"Yes," said he, "but it is not only a journey. It will cause you to be here and there all days and years. To-day here, to-night there."
"Well," I replied, "I will do even that, for my vows had no conditions and master orders."
I knew of the order, for the old Brahmin gave me the sign marked on my forehead. He had taken my hand, and covering it with his waist-cloth, traced the sign in my palm under the cloth so that it stood out in lines of light before my eyes.
He went away with no other word, as you know they so often do, leaving me in my palace. I fell asleep in the heat, with only faithful Gopal beside me. I dreamed and thought I was at the bedside of a mere child, a boy, in a foreign land unfamiliar to me only that the people looked like what I knew of the Europeans. The boy was lying as if dying, and relatives were all about the bed.
A strange and irresistible feeling drew me nearer to the child, and for a moment I felt in this dream as if I were about to lose consciousness. With a start I awoke in my own palace—on the mat where I had fallen asleep, with no one but Gopal near and no noise but the howling of jackals near the edge of the compound.
"Gopal," I said, "how long have I slept?'
"Five hours, master, since an Old Brahmin went away, and the night is nearly gone, master."
I was about to ask him something else when again sleepiness fell upon my senses, and once more I dreamed of the small dying foreign child.
The scene had changed a little, other people had come in, there was a doctor there, and the boy looked to me, dreaming so vividly, as if dead. The people were weeping, and his mother knelt by the bedside. The doctor laid his head on the child's breast a moment. As for myself I was drawn again nearer to the body and thought surely the people were strange not to notice me at all. They acted as if no stranger were there, and I looked at my clothes and saw they were eastern and bizarre to them. A magnetic line seemed to pull me to the form of the child.
And now beside me I saw the old Brahmin standing. He smiled.