“To think the Holy One remembers that! I must tell his mother. It is most singular honour! ‘He that had the belly-pain’—straightway the Holy One remembered. She will be proud.”
“My chela is to me as is a son to the unenlightened.”
“Say grandson, rather. Mothers have not the wisdom of our years. If a child cries they say the heavens are falling. Now a grandmother is far enough separated from the pain of bearing and the pleasure of giving the breast to consider whether a cry is wickedness pure or the wind. And since thou speakest once again of wind, when last the Holy One was here, maybe I offended in pressing for charms.”
“Sister,” said the lama, using that form of address a Buddhist monk may sometimes employ towards a nun, “if charms comfort thee—”
“They are better than ten thousand doctors.”
“I say, if they comfort thee, I who was Abbot of Such-zen, will make as many as thou mayest desire. I have never seen thy face—”
“That even the monkeys who steal our loquats count for again. Hee! hee!”
“But as he who sleeps there said,”—he nodded at the shut door of the guest-chamber across the forecourt—“thou hast a heart of gold... And he is in the spirit my very ‘grandson’ to me.”
“Good! I am the Holy One’s cow.” This was pure Hinduism, but the lama never heeded. “I am old. I have borne sons in the body. Oh, once I could please men! Now I can cure them.” He heard her armlets tinkle as though she bared arms for action. “I will take over the boy and dose him, and stuff him, and make him all whole. Hai! hai! We old people know something yet.”
Wherefore when Kim, aching in every bone, opened his eyes, and would go to the cook-house to get his master’s food, he found strong coercion about him, and a veiled old figure at the door, flanked by the grizzled manservant, who told him very precisely the things that he was on no account to do.