Anyhow, the hot dry nights of May were not over before old Imân's voice rose once more in declamation over the unforgettable story of the white blood.
But this time sleep did not come to the black-and-tan tribe gathered in the light of the floating oil wick. For the boys were watching something they had never seen before--the icing of a wedding cake.
And so the long-deferred personal climax came at last.
"The trouble being over, the masters were masters again, and I took Sonny-baba back to his people. And wherefore not? Seeing I had eaten of their salt all my life and they of mine. Yea! even unto wedding cakes. Look, my sons! That is done, and I, Imân, the faithful one by name and nature made it."
* * * * *
There was but one flaw in the old man's content on the great day; for he had managed to get a ham cheap for the "suffer," and Mrs. Hastings, only too glad of greater freedom in the future, had consented to his turning his attention to the education of the young couple and Lily-baba, who was to live with them. That flaw was a slight irregularity in what he was pleased to call a "too-liver-ot" on the said cake. Not that it really mattered. The true lover's knot itself was there, though the hands which fashioned it were not so young and steady as they had been when they caught up Sonny-baba and carried him to the safe shadows.
Yet, old as they were, those hands had forgotten no duty. E-stink Sahib's widow, absorbed with a friend in the recipe of a mango pickle she meant to make on the morrow--a pickle full of forbidden turmeric and mustard oil--had to be reminded of her rôle as bride's mother over and over again, but it was Imân who hung a horseshoe for luck on the miraculous car--drawn this time by an old stager--Imân, who was ready with rice, Imân, who finally ran after the departing lovers to fling the old white shoe, in which Elflida had danced the hee-haw polka, into their laps as they sate on the back seat, and then, overbalancing himself in the final effort, to tumble into the dust, where he remained blissfully uncertain as to praise or blame, murmuring blandly, "What a custom is here!"
[THE WISDOM OF OUR LORD GANESH]
"The wisdom of Sri Ganêsh--the wisdom of our Lord Ganêsh."[[1]]
Through and through my fever-drugged brain the words came, compelling, insistent; forcing me away from reality, forcing me back into the past. Yet I knew perfectly where I was; I remembered distinctly that having felt unusually tired after rather a hot day's march I had pitched the little tente d'abri--which was my home during a sketching tour in Wales--rather closer to the main road than I generally did, and had thereinafter promptly succumbed to an unmistakable go of fever and ague, a half-forgotten legacy left behind by many years of Indian life.