The Flower of Forgiveness. Flora Annie Webster Steel
to be made if Jaimul and his kind were reduced to the level of labourers. That handful of grain, for instance, thrown so recklessly to the pigeons--that might be the usurer's, and so might the plenty which went to build up the long, strong limbs of Târadevi's tribe of young soldiers--idle young scamps who thrashed the usurer's boys as diligently during play-time as they were beaten by those clever, weedy lads during school-hours.
"Seed grain," he echoed sulkily to the old peasant's calm demand. "Sure last harvest I left thee more wheat than most men in my place would have done; for the account grows, O Jaimul! and the land is mortgaged to the uttermost."
"Mayhap! but it must be sown for all that, else thou wilt suffer as much as I. So quit idle words, and give the seed as thou hast since time began. What do I know of accounts who can neither read nor write? 'Tis thy business, not mine."
"'Tis not my business to give ought for nought--"
"For nought," broke in Jaimul, with the hoarse chuckle of the peasant availing himself of a time-worn joke. "Thou canst add that nought to thy figures, O bunniah-ji![4] So bring the paper and have done with words. If Râm sends rain--and the omens are auspicious--thou canst take all but food and jewels for the women."
"Report saith thy house is rich enough in them already," suggested the usurer after a pause.
Jaimul's big white eyebrows met over his broad nose. "What then, bunniah-ji?" he asked haughtily.
Anunt Râm made haste to change the subject, whereat Jaimul, smiling softly, told the usurer that maybe more jewels would be needed with next seed grain, since if the auguries were once more propitious, the women purposed bringing home his grandson's bride ere another year had sped. The usurer smiled an evil smile.
"Set thy seal to this also," he said, when the seed grain had been measured; "the rules demand it. A plague, say I, on all these new-fangled papers the sahib-logue ask of us. Look you! how I have to pay for the stamps and fees; and then you old ones say we new ones are extortionate. We must live, O zemindar-ji![5] even as thou livest."
"Live!" retorted the old man with another chuckle. "Wherefore not! The land is good enough for you and for me. There is no fault in the land!"
"Ay! it is good enough for me and for you," echoed the usurer slowly. He inverted the pronouns--that was all.
So Jaimul, as he had done ever since he could remember, walked over the bare plain with noiseless feet, and watched the sun flash on the golden grain as it flew from his thin brown fingers. And once again the guttural chant kept time to his silent steps.
"Wheat grains grow to wheat,
And the seed of a tare to tare;
Who knows if man's soul will meet
Man's body to wear.
Great Râm, grant me life
From the grain of a golden deed;
Sink not my soul in the strife
To wake as a weed."
After that his work in the fields was over. Only at sunrise and sunset his tall, gaunt figure stood out against the circling sky as he wandered through the sprouting wheat waiting for the rain which never came. Not for the first time in his long life of waiting, so he took the want calmly, soberly.
"It is a bad year," he said, "the next will be better. For the sake of the boy's marriage I would it had been otherwise; but Anunt Râm must advance the money. It is his business."
Whereat Jodha, the youngest son, better versed than his father in new ways, shook his head doubtfully. "Have a care of Anunt, O baba-ji,"[6] he suggested with diffidence. "Folk say he is sharper than ever his father was."
"'Tis a trick sons have, or think they have, nowadays," retorted old Jaimul wrathfully. "Anunt can wait for payment as his fathers waited. God knows the interest is enough to stand a dry season or two."
In truth fifty per cent, and payment in kind at the lowest harvest rates, with a free hand in regard to the cooking of accounts, should have satisfied even a usurer's soul. But Anunt Râm wanted that handful of grain for the pigeons and the youngsters' mess of pottage. He wanted the land, in fact, and so the long row of dibbled-in seals dotting the unending scroll of accounts began to sprout and bear fruit. Drought gave them life, while it brought death to many a better seed.
"Not give the money for the boy's wedding!" shrilled old Kishnu six months after in high displeasure. "Is the man mad? When the fields are the best in all the country side."
"True enough, O wife! but he says the value under these new rules the sahib-logue make is gone already. That he must wait another harvest, or have a new seal of me."
"Is that all, O Jaimul Singh! and thou causing my liver to melt with fear? A seal--what is a seal or two more against the son of thy son's marriage?"
"'Tis a new seal," muttered Jaimul uneasily, "and I like not new things. Perhaps 'twere better to wait the harvest."
"Wait the harvest and lose the auspicious time the purohit[7] hath found written in the stars? Ai, Târadevi! Ai! Pertâbi! there is to be no marriage, hark you! The boy's strength is to go for nought, and the bride is to languish alone because the father of his father is afraid of a usurer! Haè, Haè!"
The women wept the easy tears of their race, mingled with half-real, half-pretended fears lest the Great Ones might resent such disregard of their good omens--the old man sitting silent meanwhile, for there is no tyranny like the tyranny of those we love. Despite all this his native shrewdness held his tenderness in check. They would get over it, he told himself, and a good harvest would do wonders--ay! even the wonders which the purohit was always finding in the skies. Trust a good fee for that! So he hardened his heart, went back to Anunt Râm, and told him that he had decided on postponing the marriage. The usurer's face fell. To be so near the seal which would make it possible for him to foreclose the mortgages, and yet to fail! He had counted on this marriage for years; the blue sky itself had fought for him so far, and now--what if the coming harvest were a bumper?
"But I will seal for the seed grain," said old Jaimul; "I have done that before, and I will do it again--we know that bargain of old."
Anunt Râm closed his pen-tray with a snap. "There is no seed grain for you, baba-ji, this year either," he replied calmly.
Ten days afterwards, Kishnu, Pertâbi, and Târadevi were bustling about the courtyard with the untiring energy which fills the Indian woman over the mere thought of a wedding, and Jaimul, out in the fields, was chanting as he scattered the grain into the furrows--
"Wrinkles and seams and sears
On the face of our mother earth;
There are ever sorrows and tears
At the gates of birth."
The mere thought of the land lying fallow had been too much for him; so safe in the usurer's strong-box lay a deed with the old man's seal sitting cheek by jowl beside Anunt Râm's brand-new English signature. And Jaimul knew, in a vague, unrestful way, that this harvest differed from other harvests, in that more depended upon it. So he wandered oftener than ever over the brown expanse of field where a flush of green showed that Mother Earth had done her part, and was waiting for Heaven to take up the task.
The wedding fire-balloons rose from the courtyard, and drifted away to form constellations in the cloudless sky; the sound of wedding drums and pipes disturbed the stillness of the starlit nights, and still day by day the green shoots grew lighter and lighter in colour because the rain came not. Then suddenly, like a man's hand, a little cloud! "Merry drops slanting from west to the east;" merrier by far to Jaimul's ears than all the marriage music was that low rumble from the canopy of purple cloud, and the discordant scream of the peacock telling of the storm to come. Then in the evening, when the setting sun could only send a bar of pale primrose light between the solid purple and the solid brown, what joy to pick a dry-shod way along