“That was two Rains ago; she wearied me with her continual importunity.” The lama groaned as the Unjust Judge had groaned before him. “Thus it comes—take note, my chela—that even those who would follow the Way are thrust aside by idle women. Three days through, when the child was sick, she talked to me.”
“Arre! and to whom else should I talk? The boy’s mother knew nothing, and the father—in the nights of the cold weather it was—‘Pray to the Gods,’ said he, forsooth, and turning over, snored!”
“I gave her the charm. What is an old man to do?”
“‘To abstain from action is well—except to acquire merit.’”
“Ah chela, if thou desertest me, I am all alone.”
“He found his milk-teeth easily at any rate,” said the old lady. “But all priests are alike.”
Kim coughed severely. Being young, he did not approve of her flippancy. “To importune the wise out of season is to invite calamity.”
“There is a talking mynah”—the thrust came back with the well-remembered snap of the jewelled fore-finger—“over the stables which has picked up the very tone of the family priest. Maybe I forget honour to my guests, but if ye had seen him double his fists into his belly, which was like a half-grown gourd, and cry: ‘Here is the pain!’ ye would forgive. I am half minded to take the hakim’s medicine. He sells it cheap, and certainly it makes him fat as Shiv’s own bull. He does not deny remedies, but I doubted for the child because of the in-auspicious colour of the bottles.”
The lama, under cover of the monologue, had faded out into the darkness towards the room prepared.
“Thou hast angered him, belike,” said Kim.