The Daughter of Brahma, I. A. R. Wylie [carter reed txt] 📗

had neither faith nor love nor ideals left to save me. In the whole world, which you fear, there was not one who would have held out a rescuing hand. I stood on the brink of God knows what utter degradation when I remembered you, Sarasvati."

He stopped, and she drew back against the stone parapet and watched him breathlessly. A last faint shimmer of evening light fell on his face; its stern, inflexible resolution softened for a moment, but his bearing was inexpressibly, fiercely scornful. It was as though he lived over again the hours of bitter introspection, of impotent revolt against creation.

"I remembered you," he went on with restrained force. "You were then little more to me than a picture out of some child's fairy-tale, but you were beautiful, you were the only beautiful thing of my boyhood. I called upon you there was magic in your name for all that I had thought dead in me awoke afresh to new life. I flung the devil out of my heart, and that night I saw you."

"And that night I heard your voice," she answered in a whisper.

"And from that night onwards my freedom began," he continued, still in the same low, passionate voice. "You set me free. I ceased to be a beggar when you gave me your love. God knows why you gave me your love it was like a miracle but you made me a man, you gave me back confidence, the command over myself and over my fate, Sarasvati. Can't you understand now? I owe you everything, everything that I am." Suddenly his voice broke under the strain of painful self -repression. He stretched out his arms towards her, and she came to him and drew his head down to her shoulder. For a moment there was silence, then he stood erect.

"Neither you nor I need fear the world," he went on quietly. "It gave me nothing, I owe it nothing. I have defied its laws, disregarded its customs. If it comes to me now, it is because I have grown rich, have had power thrust upon me. I have shut my door in the faces of those who pretend to seek me out either in kindness or friendship. After a little while they will cease to trouble us. I will build a wall round our lives, Sarasvati, my wife, and no one, no shadow shall enter to spoil our peace. Look " he pointed out into the coming night " that is our world," he said triumphantly.

A servant entered the room behind them and presently a stream of warm light flooded on to the balcony. Hurst looked down into his wife's face and saw that it was wet with tears.

"Sarasvati!" he uttered.

She drew closer to him; she clung to him, and a strange mingling of radiant happiness and fear shone out of her eyes.

"I love thee!" she said in her own language. ** I love thee, my lord, my god. If aught should come between thee and me, I could not live."

Her voice died into silence. He felt her shiver.

"Sarasvati!" he said, half reproachfully, "are you still afraid?"

"It is cold," she whispered back, "so cold."

A breath of night-wind, already touched with the sharpness of coming winter, brushed against their faces. David Hurst put his arm about his wife's shoulders and drew her gently into the lighted room behind them.

BOOK III_CHAPTER III (AN INTRUDER)

 

THREE months had passed since David Hurst had laid down the programme of his life. They had been cold, dreary months, sunless and dank as only English winter months can be. The low, grey skies which had seemed to hang to the tops of the leafless trees had broken scarcely for an hour to let through the pale, uncertain sunshine, and bleak winds, heavy with rain, had swept over the wide sweeps of level country. Yet Hurst counted that short period as the happiest of his life. At first there had been a brief, sharp struggle with tradition. County magistrates, as well as village pettifoggers, swallowed their pride and indignation, and impelled, partly by courtesy and still more by curiosity, had made official calls, and been refused. With grim amusement Hurst had watched their carriages, or pony-carts, as the case might be, turn reluctantly on the homeward road and had guessed, by the eloquent shoulder-shruggings and head-shakings of the owners in what tone their conversation was being carried on. Shortly afterwards he had politely intimated to the world in general that he neither sought social intercourse nor desired it, and a hitherto unknown peace and quiet entered into Hurst Court.

Curiously enough, there had been few difficulties at home, none at least that he had seen. The housekeeper, an old family retainer who had added some of the family characteristics to her own, had promptly given notice, and her place had been taken by a gently nurtured woman, badly battered in life's battle and too weary of the struggle to indulge in prejudice. After that there had been no further trouble. Hurst's manner indeed forbade it. No servant or equal who ventured to cross him had sought to repeat the experience, for somewhere in that year of independence he had changed both physically and in character. The look of moody distrust had gone out of his face, which had gained in strength; but his expression was severe to the point of relentlessness, and his bearing was that of a man constantly at warfare with his kind.

But with Sarasvati he laid down the weapons of defence. With her he returned to the self which he had inherited. All the chivalrous tenderness, the almost feminine power of intuition which had once been crushed beneath dislike and contempt sprang up side by side with energy and self-reliance beneath the sunshine of her absolute love. Above all, her need of him, free as it was from either servility or weakness, revealed to him who had always believed himself a fool unsuspected possibilities. In the simple round of his daily life with her his own mind expanded, spurred by the incentive of an intelligence which, though it sought from him, rose so swiftly to his level. At eventide, when the heavy curtains were drawn and she sat before the fire, a picturesque figure in her richly embroidered sevi, her dark head thrown back against the high back of the leather chair, her thoughtful eyes bright with the reflected fire-light, he read to her and poured out to her his store of fantastic wisdom, grown where honours in Civil Service examinations are never gathered. And she listened thirstily, and sometimes she too taught him, with a sudden colour rising beneath her olive skin, of the Vedas, of Brahma, of the great pantheistic creed of her race. Sometimes, too, she sang to him strange chants to Night and to the Goddess of the Dawn; but when he asked her to sing the song of Sarasvati, daughter of Brahma, she was silent and grew grave. Thus the three months had passed in solitude and happiness. Then, one evening, shortly after the lights had been lit, Hurst received a letter. The envelope bore an Indian stamp-mark, and he was conscious of a quickening of the pulses as he recognised the strong, somewhat angular writing. Involuntarily he glanced across at his wife's slight figure by the fire-side, and found that her eyes were fixed on his face.

"It is from her," she said in her quaint foreign way, and the certainty of her tone startled him.

He knew to whom the pronoun referred. For in her memory there was but one woman, and she the one who, in those days of suspense, when Sarasvati had laid hidden in the Professor's bungalow, had stood by her with wisdom and a fiery devotion defying though this Sarasvati did not know the wrathful protest of her father and mother and the indignation of all Kolruna.

"Yes it is from Diana Chichester," Hurst said, and opened the letter. The first line was curt and typical of the writer.

"Thank you for your last long letter," Diana had written in good-natured irony. "Going by the adage that no news is good news, I suppose I ought to be well content, but unfortunately I have heard rumours from other quarters which make me doubtful. I confess that the rumours did not exactly fly to me unsought. I have been making inquiries. The Professor, who is at present engaged in discovering some deep-laid plot which is going to blow us out of India, was worse than useless. All he seemed to know was that your English translation of the book which he compiled with you has been a tremendous success in the anthropological world which means, I suppose, no royalties. Father Romney was delirious at the time the result of a stone thrown by one of Mr. Eliot's most ardent followers and consequently was not to be interviewed. Your mother and I are only on bowing terms, so that source of information was closed, and I was on the point of writing to you myself when, behold, a certain Miss Daisy Morell of the Manor, Steeple Hampton, who has the doubtful wisdom of admiring me beyond all things earthly, supplied me in one long letter with all details each detail marked with an exclamation mark.

"Well, David, you are going your own way with a vengeance. From all accounts you have figuratively speaking blacked the parson's eye and kicked the squire downstairs. Nor have you been seen once in church I beg your pardon, I remember that you have 'gone over,' as mother calls it, but this is a fact of which Steeple Hampton is still happily ignorant. All this is very commendable, David, and shows character an article which this progressive generation seems to find difficult in supplying, but I wonder if you are not going too far. I put it to you timidly, as one who has no right, save that of respect, to interfere. What does that old Sir David Hurst hanging over your library mantelpiece think about it? After all, you have to consider him a little and, even if you didn't, there is another point of view. Wasn't it Milton who talked about a 'cloistered virtue' with some disapproval? At any rate, whatever Milton did, I despise a cloistered anything, especially courage. You have been very brave braver than any man I know and I think it is a pity for you to go and sit down behind your castle walls and rest on your laurels. It looks dangerously as though you were enjoying the benefits of a ' fluke,' and, as I know it wasn't a fluke, I should like you to go out again into the world and defy a few more of those fat aldermen, Prejudice, Humbug & Co. Won't you? I think you will when the occasion comes. And big men always make the occasion.

"So much for my chief reason for writing. As for my own affairs if they interest you, there is not much to relate. I am getting rather weary of froth and frothy people. I know they are all very brave and good at the bottom, and that, if anything dreadful happened, they would prove the heroes and heroines