The Hermit Doctor of Gaya: A Love Story of Modern India
giant-like and almost brutal. He scarcely felt the burden of her, and
yet before he reached the outskirts of the village he knew himself
broken by her nearness. Her warmth enveloped him. He could feel the
faint, irregular breath against his cheek. A perfume more subtle than a
flower's reached his senses and stirred them to an exaltation that was
beyond reason, far beyond desire. Her face rested against his shoulder
and he could have bent and touched her cheek with his lips. He did not.
He carried a Holy Thing--a vessel into which the Creator had poured all
beauty--a lamp whose flame of genius flickered beneath the breath of
death, a woman whom he loved with all the force and passion of his
manhood. Beneath great banks of sullen cloud rolling up over the moon's
silvered field, the village slept or seemed to sleep. He strode through
its forbidding silence like a man possessed. He had become invulnerable,
omnipotent. There was no force on earth that he could not have met and
scorned in that hour save the invisible spectre stalking at his elbow.
He reached his hut at last and laid her on the camp-bed. He lit the lamp
and with ruthless, skilful fingers ripped open the close-fitting bodice
about her breast. He forced a stimulant between the blue lips. In
everything he was as swift and sure as though no fear knocked at his
heart, as though his own pulses beat with the smoothness of old custom.
It was done at last--all that he could do. She lay there in her deep
unconsciousness like a fair princess from a child's dream. The laurel
wreath had freed itself from the pale gold of her hair and fallen back
upon her pillow, making a dark frame for her ethereal pallor. He took
it gently and laid it on the table. Up to that moment he had held
himself in an iron calm, but the touch of that simple ornament, with its
poignant significance, struck deeper than all his memories. He turned
to her and knelt down beside her, pressing the still hand to his lips in
an agony of helpless pity.
The seconds passed. Each one, for the man kneeling there, was measured
by the sound of the quick-drawn, shallow breath. Each one, as it
passed, left behind a deepening hope. His fingers rested on her pulse,
and as though his will drew her back from the depths into which she had
been sinking, he felt it slowly steady and strengthen.
And suddenly he looked up, knowing that her eyes were open.
They were very clear--very peaceful. They looked down into his haggard
face with a wondering tenderness. Her lips moved. Twice she essayed to
speak. He drew closer to her.
"Wasn't it the end----?" she whispered. He shook his head. He could
not have answered her. "Isn't it the end, Tristram? I'm--I'm dying, am
I not? Tell me--I'm not afraid--not very--tell me----"
"No--please God----"
She smiled with a ghostly touch of her old mockery.
"You--you believe in God, Tristram. Do you care so much?"
"Yes--I care."
She lifted her little hand as though it was almost too heavy a burden
for her weakness, and laid it on his bowed head.
"It doesn't matter what we say to each other now--we don't need to
pretend. I'd hoped there would be no coming back, but now I'm glad. I
love you, Tristram."
"I love you," he answered.
And therewith there came silence and peace into his tumult. The warring
events of their lives poured into a deep and tranquil river flowing on
irresistibly seawards. They knew now with the great certainty which
comes in such moments that there was no end, no power in heaven or earth
to blot out that simple confession and all that it must mean, now and in
whatever hereafter awaited them. He could look into her face over which
death had passed its hand, without fear, almost without pain. She too
had ceased to suffer. Her hand caressed him softly.
"I knew you would come, Tristram."
"I had to--all the time I was coming to you."
"I danced for you. I've never danced like that before--it was the last
time----"
"Sigrid--if you knew--why did you do it?--why have you hurt us both?"
"Have I hurt you?" She drew herself up a little, looking down at him
with an exquisite compassion in her fading eyes. "Dear, it was to make
you happy--to give you back all you had lost--I wanted you to see me--at
the last--on the mountain-top--in my golden palace--don't you
remember----? Not in decay and ugliness--but in beauty."
"It has always been in beauty!" he cried out in passionate protest.
She shook her head. Her eyes no longer saw him. They were fixed ahead
on some brightening vision.
"Not always. You and I--we saw the same sunrise but we were afar off
from each other. We stood on different mountain-peaks--there was a
great valley between, which one of us had to cross before we could stand
together. And one night--I couldn't bear to be so far off from you and I
saw that your mountain-peak was higher than mine and nearer to the
sun--and I made up my mind. I came down from my heights and went
through the valley. It was so ugly--quagmire and darkness--and
loathsome things--sometimes I felt I could never be clean again and
sometimes that I should not have the strength to reach you--and in that
time you could not see me but in the end we stood together--we're near
each other now, Tristram----"
Her voice faded into an exhausted silence. He knew that her mind was
clouded with a rising mist of old memories, old doubts and struggles.
He could not wholly understand, and yet the recognition of an
immeasurable, fearlessly born suffering came to him with her broken,
fevered murmurs.
He bowed his face upon her hands.
"My mountain heights--oh, Sigrid, they have been low enough--if you knew
how low----"
"I know everything--everything----"
He was silent. The certainty, serene and complete, broke in a shaft of
light through his darkness. He lifted his face to hers. Her eyes were
closed. Her fair head had fallen a little on one side in an attitude of
great weariness. Slowly, in answer to his imperative appeal, her eyes
opened. They were at first dim and expressionless as though she withdrew
her sight from some inner vision.
"Everything--Sigrid?"
"Everything," she answered.
"Barclay----"
"He told me--but I knew more--I knew everything. Because I loved you I
understood."
A fine, contemptuous smile touched her suffering lips. "I knew Anne,
too. I knew how she had chosen----"
He got up, driven to his feet by an intolerable knowledge.
"Then you shielded me----"
"Do you grudge me that little comfort?" she whispered. Then as he stood
staring down at her, she made a little helpless effort to touch his
hand. "Bracelet--brother--you mustn't be too proud----"
"Oh, God----" he burst out. "It isn't that--don't you know I love you
too--and you've suffered----"
"I've lived as I wished to live," she said with a sudden thrilling
clearness, "and when I couldn't help you any more--when I saw that it
was all useless I made an end--my end. I didn't mean to tell you--I
meant to leave you a perfect memory--and to go silently. But you called
me back. You made me--if you love me--you will be glad."
She struggled up on to her elbow, gasping for breath, and he saw the
greyness creeping to her cheeks. He turned to fetch fresh stimulants,
but she clung to him with an incredible strength.
"No--stay with me, Tristram--these must be perfect minutes--we've earned
them--they're ours--there's nothing to regret--a happy death--it's what
we live for--I'm happy--madly happy. Stay with me, Tristram--don't
leave me in all this darkness----"
He dropped to his knees beside her. He slipped his arm beneath her
shoulders, holding her in an embrace of desperate tenderness. She threw
back her head, smiling.
"Kiss me, Tristram."
Their lips met. She fell back with a short sigh and lay still, her
mouth a little open as though in the midst of a laughing triumph she had
fallen asleep. But presently she stirred and drew closer to him.
"Happy, Tristram?"
"Yes," he answered.
And indeed all anguish, all fear had gone from them both. They had gone
down together into a sea in which there was no thought, no memory, no
desire. The coming night enclosed them, shielding them from the future.
"It's because I'm dying----" Then suddenly she laughed softly,
contentedly. "Those steps--in the fast movement--no one--no one has
ever dared them--no one has ever danced like that--it was a great
triumph--the greatest----"
He bent and touched her forehead with his cheek, soothing her. She
smiled a little as though in gratitude, and sighing, fell asleep.
He did not move. He knelt there listening to her breathing. It
hypnotized him, drowning his consciousness in its sweet, unbroken
rhythm. It conveyed no meaning to him. He had passed out of the
regions of hope and dread into the serenity of resignation.
Far off, in some other world, he heard the whisper of rain, the patter
of heavy drops in the dust-laden street. He heard voices--exultant,
hysterical. A pregnant coolness crept into the suffocating quiet. He
knew that the drought had broken--that the rains had come.
But it was another world. In this world there was nothing but himself
and this one woman.
He bent lower to catch a murmur from her parted lips. One small hand
still rested on his breast, clinging to him. Its hold was greater than
death--stronger than the threat of life. It drew him down with her into
her peace.
* * * * *
She awoke as the grey, rain-swept dawn crept sullenly through the open
doorway. Only little by little had she fought back the engulfing
oblivion. The shadow of the man standing beside her, watching her, had
loomed huge and unreal. But now she saw his face and knew him.
"Tristram!" she whispered.
He seemed to draw himself up to a greater height. His features were
haggard and painted with the livid pallor of the light.
"A messenger has gone to Gaya," he said. "They will send Smithy with a
litter----"
"Tristram--I'm going to live?"
"Yes," he said, "the danger is over."
They looked away from one another, finding no word of comfort. The
glamour of the night dropped from them. They had drunk of death, and of
that intoxicated hour nothing remained but the bitter aftermath of
life--an anti-climax, tragic and pitiful, half-grotesque, a little
sordid.
And as two travellers who have reached what seemed their journey's end
only to find the desert stretched before them, they faced the grey,
unending road of their future.
*CHAPTER X*
*ANNE CHOOSES*
Outwardly the scene was commonplace enough. Women, for all their
supposed emotional weakness, have for the greater part a knack of facing
the graver crises with a deliberate and almost prosaic calm. And for
one woman at least in that quiet room the moment could not have been
more bitter, more fraught with ugliness and humiliation. Yet she sat
very straight, very composed, tearing down the sanctity of her life
without a quiver.
"You must think it very strange of me to come to you like this," she
said, "but I had the feeling that, whatever else you would do, you would
be frank with me. And I must know the truth. I must know where I
stand. I must know what you are to my husband, Mrs. Barclay."
She looked straight at her companion as she spoke. She was not
conscious of her own insolence. Her words had been forged in a
fortnight's agony and had cost too much in their utterance to allow
consciousness of any hurt but her own. Moreover, to her the pale,
delicate-faced woman opposite her had no claim to her consideration.
She was "one of those others" whom the remnant of man's prime favourite,