It was a day or two after this that an English official was sitting smoking in his verandah, when he became aware of a whispered colloquy behind him. It was someone, no doubt, trying, through the red-coated chaprasi, to gain an audience of him; and he was newly back from office, tired, impatient, perhaps, of the hopelessness of doing justice always. So he took no notice till something roused him to a swift turn, a swifter question. "What's that, chaprasi?" That was the unmistakable chink of fallen silver, the unmistakable whirr of a running rupee, the unmistakable buzzing ring of its settling to rest. And there, midway between a giving and a taking hand, lay the rupee itself--the Queen's head uppermost.
"Hazoor!" explained the chaprasi, glibly, "your slave was virtuously refusing; he was sending this ill-bred one away. Hat! budhi![[2]] Hat!"
But the sight of that head on the precious rupee, which, after many heartsearchings, poor Maimuna had determined to risk in this effort to gain justice from a budhi like herself, whose enemies also had knavish tricks, brought courage to the old heart, and the old woman stood her ground.
"Gharibparwar!" she said quietly, with her best salaam--and in the old Pathan house they had taught manners, if nothing else--"Little Fatma, the pen-maker's daughter, says that Wictoria Kaiser-i-hind is an old woman like me, and so I have fixed my hopes on her. There is my rupee. It is all I have, and I want my widow's portion."
* * * * *
And she got it. It happened years ago, but the story is worth telling to-day, when women can no longer sing "God Save the Queen."
[THE LAKE OF HIGH HOPE]
A man stood watching a primrose dawn. There was a cloud upon his face; none on the wide expanse of light-suffused sky beyond the dim distance of the world. At his feet lay, stretching far, irregularly, into the grey mistiness of morning, a great sheet of water. The dawn showed on it as in a mirror, save where tall sedges and reeds sent still-shining shadows over its level light. Unutterable peace lay upon all things. They seemed still asleep, though the new day had come, bringing with it good and evil, rest and strife.
And then, suddenly, there was a change. The man turned swiftly at a light footstep behind him, to see a woman, and in an instant passion leapt up, bringing with it joy and despair. For the woman was another man's wife.
But something in her face made him open his arms and take her close to his clasp. It seemed to him as if he had been waiting for this moment ever since he was born.