A Prince of Dreamers Part 44

Blue upon gray, violet tinting the blue, so pa.s.sing to red, flaming to orange. Then with one throb of primrose----

Light!

He felt the thrill of it--that endless quiver of the ether waves pa.s.sing on and on regardless of him, around him, through him, in him--felt it in a sudden answering s.h.i.+ver of nerve, and vein, and muscle, as he stood up, absorbed utterly in adoration.

"Thy blessing O my father!" came a voice beside him.

"May thy sacrifice be propitious O my daughter!" he replied mechanically.

"And may the King-of-Kings live forever! His slave kisses the dust of his footsteps."

He turned hastily, kings.h.i.+p coming back to him at once, to recognise atma Devi. Crouching at his feet, the wet folds of her widow's shroud clung to every curve of her supple body. After a night spent in fruitless inquiry she had come to the tank at the earliest point of dawn to wander fruitlessly in search round its sh.o.r.es; so after a hasty performance of her sacrifices, she was on her way cityward again when she had seen the solitary figure, and, guessing instinctively that it was the King--for his habits were known to all his people--had come to test her suspicion and so, perchance, gain direct speech of someone from whom, surely, she might hear the truth. But his first words checked her.

"I wist not, woman, thou wert widow," he said sternly. "As a rule thy dress----"

Thinking he blamed her--and blame from him meant all things--she was quick in explanation. "The Most-Auspicious is right," she almost interrupted, "but he to whom I was wedded as a babe proved vile; so my father--praise be to the G.o.ds!--withheld me from him utterly. Yet these few years past, that the man's evil body is dead, I come hither to ransom his soul."

The answer fitting so aptly with Akbar's previous thoughts roused his instant curiosity.

"Wherefore?" he asked, his keen face lighting up with interest as he seated himself once more. "Sit yonder, sister, at my feet and tell me, wherefore?"

"Because he was my husband," came the almost aggressively quick reply.

"And a wife is bound to her husband in Life and in Death."

Akbar smiled--the foibles of his world always amused him. "Not in Death, nowadays, my good woman," he cried lightly. "Akbar hath forbidden Death. Would that he could forbid this also."

He touched a fold of her wet shroud with his finger. A s.h.i.+ver shot heartwards from the contact. Was it merely the chill to his flesh warmed by his heart's blood, or was it--something he had told himself he had forgotten? He drew back in resentment. She also; but from his touch on what to her, as to most Hindu women, was the dearest privilege of her s.e.x--the right to burn!

"The Most Excellent is a mighty King," she commented sarcastically, "but even he cannot stay the immortal man in woman from following man in death. We are not all cowards like she who sent yonder _ram-rucki_ to the Most High."

She pointed with scorn to a slender, silken cord, behung with coloured ta.s.sels which the King wore on his wrist, bracelet fas.h.i.+on.

Akbar frowned.

"So. Thou knowest the story?"

"This slave knows all that concerns the Honour of the King," she replied proudly.

The frown grew.

"The King can keep his honour without thy help, woman! Aye! and his promises too; so this coward shall be saved." Then, as was so often the case with him, eager questioning swept away everything else. "Yet wherefore coward? Tell me that, thou, her sister in s.e.x? Wherefore should a young girl not shrink from burning with an old profligate whose very age hath prevented natural fulfilment of husbandhood? By the sun, my very stomach turns at the thought of it; yet womanhood accepts it dutifully. Lo! couldst thou but tell me--but thou canst not--whence comes this sense of sin which makes women prost.i.tute, and tempts men to be far worse than the beasts, I would give thee----." He paused, looking into her soft dark eyes whence the fierceness had died away giving place to wise surprise at ignorance.

"The Most Excellent must know," she replied. "Our mothers teach it to us. It is the love which seeks for pleasure, which forgets motherhood.

Lo! in the beginning we were the nothingness which tempted form, even as Siyala the courtesan sang; so we cannot live save through that which we create. We are 'thieves of form, and sanctuaries of souls,'

even as the Princess Sanyogata told Prithviraj. Aye! though she had lured him with the love that is illusion! But she was brave also. She left her womanhood to die, and followed the immortal in the man."

"Then this mortal love is woman's only?" he asked critically, eager as ever in argument.

"Aye!" she answered simply. "In the beginning it was so; but we have taught it to man; thus it returns to us again in every soul to which we give a body. Yea! it is so! Look how far we are, Most Excellent"--she pointed with slim finger to the distant cranes--"from yonder birds to whom pairing time is breeding time, who know not s.e.x save for the life they have to give to the world."

She paused, and there was silence; for once again, the example she had chosen fitted in with past thoughts. Far away on the primrose verge a sword-shaped shaft of red-encircled cloud hid the rising sun.

"And there is no other Love?" he asked moodily, forgetful as ever of his _entourage_ in the absorption of inquiry. Her face grew paler, her hand went up almost unconsciously to her throat round which the green stone of the _rebeck_ player hung; but no essence of rose a.s.sailed her senses; or if it did she denied the fact strenuously.

"I know not, my King," she said quietly. "There be some who talk of it; but my father--he was very learned, Most High--held that Love, needing both subject and object" (she spoke quite simply of such abstruse idea as many a nigh naked coolie in India will do, if so be he is Brahmin), "lay outside the Great Unity and so was illusion. Yet to me----" she hesitated and looked at him almost appealingly out of her large, dark, unfathomable eyes. "Lo! I am woman, so I cannot think--wherefore should not Love be all things?"

"Wouldst thou have it so, sister?" he asked, meaningly. She flushed faintly under her dark skin.

"Nay! Most High," she replied proudly. "For me honour is enough, since I guard the King's."

The words held something of self-revelation in them. He rose and wound his saffron veil closer. "So be it, sister! Guard the King's honour, aye! and his Luck too if thou canst!" he added with a smile as he moved away.

The word roused her to a sense that her chance was departing; she caught at his feet and bowed herself over them in the att.i.tude which in India brings arrest to all in authority; for it is ultimate appeal.

"What is it, sister?" he queried almost mechanically.

"What--what, Most Excellent, of the King's Luck?" she asked tremulously. At the moment other, clearer words failed her.

"What?" he echoed perplexedly, wondering what the woman would be at. "Naught that I know of save that it shone when I saw it yester-evening, and that it will s.h.i.+ne still more when the Feringhi jeweller hath spent his Western art upon it," he added with a smile.

"Yester-even," she could scarce speak for surprise, "then--then it is not stolen? The King's Luck is safe?"

"Stolen! Ye G.o.ds, no!" His look of wonder changed to kindly compa.s.sion. "Go home, my sister," he said as he might have said to a child. "And dream not so much of the King and his Luck. He is not worth it! So farewell! Yet stay! I owe thee something once more for--thy treatise on Love! I gave thee thy father's t.i.tular office did, I not? Well! to-morrow take up his duties! Come to the Great Durbar in thy Charan's dress, and, for once, a woman shall challenge the whole world for Akbar. Lo! it will make some of the _durbaries_ see Shaitan," he interpolated for himself light-heartedly. "But come and fear not--I will warn the Chamberlain to give thee place. So once more farewell, widow----"

Thus far he had spoken with a smile; now his face grew grave. "Lo!

despite Akbar, methinks thou wilt die for some man yet; thou art of that quality. Heaven send he be worth the sacrifice!"

"I will die for the King's honour if need be," she muttered, true by instinct to her life-idea, even in the midst of her mingled joy and amazement. She sate for some time after Akbar left her, trying to piece together the tangled clues she held; but such intricate balancing of facts was beyond her. She lived only by what she felt, so she was without guide in following up the actions of others.

That the diamond had been stolen she knew; and now it was evident that Birbal had kept the knowledge of the theft from the King--doubtless to save him from distress. This latter thought leapt to her heart and found instant harbour there, so that she began to reproach herself with having gone so near to making such forethought of no avail; a forethought that had done its work too, since as the Most High had seen the diamond but the evening before it must have been recovered.

The incident was therefore over--small thanks to her!

And yet the King had bidden her challenge the whole world on his behalf! She crept home and looked at her father's corselet and sword wonderingly. How had it come about that the Great Hope of her life was about to be realised, and she could scarce feel any joy in it?

Meanwhile Akbar was doffing his ascetic's robe, and donning the heron-plumed turban of empire. It was a change to which he was accustomed; but this morning, he felt that something of his interview with atma Devi lingered with him.

He paused for a moment as he pa.s.sed to the Private Hall of Audience with Birbal to look out across the palace courtyard and so through the Arch of Victory to India stretching wide and far beyond it.

"If I leave this place," he said quietly, "as leave it surely I shall some day, thus condemning myself to sonlessness, I shall go down to the ages as one who failed--who built dream-palaces unfit for humanity; therefore fit home for the bats, the foxes, the hyenas."

"This will I warrant, sire!" replied Birbal, hotly, in instant defence of his master. "Let who will come to Akbar's Arch of Triumph in the future, it shall remain to them unforgettable, unforgotten, until Death kills memory!"

"The memory of a great defeat," continued the King shaking his head.

"And to my mind a greater one if I remain!" He turned and laid his hand on Birbal's shoulder. "Yea! old friend. I have failed--why strain thyself to hide it? Wherefore--G.o.d knows! for I have striven." He paused, then went on, "There was a woman at the tank this morning who said that Love was all things. Is it so? Have I not loved enough? Is that the solving of the riddle--is it the Master-Key?"

Birbal's face was a fine study in sarcastic disagreement. "Mayhap, my King! The poets have it so; though in G.o.d's truth this wondrous key has unlocked naught for me--save nothingness!"

"A perfect mating," went on the dreamer, absorbed in his own thoughts.