“Beware! Vasantasena is in a Begum’s fury!” some one shouted. “None can satisfy her. Prince Govinda of Telingana gave her a quart of gold mohurs, and she sent him away because he had dared to call on her in riding boots! I advise you to try her with two quarts of gold, and to crawl on your belly!”
A stone stair gave on to the courtyard, through a doorway guarded by two tall serving-men—immaculate, proud images of stern propriety, turbaned and sashed with blazing silk. They looked incapable of smiling, or of anything except the jobs they held, but as gilt, as it were, on the surface of sin they were unsurpassable. Ommony’s disguise and manner aroused no suspicion, although swift suspicion was what they drew wages for, and they would have thrown him out into the street if as much as a suggestion had crossed their minds that he might be a European. They scrutinized Maitraya and Ommony and passed them as autocratically as if they were Masters of Ceremony passing judgment on attendants at a royal levee.
But royal levees are easier for outsiders to attend than that one was, and royalty, even in India, is shabby nowadays because its power is at most a shadow of the past and its forms mean nothing more than a cheap desire by unimportant folk to strut in a reflected pseudo-glory. Kings and conquerors go down, but whoever thinks that the power of the Pompadours has waned knows very little of the world or human nature. Vasantasena wielded more influence, and could pull more hidden wires than any dozen maharajahs, and the court she kept, if rather less splendid than a royal one, was alive with the mysterious magnetism of actual personal power. It was almost tangible, and much more visible than if she had been surrounded by men in armor.
Up-stairs there was no attempt at glittering display, but art and Old-World luxury in every considered detail. A hall, paneled in carved teak and hung with Rawalia woven curtains and a silver lamp on heavy silver chains, conveyed no suggestion of wickedness; a Christian bishop could have trodden the soft Persian rug (had he dared) and have imagined himself in the midst of sanctity. But as Ommony and Maitraya reached the stair-head the curtains facing them across the hall were parted, and a girl peeped through whom hardly a Wahabi ascetic would associate with thoughts of Paradise. She was much too paganly aware that life is laughter, and that men are amusing creatures, to be criticized by standard formula; and she looked like a mother o’ pearl Undine faintly veiled in mist—one of those fabled spirits who may receive a human soul, perhaps, someday, by marriage with a mortal—when she slipped out through the curtains and stood more or less revealed. She was clothed, and from head to foot, but not in obscurity.
She greeted Maitraya with a smile of recognition that suggested no familiarity. She was friendly, but perfectly sure of herself, and as sure of his unimportance. Then she glanced at Ommony, observed the caste-mark on his forehead, and made him a little mock-salaam, covering her eyes with both hands and murmuring “Pranam.”
“This is Gupta Rao sahib. The Joy of Asia will be pleased to see us both,” said Maitraya, assuming his courtliest air; whereat the girl laughed at him.
“She is not so easily pleased,” she answered, glancing at Maitraya’s hand. There was not much that her dark eyes missed. He gave her one of the gold mohurs, and then she stared straight at Ommony. Maitraya nudged him, trying to slip a mohur into his hand; but if you are to act the part of a Bhat-Brahman it is as well not to begin by bribing any one who can be overawed.
“I have a song to sing!” said Ommony. “Shall I include you in it? Shall I add a verse concerning—”
Swiftly she drew the curtain back and, laughing impudently over-shoulder at him, signed to him rather than to Maitraya to follow her down a short wide corridor to a door at the end that stood slightly ajar and through which came a murmur of voices. Through that she led without ceremony into a square room in which half a dozen men were seated on a long cushioned divan beneath a window at the farther end. They were wealthy, important-looking men, one or two of middle age. Girls, dressed as unobscurely as the one who had acted guide, were passing to and fro with cigarettes and sitting down between whiles on heaped cushions near the men’s feet. In the center of the room a white-robed Hindu was making two costumed monkeys perform tricks, solemnly watched by the men in the window, who took scant notice of Ommony and Maitraya.
Vasantasena was not there. Her richly draped divan under a peacock-colored canopy at the end of the room facing the window was vacant, although two girls with jeweled fans lounged on cushions, one on either side of it, as if she were expected to come presently. The sharp cries of the man with the monkeys and the occasional giggle of a girl punctuated an underhum of murmured conversation from the men by the window. The atmosphere was loaded with dim incense and cigarette smoke, blown into spirals of bluish mist by a punkah that swung lazily, pulled by a cord through a hole in the wall. Ommony sat down cross-legged on a cushioned couch against the wall midway between the window and Vasantasena’s divan, and Maitraya followed suit. Two girls, possessed of patronizing smiles, brought cigarettes and a little golden lamp to light them by.