‘A gallant cavalier!’ cried one, as he passed near the gate of the Fort, loud enough for Kasim to hear it; ‘five hundred rupees would not buy his suit of clothes. Mashalla! this is the place after all where soldiers are patronised, and come to spend their money in adorning their persons.’
‘Ay, brother,’ said the man he was with; ‘knowest thou who that is? it is Kasim Ali Patél—he who saved Rhyman Khan’s life on—’
Kasim lost the rest of the sentence as he passed on; but it proved to him, and not unpleasantly, that the only action he had as yet performed worthy of note was known.
‘If my fate favour me, it shall not be the last. Ya Nusseeb!’ he cried, apostrophising his fate, ‘thou art darkly hidden; but if it be the will of Alla, thou shalt yet shine brightly out.’
‘Alla kereem! what a beautiful youth!’ exclaimed a bevy of dancing girls, whose gaily-ornamented bullock-carriage obstructed the gateway of the Fort, and who in all the pride of gay and glittering apparel, and impudence of fair and pretty faces (their lustrous eyes even made more so by the use of soorméh), were proceeding to the Sultaun’s Durbar.
‘Alla, what a beautiful youth!’ cried one; ‘wilt thou not come and visit us?’
‘Shall we see thee at the Durbar?’ cried two others.
‘I am stricken with love at once,’ said a fourth.
‘What a coat! what a horse! what eyes!’ cried first one, and then another; until Kasim, whose horse had become uneasy at this volley of words, and at the jingling and clashing of the bells around the bullock’s necks or attached to the posts and crimson curtains of the car—and had curvetted once or twice, so as to cause a few faint shrieks, and afterwards a burst of merry laughter from the fair ones—bounded on, and freed him from them.
Passing hastily through the gateway, he rode on into the Fort—first through an open space, where cannon-balls in heaps, cannon mounted on carriages, and soldiers moving in all directions, showed the efficient state of the Fort for defence. Beyond this was the bazaar—long streets of goodly houses, the lower parts of which were shops, and where all sorts of grain, rich clothes, tobacco, brazen pans, and arms of all kinds, were exposed for sale.