Even the wearied Chief Eunuch would have protested, but she did not deign to heed his stammering words. It took Ibrahim some time to write all Jahangir’s titles on the parchment which set forth Nur Mahal’s settlement of Akbar’s debt. When the last flourish was drawn, and Mowbray had appended his name to the script, with Roger’s cross as agreeing to the same, the masterful lady herself was equipped for the road.
She sought no private leave-taking of the man whom, an hour earlier, she was willing to espouse. Before them all, she curtsied most gracefully to the two Englishmen.
“Farewell, sahiba,” she said. “May Allah prosper you!”
And with that she was gone. Ere they were fully resolved that this was, indeed, the end, they heard the hoof-beats of her retreating cavalcade. Soon they knew, from the distant commotion, that the Emperor’s troopers were withdrawing to their last camping-place.
Mowbray, a prey to thoughts which he could ill control, stood with Sainton a little apart from the cluster of mud huts adjoining their bivouac. Roger, sympathizing with the stress of his comrade’s reflections, gazed at the stars and softly whistled a few bars of an air popular in the North:
“O, do ye ken Elsie Marley, honey—
The wife that sells the barley, honey?
For Elsie Marley’s grown so fine,
She wëan’t get up to feed the swine.”
But Jai Singh, who had elected to go with them to Calcutta, did not scruple to break in on his new master’s reverie. To him, no matter what the comedy played by his mistress, one woman more or less in the world was of little import.
“Do we, too, march to-night, sahib?” he asked, when he discovered Mowbray on the outskirts of the hamlet.
“No,” was the curt reply.