He did not hear the latter sentence. Accustomed in all things to accept his mother's fiat, he was lost in trying to trace the likeness to himself, and, to aid his efforts, drew a reflective forefinger over the featureless face, feeling, as he did so, that strange thrill at his heart again. Suddenly, as he neared the mouth, the lips trembled and a little red tongue shot swiftly on his finger-tip. He burst into a great roar of delighted laughter.
"Ho! ho! Look, mother, look!"
"Didst never see a child suck before, O Gunesh Chund, lumberdar?"[[1]] retorted the old woman, crossly, as she tucked the baby away again. He felt abashed, but the laughter had left him at peace with all mankind.
"And Veru? How is she?"
This was too much. The stern old lady rose to her full height and faced him. Her grey hair, disordered by the night's watching, escaped from the close folds of her veil, and the quilt slipping from her showed her tall, erect as a girl. She threw out her right hand in declamation:
"Thou art no better than a woman thyself, O Gunesh! To ask after Veru, the wife of disgrace! Thou shouldst not have thought of her. Were it not better she were dead? Ungrateful! wicked! For she must be wicked to frustrate my prayers and alms. Lo, have I not fulfilled her every wish these nine months past? And now 'tis 'How is Veru?' forsooth, and no thought of the mother who has slaved in vain. But this is an end. She is accursed, and thou must bring a new wife to the hearth if thou wouldst not lose thine own soul, and the soul of those who begat thee. Leave Veru her girl, and be kind to her, if thou art a ninny. There are other women in the world who can bear sons."
As Gunesh crept out of the house feeling small, despite his great height, he told himself it was only what he had expected. For all that, his mother might have waited a day or two ere speaking of the new wife, within Veru's hearing also. God send she had been asleep after her long suffering!
He was so dispirited that he did not care to face the dharmsala with its congregation of elders ready to condole, and its younger men inclined to sneer. So he gave up his morning pipe, and carried the firstling to take possession of the lambing fold. As he walked along in the sunshine, as he had walked in the shadow, with it in his arms, he felt its little tongue sucking at his hand, and it seemed to hurt him, body and soul.
II.
The forty days of seclusion being over, Veru, in her finest clothes, sat cross-legged on a string bed ready to receive company. The court-yard had been freshly swept, the brass cooking-vessels scoured and set in a row against the mud wall, where the sun smote them into retaliating rays. A few flat baskets of sweets, covered with penny-halfpenny Manchester pocket-handkerchiefs printed in the semblance of a pack of cards, stood ready for the expected guests, and Gunesh Chund's mother had been busy all the morning making a sort of furmenty in honour of the occasion; for, though she considered her labour thrown away on the birth of a girl, she would not for the world have omitted a single ceremony, and so have given colour to outside condolence. Veru herself was a delicate-looking, pretty woman of about six-and-twenty, with a broad forehead, and a thin-lipped, sensitive mouth--both of which characteristics were more blemishes than beauties in the opinion of her neighbours. Her chief defect, however, in the eyes of the stalwart, open-hearted, shrill-voiced, village women lay in a certain refined reserve, which they set down to conceit born of her pretensions to scholarship--though how any woman could be so wrong-minded as to usurp man's estate by learning to read and write passed their simple understanding. But Veru, who had lived with a rich uncle during her girlhood, had shared her cousin's desultory visits to a mission school for a year or two, and returned to her parents and marriage with a book in which she could read glibly, and a reputation for writing. She could also knit many-hued comforters in brioche stitch, and darn strips of net in divers patterns--appalling and almost incredible culture, viewed with disfavour by all save Gunesh, who was simple enough to admire it; probably because she was woman enough to admire him immensely.