Voices in the Night. Flora Annie Webster Steel

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      Her voice, low for her race and sex, suited the fine aquiline face, whose fairness was enhanced by the exceeding darkness of the large melancholy eyes. These in their expression matched the extreme passivity of face and figure--a passivity which held no trace of supineness. For the rest, there was much ignorance and obstinacy in the face, but nobility in both.

      She sate, curiously immovable, until Khôjee reappeared with a cup of milk. It was a Jubilee cup, with clasped hands of union upon it, and a portrait of the Queen-Empress surrounded by flags and mottoes. And Noormahal held it to the lips of the little heir to Nothingness or All Things with tender cajoleries.

      'Wake up, my heart! Wake! light of mine eyes! Wake! little king!' she murmured, and under her lavish kisses the boy roused to smile, first at her, then at the cup, finally at the old woman who knelt, holding his little bare feet in her wrinkled hand, as if they were a gift. He was a pretty child, despite the ominous scars on the brown velvet of his skin, the hoarse pipe in his childish treble. A lively laddie too, and arrogant from kinglike ignorance of denial.

      So Khôjee limped for more sugar, Noormahal wheedled him into another sip or two, Khâdeeja from her tinsels murmured blessings, and even Sobrai (dismissed by the proprieties from the court against the master's visit) giggled from a balcony at Sa'adut's insolence, and called to her girlfriends over the wall that he was a pea of the right pod and no mistake!

      Certainly his lordliness was matched by Jehân Aziz when the latter stalked in, without a word of welcome for the three women who stood up salaaming profoundly. Yet even he paid court to the child, and, yielding to the implied command of outstretched arms, took Sa'adut to share the cushion of state on the state carpet.

      They were a quaint pair this father and son, dressed alike in wrinkled white calico tights, velvet vests, flimsy gauze overcoats, and round tinsel caps set far back on the white parting of their sleek hair; such a startling white parting, considering the brownness of their skins!

      The likeness between the two was, in a way, ghastly; the more so because the man's face bore no trace of the suffering which was written so clearly on the boy's.

      Noormahal, watching them with empty arms, noticed this with a fierce unreasoning jealousy for her child. Yet there was a deeper, fiercer jealousy than this in the big brooding eyes which took in every detail of the man who, scented, oiled, was all too perceptibly attired for conquest elsewhere. She hated him, it is true, but in India the marriage-tie is not a sentiment, it is a tangible right. And so, still young, still comely, Noormahal felt none of the passionate repulsion which a Western woman would have felt. Her wish, her claim, was to force her husband back to her with contumely. Was he not hers, to be the father of other heirs, if this one found freedom?

      But contumely was out of the question. Jehân Aziz still had the green gleam of the kingly emerald on his finger. That must first come back to her safe hoarding, as, by solemn agreement, it always came after the rare occasions--such as the race meeting--when it had to blazon its claims before the world. And now the races were over, where Jehân said he had lost all. All the more reason the ring should come quickly. So, when Sobrai, from above, challenged Jehân's leer by peeping and nodding, there was no need for Aunt Khôjee to sidle between the mistress of the house and the flagrant impropriety, like a hen between her ducklings and the water. Noormahal would have allowed more insult than that to pass unnoticed. She sate passive, brooding, wondering when Jehân would begin on the subject. And all around the group the still sunshine burdened the half-ruined courtyard with a cruel light.

      It was one of Khâdeeja's pious benedictions with which she embroidered truth as she embroidered her tinsel caps, which drove the stillness from that elemental group of man, woman, and child, that Trinity for Good or Evil in which the veriest agnostic must believe.

      The sight, she asserted, of such a father and such a son filled her soul with certainty that a Merciful Creator would preserve the child to take his father's place.

      'And wear the signet of his kingly ancestors,' put in Noormahal, seizing her opportunity. Her challenge smote the sunshine keen as a sword-thrust; with all her desire for diplomacy she could not help it coming. Jehân glared at her furiously for a second; but irritation at a wife soon passes when, as in India, she is no tie--unless she is beloved, and Noormahal was not. Besides, the broaching of the subject was a relief, since it had to be broached somehow; even though the negotiations with Mr. Lucanaster had gone no further than a promise of first refusal should the ring be sold. Not that he, Jehân, had as yet seriously considered sale; but even so, if Salig Râm, the usurer, were to be persuaded to loan money on the ring's security, it must not be returned to Noormahal's keeping.

      Therefore, seeing that little Sa'adut would be at once his shield and his weapon in the fight which was bound to come between himself and the passionate woman whose eyes blazed at him, he turned to the child with a laugh and a caress. 'Yea, Sa'adut! thou shalt wear the ring; father will keep it for thee.'

      The answer came swift. 'And why not mother, as heretofore?' Auntie Khôjee sidled again in deprecation of such a tone towards the master. Jehân himself would have given his fighting quail (source of his only steady income) to answer this woman as he answered other women; but he could not. The child, the only child which had come to his reprobate life, was her shield, her weapon also. He looked at this tie between them almost resentfully, and thrust it once more to the van of fight.

      'Because, Sa'adut, mother hath had it long enough. Hath she not, sonling? It is father's turn now, is it not?'

      Sa'adut's big black eyes--they had all his mother's melancholy, with a childish wistfulness superadded to their velvet depths--looked from the woman's face to the man's, from his mother's face to his father's; and a vague perplexity, a still vaguer consciousness of a hidden meaning, came to his childish mind. What did they want, these big people who always took so much upon themselves? Unless he expressed a wish, when theirs had to give way.

      Suddenly he rose to his feet, a mite of mankind between those two imperious, undisciplined natures which had so thoughtlessly called his into being. The veriest atom of humanity, and yet, by reason of its frailty, its inexperience, more imperious, more undisciplined than that from which it sprung.

      'Give it to me, myself!' came his hoarse pipe arrogantly; 'give it to Sa'adut! He will keep it himself. Give it, I say? Give it!'

      The claim to individual life in a thing to which you have given life, startled even this father and mother. They paused, uncertain.

      So in a second, ear-piercing shrieks of amazed disappointment rent the air, and there was Khôjee on her knees attempting pacification, while Khâdjee from her tinsels implored immediate gratification.

      'Give it him, Nawâb-sahib!' she fluttered. 'Lo! he will die in a fit; it is ill denying a child; thou canst take it back when he tires of the plaything.'

      'Yea! give it him, meean,' pleaded Khôjee, all of a tremble. '"A child's cry in a house is ill-luck"; thou canst take it back when he sleeps.'

      The suggestion struck the keynote of another resentment in Noormahal, making her forget the vague opposition which the child's claim had raised. She caught Sa'adut to her sharply, making that claim her own; for now, thinking only of his helplessness, his cries hurt her physically, making prudence impossible.

      'Yea, give it him, Jehân Aziz, Son of Kings!--give it him in jest for a while. It is easy for a father to steal his son's right from him while he sleeps!'

      Jehân sprang to his feet with a fearful curse; for the tempest of ungovernable anger which had come to that elemental group СКАЧАТЬ