_ PHASE III. PISGAH HEIGHTS
CHAPTER XIV
"Yet shall I bear in my heart this honour of the burden of
pain--this gift of thine."--RABINDRANATH TAGORE.
It was the last day of the year; the last moon of the year, almost at her zenith. Of all the Christmas guests Lance alone remained; and Thea had promised him before leaving, a moonlight vision of Amber, the Sleeping Beauty of Rajasthan. The event had been delayed till now, partly because they waited on the moon; partly because they did not want it to be a promiscuous affair.
To Thea's lively imagination--and to Roy's no less--Amber was more than a mere city of ghosts and marble halls. It was a symbol of Rajput womanhood--strong and beautiful, withdrawn from the clamour of the market-place, given over to her dreams and her gods. For though kings have deserted Amber, the gods remain. There is still life in her temples and the blood of sacrifice on her altar stones. Therefore she must not be approached in the spirit of the tourist. And, emphatically, she must not be approached in a motor-car; at least so far as Thea's guests were concerned. Of course one knew she
was approached by irreverent cars; also by tourists--unspeakable ones, who made contemptible jokes about 'a slump in house property.' But for these vandalisms Thea Leigh was not responsible.
Her young ones, including Captain Martin, would ride; but, because of Aruna, she and Vincent must submit to the barouche. So transparent was the girl's pleasure at being included, that Thea's heart failed her--knowing what she knew.
Roy and Lance had ridden on ahead; out through the fortified gates into the open desert, strewn with tumbled fragments of the glory that was Rajasthan. There, where courtiers had intrigued and flattered, crows held conference. On the crumbling arch of a doorway, that opened into emptiness, a vulture brooded, heavy with feeding on those who had died for lack of food. Knee-deep in the Man Sagar Lake, grey cranes sought their meat from God; every tint and curve of them repeated in the quiet water. And there, beside a ruined shrine, two dead cactus bushes, with their stiff distorted limbs, made Roy think suddenly of two dead Germans he had come upon once--killed so swiftly that they still retained, in death, the ghastly semblance of life. Why the devil couldn't a man be rid of them? Dead Germans were not 'in the bond.'...
"Buck up, Lance," he said abruptly; for Desmond, who saw no ghosts, was keenly interested. "Let's quit this place of skulls and empty eye-sockets. Amber's dead; but not utterly decayed."
He knew. He had ridden out alone one morning, in the light of paling stars, to watch the dawn steal down through the valley and greet the sleeping city that would never wake again--half hoping to recapture the miracle of Chitor. But Amber did not enshrine the soul of his mother's race. And the dawn had proved merely a dawn. Moonlight, with its eerie enchantment, would be oven more beautiful and fitting; but the pleasure of anticipation was shadowed by his resolve.
He had spoken of it only to Thea; asking her, when tea was over, to give him a chance:--and now he was heartily wishing he had chosen any other place and time than this....
The brisk canter to the foothills was a relief. Thence the road climbed, between low, reddish-grey spurs, to the narrow pass, barred by a formidable gate, that swung open at command, with a screech of rusty hinges, as if in querulous protest against intrusion.
Another gateway,--and yet another: then they were through the triple wall that guards the dead city from the invader who will never come, while both races honour the pact that alone saved desperate, stubborn Rajputana from extinction.
Up on the heights, it was still day; but in the valley it was almost evening. And there--among deepening shadows and tumbled fragments of hills--lay Amber: her palace and temples and broken houses crowding round their sacred Lake, like Queens and their handmaids round the shield of a dead King.
Descending at a foot's pace, the chill of emptiness and of oncoming twilight seemed to close like icy fingers on Roy's heart; though the death of Amber was as nothing to the death of Chitor--the warrior-queen, ravished and violently slain by Akbar's legions. Amber had, as it were, died peacefully in her sleep. But there remained the all-pervading silence and emptiness:--her sorrowful houses, cleft from roof to roadway; no longer homes of men, but of the rock-pigeon, the peacock, and the wild boar; stones of her crumbling arches thrust apart by roots of acacia and neem; her streets choked with cactus and brushwood; her beauty--disfigured but not erased--reflected in the unchanging mirror of the Lake.
If Roy and Lance had talked little before, they talked less now. From the Lake-side they rode up, by stone pathways, to the Palace of stone and marble, set upon a jutting rock and commanding the whole valley. There, in the quadrangle, they left the horses with their grooms, who were skilled in cutting corners and had trotted most of the way.
Close to the gate stood a temple of fretted marble--neither ruined nor deserted; for within were the priests of Kali, and the faint, sickly smell of blood. Daybreak after daybreak, for centuries, the severed head of a goat had been set before her, the warm blood offered in a bronze bowl....
"Pah! Beastly!" muttered Lance. "I'd sooner have no religion at all."
Roy smiled at him, sidelong--and said nothing. It
was beastly: but it matched the rest. It was in keeping with the dusky rooms, all damp-incrusted, the narrow passages and screens of marble tracery; the cloistered hanging garden, beyond the women's rooms, their baths chiselled out of naked rock. And the beastliness was off-set by the beauty of inlay and carving and colour; by the splendour of bronze gates and marble pillars, and slabs of carven granite that served as balustrade to the terraced roof, where daylight still lingered and azure-necked peacocks strutted, serenely immune.
Seated on a carven slab, they looked downward into the heart of desolation; upward, at creeping battlements and a little temple of Shiva printed sharply on the light-filled sky.
"Can't you
feel the ghosts of them all round you?" whispered Roy.
"No, thank God, I can't," said practical Lance, taking out a cigarette. But a rustle of falling stones made him start--the merest fraction. "Perhaps smoke'll keep 'em off--like mosquitoes!" he added hopefully.
But Roy paid no heed. He was looking down into the hollow shell of that which had been Amber. Not a human sound anywhere; nor any stir of life, but the soft ceaseless kuru-kooing doves, that nested and mated in those dusky inner rooms, where Queens had mated with Kings.
"'Thou hast made of a city an heap, of a defenced city a ruin ...Their houses shall be full of doleful creatures; and owls shall dwell there, and satyrs shall dance there,'" he quoted softly; adding after a pause, "Mother had a great weakness for old Isaiah. She used to say he and the minor prophets knew all about Rajasthan. The owls of Amber are blue pigeons. But I hope she's spared the satyrs."
"Globe-trotters!" suggested Lance.
"Or 'Piffers' devoid of reverence!" retorted Roy. "Hullo! Here come the others."
Footsteps and voices in the quadrangle waked hollow echoes as when a stone drops into a well. Presently they sounded on the stairs near by: Flossie's rather boisterous laugh; Martin chaffing her in his husky tones.
"Great sport! Let's rent it off H.H. and gather 'em all in from the highways and hedges for a masked fancy ball!"
Roy stood up and squared his shoulders. "Satyrs dancing, with a vengeance!" said he; but the gleam of Aruna's sari smote him silent. A band seemed to tighten round his heart....
* * * * *
Before tea was over, peacocks and pigeons had gone to roost among the trees that shadowed the Lake; and the light behind the hills had passed swiftly from gold to flame-colour, from flame-colour to rose. For the sun, that had already departed in effect, was now setting in fact.
"Hush--it's coming," murmured Thea:--and it came.
Hollow thuds, quickening to a vibrant roar, swelled up from the temple in the courtyard below. The Brahmins were beating the great tom-tom before Kali's Shrine.
It was the signal. It startlingly waked the dead city to discordant life. Groanings and howlings and clashings, as of Tophet, were echoed and re-echoed from every temple, every shrine; an orgy of demoniac sounds; blurred in transit through the empty rooms beneath; pierced at intervals by the undulating wail of ram's horns; the two reiterate notes wandering, like lost souls, through a confused blare of cymbals and bagpipes and all kinds of music.
Flossie, with a bewitching grimace at Martin, clapped both hands over her ears. Roy--standing by the balustrade with Aruna--was aware of an answering echo somewhere in subconscious depths, as the discords rose and fell above the throbbing undernote of the drum. It was as if the claimant voices of the East cried out to the blood in his veins: 'You are of us--do what you will; go where you will.' And all the while his eyes never left Aruna's half-averted face.
Sudden and clear from the heights came a ringing peal of bells, as it were the voices of angels answering the wail of devils in torment. It was from the little Shrine of Shiva close against the ramparts, etched in outline, above the dark of the hills.
Aruna turned and looked up at him. "Too beautiful!" she whispered.
He nodded, and flung out an arm. "Look there!"
Low and immense--pale in the pallor of the eastern sky--the moon hung poised above massed shadows, like a wraith escaped from the city of death. Moment by moment, she drew light from the vanished sun. Moment by moment, under their watching eyes, she conjured the formless dark into a new heaven, a new earth....
"Would you be afraid--to stroll round a little ... with me?" he asked.
"Afraid? I would love it--if Thea will allow." This time she did not look up.
Vincent and Thea were sitting a little farther along the balustrade; Lance beside them, imbibing tales of Rajasthan. Flossie and her Captain had already disappeared.
"
I'm going to be frankly a Goth and flash my electric torch into holes and corners," Lance announced as the other two came up. "I bar being intimidated by ghosts."
"We're not going to be intimidated either," said Roy, addressing himself to Thea. "And I guarantee not to let Aruna be spirited away."
Vincent shot a look at his wife. "Don't wander too far," said he.
"And don't hang about too long," she added. "It'll be cold going home."
Though he was standing close to her, she could say no more. But, under cover of the dusk, her hand found his and closed on it hard.
The characteristic impulse heartened him amazingly, as he followed Aruna down the ghostly stairway, through marble cloisters into the hanging garden, misted with moonlight, fragrant with orange trees.
And now there was more than Thea's hand-clasp to uphold him. Gradually there dawned on him a faint yet sure intimation of his mother's presence, of her tenderly approving love--dim to his brain, yet as sensible to his spirit as light and warmth to his body.
It did not last many moments; but--as in all contact with her--the clear after-certainty remained....
Exactly what he intended to say he did not know even now. To speak the cruel truth, yet by some means to soften the edge of it, seemed almost impossible. But nerved by this vivid, exalted sense of her nearness, the right moment, the right words could be trusted to come of themselves....
And Aruna, walking beside him in a hushed expectancy, was remembering that other night, so strangely far away, when they had walked alone under the same moon, and assurance of his love had so possessed her, that she had very nearly broken her little chiragh. And to-night--how different! Her very love for him, though the same, was not quite the same. It seemed to depend not at all on nearness or response. Starved of both, it had grown not less, but more.
From a primitive passion it had become a rarefied emotional atmosphere in which she lived and moved. And this garden of eerie lights and shadows was saturated with it; thronged, to her fancy, with ghosts of dead passions and intrigues, of dead Queens, in whom the twin flames of love and courage could be quenched only by flames of the funeral pyre. Their blood ran in her veins--and in his too.
That closeness of belonging none could snatch from her. About the other, she was growing woefully uncertain, as day followed day, and still no word. Was there trouble after all! Would he speak to-night...?
They had reached a dark doorway, and he was trying the handle. It opened inwards.
"I'm keen to go a little way up the hillside," he said, forcing himself to break a silence that was growing oppressive. "To get a sight of the Palace with the moon full on it. We'll be cautious--not go too far."
"I am ready to go anywhere," she answered; and the fervour of that simple statement told him she was not thinking of hillsides any more than he was--at the back of his mind.
Silence was unkinder than speech; and as they passed out into the open, he scanned the near prospect for a convenient spot. Not far above them a fragment of ruined wall, overhung by trees, ended in a broken arch; its lingering keystone threatened by a bird-borne acacia. A fallen slab of stone, half under it, offered a not too distant seat. Slab and arch were in full light; the space beyond, engulfed in shadow.
Far up the hillside a jackal laughed. Across the valley another answered it. A monkey swung from a branch on to the slab, and sat there engaged in his toilet--a very imp of darkness.
"Not be-creeped--are you?" Roy asked.
"Just the littlest bit! Nice kind of creeps. I feel quite safe--with you."
The path was rough in parts. Once she stumbled and his hand closed lightly on her arm under the cloak. She felt safe with him--and he must turn and smite her----!
At their approach, the monkey fled with a gibbering squeak: and Roy loosened his hold. Between them and the lake loomed the noble bulk of the palace; roof-terraces and facades bathed in silver, splashed with indigo shadow; but for them--mere man and woman--its imperishable strength and beauty had suddenly become a very little thing. They scarcely noticed it even.
"There--sit," Roy said softly, and she obeyed.
Her smile mutely invited him; but he could not trust himself--yet. He might have known the moonlight would go to his head.
"Aruna--my dear----" he plunged without preamble. "I took you away from them all because--well--we can't pretend any more ... you and I. It's fate--and there we are. I love you--dearly--truly. But...."
How could one go on?
"Oh,
Roy!"
Her lifted gaze, her low impassioned cry told all; and before that too clear revealing his hard-won resolution quailed.
"No--not that. I don't deserve it," he broke out, lashing himself and startling her. "I've been a rank coward--letting things drift. But honestly I hadn't the conceit--we were cousins ... it seemed natural. And now ...
this!"
A stupid catch in his throat arrested him. She sat motionless; never a word.
Impulsively he dropped on one knee, to be nearer, yet not too near. "Aruna--I don't know how to say it. The fact is ... they were afraid, at Home, if I came out here, I might--it might ... Well, just what's come to us," he blurted out in desperation. "And Mother told me frankly--it mustn't be, twice running ... like that." Her stillness dismayed him. "Dear," he urged tenderly, "you see their difficulty--you understand?"
"I am trying--to understand." Her voice was small and contained. The courage and control of it unsteadied him more than any passionate protest. Yet he hurried on in the same low tone.
"Of course, I ought to have thought. But, as I say, it seemed natural.... Only--on Dewali night----"
She caught her breath. "Yes--Dewali night. Mai Lakshmi knew.
Why did you not say it
then?"
"Well ... so soon--I wasn't sure ... I hoped going away might give us both a chance. It seemed the best I could do," he pleaded. "And--there was Dyan. I'm not vamping up excuses, Aruna. If you hate me for hurting you so----"
"Roy--you
shall not say it!" she cried, roused at last. "Could I hate ... the heart in my own body!"
"Better for us both perhaps if you could!" he jerked out, rising abruptly, not daring to let the full force of her confession sink in. "But--because of my father, I promised. No getting over that."
She was silent:--a silence more moving, more compelling than speech. Was she wondering--had he not promised...? Was he certain himself? Near enough to swear by; and the impulse to comfort her was overwhelming.
"If--if things had been different, Aruna," he added with grave tenderness, "of course I would be asking you now ... to be my wife."
At that, the tension of her control seemed to snap; and hiding her face, she sat there shaken all through with muffled, broken-hearted sobs.
"Don't--oh,
don't!" he cried low, his own nerves quivering with her pain.
"How can I
not" she wailed, battling with fresh sobs. "Because of your Indian mother--I hoped.... But for me--England-returned--no hope anywhere: no true country now; no true belief; no true home; everything divided in two; only my heart--not divided. And that you cannot have, even if you would----"
Tears threatened again. It was all he could do not to take her in his arms.
"If--if they would only leave me alone," she went on, clenching her small hands to steady herself. "But impossible to change all the laws of our religion for one worthless me. They will insist I shall marry--even Dyan; and I cannot--I
cannot----!"
Suddenly there sprang an inspiration, born of despair, of the chance and the hour and the grave tenderness of his assurance. No time for shrinking or doubt. Almost in speaking she was on her feet; her cloak--that had come unlinked--dropped from her shoulders, leaving her a slim strip of pallor, like a ray of light escaped from clouds.
"Roy--
Dilkusha!" Involuntarily her hands went out to him. "If it is true ... you are caring--and if I must not belong to you, there is a way
you can belong to me without trouble for any one. If--if we make pledge of betrothal ... for this one night, if you hold me this one hour ... I am safe. For me that pledge would be sacred--as marriage, because I am still Hindu. Perhaps I am punished for far-away sins--not worthy to be wife and mother; but, by my pledge, I can remain always
Swami Bakht--worshipper of my lord ... a widow in my heart."
And Roy stood before her--motionless; stirred all through by the thrill of her exalted passion, of her strange appeal. The pathos--the nobility of it--swept him a little off his feet. It seemed as if, till to-night, he had scarcely known her. The Eastern in him said, 'Accept.' The Englishman demurred--'Unfair on her.'
"My dear----" he said--"I can refuse you nothing. But--is it right? You
should marry----"
"Don't trouble your mind for me," she murmured; and her eyes never left his face. "If I keep out of purdah, becoming Brahmo Samaj ... perhaps----" She drew in her full lower lip to steady it. "But the marriage of arrangement--I cannot. I have read too many English books, thought too many English thoughts. And I know in here"--one clenched hand smote her breast--"that now I could
not give my body and life to any man, unless heart and mind are given too. And for me.... Must I tell all? It is not only these few weeks. It is years and years...." Her voice broke.
"Aruna! Dearest one----"
He opened his arms to her--and she was on his breast. Close and tenderly he held her, putting a strong constraint on himself lest her ecstasy of surrender should bear down all his defences. To fail her like this was a bitter thing: and as her arms stole up round his neck, he instinctively tightened his hold. So yielding she was, so unsubstantial....
And suddenly a rush of memory wafted him from the moonlit hillside to the drawing-room at Home. It was his mother he held against his breast:--the silken draperies, the clinging arms, the yielding softness, the unyielding courage at the core....
So vivid, so poignant was the lightning gleam of illusion, that when it passed he felt dizzy, as if his body had been swept in the wake of his spirit, a thousand leagues and back: dizzy, yet, in some mysterious fashion, reinforced--assured....
He knew now that his defences would hold....
And Aruna, utterly at rest in his arms, knew it also. He loved her--oh yes, truly--as much as he said and more; but instinct told her there lacked ... just something; something that would have set him--and her--on fire, and perhaps have made renunciation unthinkable. Her acute, instinctive sense of it, hurt like the edge of a knife pressed on her heart; yet just enabled her to bear the unbearable. Had it been ...
that way, to lose him were utter loss. This way--there would be no losing. What she had now, she would keep--whether his bodily presence were with her or no----
Next minute, she dropped from the heights. Fire ran in her veins. His lips were on her forehead.
"The seal of betrothal," he whispered. "My brave Aruna----"
Without a word she put up her face like a child; but it was very woman who yielded her lips to his....
For her, in that supreme moment, the years that were past and the years that were to come seemed gathered into a burnt-offering--laid on his shrine. For her, that long kiss held much of passion--confessed yet transcended; more of sacredness, inexpressible, because it would never come again--with him or any other man. She vowed it silently to her own heart....
Again far up the hillside a jackal laughed; another and another--as if in derision. She shivered; and he loosed his hold, still keeping an arm round her. To-night they were betrothed. He owed her all he had the right to give.
"Your cloak. You'll catch your death...." He stopped short--and flung up his head. "What was that? There--again--in those trees----"
"Some monkey perhaps," she whispered, startled by his look and tone.
"Hush--listen!" His grip tightened and they stood rigidly still, Roy straining every nerve to locate those stealthy sounds. They were almost under the arch; strong mellow light on one side, nethermost darkness on the other. And from all sides the large unheeded night seemed to close in on them--threatening, full of hidden danger.
Presently the sounds came again, unmistakably nearer; faint rustlings and creakings, then a distinct crumbling, as of loosened earth and stones. The shadowy plumes of acacia that crowned the arch stirred perceptibly, though no breeze was abroad:--and not the acacia only. To Aruna's excited fancy it seemed that the loose upper stones of the arch itself moved ever so slightly. But
was it fancy? No--there again----!
And before the truth dawned on Roy, she had pushed him with all her force, so vehemently that he stumbled backward and let go of her.
Before he recovered himself, down crashed two large stones and a shower of small ones--on Aruna, not on him. With a stifled scream she tottered and fell, knocking her head against the slab of rock.
Instantly he was on his knees beside her; stanching the cut on her forehead, binding it with his handkerchief; consumed with rage and concern;--rage at himself and the dastardly intruder,--no monkey, that was certain.
His quick ear caught the stealthy rustling again, lower down; and, yes--unmistakably--a human sound, like a stifled exclamation of dismay.
"Aruna--I
must get at that devil," he whispered. "Does your head feel better? Dare I leave you a moment?"
"Yes--oh yes," she whispered back. "Nothing will harm me. Only take care--please take care."
Hastily he made a pillow of his overcoat and covered her with the cloak; then, stooping down, he kissed her fervently--and was gone. _