“I told you,” he said, “that Jahangir’s nature owed something to his lineage. May Allah grant him wit enough to win me and others to his side by reason of his forebearance!”
With this magnanimous wish on his lips he quitted them. They were fated soon to recall his words in bitterness and despair. Jahangir, sunk in renewed orgy, and twitted by his evil associates with the failure of the afternoon’s device, was even then devoting himself, with an almost diabolical ingenuity, to a fresh plot for their undoing.
He limned the project fully, but declared with scorn that it needed a man of courage to carry it out, and there was not one such in his court.
Whereupon, Kutub-ud-din, his foster-brother, who was noted chiefly for the girth of his paunch, but who, nevertheless, had some reputation for personal bravery, sprang up from the cushions on which he reposed and cried:—
“Give me the vice-royalty of Bengal and I swear, by the beard of the Prophet, to bring you news of Sher Afghán’s death ere day dawns.”
The Emperor paused. It was a high price, but the memory of Nur Mahal’s beauty rushed on him like a flood, and he said:—
“Keep thy vow and I shall keep my bond.”
The conspirators knew nothing of Roger’s pact with the chamberlain, else their task were made more easy. But there is in India a poisonous herb called dhatura, the presence of which cannot be detected in food or drink. Taken in any considerable quantity, it conveys sure death, quick and painless as the venom of a cobra; in less degree it induces lethargy, followed by heavy sleep.
Now, Sher Afghán’s doubts of the Emperor’s wine were justified to this extent, that it had been slightly tinctured with dhatura, in the belief that Mowbray and Sainton would drink heavily during the midday meal, and thus be rendered slow of thought and sluggish in action when put to the test by the Persian’s encounter with the tiger. Such drugs, thwarted by the unforeseen, oft have exactly the opposite effects to those intended. Their state of rude health, and the exciting scenes which took place before the Emperor played his ultimate card and failed, caused the poison to stimulate rather than retard their faculties.
With night came reaction and weariness. Nevertheless, they did not retire to rest until nearly an hour after Sher Afghán left them. They drank a little more of the wine, discussed their doubtful position for the hundredth time, and thus unconsciously spun another strand in the spider’s web of fate, for Jahangir, whom fortune so aided, might have spent his life in vain conjecture ere he guessed the circumstance which in part defeated his malice.