CHAPTER III.
The conduct of Lallcheen excited great indignation: but the king had so lately given way to intemperance and the indulgence of his grosser passions, that those hopes entertained of him at his accession to the throne had subsided. He had raised many enemies by his excesses. The traitor, moreover, was supported by the queen-mother, of whom her younger son, Shums-ood-Deen, had ever been the favourite. He was extremely popular, too, among many of the Omrahs; for he was a generous youth, possessing many virtues, and no flagrant vices.
The moment his brother was deposed, Lallcheen, assisted by the influence of the queen-mother, placed Shums-ood-Deen upon the musnud. The young monarch was now eager to make Agha his queen; but she, shocked at what had passed, could not be prevailed upon, for the moment, to consent. She would not see her father, and to the king’s urgent entreaties to make him happy, she replied:—
“Alas! the auspices under which you reign are evil. I fear that prosperity can never track the steps of a prince whose path to the throne has been stained with blood.”
“My noble Agha, we must bow to the crisis that has suddenly come upon us. I mourn the event which has elevated me to the highest of human dignities as much as you can do, and detest the agents who have placed me upon the musnud, with hands dyed in my brother’s blood. But as he has been disabled, it was necessary that a sovereign should be found; and I am the next of kin. You know it to be against the canons of our constitution that a blind prince should reign. Were I to refuse to hold the sceptre, I should be looked upon with suspicion, and my life would be in perpetual peril.”
“Prince, I shrink from becoming the wife of a man who has obtained his dignities by violence. I acquit you of all participation in the crime which has so suddenly made you a monarch, but will never consent to share your sullied honours. I foresee only misery from my parent’s ambition. Though the deposed kingwould have heaped upon me the heaviest wrongs which can weigh down the spirit of a virtuous woman, still I would have left him to the punishment which invariably awaits the wicked, administered by a higher arbiter of human dereliction than man.”
“Agha!” cried the Prince, passionately, “have I deserved to forfeit your love?”
“Not my love, Prince; but my consent to be your bride. You must now form higher views; there is an insuperable bar between us.”
“Nay, had we been united while I was only heir-apparent to the throne to which I have been just elevated, I might have soon come to that inheritance to which your father’s violence has prematurely raised me.”
“But then you would have ascended the musnud with honour; now, you have ascended it with disgrace.”
“I am ready to relinquish all honours for you, Agha.”
“That may not be; you have pushed the stone from the precipice, and, in spite of all mortal endeavours, it will roll to the bottom. Farewell, and may your reign be happy.”
One day, a singular-looking devotee was seen to cast himself upon the ground without the walls of the capital, and to pronounce, in a tone of solemn vaticination, woe to the kingdom of the Deccan. In proof of his inspiration, the fanatic declared himself ready to fast forty days on the very spot where he then lay. He was old and withered to a mere skeleton; his age was said to exceed a hundred years; for the oldest inhabitants remembered him but as a very aged man. His hair still hung over his shoulders so copiously as to cover them like a mantle; but it was so impregnated with filth that its colour was not to be ascertained. He had no beard, save a few straggling hairs scattered over his chin like stunted bushes upon the desert rock. His ears were so long that they nearly reached his shoulders, which rose towards them with physical sympathy, as if to relieve the head from their weight. His gums were toothless, and so blackened by opium and the smoke of tobacco, that as his lips parted—and when they did, they seemed to shrink from a renewed contact, and to seekseverally protection from the nose and chin—the whole mouth presented a feature of sickening deformity. Every rib in the old man’s body was as traceable as the lines which mark the latitude and longitude upon a chart. The very sinews had wasted into thin, rigid cords, without either flexibility or tension.
The approach of this sainted object to the city was a circumstance of much uneasiness to those who had acted so conspicuous a part in the recent change of government. The veneration in which he was held made them fear the effect of his crazy predictions upon the excited multitude.
Lallcheen hoped the old man would confirm his declarations by a fast of forty days; flattering himself that, by exposing to the people the delusions by which the object of their veneration evidently juggled them, he should be able to show that the fanatic was a worthless impostor. A tent was consequently ordered to be pitched over the prostrate devotee, and a number of men appointed to watch him day and night, in order to see that no human nourishment passed his lips. Two persons were constantly by his side.
Lallcheen visited him. As the traitor appeared before him, the seer raised his head; his eye instantly kindled as if with a divine afflatus, and he said, waving his arm solemnly:
“The blood of the murdered shall give life to the avenger! When slaves rebel, and grasp the thunderbolt of power, they eventually hurl it against their own heads. The web of fate is spun by different threads, but the woof of thine is black. Prepare, Lallcheen, for the explosion which thy own ambitious hand has kindled. The match is already at the train; thou wilt soon hear and feel the desolating concussion! Woe to the destroyer!”
The slave trembled, in spite of his conviction that the saint was crazed. He dreaded the influence of his wild sallies of prophecy. Day after day passed, and neither food nor water was seen to pass the diviner’s lips. The guards were astonished, and beheld him with sacred awe. They vowed they never slept: they were constantly changed, but precisely the same result followed—the inspired man was seen to taste nothing. He sat upon the cold ground, without a rag to cover him, in an apparent state of devoutabstraction, never uttering a word; except now and then, when he poured out terrible denunciations of wrath against those who had blinded the late king and murdered his nobles.
Fifteen days of the term of fasting had already expired, and no change appeared in the prophet. His eyes occasionally sparkled with fierce brightness, though he said nothing, and the watchers began to grow uneasy in his company. They feared a proximity to something unearthly; and in proportion as they were impressed with this superstitious feeling, in their eyes their sacred charge grew more deformed and hideous. They placed themselves at the very extremity of the tent, and were so awed by his ghoul-like appearance, that they were obliged, for relief, to turn their faces to the broad sky, and remit their vigils until they had recovered their self-possession. They took it for granted, however, that he could not, like some less disgusting reptiles, feed upon the dust, and therefore hesitated not to report, at the end of their term of watching, that the saint had taken nothing but a chameleon diet, and yet was as lively as that celebrated lizard after a six months’ fattening upon good wholesome air.
The people’s astonishment was daily increased by the report of those persons appointed to watch the devotee. They already began to talk of dedicating a temple to him, and paying him divine honours.
On the twentieth morning of his voluntary abstinence, the venerable probationer desired that some of the authorities might be summoned to attest his having undergone half of his prescribed mortification, and to witness his performance of a holy rite. Lallcheen accordingly visited the seer.
“Behold!” said the man, “I have subsisted twenty days without earthly food, sustained by a heavenly nutriment, which the eye does not see, but the body is sensible of. This night the Prophet has visited me, and here is the sign of his coming;” saying this he held between his bony fingers a white pebble about the size of a plum. “Within this,” he continued, “is the revelation which I shall make known to you at the termination of my penance.”
Having once more exhibited the pebble, he jerked it from his fingers into his mouth, and swallowed it in an instant.
“For twenty days I need no further nourishment. A stone is neither meat nor drink, yet will it invigorate this withered body to tell you things to come. Leave me.”
He could not be prevailed upon to make any further communication; but relapsed into silence. The slave was abashed before the presence of a man whom he despised, and who, he felt satisfied was an impostor; nevertheless, he dared not commit an act of violence against one generally held to be in direct communication with Heaven. In spite of his incredulity, he could not conceive how the pretended diviner had evaded the scrutiny of his guards. He had used every precaution to detect the imposture, without success. Day after day passed on, but the same report was every morning received that the saint had not tasted food. Multitudes flocked round the tent to behold this extraordinary man. Persons who were diseased approached to touch him, imagining that their distempers would be removed by the sacred contact. He pronounced blessings upon the poor, which won him the homage of the needy crowd who thronged to receive his benedictions. The marvel of his supernatural fast rapidly spread over the country, and people came from every part of the vicinity to behold him.
The term of his abstinence at length expired: no one had seen him taste a morsel of food or a drop of water for forty days. On the morning of the forty-first day he rose, and, quitting his tent, was greeted with profound reverence by thousands who had assembled to behold him. Money was thrown at his feet, which he picked up and scattered among the religious mendicants who had come far and near to offer him their homage. He now partook of a small quantity of milk, and then turning his face towards the holy city, repeated a certain prayer. Having poured dust upon his head, he crossed his arms upon his breast, and invoked audibly the name of the Prophet; then came the solemn objurgation:
“Woe to the man of blood! he shall fall by the hand of himfrom whose eyes he has shut out the sunbeam! The sceptre shall drop from the grasp of his minion, who shall find that happiness is not the inheritance of kings. But the innocent shall not be confounded with the guilty: the slave shall be requited as becomes a regicide! The voice of our holy Prophet has spoken, and it shall come to pass!”
He dropped his arms and hobbled slowly through the crowd, who made way before him, following him with acclamations. Lallcheen was disappointed at not having been able to detect the juggle of this patriarchal deceiver. How he had managed to elude the scrutiny of the watchers was a fact which baffled his comprehension; and he was fearful that the credulity of the multitude as to the fakeer’s direct communication with Heaven might lead to dangerous consequences. No doubt was entertained of the man’s prophetic endowments and supernatural sustentation. That he had fasted forty days and forty nights was a fact which few questioned; and the general expectation was that some fearful calamity was about to befall the king and his ministers. Groups of idle gossippers were seen at the corners of the streets, communicating their suspicions and whispering their fears.