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?"
And who shall challenge her? Who shall bid her move on? Mamoul has
crowned her Queen of Tears, and her sublime patience and appealing
have made a throne of the wayside stone on which she sits; there is
no power so audacious that it would give the word to depose her; her
matted gray locks and her furrowed cheeks, her sunken eyes and her
hungry lips, are her "sacred ashes" of the high caste of Sorrow.
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