Her father was grieved to observe her sadness, but could not alleviate it. He perceived that the web of life was a tangled tissue, which never could be perfectly unravelled. The very fortune which had elevated him above his compeers, had already put forth the buds of misery that seemed but too likely to blossom and ripen into fruit. It began to be clear to him that a man may be as wretched under the bright sun of prosperity, which may scorch and wither his peace, as under the cloud of bereavement, where oft amid the darkness a faint light glimmers that imparts a momentary joy, the more exquisite in proportion to the briefness of its duration. He had become wealthy, but his riches, elevating him above the society of his fellow outcasts, rendered him comparatively a solitary man. They had placed a bar betwixt his child and that blessed boon which is the inheritance of all God’s creatures,—the union of hearts in a bond of reciprocal affection. She was excluded from the greatest of immunities to the Hindoo, the privilege of perpetuating her race, unless by an alliance which her proud but sensitive heart could not stoop to embrace.
Many a Pariah had sighed in vain to win the affections of the beautiful Yhahil, but she could not yield to solicitations coming from beings who were but too commonly little above the brute in understanding and familiar with habits which outraged humanity. Hers was no unnatural pride, but she saw in the members of her own tribe much to pity, and nothing to love. Fortune had raised her above them, and she could not stoop to an alliance with those who often fed upon the garbage cast to beasts of prey, and had no better home than the perilous retirement of the jungle, where, in common with creatures of rapine and of blood, they shared a precarious abode.
Though the Pariah could bestow upon his daughter a dowry that would have rendered her an eligible object of alliance had she been blessed with the proud distinction of caste, no one out of her own tribe proposed for one of the loveliest specimens of nature’s craft that could be exhibited to the admiration of man:—the gentle girl was doomed to pine in utter hopelessness.
A young Pariah had sighed in vain for the love of the beautiful Yhahil. He had sought her notice by every attention, but her averted eye and compressed lip showed that he had no place in the affections he sought to win. He was a well-looking youth, with an elevation of mind and a natural refinement of character much above the generality of his race; still he was not beloved. He, nevertheless, laboured with unwearying assiduity to thaw the frost that seemed to have incrusted the heart of her for whom he would have gladly died, had such a sacrifice been demanded of him. Whenever she quitted her home he was sure to be in the way with some humble offering of attachment, which she invariably refused with gentleness, though in a manner that showed her sincerity.
“Yhahil,” he one day said, “why am I despised?”
“You are not despised, Goutama; not to love a man is not to despise him, and you know that our affections are not in our own keeping.”
“But why can you not love me? You cannot desire to live unmarried; and where will you find a husband, if you do not wed a Pariah?”
“It is true, indeed, that I would be married; but I must find a husband whom I can love, otherwise I shall submit to the curse of maidenhood,—for I never could attach myself to a man who had not obtained an entire ascendancy over my heart.”
“But where do you think of seeking for such a man, if you reject the whole race to which you and your family belong?”
“If I find not a man of caste, I tell you honestly I shall never marry.”