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

"We can send an attendant afterwards to fetch it," Hurst said. Some one touched him on the shoulder and he rose and quickly left the box. Outside in the empty couloir Professor Heilig faced him.

"I did not know you were in England," Hurst began, but his proffered hand was impatiently ignored.

"I only arrived a few hours ago. At your club they told me I should most probably find you here, and I wanted to arrange a meeting with you at once. I was waiting for you to come out of that rabbit-hutch when an excited female arrived with this letter for you, and I promised to see that you got it without delay. You had better look at it before you go into ecstasies over me good news rarely comes so out of breath."

Hurst took the letter and opened it. His dark face stiffened as he read, and, without a word, he turned and went back into the box.

"Sarasvati," he said, in an undertone, "we must go home at once. The child--"

"Is dead," she interrupted. "I know."

She rose. Her cowering weakness had gone. Erect, the slender figure in the gold-embroidered sew drawn to its full height, her dark head lifted in an attitude of haughty aloofness, she gazed steadfastly into the

93 great dimly lit theatre. The singer had just appeared before the curtain to receive the plaudits of her audience and a fat hand wafted a kiss in the direction of the crowded box. A smile of infinite contempt hovered round the Hindu woman's curved lips, then, with a last glance which swept the whole theatre, she turned and followed her husband into the lighted corridor.

THAT night David Hurst did not sleep. A futile attempt to lose himself in that merciful oblivion had driven him back to his library, where a feeble fire-light alone broke through the darkness. He had drawn up his chair, and, against the sullen red background, memory marshalled the grey pageant of his life. Distinct, yet linked together by an invisible chain of cause and effect, the pictures represented to him a tragedy not of circumstance but of character. He saw himself as child, now lying on the long grasses weaving his dreams into the dying Indian sunset, now grasping at visible success with weak, desperate hands. He saw himself, as boy, now beating his tortured brains against the profession which tradition had ordained, now hungering after the world of imagination which he had lost. He saw himself as man, his challenge uttered, stepping out on the lonely path of his own will. Whither had it led him? He had lived according to his own character, and the disaster that followed was as inevitable as it was complete. The inevitableness crushed him. "A house divided against itself." The words occurred to him with a painful persistence, and he knew that they described him and prophesied the end.

His challenge to the world had been useless, for his greater enemy lay behind the locked door of his own soul, where two forces opposed one another in silent daily conflict. To his distraught fancy two figures represented them, the vague shadow of the father he had never known, but whose confession was engraved on his memory, and on the other side his mother, a clear definite personification of a boundless ambition and inexhaustible energy. And of these two he was the outcome, the inheritor. Strength coupled with weakness, the dreamer with the man of action what wonder that such a union had failed! For David Hurst looked failure in the face. He had lost the one woman who might have bridged the cleft in his own nature, and with her the place for which he had striven doggedly, tenaciously. The dreams remained faded unreal flowers of fancy, whose fragrance had been destroyed in the heat of battle. He leant forward with his face buried in his hands, striving to animate them with something of their first beautiful life; but a pale ghost, clasping the body of a dead child in its feeble arms, arose before his mental vision as though in piteous mockery.

Outside the rain beat with hard fingers against the window-panes, a lump of coal crashed down into the grate, startling him from his painful introspection. He looked up and saw that he was no longer alone. Half lost against the background of shadows, Sarasvati stood and watched him. She was fully dressed; her black hair lay smooth on the small shapely head which was thrown back slightly so that her heavily-lashed eyes seemed closed, and her hands lay crossed on her breast. So noiselessly had been her entrance, so strange, almost sinister was her attitude, that for a moment Hurst sat motionless, watching her with the petrified fascination of a man who sees his dreams take shape before him. And in that brief space of time he recalled her as he had first seen her asleep amidst her lotus-flowers with the golden figure of the god towering over her in hideous majesty; and, as she came towards him, glidingly, with scarce perceptible steps, he saw her again in that wondrous moment of awakening when she had come to him with the one complete surrender of herself.

"Sarasvati!" he exclaimed under his breath. Swept back on the tide of memory, he realised the ruin which had been wrought. He sprang to his feet, his arms outstretched in an impulsive, passionate pity; but something in her wan face checked him. "Sarasvati?" he repeated with a note of interrogation.

She laid her hands on his shoulders, and for a moment they looked each other steadily in the eyes. The golden sunshine which had once lit up the pure glory of her beauty was changed to the dull reflection of the fire-light; the beauty had gone, and the earthforgetting love become a tragic, tearless recognition of a mutual sorrow.

"My lord and God!" she said solemnly.

He knew then that she too had remembered. He held her to him, instinctively seeking to shield her from some invisible danger, but she released herself with a quiet decision.

"I have come to say good-night to you and to my son," she said.

"Now?" he questioned, painfully moved.

"I cannot sleep until I have said good night," she answered tonelessly. Without protest he lit a candle, and led the way out of the room and across the corridor. At the closed door which shut in their dead child, he turned as though to support her, but she drew back with a slight restraining gesture.

"I will go alone." She took the candle from his hand, and he opened the door for her to through.

By the dim flickering light he saw the cradle amidst the walls of white heavy smelling flowers; he saw Sarasvati take her stand at the foot and gaze down on the pitiful thing that had been her child. Then, moved by a sudden sense of his own unfitness, he closed the door and stood alone in the profound darkness of the passage. Five minutes passed. The door opened again and she passed out. He saw no change in her quiet face, save that its expression of solemn purpose seemed to have deepened, and in silence he accompanied her to the foot of the stairs. There she turned, and once more her thin hands rested on his shoulder.

"Good night," she said softly, and in her own tongue. "May thy God and my God watch over thee and keep thee, my beloved."

He bent his head, and he felt her lips touch him. The impulsive desire to shield, to enclose her in the shelter of love had given place to an awe-struck recognition of a great change. Not the daughter of Brahma, the woman-child of mysticism and dreams, nor yet the broken cowed product of his world's system stood before him, but a being whom he had never known, an aloof and inscrutable spirit. And suddenly the great evil he had done her took shape before him, and a pent-up longing for absolution broke from his compressed lips.

"Forgive me!" he said hoarsely.

And again she kissed him.

"I have forgiven."

She passed on up the stairs, rising in her trailing garments like some ghost into the deeper shadows, and he watched her until a bend in the staircase hid her from him. Then he felt his way back to his place before the dying fire and there, as though released from some evil spell, he slept dreamlessly until daybreak. He was aroused then by the entrance of the nurse. Instantly, fully awake, he saw by her expression that her unusual appearance in his room was caused by some fresh trouble. She was white to the lips, and for the first moment incapable of speech. Possessed by a swift prescience of misfortune, he sprang to his feet.

"What has happened?" he demanded roughly.

His peremptory tone recalled her to some measure of calm.

"I beg your pardon, Sir David -" she stammered. "I wouldn't have ventured, but we thought you might know Lady Hurst is missing--"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, Sir David, that this morning we found her bed empty it had not even been slept in and she is nowhere in the house. We have looked everywhere and we were afraid her ladyship has been in great trouble--"

Hurst pushed the frightened woman on one side and hurried out of the room. He knew now that, whatever disaster had befallen, it had not come upon him without warning. It had hung heavy in the atmosphere he had seen it written on Sarasvati's face, he had felt its dark force gathering about him, slowly, invidiously, yet with all the inevitableness of Fate. Downstairs he was met by Heilig. Early as it was, the Professor's appearance caused him no surprise. He was vaguely aware that the warning had first become manifest with Heilig 's sudden reentry into his life the day before, and that now he belonged essentially to the crisis. For a moment the two men stared at each other with a reasonless antagonism. Then Heilig made a curt gesture of apology.

"I regret to haf come upon you like this," he said, "but I had to see you at once. If I had had my own way, I would have told you last night--"

"I cannot listen not now," Hurst interrupted sternly. "My son is dead."

"I know."

"That's not all, Sarasvati, my wife--"

"I know that too."

Hurst, with his hand on the telephone, swung round.

"You know? How do you know?" he demanded.

"I guessed at the possibility yesterday, when I saw her face. I knew for certain when I heard the child had died. Rama Pal was in the theatre last night."

"Well? For God's sake, Heilig, tell me what you know what you suspect. Every minute is precious."

"My young friend, do you think I haf travelled a few thousand miles to warn you, and do not know how precious time is? But I haf come too late, and now we must act swiftly it is true, but not recklessly. Leave that telephone. It cannot help us."

Hurst led the way into his wife's sitting-room, and there faced about with a hard- won calm.

"At least tell me where Sarasvati is," he said. "That is all that matters just now."

"By this time