A door or two down the alley creaked ajar, showing dim white-sheeted figures of wonder; for that was not a call to be ignored.
Lateefa, from his corner, wondered still more. What could have happened? Something, evidently, about which those two knew nothing.
A man who had pushed past the dim shadows into the lane, started the question as to when the door had last been seen open; whereat voices came from the dim shadows in answer. One had not seen it so these three days, others had noticed Khôjee's limp that morning. The voices grew contentious over the point, so that Nawâb Jehân Aziz growled a curse under his breath, and turned away savagely.
'Come, Burkut,' he said, 'did I not tell thee they could not have arrived by now? The paper at the "estation" says the mail is "change-time." Let me pass, good folk,' he went on irritably to the little group that hung round, curious. 'Can a body not come to see if his family be returned from a journey without the neighbours crowding out?'
The remark was plausible explanation enough; but as the two passed Lateefa in the dark, Jehân could be heard girding at Burkut. Why had he suggested coming on the sly? It would be all over the town how that Jehân's women had refused him entrance. He, Burkut, would be suggesting the police next.
'Not the police, my lord,' came Burkut's suave, cunning voice; 'there be better ways of gaining entry than that nowadays!'
When they had gone, and the lane--with clucks of incredulity and remarks that it was time some folk refused to be treated scandalously--had settled behind closed doors again, Lateefa stole back to the wicket.
Once more he had the advantage. He knew that it was no obstinacy induced by his presence which kept the inmates silent. And Jehân had made noise enough to wake the dead.
The dead? But they could not all be dead! A vast curiosity, more than any apprehension, made Lateefa look up to the balcony of the naubat khana and wonder if he could climb to it. Once there, the shutters he knew were rotten. It seemed possible--if a foothold or two were picked out of the crumbling brick, and a rope hitched on to an iron hook he knew of, some ten feet up the wall. In fact, given a quiet hour or so, he would undertake to make a felonious entry somehow. But it was too early in the night to try. The time for such work came with the false dawn when sleep simulated death. And that was--how many hours away? He did not know, or care. In that strange life of the bazaars, night was as day. No question of bed-time entered into it; so, sooner or later, he would see that the hour he waited for had come, by the look on those ribbons of sky between the close-packed houses; that network of sky, following the pattern of the network of streets and alleys, which was all that thousands in the city knew of the heaven above it.
The bazaars were scarcely more empty, when once again he returned to them; but they were less noisy. Many voices had dwindled to one voice; the voice of the tale-teller. Therefore the voice of the most imaginative mind in the assemblage.