"Silence!" cried Narayan Chand fussily. "Govind Sahai, your name is first for vivâ. Come up, Govind Sahai, Kyasth." Then, as the dull yet anxious face passed him, he whispered: "Now for value of light literature. You are best at colloquial, my pupil, so courage, and remember Amor Vincit Omnia and such like things."
Amor Vincit Omnia! The boy's last chance fled before those words. When the ordeal was over, he turned back to his place mechanically. As he passed the master-ji once more, he read his fate in the disappointed face raised to his, then in the confident smile of the boy succeeding him, finally in the surprised nudging of the whole class. Something seemed to snap in his brain; he paused, and, facing the examiners, raised his hand. The rush of thought was too much for him at first; then he broke silence in a gentle, deprecating voice: "If you will be kind enough to excuse me, Sirs, I will beg leave to retire. The exigencies of the case forbid explanation, but this much is admitted--that Amor vincit Omnia."
"That boy speaks better English than I thought for," said one examiner to the other, when the leave had been granted. "Give him five marks more; he's failed, of course, but it's as well to be just."
When Govind reached home Nihâli's arms were empty. There is no need to say more. It was an unnecessary infant to all save those two.
"You have failed, failed badly, my poor pupil, owing, doubtless, to domestic bereavement," said the master-ji, when he called a week or two later full of vexed sympathy. "Such circumstances point to special privilege of entering again next year, for which we will apply. And then, Govind, there must be no killing of birds with one stone. There must be no complicated states of mind, confusing idiom."
But Govind Sahai, Kyasth, did not avail himself of the permission duly given, as the pundit-ji put it, "in consideration of the strictly nonregulation death of his infant at a premature age."
The old grandfather, whose small life-pension had been the prop of the household, died of autumnal fever, and during the ensuing winter the result of his failure to win the scholarship came home to Govind with depressing force, since even from that poor ten rupees a month something might have been spared to stand between those three fond women and the grindstone, that last resort of poverty. Then Nihâli's mother, coming over unexpectedly and finding her daughter at the mill, carried her off in a huff. This time Govind said nothing; the spirit had gone out of him, and for the girl's own sake he gave in to custom. He worked very hard, but as the winter advanced his shoulders seemed to grow narrower and narrower, and the teasing cough became louder. Good food, care, and rest might have done something perhaps; only perhaps, for there is not much to be done when the candle of life is alight at both ends, except to put it out. That is what happened one April morning when the bougainvillea round the arched verandah of the library looked like a crimson drapery. He used to go there every morning before school hours, for the memory of his failure in vivâ voce rankled keenly, and he was possessed by a curious determination to prove Master Narayan Chand wrong in attributing it to Govind's unwise selection of books. So, secure at those hours from interruption, he used to sit and study the idiom of light literature.
"Thou art not fit to go," said his mother tearfully one morning after the boy had been kept awake all night by cough and fever.
"Reading will not hurt me, amma jan," he replied, "and the examination is next month."
They found him two hours afterwards seated at the desk before the ledger, his head resting on a novel he had just been entering in the register. A horrible stain of blood from the blood-vessel he had ruptured blotted the page, but through it you could still see, in his bold handwriting: