Page:Karl Gjellerup - The Pilgrim Kamanita - 1911.djvu/112

 returned to the Master, his words were: 'Have patience, ascetic, have patience! For the deed whose atonement would have cost thee many years of the torments of hell—that deed will be atoned for in thy lifetime.

At the first sound of his voice, there quivered through me from head to foot a flash of horror, and, with every additional word, an icy coldness penetrated deeper into the very recesses of my being. For that was, O brother, the voice of Angulimala, the robber—how could I doubt it? And when my convulsive glance fixed itself on his face, I recognised that also, although his beard formerly went almost up to his eyes and his hair grew down deep into his forehead, whereas he now stood bald and shaven before me. But too well did I recognise again the eyes under those bushy, coalescing eyebrows, although instead of, as in those days, darting only flashes of rage at me, they now, with deep dissimulation, looked kindness itself; and the sinewy fingers which encircled the alms-bowl—they were assuredly the same that had once clutched my throat like devilish talons.

"How should I indeed, O head of thy house," my gruesome guest went on, "how should I indeed grow angry at abuse? Has not the Master said, 'Even if, O ye disciples, your limbs and members should be cut off, by robbers and murderers, with a cross-cut saw, ye would not fulfil my commands, if ye should thereupon give place to rage.

When I, O brother, heard these words, with their diabolically concealed, yet to me so evident, threat, my legs shook under me, and to such a degree that I had to hold on to the wall in order not to fall down.

With the greatest difficulty I managed to pull myself together so far as to indicate to the robber-ascetic, more by