For the shadow of an instant Oman hesitated. Then he answered, quietly: “She had heard that I taught a new creed. She desired to hear it.”
“Is that all?” The words shot from Bhavani’s lips.
“That is all,” was the tranquil rejoinder.
Bhavani found no reply to this, yet he did not move on. Oman stood waiting, with fear in his heart. He heard Bhavani say, in a voice that was monotonous with repression: “She had been weeping. I could see it. She had wept.” Then, all at once, he flung both arms over his head, and cried out, in a voice deep with long-endured anguish: “How long, O Brahma! How long? My strength fails me at last. I can endure it no more. I shall fall—I shall fall!”
“Wherefore?” murmured Oman, at his shoulder.
“Can you not see? Do you not perceive?” whispered Bhavani, hoarsely. “I love her. I love her, Oman. I love Zenaide.”
Then Oman began to laugh. He laughed till Bhavani, seizing him by the shoulder, shook him like a rat, crying to him the while to speak. And Oman obeyed him, saying, in a tone of bitter mockery: “Thou lovest her, Bhavani, thou, Rajah of Mandu! Thou lovest her whose heart has been given in turn to half a hundred; who loves thee to-day for thy gold, who will love me to-morrow for my creed: Thou, son of Rajahs, stoop to such?” And again he laughed.
Bhavani straightened up, and his face grew hard and set. “Ah, thou speakest well. It is folly indeed to talk to thee of love. But have no fear. I am Bhavani, a prince, the son of princes. I have not stooped, nor shall I.”
With that speech his expression was not pleasant to look upon. But Oman felt a sudden relief. He had won a battle in behalf of the law. Yet, a few moments later, as he shut himself into his room, he felt a new confusion and a new bitterness in his heart; and he repeated over and over to himself these words: “And these—and these—the greatest and the best, know still the struggle, still faint before it, still call on high for the Reason that never comes. Was it so wonderful that I—we—failed?”