CHAPTER III.

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THE GREAT GULF FIXED.

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      It was a quaint house in the oldest quarter of the city of Lucknow, where odd little groves linger between the alleys, so that men pass, at a step, from evil-smelling lanes to cool, scented retreats, dark with orange and mango trees; where birds flutter, and squirrels loll yawning through the summer days, as if the great town were miles away.

      It was in the furthest corner of such a flowerless, shady garden that the house reared its lessening stories and projecting eaves above its neighbors. The upper half of it was not unlike an Italian villa in its airiness, its balustraded roof, its green jalousies; but the lower portion was unmistakably Indian. It was a perfect rabbit warren of dark cells, crushed in on each other causelessly; the very staircase, though but two feet wide, having to fold itself away circumspectly so as to find space to creep upward.

      But no one lived below, and the dark twists and turns of the brick ladder mattered little to Zora bibi, who lived in the pleasant pavilions above; for she had scarcely ever left them since the day, nearly eight years past, when James Greyman had installed her there with all the honor possible to the situation. Which was, briefly, that he had bought the slip of a girl from a house of ill-fame, as he would have bought a horse, or a flower-pot, or anything else which he thought would make life pleasanter to him. He had paid a long price for her, not only because she was beautiful, but because he pitied the delicate-looking child--for she was little more--just about to enter a profession to which she was evidently a recruit kidnaped in early infancy; as so many are in India. Not that his pity would have led him to buy her if she had been ugly, or even dark; for the creamy ivory tint of her skin satisfied his fastidiousness quite as much as did the hint of a soul in her dark, dreamy eyes. Romance had perhaps had more to do with his purchase than passion; restless, reckless determination to show himself that he had no regrets for the society which had dispensed with his, had had more than either. For he had begun to rent the pleasant pavilions after a few years of adventurous roving had emphasized the gulf fixed between him and his previous life, and forced his pride into leading his present one as happily as he could.

      As for the girl, those eight years of pure passion on the housetops had been a dream of absolute content. It was so even now, when she lay dying, as so many secluded women do, of a slow decline. To have flowers and fruit brought to her, to find no change in his tenderness because she was too languid to amuse him, to have him wait upon her and kiss away her protests; all this made her soft warm eyes softer, warmer. It was so unlike anything she had ever heard or dreamed of; it made her blind to the truth, that she was dying. How could this be so when there was no hint of change, when life still gave her all she cared for? She did not, to be sure, play tricks with him like a kitten, as she used to; but that was because she was growing old--nearly one and twenty!

      "She is worse to-day. I deem her close to freedom, Soma, so I have warned the death-tender," said a tall woman, as she straightened the long column of her throat to the burden of a brass water-pot, new-poised on her head, and stepped down from the low parapet of the well which stood in one corner of the shady grove. Sometimes its creaking Persian wheel moaned over the task of sending runnels of water to the thirsty trees; but to-day it was silent, save for an intermittent protest when the man--who was lazily leaning his back against the yoke--put out his strength so as to empty an extra water can or two into the trough for the woman's use. He was in the undress uniform of a sepoy, and as he also straightened himself to face the speaker the extraordinary likeness between them in face and figure stamped them as twins. It would have been difficult to give the palm to either for superior height or beauty; and in their perfection of form they might have stood as models of the mythical race-founders whose names they bore. For Tara Devi and Soma Chund were Rajpoots of the single Lunar or Yadubansi tribe. She was dressed in an endless scarf of crimson wool, which with its border of white and yellow embroidery hung about her in admirable folds. The gleam of the water-pot matched the dead gold circlets on the brown wrists and ankles; for Tara wore her savings thus, though she had no right to do so, being a widow. But she had been eight years in James Greyman's service; more than eight bound to him by the strangest of ties. He had been the means of saving her from her husband's funeral pyre; in other words of preventing her from being a saint, of making her outcaste utterly. Since none, not even other widows, would eat or drink with a woman rejected by the very gods on the threshold of Paradise. Such a mental position is well-nigh incomprehensible to western minds. It was confusing even to Tara herself; and the mingling of conscious dignity and conscious degradation, gratitude, resentment, attraction, repulsion, made her a puzzle even to herself at times.

      "The master will grieve," replied Soma; his voice was far softer than his sister's had been, but it had the effect of hardening hers still more.

      "What then?" she asked; "man's sorrow for a woman passes; or even if it pass not, bears no fruit here, or hereafter. But I, as thou knowest, Soma, would have burned with my love. But for thee, as thou knowest, I would have been suttee (lit. virtuous). But for thee I should have found, ay! and given salvation."

      She passed on with a sweep of full drapery, bearing her water-pot as a queen might her crown, leaving Soma's handsome face full of conscious-stricken amaze. His sister--from whom, despite her degradation, he had not been able to dissociate himself utterly--had never before rounded on him for his share in her misfortune; but in his heart of hearts he had admitted his responsibility at one moment, scorned it the next. True, he had told his young Lieutenant that his brother-in-law was going to be burned, as an excuse for not accompanying him after black-buck one morning; but who would have dreamed that this commonplace remark would rouse the Huzoor's curiosity to see the obsequies of a high-caste Rajpoot, and so lead, incidentally, to a file of policemen and the neighboring magistrate dragging the sixteen-year old widow from the very flames?--when she was drugged, too, and quite happy--when the wrench was over, even for him, and she, to all intents, was a saint scattering salvation on seven generations of inconstant males! Much as he loved Tara, the little twin sister who, so the village gossips loved to tell, had left the Darkness for the Light of Life still clasping his hand, how could he have done her such an injury? As a Rajpoot how could he have brought such a scandalous dishonor on any family?

      But being also a soldier, as his fathers had been before him, and so leavened unconsciously by much contact with Europeans, he could not help admiring Tara's pluck in refusing to accept the life of a dog, which was all that was left to her among her own people. And he had been grateful to the Huzoor, as she was, for giving her good service where he could see her; though he would not for worlds have touched the hand which had lain in his from the beginning of all things. It was unclean now.

      Still he could not forget the gossip's story any more than he could forget that James Greyman had been his Lieutenant, and that together they had shot over half Hurreeana. So when he passed through Lucknow on his way to spend his leave in his wife's village, he always gave a day or two of it to the quaint garden-house.

      And now Tara had definitely accused him of ruining her life! Anger, born of a vague remorse, filled him as he watched her disappear up the plinth. If it was anybody's fault it was the Huzoor's; or rather of the Sirkar itself who, by high-handed interference with venerable customs, made it possible for a poor man, by a mere slip of the tongue, to injure one bound to him by the closest of ties.