III
But Arunodaya, careless of his minister, gave himself up a willing captive to the witchery of his Widyádharí wife. And for a time, her task was very easy. For owing to his inexperience, he resembled a child, and every woman was to him an illusion, and a mystery, so that he would have sunk under the spell, even had it been less potent than it actually was. And Makarandiká was as it were his dikshá,[38] incarnate in a form of more than mortal fascination: and like a priestess she took him by the hand and led him into the garbha[39] of that strange temple built not of stone, but of the materials of elementary infatuation, and made him perform, so to say, a pradakshina round the image of the divinity[40] of which she was herself a bewildering and irresistible incarnation. And lost in the adoration of a neophyte, he lay like a drunken bee in a lotus-cup, rolling in honey, and forgetting utterly not only his kingdom and its affairs, but everything else in the three worlds.
And yet, strange! there lay all the while lurking in the recesses of his soul a vague misgiving, mixed with a faint and unintelligible dissatisfaction, resembling a taste of something bitter in the draught of his infatuation, and an ingredient that qualified and just prevented his gratification from reaching its extreme degree, of ecstasy without alloy. And yet he hardly dared to acknowledge it, even to himself, accusing himself of ingratitude and treachery, and saying to his own soul: How is it possible to requite such infinite affection, and devotion, and service, and beauty, by returning nothing in exchange for it all but suspicion, and distrust, and doubt? For even if she were not the very wife of my former birth, what could I possibly wish for, more? And yet, it is very strange. For notwithstanding all she does, she does not seem to reach and satisfy the craving for recognition in my heart, which obstinately refuses to corroborate her asseverations: nor do I ever feel that confidence and certainty, arising from the depths of recollection, which, if she really were my former wife, surely I ought to feel. Is it my fault, or hers? Alas! instead of meeting her half-way, I am oppressed with what is very nearly disappointment, and feel almost like a dupe, that have allowed myself to fall into the snare of beauty, so as to yield to another what should belong to one alone. Little indeed would she have to complain of in the warmth of my return, had she just that one thing that she lacks, the stamp of genuine priority: for then she would get in full the very thing I long to give her.
Aye! I am as it were dying to do, the thing I cannot do, and divided from supreme bliss by a partition composed of the most exasperating inability to know for certain, what all the time may after all be true. For if she is only playing a part not really hers, how in the world did she discover the way to take me in, by exhibiting a knowledge of those very same dim vestiges of recollection which I have never told to anyone but my own prime minister? And very sure I am, that it was not he who told her, since he almost lost his reason with astonishment, and admiration that was mixed with envy and annoyance, when her beauty struck him dumb. So after all, perhaps I am mistaken, and only torturing myself for nothing. Out on me, if what she says be really true! for then indeed I deserve something even worse than death, for treating her with such monstrous ungenerosity. Can it be that her memory is truer and stronger, putting mine, for its fidelity, to utter shame? Or why, again, should I struggle any longer against conviction, and persevere in longing for what I have not got? Who knows whether even if I actually got it, I should be any better off than I actually am? Could the very wife of my former birth be a better wife than this? Is not this wife just as good as any wife could ever be? Does she not as it were combine the virtues of even a hundred wives? Yet if she be not the true, can it be that the other is even now upbraiding me, somehow, somewhere, for falling with such inconstancy straight into another's snares, and wasting on a stranger the love that belongs to her? Alas! alas! Why did the Creator make my memory too strong for blank oblivion, and yet so feeble as to leave me without a proof, and plunge me in such perplexity in this matter of a wife?