"I saw its eyes," she gasped, still straining the child to her ample bosom, when Gurditta, brought thither by Maya's screams of "Snake! snake!" stood beside her, his breath coming fast, his manliness stirred to its depths.
Maya saw the danger swiftly. "Give him to me," she clamoured. "O husband, make her give him to me. She would kill him if she could. She put it there--I saw her put it there--I swear it."
Saraswati turned on her in calm contempt. "Thou liest, O Maya; since Time began, spirit of deceit and mother of illusion. Thou didst not see me put it there."
Then, with the same dignity, she turned to the man.
"Master! Take the child. He is safe. This much is true, I saved him."
That night, when the moon still shone in the cloudless sky, Saraswati, her veil wrapped closely round her, stole softly from the homestead. Past the resting oxen, out among the serried battalions of maize and millet, where the tall sheaves, lying prone on the ground, looked like the bodies of those who had fallen in the day's fight; down on the sun-cracked borders of the tank, whence the water was sinking swiftly, now the rain had ceased; by the ghostly peepul trees, shorn of their branches which the camels love, and looking weird and human with great arms stretched skywards; so on to the burning ghât beyond, with its little cones of mud marking the spot of each funeral pyre, and the twinkling lights set here and there by pious survivors. Saraswati drew her veil tighter and sped faster as she passed through the more recent ashes, as yet uncovered, but swept into little heaps; and there--horrible sight!--still scattered, with the uncalcined bones gleaming in the moonlight, and a faint line of smoke still circling upwards, lay the most recent of all. That must be old Anant Ram, the khuttri (merchant) who had died that morning: an evil man, come to his end.
She was trembling ere she reached the hut where Dhun Devi, the wise woman, kept watch and ward over the ashes. It was a miserable shanty, where she found the old woman asleep before a large iron pot, supported on a trivet. Beneath it some cowdung cakes smouldered slowly, yet not so slowly but that every now and again a blood-red bubble showed on the contents of the pot. A flaring oil-lamp, filched, doubtless, from those outside, stood in a smoke-blackened niche, and by its light you could see festoons of dank, blood-red drapery clinging, to a rope, while, with a drip, drip, drip, something fell upon the floor--something which ran in rills right out to the moonlight, and, sinking into the sand, stained it blood-red; a ghastly setting to the wise woman's crouching figure, even though Saraswati knew that Mai Dhunnu was engaged in no more nefarious occupation than dyeing the webs of her ignorant neighbours with madder.
The old crone stood up hastily, then sank to her low stool again when she had peered into her visitor's face. "Thou wilt not tell," she whispered in a hoarse croak, which, coming in reality from a throat affection, vastly enhanced her claims to wisdom in the eyes of the villagers. "Thou art of the old style; not like these apes of to-day, with their dog-eared books and their dyes which fade before a January sun." The chuckle she gave suited her surroundings well; so did the claw-like hand she laid suddenly on Saraswati's firm arm. "Well, daughter! Hast plucked up courage? Hast learnt to trust the wisdom of old Dhun Devi?"
Saraswati shook her head. "Thou must find other wisdom for me, mother," she said briefly. "Such is not for me."
"Obstinate! I tell thee 'tis the glamour of the child."