Life was going out of her with the words, but she would not stop. Her heart was pounding like a frightened bird’s. The weight of them both was but that of a healthy child—an armful of dissolution.
“Listen, mother,” Routledge said. “Do not talk any more. I am going to the Rest House to get food for you and the son of Madan Das. Lie here and rest. I shall not be long.”
Even as he left her, she was repeating her story. He returned with a pitcher of hot tea, strong enough to color and make palatable the nourishment of half a can of condensed milk. He brought a servant with him, and a sheet to cover the woman. Routledge handed the child to the servant, and lifted the mother’s head to a cup. Afterward he cleansed her face and throat and arms with cool water, and bade her sleep.
“The little one is quite well, mother,” he told her softly. “All is well with you now. The English will be here to-day with much food, and you have only to rest. The child eats.”
“He is the son of Madan Das,” she mumbled, “and I am his mother.... Do not forget.”
She sank into a half-stupor. The servant had spooned a few drops into the babe’s mouth. Routledge took the child—a wee thing, light as a kitten, numbed from want, and too weak to cry. Its body had the feel of a glove, and the bones showed white under the dry brown skin, and protruded like the bones of a bat’s wing. The servant went to fetch a basin of water.
“Why must you, little seedling, learn the hunger-lesson so soon?” Routledge reflected whimsically. “You are lots too little to have done any wrong, and if your bit of a soul is stained with the sins of other lives, you are lots too little to know that you are being punished for them now.... I should have asked Sekar of what avail is the karmic imposition of hunger upon the body of a babe.”
He sponged and dried the little one, wrapped him in a cloth, and fed him again—just a few drops. The son of Madan Das choked and gurgled furthermore over a half-spoonful of water.
“Oh, you’re not nearly so far gone as your mother, my son. She was already starving before your inestimable fountains dried.... And so they took away your sister’s little brass bowl—and the soup made of bark and flower-pods and wild berries. The poor tahsildar must have been very tired and hot that day.... And so your worthy uncle who was a leper sold the clothing of Madan Das, who borrowed a loin-cloth from a neighbor, and did not need that very long.... Curl up and sleep on a man’s arm, my wee Rajput.”
Between the two, Routledge passed the forenoon. At last, miles away across the dusty sun-shot plain eastward, a bullock-cart appeared, and long afterward behind it, faint as its shadow, another—and others. Almost imperceptibly, they moved forward on the twisting, burning road, like crippled insects; and the poles of the native-drivers raised from time to time like tortured antennæ. There was a murmur now within the huts of stricken Rydamphur. Routledge had sent his baggage west to the railroad and settled his account at the Rest House. He would leave with the coming of the famine relief. The child was better, but the woman could not rally. The nourishment lay dead within her. The bullock-carts merely moved in the retina of his eye. He was thinking deep, unbridled things in the stillness of high noon.