And then she began to speak. And as she spoke, she leaned forward, as
she sat upon the fallen pillar, and fastened her great eager eyes like
magnets on his own. And as Aja watched them, they played as it were upon
his heart. For their colour wavered and changed and faltered, shifting
ever from hue to hue, turning golden and ruddy amber, and emerald-green
and lotus-blue; and over her eyes her arching brows lifted and fell and
played and flickered, fixing his troubled soul like nails, and
rivetting his attention, till her singing voice sounded in his head like
a distant tune crooned in the ear of a sleepy man. And she waved slowly
her long round arms, all the while she spoke. And she said: Far away,
over the sea, lies thy own forgotten land, and presently I will tell
thee, and even show thee, where it is. And there it was, in our former
birth, that thou and I were boy and girl. But thou wert the son of a
mighty King, and I was only a Bráhmani, a poor man's daughter, and my
father was an old ascetic, far below thee in everything else, but caste.
And I lived alone with my old father, in the very heart of a great
forest, in a little hut of bark, over which the _málatí_ creeper grew so
thick, that nothing was visible of that little hut, except its door. And
then one day I was seen by thee, standing still in that very door, with
my pitcher on my head: as thou wert passing through the wood to hunt
upon thy horse. And that moment was like a sponge, that blotted from the
mind of each everything but the other's image. And I made of thee my
deity, and forgot everything in the three great worlds, for thee alone.
And thou, that day, didst clean forget thy hunting: or rather, the God
of Love showed thee game of another kind[11], and from pursuing thou
didst fall to wooing a quarry that wished for nothing so much as to be
thy prey. And we married each other that very day, which ah! thou hast
all forgotten. What! dost thou not remember how I used to meet thee
every day in the little hut, when my father was away in the wood engaged
in meditation? What! hast thou really all forgotten how it was thy
supreme delight to bring me garments and costly jewels, which I put on
for thy amusement, thy forest-queen of the little hut? Has thy memory
cast away every vestige of reminiscence of thy old sweet love in the
little hut? So then it happened that on a day we were together, blind
and drunk with each other's presence, shut within the little hut like a
pair of bees in a nectared lotus. And I was standing like an idol,
dressed like the queen of a _chakrawarti_[12], loaded with gold on
wrists and feet, with great pearls wound about my neck; and thou wert
contemplating me, thy creature[13], with intoxication, and hard indeed
it was to tell, which of us two was the idol, and which was the
devotee. And as we woke up from a kiss that lasted like infinity, lo! my
father stood before us. And he said slowly: Abandoned daughter, that
hast forgot thy duty in thy passion for this King's son, become what
thou hast represented, an idol[14] of stone on the wall of a ruined
temple far away: and thou, her guilty lover, fall again into another
birth, and be separated from thy guilty love. Then being besought by us,
to fix some period to the curse, he said again: When ye two shall meet
again, and thy husband in his curiosity shall touch thee with his
finger, she shall regain her woman's state, and be as she was before.
And now all this has come about, exactly as he said. And I have found
thee once again, only to find alas! alas! that thou hast left thy heart
behind thee in that old delicious birth.
[11] In Sanskrit, hunting and wooing can be mixed up
together by plays on words.
[12] An emperor. Hindoo idols are dressed and undressed,
like dolls, by their officiating priests.
[13] She means, he was her Creator.
[14] The Hindoos have no word, because they have not the
idea, of an _idol_. They call it a _god_ or an _image_. Our
word _idol_ implies the antagonism to paganism involved in
Christianity, and no two books are more alike than S.
Augustine's _City of God_ and Ward's _Hindoo Mythology_.