British -- India -- Fiction; India -- Fiction; Inheritance and succession -- Fiction
"By George, Belle!" said John Raby next morning, when she told him
that she had made up her mind to take the legacy without demur, "you
are simply a pearl of women for sense. I prophesy we shall be as happy
as the day is long, always."
And Belle said she hoped so too. But when he fell to talking joyously
of the coming comforts of sweet reasonableness and thirty thousand
pounds, in the life that was just beginning for them, her thoughts
were busy with schemes for spending some at least of the legacy in
building a shrine of good deeds to the memory of her friend,--surely
the best friend a woman ever had. She was bound by her nature to
idealise some one, and the dead man was an easier subject than the
living one.
CHAPTER XV.
Murghub Ahmad, with nothing on but a waistcloth, his high narrow
forehead bedewed with the sweat which ran down his hollow cheeks like
teardrops, was fanning the flame of his own virtue with windy words in
the dark outhouse which he designated the editor's room. Four square
yards of court beyond constituted the printing office of the _Jehâd_,
a bi-weekly paper of extreme views on every topic under the sun. For
the proprietors of _The Light of Islâm_ having a wholesome regard to
the expense of libels, had dispensed with the young man's eloquence as
being too fervid for safety. So, Heaven knows by what pinching and
paring, by what starvation-point of self-denial, the boy had saved and
scraped enough to buy a wretched, rotten handpress, and two used up
lithographic stones. With these implements, and a heart and brain full
of the fierce fire of his conquering race, he set to work with the
utmost simplicity to regenerate mankind in general, and the Government
of India in particular, by disseminating the smudged results of his
labours on the poor old press among his fellow-subjects; for the most
part, it is to be feared, free, gratis, and for nothing. Poor old
press! No wonder it creaked and groaned under Murghub Ahmad's thin
straining arms; for it had grown old in the service of Government, and
on the side of law and order. Generation after generation of prisoners
in the district jail had found a certain grim satisfaction and
amusement in producing by its help endless thousands of the forms
necessary for the due capture and punishments of criminals yet to
come. Reams and reams of paper had they turned out as writs of arrest,
warrants for committal, charge-sheets, orders for jail discipline, or,
joyful thought, memos of discharge. And now order and discipline were
unknown quantities in its life. Perhaps the change was too much for
its constitution; certain it is that it became daily more and more
unsatisfactory in regard to the complicated Arabic words with which
its present owner loved to besprinkle his text. Then the damp,
overworked stones refused to dry, even under the boy's hot feverish
hands; and he lost half his precious time in chasing the shifting
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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