The Mercy of the Lord. Flora Annie Webster Steel
warranted to draw themselves instead of the corks!
"Ari Bhai," said Imân mildly to this worthy, "thou art a prince of workmen, truly; but come and see something beyond thy art in iron. Bâpri bâp! I warrant thou couldst not even guess at its inner parts."
Could he not? Tezoo, the smith, thought otherwise, and being clever as well as voluble, hit with fair correctness on pivots, cog-wheels, and such-like inevitables of all machinery, the result of the interview being that Imân, armed with his kitchen chopper and a bundle of skewers, had a subsequent tête-à-tête with the monster, in which the latter came off second best; so that when its owner, fortified by a most magnificent breakfast (served in the verandah by reason of the central room of that bastion having an absolutely unsafe roof), went to overhaul his metal steed, he was fairly surprised.
"It is a verra remarkable occurrence," he said softly to himself as his deft hands busied themselves with nuts and screws (for he was a Scotch engineer on his way to take up an appointment as superintendent in a canal workshop), "most remarkable. And would be a fine example to the old ministers thesis that accident is not chance. There's just a method in it that is absolutely uncanny."
In short, even with the smithy on the premises, of which the good old chap in charge spoke consolingly, it was clear he could not start before evening, if then. Not that it mattered so much, since he had plenty of time in which to join his billet.
Thus, as he smoked his pipe, the question came at last for which the old matchmaker had been longing.
"And who would the young lady be who smashed me up last night?"
In his reply Imân dragged in Warm E-stink Sahib Bahadur and a vast amount of extraneous matter out of his own past experiences. Regarding the present, however, he was distinctly selective without being actually untruthful. The late E-stink Sahib's widow and children, for instance, being also at rest in the serai, were equally under his charge. And this being so, since there was but one public room in which dinner could possibly be served as it should be served--here Imân made a digression regarding the rights of the sahib-logue at large and E-stink Sahib's family in particular--it was possible that the Huzoor might meet his fellow-lodgers and the Miss-Sahiba again.
In fact, he--Imân--would find it more convenient if the meal were eaten together and at the same time, and the mem--her absence being one of the eliminated truths--would, he knew, fall in with any suggestion of his; which statement again was absolutely true.
Alec Alexander, lost in the intricacies of a piston-rod, acquiesced mechanically, though in truth the likelihood of seeing such a remarkably pretty face again was not without its usual unconscious charm to a young man.
This charm, however, became conscious half an hour afterwards, when hard at work in the smithy, his coat off, his sleeves rolled up, showing milk-white arms above his tanned wrists, he looked up from the bit of glowing iron on the anvil and saw a large pair of blue eyes and a large string of blue beads about an almost childish throat.
It struck him that both were as blue as the sky inarching the wide inarched square of the old serai. It struck him also that the eyes, anyhow, had more in common with the sky than with the house made with hands in which he stood, even though dead kings had built it. Yes! the whole figure did not belong somehow to its environment; to the litter of wasted forage, the ashes of dead fires, to the desertion and neglect of a place which, having served its purpose of a night's lodging, has been left behind on the road. It seemed worth more than that.
"I gave you a nice toss, didn't I?" said Elflida Norma, breaking in on his quasi-sentimental thought with a certain complacency. "If you had got out of my way it would have been more better."
"You mean if you hadn't got in mine," he replied, grimly. "But don't let us quarrel about that now. The mischief's done so far as I am concerned."
The blue eyes narrowed in eager interest.
"Have you broken things inside, too?" she asked, sympathy absent, pure curiosity present in her tone.
"No! I didn't," he said, shortly. "I'm not of the kind that breaks easily."
She considered him calmly from head to foot. "No-o-o," she admitted, sparingly. "I suppose not--but your arms look veree brittle, like china--I suppose that is from being so--being so chicken-white."
"Perhaps," he said, still more shortly, and was relieved when Imân (having from the cook-room, where he was feverishly feathering fowls in preparation for the night's feast, detected Elflida's flagrant breach of etiquette in having anything whatever to do with a coatless sahib) hurried across to beguile his charge back to the paths of propriety by reporting that Lily-baba (to whom the girl was devoted) evinced a determination to eat melons with her brothers, which he, Imân, was far too busy to frustrate.
"You need not make such pother about big dinner to-night," she said, viciously, when, with the absolutely accommodating Lily in her arms, she stood watching the far less interesting process of pounding forcemeat on a curry stone; "for I heard him tell the smith that he would go this evening if--well, if somebody kept his temper in boiling oil. Such a queer idea--as if anybody could!"
Old Imân's hands fell for an instant from the munâdu (Maintenon) cutlets he was preparing, for he understood the frail foundation on which his chance of manufacturing a husband stood. Jullunder-sahib must be making a spring, and if the oil in which it had to be boiled---- But no! As cook, he knew something of the properties of hot fat, and felt convinced that the spring would never be fried in time.
So all that long hot day he toiled and slaved in company with an anatomy of a man whom he had unearthed from the city. A man who had also in his youth served the white blood, but had never risen beyond the scullery. A man who called him "Great Artificer," and fanned him and the charcoal fire indiscriminately according to their needs.
And all that long hot day on the other side of the arcaded square work went on also, so that the clang of metal on anvil or cook-room fire rose in antagonism on the dusty sunshine which slept between them. Dinner or no dinner? Spring or no spring? And the circling dark shadows of the kites above in the blue sky were almost the only other signs of life, for Elflida Norma had found sleep the easiest way of keeping Lily-baba from the melons, and the boys slept as they slept always.
But as the sun set Imân knew that fate had decided in favour of the dinner, for Jullunder-sahib came over from the smithy with empty hands, and found hot water in his room, and the change of white raiment he carried in his knapsack laid out decorously on the bed.
He took the hint and dressed for dinner, even to the buttonhole of jasmine which he found beside his hair-brush.
Elflida Norma, under similar supervision, dressed also. In fact, everything was dressed, including the flat tin lids of the saucepans which Imân had impressed into doing duty as side-dishes. Surrounded by castellated walls of rice paste, supporting cannon balls of alternate spinach and cochinealed potatoes, they really looked very fine. So did Imân himself, starched to inconceivable stiffness of deportment. So even did the anatomy, who, promoted for once to the dining-room, grinned at the young man and the girl, at the Great Artificer and all his works, with his usual indiscrimination.
And, in truth, each and all deserved grins. Yet Elflida Norma looked at Alec Alexander, he at her, and both at the dinner table set out marvellously with great trails of the common pumpkin vine looped with the cheap silver tinsel every Indian bazaar provides, and felt a sudden shyness of themselves, of each other, and the unwonted snowiness and glitter.
"Cler or wite?" said Imân, his old hands in difficulties with two soup plates. There was a dead silence.
"He means soup," faltered Elflida Norma desperately, wishing herself with the boys who were being regaled with curry and rice in her room, and thereinafter became dumb until the next course, when a sense of duty made her supplement Imân's "fish-bar'l" with the explanation that it was not really fish, which was not procurable, but another form of fowl.
So, in fact, were the side dishes which followed, and in which Imân had so far surpassed his usual self that Elflida was