'Come, come, mother Chândni,' urged the servant in response to shrill commands. 'This is no place for thee now. These are mem's. And he hath married her,' he went on fast and low. 'Yea! 'tis true, the _nikka_ hath been read, so abuse is vain. Come, thou canst see him elsewhere.'
'Nay! I will see him here--here with his mem,' retorted Chândni airily. Then she turned swiftly on the elder woman, who, going to the door, was about to call for further assistance. 'What harm shall I do thee, fool, who art as I am with a piebald skin, or as this one, who would be as I am had God made her a woman. Lo! ask thy servants who Chândni the courtesan is, and what she has been, ay! and will be--if she chooses.'
It was an odd scene. The room decorated into bastard civilisation; the girl depending on a lack of pigment in her skin for all her claims to mem-ship, that being the only trace of her unknown European father; the mother without even this distinction, yet clinging to her taint of 'Western blood, as to a patent of nobility; clinging to it farcically, in fringe and furbelow, in fashion generally. Before them, as it were, against them, stood Chândni, in her trailing white Delhi draperies and massive garlands, a figure which might have served as model for some of those strange solemn-eyed statues, half Greek, half Indian, which are found buried in the sand-hills of the frontier. There was a little crowd of dark expectant faces at the door now, towards which she nodded familiarly.
'Go back! oh brothers! I do no harm. 'Tis not my way with women folk. I wait the Mirza's return. Then, if I am not wanted, I will go. Lo! Chândni the courtesan hath no need to keep a man in a leash; she hath no need to have the _nikka_ read, my little pigeon, as thou hast. Ari! so the pictures in the papers Dalel used to bring me are true, and 'tis a beauty to have no body and a big head.
Beatrice Norma Elflida D'Eremao, presently her Highness Mrs. Dalel Beg, gave a little scream of rage, and stamped her tiny high-heeled shoes upon the floor. Mrs. Lily Violet D'Eremao, her mother, known in her time by many a _sobriquet_ until she settled down to sobriety and the education of a fair daughter, screamed too, in voluble abuse; but they were both quite helpless before the white-robed figure standing between them and the sunlight with a laugh on its red lips, which did not leave them when into the midst of the scene came Dalel Beg, got up in his dandy riding gear; only the folded pugree remaining to tell the tale of his birth. Perhaps because the ideas within the head it covered needed some such excuse for their existence. His face was hideous in its sheer malice, livid, not with passion or fear, but from that hatred of opposition which belonged to his race. And Chândni, recognising this, swept him a low salaam, graceful to the uttermost curve of each finger, a salaam which would have made Turveydrop die of envy, a salaam such as one sees once or twice in a lifetime. A minute before she might have given it in derision; now she yielded it to the lingering majesty in this pitiful representative of a long line of tyrants.