‘Ya Mousoof Alla! Ya Beebee Muriam! what a gash!’ exclaimed both, turning their heads away from the horrid sight for an instant. ‘But she is warm,’ said Meeran. ‘Apostle of Alla! there may be life. Hold her, while I run for my brother—he is without.’
He came quickly; for a long time they doubted if she would revive, and her first breath was hailed with a burst of joy.
‘I know a secure place,’ said Sozun; ‘she is not safe here. She will be discovered by the Khan, and he will kill her.’
‘Art thou to be trusted, Sozun?’ said Meeran; ‘it was thou who didst cause this murder, and I mistrust thee.’
‘Alla who sees my heart knows how true it is,’ said the woman, ‘and how bitter is my repentance. Ye may leave this poor flower if ye will; but never while Sozun hath life will she depart from her, come weal, come woe.’ And as she said it she looked up fervently; and when Meeran saw that her eyes glistened with tears which fell over on her cheeks—that her features were quivering, and her lips moved in silent prayer, then she believed her, and yielded to the necessity of the moment.
Zoolficar, with their assistance, bound up the wound, which had cut deeply into the shoulder and neck, and had bled much, and they now laid the lady in the dooly. Only that she sighed now and then, she would have been thought to be dead; but there was life, and while life was in the nostrils there was hope. The bearers, who had been ready without from the first, were now called; and preceded by Sozun, they went on till they stopped at an obscure house behind the principal bazaar, in an unfrequented part of the Fort. The lady still lived, when they lifted her out of the dooly and laid here upon as soft and easy a bed as the house afforded.
Kasim Ali passed a wild and restless night—in comparison of which, that upon the battle-field, when the jackal and hyena had howled around him, was remembered with pleasure. He searched every corner of the Fort, every ravelin, every bastion, the most miserable purlieus of the bazaar, which rung with wild shouts of revelry, of drunkenness and debauchery. He went into the thickest and hottest of the fire, where shot and shells and the deadly grape whistled around him. He examined every group of men, but saw neither the Khan nor Jaffar. Twice he returned to his house—once ere he had been long absent, dreading to behold again that beauteous form lying in its blood and disfigured by the gaping wound. It was not there—that misery, he thought, was spared him by the kind Meeran and her brother. ‘They have taken it away to bury,’ he thought; but where he knew not—the morning would reveal. Her blood lay there, clotted upon the white muslin, a horrible evidence of the crime that had been committed. He sought not to remove it; but it reminded him of the state of his own garments, which were saturated. He changed them, and again sallied out.
He returned towards morning, and wrote a few lines to the only other friend he possessed, a Moolah of the mosque in the Fort, to whom he had willed that his little property should be given, in case of his death and the Khan’s, in trust for his mother; they were a few lines only, to tell of his fate; and for the second time he went forth, to seek death in the hot battle.
He found it not, however, all that night; and sick at heart, as the morning broke over the beleaguered city, he entered the court of the mosque, from the tall minarets of which the Muezzin was proclaiming the morning prayer. ‘It will calm me,’ he said, ‘to join in it.’