Now the matter of the blue envelope became more and more oppressive to Afzul Khân the more he thought of it. Easy enough to send it anonymously to Raby _sahib's mem_, and so be quit of it once for all; but what if she had taken the Major's money, as Shunker asserted, in order to buy a new husband? And what if this paper of Eshmitt _sahib's_ meant more loot? Afzul was, all unconsciously, jealous of this white-faced _mem_, and but for a strange sort of loyalty to the boy he had betrayed would have liked to put the letter in the fire, shake himself loose of all ties, and return to his people.
"Nay! thou askest more than I have to give," replied Mahomed Lateef to his questioning. "I know 'tis on paper they leave their moneys, for, as I said, the Colonel _sahib_ once asked me--'twas in China, during the war--to set my name as witness to something."
"Was it long-shaped, in a blue cover?" asked Afzul, eagerly.
"There was no cover, but it was long, like the summons from the courts. Stay! if thy mind be really set on such knowledge there is a friend of my poor Murghub's--one who pleads in the courts--even now resting in his father's village but a space from here. He must know more than thou canst want to hear."
So in the cool of the next morning Afzul walked through the barren fields to see the pleader. A keen-faced sallow young man, seemingly glad to escape for the time from patent-leather boots and such like products of civilisation. The Pathan found him squatting over against a _hookah_ and basking in the sunshine like the veriest villager. For all that he was fulfilled with strange knowledge of law and order as administered by the alien, and Afzul sat open-eyed while he discoursed of legacies, and settlements, of the _feme covert_ and the Married Women's Property Act, with a side glance at divorces and permanent alimony--strange topics to be gravely discussed at the gateway of an Indian village through which men were carried to their rest and women to their bridal beds, with scant appeal to anything but custom. It utterly confused Afzul, though it sent him away convinced that the blue envelope must mean the loot of another lover to the _mem-sahib_.
"I will wait," he said to himself decisively; "yes, I will wait until she is faithful and goes back to the Major; then, as that pleader fellow says, he will get the money. But if _he_ leaves her and takes his money instead, then I will send her the envelope. That is but fair. God and his Prophet! but their ways are confusing. 'Tis better to steal and fight as we do; it makes the women faithful."