"Then you will take her--to--to Hurdwâr--and--and leave her there." Smith-Jones had a difficulty with this euphemism for the strange and barbarous custom he had read about in books. He seemed to see the old creature seated in her flat basket in the stream, a prey to exposure and cold.
"It would scarcely be worth while her coming back," suggested Dittu humbly. "My grannie (she is over there, Huzoor," nodding his head towards the earthern pots) "was the last person who knew her ere she ceased singing. Now she is gone, wherefore should Gulâbi wait longer? She hath waited over long as it is. To-night, when the moon rises, we will travel onwards to her rest. I must get back to the village by harvest-time."
Smith-Jones gave Dittu the rupee. He rode into camp sedately; he wrote his judgment still more sedately; then he ate his dinner and sat down sedately to read, one book after another--the Asiatic Antiquary, a sermon by his father on the relative guilt of the heathen--which in its day had fluttered the fold of Muddleton-on-the-Fens by its laxity--Herbert Spencer's Sociology, finally The Whole Duty of Man, which had been presented to him by a maiden aunt. And outside, beyond the thin film of canvas separating him from the calm Indian night, stretched a flood of moonshine; the tent-ropes glittering like silver cords against the dark leafage of the banyan-tree, the white road shining like a straight broad path to heaven--or elsewhere. Sitting beside the reading lamp he could see past the furled chicks of the door, right away to east and west: west to Rajputana and the Pearl Palace; east to holy Ganges and the golden gates of the great Rest-House.
Chink-a-chink-a-chink came the brass jingles of a banghy, making Smith-Jones lay down The Whole Duty of Man restlessly, and move towards the door. Along that broad white shining path from west to east came a strange sight,--an old mummy of a woman wrapped in a shroud-like veil and balanced by the ashes of the village. Swaying, bobbing, dancing, mummy and ashes alike, as the pliant bamboo lever on Dittu's shoulder made the jingles chink and the eyes on the worn peacock's plume at either end look as if they were alive. Shuffle, shuffle, shuffle, bob, bob, bob, came Dittu and his burden. Hurri Gunga! Hurri Gunga! Hurri Gunga![[29]] Just a little guttural grunting, like a pig's, to keep the shuffle and the bob together.
Smith-Jones stood staring into the moonlight, the picture of irresolution. The shadow of the banyan-tree lay right across the road in a solid mass of darkness, as if a great gulf were fixed between the light westward and the light eastward. Here, in this No Man's Land, Dittu set down his banghy, propped the lever into position with his packman's stick, and made sideways for an interlude of tobacco among the camp-followers at the watchfires across the road.
Smith-Jones and the banghy were alone. He could scarcely see it in the darkness, though a wayward gleam of moonlight glittered on the brass jingles and lit up the peacock's eyes. For all that he saw it clearly in his mind. He saw the net of earthern pots, the figure in the shroud,--nay, he saw more! He saw through the grave clothes to the faded finery within, and through that again to something which had not faded despite the long, long years. To something which was waiting still for its reward.
And then a strange thing happened. Smith-Jones forgot everything he had been taught. He forgot his father's sermon, he forgot sociology, folklore, and the whole duty of man. He forgot the sun-myth and the great fight between darkness and dawn which never ceases. He even forgot himself, as he stepped into the shadowy gulf, stooped, and paid another man's debt of honour with a kiss.
He told me the tale years after, when we were sitting over our toddy round a camp fire. It was a moonlight night, and the shadow of a great banyan-tree lay like a gulf across a white road; perhaps that awoke the memory. He was then a married man, with a charming wife and a growing family, but never, he assured me, had he forgotten, nor could he ever forget, that kiss! He declared that for one short second the whole world was at his feet, the wilderness a blossoming rose, the perfumes of which lingered-- Here he took off his spectacles, for though he had given up wearing blue ones years before, his kind eyes had become a little dim, perhaps with the sympathy they bestowed on all sorts and conditions of men; he took off his spectacles, I say, and wiped them furtively.
[THE VILLAGE LEGACY.]
"The case of Mussumât[[30]] Nuttia being without heirs," droned the Court-Inspector.