Meanwhile the desolate little couple had toiled painfully back to
Paroor, and halted outside their uncle’s enclosure. They dared not
venture in, and they crouched timidly without the battered wooden
doorway, whilst Zālim Sing laid down the law, expounded his own
virtues, and denounced Chūnnee to more than half the village. He
had always been secretly jealous of his good-looking brother, who,
moreover, was the father of a son, whilst his wife had borne him,
instead of the much-desired heir, no fewer than seven daughters, of
whom four survived; and Zālim’s enemies said among themselves that
his sins must be many, or he would never have been punished with
seven girls! He talked freely, knowing there was no one to defend the
absent, and the starving pair heard that their father was a liar,
a dacoit, a budmash, a thief, and the most ungrateful kinsman to a
noble-hearted brother that ever drew the breath of life--one cannot
talk for ever; and as the listeners gradually dropped off, notice
was naturally attracted by the two wretched little beggars in the
lane--what was to become of them?--their home was empty, save for a
reaping-hook, a charpoy, and a cat.
Zālim Sing pulled his beard, and scowled; his crooked eye rolled
fiercely, till a woman in the crowd exclaimed in a loud clear voice--
“Since thou sayest thou art a benevolent man, and the most generous of
kinsmen, why dost thou stare at the starving ones, instead of taking
them in?”
Their dusty feet and hunger-stricken faces touched the crowd--as easily
swayed as the branch of a tree to this side and that, by whatever wind
may blow.
There was a hoarse murmur, which the crafty Zālim quickly interpreted;
now was the time to pose as a noble benefactor--or never; and he drew
the two children over the threshold of the door, and shut himself in
with his detested encumbrances.
He gave them some coarse food and water, and showed them a sort of shed
where they might sleep. “But thou mayst not enter my house,” he said,
“or play with my children; thy father is a wicked man, therefore ye are
pariahs, but I and my children are good.”
The next day he went to his brother’s abode and sold the old charpoy,
reaping-hook, and house for the sum of seven rupees; but he could
neither sell nor kill the cat--she sat serenely aloft in a neem tree,
far out of his reach. Presently she discovered her old owners, or they
discovered her; they hid her secretly in their miserable shelter, and
begged a little milk in the village. Alas! she was their only friend.
Their cousins--four sallow, ugly children, two of whom had inherited
their parent’s violent squint, and all of whom were laden with anklets
and bangles, and a vast sense of their own importance--condescended
to come and patronize the two wicked beggars who lived in the old
goat-shed in a corner of the enclosure. They experienced an intense
and novel delight in patronizing, teasing, pinching, and threatening
these little pariahs, who were better fun, and afforded more scope
for amusement, than any of their usual games, and their sense of
their own superiority swelled to enormous proportions. They visited
the unfortunates at all hours; but the cat knew their voices, and
hid hastily among the thatch. Bazaar cats are wonderfully active and
cunning, they are also marvellous thieves, and the cat throve.
Presently Zālim Sing’s wife discovered that Girunda was old enough to
be of use. She set him to do the work of two servants, or one pony. He
had to draw water and carry it home from the well, to grind corn, to
cut fodder, whilst his little sister cried herself to sleep alone,
for she dared not leave the cat, lest her ever-prying cousins should
discover it and throw it down the well. Certainly its appearance was
against it; it was lean and long and dirty-white, with a thin rat tail;
and a sharp-pointed face--a pure village type--hungry, and careless of
its appearance, a merciless mouser, but a faithful adherent.
Poor Girunda now toiled early and late, he received nought but blows,
abuse, and the coarsest fare. Much of his utility was unknown to his
uncle--who was frequently from home--but who scowled every time that
his glance fell upon him.
Affairs were not going quite as smoothly as hitherto with Zālim
Sing. The prices had risen in everything, save in his own particular
commodity, linseed. There was the prospect of an unusually hot, scarce
season, and his pony was sick. He vented all his ill humour on the two
oppressed children “within his gates”--a most excellent, comprehensive,
and Eastern expression--meaning within the mud or stone enclosure,
where the master is supreme, where he can shut out all the world save
his household, his oxen, and servants--shut it out by merely closing
to the street an iron-knobbed wooden door. Within Zālim’s gates his
nephew became a slave; he was made to tend the furnace in the wall, at
the other side of which boiled an enormous receptacle of linseed oil.
This duty was murderous in the glaring, breathless month of April;
it was worse than a fireman’s work in June in the Red Sea--and the
fireman is relieved at his post; no one ever relieved Girunda--the name
signified “thick bread;” but of any bread his share was small--and then
he fell sick. For two days he lay in his shed, burning with fever, his
uncle beat him repeatedly with a thick stick for his laziness--beat
him savagely too--but the boy made no moan, only his little sister
screamed, and the screams attracted the neighbours.
“He is a lazy, idle, good-for-nothing pig!” explained the uncle to
an eager inquirer; “he will not work aught save his teeth. And she is
half-witted.”
“True,” said the listener; “and it is only a charitable man like
thyself, O Zālim Sing, who would keep the beggar’s brats, and with a
dearth in the land, too; and wheat rising every week.”
Then she went back to her spinning of coarse country cloth; Girunda lay
and buried his head in his hands, and Gyannia sobbed in a corner; but
his tormentor went into the house, to confer with his wife.
“If the boy would not work, neither should he eat. Was _he_ himself to
mind the furnace?” he demanded angrily.
“The boy is sickening,” said the woman. “I have seen it coming--it is
something bad--maybe the cholera, maybe the smallpox. It is surely some
heavy sickness.”
“And he may die?”
“Yea, having given it to us and ours. What shall we do?”
“Behold, to-night, when the village is quiet, I will take the two of
them, and set them on the high-road. Thou canst bake some chupattis,
and I will give them four annas, and tell them to begone, to return
here no more, for if they do, of a surety I will kill them.”
“They will believe thee!” said his wife with a laugh.
“Yea. Why should they not beg, as others do? And soon the boy can work,
and earn an anna a day.”
“Yea, he will soon be able to work,” agreed this treacherous woman.
The children were surprised to be left in peace till sunset, and then
to receive some fried beans and a chupatti--most sumptuous fare for
them! But when it was dark, save for a dying moon, Zālim Sing entered
their hut, staff in hand, and awoke them roughly.
“Arise quickly, and come with me; thou shalt no more remain under my
roof. I have fed thee for three moons, now thou mayst go forth and
feed thyselves. I will set thee on the road, and give thee food for
two days and a little money; get thee to some town, and appeal to the
charitable. Return here, and I will slay thee.”
The children rose trembling; they had not much delay in dressing,
but Gyannia smuggled the cat under her bit of blue cloth (once her
mother’s), and without one word the wretched pair meekly followed their
uncle across the enclosure, past the oil-press, the sleeping bullocks,
out of the postern, and through the silent village, then away to the
high-road. Their kinsman walked along behind them in the powdery-white
dust, stick in hand, for nearly two miles. It was nigh dawn; already
the yellow light glimmered in the east; he must return; so he halted
abruptly, and gave the boy some chupattis rolled in plantain leaves,
and a four-anna piece (five-pence), and then said, “There lieth thy
road out into the world; get thee gone, and never let me behold thy
face again,” and turning, he walked rapidly homewards.
The soft tap of his stick gradually died away, and then the children
were quite alone. They sat down, and began to whisper. It was not a
dream; their uncle had come to them in the middle of the night, and
brought them along the high-road in the dark, and given them food, and
told them to begone, and never let him see them again.
After their first feeling of astonishment had abated, they devoured
a chupatti, sharing it with the cat; and then, as the dawn of light
showed red along the horizon, they rose and went forward.
“If they had to walk, best make the journey now,” thought the boy, who
was wonderfully sensible for his years.
“Brother, whither are we going?” asked Gyannia presently.
“We have no one to go to but father,” he replied. “We will go to
him--to the Jail Khana.”
But he did not tell her, nor would she have understood, that the
jail in which their father lay imprisoned was seventy miles away.
Hand-in-hand the two outcasts went slowly along the shadeless white
roads; several villagers on the way to their work met them, and halted
and stared at the party--a ragged little boy and girl, with a bazaar
cat running after them.