"The Mission!" Meer Ahmed Ali was awake now, and the peaceful party, gathered in the verandah for early tea, stared as the young man burst in on it with imperious demands for his wife. Then his surroundings recalled his acquired courtesy, and he stammered an apologetic explanation.
"She has gone away?" cried Julia, with a queer catch in her breath. "Oh, Meer sahib! what a mistake we have all made. It was too late to write, and then I got ill; but, indeed! I was going down this very morning to try and make you understand."
"Understand what?" asked the Meer, helplessly confused, adding hurriedly, "but I can't stay now. She must be found. I will not have her run away. I will have her back--yes! I will have her back."
Half-an-hour later Julia Smith, driven to the Moulvie's house by remorseful anxiety, found the wicket-gate ajar. She entered silently upon a scene framed like a picture by the dark doorway of the men's court.
Feroza had come back to those familiar walls. She lay beside the well, and the water from her clinging garments crept in dark stains through the dust. She had wrapped her veil round her to stifle useless cries, and so the dead face, as in life, was decently hidden from the eyes of men. She lay alone under the cloudless sky, for her friends, shrinking from the defilement of death, stood apart: Kareema sobbing on Mytâb's breast, with Ahmed Ali, dazed yet indignant, holding her hand; the Moulvie, repeating a prayer; the servants still breathless from their ghastly toil. Julia Smith saw it all with her bodily eyes; yet nothing seemed worth seeing save that veiled figure in the dust. She knelt beside it and took the slender cold hand in hers. "My dear, my dear!" she whispered through her sobs. "Surely you need not have gone so far, so very far--for help."
But the dead face was hidden even from her tears.
[IN THE HOUSE OF A COPPERSMITH.]
I.
The clangour of metal upon metal filling the low, dark workshop, pulsating out into the hot sunshine of the courtyards behind, and the hot shadow of the narrow street in front. Pulsating musically, yet with an undercurrent of jarring vibration like a north-country burr on a woman's tongue. The whole best described, perchance, in the native name for the copper which the workmen were hammering and welding into pots and pans--tambur.
Tâm bur, tâm-burr-urr-ur.