Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (57 page)

‘Ahi! I am very weak,’ he said, with a little laugh, as they drove to the palace. ‘Certainly it seems to myself that I shall never get well in Rhatore.’

Kate put her arm about him and drew him closer to her.

‘Kate,’ he continued, ‘if I ask anything of my father, will you say that that thing is good for me?’

Kate, whose thoughts were still bitter and far away, patted his shoulder vaguely as she lifted her tear-stained eyes toward the red height on which the palace stood. ‘How can I tell, Lalji?’ She smiled down into his upturned face.

‘But it is a most wise thing.’

‘Is it?’ asked she fondly.

‘Yes; I have thought it out by myself. I am myself a Raj Kumar, and I would go to the Raj Kumar College, where they train the sons of princes to become kings. That is only at Ajmir; but I must go and learn, and fight, and ride with the other princes of Rajputana, and then I shall be altogether a man. I am going to the Raj Kumar College at Ajmir, that I may learn about the world. But you shall see how it is wise. The world looks very big since I have been ill. Kate, how big is the world which you have seen across the Black Water? Where is Tarvin Sahib? I have wished to see him too. Is Tarvin Sahib angry with me or with you?’

He plied her with a hundred questions till they halted before one of the gates in the flank of the palace that led to his mother’s wing. The woman of the desert rose from the ground beside it, and held out her arms.

‘I heard the message come,’ she said to Kate, ‘and I knew what was required. Give me the child to carry in. Nay, my Prince, there is no cause for fear. I am of good blood.’

‘Women of good blood walk veiled, and do not speak in the streets,’ said the child doubtfully.

‘One law for thee and thine, and another for me and mine,’ the woman answered, with a laugh. ‘We who earn our bread by toil cannot go veiled, but our fathers lived before us for many hundred years, even as did thine, heaven-born. Come then, the white fairy cannot carry thee so tenderly as I can.’

She put her arms about him, and held him to her breast as, easily as though he had been a three year-old child. He leaned back luxuriously, and waved a wasted hand; the grim gate grated on its hinges as it swung back, and they entered together — the woman, the child, and the girl.

There was no lavish display of ornament in that part of the palace. The gaudy tilework on the walls had flaked and crumbled away in many places, the shutters lacked paint and hung awry, and there was litter and refuse in the courtyard behind the gates. A queen who has lost the King’s favour loses much else as well in material comforts.

A door opened and a voice called. The three plunged into half darkness, and traversed a long, upward-sloping passage, floored with shining white stucco as smooth as marble, which communicated with the Queen’s apartments. The Maharaj Kunwar’s mother lived by preference in one long, low room that faced to the north-east, that she might press her face against the marble tracery and dream of her home across the sands, eight hundred miles away, among the Kulu hills. The hum of the crowded palace could not be heard there, and the footsteps of her few waiting-women alone broke the silence.

The woman of the desert, with the Prince hugged more closely to her breast, moved through the labyrinth of empty rooms, narrow staircases, and roofed courtyards with the air of a caged panther. Kate and the Prince were familiar with the dark and the tortuousness, the silence and the sullen mystery. To the one it was part and parcel of the horrors amid which she had elected to move; to the other it was his daily life.

At last the journey ended. Kate lifted a heavy curtain, as the Prince called for his mother; and the Queen, rising from a pile of white cushions by the window, cried passionately —

‘Is it well with the child?’

The Prince struggled to the floor from the woman’s arms, and the Queen hung sobbing over him, calling him a thousand endearing names, and fondling him from head to foot. The child’s reserve melted — he had striven for a moment to carry himself as a man of the Rajput race: that is to say, as one shocked beyond expression at any public display of emotion — and he laughed and wept in his mother’s arms. The woman of the ‘desert drew her hand across her eyes, muttering to herself, and Kate turned to look out of the window.

‘How shall I give you thanks?’ said the Queen at last. ‘Oh, my son — my little son — child of my heart, the gods and she have made thee well again. But who is that yonder?’

Her eyes fell for the first time on the woman of the desert, where the latter stood by the doorway draped in dull-red.

‘She carried me here from the carriage,’ said the Prince, ‘saying that she was a Rajput of good blood.’

‘I am of Chohan blood — a Rajput and a mother of Rajputs,’ said the woman simply, still standing. ‘The white fairy worked a miracle upon my man. He was sick in the head and did not know me. It is true that he died, but before the passing of the breath he knew me and called me by my name.’

‘And she carried thee!’ said the Queen, with a shiver, drawing the Prince closer to her, for, like all Indian women, she counted the touch and glance of a widow things of evil omen.

The woman fell at the Queen’s feet. ‘Forgive me, forgive me,’ she cried. ‘I had borne three little ones, and the gods took them all and my man at the last. It was good — it was so good — to hold a child in my arms again. Thou canst forgive,’ she wailed; ‘thou art so rich in thy son, and I am only a widow.’

‘And I a widow in life,’ said the Queen, under her breath. ‘Of a truth, I should forgive. Rise thou.’

The woman lay still where she had fallen, clutching at the Queen’s naked feet.

‘Rise, then, my sister,’ the Queen whispered.

‘We of the fields,’ murmured the woman of the desert, ‘we do not know how to speak to the great people. If my words are rough, does the Queen forgive me?’

‘Indeed I forgive. Thy speech is softer than that of the hill-women of Kulu, but some of the words are new.’

‘I am of the desert — a herder of camels, a milker of goats. What should I know of the speech of courts? Let the white fairy speak for me.’

Kate listened with an alien ear. Now that she had discharged her duty, her freed mind went back to Tarvin’s danger and the shame and overthrow of an hour ago. She saw the women in her hospital slipping away one by one, her work unravelled, and all hope of good brought to wreck; and she saw Tarvin dying atrocious deaths, and, as she felt, by her hand.

‘What is it?’ she asked wearily, as the woman plucked at her skirt. Then to the Queen, ‘This is a woman who alone of all those whom I tried to benefit remained at my side today, Queen.’

‘There has been a talk in the palace,’ said the Queen, her arm round the Prince’s neck, ‘a talk that trouble had come to your hospital, sahiba.’

‘There is no hospital now,’ Kate answered grimly.

‘You promised to take me there, Kate, some day,’ the Prince said in English.

‘The women were fools,’ said the woman of the desert quietly, from her place on the ground. ‘A mad priest told them a lie — that there was a charm among the drugs —  — ’

‘Deliver us from all evil spirits and exorcisms,’ the Queen murmured.

‘A charm among her drugs that she handles with her own hands, and so forsooth, sahiba, they must run out shrieking that their children will be misborn apes and their chicken-souls given to the devils. Aho! They will know in a week, not one or two, but many, whither their souls go for they will die — the corn and the corn in the ear together.’

Kate shivered. She knew too well that the woman spoke the truth.

‘But the drugs!’ began the Queen. ‘Who knows what powers there may be in the drugs?’ she laughed nervously, glancing at Kate.

‘Dekko! Look at her,’ said the woman, with quiet scorn. ‘She is a girl and naught else. What could she do to the Gates of Life?’

‘She has made my son whole, therefore she is my sister,’ said the Queen.

‘She caused my man to speak to me before the death hour; therefore I am her servant as well as thine, sahiba,’ said the other.

The Prince looked up in his mother’s face curiously. ‘She calls thee “thou,”‘ he said, as though the woman did not exist. ‘That is not seemly between a villager and a queen, thee and thou!’

‘We be both women, little son. Stay still in my arms. Oh, it is good to feel thee here again, worthless one.’

‘The heaven-born looks as frail as dried maize,’ said the woman quickly.

‘A dried monkey, rather,’ returned the Queen, dropping her lips on the child’s head. Both mothers spoke aloud and with emphasis, that the gods, jealous of human happiness, might hear and take for truth the disparagement that veils deepest love.

‘Aho, my little monkey is dead,’ said the Prince, moving restlessly. ‘I need another one. Let me go into the palace and find another monkey.’

‘He must not wander into the palace from this chamber,’ said the Queen passionately, turning to Kate. ‘Thou art all too weak, beloved. O miss sahib, he must not go.’ She knew by experience that it was fruitless to cross her son’s will.

‘It is my order,’ said the Prince, without turning his head. ‘I will go.’

‘Stay with us, beloved,’ said Kate. She was wondering whether the hospital could be dragged together again, after three months, and whether it was possible she might have overrated the danger to Nick.

‘I go,’ said the Prince, breaking from his mother’s arms. ‘I am tired of this talk.’

‘Does the Queen give leave?’ asked the woman of the desert under her breath. The Queen nodded, and the Prince found himself caught between two brown arms, against whose strength it was impossible to struggle.

‘Let me go, widow!’he shouted furiously.

‘It is not good for a Rajput to make light of a mother of Rajputs, my king,’ was the unmoved answer. ‘If the young calf does not obey the cow, he learns obedience from the yoke. The heaven-born is not strong. He will fall among those passages and stairs. He will stay here. When the rage has left his body he will be weaker than before. Even now’ — the large bright eyes bent themselves on the face of the child — ’even now,’ the calm voice continued, ‘the rage is going. One moment more, heaven-born, and thou wilt be a prince no longer, but only a little, little child, such as I have borne. Ahi, such as I shall never bear again.’

With the last words the Prince’s head nodded forward on her shoulder. The gust of passion had spent itself, leaving him, as she had foreseen, weak to sleep.

‘Shame — oh, shame!’ he muttered thickly. ‘Indeed I do not wish to go. Let me sleep.’

She began to pat him on the shoulder, till the Queen put forward hungry arms, and took back her own again, and laying the child on a cushion at her side, spread the skirt of her long muslin robe over him, and looked long at her treasure. The woman crouched down on the floor. Kate sat on a cushion, and listened to the ticking of the cheap American clock in a niche in the wall. The voice of a woman singing a song came muffled and faint through many walls. The dry wind of noon sighed through the fretted screens of the window, and she could hear the horses of the escort swishing their tails and champing their bits in the courtyard a hundred feet below. She listened, thinking ever of Tarvin in growing terror. The Queen leaned over her son more closely, her eyes humid with mother love.

‘He is asleep,’ she said at last. ‘What was the talk about his monkey, miss sahib?’

‘It died,’ Kate said, and spurred herself to the lie. ‘I think it had eaten bad fruit in the garden.’

‘In the garden?’ said the Queen quickly.

‘Yes, in the garden.’

The woman of the desert turned her eyes from one woman to the other. These were matters too high for her, and she began timidly to rub the Queen’s feet.

‘Monkeys often die,’ she observed. ‘I have seen as it were a pestilence among the monkey folk over there at Banswarra.’

‘In what fashion did it die?’ insisted the Queen.

‘I — I do not know,’ Kate stammered, and there was another long silence as the hot afternoon wore on.

‘Miss Kate, what do you think about my son?’ whispered the Queen. ‘Is he well, or is he not well?’

‘He is not very well. In time he will grow stronger, but it would be better if he could go away for a while.’

The Queen bowed her head quietly. ‘I have thought of that also many times sitting here alone; and it was the tearing out of my own heart from my breast. Yes, it would be well if he were to go away. But’ — she stretched out her hands despairingly towards the sunshine — ’what do I know of the world where he will go, and how can I be sure that he will be safe? Here — even here’ . . . She checked herself suddenly. ‘Since you have come, Miss Kate, my heart has known a little comfort, but I do not know when you will go away again.’

‘I cannot guard the child against every evil,’ Kate replied, covering her face with her hands; ‘but send him away from this place as swiftly as may be. In God’s name let him go away.’

‘Such hai! Such hai! It is the truth, the truth!’ The Queen turned from Kate to the woman at her feet.

‘Thou hast borne three?’she said.

‘Yea, three, and one other that never drew breath. They were all men-children,’ said the woman of the desert.

‘And the gods took them?’

‘Of smallpox one, and fever the two others.’

‘Art thou certain that it was the gods?’

‘I was with them always till the end.’

‘Thy man, then, was all thine own?’

‘We were only two, he and I. Among our villages the men are poor, and one wife suffices.’

‘Arre! They are rich among the villages. Listen now. If a co-wife had sought the lives of those three of thine —  — ’

‘I would have killed her. What else?’ The woman’s nostrils dilated and her hand went swiftly to her bosom.

‘And if in place of three there had been one only, the delight of thy eyes, and thou hadst known that thou shouldst never bear another, and the co-wife working in darkness had sought for that life? What then?’

‘I would have slain her — but with no easy death. At her man’s side and in his arms I would have slain her. If she died before my vengeance arrived I would seek for her in hell.’