1 a vizier's daughter - Hazara.net

134
A VIZIER’S DAUGHTER – A TALE OF THE HAZARA WAR
“We have had a great discussion, the Mir Sahib and I, ever since you
left us,” the Chief Secretar y explained, “and it is a very difficult case
to settle. The Mir has been promised one of my slave girls, a girl called
Gul Begum, and now she objects to go to him. The Mir says that that
should form no insurmountable difficult y, as all girls are co y, and even
when most willing to be wooed like to appear to be hard to win. Now I
say that if Gul Begum is only co y, or even more that coy, unwilling to
accept our young (?) friend here, I still will send her to him so long as
tears and cries are the only weapons that she uses, but if she utterly
refuses to go and will not leave without brute force and beatings, I will
not have her carried away, I will not have the scandal of such a
marriage from my house.”
“You seem to anticipate much difficult y,” the Mir remarked. “Since
when has all this opposition arisen?”
“Since the subject was first broached, oh most excellent and desirable
bridegroom. My wife could do nothing with her, and sent her on to me,
to see what I could do, but I could do no more than she had done. The
girl insisted that she would not go. Now we are go ing to have a
Tamasha (entertainment), and the Mir Sahib himself is going to take an
active part in it; we are all going to have a lesson in the gentle art of
love, or if not of love, at least of persuasion. (Come along, Hakimgee,
will you be the intercessor, will you go fetch the unwilling bride?”
“This business is not much in my line? the old man said; but as he
spoke he smiled, and the Chief Secretary thought he detected
something, just a little knowing, in the wrinkles in the corner of his
eye. Then their eyes met. The y understood one another, there was no
love lost between the Hakim and the Mir; not that the Mir had any
serious cause of complaint, except just this, that the Hakim was
somewhat overbearing, somewhat exacting of deference and respect,
which the Mir seemed to think it beneath his dignity to bestow. On the
Hakim’s side the dislike was due to a totally different cause. The Chief
Secretar y was a very generous man, almost prodigal in his gifts. It took
but the slightest persuasion, hardly more than a hint, to get a piece of
fur, a new coat, a posteen (fur cloak) from him, unless indeed it had
once been seen inside the harem, then it was comparatively safe, for it
was there under his wife’s protection, and she saw that it did not slip
through her fingers easily.
But many were the presents that fell to the Chief Secretary’s share. He
was a great man at court, and furs and camel cloth, embroideries, and
even carpets and fine silks, not infrequently accompanied the letters
that came from a distance, begging this favour or that, craving relief
from this injustice or that extortion, and if the Hakim happened to be
present at the time, and reminded his patron that he was poor, or cold,
or that his wife was sick or his daughter had no posteen, and that he
had been promised one last winter, but that it had been forgotten in the