A Prince of Dreamers. Flora Annie Webster Steel
Aunt Rosebody caught her up fiercely. "But never clown-drunk like this boy! When my father of blessed memory was drunk, he was as the Archangel Gabriel,--of the most entertaining--the most exhilarating--And he gave it up! Does he not say in his blessed book of memoirs: 'Being now thirty-nine and having vowed to abandon wine in my fortieth year, I therefore drank to excess.' What would you more? And his recantation! 'Gentlemen of the army! Those who sit down to the feast of life must end by drinking the cup of death!' It stirs one like the Day of Resurrection! But this boy--'tis all his Hindu mother's fault."
"And his grandfather took opium," continued Râkiya, relentlessly.
Lady Hamida looked up with chill dignity. "Let the earth of the grave cover the dead, daughter-in-law. What my husband did is known to me better than to you."
Râkiya Begum put the spectacles on her pinched nose once more.
"I offer excuse," she replied ceremoniously. "I was but going to remark that both blessed saints, despite these habits, were good enough kings. It is the unprecedented abstemiousness of the present Lord of the Universe, who looks neither at wine nor women, which throws the Prince's indiscretions into relief."
Her words brought solace. After all who could expect a boy of eighteen to be Akbar?--who, in truth, scarcely slept or ate. And this brought the remembrance that if Salîm was sick--as he invariably was after a drinking bout--the pile of good dishes which the Beneficent Ladies had been preparing these many days back against this feast might as well not have been made! The thought was depressing.
"I wonder," sighed Aunt Rosebody, "what 'Dearest Lady' would have advised."
A hush fell over the company. It seemed as though the sweet wise presence of a dead woman filled the room. A dead woman who even in life had earned for herself that title, who lives under it still in the pages of her niece's memoirs.
"She would have counselled patience as ever," answered the Lady Haimda. "Lo! Elder-Sister-Rose! Such tangled skeins can be but disentangled by Time. I remember when my marriage----" She broke off and was silent. Elder-Sister-Rose might know the story, might even remember for her memoirs the very words of the pitiful little tale of girlish refusal overborne; but these others? No! sufficient for them the fact that the unwelcome marriage had made her mother to the King-of-Kings.
"It must not spoil the day anyhow," summed up Aunt Rosebody at last, decisively drying her eyes, "and by and by, perhaps, when his mother hath done giving the boy Hindu medicines--in truth, though I admit my nephew is right in deeming the idolaters fellow mortals, their drugs are detestable--we may have a chance with a cooling sherbet such as my father--on whom be peace--ever loved after a carouse. Meanwhile is everything ready for the weighing?"
"All things," replied Lady Hamida proudly. "My son shall lack for nothing."
"Then the poor will at least benefit, God be praised!" said Râkiya Begum tartly as she rose. "Though this weighing of the Sacred Personality is a heathenish custom unsanctioned by our Holy Book; but what with his Majesty's divine faith, what with the shaving of beards, the keeping of dogs, and mixed marriages, a pious Musulmâni such as I, had best take off her spectacles lest she see too much."
She took them off with a flourish and a loud Sobhan-ullah! which echoed militantly through the wide arcaded room.
Then she prepared to put on her burka veil; for trumpets were sounding outside that it was time for the Beneficent Ladies to take up their secluded coign of vantage in order to see the coming show.
"There is no need for all-over-dresses," suggested Lady Hamida gently. "My son hath arranged seclusion in a new fashion."
"I offer excuse!" replied Râkiya with a sniff, "but my honourable veiling is of the old fashion."
With that she led the way in her ghostly goggle-eyed wrapper.
Such tinkling of jewels! Such perfume from stirred scent-sodden silks! Such hurried needless mufflings with diaphanous veilings! Such final eagerness of outlook, when they could peep through the latticing, see the throne almost within touch of them, and--curving from it in a vast semicircle of which it was the centre--see the packed rows on rows of nobles glittering with jewels awaiting the coming of the King. So entrancing was the sight that the due and stately greeting of the rival women who trooped to their places from the Hindu harem, lacked something of lengthy dignity, and there was a general sigh of content as every eye settled down to a peephole.
"Look!" chattered even silent Salîma. "Yonder is Sher Afkân new back from the Deccan war! A goodly man, and betrothed, they say, to Ghiâss Beg, the Treasurer's daughter--a little witch for beauty. They call her Queen of Women--Mihr-un-nissa--and she not twelve years old!"
"See, Amma-jân!" whispered little Umm Kulsum, the "Mother of Plumpness," "that is Budaoni beside the Makhdûm--O God of the Prophet, may the Holy One's blessing rest on me!"
"Yonder is Faiz, the poet--oh fie! He hath his dog with him--the unclean beast," giggled another.
"Aye! Abulfazl, his brother, will likely come with the King; they say his stomach grows bigger every day trying to swallow what his Majesty will not eat."
Râkiya Begum gave a cackling laugh. "Stomach or no stomach, he is the wonder of the age. He hath approved this concealed one's verses."
"Mine also," bridled Aunt Rosebody. "He hath asked and used my memory in his history. But wherefore delays the King? The show is like a peacock's tail without an eye, and he away."
It was an apt simile. The almost inconceivable magnificence of the scene made the eye wander. The acres on acres of gorgeous pavilion flashing with silver-gilt columns, glowing with silken Khorasân carpetings, filled to the roofing with tier on tier of grandees of the empire ablaze with jewels, multi-coloured as a flowerful parterre--all this needed centralising, seemed incoherent without a figure on the throne. The very curve of waiting elephants--a solid wall of gold trappings encrusted with gems which stretched on and on beyond the pavilion on either side like some huge bow--seemed as if it might have gone over the horizon, but for the tight-packed bowstring of the populace blocking the distant view from sight with myriads of eager watching eyes.
Suddenly a great blare of sound!
At last--at last! The Royal nakarah at last! And see! sweeping round ahead of a scintillating knot of horsemen, banners, lances--one man!
The King! The King!
A low moaning surge of sound came from the packed humanity for an instant. The next it was lost in the wild shrieking bellow which seemed to crack the skies as two thousand elephants threw up their trunks head-high and let loose their leviathan throats.
An imperial salute indeed! One that never grows stale, and the thrill of it paled Akbar's cheek as, with the shining sun, standard of the Râjpûts on one hand, the glorious green banner of Islâm on the other, he rode forward to take the throne which he had wrung alike from Hindus and Mahommedans.
Of what was he thinking, as grave, courteous, he returned the obeisances of all? He was thinking with a passion of regret in his heart of a lad of eighteen found drunk in Siyah Yamin's Paradise.
And now, seated on the throne, his figure, clad in simple white muslin--with the milky sheen of a rope of pearls, and the dull white gleam of the diamond he always wore in his turban--its only ornament--seemed to centre the magificence in curious contrast.
"The King--may he live for ever!--looks well enough," commented Râkiya Begum, charily concealing her pride, "but why doth he not wear a gold coat like his fathers? These innovations will surely lead him to hell."
"Sobhan-ullah!" assented Salîma nervously.
They were such simple, straightforward Beneficent Ladies with their high features, high courage, high sense of duty, of family, of tradition, all swathed and hidden away in scent-sodden silks and satins. They formed as it were a masked battery of pure benevolence behind the throne, unseen, but felt; for Akbar gave a glance round to where he knew his mother must be sitting ere, facing his empire for a second