Page:Karl Gjellerup - The Pilgrim Kamanita - 1911.djvu/268

 was dealt with very summarily: "he had matters of importance to talk over with me."

When we were again alone, he forthwith began, to my unspeakable discomfort, to talk of his love, of how he had missed me on the way, and with what joy he had looked forward to this hour of reunion.

I was on the point of telling him about the troubles in the town, in order to change the current of his thoughts, when the servants announced the chamberlain, who had come to summon Satagira to the king.

After about an hour he returned—another being. Pale, and with perturbed countenance, he came in to me, flung himself down on a low seat, and exclaimed that he was the most wretched man in the whole kingdom, a fallen great one, soon to be a beggar, mayhap even exposed to imprisonment or exile, and that the cause of all his misfortune was his boundless love for me, which I didn't even return. After I had repeatedly urged him to tell me what had happened, he calmed himself sufficiently to give me an account of what had taken place in the palace, accompanying the recital by many outbursts of despair, all the while ceaselessly mopping his forehead, from which the sweat-drops ran trickling down.

The king had received him very ungraciously, and, without desiring to hear anything of the village quarrel which he had settled, had ordered him, with threats, to acknowledge the whole truth about Angulimala, which Satagira was now obliged to confess to me also, without having the smallest idea that I was already so well informed on the subject. For the rest, he only saw in it a proof of his "boundless love" for me, and spoke of my love for thee lightly, as of a foolish youthful sentimentality which would, in any case, have assuredly led to nothing.