"It was the maharanee who devised the bold stroke which involved undoubted danger yet promised the best chance of success. Her idea was to take the whole court unawares at one and the same moment, so that the nobles might have presented to them, not only a common rallying-point for loyalty, but the chance by united action to break for all time the hated military power of the slave-born sirdar.
"It was the appointed day when the recently installed maharajah, according to custom immemorial, was to be publicly weighed, and the gold he counterbalanced distributed in charity. In the great courtyard of the palace all the people were assembled, nobles and officers of state, soldiers and traders, rich and poor, among the latter the halt, the blind and the maimed, the deformed and the leprous, in pitiful evidence as fitting objects for a share of the promised bounty. On a raised dais, seated upon a throne covered with cloth of gold, and sheltered by a canopy and awnings of crimson brocade, sat the reigning maharajah, a puny and sickly-looking stripling.
"Before the main ceremony of the day, heralds had announced that the sovereign was prepared to listen to any grievances or complaints from his people. For a few minutes no one came forward, but at last a pair of sleek mules, handsomely caparisoned, with a richly adorned palankeen slung between them, the identical equipage of the maharanee which had been harboured in my home, emerged from the crowd, and advanced at a grave pace toward the royal dais. That some high-born lady was within the silken coverings of the palankeen every one surmised, and at this extraordinary spectacle a hush of tense expectancy fell upon the assemblage.
"But the silence changed to murmurs of amazement and admiration when a queenly woman stepped upon the edge of the dais, and faced, not the maharajah on his throne, but the nobles and courtiers and officers clustered around.
"With a proud gesture she flung even the sari from her face, which the play of the sunbeams among the jewels in her hair and around her neck invested with a shimmering halo of radiance. On such a woman's face the multitude had never looked before. But stately and unabashed, serene in the purity of her womanhood, the dignity of her motherhood, and the majesty of her rank, she raised aloft a hand, and spake aloud in tones clear as the notes of a silver trumpet.