DELHI NAUTCH GIRL. Page 56.
The Major and his wife, our host and hostess, we had known well in Italy. I had been delighted to dine with them; and now, that the dinner was almost over, I was congratulating myself on having had so pleasant a time.
The plum-puddings had caught properly, and the breath of the punkahs came upon us again as a new sensation of delight. They fanned the creaming wine until the ice tinkled against our thin glasses, until the champagne frothed and bubbled in a perfect tempest of conviviality.
“Do you know the history of this old palace in which you are living?” I asked the Major.
“No,” he said; “or at least very little of it. A mighty Nabob lived here once. This roof garden, where we are now, he had made very lovely for his favourite wife. She was of a higher caste than his. Her stepmother, who hated her of course, had given the girl to the Nabob in the father’s absence. The girl’s father had gone up to Peshawar, I believe, to buy camels. It was a year or more after the Nabob’s marriage that the girl’s father came back to Jullundar and found his favourite child gone. The stepmother said the girl was dead; but the servants told the old man the truth; so he killed his treacherous wife and came to Calcutta to find his daughter. Well, he found her on this very roof. Now a Hindoo girl who weds beneath her caste is degraded for ever,—she has become a pariah, an outcast, and all her family are defiled. So the old Brahmin—he was a Brahmin, of course—took out his knife and plunged it through his daughter’s sari into her heart. And she cried ‘Salaam’ and died; and he went away rejoicing.”
“But how did he get in, and how did he get out?” demanded the subaltern. “Aren’t the women’s quarters in a Nabob’s palace better guarded than that?”
“Sir, those are details, mere details,” snapped the Major. “Were you not taught at Sandhurst that the subaltern is shot at sunrise who asks his superior officer for details?”
The subaltern saluted (with a walnut shell in his fingers) and fell into the conversational background.
“It is quite true, the story, Mr. Howard,” said the Major’s wife; “only my husband is telling it so badly.”
The Major went on smoothly. “When Abdul came back——”