The Flower of Forgiveness

by Flora Annie Webster Steel

"She is not at all dead, Huzoor; on the contrary, she is very young. Children cry sometimes, and my house does not like crying. You see, when people are young they require more sleep; when she is old as I am she will be able to keep awake."

His tone was argumentative, as if he were reasoning the matter out for his own edification. "Not that Dhropudi keeps me awake often," he added, in hasty apology to that infant's reputation; "considering how young a person she is, her ways are very straight-walking and meek."

"If she cries you can always stop her with the watering-pot, I suppose."

He looked shocked at the suggestion.

"Huzoor! it is not difficult to stop them; such a very little thing pleases a baby. Sometimes it is the sunshine--sometimes it is the wind in the trees--sometimes it is the birds, or the squirrels, or the flowers. When it is tired of these there is always the milk in its stomach. Dhropudi's goat is yonder; it lives on your Honour's weeds. You are her father and her mother."

However much I might repudiate the relationship, I soon became quite accustomed to finding Dhropudi in the most unexpected places in my garden. For, soon after my first introduction to her, the claims of an early crop of lettuces to protection from the squirrels led Heera Nund to transfer the hand-light from one of his charges to another. Dhropudi, he said, could grow nicely without it now; the black ants could not carry her off, and the squirrels had quite begun to recognise that she was of the race of Adam. At first, however, he took precautions against mistakes, and many a time I have seen the sleeping child stuck round with pea-sticks, or decorated with fluttering feathers on a string, to scare away the birds. Sometimes she was blanching with the celery, and once I nearly trod on her as she lay among the toppings in a thick plantation of blossoming beans. But she never came to harm; the only misadventure being when her father would lay her to sleep in some dry water channel, and, forgetting which one it was, turn the shallow stream that way. Then there would be a momentary outcry at the cold bath; but the next, she would be pacified with a flower, and sit in the sun to dry, for to say sooth, no more good-tempered child ever existed than Dhropudi. In this, at any rate, she was like her father, though I could trace no resemblance in other ways. "She is like my house," he would say, when I noticed the fact. "She is young, and I am old--quite old."

Indeed, as time passed I saw that Heera Nund was older than I thought at first. Before the barber came in the morning there was quite a silver stubble on his bronze cheek, and his bright, restless eyes were haggard and anxious. Despite his almost comic jauntiness and self-importance, he struck me as having a hunted look at times, especially when he came out from the mud-walled enclosure at the further end of the garden, where his "house" lived. He went there but seldom, spending his days in tending Dhropudi and his plants with an almost extravagant devotion. His state of mind when that young lady used her new accomplishment of crawling, to the detriment of a bed of sootullians (Sweet Williams) in which he took special pride, was quite pathetic. I found him simply howling between regret for the plants and fear lest I should order punishment to the offender. His gratitude when I laughed was unbounded.

After this Dhropudi used to be set in a twelve-inch pot, half sunk in the ground, where she would stay contentedly for hours, drumming the sides with a carrot, while Heera weeded and dibbled.

"She grows," he would say, snatching her up fiercely in his arms; "she grows as all my plants grow. See my sootullians! They will blossom soon, and then all the sahibs will come and say, 'See the sootullians which Heera Nund and Dhropudi have grown for the Huzoor.'"

Yet with all this blazoning of content the man was curiously restless--almost like a child in his desire for action and vivid interest in trivialities. "See the misbegotten creature I have found eating the honourable Huzoor's roots!" he would say, casting a wire-worm on the verandah steps, and dancing on it vindictively. "It was in the Huzoor's carnations, but by the blessing of God and Heera Nund's vigilance it is dead. Nothing escapes me. Have I not fought wire-worms since the beginning of all things, I and my fathers? We kill all creeping, crawling things, except the holy snake that brings fruit and blossom to the garden."