“—I call upon Mahadeo, the most holy, the destroyer, to smite me with the black leprosy in the sight of all men, and that within three moons. May I die in torture, and by piecemeal. May I be abhorrent alike to men and gods, and after death, may I hang by my feet for one thousand years above a fire of chaff.”
Durga Pershad echoed this hideous sentence with recovered composure. Truly, it was a vast relief to find that his end was not yet—his life in no present danger.
Here was a weird and ghostly scene! The dark, damp temple, at dead of night, the crowd of stern, accusing countenances, lit up by flashes of torchlight, the austere high-priest in his robe of office, and the haggard culprit, the central figure, glaring defiance, with his uplifted hand upon the cold wet stone! There seemed to the wretched accused some accursed power in this holy image; the stone clung tenaciously to his trembling flesh, and he was sensible of an awful, death-like chill that penetrated to the very marrow of his bones.
In a few minutes the lights were extinguished, the wolfish-faced crowd had melted away, and Durga Pershad found himself alone. He stumbled out of the shrine, and by the cold, keen starlight descried the edge of a large tank, which was surrounded by temples. He had never visited the place of his own free will, but he recognized it from description as undoubtedly the most holy Gola, where two hundred thousand pilgrims flocked to worship once a year.
At daybreak he made his way to the bazaar, and there sold a silver chain,—for he had no money. It might be imagination, but he believed that people looked upon him with suspicious eyes. Three days later, he was at home once more. He told no one that he had been kidnapped—no, not even his mother or his wife.
By the end of a month, Durga Pershad had become an altered man. He looked wofully lean and haggard, he scarcely ate, slept, or smoked, and appeared dreadfully depressed. He now cared nought for taxes, rents, or crops, and complained of a strange numbness in his limbs. Much to the surprise of his household, he undertook a pilgrimage to Hurdwar, the source of the Ganges (some one had suggested most holy Gola—some one ignorant of Durga’s enforced expedition). He had barely returned from Hurdwar when, as if possessed by a fever of piety, he set forth for Badrinath, in the Himalayas. After that long and arduous journey, he passed rapidly down to Benares. From thence, concluding an absence of four months, he returned finally to Haru, and shut himself up within his own courtyard and in his own house, refusing to see even his nearest of kin. And now it began to be whispered about from ear to ear that Durga Pershad, the son of Govindoo Pershad, was smitten with the kôrh—or black leprosy.
Yes, the grasp of that terrible disease was upon him. His features altered, thickened, and took the fatal and unmistakable leonine look. In a surprisingly short time he had lost the fingers of both hands. To show himself abroad would simply be to proclaim his guilt, and the judgment of Mahadeo—whose wrath he had invoked. For weeks and weeks he successfully evaded his enemies, fortified within his own house, and protected by his wife and mother, whose shrill tongues garrisoned it effectually.
When it became known that the hours of Durga Pershad were numbered, a body of the elders, led by the village priest, came and sternly demanded an entrance. They would take no denial. After frantic clamour and frenzied resistance, they gained admittance—admittance to the very presence of the leper, who lay in a darkened room, huddled up on a string bed.
“Behold,” cried the priest in a sonorous voice, “the finger of Mahadeo, and the punishment of the slayer of a child! Speak, ere your tongue rot away, and declare unto us what befell the boy at thy hands, O Durga Pershad, leper!”