"They are true for all that. She hath bewitched thee!"
They stood for a moment face to face, so like each other in their anger and dread. Then the strong man quailed, and fled before her words and his own thoughts. He was no wiser than his fellows, for all the soft heart that betrayed him into progress; perhaps less so, since the superstitions of his fathers enslaved his mind without controlling his affections. He wandered into the fields once more, where the rows of blossoming mustard sown among the wheat showed like a yellow sea against the horizon, but close at hand broke the green gloom of the earing corn in long, curling waves crested with gold--a sight dear to husbandmen's eyes! Yet it brought no comfort to the dull ache in Gunesh's heart, which drove him to finish work with the first excuse of waning light.
The child was at least no worse. Perhaps the warmth had soothed its pain; perhaps the feeble life was sinking silently; but the ignorant, loving eyes that watched it knew not whether the stillness made for sleep or death.
Save for Gunesh Chund and his wife the house was empty, for his mother had sought the relief of words with a neighbouring crony.
"Veru," said Gunesh in a whisper, as if the darkening walls had ears, "dost think the doctor might do her good? The mother will not have him here--mayhap she is right--but I could take the child to him."
"O husband!" Brought face to face with decision, the woman shrank from action. "I know not, and the mother would be so angry."
But the slower mind and warmer heart had been at work on the problem, and ciphered it out once and for all.
"She need never know. Sit within, silent, as if thou hadst it still, should she return. I shall not be long; so give the child to me."
Half fearful, half pleased at his decision, the mother shifted her burden to his awkward arms. How small, how light it seemed, hidden away in the folds of his flowing plaid-like shawl, as he passed through the twilight alleys on his way to the camping-ground where, in the mud caravanserai, the travelling vaccinator was to be found! Neighbours, resting after the day's labour, called to him in various greeting, and he paused to reply with dull patience, conscious always of the unseen burden near his heart. So had he carried the firstling lamb on the night when Nihâli was born. How it had struggled to escape, and sucked at his restraining hand in fierce desire for life! A fear lest the child's quiet was death made him turn aside more than once into a darker corner to look and listen.
Still with the same dull patience he sat down before the vacant room in the serai to await the vaccinator's return; for patience and doggedness are the peasant farmer's unfailing inheritance, not to be reft from him by tyrants or strangers. Some camel-drivers, newly arrived, were cooking their food at a blazing wood-fire in the open, whence the flames threw long shadows, distorted out of all human semblance, into the far corners of the court-yard, where a circle of kneeling camels browsed upon a pile of green branches. Familiar sights and sounds to Gunesh's eyes and ears, yet to-night, with that strange burden near his heart, seeming out of place and unexpected.