Part 7

Ten years after, she paid her first visit to the cemetery, in order to cool her newly buried husband's grave with decorous tears. She went there calmly, and then as calmly refused to return. She had made up her mind to become a religious, she said. Now this fell in with both the old man's and her father-in-law's views. The former was willing, as before, to pay for her companionship; and the latter, with an eye to a future when he should have Suttu entirely under his control, thought it as well she should keep in with her grandfather and the hidden treasure. So a religious she became, somewhat to the scandal of the neighbourhood. Then came the paralysis, leaving Hussan _minus_ his monthly payment, and quite uncertain whether Suttu said truth when she denied all knowledge of the hoard. In truth, the position was awkward. The saint might recover speech, and then, if he found that Suttu had been violently used, he might resent it and make away with the treasure. If, however, by starving her out, Suttu could be induced to break her vow and marry, Hussan could no doubt get himself appointed guardian of the shrine, and so have an opportunity of searching where he chose. The task was not a difficult one, since the people around were easily led to believe that her ways and works were anything but what a _fakeerni's_ should be. So the offerings grew less and less, the complaints of mischance or neglect more frequent; yet still Suttu held her head jauntily and laughed when, of an evening, she met her father-in-law prowling around the graveyard. It had a fascination for him; and often when his feet were not there, his finger was tracing its outline on the village map. There, within that little space, lay the treasure, and a horrible conjunction of a half-dead old man and a very much alive young woman prevented him from getting hold of it. The thought kept him from sleeping when there had been a death in the village, and he knew Shâhbâsh was digging and delving. And when he slept he dreamed that the old saint sat up and spoke, but that no one could hear a word he said. He did not know that Suttu and her henchman had gone the crucial length of spreading the holy carpet Mecca-ways, and setting the old saint's feet upon it, more than once, at sunrising and sunsetting. In vain; the miracle would not work for gold; so they had lifted him back again to the high wooden bed.

Shâhbâsh was really losing his temper over his part of the business. Lotus-beans for breakfast were all very well, but you could not dig graves on lotus-beans. Besides, the black bottle was always empty.

"Lo, _mai_, I grow thin," he grumbled; "then the fairy will cease to care for me, and that is an end. Women are not to be trusted."

As he set to work on a baby's grave, he went on grumbling and muttering to himself. He had been her father's foster-brother, and she was the apple of his eye. For all that, he must eat. Some day her enemy would tempt him to treason when he ached with hunger, and who could be faithful on an empty stomach? He blubbered at the thought of his own betrayal.

Thus, on the evening of the day when Suttu slapped the Kâzi's son, matters were approaching a crisis all round; even Hussan, prowling about the graveyard in the vague disquiet which beset him after every fresh excavation of the soil, made up his mind to a bolder game. As he picked his way through the short mud mounds, a sort of thrill shot up his legs at the thought that he might be treading on gold; for the hope of buried treasure takes possession of men, body and soul. He found no one in the reed thatched-hut; but a savory smell of curried beans from the fire-place showed that its mistress would soon be back to supper. So he went over to the tomb where the saint lay on the wooden bed under the dome, in which the faint breathing of the old man swelled to a murmuring echo like a swarm of bees. Hussan stood beside the bed, full of rage, malice, and greed. If he could only crack that bald old noddle and pick out the kernel!

Suddenly the thought came that perhaps now--this moment or the next--was the one appointed from all eternity in which speech would return, and he stood petrified by expectation. Perhaps a call might rouse the sleeping soul. He started as his own hoarse whisper grew to a roar in the echoing dome. That should wake the dead. Then, as the sound died ineffectually to silence, the desire to crack the old man's skull at all costs returned. The kernel might take care of itself.

Something of this must have showed in his face, for Suttu, coming in behind him, passed softly to the bed and raised a menacing hand. Only for an instant. Then she sat down on the edge and laughed.

"Well! did he tell you?"

A brutal question; for the answer would be dinned into his ears by the echo, and he knew it all too well already.

"Come outside, daughter," he said, with a curse; "one cannot hear one's self speak in this chattering place."

They sat down on the topmost step of the low flight leading to the tomb. The heat of the sun was over, but a scorching air struck up from the bricks, making Suttu fan herself with the corner of her veil. No wonder men coveted her, thought her companion, eying her askance. She grew handsomer every day.

"Suttu," he began, taking the plunge boldly, "peace is better than war. Give me half the gold, and I am content. Let it stay in the family, Suttu."

"Whose family--mine or thine?" she asked, scornfully.

"'Tis the same. Lo, is not Murghub thy brother, since he is thy mother's son, though he be but a poor natural?"

"Lay not that to her charge," retorted Suttu, flippantly. "She made no mistake in me."

Hussan coughed down his impatience. "Well, well, I care not. I came not to chop words. It is the gold, Suttu! I mean to have some of it."

"What gold? I know of none. I have seen none."

"Then have I! See!" He felt in an innermost pocket, and showed her, lying in his palm, a broad gold-piece. "They make not such pieces nowadays. Where that came from there are more."

She turned it over and over in her long, brown fingers. "Aye, 'tis old. Didst steal it from him, then?" A backward toss of the head indicated her meaning.

"Nay, he gave it."

"Wherefore?"

"For thee, Suttu, when thou wast a child. Give it me back. Stop! what dost thou?"

"This," she cried, shrilly, seizing his clutching hand by the wrist in a grasp firm as a man's, while in sheer bravado she held the coin high above her head. "I will give it back to the old man, and see what he thinks of thee for keeping it. What! wouldst fight for one gold-piece, fool, and lose the chance of lakhs by my death? Yea, yea, I know. Thou art not my heir in death, though thou mayst have hold on me alive. Hands off, or I will fight too! And Shâhbâsh comes to his supper. He is a devil when hungry!"

Her tone was still mocking, the grasp on his wrist firm but not straining. Her temper in control as yet, but she meant mischief, if mischief was to be; and for the life of him Hussan could not help admiring her.

"Thou art a she-devil," he said, sulkily--"a she-devil, and no woman."

"I bore a son to your son, anyhow," she retorted quickly, and her frown warned him that he had gone too far.

"If thou wilt but listen--"

"Not till I have laid this offering in the saint's hand," she interrupted imperially, with a gesture of disdain. Hussan kicked his heels savagely as she marched over the platform and entered the tomb. He could see her stoop and lay the coin in the indifferent palm resting beside the still body. She came back much the better for this serio-comic interlude, for her dramatic instincts were strong, and she played her part of independence vigorously.

"Well," she began, quite graciously, settling herself down on the step beside her father-in-law, "if peace be better than war, what price hath peace?"

The accountant leaned over to her eagerly. "Halves--halves in everything save liberty. That is all thine own."

For an instant she felt tempted. Then her natural waywardness returned.

"And if I claim the whole?"

"War! And that to a woman without gold--"

She gave an irritating chuckle. "Bah! It may come any day. Shâhbâsh may find it; the old man may speak."

The very possibility of her words being true roused his anger. "Speak! He will never speak again."

A rattle behind made them both turn with the alertness of those who live among snakes. Suttu was on her feet in a second without a cry. The accountant let loose a yell of dismay, and in his recoil rolled back a step or two, where he lay clutching at the bricks wildly. For the old saint was sitting up on his bed waggling his bald head over the coin; he could not have looked more ghastly had he risen from the dead.

The great moment was upon them!

This thought came first to both spectators; and they were too uncultured to conceal it.

"Tell us where!" cried Suttu, as she stood.

"Yea, tell us ere you die!" echoed the accountant as he lay.

Not a very warm welcome back to life, but the old man, though he raised his head at the cry, understood nothing. The dim eyes passed the covetous faces and rested on the familiar landscape darkening beyond the door of his tomb. Then the nerveless hand slipped from its resting-place on his knee--slipped, slipped, till with a clink, and a roll, and a rattle, given back a thousand-fold by the dome, the coin fell upon the stone floor.

"Gone!" he whispered, "gone--yea, gone forever!"

But the look of life in his face had carried Suttu back to her childhood, and her arms were already round the failing figure, as she turned such fierce forbidding on her companion that he shrank back silent.

"It is the last chance!" he whispered, after a time.

"I care not."

Suddenly the bald head fell back on Suttu's breast.

The chance was over.

They sat all through the night waiting for a sign, and none came. Before the dawn broke, the old saint and his secret had gone together into the darkness.

Hussan, as he walked cityward, felt that Fate had done him a good as well as an ill turn. He had made no compact with Suttu, and, now that the grandfather was out of the way, he could sue for guardianship at once, and unmask a battery he had been keeping in reserve.

And Shâhbâsh, disconsolate over the cold curry he had actually forgotten to eat in the hope of hearing his old master speak once more, made gruesome faces over his coming task. The gold, for sure, was not hidden under Deen Ali's roly-poly, so he would have to find a resting-place in it for the last incumbent without greed of gain to beguile his labour.

Only Suttu did not think of the future, but of the past, when the old man had been her willing slave.

III.

The dates were ripe. Great drooping bunches of them hung under the swaying palm-leaves--rose-pink and purple-black, yellow and brown, many-tinted like some rare agate. Shâhbâsh gorged himself on the sickly-sweet fruit, and every one, far and near, grew visibly fatter. But Deen Ali's Arabian dates were too valuable for home consumption, and Suttu only awaited the new moon in order to summon the pluckers and driers to prepare the fruit for market. Shâhbâsh, with a sigh at the shortness of opportunity, ate all the more and thought of little else.

Yet the four weeks since the saint's death had not been uneventful. The Kâzi's son and the accountant had joined issue in their desire to see Suttu worsted. As yet, however, there had been no overt act. To begin with, the native of India does nothing in a hurry. In addition, none gauges better than he the indisputable advantage of an old lie over a new one. It is like port wine depositing a crust for itself out of its own sediment. Finally, even a false claim acquires dignity by being preferred deliberately, moderately. All these considerations had coincided towards inaction--as yet.

But a day or two before the new moon matters changed. Suttu, coming at dawn from her hut, saw a sight which literally took her breath away. Three of the tallest stems in the nearest clump of palms were swaying under the weight of men clinging to them by clamps and a rope passed round their waists. Below, the freshly gathered fruit lay in heaps under the fingers of women busy in sorting it and carrying it in baskets to a drying enclosure already fenced in by hedges of plaited leaves. In a word, date-picking was in full swing. Had she by chance given the orders in her sleep?

Incredulous of her own sight, she roused Shâhbâsh, who still lay snoring on the raised platform of the tomb.

He was on his feet in a moment, and shouting "Thieves!" loudly as the only explanation, swung himself down like a monkey, and ran gesticulating with windmill arms towards the trees. His ugliness, even when familiar, was phenomenal; seen by the date-pickers, who as usual were strangers employed by a big contractor, it appeared supernatural; and the women, taking him to be nothing more nor less than the demon in charge of the grove, flung down their baskets and fled, screaming. The men would doubtless have followed their example, had it been possible; but, rather than run the gantlet of the dancing, yelling creature below, they dug their clamps tighter and held on in mortal terror of what would happen next.

Suttu's more tardy appearance led to an explanation; from which it appeared that the pickers had been sent by a contractor, who had formally bought the crop from one Hussan the accountant.

"Leave them to me, _mai_ Suttu!" shrieked Shâhbâsh, in an ecstasy of rage over this calm appropriation. "Lo, I will give them a crop of blows if they come down. If not, let them starve and drop like bats in the cold. I am in no hurry." He squatted himself on the matting and helped himself to the gathered dates with both hands. But Suttu saw further than the immediate present, and knew a protest must be raised, and that quickly. She turned at once to that confidence in the power of personal appeal which, thank Heaven, still lingers in India, despite Western attempts to strangle it with red tape and smother it with sealing-wax.

"Yea, watch thou," she cried, "while I go to the big _sahib's_ house and cry for justice. He listens to the poor."

"_Wâh! wâh!_" assented the clingers, "but see us safe first, O mother!"

"Let them be," said Shâhbâsh, confidentially, "else they may make away with the dates they have picked. Lo, they are safer there till the police come."

So there they clung, while the _fakeerni_, her indignation increasing at every swinging stride, made her way to the deputy-commissioner's bungalow.

He was a small, fair English lad, put in charge--with many instructions to telegraph to headquarters if he saw signs of the millennium or another mutiny--during the absence on three weeks' leave of a senior man. He was just mounting his polo pony in order to keep his hand in by chivying a ball round a stick, when wronged womanhood appeared and flung out a pair of remarkably beautiful arms for justice. Perhaps the fact that the complainant was superbly handsome and struck a most impressive attitude had something to do with the readiness with which he turned to the red-coated orderlies for a translation of her _patois_ petition.

"'Tis Suttu, the _fakeerni_, and she comes to tell the Protector of the Poor that contractors are feloniously picking her dates."

"Send and stop 'em. And, and--what the deuce is the right thing to do. Oh, yes. Tell the police to report as usual." Then, as he rode off, he nodded affably to Suttu. "Take comfort, mother; I'll see to it."

He had been swished at Harrow quite an incredibly short time before, but he did the part of Providence neatly, while men for whom he had fagged were enjoying the inestimable privilege of sitting on a vestry--or the knife-board of an omnibus conveying them citywards to act as copying-machines for the term of their natural lives.

Suttu's apparent triumph, however, dwindled in Shâhbâsh's eyes to ignominious defeat when the police refused permission for any one to pick the dates until the petition of Hussan for the land on behalf of his son Murghub should be decided.

"What has that idiot to do with my land?" cried the _fakeerni_, indignantly. "Lo, there is no drop of saint's blood in him. He is of the second marriage."

The policeman sniggered. "I know not, mother! But this I hear, that Hussan saith otherwise, and the Kâzi is with him. And births and marriages are ticklish things to date, if the Kâzi be not friendly."

Suttu's heart throbbed. If the Kâzi were indeed her only refuge, she might have to face the storm in the open.

"O thou with the yellow trousers on thy legs, and wisdom in head and heart," moaned Shâhbâsh, "dost mean that these dates--Deen Ali's famous dates--are to be food for parrots? while I----" He sat in the sand, clasping his stomach, rocking backwards and forwards, a ludicrous spectacle of woe; yet there was tragedy in the comedy.

That evening, when supper consisted of a few millet-cakes and a tray of watery _pilu_-berries, which Suttu had gathered from the jungles, he looked at the ripe dates overhead and felt that the hour of apostasy had come. After the barmecidal feast he took his mattock and went to the graveyard--not to dig, but solemnly to consider which of Suttu's two enemies should have his services. Dawn found him returning from the Kâzi's house, with the black bottle full of rum, and the remains of a perfect feast of _bakkar khana_ tied up in a handkerchief--both of which he hid carefully. All that day he did nothing but vaunt the delights of a sheltered home combined with rich food; especially to a woman--more especially to a woman who had nothing to eat but _pilu_-berries and millet cakes! Suttu smiled at him indulgently.

"Lo, God did not make me all stomach," she said. "I eat the air and the sunshine; and I like to see the parrot people and the squirrel people eat my dates, even if I can't."

Shâhbâsh gave a rumble of despair, and bolstered up his uneasy conscience by telling himself such views were unnatural, accursed.

"Is a grave ordered?" asked Suttu, in surprise, when, that evening after supper, the dwarf shouldered his mattock. "Who is dead?"

"The saddler's son. Leastways he was so nigh his end to-day that his people gave me warning it might be wanted. And like as not they would eat oaths had it been bespoke in form, for they are keen to quarrel. Aye, aye, if lies were satisfying, my belly wouldn't be empty."

He disappeared into the soft, balmy darkness, grumbling and muttering--to come back circuitously to the hiding-place of the black bottle. He would need that for consolation, aye, for forgetfulness, before midnight brought the bribed watchmen to guard the date-grove. Then sooner or later after that some one's cries---- Well, why not? Suttu would not be the first woman who had been carried off to a rich marriage, and had lived to tell the tale cheerfully. Still, the thought of those cries when the Kâzi and his friends came was disturbing. Shâhbâsh took a great pull at the bottle. It would bring the fairy, and the fairy was unfailing consolation.

Meanwhile Suttu sat on the steps of the tomb, too much disturbed, by this outrageous claim of Hussan's, for sleep. The grounds which he would put forward were easy to guess. He and the Kâzi would post-date the second marriage, and ante-date Murghub, the idiot's birth, so as to make him out her full brother. Besides, they had money for evidence; she had none, and the neighbours were unfriendly. Her only help lay in the Lord, and that, she knew, had nothing to do with a court of justice. Still, it was as well to omit nothing which might be of use; so she brought out the trestle-shaped stool, on which her grandfather's copy of the Koran lay, and began to chant an additional chapter of Holy Writ as a kind of bribe to favour. As she rocked herself backward and forward, her lips busy with the long rhythm in which the unknown words quite lost all identity, her mind was busy over the time when she had learned it all with tears and trouble from the saint, stern on this one point. How fond he had been of divinations!--and Suttu paused in the middle of a pious apothegm to recollections of her grandfather compiling date-names for his neighbours--names, that is to say, which by the values of the composing letters would give the date of birth. What if her own name, Sutara Begum, was one of these, and the idiot's also? That would be proof indeed! Perhaps Shâhbâsh---- She had started to her feet, when she remembered her chapter, in some trepidation, since half a bribe was no bribe. She would just go on chanting till Shâhbâsh came home. It could do no harm, and might do good. Her round, full voice echoed back from the tomb, and out into the date-palms.

"_Wâh!_ if she were really, after all, a pious one, and not a bad walker," said one of the watchers to the other. His companion clucked a denial. "_Thchu!_ 'tis likely she knows the Kâzi is to be here to-night. That is woman's way."

Suttu chanted and chanted till she grew hoarse. Then she stood up and listened. The night was still and silent. Not even the distant thud of the mattock, so Shâhbâsh must be on his way back. She waited with the little oil-lamp in her hand, eager for her question. Then impatience gained the mastery, and still with the oil-cresset in her hand--for the new moon gave little light, and snakes were common--she set off swiftly through the palms towards the cemetery.

"Shâhbâsh!" she cried, but nothing stirred or answered as she picked her way through the short graves. Suddenly she was brought up sharply by something at her feet--something she had deemed another grave. It was the dwarf stretched fast asleep on a white sheet. His grey hair was twined with jasmine blossoms, and a black bottle lay empty by his side. He had been dancing to amuse his fairy. That was no uncommon affair; but whence had he got the inspiration, and the greasy remnants of a feast which the light of the lamp disclosed? What villainy had he been bribed to commit? Something, she felt sure, even if it were nothing more serious than a failure to fulfil the duties of her freehold, by having Deen Ali's bed ready for the saddler's son. If it were that! She seized the shovel, and swinging it over her head brought it down on the ground, where Shâhbâsh had outlined a grave, with a thud which set her arms tingling. The soil was hard, indeed, and surely that was twelve o'clock chiming from the court gong! Not much time left; but softer spots were to be found than the one Shâhbâsh had chosen. She took up the oil-cresset again and wandered round to the extreme edge of the graveyard where it merged into the sandier common.

Thud! thud! The strokes of the mattock echoing through the night made the Kâzi's son smile as, about an hour after midnight, he crept alone to the tomb. A man who is the prey of a purely animal passion does not have his ears boxed for nothing, and his idea of revenge went further than marriage. No one would heed Suttu's cries for help this time, and the watchers were in his pay.

Thud! thud! Suttu's respect for her henchman increased at every stroke. She was well into the grave by this time, digging round and round methodically, though she ached all over. Yet, if she died of it, that grave should be ready. What was that? Metal on metal! The surprise sent a tingle all through her. Then she was down on hands and knees, groping in the loosened soil.