“Bus! The Lât Sahib died in the little dawn. This place is empty but for the widow. Mutti dani wasti gia—they have gone to give the earth. It was the bad sickness, and the pain of it lasted only five hours. When he was dead, worthy one, his face was like a blue puggri that has been thrice washed, and his hand was no larger than the hand of my woman! What talk is there of justice? Bus!”
Hari Lal heard him through with a countenance that grew ever more terrified. Then he spat vigorously, and got again upon his animal. “And you, fool, why do you sit here?” he asked quaveringly, as he sawed at the creature’s mouth.
“Because the servant-folk of the Sirkar do not run away. Who then would do justice and collect taxes, budzat? Jao, you Bengali rice-eater! I am of a country where those who are not women are men!”
The Bengali rice-eater went as he was bidden, and only a little curling cloud of white dust, sinking back into the road under the sun, remained to tell of him. Bundal Singh, hoarse with hours of howling, lifted up his voice in the silence because of the grief within him, and howled again.
A little wind stole out from under a clump of mango trees and chased some new-curled shavings about the verandah, and did its best to blow them in at the closed shutters of a darkened room. The shavings were too substantial, but the scent of the fresh-cut planks came through, and brought the stunned woman on the bed a sickening realisation of one unalterable fact in the horror of great darkness through which she groped, babbling prayers.
CHAPTER XVIII.
“It was all very well for him, poor man, to want to be buried in that hole-and-corner kind of way—where he fell, I suppose, doing his duty: very simple and proper, I’m sure; and I should have felt just the same about it in his place—but on her account he ought to have made it possible for them to have taken him back to Calcutta and given him a public funeral.”
Mrs. Daye spoke feelingly, gently tapping her egg. Mrs. Daye never could induce herself to cut off the top of an egg with one fell blow; she always tapped it, tenderly, first.
“It would have been something!” she continued. “Poor dear thing! I was so fond of Mrs. Church.”
“I see they have started subscriptions to give him a memorial of sorts,” remarked her husband from behind his newspaper. “But whether it’s to be put in Bhugsi or in Calcutta doesn’t seem to be arranged.”