[CHAPTER XLIX]
SEEN IN THE LIGHT OF MORNING
When the rajah awoke the following morning he was conscious of a curious novelty, not only in the world about him, but in his own relations towards it. Deep down in his heart was a tremulous feeling of anxiety and incertitude that might presently become pain; but, for the moment, and floating buoyantly on the surface of his being, there was a sense of completeness and satisfaction such as he had never known before.
The first thought—rapturous as the saint's vision of Paradise—which leapt to his heart was that Grace was under his roof. His roof—he repeated the words with a pleasant emphasis on the pronoun, for it had brought him back to the revelation of the previous night.
His—yes, his—in a new sense. The State—the city—the palace—the servants who had attended upon him with such marvellous fidelity—the councillors, by whom he had been inducted into the duties of his position, and to whose wisdom and disinterestedness he owed it that he had been able to leave the task of government, which had become irksome to him, and to rescue and bring back in triumph the English girl, so much dearer to him than life—all these were his! His father—how warmly his heart thrilled to the name!—the great man, who up to this had been an enigma to him—a mysterious and disturbing element in his life—had given them to him: had prepared many of them for him most likely, with a view to the difficulties and dangers that he foresaw would beset him. This was the entrancing thought which glorified that strange awakening. The sensation was as that of one who steps out of a wilderness into a well-ordered home.
True the story was somewhat of a tangle to him still. There had been a moment—an awful moment—during its perusal when the blood had rushed like fire to his brain, and he had held back his breath in terror of what he might have to know. But it had passed. Byrajee Pirtha Raj was no stranger to him. Through his works; through the strange yet always noble inspirations that had surged to his soul when he was, as he still firmly believed, holding commune with him; through the impression of himself he had left upon his friends and contemporaries, all of whom looked upon him as something more than a man, the young rajah had learned to know his father; and his mother's story, which, through all its penitence and self-accusation, hinted dimly at a great wrong done to her, did not stagger him, as it might otherwise have done. Wrong there had been, and grievous mistake and misconception; but he was passionately convinced that his father had meant no evil. To him the marriage-rite, whatever it had been, through which he had knit the fortunes of the woman he loved to his own, had been true and holy and perfect.
So Tom said to himself, and it may be as well to say here that his instincts were true. His mother had not told, and, indeed, being young then to the ways of the world, she did not herself understand all the circumstances that had led up to the step which she afterwards so bitterly deplored. As a fact, partly through her own folly and inexperience, and partly through the mischievous devices of one of her friends, she had been thrown, after that memorable ball, into an extremely compromising situation, and it was no less to shield her honour than to gratify his own ardent love that her chivalrous cousin had proposed the hasty marriage and carried it through. He honestly believed then that her father, when he came to know everything, would give to their union joyfully the seal of his approval.
He was, as we know, undeceived; and it was to save her from the pain of a final breach with her race and nation that he had bowed silently to her decision to leave him. It was for her sake that he had not disputed the validity of her marriage with Captain Gregory. For her sake—ah! was it for her sake, or was it for the sake of Gumilcund, of India, of the high policy which he so consistently and courageously pursued—that he had allowed his son and successor to grow up away from him and in a distant land? This, with many another secret which Tom would have given everything he possessed to know, had died with the dead rajah. But his son knew enough to give to his life a new spring of gladness—a new soul of order. For now the war of contending impulses that had bewildered him was over. His present grew naturally out of his past, and formed, in its turn, a fitting prelude to the deeper harmonies of the future.
It was very early. The dawn was just breaking in the eastern heavens. Through the pierced marble lattices came the golden light, tracing, with its airy pencil, soft patterns of light and shade on the roof and wall. The morning air, burdened with delicate odours of tropical lilies and Cape jessamine and heliotrope and late-flowering roses, stole in rejoicingly. Then came sounds of awakening in the palace. The chowkedars, or night-watchmen, cried out to one another, and gave up their posts to the bearers and chuprassies. The royal peacock, perched on the garden wall, shook out his jewelled fan to the sun and screamed in discordant tones his welcome to the morning. Innumerable doves, of old time pensioners of the palace, swept past the marble lattices, with a whirr and flutter of soft grey wings, to take toll from the heaps of yellow grain piled up in the outer court. The stir of the city, the lowing of kine, the rumble of wheels, the cries of those who bought and sold, the ring of metal, wrought painfully into forms of use and beauty, the monotonous beat of hammers—these, with the thousand indistinguishable sounds of a multitude in busy movement, fell, softened by distance, on the young rajah's ears. His heart swelled as he listened, and his eyes were dim with a sudden rush of tears. All the strangeness, all the wonder, all the curious tangle of conflicting passions and fates had brought him hither—he, in his weakness and inexperience—to be the ruler of this people. Yes; and the strangest part of it was that he felt in himself a fitness for the work he was called upon to do.