Father Ninian had been awake all night. He had been vaguely uneasy all day, conscious, with that fine perception of his, that something was amiss. But it was no fear of what might happen which had kept him watching when others slept. It was the memory of something which had happened; for, by a coincidence that for more than fifty years had never lost its mystical significance for Ninian Bruce--sentimentalist as he was to his finger tips--the night of the Vaisakh festival, when the pilgrims watched for the dawn to guide them on their way to the 'Cradle of the Gods,' was to him, personally, the saddest and gladdest of the whole year. Since it was the night on which he had sinned the great sin of his life, and repented of it, even in the sinning.
And that sinning, that repenting, was no slight thing to him. It was the man himself; for the passion that was in him in his youth was in him in his old age. It had only changed its dwelling-place. It had fled from the senses, and found refuge in the emotions. In a way, indeed, by thus seeking freedom from it, he had fallen into a greater thraldom, so that his whole life had been as much swayed by this renunciation of a woman as it would have been by her possession.
Old as he was, this very night had brought him--with the thought that Death could not delay much longer, and that next Vaisakh festival might find him no lonely watcher--that thrill of self-absorption in another self, that claim for all, which is the essence of passion. For this woman, waiting for him in the land where there is no marrying or giving in marriage, was still a woman; still the one of all God's creatures whom he claimed, and who claimed him, even as the first woman claimed the first man in Paradise.
So he had passed the night watches of the Festival of Spring: as he had always passed them. Partly in his room, that room made holy by her presence in his heart, partly in the chapel, made holy by the Bodily Presence of Him for Whose sake he had renounced her. The two holinesses were inextricably mixed in Pidar Narâyan's mind.
He had finished one of the masses for the repose of a sinning yet sainted soul, and, before repeating the next, was confessing his own repentance in his room, when that hasty footstep along the passage, which alarmed those two lovers in the balcony nearer the garden, had resounded through the arches. It had disturbed, but not startled him, its very boldness reassuring him of its right to be there. Probably it was some messenger from the police camp or the Fort. So he had risen from his knees calmly and passed into the chapel, which lay between his room and the balcony, in order to see who it could be. For the candles were lit on the Altar and sent a faint light into the vaulted passage beyond.
It was as he paused, in passing, to do homage to that Bodily Presence upon the Altar, which was ready--as he was in his robes--for the service of love which was to him, as a priest, his duty, as a man a joy unspeakable, that the pistol-shot came clamouring through the arches, followed by those despairing cries.
What they were he could not distinguish, but that they were urgent was unmistakable, and had he been young as he had been on that night long years ago in the balcony above the pale flood of the Tiber, he could not have been quicker to reach the armoury, seize the long rapier, which he had not used, save in play, since those ruffling days in Rome, and run out into the wide, dim passage whence the sound had reached him.
None too soon! Someone was already flying down it. He pulled himself up for attack, but the figure ere he could lunge at it was past him, desperate, indifferent, flinging him against the wall as it continued its reckless way to the outer door, where, with swift opening and closing, it disappeared into the crowded courtyard, out of sight--beyond recall!
He stood for a moment, stupefied. What was Roshan Khân doing there? For that faint light from the Altar had given him a glimpse of a familiar, dark face, Roshan Khân's without a doubt!
"Laila! Laila!"