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 n.o.ble 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 pa.s.sionate 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 hara.s.sed.
"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 ma.s.s 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!"
So come; we really must be off; it"s getting late."
He felt in his pocket, and held out a _baksheesh_ to Hushmut; but the latter shook his head, and once more said something rapidly in Hindustani. It had a note of pet.i.tion in it, but the request was apparently not to the hearer"s taste. That was to be seen from his face.
"What does he want?" asked the girl, curiously.
"Nothing he is going to get," replied her lover, moving off; "the cheek of the man!"