And then, the very instant she had spoken, recollection suddenly rushed
across her: and she knew, like a flash of lightning, that she had
uttered her own doom. And as she gazed at him with eyes, whose love
suddenly turned to terror, Arunodaya, all at once, started to his feet.
And he exclaimed: Ha! wert thou the bird? Ha! now, at last, I
understand. So this, then, was the means of thy discovery, and the
origin of thy deceit, thy listening to the conversation of my minister
and me? And all thy story was a lie, and thou thyself art nothing but a
liar and a cheat. And like a worm, that is hidden in the recesses of a
flower, thou hast placed thyself on a king's head, being only fit to be
cast away and trodden underfoot: as I myself will tread thee, and cast
thee away like a blade of grass, fit only to be burned. And I will sweep
the very shadow of thy memory from my heart, into which thou hast
wriggled, by treachery and fraud, to the prejudice of its proper owner,
the true wife of my former birth.
So as he spoke, with eyes that consumed her, as it were, with the fire
of their hatred and contempt, she stood for a single instant still,
stupefied and aghast, shrinking from his fury, and confessing by her
confusion her inability to clear herself of the charge he brought
against her, looking like a feminine incarnation of the acknowledgment
of guilt. But as he ended, the thought of the rival whom he cast into
her teeth entered her heart like the stab of a poisoned sword. And as he
looked at her, all at once he saw her change. And the fierce fire of his
own emotion suddenly died away, annihilated as it were and turned in a
trice to ashes as he watched her, by the intensity of hers. For from
crouching as she was, she slowly stood erect, becoming so ashy pale that
life seemed on the very point of leaving her a thing composed of snow
and ice in the white rays of the moon. And she looked at him with eyes,
in which the love of but a moment since had frozen into a glitter, as
though the blood that filled her heart had suddenly turned to venom that
was black instead of red. And so she stood for a moment, and then all at
once she leaped at him and clutched him by the hand, with fingers that
shut upon it and squeezed into it like teeth. And she said, with
difficulty, as if the breath were wanting to make audible the words:
Dost thou repay me thus? And have I thrown away my state of a
Widyadhari, and all my magic sciences, for such a thing as thee, and
this? And have I sacrificed a countless host of suitors, who would have
given the three worlds for a single glance of my eye, for thee to
trample on my beauty and my affection, counting it all as absolutely
less than nothing, in comparison with another who is nothing but a
dream? Make, then, the very most of all the sweetness and the love that
she will give thee; for mine thou hast lost, and it is dead, and it is
gone. See, whether the affection of the wives of thy future and thy past
will make up to thee for that of thy wife of the present, which thou
hast despised, and outraged, and mangled and annihilated, and wilt never
see again.
And she turned, abruptly, and looked for a single instant away across
the sea. And she said: I cannot leave thee as I would have done, for I
have lost my power of flying through the air. But bid adieu to the wife
of the present, and sing hey! for the wife of the past.
And as she spoke, her voice shook. And she went away very quickly into
the palace, and left him there on the roof alone.