It was a long and solemn talk. Since the days of his sickness, three years before, Oman and his father had spoken scarcely a dozen words together. True, he usually slept at home, and his mother always left him food for the day in a corner of the veranda. But he was not of his family. In the village he had come to be looked on as a recluse, almost a hermit; and as such was in some measure respected. Now, however, Oman had come to demand one of two things: speedy death, or a place in the world. Gokarna was taken aback, demurred, finally offered his son a menial position among the priests, which Oman straightway refused.
“My brain is sick of religion and the gods. My power of worship is spent. Let me work.”
“Work! You are a Brahman.”
“Thou knowest I am not—cannot be.”
Gokarna glared at him, and muttered some sort of insult; whereupon Oman rose and left his father, and within twelve hours apprenticed himself to a weaver in the town, thereby renouncing caste and becoming one of the Vaisyas, the lowest order to whom was granted the right of re-birth and investiture with the sacred cord. Yet, in the village, Oman was now regarded as a privileged being; and, after a week of banishment from his home, during which time he worked steadily and well, Kota went to him, and begged him to return to his father’s house, to sleep and eat as he had been wont to do; and when Gokarna sent a message to the same effect, Oman, for his mother’s sake, consented, and resumed the old relations with his people. He could not, of course, eat in their presence, nor sleep in the same room with one of them, nor take part in the Agnihotra. But at night he was there, in the veranda, as of old; and the heart of his mother was at peace.
Now, in the endless sunshine, Oman Ramasarman worked at his trade: first combing and carding the wool, later dyeing it, then learning how to mix the different threads for warp and woof, and finally sitting down to the loom, where, under his skilful manipulation, the cloth was turned off, smooth and strong and useful. And now, at last, Oman’s thoughts were taken from himself, and he was like a busy child, playing at work, working at play, till two swift years had rolled round again, and it was the spring of the year 1224, with Oman in his eighteenth year of expiative life.
CHAPTER IV
HUSHKA IN THE MARKET-PLACE
It was spring. The Sravana sacrifices were over. Farmers had finished their planting, and the world ran with life. As yet, there was no presage of summer heat. The nights were cool, and the mornings soft as in winter. But the new foliage was delicately bright, and more tender flowers had come to join the perpetual blossoms. Almond and apricot trees were in bloom; and the breeze was perfumed with orchard breaths. The mongoose and the turtle began their rovings. There was an air of love and liberty in all things; and the heart of Oman was filled with suppressed yearning. He worked as steadily as usual; but his thoughts went wandering. For the first time since the day he had left the banyan grove, he desired solitude. But it was solitude in a new form. He felt in him the longing to wander, to roam the land, to penetrate distant places that he had heard of:—great cities and fair plains, where historic men had dwelt.
Gradually he fell into the habit of dreaming over this new ambition; and by degrees strange pictures rose up before him:—pictures of places that he had seen and known, somewhere, somehow, perhaps only as myths in an epic, perhaps actually, in an old life. And with these pictures was always the unattainable—a golden thread, running in and out of all his dreams: the thought of that which he already had perceived to soften the whole world,—love—the love of man for woman, the love of woman for man. And dangerous as this brooding was, it grew so dear to him that he could not relinquish it, but cherished it, secretly, as a gift from the high gods.
There came an evening when he betrayed his thoughts, involuntarily, resistlessly, to the one being in the world who would try to understand them. And forever after he rejoiced that he had done so. He was sitting alone in the veranda of Gokarna’s house, waiting for his meal of millet-cakes and milk, which Kota presently brought. Then, when she had laid it before him, she walked slowly over to the veranda entrance and seated herself there, and looked off upon the swift-falling dusk. In the misty radiance of the sunset, still more under the spell of the rising night, spangled with white stars, the little village of mud and straw lost its marks of poverty and squalor, and was softened into a dream-city, of ineffable delicacy. As they sat looking out upon it now, the thoughts of mother and son were alike, except that Oman was regretting what he could never have, and Kota that which had not been given her, for Gokarna was not such a man as the springtime loves. But mother and son felt a sympathy with each other, and, under this sense, the nature of each expanded.