1 a vizier's daughter - Hazara.net

173
A VIZIER’S DAUGHTER – A TALE OF THE HAZARA WAR
iron, for she had learned the latter accomplishment, and was proud of
it. Her mother, of course, was pleased to see the important position
occupied by her daughter in so high an official’s establishment and in
spite of Miriam’s prophecies, which had, of course, been repeated to
her, had hope of great things. No mother in Kabul, indeed, aspired to a
better position for her child than did the Hazara e xile. One day,
however, she was the bearer of evil tidings.
“Who do you think I met in the bazaar to-day, Gul Begum?” she asked,
when she got the girl alone.
“Who?” asked the daughter indifferently.
“Mohamed Jan.”
The girl flushed for a moment, then turned deadly white. “My God,
what is he doing here?” she asked.
“He has come to get news of you. Had he dared he would have struck
me in the open street because I told him I knew nothing about you, and
no more I did. None of us do, at least, nothing of your thoughts and
intentions. You know Mohamed Jan is quite a rich man now, and has
some sort of official position. I don’t know what it is, but it is
something that seems to give him a right do domineer over his betters,
at any rate, if nothing more.”
“What does he want with me? He must know I am a slave and that he
cannot claim me,” the girl said nervously. “It is not hard to guess how
he got his appointment, nor yet even what it is. It is easy enough for a
man who is not ashamed to be a traitor to his country to make a fortune
in time of war. It does not take a clever man to do that, only a rogue,
and there are plenty of those about.”
“But he is all the more dangerous to us for that,” the elder woman went
on, below her beneath. “He knows that we know, not only of his
treacher y, but of his humiliation that awful night, and it is quite
possible he knows who secured him his flogging too. Oh, you have
made a bitter enemy there, my daughter. I often wonder if you will not
live to repent it. Moreover, he has he ard that the soldiers offered to
return you to him, and that you refused and preferred imprisonment and
slaver y to becoming his wife, and he is furious. I tell you, as I have
alwa ys told you, that you should have gone back to him patiently, or,
better still, have put up with him from the first. Men are all alike, some
a little better, some a little worse, but not worth the choosing between.
Had you gone back to him you would have been a free woman to-day,
instead of a slave; and in a good position, too. I tell you Mohamed Jan
is a rich man, while your poor foolish father roams the hills a beggar,
with all his family in slavery. Oh, your father may be a ver y fine man,
but he is nothing either as a husband or a father!”