CHAPTER III.
| "Darkness and solitude shine for me: |
| For life's fair outward part, are rife |
| The silver noises: let them be. |
| It is the very soul of life |
| Listens for thee, listens for thee." |
| —Alice Meynell. |
The depressingly bare, whitewashed bedroom owned a French bedstead, with brass rails;—a welcome 'find' in a dák bungalow, especially after three very broken nights in an Indian train. Tired to the point of stupefaction, Roy promised himself he would sleep the clock round; eat a three-decker Anglo-Indian breakfast, and thereafter be his own man again. In that faith he laid his head on the least lumpy portion of the pillow—and in less than five minutes found himself quite intolerably wide awake.
Though the bedstead neither repudiated him, nor took liberties with his person, ghostly clankings and vibrations still jarred his nerves and played devil's tunes in his brain. Though he kept his eyelids severely closed, sleep—the coveted anodyne—seemed to hover on the misty edge of things, always just out of reach. His body was over-tired, his brain abnormally alert. Each change of position, that was to be positively the last, lost its virtue in the space of three minutes, till the sheet—that was too narrow for the mattress—became ruckled into hills and valleys and made things worse than ever. Having started like this, he knew himself capable of keeping it up gaily till the small hours; and to-night, of all nights——!
Even through his closed eyelids, he was still aware that his verandah doorway framed a wide panel of moonlight—the almost incredible moonlight of India. He had flung it open as usual and rolled up the chick. A bedroom hermetically sealed made him feel suffocated, imprisoned; so he must, perforce, put up with the moon; and when the world was drowned in her radiance, sleep seemed almost a sin. But to-night, moon or no, he craved sleep as an opium-eater craves his magic pellets,—because he wanted to dream. It was many weeks since he last had sight of his mother. But surely she must be near him in his loneliness; aware, in some mysterious fashion, of the deep longing with which he longed for sight or sense of her, to assure him that—in spite of qualms and indecisions—he had chosen aright. Conviction grew that directly the veil of sleep fell he would see her. It magnified his insomnia from mere discomfort to a baffling inimical presence withholding him from her:—till utter weariness blotted out everything; and even as he hovered on the verge of sleep, she was there....
She was lying in her hammock under the beeches, in her apple-blossom sari, sunlight flickering through the leaves. And he saw his own figure moving towards her, without the least surprise, that he could see and hear himself as another being, while still remaining inside himself.
He heard his own voice say, low and fervently, "Beloved little Mother—I am here. Always in the battle I remembered Chitor. Now—turned out of the battle—I have come to Chitor."
Then he was on his knees beside her; and her fingers, light as thistledown, strayed over his hair, in the ghost of a caress that so unfailingly stilled his excitable spirit. Without actual words, by some miracle of interpenetration, she seemed to know all that was in his heart—the perplexities and indecisions; the magnetism of Home and the dread of it; the difficulty of making things clear to his father. And the magic of her touch charmed away all inner confusions, all headache and heartache. But when he rose impulsively, and would have taken her in his arms—she was gone; everything was gone; ... the hammock, the beeches, the sunbeams....
He was standing alone on a moonlit plain, blotched and streaked with shadows of dák-jungle and date-palm; and rising out of it abruptly—as he had seen it last night—loomed the black bulk of Chitor; the sacred, solitary ghost of a city, linked with his happiest days of childhood and his mother's heroic tales. The great rock was scarped and bastioned, every line of it. The walls, ruined in parts, showed ghostly shades of ruins beyond; and soaring high above all, Khumba Rána's nine-storied Tower of Victory lifted a giant finger to the unheeding heavens. Watching it, fascinated, trying in vain to make out details, he was startlingly beset by the strangest among many strange sensations that had visited his imaginative brain: nothing less than a revival of the long-ago dream-feeling, the strange sense of familiarity—he knew! Beyond all cavil, he knew every line of that looming shadow, every curve of the hills. He knew the exact position of the old bridge over the Gamberi river. From the spot where he stood, he could find his way unerringly to the Padal Pol—the fortified entrance to the road of Seven Gates;—the road that had witnessed, three times in three hundred years, that heroic alternative to surrender, the terrible rite of Johur:—the final down-rush of every male defender, wearing the saffron robe and coronet of him who embraces death as a bride; the awful slaughter at the lowest gate, where they fell, every man of them, before the victors entered in....