"I think we ought to be going back to the others," said the girl.
She was a pretty, fair English girl, fresh as a rose in her dainty
pink muslin dress, flounced as they wore them in the mutiny year--in
three full flounces to the waist, like the corolla of a flower. And
the lace sunshade she held tilted over her shoulder as a protection
against the slanting rays of the afternoon sun added to her
rose-likeness by its calyx of pale green lining.
"Ought we?" said the young Englishman who walked beside her, his hand
clasping hers. They were a good-looking pair, pleasant to behold.
"What a bore; it is so jolly here."
The epithet was not happy, save as an expression of the speaker's
frame of mind. For the garden into which these engaged lovers had
wandered away from the gay party of English men and women who had
taken possession of the marble summer-house in its centre for a
picnic, or, as the natives call it, "a fool's dinner," was something
more than jolly.
It was beautiful, this garden of a dead dynasty of kings past and gone
like last year's roses.
But there were roses and to spare still within its high four-square
walls that were hidden from each other by the burnished orange-groves,
by the tall forest trees fringing its cross of wide marble aqueducts
bordered by wide paths.
Such blossoming trees! The _kachnar_ flinging its bare branches, set
thick with its geranium flowers, against the creamy feathers waving
among the dense dark foliage of the _mangoes_, the _bakayun_ drooping
its long lilac tassels beside the great gold ones of the _umultas_,
and here and there its whole vitality lavished on a monstrous leaf or
two, a huge flower or two, white, curved, solid, as if cut in cold
marble, yet with a warm fragrance at its heart, a hill magnolia
challenged the scent of the roses below.
Ineffectually, at least here in this square of the garden; for that
cross of wide, empty aqueducts divided it into squares.
And this one was a square of roses--roses everywhere, even in the
lower level of what in the old kingly days had been a marble-edged
water-way, which now, half filled with soil, held more roses.
But they were all of one kind--the pink Persian rose, whose outer
petals pale in the sunlight, whose rose of roses heart is full of an
almost piercing perfume.
What wonder, when it is the otto of roses rose! It grew here for that
set purpose in orderly lines, its grey green, velvety leaves almost
hidden by its profusion of flowers.
And the scent of them filled the whole square of garden, where the
air, still warm from the past noon, lay prisoned in that fringe of
blossoming trees.
It seemed to fill the brain, also, with the quintessence of gladness,
beauty, life, and love.
So His arm sought Her waist and their eyes met.
But only for a second; the next, Her blush matching Her flounces, She
had drawn back, and He with an angry frown was glaring in the
direction of the voice which had interrupted them.
It was a high, clear voice full of little trills and bubblings like a
bird's, and it sang on incessantly, as if to give those two time to
recover from their confusion. And as it sang, the Persian vowels
seemed as piercingly sweet as the perfume into which they echoed.
"The rose-root takes earth's kisses for its meat,
The rose-leaf makes its blush from the sun's heat,
The rose-scent wakes-who knows from what thing
sweet?
Who knows
The secret of the perfume of the rose?"
As the song ended, a head showed above the tufted bushes. It was
rather a fine head; bare of covering, its long grizzled hair parted in
the middle lying in a smooth outward curve on the high narrow
forehead, then sweeping in an equal inside curve between the ear and
throat. So much, no more, was to be seen above the roses, save, for a
moment, a long-fingered, delicate brown hand hiding the face in its
_salaam_.
"Who the _shaitan_ are you?" asked the young man fiercely in
Hindustani.
The head and hand met in a second _salaam_, then the face showed;
rather a fine face, preternaturally grave, but with a cunning
comprehension in its gravity.
"I am Hushmut the essence-maker, _Huzoor_," was the reply. "I belong
to the garden, and, being hidden from the noble people in my
occupation of plucking roses for my still, I sang to let them know."
The young Englishman gave a half-embarrassed laugh.
"What does he say?" asked the girl. She had only been two months in
India, and these had been spent in falling in love.
"He thought we might like to know he was there, that's all--a joke,
isn't it?" answered her lover. She smiled, and so holding each other's
hands boldly they stood facing that head above the roses.
It nodded cheerfully.
"The _Huzoors_ are doubtless about-to-marry persons," came the voice.
"It is not always so, even with the _Huzoors_. But this being
different, if they require essences for the bridal let them come to
Hushmut. Rose, jasmine, orange, sandal, lemon grass. I make them all
in their season. Yea, even 'wylet'[4] which the _memi_ love. It is not
really _banafsha_, _Huzoor_; they grow not in the plains. I make it
from the _babul_ blossom, and none could tell the difference. Mayhap
there _is_ none, since He who makes the perfume of the flowers in His
still, may send the same to many blossoms, as I send my essences to
many lovers; even the noble people!"
---------------------
[Footnote 4: Violet.]
---------------------
There was distinct raillery in the last words, and the young
Englishman's smile vanished.
"We people hold not with essences," he said curtly; adding to the
girl, "Come, dear, I think we really ought to go back, your father
will be wanting to go home--he has a lot of work, I know--"
A shuffle in the bushes made the lovers pause, a curious shuffle such
as a wounded bird makes in its efforts to escape.
"If the most noble will tarry, this slave will at least make the
luck-offering to the bride," came the voice again, and to point its
meaning the delicate brown hand held up a circular shallow basket
heaped with rose-petals. Heaped so lightly, that the hand held it
level, and it seemed to glide on the top of the bushes, heralding the
grizzled head which slid after it with a faintly undulating movement.
The cause of this became clear when the limit of the roses was
reached.
Hushmut the essence-maker must have been a cripple from birth. The
loose blue cloth, such as gardeners wear knotted round their loins
like a petticoat, hid, however, all deformity, even when he clambered
up the marble edge of the old water-way, and shuffled with sidelong
jerks along the path to the pink muslin flounces.
The wearer's eyes grew soft suddenly. The mystery of such births came
home to the woman who was so soon to be a wife, perhaps a mother.
She gave him a mother's look anyhow; the look of almost passionate
pity a woman gives to a child's deformity.
Perhaps he saw it. Anyhow he paused; then, with his bold black eyes
twinkling, held out the basket.
"A handful, _Huzoor_, for luck!" he cried.
"A rose ungathered is but a rose,
Pluck it, lover, don't mind a thorn;
Tuck it away in your bosom-clothes,
And drink its beauty from night to morn."
The voice trilled and bubbled quite decorously, but the young
Englishman intercepted a deliberate wink, and felt inclined to kick
Hushmut to lower levels; till he remembered that the girl could not
understand.
"Take a handful," he said, "and let's get rid of him." The girl
obeyed, but, by mere chance, the little white hand with his ring on it
did tuck its handful of pink rose-leaves away in the loose pink
ruffles on her breast. Whereat Hushmut's approval became so
unmistakable that the young Englishman felt that the only thing was to
escape from it.
Yet as he hurried the girl back to the summerhouse he turned to listen
to the essence-maker's voice as he went on with his song, and his
rose-picking.
"Dig, gardener! deep; till the Earth-lips cling tight.
Prune, gardener! keep those blushes to the light.
Then, gardener, sleep! he brings the scent by night.
Who knows
The secret of the perfume of the rose?"
There was nothing to be seen now but the stunted grey green bushes
half hidden in blossom; even the head had disappeared. They were a
queer people, thought the young man, very difficult to understand.
Then the refrain returned to him--
"Who knows
The secret of the perfume of the rose?"
"Hushmut?" answered an older man who lounged smoking in one of the
marble-fretted balconies of the dead King's pleasure-house. "Oh, yes!
he is quite a character. A scoundrel, I believe; at least he knows all
the worst lots in the city. They come to the garden at night, you see,
and the bazaar women get all their essences from him. So I expect he
knows at any rate of all the devilry that's going on. I wish I did."
The speaker's face looked a trifle harassed.
"Is it true, sir, what they say?" asked another voice, "that
Hushmut is really the King's son. That his mother was a Brahmin girl
they kidnapped, who cried herself to death in one of these rooms.
Then, when the child was a cripple, the King--by Jove, he was a
brute!--disowned it."
"Is that about Hushmut?" asked the girl, who had joined the group in
time to hear the last words.
The men looked at each other, and the older one said: "Yes, my dear;
they say he was deserted by his parents because he was a cripple.
Rather rough on him. Now I think I'll go and get your mother to come
home. It's getting late. You'll follow, I suppose?"
"Yes, father, with him," she said, with a rose-blush.
So, by degrees, in couples, as a rule, but sometimes with a pale-faced
child tucked into the carriage between father and mother, the
pleasure-seekers left the garden of dead Kings to the scent of the
roses. Left it cheerfully, calling back to their friends times and
places where they were to meet again, as English men and women did on
those fatal evenings in May, '57.
Only the girl in the pink frock and her lover lingered; while the
dogcart in which he was to drive her home waited under the blossoming
trees.
And as they stood talking, as lovers will, Hushmut the essence-maker,
thinking the coast was clear, came shuffling down the scented shadow
of the path--for the sun had left the garden--pushing his basket of
rose-leaves before him, dragging his crippledom behind him.
"Do you think he would show us his still?" said the girl, suddenly.
"I've never seen one. Ask him, will you?"
Hushmut's big, bold black eyes twinkled. Certainly the Miss-_sahiba_
might see. There was no secret in his work. He took the scent as he
found it, as wise men took love. Again there was that faint suspicion
of raillery only to be pardoned by the girl's ignorance, and also by a
conviction that Hushmut counted on that ignorance, and meant the
remark only for the young Englishman. And so, oddly, the latter became
conscious of a distinct antagonism between himself and the crippled
essence-maker. It was absurd, ludicrous; but it existed, nevertheless.
There was not much to see in those vaults under the plinth of the
pleasure-palace in which Hushmut had set up his distillery. They were
very low, very dark, the only light coming through the open door, and
from the row of rose-shaped air-holes pierced at intervals in the
plinth. Viewed from outside, these formed part of its raised and
pierced marble decoration. From within they looked quaint and
flower-like, set as they were in the dim shadowy vault, hidden here
and there by the dumpy columns, showing through the arches distantly,
softly, brightly pink; for Hushmut had pasted pink paper over them, to
keep out the bees and wasps, he explained, which otherwise, led by the
scent of the flowers, came in troublesome numbers.
The rude still, like a huge cooking-pot, stood in one corner, and all
about it lay trays on trays of fading rose-leaves.
"_Pah!_ How sickly sweet! Let's get outside," said the young man after
a brief glance round. But the girl stood looking curiously at a
brownish-yellow mass piled beside the still.
"What is that?" she asked. Hushmut's black eyes turned to her
comprehendingly. He shuffled to the pile and held out a sample for her
to see. She bent to look at it.
"Rose-leaves!" she said. "Oh! I see--after scent has been taken out of
them. Poor things! What a shame!"
Hushmut said something rapidly in Hindustani, and the girl turned to
her companion for explanation.
"He says," translated the latter, with a curiously grudging note in
his voice, "that they have their use. He dries them in the sun and
burns them in the furnace of his still."
She shook her head and smiled. "That's poor compensation!" Then she
bent closer and sniffed regretfully at what Hushmut held.
"All gone!" she said, so like a child that her lover laughed at her
tenderly.
"What else did you expect, you goose!
'Only the actions of the just, smell sweet and blossom in the dust!'