The flame-gatherers

by Margaret Horton Potter

CHAPTER XVI

“LA-ILAHA-IL-LAL-LAHA”

Ten years glided away. Oman was more than forty, and Bhavani about fifty-five. To the worker among men the time had seemed longer than that spent on the Silver Peak. There he had, after a little, won faith in himself. Here he came gradually to perceive that he was accomplishing nothing of that which he had set out to do. Little by little he was made to realize that those who are wholly of the world can get no help out of the great, abstract truths: the high standard of religion. This at last he perceived. But he would stoop to no creed petty enough to catch the belief of his people. It was, indeed, only what is discovered by all men who seek to bring high truths home to narrow minds:—that the great, polluted religions have, by slow process of retrograde development, been constituted by the masses for the masses, who must thenceforth only be left alone to peck over and over the heap of chaff from which the last kernels of truth have been long since snatched away.

Fortunately, during this period of thankless labor, Oman had not lost touch with a wider world. Bhavani and Zenaide, the man and the woman, were still his refuge. To them he carried some of his weariness, and from them got constant renewal and refreshment. Their lives had become tranquil,—singularly so, indeed. Only Bhavani, as he grew older, sometimes chafed at the thought that he alone, of all Manduvian rulers, had been peaceful, had brought no glories of conquest and plunder home to his people. He fretted lest Mandu’s prestige had been dimmed by his policy; though he could not deny that he had trebled the strength of his kingdom in wealth and in population.

“Ah,” he would sometimes say, “at my death the country will be fit for Viradha’s rule. He will find her ready to give him soldiers and gold for his wars. He will be what my father was. With all thy teachings, Oman, thou hast never eradicated in him the warrior spirit.”

And Oman would shake his head, his eyes growing sad; for he was not a lover of war.

This matter of the long-continued peace in Mandu was not wholly owing to the policy of its present Rajah; for, during all the early part of his reign, there had been quiet in the turbulent north. Now, however, sinister rumors began to spread and grow. It was, indeed, a time of universal disquiet; for this was the middle of the constructive period of Indian history: the time of the fusion of two great races. Conquest had begun two hundred years before, under the great lord of Ghazni. The second conqueror, Mohammed Ghori, had been dead but forty years. And, since then, the first line of slave kings, founded by Aybek, had been broken by another slave:—Balban, the mighty minister of studious Mahmoud. Under him began the first concerted campaigns into Gujerat and Malwa, which were eventually to result in the conquest of everything north of the Dekkhan. In Delhi, now the capital of Moslem India, there dwelt more than one powerful general of the Prophet’s faith. Among these, Osman-ibn-Omar, the Asra, had won high reputation for the courage and daring that were, indeed, characteristic of his race. In his youth he had known Lahore, even mountain-built Ghazni; and now, his father long ago honorably dead in battle, the son, himself more than sixty years old, dwelt in Delhi, yearning for new wars. And it was eventually he, still bearing in mind an old, disastrous campaign of Dhár in the Vindhyas, who now, in the year 1249, swore to his lord a mighty oath that in him Malwa should find its conqueror. He would go down to the south, and learn whether a cousin of his, whilom head of the Asra race, were still, by any chance, alive and in captivity among the unconquered natives. But of this matter the folk of Mandu, peacefully engaged in the garnering of rice and millet, knew nothing, and as little cared.

Oman, perhaps, had some premonition of what was about to come. At any rate, during this winter, his spirit was restless. He had recourse to many long-abandoned methods of tranquillizing himself. He felt that he was becoming world-troubled. The still waters of his nature had been disturbed and set into motion by a too intimate knowledge of various matters. And all his efforts after calm brought him but temporary relief.

Part of his trouble lay in the sad knowledge of Bhavani’s state. The beloved of Mandu was afflicted with a mortal disease, slow in its fatal progress, but so sure that no man knew of a single prayer, a single sacrifice, that could prove efficacious. Zenaide and Oman, much depending on each other, did not scruple to speak of the inevitable: the shadow of death that hovered daily over them. Zenaide grew strong, now. It was that strength of despair that upholds us at the last. Even Oman, knowing, as he did, her inmost heart, marvelled sometimes at the calm that possessed her. She was no longer young; but, unlike most of her race and class, middle age had not made her ugly. She had lived too well for that. Beauty of spirit, gathered during her years of painful youth, the time of her sacrifice, brought its reward, clothing her with a dignity and a serene beauty that mere happiness cannot give. Bhavani’s wife was dead: had died as she had lived, among her embroideries and her trivialities, regretting to the last the zenana life in which she had been brought up. Bhavani, always reverent toward her in life, felt no acute sorrow at her decease, and, after her burial, returned to his usual way of life, affecting nothing. There were still those in Mandu who wondered if he would not take to wife the woman to whom he had been far more devoted than ever he was to the daughter of Dhár. But Bhavani never entertained a thought of marrying her who had been the greatest courtesan in Malwa. Nor did Zenaide herself regard marriage as a possibility. Youth had passed both from her and from him who, all unknown to her, had passionately loved her. The fire of youth, quenched in its height, had found another life, had been transmuted into a deep and holy affection that demanded no closer bond than that of friendship. If the thought of marriage ever came to the woman, it was only with the wish that, in the suffering he endured almost constantly, she might comfort him as only women can. But Bhavani preferred to die as he had lived: austerely and alone. If he was aware how closely his people watched him, he gave no sign. Oman sometimes wondered if the Rajah dreamed of the storm that his marriage with Zenaide would have raised among the people. Only Oman, from his constant intercourse with the lower classes, knew how blindly and how bitterly the woman of the water-palace was still hated. But Oman himself, had the two chosen to unite themselves, would have uttered not one word of remonstrance:—would, indeed, have given his life in their defence. So had time changed his earlier, rigid views.

It was in this year 1249 that Viradha-Pál, the young prince, began to take his place in the government of Mandu as a person of importance. Indeed it was time that he came into his own. Bhavani had kept him too long in the background. Mandu was beginning to whisper that he should have been at war for them these five years past: that it behoved a Kshatriya to follow his profession. And Viradha, allowed liberty of action, proved himself worthy of his people by quickly claiming his own. Bhavani let him go; for he knew that the spirit of the old warrior kings was upon the youth; and he knew also, still better, that the time approached when a warrior would be sorely needed in Mandu. For Bhavani, in his peacefulness, was by no means blind to the outlook of India; and it was no surprise when Viradha came to him with tales of Mohammedan invasions in the north, and demands of an army with which to march against the alien race. Bhavani acceded to his demands, making, however, one stipulation. Viradha must marry. Then he might leave his wife and go forth to battle. Such was the rule in the Orient.