The flame-gatherers

by Margaret Horton Potter

The momentary and fleeting suggestions of remorse were very slight, however, even with Ahalya. Neila, who knew all, watched her mistress in perpetual wonder; for she had changed utterly. She was a gazelle transformed to a tigress; and the handmaid, who worshipped her with the worship of a slave for a queen, now feared her while she loved her, and because she loved her, also feared. Neila, never told anything in words, had known all from the first, and from that first had acted as go-between. In spite of the cynicism of Fidá, who, after the Mohammedan fashion, trusted no woman, she had proved faithful to both of them, and had held the interests of both at heart. For, if Ahalya were her princess, Fidá was a captive prince, a man rarely beautiful in form, and, moreover, the very first that, to her knowledge, had ever succeeded in doing what he had done. He had risen to great heights in her eyes; and if Ahalya sometimes called her lover by the name of her wooden god, Neila carried the matter farther yet, and half believed that Fidá was really more than human.

In this different-wise ten weeks passed, and it came to be the third Ashtaka[4] of Magghar Poh (December). This sacrifice and festival, begun at noon, was wont to continue till midnight; and the Rajah, jealous of Brahman prerogatives, never failed to take a chief place in such rites. Fidá, an outcast according to Hindoo codes, was, during this holy ceremony, not allowed on sacred ground; and he therefore gave himself up to the propitious time, and spent eight of the twelve hours at Ahalya’s side. It wanted ten minutes to two when he left her, by the now usual means of the low window in her room. Wrapping himself closely in the long, white cloak of thin woollen stuff that made part of his winter clothing, he started across the little, dark courtyard.

[4] On every eighth day through December and January there is a special Brahman sacrifice called the “Ashtaka.” (See Grihya-Sutras, Vol. I, p. 203, M. Müller edit.)

The noise of the revellers in the great court had not yet died away; and Fidá debated whether he dared pass through them on his way to bed. For the first time in many weeks he was thoroughly exhausted; and the chilly night air swept over his parched and burning body with grateful effect. All at once he felt that he dreaded to be alone because of the thoughts that might come upon him. Entering the north wing, he rapidly traversed the narrow passage leading past Ragunáth’s rooms, turned instinctively in the usual direction, and presently emerged at the court, where the ceremonial was over, the fires burning low, and the soma revellers lying or standing about in various degrees of intoxication. Near the door of the audience hall stood a little group of priests and officials, among whom were the Rajah and Ragunáth. Not daring to approach these, and giving not more than a passing thought to the matter, gradually overcome by vague, chaotic ideas that were rising in his mind, Fidá went on, out into the road, and along it till he came to the water palace that stood on the edge of the plateau, overlooking the south plain, through which the great Narmáda rushed. Here, in the stillness, Fidá halted, looking around him. He was beside one of the smooth water-basins overhung with slender bamboos and tamarind shrubs, with tangles of lotus-plants floating, brown and dead, upon its mirror-like surface. Before him rose the low, level walls of this charming accident of Indian architecture. On high, overhead, hung a late moon, wreathed in a feathery mist of night clouds, and throwing a faint light over the plain and the distant river. To the right, in the distance, a long, black, irregular shadow, rose the giant barrier of the Vindhyas, beyond whose mystic recesses, far northward, lay distant Delhi, the city of the slow-conquering race, the people of the captive now standing here alone with the night. Gradually, as Fidá looked, a great awe stole upon him. His body had grown cold with the night chill; but his mind took no heed of the flesh. A change was upon him. His chaotic thoughts were shaping themselves. Gradually, before the vastness, the high dignity of nature, the ugliness of his last weeks became clear to him, and he trembled with horror of himself. Slow tears ran down his cold, set face. He locked his hands together, and rocked his stiffened body to and fro. A cry was welling up in the heart of him, standing there in the face of Allah’s creation: the high-reaching hills, the wide, moonlit plain. To his overstrained nerves it seemed that they judged him, in their immense incorruptibleness:—him, the corrupt. And presently the mountains lifted up their voices and spake. Plainly to his ears, out of the dim, black recesses, came low, deep tones, uttering first his name: “Fidá ibn-Mahmud ibn-Hassan el-Asra,” and then, after a long pause, the words, old and familiar to him since childhood, the tradition of his race:

“Cursed be the Asra by Osman: cursed this day and forevermore any man of them that loveth woman as I have loved Zenora. Let him die in the first year of his loving, though from east to west he seek a cure. And to him that taketh from another a promised wife, may the curse of Allah the Avenger seek him out till he be hidden in the depth of Hell. Thus I, Osman, curse thy race!”

Down from far generations rolled these words into the ears of the youngest of the Asra, who, hearing them, uttered a deep cry, and, swaying for a moment where he stood, presently fell, face down, into the dead grass beside the pool.

CHAPTER VIII
THE CURSE

The night moved quietly on, the moon dropped westward, and still Fidá, lying there on the dead kusa grass, did not stir. From his swoon he had fallen into a heavy sleep which was unmoved by the slow passing of the night. The far mountains, oblivious of the havoc they had wrought upon a human mind, reared themselves grimly toward the stars, and out of their fringing forests came now and then the roar of some king animal, or the melting cry of a night-bird. Little by little the moon paled and the stars grew dim, and a white mist rose over the far-flowing river. The cold breath of dawn was upon the world, and in its inimitable stillness the slave, wakened perhaps by the throbbing of his own pulses, opened his eyes dully, and shivered and then rose and stood staring down into the pool, struggling to free himself from the bonds of oblivion and of sleep. When the memory of the past night opened before him, it was as if he contemplated the undoing of another man. He made no attempt, he had no wish, to think or to reflect upon himself. The dawn was upon him—the sacred hour. Already, in the east, a pale, clear light had lifted itself upon the horizon. One or two silent birds—kites—floated over the walls of the water palace and began to sink slowly into the depth of the plain. In the village a dog howled, an ass brayed. Instinctively the spectator inclined his ear for the muezzin’s call to prayer. But there was audible only the flutelike note of the newly wakened koïl. The east brightened. The clouds over the Vindhyas grew rosy, and the river mist was tinged with gold. In the fresh morning air Fidá could perceive how his brain burned, how his head throbbed. His body was racked with misery, but there was a great clearness in his mind:—no searching, no thinking, only a sudden upliftment and a simple sense of gratitude to nature for this, her hour. Prayer was not upon his lips; but at last it lay in his heart:—the great natural prayer that the first Hindoo, waking on his world two thousand years before, had felt and could not utter.

The hour was advancing. The line of clouds above the northeast hills changed from pale pink to a fiery rose-color that shed a glow over the whole plateau, and haloed the man who stood, with his white-clothed arms upraised, drinking in the purity around him. When at last the sun pushed its edge over the horizon, it was invisible to Fidá; but he knew, from the gradual disappearance of the delicate vapors, from the sudden quieting of the birds, the sense of day, that the mystic dawn was over. Then, at last, Fidá realized suddenly that he was faint with weariness and parched with thirst. Slowly he took his way back to the palace, thinking not at all, only passively longing for rest. His walk over, he stopped for a moment at the well, then went at once to his own room, and, thankfully remembering that every one would rise late to-day, threw himself on his bed and sank into another stupor-like sleep. How long it was before he regained a vague consciousness, he did not know; but he found two men standing over him, and one he recognized as the Rajah. The sight of his face caused Fidá a dull surprise; but he returned into the stupor without having uttered a word. After that his rest seemed to be broken by various dire sensations and many monstrous dreams. When his eyes opened, he always found Ahmed, and sometimes Churi, near at hand; and, comforted by their presence, realizing that, with them, delirium would be safe, he resigned himself. He knew that he was very ill. Every one else knew it. Churi was exerting his utmost skill; though he never once thought of the ruby. It did not remotely occur to him to try that as a remedy. Three or four weeks passed away, and then the fever abated a little, and gradually it came to be understood that the Rajah’s favorite slave would live. By degrees his strength, wofully depleted by the reckless strain he had put upon it for so long, came back; and by the end of January he made a feeble appearance again. He soon discovered that his sickness had not been thought unusual by any one, since in his ravings he had betrayed the fact that he had spent a night on the ground near the water palace. Indeed, it would have been strange if the fever that lurks in all damp night mists in western India had not made him a victim of his own imprudence.

This view of the matter brought a great relief to Fidá. Perhaps, after all, the incident of the curse had been just the wild dream of a sick man. Perhaps those sinister words had been spoken by his own heart. Perhaps.—Perhaps.—Perhaps. But, unnaturally, after Fidá was up and about again, he did not get well. There were days when it seemed as if his old-time vitality were returning to him; but there were many more when he felt as if, by no possibility, could he bear the weight of his limbs: when, racked with an inward fever that penetrated to the very bone, he dragged himself about only by a superhuman effort. Yet, unspeakably dreading that time when he must face the end, the slave made every effort to conceal his illness, forcing himself to much that seemed impossible for a man in his condition. One thing only he could not do. He could not see Ahalya. Now, in the light of their past vital relationship, he realized that he could no longer attempt his former rôle. Day and night, it is true, he longed for her sympathy, her tenderness, the touch of her gentle hands. But in return for her ministrations he could give her nothing—nothing but the weary plaints of a sick man. And so, steeling his heart to loneliness, he went his way, blindly and dumbly, yet still, after the pathetic human custom, hoping that life held yet a few empty years for him.