Rudyard Kipling - Rudyard Kipling - The Complete Novels and Stories

‘How shall I give you thanks?’ said the Queen at last. ‘Oh, my son—my little son—child of my heart, the gods and she have made thee well again. But who is that yonder?’

Her eyes fell for the first time on the woman of the desert, where the latter stood by the doorway draped in dull-red.

‘She carried me here from the carriage,’ said the Prince, ‘saying that she was a Rajput of good blood.’

‘I am of Chohan blood—a Rajput and a mother of Rajputs,’ said the woman simply, still standing. ‘The white fairy worked a miracle upon my man. He was sick in the head and did not know me. It is true that he died, but before the passing of the breath he knew me and called me by my name.’

‘And she carried thee!’ said the Queen, with a shiver, drawing the Prince closer to her, for, like all Indian women, she counted the touch and glance of a widow things of evil omen.

The woman fell at the Queen’s feet. ‘Forgive me, forgive me,’ she cried. ‘I had borne three little ones, and the gods took them all and my man at the last. It was good—it was so good—to hold a child in my arms again. Thou canst forgive,’ she wailed; ‘thou art so rich in thy son, and I am only a widow.’

‘And I a widow in life,’ said the Queen, under her breath. ‘Of a truth, I should forgive. Rise thou.’

The woman lay still where she had fallen, clutching at the Queen’s naked feet.

‘Rise, then, my sister,’ the Queen whispered.

‘We of the fields,’ murmured the woman of the desert, ‘we do not know how to speak to the great people. If my words are rough, does the Queen forgive me?’

‘Indeed I forgive. Thy speech is softer than that of the hill-women of Kulu, but some of the words are new.’

‘I am of the desert—a herder of camels, a milker of goats. What should I know of the speech of courts? Let the white fairy speak for me.’

Kate listened with an alien ear. Now that she had discharged her duty, her freed mind went back to Tarvin’s danger and the shame and overthrow of an hour ago. She saw the women in her hospital slipping away one by one, her work unravelled, and all hope of good brought to wreck; and she saw Tarvin dying atrocious deaths, and, as she felt, by her hand.

‘What is it?’ she asked wearily, as the woman plucked at her skirt. Then to the Queen, ‘This is a woman who alone of all those whom I tried to benefit remained at my side to-day, Queen.’

‘There has been a talk in the palace,’ said the Queen, her arm round the Prince’s neck, ‘a talk that trouble had come to your hospital, sahiba.’

‘There is no hospital now,’ Kate answered grimly.

‘You promised to take me there, Kate, some day,’ the Prince said in English.

‘The women were fools,’ said the woman of the desert quietly, from her place on the ground. ‘A mad priest told them a lie—that there was a charm among the drugs——’

‘Deliver us from all evil spirits and exorcisms,’ the Queen murmured.

‘A charm among her drugs that she handles with her own hands, and so forsooth, sahiba, they must run out shrieking that their children will be misborn apes and their chicken-souls given to the devils. Aho! They will know in a week, not one or two, but many, whither their souls go for they will die—the corn and the corn in the ear together.’

Kate shivered. She knew too well that the woman spoke the truth.

‘But the drugs!’ began the Queen. ‘Who knows what powers there may be in the drugs?’ she laughed nervously, glancing at Kate.

‘ Dekko! Look at her,’ said the woman, with quiet scorn. ‘She is a girl and naught else. What could she do to the Gates of Life?’

‘She has made my son whole, therefore she is my sister,’ said the Queen.

‘She caused my man to speak to me before the death hour; therefore I am her servant as well as thine, sahiba,’ said the other.

The Prince looked up in his mother’s face curiously. ‘She calls thee “thou,”’ he said, as though the woman did not exist. ‘That is not seemly between a villager and a queen, thee and thou!’

‘We be both women, little son. Stay still in my arms. Oh, it is good to feel thee here again, worthless one.’

‘The heaven-born looks as frail as dried maize,’ said the woman quickly.

‘A dried monkey, rather,’ returned the Queen, dropping her lips on the child’s head. Both mothers spoke aloud and with emphasis, that the gods, jealous of human happiness, might hear and take for truth the disparagement that veils deepest love.

‘ Aho , my little monkey is dead,’ said the Prince, moving restlessly. ‘I need another one. Let me go into the palace and find another monkey.’

‘He must not wander into the palace from this chamber,’ said the Queen passionately, turning to Kate. ‘Thou art all too weak, beloved. O miss sahib, he must not go.’ She knew by experience that it was fruitless to cross her son’s will.

‘It is my order,’ said the Prince, without turning his head. ‘I will go.’

‘Stay with us, beloved,’ said Kate. She was wondering whether the hospital could be dragged together again, after three months, and whether it was possible she might have overrated the danger to Nick.

‘I go,’ said the Prince, breaking from his mother’s arms. ‘I am tired of this talk.’

‘Does the Queen give leave?’ asked the woman of the desert under her breath. The Queen nodded, and the Prince found himself caught between two brown arms, against whose strength it was impossible to struggle.

‘Let me go, widow! ‘he shouted furiously.

‘It is not good for a Rajput to make light of a mother of Rajputs, my king,’ was the unmoved answer. ‘If the young calf does not obey the cow, he. learns obedience from the yoke. The heaven-born is not strong. He will fall among those passages and stairs. He will stay here. When the rage has left his body he will be weaker than before. Even now’—the large bright eyes bent themselves on the face of the child—‘even now,’ the calm voice continued, ‘the rage is going. One moment more, heaven-born, and thou wilt be a prince no longer, but only a little, little child, such as I have borne. Ahi , such as I shall never bear again.’

With the last words the Prince’s head nodded forward on her shoulder. The gust of passion had spent itself, leaving him, as she had foreseen, weak to sleep.

‘Shame—oh, shame!’ he muttered thickly. ‘Indeed I do not wish to go. Let me sleep.’

She began to pat him on the shoulder, till the Queen put forward hungry arms, and took back her own again, and laying the child on a cushion at her side, spread the skirt of her long muslin robe over him, and looked long at her treasure. The woman crouched down on the floor. Kate sat on a cushion, and listened to the ticking of the cheap American clock in a niche in the wall. The voice of a woman singing a song came muffled and faint through many walls. The dry wind of noon sighed through the fretted screens of the window, and she could hear the horses of the escort swishing their tails and champing their bits in the courtyard a hundred feet below. She listened, thinking ever of Tarvin in growing terror. The Queen leaned over her son more closely, her eyes humid with mother love.

‘He is asleep,’ she said at last. ‘What was the talk about his monkey, miss sahib?’

‘It died,’ Kate said, and spurred herself to the lie. ‘I think it had eaten bad fruit in the garden.’

‘In the garden?’ said the Queen quickly.

‘Yes, in the garden.’

The woman of the desert turned her eyes from one woman to the other. These were matters too high for her, and she began timidly to rub the Queen’s feet.

‘Monkeys often die,’ she observed. ‘I have seen as it were a pestilence among the monkey folk over there at Banswarra.’