Chapter V: Front Matter (5)

One of these, belated, drifted into the vault through the open door, and hummed a background to the high, trilling voice.

"Pale, pale are the rose-lips, sweet!
Red is the heart of the rose,
But red are the lips mine meet,
And your heart white as the snows."

Then a faint, almost noiseless patter of bare running feet paused at the door, and some one looked in to say breathlessly--

"It hath begun, they say. But who knows? I am off to the city to see."

Hushmut looked up startled from his rose-leaves; startled, nothing more.

"Begun!--so soon--wherefore?"

"God knows!" came the breathless voice. "Mayhap it is a lie. Some thought it would not come at all. I will return and tell thee the news."

The faint, almost noiseless patter of bare feet died away, and there was peace and rest in the garden for another space. Only Hushmut shuffled to the door, looked out curiously, then shuffled back to his work, for that must be finished before dark, else the roses would spoil, squandering their sweetness. There was another pile of brownish, yellow residuum ready dried for the furnace, and as he filled a basket with it, his hands among the scentless stuff, a sudden remembrance of his own impotence, his own deprivation, came to him. Perhaps he had seen a hint of the simile in the English girl's face.

He smiled half cynically and muttered--

"Only the dust of the rose remains for the perfume-seller."

He paused almost before the bit of treasured wisdom was ended. There was a sound of wheels; of a galloping horse's feet.

Some one was coming back to the garden. The next instant, through the open door, he saw two figures running; an Englishman, an English girl in a pink dress. The man's arm was round her as he ran; he looked back fearfully, then seemed to whisper something in her ear, and she gave answer back.

"What was it?" they said to each other. Hushmut knew by instinct.

He was thinking of the roof of the palace pleasure-house, of the winding stair that led to it, down which it would at least be possible to fling a foe, before the end came; and She was thinking of the marble plinth below, where, when that end came, a woman might find safety from men's hands in death.

So they came on through the growing shadows.

Hushmut shuffled to the door and watched the figures calmly, indifferently, as they neared him; for the way to the winding stair lay up the steps which rose just beyond the low door of his distillery in the plinth.

Perhaps the dusk hid him from those two; perhaps even in broad daylight they would not, in their fierce desire to reach not safety but resistance, have seen him.

They did not, anyhow; but as they passed the door the girl's muslin flounce caught hard on its lintel hasp, and as in frantic haste she stooped to rip it free, the scent of those rose-leaves Hushmut had given her, still lingering in the ruffles at her breast, seemed to pass straight back into those same rose-leaves in his own.

That was all, nothing more. But it brought back his last words to her: "May He who knows the secret of the rose protect the bride."

Strange!

The same instant his long-fingered brown hand was on her white one as she tugged at her dress.

"This way, _Huzoor!_" he cried in a loud voice, for the man to hear. "There is a secret passage here; it leads to safety."

Safety! That word, better than resistance, not to the man himself, but as sole guardian to the girl, arrested him in a second, tempted him.

He looked, hesitated, then dragged his charge on--dragged her from anything with a dark skin to it.

But her white one touching this dark one, found something in it to give confidence; or perhaps that fragrance of the flower from His still which "He sends to many blossoms," had passed from Hushmut's breast to hers, as hers had to Hushmut's. He knows, who knows the secret of the perfume of the rose.

Anyhow she hung back, and she called pitifully, clamorously--

"No! No! Let us trust him--let us take the chance."

There was no time for remonstrance.

The next second they were in the cool, scented darkness of the vault, with those pink air-holes showing like shadowy roses among the low arches, the squat pillars.

"At the farther end," came Hushmut's voice, amid his shuffling, till the latter ceased in the rasping of a chain unhasped. "Here, _Huzoor_, it leads to the Summer Palace beyond the garden wall. So by the mango groves to the Residency. May He who knows the secret of the perfume of the rose protect the bride."

His voice sounded hollow in their ears as they ran down the vaulted passage which opened before them, lit at intervals by those cunning air-holes hidden flowerfully in the scrollwork of one of the marble-edged aqueducts, and the closing door behind them blew a breath of the rose scent from the vault after their retreating figures.

* * * * *

Two years had passed. Nine long months spent in keeping a foe at bay; three in following that spent and broken foe to the bitter end; and then a year of English skies and English faces to dull the memory of that long strain to mind and body.

And then once more a young Englishman, with a girl in a pink dress, drove into that garden of dead Kings. But the four-square wall was in ruins. It had been a rallying-point of that spent and broken foe.

The garden itself was neglected, the roses unpruned. And those two were changed also, and an _ayah_ holding a baby remained in the hired carriage which they left waiting for them under the blossoming trees, as the dogcart had waited that May evening two years before.

"I'm afraid he must have thought us awfully ungrateful," said the man, regretfully. "But it couldn't be helped at first; then afterwards one had to move on. But I did write, you know, more than once about him, after we got a grip on the place again; so I hope they have done something."

"They will have to now, at any rate," said the wearer of the pink dress, firmly.

The sight of the garden, changed, neglected as it was, had brought back the very picture of that grizzled head with the curved hair, slipping through the rose-bushes, the delicate dark hand holding the tray of rose-leaves, as it slid over the bushes with its luck-offering for the bride. Yes! even if justice had been slow, inevitably slow, it should come now. This very evening, though she and her husband had only arrived in the station that morning.

They went to the rose square first, but Hushmut was not there. Then, seeing by the lack of blossom that the time of roses was not yet, they went on to the orange groves.

No one was there. So, doubtfully, they passed to the jasmine, to the lemon grass.

But no one was to be seen. Nothing was to be heard but the lazy yet insistent cry of some one scaring the birds from the pomegranates.

"Let us ask him. He may know," suggested the wearer of the pink dress. So they called him and he came--an old man, wizened, careworn.

Yes, he said, he knew. Wherefore not, when he had guarded fruit in that garden since he was a boy? There was not much to guard now, owing to past evils. Hushmut the essence-maker--Hushmut was dead. No one made essences any more. How did he die? Very simply. He had seen it with his own eyes when he was guarding fruit. The _Huzoors_ had doubtless heard of the evil times, even though, as the coachman had told him, they had just come from _wilayet_. Well, it began quite suddenly one evening in May. It was the peaches he was guarding then. There had been a "fool's dinner" in the garden, and afterwards a young _sahib_ and a miss in a pink dress had come running in to take refuge from the troopers. He had seen them, but what could he do? But Hushmut had shown them the secret passage, no doubt. Anyhow he had come out alone and closed the door, and sate beside it singing when the troopers rode up.

And doubtless they would have believed him, seeing that he was friends with all the bad walkers in the city through the selling of his essences; but for a bit of the Miss-_sahiba's_ dress which had caught in the door hasp. So they knew what he had done, and being enraged, had killed him there, by the door. It was quite simple.

Quite. So simple that those two said nothing. Only their hands sought each other as they turned back to the summer-house.

"I should like to see the place again," said the wearer of the pink dress in a hard, even voice. "I wonder if the door is open?"

It was; for no one made essences now. So they entered.

The still stood in the corner as before. The pile of that strange fuel lay between it and the trays of rose-leaves. But there was no difference between them now. Both were yellow, scentless; and though the pink paper which Hushmut had pasted over the rose-shaped air-holes was all broken and torn by birds and winds and weather, the bees did not drift in.

For there was no scent to lead them on. None.

The winds of two long years had swept it away absolutely. What else was to be expected?

Yet a vague disappointment showed in the woman's face as it had in the girl's.

But this time the man's voice trembled as he answered her look with the words--

"Only the actions of the just,
Smell sweet and blossom in the dust."

LITTLE HENRY AND HIS BEARER