CHAPTER IX.
Mohabet, feeling that his future safety depended upon the death of Noor Jehan, had sent a soldier to despatch her. The minister of destruction entered her tent after midnight, when she was plunged in profound repose. Her beautiful limbs were stretched upon a Persian carpet, the rich colours of which glowed in the light of a lamp that burned upon a silver frame near her bed. Her fine features were relaxed into that placid expression which sleep casts over the countenance when no disquietingdreams disturb and excite it into muscular activity. The slow and measured breath came from her lovely bosom like incense from a sacred censer. Her right arm, naked to the shoulder, and on which the scar of the wound she had lately received appeared still red and tender, was thrown across her bosom, showing an exquisite roundness of surface and delicacy of outline that fixed the attention of the rugged soldier, who hesitated to remove so beautiful a barrier to that bosom which his dagger was commissioned to reach. He stood over his victim in mute astonishment. He was entranced by her beauty. The recollection of her undaunted heroism disarmed his purpose, and he dropped the weapon of death. Noor Jehan was roused by the noise;—she started from her slumber. Seeing a man in the tent, she sprang from her couch, and, eyeing him with calm disdain, said,
“I apprehend your purpose; you are a murderer;—Noor Jehan is not unprepared to die even by the assassin’s dagger. Strike!” she said sternly, and bared her bosom.
The man was overcome; he prostrated himself before her, pointed to the fallen weapon, and besought her to forgive the evil purpose with which he had entered her tent:
“I am but an humble instrument of another’s will.”
“Go,” replied the Sultana with dignity, “and tell your employer that your mistress and his knows how to meet death when it comes, but claims from him the justice awarded to the meanest criminal. The secret dagger is the instrument of tyranny, not of justice. I am in his power; but let him exercise that power as becomes a brave and a good man.”
Mohabet was not surprised, though greatly mortified, when he found that his purpose had been thus defeated. He therefore sought the Emperor, and insisted that he should immediately sign a warrant for the death of his Sultana. Jehangire knew too well the justice of the demand, the wrongs which she had heaped upon the man who made it, and his own incapability of resistance, to disobey. Not having seen the Empress for some time, he had in a degree forgotten the influence of her charms; and prepared,though with reluctance, to comply with the sanguinary requisition. When the awful announcement was made to the Sultana, she did not exhibit the slightest emotion. “Imprisoned sovereigns,” she said, “lose their right of life with their freedom; but permit me once more to see the Emperor, and to bathe with my tears the hand that has fixed the seal to the warrant of my death.” She was well aware of the influence she still possessed over the uxorious Emperor; and, her request being complied with, she attired herself in a plain white dress, with the simplest drapery, which showed her still lovely figure to the greatest advantage, and was thus brought before Jehangire in the presence of Mohabet. There was an expression of subdued sorrow upon her countenance, which seemed only to enhance the lustre of her beauty. She advanced with a stately step, but did not utter a word; and, bending before her royal husband, took his hand and pressed it to her bosom with a silent but solemn appeal. Jehangire was deeply moved. He burst into tears, and raising the object of his long and ardent attachment, turned to Mohabet, and said in a tone of tremulous earnestness, “Will you not spare this woman?” Mohabet, subdued by the scene, and feeling for his sovereign’s distress, replied,
“The Emperor of the Moguls should never ask in vain.”
Waving his hand to the guards, they instantly retired, and the Sultana was restored to liberty. She, however, never forgot the wrong, and determined to avenge it. She manifested no signs of hostility, but always met the general with a cheerful countenance and a courteous air, by which she completely lulled his suspicions. Secure in the general estimation of the troops, and especially of his faithful Rajpoots, he felt no fears for his own personal safety; and having completely won the good opinion of Jehangire by his late act of generous forbearance towards Noor Jehan, he had little apprehension from the intrigues of the latter, however she might choose to employ them. He, however, knew not the person of whom he judged so lightly. Her aims were not to be defeated but by the loss of liberty. She never lost sight of her purpose save in its accomplishment. Nothing could reconcile her to thedegradation which she had been lately made to endure. Her daughter indeed had been restored to her; but she likewise had been deprived of freedom, and treated with the indignity of a prisoner. The wound of the latter, which was slight, had soon healed; yet the mother felt that she had received a double wrong in the captivity of herself and child. She employed her time in devising schemes of vengeance; but for six months she plotted so secretly, that not the least suspicion was excited in the mind of Mohabet. Jehangire treated him with the open confidence of friendship, and the Sultana appeared to meet him at all times with amicable cordiality. This, however, was only the treacherous calm which often heralds a tempest.
One morning, when the general, accompanied by a considerable retinue, went to pay his customary respects to the Emperor, he was attacked at the same moment from both ends of a narrow street. He was fired at from the windows of several houses. Great confusion ensued; but Mohabet’s followers being well armed, he put himself at their head and cut his way through the assailants. His escape was a miracle; the whole of his retinue were either wounded or slain, yet he was unhurt. The plot had been so well concerted, that not a single creature was prepared for it but those persons to whom it had been communicated. The spirit of disaffection soon spread. The guards who surrounded the Emperor were attacked by the citizens; and all, to the number of five hundred, put to the sword. The whole city of Cabul was in an uproar; and had not Mohabet fled to his camp, which was pitched without the walls, he would have fallen a sacrifice to their fury. Enraged at their perfidy, he prepared to take a speedy and ample revenge. The Sultana, perceiving the failure of her scheme, was aware that she was in a situation of extreme peril. The citizens, terrified at the preparations which the incensed general was making to punish their perfidy, sent some of the principal inhabitants to him, supplicating his forbearance; declaring that the tumult originated with the rabble, and offering to give up the ringleaders to his just indignation. Although Mohabet suspected that Noor Jehan had been the principalinstrument of the attack upon his life and the massacre of his guards, he dissembled his resentment, and accepted the offers of submission, but made a vow never again to enter Cabul. Having punished the ringleaders, he quitted the neighbourhood on the following morning, taking the Emperor with him.
On their way to Lahore, Mohabet suddenly resolved to resign his power, and to place Jehangire again at liberty. The resolution was as inexplicable as it was sudden and unexpected. He had no wish for empire. Having punished his enemies and vindicated his own wrongs, he exacted from Jehangire oblivion of the past; then disbanding his army, and retaining only a small retinue, he left his sovereign to his entire freedom. Noor Jehan, not in the least moved by this act of generosity on the part of a man whom her own intrigues had forced into rebellion, resolved now to seize the opportunity of consummating her revenge. She could not forget the indignities she had endured at the hand of Mohabet; that he had once attempted her life, obliged the Emperor to sign her death-warrant, and held her in odious captivity. She demanded that her royal consort should immediately order his execution.
“A man,” said she, “so daring as to seize the person of his sovereign is a dangerous subject. The lustre of royalty must be diminished in the eyes of the people, while he who has dragged his prince from the throne is permitted to kneel before it with feigned allegiance.”
Jehangire, remembering the provocations which Mohabet had received, and his temperate use of power, was shocked at the Sultana’s vindictiveness, and commanded her, in a severe tone, to be silent.
Although she made no reply, she did not relinquish her design. Shortly afterwards, an attempt being made upon the general’s life, he found it necessary to quit the camp secretly. The emissaries of the Empress were sent to capture him, but he effected his escape. He who had so lately had a victorious army at his command was now a fugitive, without a follower, and obliged to fly for his life. He had left all his wealth behind him, which wasseized by the implacable Noor Jehan; and she issued a proclamation through all the provinces of the empire, denouncing him as a rebel, commanded him to be seized, and set a price upon his head. This violence on the part of the Sultana was disapproved both by the Emperor and the Vizier, the latter of whom did not forget the courtesy shown to him by the fugitive after the defeat of the imperial army, when he was made prisoner by that very man who was now pursued with such hostility by a vindictive enemy who owed to him her life and liberty.
Asiph, Noor Jehan’s brother, was not insensible to the merit of Mohabet. He knew him to be the best general of his time, an ardent lover of his country, and that he had been forced into rebellion by acts of repeated and unjustifiable aggression. He felt assured that such was not a man to be cast off from the state without doing it an injury that could never be repaired. Besides, he feared the lengths to which the Sultana’s ambition might carry her, and considered it was high time it should be checked. Although Mohabet was a wanderer and a refugee under the denouncement of death, he bore up against his reverses with the same magnanimity which had actuated him when at the summit of his power.
The Vizier having found means to assure him of his friendship, Mohabet mounted his horse and rode four hundred miles without a single follower, to meet and confer with that high functionary; trusting to his bare and secret promise of protection. The minister was at that time encamped in the road between Lahore and Delhi. Mohabet entered the camp in a mean habit, late in the evening. Placing himself in the passage which led from the apartments of the Vizier to the harem, and telling the eunuch that he wished to see that minister, the fugitive was immediately led into the latter’s presence. When Asiph saw the wretched condition of Mohabet, he fell upon his neck and wept. Retiring with him to a secret apartment, the general declared his determination, notwithstanding the low ebb of his fortunes, to raise Shah Jehan to the imperial throne. Asiph was overjoyed at thisdeclaration, as that prince was allied to him by the double tie of friendship and family connexion.
The result of this conference was a general declaration, in favour of Jehangire’s third son, who had already twice rebelled; but the Emperor dying a few months after, the state was freed from the probable effects of a civil war, and Prince Churrum ascended the imperial throne, under the title of Shah Jehan. From that moment the Sultana retired from the world, devoting the rest of her days to study, and the quiet enjoyments of domestic life. As her power ceased with the death of Jehangire, her haughty spirit could not brook the public mortification of seeing herself holding a secondary rank in the empire. She never henceforward spoke upon state affairs, or allowed the subject to be mentioned in her presence. The singular beauty of her person continued almost to the last moment of her life; nor was the structure of her mind less remarkable. She was a woman of transcendent abilities; she rendered herself absolute in a government in which women were held to be both incapable and unworthy of holding the slightest share. It was not merely by the permissive weakness of Jehangire that she acquired such a political dominancy in the state; but by the pre-eminent superiority of her own mental endowments, and the indomitable energy of her character, before which the inferior mind and spirit of her royal husband shrank into comparative insignificance. She had as well the resolution to achieve as the intellects to project, and kept a mighty nation in awe by the extreme vigour of her administration. Though her passions were violent, her chastity was never impeached, and she lived an eminent pattern conjugal fidelity. To her, the world are indebted for that delicious perfume so well-known by the name of atar of roses, which she discovered during her retirement from public life. She died in the city of Lahore eighteen years after the death of Jehangire.