The Daughter of Brahma by I. A. R. Wylie (to read list txt) 📕

Professor Heilig laid his hand upon his companion's shoulder. His rugged, resolute face had softened.

"I haf shared my secret with you," he said. "In part it was yours but tell no one of it, unless you would haf them say that you are as mad as an old German Professor. These things are not for the wise and practical."

Hurst roused himself. He looked back at the island-shrine, now glistening in the full daylight, and his face darkened.

"Perhaps one day the wise and practical will find her," he said with a sudden fear.

"Nefer. In an hour she will haf disappeared. Do your clever friends come at midnight or at daybreak to the Temple of the Unknown? No, no, they are too clever for that. They know that the old Sakti rites are no more, and that Kali has ceased to ask blood as offering. So they come in the cool hours of the afternoon, and talk grave nonsense about dead religion and old civilisations and the progress of Christianity, and the dear God knows what else, until the very shadows mock at them. A mystery? Yes, it is a mystery. An empty sanctuary which at midnight belches out its hundreds, and at daybreak lies dead and silent. Yes, I grant it you, I, too, do not understand; but one day, when I am tired of life, I will try and find out." He gave a grim laugh and began to stride towards the broken gateway of the outer Temple. "But then, perhaps, it will be too late, and the sanctuary will haf opened of herself, and your wise friends will haf found their wisdom a poor thing compared with the folly they despised. I hope I shall lif to see it it would be a fit ending." He glanced sideways at his companion. "You do not listen," he observed, but without resentment.

Hurst stopped and pointed to the carved walls of the Gopura. His face was white and hard.

"I was thinking of last night and Those," he said fiercely. "It was a devil's orgy, and these things are a devil's work."

"They offend you?" Heilig shrugged his shoulders. "Yes, they are not pictures for an English drawing-room, I admit; but I could show you worse in the southern temples," he added complacently. "But she is a woman," Hurst broke out with a sudden passion. "Scarcely a woman a child, innocent of all evil and one day she will awake from her dreams and see all this. They will drag her into their mire make her one of themselves."

Heilig made no immediate answer. He walked on rapidly until they reached the brow of the hill, from whence they looked over the vast stretch of undulating jungle and forest-land. There he stopped a moment, playing thoughtfully with his short, carefully trimmed beard.

"And you came up out of that at midnight, alone?" he asked abruptly.

Hurst nodded. In memory he traced his own faltering footsteps, and felt a faint vibration of that mingled fear and expectation which had fought their battle in his child's heart. And suddenly the gulf which separated now from then yawned before him, and he knew that he had become a man and that his passion was a man's passion.

"And they laughed at you?" Heilig went on in the same tone of thoughtful curiosity.

"I did not tell a very plausible story," Hurst answered.

Heilig swung round upon him.

"Does one only belief plausible stories? Is life plausible? Come, if I told your friends that herein this apparent pathless jungle there was a secret road wide enough to allow a whole army to pass from here to Kolruna in an hour, what would they do? They would laugh at me. They would say they had nefer seen the road that they had nefer seen any one building a road and that therefore he cannot exist. But come you shall see him and know the value of wise laughter." He turned abruptly to the left and led the way down the smooth side of the hill to the edge of the jungle. There again he changed his course, keeping always on the outskirts until, without a moment's hesitation, he turned into a narrow, scarcely noticeable opening in the thick undergrowth, which after a few steps broadened out to the width of an ordinary road. He glanced back, but the sudden darkness hid his companion's face.

"Na?" he interrogated triumphantly.

"How long has this existed?" Hurst returned. He spoke with the abruptness of an instinctive alarm.

"A year. I helped make him with my own hands."

"You!"

The German laughed softly.

"Yes, I at midnight and the clever Brahman priest who killed your father, and who has lain in hiding these twelve years, had the plans and gave orders. A wonderful man, Junge! I should like to have known him better."

"And you let this go on without warning us?"

"Warning you? Adi! yes, I warned the authorities, but they were not grateful, the authorities. They think me a little what we call verworren; and, after all, why should I bother? I am a man of science and a foreigner. It is not my affair."

He walked on stolidly, keeping to the centre of the road, which began to wind in slight gradations down the hill-side, and Hurst asked no more. Tongue-tied by his own crowding fancies and upheld by unnatural exaltation, he followed his guide in passive silence through the jungle. Once he put his hand to his head and found it burnt as though with fever, and his temples throbbed. Yet he felt no fatigue, only an insatiable, restless energy. The sense of this awakening power was new to him; it acted like an intoxicant on his racing blood. But whence it had come he did not know. He stood before the mysterious upheaval of his whole being and found no cause, above all no peace.

An hour passed, and then the road ended as it had begun, suddenly, in a narrow pathway, and they passed out of the gloom into the full sunshine. Before them lay the broad, peaceful valley, and beyond Kolruna, glistening like a white gem in the blaze of midday, the hills rose again and rolled sullenly towards the horizon.

David Hurst stretched out his arms in sudden, passionate relief. He threw back his head and drew in deep draughts of the soft air with the joy of a man who has been suffocating in a foul, unwholesome prison.

"My God, how beautiful she was!" he said aloud.

Heilig seated himself, cross-legged, amidst the long dry grass, and, taking out a carefully made-up parcel in tissue paper, began to unknot the string with deliberate fingers.

"Yes, she is beautiful," he said complacently; "perhaps the most beautiful woman in India, and I haf seen many. But it will not last. Like her lotusflowers, she will fade before her time." His parcel was now unpacked, revealing a heap of sandwiches, which he held out hospitably. "Eat!" he said. "I promise you they are good, my sandwiches none of your English flabbinesses. Eat, friend."

Hurst shook his head.

"I am not hungry," he said impatiently.

The Professor chuckled in the midst of a substantial mouthful.

"Ach, you are not hungry? You haf seen a beautiful woman and you haf become immortal? And you despise the coarse Teuton that he eats? Do you think that I, who haf risked my life to see her nightly, do not feel how beautiful she is? Do you not think I haf tears of happiness at the sight of her I And yet I eat. Body and soul go together the dear God made it so and he who denies it is a fool."

Hurst turned with a quick movement of apology.

"Forgive me!" he said. "It is not that but I am full of unrest uneasiness. Don't you understand? it was all a boy's dream to me, and now it has become real." He dropped down into the grass at his companion's feet and lay at full length with his face supported in his hands. "Tell me who is she 1" he asked.

"How should I know? The child of some Brahman whom they have set up as goddess for their own purposes. They are cunning those priests. They know how to pander to their followers."

"And she does she know for what purpose she is being used? Does she believe in her own divinity? in that vile devils' religion?"

Heilig dropped his sandwich, his face scarlet with scorn.

"Vile devils' religion!" he echoed. "Who are you to criticise a faith that dates its birth centuries before Christ, that taught mercy and love and truth, whilst the Jews still clamoured for a tooth for a tooth, an eye for an eye, that recognised one Almighty God whilst your ancestors worshipped wooden idols? Think you of last night's devilry? What is that but the excrescence which grows on every religion? Look at Christ, and look at His churches, with their cant, their empty ritual, their greed, their bloody persecutions, their heartless bigotry; and then, if you dare, criticise a people who haf fallen away from the high teaching of the Vedas! "He broke off suddenly and the indignation died out of his face. "But abof the churches there is Christ," he said gently, "and abof last night's superstitious wickedness there is Sarasvati, the Spirit of Purity, of Unity with God."

Hurst looked up.

"You talk as though you hated the Christian Church," he said, "and yet your greatest friend is a Catholic missionary."

"Father Romney? He teach his followers the simple truths of justice and love and mercy, as they might find them written in their own Vedas, knowing that when they haf learnt their lesson they will be ready for the greater truth perhaps be nearer it than many so-called Christians. At least he does not turn them into hypocritical atheists, such as haunt Herr Eliot's chapel." Heilig gave a short, contemptuous laugh. "And one day he will be excommunicated," he added bitterly.

A silence fell between the two men. Heilig returned to his sandwich and Hurst lay very quiet, with his face hidden in his hands. Presently he looked up. The black, wavy hair hung disordered over his brows and a feverish fire burnt in his eyes and sallow cheeks.

"And the end what will it be?" he asked hoarsely.

"For her? I do not know, but it will come swift and sudden. Goddesses die not nor grow old they vanish, and no man sees them more."

"My God! You mean they will kill her?"

Heilig shrugged his shoulders.

"If it suited them, why not?"

"And we can do nothing?"

"Nothing. I am a foreigner and haf no right to interfere. You are bound by your conventions, your laws, your very ideals. You cannot free others when you are yourself not free." He gathered his remaining sandwiches together and put them carefully into his pocket. "Come." he said. "It is late, and we haf far to go."

In silence they set off across the burnt and parched fields towards Kolruna. On either hand were the dreaded signs of coming famine, and Heilig nodded significantly.

"Soon there will be trouble," he said.

It was late afternoon before they reached the white bungalow on the outskirts of the town, and Hurst, responding to the Professor's invitation, followed him through the pleasant garden and into the library. A writing-table, a few chairs, and a small upright piano constituted the furniture, whilst the whitewashed walls were unadorned save for the engravings of Bismarck and Wagner. Father Romney, who had been preparing a curious meal of tea and the inevitable sandwiches, looked up as they entered and uttered an exclamation of intense relief.

"I am glad you have come," he said. "I was growing anxious about you. There has been a peculiar unrest in the native