“You have heard this Son of Lies? Hear me tell a true tale. I also was once starved, and tightened my belt on the sharp belly-pinch. Nor was I alone, for with me was another, who did not fail me in my evil days, when I was hunted, before ever I came to this throne. And wandering like a houseless dog by Kandahar, my money melted, melted, melted till——” He flung out a bare palm before the audience. “And day upon day, faint and sick, I went back to that one who waited, and God knows how we lived, till on a day I took our best lihaf—silk it was, fine work of Iran, such as no needle now works, warm, and a coverlet for two, and all that we had. I brought it to a money-lender in a by-lane, and I asked for three rupees upon it. He said to me, who am now the King, ‘You are a thief. This is worth three hundred.’ ‘I am no thief,’ I answered, ‘but a prince of good blood, and I am hungry.’—‘Prince of wandering beggars,’ said that money-lender, ‘I have no money with me, but go to my house with my clerk and he will give you two rupees eight annas, for that is all I will lend.’ So I went with the clerk to the house, and we talked on the way, and he gave me the money. We lived on it till it was spent, and we fared hard. And then that clerk said, being a young man of a good heart, ‘Surely the money-lender will lend yet more on that lihaf,’ and he offered me two rupees. These I refused, saying, ‘Nay; but get me some work.’ And he got me work, and I, even I, Abdur Rahman, Amir of Afghanistan, wrought day by day as a coolie, bearing burdens, and labouring of my hands, receiving four annas wage a day for my sweat and backache. But he, this bastard son of naught, must steal! For a year and four months I worked, and none dare say that I lie, for I have a witness, even that clerk who is now my friend.”
Then there rose in his place among the Sirdars and the nobles one clad in silk, who folded his hands and said, “This is the truth of God, for I, who, by the favour of God and the Amir, am such as you know, was once clerk to that money-lender.”
There was a pause, and the Amir cried hoarsely to the prisoner, throwing scorn upon him, till he ended with the dread, “Dar arid,” which clinches justice.
So they led the thief away, and the whole of him was seen no more together; and the Court rustled out of its silence, whispering, “Before God and the Prophet, but this is a man!”
AT TWENTY-TWO
Narrow as the womb, deep as the Pit, and dark as the heart of a man.—Sonthal Miner’s Proverb.
“A weaver went out to reap, but stayed to unravel the corn-stalks. Ha! Ha! Ha! Is there any sense in a weaver?”
Janki Meah glared at Kundoo, but, as Janki Meah was blind, Kundoo was not impressed. He had come to argue with Janki Meah, and, if chance favoured, to make love to the old man’s pretty young wife.
This was Kundoo’s grievance, and he spoke in the name of all the five men who, with Janki Meah, composed the gang in Number Seven gallery of Twenty-Two. Janki Meah had been blind for the thirty years during which he had served the Jimahari Collieries with pick and crowbar. All through those thirty years he had regularly, every morning before going down, drawn from the overseer his allowance of lamp-oil—just as if he had been an eyed miner. What Kundoo’s gang resented, as hundreds of gangs had resented before, was Janki Meah’s selfishness. He would not add the oil to the common stock of his gang, but would save and sell it.
“I knew these workings before you were born,” Janki Meah used to reply: “I don’t want the light to get my coal out by, and I am not going to help you. The oil is mine, and I intend to keep it.”