He was.
"Lies!" he began, and there was tone in the old voice, "and wherefore not if it is a real lie and not a bungle? But I never was a bungler. I know my profession too well--even at the last--yea, at the very end they had to come to me for artifice--for subterfuge. It was the last lie--to count as a real lie."
He paused, one of the boys had crept round to him and now laid a compelling hand of entreaty on the old man.
"Tell us of it, dâdâ."
The spokesman looked at the enumerator as if for orders.
"It may elucidate the meanings," muttered the Middle-fail to himself.
So in the stillness of that sunshiny roof, set so far above the workaday world, they sate listening.
"Yea! it was the last lie that was worth the telling. Yet I was past my prime like the court itself. For none, save those who saw, knew the heart-burnings, the bitterness of those last years. King but in name, the very court officials drifting away to other allegiance. And Lake sahib had been so full of promise on that first September day, when the Frenchman was driven away because, forsooth! he had made the blind Shah Alum a prisoner in his own palace----" There was a pause in the thin old cadences, and a flitting shadow fell on the sun-saturate listeners from a wheeling kite overhead.
"And what was Bahadur Shah but a prisoner, too? What matter--the Huzoors gave him bread after their fashion and he was unfaithful to the salt of it. That was not well--one must be loyal even to a lie! So after the mad midsummer dream of recovered kingship in the palace--such a mad dream--we who dreamed it knew at the time that we were dreaming--came that second September day when the English returned to Delhi. We did not watch them, then; we were hiding in the tombs--Humayon's tomb without the wall.
"It was the night after Hudson sahib bahadur had wiled away the King by fair promises--aya! the Huzoor knew the trick of those well--but the Princes were still hiding--and many a better man, too.