So the days and nights following on Jehân's vow never to set foot in the house again, dragged by.
'Were it not best to tell his father?' suggested Khôjee, the peace-maker, one evening when she came down breathless from that futile beating of kettledrums and blowing of horns, to find Sa'adut without his usual smile for her efforts. 'He is fond of his father, and it might rouse him.'
Noormahal leant forward, and gripped the cot with both hands. 'No!' she said passionately. 'May I not keep this myself? He is no worse, fool! Thou didst not sound the naubut well, that is all. I could scarce hear it myself.'
That might well be, Aunt Khôjee thought humbly, seeing that she was not used to the beating of drums and the blowing of horns, and that both were cracked and dilapidated almost past beating and blowing. Still, even she would not allow the child to be worse, not even in the watches of the night, when a body's thoughts cannot always stay themselves on the will of God, when railway whistles and other strange sounds set the mind questioning what will come, and why it should come.
And this night, just at the turn of twelve, when the night of a past day turns into the night of a coming one, a voice rose on the darkness as it sometimes did; the voice of a telegraph peon seeking an unknown owner for a telegram.
'O Addum! O Addum Khân! dweller in the Place of Sojourners in the quarter of Palaces! Awake! Arise! O Addum! a message hath come for thee. Awake! Arise! O Sleepers! awake and say where is Addum Khân for whom a message to go on a journey hath come.'
So, on and on insistently, the man Addum--quaintly namesake of the man in whose name all men go on the great journey--was sought; until the rattle of a door-chain being unhasped brought silence, and the knowledge that Addum had received his message from the darkness.
'La illâha--il Ullâho-bism'-illâh-ur-rahmân-ur-raheem,' murmured Khôjee under her breath as she sate by the cot trimming the smoky little rushlight. For the cry on Addum had roused Sa'adut from a half-doze and brought opportunity for more paper pellets.
'Bismillah-ur-rahmân-ur-raheem,' he echoed in his cracked little voice quite cheerfully; for these words, the assertion that God is a merciful and a clement God, are the Mohammedan grace before meat as well as a prayer, and the four years, four months, and four days, at which age children are taught them as their initiation into the Church, were still close enough to Sa'adut's sum-total of life, to give the repetition a pleasurable importance.
'Heart of my heart! Eye of my eye! Life of my life! murmured old Khôjee again. 'Lo! swallow it down, my uttermost beloved, and sleep.'