But, behold you now, "he had paid," he said. "By the Holy Ganges and the Blessed Cow! by the turban of his father and the veil of his mother! restitution had been made long ago," the old man said; "and the soul of Uncle Rajinda, the pride of the Mullicks, had no reason to be disquieted for the rupees, though the seersuckers had been but vanity, and the castor-oil vexation of spirit."
"Produce the documents," said the Baboo, with a business-like impassibility that in Wall Street would have made him a great bear;-- "where are the receipts?"
"My Lord, I know not. Prostrating my unworthy turban beneath the lovely lilies of your feet, I swear to my _gureeb purwar_, the destitute-and-humble-protecting lord, by the Holy Water and the Blessed Cow, by the beard of my father and the veil of my mother, that I settled the little account long ago!"
That unhappy speculator in seersuckers and castor-oil died in prison, and a _gooroo_ (that is, a spiritual teacher) feed by the Baboo, desolated his last hour with the assurance that he should transmigrate into the bodies of seven generations of _gharree_-horses, and drag _feringhee_ sailormen, in a state of beer, from the ghauts to the punch-houses, all his miserable lives.
Now whether or not the unlucky little speculator had in good faith discharged the debt will, in all the probabilities of human rights and wrongs, never appear this side of the last trump; for the Holy Water and the Sacred Cow, his father's beard and his mother's veil, were not good in law, the documents not forthcoming.
But it is certain that his widow had faith in his integrity; for at once, with all her sorrows on her head, she sallied forth in quest of justice; and from Brahmin post to Sahib pillar she went crying, "See me righted! Against this hard and arrogant Baboo let my wrongs be redressed, or fear the evil eye of Dookhee the Sorrowful, of Haranu the Lost!"
But utterly in vain; for the clamor of the Hindoo widow, however bitterly aggrieved, is but a nuisance, and her accusation insolence. So in her pitiful outcasting, in all the forlorn loathsomeness of leprosy, and the shunned squalor of a cripple, she sat down at the Baboo's gate, to wait for justice till the gods should bestow it,-- till Siva, the Avenger, should behold her, and ask, "Who has done this?"