"The Presence saith truly; it is very old," echoed Râmchunderji drearily. "That is why folk will not listen. It is too old; too old to be worth money."
Nevertheless he cheered up at the sight of his rupee; for he would not take more, saying he had every intention of returning to claim the vina ere long, and that five rupees would be beyond his hopes of gain.
A fortnight after I came home from my early morning ride by the police office, which stood outside the native town, close to a brick-stepped tank shaded by peepul-trees, my object being to check the tally of poisonous snakes brought in for the reward given by Government for their capture. The first time I saw some six or seven hundred deadly serpents ranged in a row with all their heads one way, and all their unwinking eyes apparently fixed on me, I felt queer, and the fact of their being dead did not somehow enter into the equation. But habit inures one, and I walked along the thin grey fringe of certain death spread out on the first step of the tank with an air of stolid business, only stopping before an unusually large specimen to ask the captor, who sat behind awaiting his pence, where he had come across it.
"Six hundred and seventy in all, Huzoor" remarked the Deputy Inspector of Police, following me, resplendent in silver trappings and white cotton gloves. "That is owing to the floods, and the season, since this is the sixth of Bhâdron (August) the month of snakes. Yet the outlay is excessive to the Government, and perhaps with justice the price of small ones, such as these, might be reduced one-half."
I looked up, and behind a fringe of diminutive vipers sat Râmchunderji and the bundle he called Seeta. On his bare right arm he wore a much betasselled floss silk bracelet bound with tinsel.
"I am glad to see the greed is in your heart again," said I, pointing to the ornament.
"The Râm-rucki is not bought, but given, as in the days before the flood," replied the boy. "Every one wears the Râm-rucki still, every one!"
The Deputy Inspector pulled down the cuff of his uniform hastily, but against the gleam of his white gloves I caught a glimpse of bright colours. The Râm-rucki, he explained evasively, was the bracelet of luck given to Râmchunderji in old days before his search for Seeta, and common, ill-educated people still retained the superstitious custom of binding one on the wrist of each male during the month of Bhâdron. There was so much deplorable ignorance amongst the uneducated classes, and did the Presence look with favour on the proposal for reducing the rewards? Perhaps it was Râmchunderji's eager, wistful face hinting at the way promises were kept before the flood, which made me reply that I considered no one but the Viceroy in Council had power to reduce the price of snakes.
Several times after this I found the odd little couple disposed behind their tally of small vipers; then the season of serpents ceased, and one by one the habitués of the tank steps dropped off to pursue other professions. The fringe broke into isolated tassels, and finally the worn, ruddy steps lay bare of all save the flickering light and shade of the leaves above.
November had chilled the welcome cool weather to cold, when a report came in the usual course that a boy calling himself Râmchunderji, and a girl said to be his wife, had been found in a jasmin garden outside the city, half dead of exhaustion and without any ostensible means of livelihood. They had been taken up as vagrants and sent to hospital, pending Government orders. Now the Jubilee year was coming to a close, leaving behind it a legacy of new charities throughout the length and breadth of India. Of some the foundation stone only had been laid by direct telegram to the Queen-Empress; others had sprung to life in a manner suggestive of workmen's tenements. Among the latter was a Female Boarding School and Orphanage for the children of high-caste Hindus, which had been built and endowed by a number of rich contractors and usurers, not one of whom would have sent their daughters to it for all their hoarded wealth. Persistent pennies had attracted a creditable, if intermittent, supply of day-scholars to its stucco walls; but despite an appropriate inscription in three languages over the gate, the orphanage remained empty. Money can do much, but it cannot produce homeless orphans of good family in a society where the patriarchal system lingers in all its crass disregard of the main chance. So at the first hint of Seeta I was besieged on all sides. A real live, genuine, Hindu female orphan going a begging! Preposterous! Sacrilegious! The Chairman of the Orphanage Committee almost wept as he pictured the emptiness of those white walls, and actually shed tears over the building estimates which he produced in order to strengthen his claim to poor little Seeta. Was it fair, he asked, that such a total of munificent charity should not have a single orphan to show the Commissioner-sahib when he came on tour? His distress touched me. Then winter, hard on the poor even in sunlit India, was on us; besides, Narayan Das tempted me further, with suggestions of a Jubilee Scholarship at the district school for Râmchunderji himself.