"But, if I had been determined before, ten times more now was I resolved never to yield. No cowardly surrender could bring me back my child. The boy was dead, and what was done could not be undone, for the will of God is eternal.
"That very night I visited the Ganapati, and in the frenzy of my bitter grief and righteous wrath I swore, with clenched fist shaken before his twinkling eyeballs, that I would break him into pieces, throw the blue diamonds into a fire of charcoal, and myself die, rather than restore him to the infidels who had destroyed my happiness and my home.
"The next blow fell swifter than ever. Only four days had passed when the bereaved mother, who had refused to be consoled for the death of her only child, was found drowned at the bottom of the well in the harem garden. The household was plunged in lamentation over her pitiful act of self-destruction, and now I became vaguely conscious that friends and neighbours, as well as servants, were looking at me askance, and were beginning to shun my presence as if a curse had fallen upon my head.
"It was at the funeral ceremonies of my wife that I was first made pointedly to feel that there rested over me the suspicion of some terrible crime that had drawn down the special wrath of Allah. Standing in isolation, at a time when my sorrowing heart yearned for brotherly comfort, I realized that already I was an outcast from among my own people, one whom they deemed to be marked by heaven for special vengeance, a moral leper, a menace to the community, to be shunned for all time by his fellow men.
"And there and then I made up my mind to flee secretly to another country, sending later for my surviving wife and children, abandoning all my other possessions in the shape of land and cattle and accumulated stores, but clinging to the blue diamonds which would yet bring me riches out of all proportion to those of which fate was robbing me at the present time.
"For the third and final warning had passed, although no one but myself had thought of my wife's death otherwise than as a case of grief-demented suicide.
"But, as she had lain on her bier, I had looked secretly, and had found the brand of the bull on her shoulder blade, just as she had found it on that of her murdered boy. Allah alone knows how this last crime was wrought—how access to the women's quarters had been gained, and how the fatal seal of Siva had been impressed upon her flesh before she had been flung into the well.
"To me has this ever remained a mystery of mysteries.
"So the three warnings had been delivered—the burning of my crops, the slaying of my child, the drowning of my wife. Unless by the morrow I made signs of submission by taking the road to Ferishtapur, there to surrender the Ganapati, it would assuredly be upon myself that the sword of fate would next descend.
"That very night of the funeral, after securely barricading the outer gates of the house, I locked myself in the treasure chamber. Not a servant had remained in the home upon which the curse of God had descended; even the two women slaves had fled in the dusk of the evening, gone, I knew not whither, and now I little cared. My surviving wife and children, tiny infants, a girl and a boy, were asleep in an inner room; I had glanced at their slumbering forms when passing to the corridor that led to the secret doorway.