“Who was Abdul?” asked an exacting civilian.
“Abdul was the Nabob,” said our host curtly.
“Oh!” said the civilian, “I thought perhaps you meant my bearer; his name is Abdul.”
“When Abdullah returned,” continued the Major, “and found his favourite wife dead, he tore his beard and cast his turban at her feet. Then he went into the women’s quarters—the part of the palace where the other wives lived, for the dead girl-wife had had apartments of her own. Abdullah had not been in the women’s quarters since his last and happiest marriage. His wives gathered about him; they fell at his feet and kissed them. He raised them up kindly. He gave them wine to drink, and in each glass of wine he put three three-grained morphia pills. When they had all fallen into the sleep from which he knew they could not wake, he rose up and went, saying, ‘Allah, I had ceased to love them, but I have killed them gently, that they shall feel no pain when they burn upon my funeral pile.’ He went back to his dead girl-wife. He laid a satin cushion beneath her head; he strewed sandal-wood dust upon her, then he borrowed a scimitar from a eunuch and died.”
“I had no idea that the Hindoos were such good husbands,” said the pretty American girl who sat on the other side of the subaltern.
“Might I be allowed to ask,” said the subaltern, “as a guest, whether——”
But the Major’s wife had looked at me and smiled, and as we rose, he jumped to his feet and rushed to the filmy portiere that hung across the archway which topped the garden steps. They were broad, white, marble steps, well called garden steps, for they led from the artificial roof garden into the great wild place beneath, where mangoes and roses, palms, ferns, and tuberoses crowded amongst the tangling wood-flowers of Bengal.
“Gather all you want,” my hostess said, as I paused, spell-bound beside a bed of strangely sweet flowers. “Gather all you like, but don’t ask me the names.”
“Oh! I know what those are,” said the American girl who had come down behind the rest of us. “They are mogree flowers. The nautch girls wear them in their hair—I saw them at Amritzar. When the girls dance, the flowers perfume the air; and if a very big man—high-caste or rich I mean—comes in, they throw mogree flowers at him.”
We strolled on through the shapeless grounds,—we two Americans. She pushed her pretty dimpled arm through mine. “Does it not seem very strange to you to be ’way off here in India?” she asked me.