So then, the very moment it was done, Makarandika woke, herself, as it
were, from a dream. And horror at her own action, as if it had waited
till the very moment when it should be unavailing, suddenly flowed in
upon her soul. And as she gazed at Arunodaya, lying still in the
moonlight with her dagger in his heart, and found herself with
absolutely no companions but the dead body, and the darkness, and the
wind and the waves, alone on that palace roof, she murmured to herself,
as if she hardly understood: What! can this be of my doing? What! have I
actually slain the husband of my own choice, jealous of his very dreams?
And she stood, for a little while, with one hand upon her head, and
then, she uttered a scream. And she seized him by the hand, and shook it
violently, as if endeavouring to wake him and recall him from a dream,
in which she herself had buried him for ever, cutting off its
termination, and prisoning his soul in an everlasting dungeon, like a
stone dropped beyond recovery, fallen with a hollow echo into the black
darkness of a well.
And lo! that shriek reverberated as it were in heaven, and was answered
by a peal of laughter that fell on her from the sky. And she looked up
into the air, and saw, hovering in rows above her, all those Widyadhara
suitors whom she had rejected long ago, gazing down at her with faces
that were distorted with malice and derision. And as she stood,
confounded, with their laughter ringing in her ears, Smaradasa swooped
towards her, and called to her ironically: Ha! Makarandika the scornful,
how is it with thy mortal husband? How could he prefer another to such a
beauty as thyself?
And Makarandika gazed at them all for an instant, with eyes that exactly
resembled those of a fawn, on the very verge of escaping from its
pursuers by leaping from a cliff. And her reason fled away from her, as
if anticipating her own flight. And strange! at that moment, as if
bewildered by her own deed and the very sight of those Widyadharas of
whom she had been one, she utterly forgot for an instant that she
herself was no longer a Widyadhari, and had lost her own power of flying
through the air. And she made a bound to the edge of the parapet, and
leaped off, thinking to fly over the sea, and escape, and be at rest.
But instead of flying, she fell, and was broken to pieces at the bottom
of the wall, in the foam of the waves that were also broken, at the foot
of the palace rock.
* * * * *
So then, when at last Maheshwara ended, the Daughter of the Mountain
asked eagerly: But, O thou of the Moony Tire, tell me, how as to the
dream. Was it the very truth, and Sarojini the very wife of his former
birth?
And Maheshwara said slowly: Nay, O Snowy One, not at all. For it was not
even a true dream. For if it had really been a dream, it would not have
continued, as it actually did, in spite of its interruptions. But the
whole was a delusion, and a contrivance of the Widyadharas, who lured
his soul out of his body by means of a magic drug, and acted all before
him, exactly like a play. For the Widyadharas were the pandits, and the
great hall was nothing whatever but the sky. And the noise was nothing
whatever but that of the wind and waves, and Sarojini herself was
Makarandika's own sister, who hated her for her beauty, which was
greater than her own. And as for Makarandika, she was all the time her
own rival; for she herself, and no other, was the real wife of his
former birth.
And the Daughter of the Mountain started, and she uttered a little cry.
And she exclaimed: Ah! no! O Moony-crested, it cannot be. Surely thou
art only jesting? What! was their happiness divided from them by so thin
a wall as that? What! when they would have given, each his soul, to know
it? Alas! alas! what cruelty of the Creator, to bring the cup of
happiness as it were to their very lips, without allowing them to taste!
simply by reason of a film of utter darkness, that prevented them from
seeing it was actually there!
And after a while, that Lord of Creatures said slowly: O Daughter of the
Mountain, yet for all that it was true. And many a traveller crosses
over seas and years of separation, surmounting every peril, to perish at
the very last moment, when the ecstasy of reunion is almost in his
grasp, on the step of his own door. And be not thou hasty to lay cruelty
to the door of the Creator, who is absolutely blameless in the matter,
seeing that all these and similar misfortunes come about, as the
necessary consequence of works. And though the extremity of happiness,
arising from mutual recognition, was divided from Arunodaya and
Makarandika by a screen thinner than the thickness of a single hair,
they could not reach it, for thin as it was, that screen had been
erected by their own wrong-doing, and was nothing whatever but the doom
pronounced against themselves by their own misbehaviour in a former
birth. And thus it came about, that Makarandika played the part of
Arunodaya's former wife, never even dreaming that she was only claiming
to be what she actually was: while Arunodaya shrank, in his ignorance,
from the very wife whom he would have given the three worlds to
discover, in pursuit of a phantom, that was substituted for her by his
own unilluminated longing for a treasure that, all unaware, he held
already in his hand. For souls that wander to and fro in the waste of
the world's illusion resemble chips tossing aimlessly up and down on the
heaving waves of time, driving about at random they know not how or
where, under a night that has no moon, in an ocean without a shore: for
whom the very quarters of heaven are lost in an undistinguishable
identity, and even distance and proximity are but words without a sense.
So, now, let us leave these our images to become once more, by our
departure, nothing but the stony guardians of this empty shrine. And
to-morrow Gangadhara will learn, by listening to the story of yonder
sleeper, what Smaradasa meant, and unriddle his enigma of the poisoning
of the soul.