It was intolerable that this woman with her yearly, endless babies should come and crow over the childless hearth. Yet she was right; and again the old sickening sense of failure replaced the flash of indignant forgetfulness.
"Heed not my food, daughter," came the cheerful contented old voice. "I can cook mine own and Shivo must need his after the day's toil. If thou take it to him at the threshing-floor 'twill save time; when hands are few the minutes are as jewels and it grows dark already. Thou wilt need a cresset for safety from the snakes."
Once more the woman winced. That was true also; yet had she been doing her duty and bringing sons to the hearth it would not have been so, for the glory of coming motherhood would have driven the serpents from her path.[[35]]
She paused at the doorstep to give a backward glance, to see the old man already at his woman's work, and her heart smote her again. Was it seemly work for the most learned man in the village who had taught his son to be so good, so kind? Yet Shivo of himself would never say the word, neither would the old man. That was the worst of it; for it would have been easier to have kicked against the pricks.
She passed swiftly to the fields, the brass platter--glittering under the flicker of the cresset and piled with dough cakes and a green leaf of curds--poised gracefully on her right palm, the brass lotah of drinking water hanging from her left hand, the heavy folds of her gold and madder draperies swaying as she walked. It was not yet quite dark. A streak of red light lingered in the horizon, though overhead the stars began to twinkle, matched in the dim stretch of shadowy plain by the twinkling lights showing one by one from the threshing-floors. But Shiv-deo's was still dark, because there had been no one to bring him a lamp. She gave an angry laugh, set her teeth and stepped quicker. If it came to that, she had better speak at once; speak now--to-night--before Mai Râdha or some one else had a chance--speak out in the open where there were no spies to see--to hear.
It was a clear night, she thought, for sure; and, despite the red warning, giving promise of a clear dawn. One of those dawns, maybe, when, like a pearl-edged cloud, the far distant Himalayas would hang on the northern horizon during the brief twilight and vanish before the glare of day. Ai! Mai Uma must be cold up there in the snows!
And Shivo must be hungry by this time; watching, perhaps, the twinkling light she carried come nearer and nearer.
The thought pleased her, soothing her simple heart, and the placid routine of her life came to aid her as she set the platter before her husband reverently with the signs of worship she would have yielded a god. Were they not, she and Shivo, indissolubly joined together for this world and the next? Was not a good woman redemption's source to her husband? Baba-jee had read that many times from his old books. So she felt no degradation as she set the water silently by Shivo's right hand, scooped a hollow in the yellow wheat for the flickering cresset and then drew apart into the shadows leaving the man alone to perform the ritual in that little circle of light. He was her husband; that was enough.
With her chin upon both her hands she crouched on another pile of corn and watched him with sad eyes. Far and near all was soft, silent darkness save for those twinkling stars shining in heaven and matched on earth. Far and near familiar peace, familiar certainty. Even that pain at her heart? Had not others felt it and set it aside? The calm endurance of her world, its disregard of pain, seemed to change her own smart to a dull ache, as her eyes followed every movement of the man who loved her.
"Thou art silent, wife," he said, kind wonder in his tone, when, the need for silence being over, she still sat without a word.