"True enough, O wife! but he says the value under these new rules the sahib-logue make is gone already. That he must wait another harvest, or have a new seal of me."
"Is that all, O Jaimul Singh! and thou causing my liver to melt with fear? A seal--what is a seal or two more against the son of thy son's marriage?"
"'Tis a new seal," muttered Jaimul uneasily, "and I like not new things. Perhaps 'twere better to wait the harvest."
"Wait the harvest and lose the auspicious time the purohit[7] hath found written in the stars? Ai, Târadevi! Ai! Pertâbi! there is to be no marriage, hark you! The boy's strength is to go for nought, and the bride is to languish alone because the father of his father is afraid of a usurer! Haè, Haè!"
The women wept the easy tears of their race, mingled with half-real, half-pretended fears lest the Great Ones might resent such disregard of their good omens--the old man sitting silent meanwhile, for there is no tyranny like the tyranny of those we love. Despite all this his native shrewdness held his tenderness in check. They would get over it, he told himself, and a good harvest would do wonders--ay! even the wonders which the purohit was always finding in the skies. Trust a good fee for that! So he hardened his heart, went back to Anunt Râm, and told him that he had decided on postponing the marriage. The usurer's face fell. To be so near the seal which would make it possible for him to foreclose the mortgages, and yet to fail! He had counted on this marriage for years; the blue sky itself had fought for him so far, and now--what if the coming harvest were a bumper?
"But I will seal for the seed grain," said old Jaimul; "I have done that before, and I will do it again--we know that bargain of old."
Anunt Râm closed his pen-tray with a snap. "There is no seed grain for you, baba-ji, this year either," he replied calmly.
Ten days afterwards, Kishnu, Pertâbi, and Târadevi were bustling about the courtyard with the untiring energy which fills the Indian woman over the mere thought of a wedding, and Jaimul, out in the fields, was chanting as he scattered the grain into the furrows--
"Wrinkles and seams and sears
On the face of our mother earth;
There are ever sorrows and tears
At the gates of birth."
The mere thought of the land lying fallow had been too much for him; so safe in the usurer's strong-box lay a deed with the old man's seal sitting cheek by jowl beside Anunt Râm's brand-new English signature. And Jaimul knew, in a vague, unrestful way, that this harvest differed from other harvests, in that more depended upon it. So he wandered oftener than ever over the brown expanse of field where a flush of green showed that Mother Earth had done her part, and was waiting for Heaven to take up the task.
The wedding fire-balloons rose from the courtyard, and drifted away to form constellations in the cloudless sky; the sound of wedding drums and pipes disturbed the stillness of the starlit nights, and still day by day the green shoots grew lighter and lighter in colour because the rain came not. Then suddenly, like a man's hand, a little cloud! "Merry drops slanting from west to the east;" merrier by far to Jaimul's ears than all the marriage music was that low rumble from the canopy of purple cloud, and the discordant scream of the peacock telling of the storm to come. Then in the evening, when the setting sun could only send a bar of pale primrose light between the solid purple and the solid brown, what joy to pick a dry-shod way along the boundary ridges and see the promise of harvest doubled by the reflection of each tender green spikelet in the flooded fields! The night settled down dark, heavenly dark, with a fine spray of steady rain in the old, weather-beaten face, as it set itself towards home.
The blue sky was on the side of labour this time, and, during the next month or so, Târadevi's young soldiers made mud pies, and crowed more lustily than ever over the bunniah's boys.
Then the silvery beard began to show in the wheat, and old Jaimul laughed aloud in the fulness of his heart.
"That is an end of the new seal," he said boastfully, as he smoked his pipe in the village square. "It is a poor man's harvest, and no mistake."
But Anunt Râm was silent. The April sun had given some of its sunshine to the yellowing crops before he spoke.
"I can wait no longer for my money, O baba-ji!" he said; "the three years are nigh over, and I must defend myself."
"What three years?" asked Jaimul, in perplexity.
"The three years during which I can claim my own according to the sahib-logue's rule. You must pay, or I must sue."
"Pay before harvest! What are these fool's words? Of course I will pay in due time; hath not great Râm sent me rain to wash out the old writing?"
"But what of the new one, baba-ji?--the cash lent on permission to foreclose the mortgages?"
"If the harvest failed--if it failed," protested Jaimul quickly. "And I knew it could not fail. The stars said so, and great Râm would not have it so."
"That is old-world talk!" sneered Anunt. "We do not put that sort of thing in the bond. You sealed it, and I must sue."
"What good to sue ere harvest? What money have I? But I will pay good grain when it comes, and the paper can grow as before."
Anunt Râm sniggered.
"What good, O baba-ji? Why, the land will be mine, and I can take, not what you give me, but what I choose. For the labourer his hire, and the rest for me."
"Thou art mad!" cried Jaimul, but he went back to his fields with a great fear at his heart--a fear which sent him again to the usurer's ere many days were over.
"Here are my house's jewels," he said briefly, "and the mare thou hast coveted these two years. Take them, and write off my debt till harvest."
Anunt Râm smiled again.
"It shall be part payment of the acknowledged claim," he said; "let the Courts decide on the rest."
"After the harvest?"
"Ay, after the harvest; in consideration of the jewels."
Anunt Râm kept his word, and the fields were shorn of their crop ere the summons to attend the District Court was brought to the old peasant.
"By the Great Spirit who judges all it is a lie!" That was all he could say as the long, carefully-woven tissue of fraud and cunning blinded even the eyes of a justice biassed in his favour. The records of our Indian law-courts teem with such cases--cases where even equity can do nothing against the evidence of pen and paper. No need to detail the strands which formed the net. The long array of seals had borne fruit at last, fiftyfold, sixtyfold, a hundredfold--a goodly harvest for the usurer.
"Look not so glum, friend," smiled Anunt Râm, as they pushed old Jaimul from the Court at last, dazed, but still vehemently protesting. "Thou and Jodha thy son shall till the land as ever, seeing thou art skilled in such work, but there shall be no idlers; and the land, mark you, is mine, not thine."
A sudden gleam of furious hate sprang to the strong old face, but died away as quickly as it came.
"Thou liest," said Jaimul; "I will appeal. The land
