As he spoke there was a noise without, and suddenly a man, evidently a Hindoo, rushed bare-headed into the assembly, crying out, ‘Daad! Daad! Daad!’[[43]] and advancing threw himself on the ground, and lay at full length motionless before the Sultaun.
[43]. Complaint.
‘What ho, Furashes! Chobdars!’ roared the Sultaun, his face quivering with rage; ‘what is this hog—this defiled father of abomination? were ye asleep to allow our Durbar to be polluted by his presence? who and what art thou?’ he cried to the trembling wretch, who had been roughly raised by the Furashes; ‘speak! art thou drunk?’
‘You are my father and mother—you are my Sultaun—you are my god!’ cried the man; ‘I am a poor Brahmin; I am not drunk—I have been plundered—I have been beaten by a devil they call Jaffar Sahib; he seeks my life, and I have fled to your throne for mercy.’
‘Thou shalt have it,’ said the Sultaun quietly, with his low chuckling laugh, which not even his officers could listen to without feeling their blood curdle; ‘thou shalt have it. Away with him, Furashes!’ he cried, raising his shrill voice, ‘away with him! I see an elephant yonder; chain him to its foot, and let him be dragged to and fro before the place he has defiled.’
The wretched man listened wildly to his sentence—he could not understand it; he looked on the Sultaun with a trembling smile, and then with a feigned laugh round the assembly; nought met his eye but stern and inexorable faces; there were many who felt the horrible injustice of the act, but none pitied the fate of the Brahmin after the event of the morning.
‘Do ye not hear?’ cried the Sultaun again; and, ere he could say a word, the Brahmin was borne shrieking out of the tent. All listened fearfully, and soon they heard the shrill scream of the elephant, as, after the wretched man had been bound to his foot, the noble and tender-hearted animal—it was old Hyder—was unwillingly goaded into a desperate run, and, dashing forward, soon put an end to his sufferings. They looked, and saw something apparently without form jerked along at the end of a chain by the foot of the elephant at every step he took in the rapid pace into which he had been urged.
‘The Durbar is closed,’ said the Sultaun after a time, during which he had not spoken, but continued moodily to watch the door of the tent for the elephant, as it passed to and fro. ‘Ye have your dismissal, sirs, we would be alone.’