“ ‘To abstain from action is well—except to acquire merit.’ ”
“Ah chela , if thou desertest me, I am all alone.”
“He found his milk-teeth easily at any rate,” said the old lady. “But all priests are alike.”
Kim coughed severely. Being young, he did not approve of her flippancy. “To importune the wise out of season is to invite calamity.”
“There is a talking mynah ”—the thrust came back with the well-remembered snap of the jewelled forefinger—“over the stables which has picked up the very tone of the family priest. Maybe I forget honour to my guests, but if ye had seen him double his fists into his belly, which was like a half-grown gourd, and cry: ‘Here is the pain!’ ye would forgive. I am half minded to take the hakim ’s medicine. He sells it cheap, and certainly it makes him fat as Shiv’s own bull. He does not deny remedies, but I doubted for the child because of the inauspicious colour of the bottles.”
The lama, under cover of the monologue, had faded out into the darkness towards the room prepared.
“Thou hast angered him, belike,” said Kim.
“Not he. He is wearied, and I forgot, being a grandmother. (None but a grandmother should ever oversee a child. Mothers are only fit for bearing.) Tomorrow, when he sees how my daughter’s son is grown, he will write the charm. Then, too, he can judge of the new hakim ’s drugs.”
“Who is the hakim , Maharanee?”
“A wanderer, as thou art, but a most sober Bengali from Dacca—a master of medicine. He relieved me of an oppression after meat by means of a small pill that wrought like a devil unchained. He travels about now,