"They are mis-begotten devils," remarked Heera cheerfully; "but they are building nests, sahib, and like to paper the inside. Notwithstanding, the Presence need fear no confusion; his slave has many names in his head. This is arly walkrin (Early Walcheren), that is droomade (Drumhead), yonder is dookoyark (Duke of York), and that, that, and that--He would have gone on interminably, had I not changed the subject by asking what was growing beneath a dilapidated hand-light, which stood next to a sturdy crop of broadcast radishes. Only a few panes of glass remained intact, but the vacancies had been neatly supplied by coarse muslin. The gardener's face, always simple in expression, became quite homogeneous with pure content.
"Huzoor! It is the mâlin (female gardener)!"
"The mâlin! What on earth do you mean?"
Have you ever watched the face of a general servant when she takes the covers off the Christmas dinner? Have you ever seen a very young conjurer lift his father's hat to show you that the handkerchief (which he has palpably secreted elsewhere) is no longer in its legitimate hiding-place? Something of that mingled triumph and fear lest some accident may have befallen skill in the interim showed itself in Heera Nund's countenance as he removed the light with a flourish, thus disclosing to view a fat and remarkably black baby asleep on a bed of leaves. It was attired in a pair of silver bangles, and a Maw's feeding-bottle grew, like some new kind of root-crop, from the ground beside it.
"My daughter, Huzoor--little Dhropudi the mâlin."
His voice thrilled even my bachelor ears as he squatted down and began mechanically to fan the swift-gathering flies from the sleeping child.
"You seem to be very fond of her," I remarked after a pause. "It is only a girl after all. Have you no son?"
He shook his head.
"She is the only one, and I waited for her ten years--ten long years; so I was glad even to get a mâlin. Dhropudi grows as fast as a boy, almost as fast as the Huzoor's cabbages. Only the other day she was no bigger than my hand."
"Your wife is dead, I suppose?" The question was, perhaps, a little brutal, but it was so unusual to see a man doing dry nurse to a baby girl, that I took it for granted that the mother had died months before, at the child's birth. I never saw a face change more rapidly than his; the simplicity left it, and in place thereof came a curious anxiety such as a child might show with the dawning conviction that it has lost itself.