In The Permanent Way Part 8

"If they do, what then? To-morrow will see us far away. I tell you the times are changed. Why there is a police station within hail almost.

Nay, sweetheart! I will not say it. Come, the dawn breaks."

"For my sake, Ramu, for my sake," she pleaded, even as he drew her with him, reluctant yet willing.

And now on the landing where the brick and the stone met, he paused again, his pulses throbbing with pa.s.sion, to think that this was their last parting.

"Take heart, beloved," he whispered. "Sure I am Ram and thou art Anunda. Who can hinder G.o.d's happiness when He gives it?"[20]

[Footnote 20: Ram anund. _Ram_, G.o.d; _anund_, happiness.]

The conceit upon the meaning of their names brought a faint smile to her face, and yet once more she whispered doubtfully: "But this is happiness. Ah, Ramu! it would be better--so----"

"It will be better," he corrected. "It is quite easy, heart's beloved.

A hired carriage and two railway tickets, that is all! As for _Mai Kali_--I defy her!"

Suddenly through the darkness, which seemed to hold them closer to each other, came a sound making them start asunder. It was the clang of the bell which hung before the shrine.

"_Kali ma! Kali ma!_" Anunda's pitiful little sobbing cry blent with the clang as she fled downstairs, and the mingled sound sent a strange thrill of fear to Ramanund's heart. Kali herself could not have heard; but if there had been others beside themselves amid the shadows?

He climbed to his lodging on the roof full of vague anxiety and honest relief that the strain and the stress and the pa.s.sion of the last fortnight was so nearly at an end. It was lucky, he told himself, that it had happened during holiday time, or the exact sciences must have suffered--for of course the idea of Anunda's yielding to _them_ was preposterous; Anunda who had made him forget everything save that he was her lover. He fell asleep thinking of her, and slept even through the wailing which arose ere long in the next lodging. The wailing of a household over an only son reft from it by Kali _ma_.

"The wrath of the G.o.ds is on the house," said Ramanund's widowed mother when he came down late next morning. "And I wonder not when children disobey their parents. But I will hear thy excuses no longer, Ramo. G.o.d knows but my slackness. .h.i.therto hath been the cause of that poor boy's death. The holy man downstairs holds that She is angry for our want of faith, and many folks believe him, and vow some sacrifice of purification. So shall I, Ramanund. This very day I will speak to my cousin Gungo of her daughter."

"Thou wilt do nothing of the kind, mother," replied Ramanund quietly.

"I have made my own arrangements. I am going to marry a widow, a young and virtuous widow."

He felt dimly surprised at his own courage, perhaps a little elated, seeing how severe the qualms of antic.i.p.ation had been; so he looked his mother in the face fairly as, startled out of all senses save sight, she stared at him as if he had been a ghost. Then suddenly she threw her arms above her head and beat her palms together fiercely.

"_Mai Kali! Mai Kali!_ justly art Thou incensed. Ai! Kirpo! Ai!

Bishun! listen, hear. This is the cause. My son, the light of mine eyes, the son of my prayers, has done this thing. He is the cursed one! He would bring a widow to a Brahmin hearth. _Jai Kali ma! Jai Kali ma!_"

"Mother! mother! for G.o.d's sake," pleaded Ramanund, aghast at the prospect of having the secret of his heart made bazaar property.

"Think; give me time."

"Time!" she echoed wildly. "What time is there when folks die every minute for thy sin? Oh, Raino, son of my prayer, repent--do atonement.

Lo! come with me even now and humble thyself before Her feet. I will ask no more but that to-day--no more." She thrust her hands feverishly into his as if to drag him to the shrine. "For my sake, Ramo, for the sake of many a poor mother, remember whose son thou art, and forsake not thy fathers utterly."

"Mother!" he faltered; "mother!" And then silence fell between them.

For what words could bridge the gulf which the rapid flood of another nation's learning had torn between these two? A gulf not worn away by generations of culture, but reft recklessly through solid earth.

Simply there was nothing he felt to be said, as with a heart aching at the utter impossibility of their ever understanding each other, he did his best to sooth her superst.i.tious fears.

But here he was met by a conviction, an obstinacy which surprised him; for he had been too much occupied during the last fortnight to observe the signs of the times around him, and knew nothing of the religious terror which, carefully fomented by the priests as a means of extortion, had seized upon the neighbourhood. When, however, it did dawn upon him that the general consensus of opinion lay towards a signal expression of the G.o.ddess' anger, which needed signal propitiation by more numerous sacrifices, his indignation knew no bounds, and carried him beyond the personal question into general condemnation, so that, ere many minutes were over, she was attempting to sooth him in her turn. That G.o.d was above all was, however, their one bond of unity; in that they both agreed. The truth would be made manifest by the sickness being stayed or increased by the sacrifices.

Meanwhile the very thought of these latter, while it roused his anger, horrified his refinement into a certain silence, and kept him prisoner to the roof all day for fear of meeting some struggling victim on its way upstairs to the second story. This did not matter so much, however, since all his arrangements were made, and he had even taken the precaution to secure his railway tickets through a branch of Cook's agency which had been lately opened in the city. He took them out of his pocket sometimes and looked at them, feeling a vague comfort in their smug, civilised appearance. Fate must needs be commonplace and secure, surely, with such vouchers for safe conduct as these!

So the long hot day dragged its slow length along. Every now and again the death-wail, near or distant, would rise in even, discordant rhythm on the hot air; and as the sun set it began, loudly imperative, under his very roof. The only son was being carried out to the burning _ghat_, and the cries and sobs utterly overwhelmed the shouts and shufflings of feet, the moans and murmur of voices, which all day long had come from the second story. It was a relief that it should be so; that the ear might no longer be all unwillingly on the strain to catch some sound that would tell of a death-struggle in the slaughter-house downstairs. And yet the scene being enacted, perchance, on that three-cornered landing which, for once, visualised itself to Ramanund's clear brain, was not one in which to find much consolation.

The crowds of mourners edging the bier down the narrow stairs, the crowd of wors.h.i.+ppers dragging the victims up. He wondered which stood aside to give place to the other--the Living or the Dead? The flower-decked corpse or the flower-decked victim? Flowers and blood!

Blood and flowers for a Demon of Death who was satisfied with neither!

Ramanund, excited, overstrained, wearied by many a sleepless night of happiness, covered his face with his hands to shut out the sight even of the book which he tried to read.

So, as the sun sunk red in the western haze leaving the roof cooler, he fell asleep and slept soundly.

When he woke it was dark, and yet, as he stood up stretching himself, a faint paling of the horizon warned him that there was light beneath it--light that was coming to the world. The moon? Confused as he was by sleep, the thought came to him, only to be set aside by memory.

There was no moon; for this was the dark night of Kali.

The dark night! Then that must be the dawn when he had promised to meet Anunda on the threshold! Was it possible that he had slept so long? Yet not too long, since the dawn had not yet come, and he was ready. Hurriedly feeling for the safety of those precious tickets, and taking up a Gladstone bag which he had already packed, he stole down from the roof cautiously; and from thence to the landing. There was a new odour now blending with the perfumes of the flowers, and the incense, and the women: an odour which sickened him as he stood waiting and watching in the now deserted threshold. It was the odour of the shambles; an odour which seemed also to lie heavy on the breath and shorten it.

So by quick strides the grey glimmer through the stone lattice grew and grew to whiteness. Yet no one came, and there was no light step on the staircase below to tell of a late-comer.

"Anunda! Anunda!" he whispered more than once, even his low tones seeming to stir the heavy atmosphere into waves of sweet sickening perfume. Was it possible that she was waiting for him within--in the old place?

That must be it, surely, or else something had happened. What?

With a beating heart he moved on into the ante-shrine picking his steps in an almost morbid terror of what he might be treading upon.

"Anunda! Anunda!"

There was no answer save, heavier than before, that sort of scented, wave coming back from his own words.

She was not there, and something must have happened.... Not there!

Impossible, with those tickets in his pocket, that hired carriage waiting at the end of the alley, that police station round the corner!...

He strode forward with renewed courage, heedless of the damp clamminess at his feet; strode recklessly right into the yellow flare of the lamps. Save for that ghastly crimson upon the floor, the walls, the canopy, the place lay unchanged, and quiet as the grave.

No! there was a change; the iron doors were open, and there, upon the low stone-slab before those clutching arms, lay something....

G.o.d in Heaven! what was it?

A head--a small dark----

Ramanund's scream caught in the big bell which hung above him, and the last thing he heard, as he fell forward on that crimson floor, was its faint booming echo of his own cry.

When he came to himself again, six weeks had pa.s.sed by. The heat was over, the cholera had gone, and he lay in one of the new wards of a new hospital whither his anxious friends had had him conveyed when they found how ill he was. The very strangeness of his environment held him silent for the first few moments of consciousness; then with a rush it all came back upon him and, weak as he was, he sat up in bed wildly.

"Anunda! Anunda! My G.o.d! the shrine!--the blood!"

"It is a bad sign," remarked the doctor to one of his friends significantly when they had persuaded him to lie down again quietly, more from inability to sit up, than from obedience. "It is a bad sign when the delusions remain after the fever has left the brain. However, it is early days yet, and we must hope for the best."

"You should rid your mind of such things," said the pleader a week or two afterwards when, despite Ramanund's growing strength of body, he still reverted again and again to that terrible dark night of Kali, imploring them to search out the criminals and have them brought to justice. "There is, pardon me, not a t.i.ttle of evidence for truth of your story; but circ.u.mstantial proof to contrary as I will state categorically. _First_, known dislike to and hatred for Kali and such like, leading to language in my hearing calculated to break the peace.

_Second_, known excitement consequent perhaps on general sickness, stress of examinations before holiday times, and such like, leading to general look of fatigue and absent-mindedness noticeable to friends as myself. _Third_, known physical horror of blood leading to much recrimination of sacrifices, and such like; even to extent of shutting yourself up all day, as per mother's evidence, from fear of disagreeables. _Finally_, profound feverish sleep watched by same mother with dubiosity several times, ending in sleep-walk to the reeking shrine where you are found by Brahmins after dawn unconscious.