Tara attempted to reply, but was too feeble. They saw her lips moving, but no, words could be heard. She tried to stretch forth her hand to Zyna, but she could not lift it. Zyna saw the attempt, and threw her arm round her. "Not now, beloved," she said—"not now. Lie still and rest; we are all near thee, and will not go away."
So more days passed, and Tara grew stronger, though slowly. The shock to mind and body had been very heavy, and needed long rest and much care; but she was in tender hands, and gradually, but surely, they saw progression to convalescence, and were thankful. Lurlee could not restrain her pious gratitude; and Friday after Friday, the poor of the town, Hindus as well as Mahomedans, received a munificent dole of food and money, and rejoiced at the widow's profuse charity.
Dear reader, if you have ever recovered from such an illness as befell Tara, you will remember, vividly and gratefully, the pleasant languor, the perfect rest, and the sensation of growing strength of life,—amid its weakness, such as you cannot estimate till you attempt to act for yourself. You long to speak, but your tongue refuses words; you long to rise and help yourself, but your members as yet decline office. If you can turn yourself about as you lie, it is all that is possible. Then, if you are ministered to by loving hands, and you hear sweet familiar voices around you, how often has your heart swelled, and run over at your eyes, silently, and in very weakness, as you have abandoned yourself to their sweet influences! How powerfully the new life which God has given you, grows under their ever-present care! Sometimes you can hardly bear the excess of joy, and tremble lest it should suddenly cease; and again, you find periods of rest possessing you—dreamy unrealities—incomplete perceptions—even vacuity, which is not sleep, nor yet waking—and still with all, a consciousness of increasing strength which will not be denied.
It was so with Tara. No one spoke much to her, she could not bear it, nor could she reply; but if Zyna sat by her, or Lurlee, and held her hand, it was enough for reality; and morning and evening Fazil was admitted to see her, and to satisfy himself that she was gaining ground. The past was never alluded to by any of them. At first she had only a dim and broken remembrance of it, as of some great ill-usage or suffering. As she grew stronger, the detail became more distinct: and they often saw her shudder, and draw the end of her garment or the coverlet over her face, as if to hide it from observation, or to shut out some terrible sight from her view. Yet to herself there was an unreality about the whole, which she could neither comprehend, nor account for. Most of all about her parents: were they indeed alive, or was their sudden appearance on the day of the Sutee, a reality, or a trick of imagination—was all she retained in her mind one of the hideous dreams of her illness rather than a fact? Who was to tell her the truth?
All that Fazil had heard from the hunchback, he had told to Tara as they rested here and there in their escape; but her own mind was then in that state of terror and confusion that she could tell him nothing, nor, indeed, could she find courage to speak to him at all. Long before, when they had been together in camp, she had never dared to answer him. It was enough for her that he spoke, and that she listened. Her mind, as he rode with her that night before him—for he would trust her to no one—was sorely unhinged. That she had escaped death she knew; that she was with him she knew also: that she feared pursuit, and might be taken and burned alive, was an absorbing terror, which shut out the shame of her flight; and it was perhaps a happy circumstance that the fever, which had so long affected her brain, shut out all realities till she was stronger, and calmer to bear them.
[CHAPTER LXXXVIII.]
Day by day, as strength returned to Tara, remembrance returned also. It might have been with abhorrence of her present position—with dread of her broken vows—with terror of the Mother's vengeance, and with a sense of her own pollution as an escaped Sutee—which would have utterly overwhelmed her with remorse, and forbidden recovery at all; and in such a case, death would have been welcome. We will not say that there was no revulsion of feeling: it would have been unnatural in one with so fine an intellect as Tara possessed, had there been no struggle. Perhaps the new life to which she awakened, after the illness she had undergone, had blunted the perceptions of the old; perhaps, as Zyna and Lurlee told her, that it was her destiny, which she could not resist; and that, if she were to have died, as her creed had determined, could Fazil have prevented it?—would she have been delivered at all? Had she not already undergone the pains of death in preparation for it, and been delivered from them?
Then Lurlee again brought forth her books, and went over all her old calculations, and there were the priest's also with them, all tending to the same point. If her faith had been shaken for a time, in the fact that Afzool Khan had died, when the planets showed that he should be victorious, might there not have been some mistake? Here at least there was none; none in the restoration of her child, as she called Tara, from death to life—none in her having been rescued from the evil idolaters and Kafirs, to be newly born into the true faith, acceptable to Alla and the Prophet. All this was very plain and incontrovertible.
Could Tara deny it? It was not clear that she even attempted to do so: and ever nigh her, were anxious pleaders against any justification of the rites of her own faith, from the most horrible consummation of which, she could not possibly have escaped. "Even your father and mother could not have saved you had they desired it," argued Zyna, "from dying in the fire before them: they would have seen you burned, and shouted 'Jey Kalee!' with the rest, to drown the scream of your dying agony; but they would not have relented." No; Tara's heart told her they would not have relented, and she must have perished, but for Fazil.