“True courtesy,” Kim echoed, “is very often inattention.”
These, be it understood, were company-manners, designed to impress.
“Hi! I have an ulcer on my leg,” cried a scullion. “Look at it!”
“Get hence! Remove!” said the hakim . “Is it the habit of the place to pester honoured guests? Ye crowd in like buffaloes.”
“If the Sahiba knew—” Kim began.
“Ai! Ai! Come away. They are meat for our mistress. When her young Shaitan’s colics are cured perhaps we poor people may be suffered to—”
“The mistress fed thy wife when thou wast in jail for breaking the moneylender’s head. Who speaks against her?” The old servitor curled his white moustaches savagely in the young moonlight. “ I am responsible for the honour of this house. Go!” and he drove the underlings before him.
Said the hakim , hardly more than shaping the words with his lips: “How do you do, Mister O’Hara? I am jolly glad to see you again.”
Kim’s hand clenched about the pipe-stem. Anywhere on the open road, perhaps, he would not have been astonished; but here, in this quiet backwater of life, he was not prepared for Hurree Babu. It annoyed him, too, that he had been hoodwinked.
“Ah ha! I told you at Lucknow— resurgam —I shall rise again and you shall not know me. How much did you bet—eh?”
He chewed leisurely upon a few cardamom seeds, but he breathed uneasily.
“But why come here, Babuji?”