparations were complete, the old man's delight was huge; and he drove the mule forth to the wilderness before him with much futile waving of the stick which had replaced the sword. Even over that abnegation he was cheerful.
"Lo! I am turned a dhundi-wallah[[15]] in mine old age, as becomes the pious-minded. Ari! thou misbegotten offspring of a mixed race doomed to childless extinction, wilt stray from the beaten path! Wouldst steal the corn of others, when thy master is a missen sahib, and thy tender a devotee? May the uttermost--"
Then to Sonny's pained reproof he would reply, cheerfully as ever, that he had understood the refraining of his tongue from abuse was to be towards those born of Adam; and this was not even a God-created thing, but a nondescript invented by the sahib-logue.
Cheerful always; even when, as time went on, his daily pills of opium were mixed with quinine. He sat and compounded them himself dhurm nâl, keeping no grain of the beloved dream-giver from the sacrilegious mixture, and telling the full tale of the "fiat pillulæ" into the master's locked medicine chest, whence they were doled out daily.