"She will not listen--She will not hear! No one ever listens--no one ..."
It was not a cry; it was only a girl's whisper with a note of girlish fear rising above its pain, but it echoed like a reveillé to something which had till then been asleep in Ramanund. Not listen! Was he not there in the dark listening? Was he not ready to help?--God! how young and slender she was down there on her knees thrusting the chaplets she had brought through the fretwork fiercely ...
"Mai Kâli! Mai! Listen! Listen!" The clear sharp voice rang passionately now, echoing through the arches. "What have I done, Mother, to be accursed? Why didst Thou take him from me--my beautiful young husband--for they tell me he was young and beautiful. And now they say that Thou sendest the other for my lover--thy priest! But I will not, Mother, if they kill me for it. Thou wouldst not give thyself to such as he, Kâli, ugly as Thou art--and I am pretty. Far prettier than the other girls who have husbands. Mai Kâli! listen this once--this once only! Kill me now when Thou art killing so many and give me a husband in the next life; or let me go--let me be free--free to choose my own way--my own lover. Mother! Mother! if Thou wouldst only wake!--if Thou wouldst only listen!--if Thou wouldst only look and see how pretty I am!----"
Her voice died away amid that mingled perfume of love and worship, of sex and religion, which seemed to lie heavy on the breath, making it come short....
Truly the gods might sleep, but man waked! There, in the shadow, a man looked and listened till pity and passion set his brain and heart on fire.
The girl had risen to her feet again in her last hopeless appeal, and now stood once more looking upwards at the silent bell, her hands, empty of their chaplets, clenched in angry despair, and a world of baffled life and youth in her childish face.
"She will not listen! She will not wake!" The whisper, with its note of fear in it, ended in a booming clang which forced a vibrating response from the dim arches as Ramanund's nervous hand smote the big bell full and fair. She turned with a low cry, then stood silent till a slow smile came to her face.
Mai Kâli had wakened indeed! She had listened also, and the lover had come....
II
The moonlit nights which had so often shown two ghost-like figures amid the shadows of Kâli's shrine had given place to dark ones. And now, save for a whisper, there was no sign of life beneath the dim arches, since, as a rule, those two--Ramanund and the woman Fate had sent him--shunned the smoky flare of the lamps, and the half-seen watchfulness of that hideous figure within the closed fretwork doors. Yet sometimes little Anunda would insist on their sitting right in the very threshold of the Mother who, she said, would be angry if they distrusted Her. But at other times she would meet her lover, finger to lip, and lead him hastily to the darkest corner lest he should wake the goddess to direful anger at this desecration of Her holy place. Then again, she would laugh recklessly, hang the chaplets she had brought with her round his neck, cense him with sweet matches, and tell him, truthfully, that he was the only god she feared.