Noormahal could not fail to see the reassuring message there when she woke, and began to wonder where Auntie Khôjee had gone.
As she straightened herself from stooping to the padlock, she felt, giddily, that she had locked herself out of life. She had but a few hours left of seclusion, and then--the streets.
But those few hours she might surely claim. So she closed and barred the wicket in the outer door, and dragging a string bed into the scant shade cast by the _naubut khana_, found rest for her aching limbs. And there she lay silent, taking no heed of Noormahal's knockings and appeals which, after a time, rose cautiously. When they ceased the old woman gave a sigh of relief.
Thus far all had gone well. Now she had only to wait till she felt she dare wait no more.
So she lay, watching the shadows of the broken-tailed plaster peacocks of royalty above the gateway creep over the courtyard, up the walls, and disappear into thin air.
Jehân Aziz was meanwhile repenting at leisure in Oriental fashion. That is, he had succumbed to the perpetual temptation of a string bed set either in shade or sunshine, to which it is always possible to retire without, as it were, quite throwing up the sponge. An Englishman who seeks his bed and turns his face to the wall gives himself away; the native who does the same thing is not even committed to discouragement. And Jehân, though he had a racking headache from an attempt to drown care in a debauch, was not exactly discouraged. His anger, though impotent, was too strong for that. Indeed, his whole force of character lay in his fierce arrogance; for he was neither clever nor cunning, like Burkut Ali. And so when, the day after the disappearance of the ring, the latter walked coolly in as if nothing had happened, and sat down on the end of the string bed, Jehân only sat up at the other end and glowered at the man, without whom he knew himself to be lost.
'Thou hadst best tell the truth, Lord of the Universe,' said Burkut, with a fine sarcasm, 'for I have heard many lies from the police. My head whirls with women, and pearls, and God knows what! Is there so much as foothold anywhere, whence we may deal a blow?'
Jehân felt comforted by that plural, though it roused curiosity to know what Burkut would be at. In truth, the latter's first desire for vengeance on Jehân only, had shifted as he had listened to the tales he bribed the police to tell. Here, it had seemed to him, was the possibility of greater mischief; mischief which, it was true, could have no immediate or definite object, but which would add something fresh to that rock of offence, that stumbling-block in the way of the alien master, on which it was the duty of the disloyal to cast every stone they could.