"I am going to Holy Gunga. Where else should a suttee go? The Water will not reject me as the Fire did, since, before God! I am suttee. As the master knows,"--her voice held a passionate appeal,--"I have been suttee all these long years. Yet now I have given up all--all!"
With a swift gesture, full of womanly grace, but with a sort of protest against such grace in its utter abandonment and self-forgetfulness, she flung out her arms once more. This time to raise the shrouding veil from her head and shoulders. Against this background of white gleaming in the moonlight, her new-shaven skull showed death-like, ghastly. Jim Douglas recoiled a step, not from the sight itself, but because he knew its true meaning; knew that it meant self-immolation if she were left to follow her present bent. She would simply go down to the Ganges and drown herself. An inconceivable state of affairs, beyond all rational understanding; but to be reckoned with, nevertheless, as real, inevitable.
"What a pity!" he said, after a moment's pause had told him that it would be well to try and take the starch out of her resolution by fair means or foul, leaving its cause for future inquiry. "You had such nice hair. I used to admire it very much."
Her hands fell slowly, a vague terror and remorse came to her eyes; and he pursued the advantage remorselessly. "Why did you cut it off?" He knew, of course, but his affected ignorance took the color, the intensity from the situation, by making her feel her coup de theatre had failed.
"The Huzoor must know," she faltered, anger and disappointment and vague doubt in her tone, while her right hand drew itself over the shaven skull as if to make sure there was no mistake. "I am suttee--" The familiar word seemed to bring certainty with it, and she went on more confidentially. "So I cut it all off and it lies there, ready, as I am, for purification."
She pointed to the upper step leading to the plinth, where, as on an altar, lay all her worldly treasures, arranged carefully with a view to effect. The crimson scarf she had always worn was folded--with due regard to the display of its embroidered edge--as a cloth, and at either end of it lay a pile of trumpery personal adornments, each topped and redeemed from triviality by a gold wristlet and anklet. In the center, set round by fallen orange-blossoms, rose a great heap of black hair, snakelike in glistening coils. The simple pomposity of the arrangement was provocative of smiles, the wistful eagerness of the face watching its effect on the master was provocative of tears. Jim Douglas, feeling inclined for both, chose the former deliberately; he even managed a derisive laugh as he stepped up to the altar and laid sacrilegious hands on the hair. Tara gave a cry of dismay, but he was too quick for her, and dangled a long lock before her very eyes, in jesting, but stern decision.
"That settles it, Tara. You can go to Gunga now if you like, and bathe and be as holy as you like. But there will be no Fire or Water. Do you understand?"
She looked at the hand holding the hair with the oddest expression, though she said obstinately, "I shall drown if I choose."
"Why should you choose?" he asked. "You know as well as I that it is too late for any good to you or others. The Fire and Water should have come twelve years ago. The priests won't say so of course. They want fools to help them in this fuss about the new law. Ah! I thought so! They have been at you, have they? Well, be a fool if you like, and bring them pennies at Benares as a show. You cannot do anything else. You can't even sacrifice your hair really, so long as I have this bit." He began to roll the lock round his finger, neatly.
"What is the Huzoor going to do with it?" she asked, and the oddness had invaded her voice.
"Keep it," he retorted. "And by all, these thirty thousand and odd gods of yours, I'll say it was a love-token if I choose. And I will if you are a fool." He drew out a small gold locket attached to the Brahminical thread he always wore, and began methodically to fit the curl into it, wondering if this cantrip of his--for it was nothing more--would impress Tara. Possibly. He had found such suggestions of ritual had an immense effect, especially with the womenkind who were for ever inventing new shackles for themselves; but her next remark startled him considerably.
"Is the bibi's hair in there too?" she asked. There was a real anxiety in her tone, and he looked at her sharply, wondering what she would be at.
"No," he answered. In truth it was empty; and had been empty ever since he had taken a fair curl from it many years before; a curl which had ruined his life. The memory making him impatient of all feminine subtleties, he added roughly, "It will stay there for the present; but if you try suttee nonsense I swear I'll tie it up in a cowskin bag, and give it to a sweeper to make broth of."
The grotesque threat, which suggested itself to his sardonic humor as one suitable to the occasion, and which in sober earnest was terrible to one of her race, involving as it did eternal damnation, seemed to pass her by. There was even, he fancied, a certain relief in the face watching him complete his task; almost a smile quivering about her lips. But when he closed the locket with a snap, and was about to slip it back to its place, the full meaning of the threat, of the loss--or of something beyond these--seemed to overtake her; an unmistakable terror, horror, and despair swept through her. She flung herself at his feet, clasping them with both hands.
"Give it me back, master," she pleaded wildly. "Hinder me not again! Before God I am suttee! I am suttee!"
But this same Eastern clutch of appeal is disconcerting to the average Englishman. It fetters the understanding in another sense, and smothers sympathy in a desire to be left alone. Even Jim Douglas stepped back from it with something like a bad word. She remained crouching for a moment with empty hands, then rose in scornful dignity.
"There was no need to thrust this slave away," she said proudly. "Tara, the Rajputni, will go without that. She will go to Holy Gunga and be purged of inmost sin. Then she will return and claim her right of suttee at the master's hand. Till then he may keep what he stole."
"He means to keep it," retorted the master savagely, for he had come to the end of his patience. "Though what this fuss about suttee means I don't know. You used to be sensible enough. What has come to you?"
Tara looked at him helplessly, then, wrapping her widow's veil round her, prepared to go in silence. She could not answer that question even to herself. She would not even admit the truth of the old tradition, that the only method for a woman to preserve constancy to the dead was to seek death itself. That would be to admit too much. Yet that was the truth, to which her despair at parting pointed even to herself. Truth? No! it was a lie! She would disprove it even in life if she was prevented from doing so by death. So, without a word, she gathered up the crimson drapery and what lay on it. Then, with these pathetic sacrifices of all the womanhood she knew tight clasped in her widow's veil, she paused for a last salaam.
The incomprehensible tragedy of her face irritated him into greater insistence.
"But what is it all about?" he reiterated. "Who has been putting these ideas into your head? Who has been telling you to do this? Is it Soma, or some devil of a priest?"
As he waited for an answer the floods of moonlight threw their shadows together to join the perfumed darkness of the orange trees. The city, half asleep already, sent no sound to invade the silence.
"No! master. It was God."
Then the shadow left him and disappeared with her among the trees. He did not try to call her back. That answer left him helpless.
But as, after climbing the stairs, he passed slowly from one to another of the old familiar places in the pleasant pavilions, the mystery of such womanhood as Tara Devi's and little Zora's oppressed him. Their eternal cult of purely physical passion, their eternal struggle for perfect purity and constancy, not of the soul, but the body;
