Birbal! to thy charge the arrangements. The room next Diswunt the painter's, in the Court of Labour, is vacant. See it prepared. Double the guards if necessary--to thee I leave--the King's Luck."
A faint smile came to his face, but Birbal and Abulfazl looked at each other, and finally the latter spoke.
"This dust-like one," he said tentatively and yet with firmness, "presumes not to offer wisdom to its fount; but to the minds of the Most Exalted's devoted slaves it seems as if to the populace, there might be danger in Royalty appearing without the talisman to which all have looked as security for the King's success in all ways. Therefore if Majesty will ordain the cutting of the Eastern gem in Western fashion, let it at least condescend to wear in its place--until the gem return--a veritable Mountain of Light doubtless a substitute. Pooroo, the false jewel maker, who can deceive all but a diamond itself, hath the cast of the King's Luck, made when the Most Exalted changed the setting thereof. Let him fashion a double to deceive----"
"Deceive?" came Akbar's voice with a note of affectionate reproach in it, "deceive whom? Fate or the people? Lo! Abulfazl! to what end? Since if the tale be not true that luck lies in the stone, what need to regard it? And if it be true, how shall the false gem hoodwink God?"
He raised himself as he spoke, holding the diamond in his palm as an orb.
"Luck!" he said dreamily, "thou art mine to-night; and to-morrow is Fate's! Go!"
He gave the Eastern wave of dismissal and sank back amongst his cushions; sank back with more than usual lassitude, for the day had left him weary. It was no small thing to one of his temperament to quarrel with his son, his heir. It was a still greater thing to forgive him causelessly.
Therein lay the sting. The causelessness of the forgiveness, the lack of any security against a recurrence of the offence. So, as he thought of this, with a rush came back the memory of many a similar scene, and his fingers clasped in upon themselves as the disappointment ate into his very soul. Surely he had a right to expect more of Fate?--he who had waited so long, so patiently for an heir--since in those long years of waiting the very thought of mere sonship had been forgotten in the heirship. Yes, even now, Love seemed too trivial to count against Empire! Yet it was Love which had prompted forgiveness. Love of what?--what? Of himself surely--the love which claimed to live in his son--to live on. …
"Shall I bid the Reader of Wisdom to the Wise resume his task," came Birbal's voice. Noting the King's weariness he had lingered behind the others.
The King started, then looked round cheerfully. "Not to-night, friend; I have food for thought, and if I lack more--it waits below," he said, and leaning forward, rested his arm on the marble balustrade of the balcony, so pointed downward into the void darkness of the night. Through it like a little line of light fading into nothingness, ran the signal string attached to the quaint contrivance by which the King could secure, when the mood seized him, the presence of an opponent for some midnight argument. One touch at the cord and through the darkness the disputant waiting below, would by an ingenious system of counterpoise rise in a domed dhooli to the level of the balcony. Akbar laid his finger on the tense string, then once more looked back suddenly into Birbal's face.
"Ah! friend!" he said bitterly. "Could we but sound the Great Darkness as I can sound this little night, certain that my need will bring some sage, or fool, or knave, to keep Jalâl-ud-din Mahomed Akbar, Defender of the Faith, from wearying for sleep! But from the great Depths there comes no answer. The mystery is unfathomable--man's reason wanders bewildered in the streets of the City of God."
His voice sank in silence; then yet once again, he roused himself.
"Farewell, friend, for the night--the night that will bring to-morrow--Ye Gods! How will it be when the Night of Death closes in--on one of us?"
Birbal sank to his knees and touched his master's feet with his forehead. He had no other answer; so silently he passed through the great wadded curtains of gold tissue which separated the alcove from the rest of the room, leaving the King alone, lost in thought.
The problem of a future life had pressed on him all his days, and yet, he told himself as he sate thinking, the fact had not interfered with his enjoyment of the present one. Verily he had drunk of the cup of life to the dregs. His vitality had spared neither himself nor his world.
The memory of man is curiously creative. Out of the welter of remembrance it chooses this and that in obedience to no law, but arbitrarily, whimsically. It passes by unseen the peaks of past passion, and makes mountains of the merest mole-hill of caprice.
So, as Akbar looked back over his life, he found many a triviality standing out as clear, as untouched by Time, as many a tragedy, many a palpable turning point in his career.
The first snow he ever saw? The sight came back to him as if he had seen it yesterday, though five-and-forty years had passed since that perilous journey from Kandahar to Kabul in charge of his foster-nurse Anagâh. Dear Anagâh! How he had loved her! More, in a way, than he had loved his absent, stately mother; but he had vague recollections of that quaint meeting with the latter after three long years of separation, when his father, as a joke, had brought him--a little lad-ling of six--into a great circle of unveiled women and bidden him to choose a mother for himself.
He had chosen right, but the very recollection of his choice had gone. All he remembered was quick clasping arms and a kiss--surely the sweetest kiss of his life.
The sweetest? No!
That (even after five-and-twenty years the horror, the despair of it seemed to overwhelm him again) had been the last passion-fraught kiss he had given to--to a murderer--to Adham! Adham his foster brother--his playmate Adham, whom he loved, whom he trusted.
Oh! God! the tragedy of it! Why did such things come into this little trivial life?
Yet it was inevitable. If Adham were to come to him now as he had done that day; reckless, defiant, presuming on his position, boasting of the foul murder of an old man whom he conceived to be his enemy, the same swift justice must follow.
The beads of sweat started to Akbar's brow as he remembered the sudden grip of his own strong young arms, the relentless forcing backward to the parapet's edge, and then--before the final fling--that kiss!
And thereinafter silence. No! not silence--tears! Anagâh--dear Anagâh's tears. She had died of a broken heart because of her son's death--died without one word of forgiveness for the doer of justice.
Yet he did not regret the deed, though he had always, even as a boy, been tender of life.
"I will fight a whole enemy, I will not slay a wounded one."
The very words of his refusal when his tutor had bidden him whet his maiden sword on the rebel Hemu came back to him, and led him on to remembrance of the day when this feeling for the sanctity of life had risen in him not toward man only but toward all creatures. That was a later memory, and the scene reproduced itself before his mind's eye complete in every detail.
The long laborious encircling of game drawing to its close--the opposing ends of the great arc of thousands upon thousands of men who for two days had been sweeping across the country driving all wild things before them, were narrowing, closing in--and he, the man called King, was watching, luxuriously posted, his court about him, for his first shot.
And then? Then close beside him a chinkara fawn, looking at him with great soft dim eyes, startled, but not afraid!
"His Majesty was seized suddenly
