Page:Krishnakanta's Will (Chatterjee, Roy).pdf/35

Rh "Why have you no mind? Will you not tell me?"

"Since you ask me I must tell you that I hate to be a hanger-on."

"Oh, how you pain me to talk like this!"

"Maybe I do. But did you ever care to think that you were taking an unadvised step when you went to your father's?"

"I didn't, and I repented for it afterwards. I fell at your feet and craved your pardon. Oh, is it such a great offence that it cannot be forgiven? Will you not forgive and forget? To forgive is divine: you said it yourself."

"Yes; but you are the possessor of the half share of the estate. I shouldn't wonder if you think that you are now free to do as you like."

"Oh, you wrong me to talk like this. But you do not know what I have been doing. Look at this paper, do."

Through her father's help Bhramar had made over the half share of the property to her husband, and the paper she now placed in his hand was a deed of conveyance duly executed and registered.

When Gobindalal had glanced over it he tore up the paper. "I will not accept a gift from you," he said.

"It is useless to destroy it," she said. "There is a copy of it at the Registrar's office, my father has told me."

"I don't care. I will not accept a pie at your hands, that's all. Now good-bye."

"When do you come back?" she asked again.

"I don't know. I may not."

"Oh, how can you be so cruel?"

"I tell you seriously I have no mind to return."

"Is there not One above!" she gasped forth in a piteous wailing tone.

"Spare now your sermon, please. It is getting late,—I must be off."

His words smote heavily on her heart. She felt as if some one had struck her a deadly blow. Tears started to her eyes, but by an uncommon effort she quickly mastered them and sent them back to the source from which they sprung. "Go," she said with agony in her eye, "and return not if that, as you say, be your intention. I am innocent, you know I am, and yet you want to forsake me. But remember there is a God! Remember you will have to repent one day! If you think you can find one who can love you as truly and devotedly as I love you, you are greatly mistaken. But you will find your mistake one day, I am sure you will. Then you will seek me, and you will know the agony of remorse when you think what a grave wrong you have done me. Go; say you will not come again if you like. But if I have been ever faithful to you, as faithful in thought as in deed, I say you will seek me; you will come to me again, and you will call me by my name as fondly as you used to do, and weep bitter tears."

Here her feelings choked her. She could say no more. She fell on her knees, stooped to kiss his feet, then rose and left the room.

At one time when she was very happy with her husband, Bhramar had lost a child, a boy, at her lying-in, and now the reminiscence of that sad incident served to add fuel to the flame of her grief. She bolted herself into her room and bewailed the loss of her child, throwing herself down on the bare floor. "O my child, my baby," she wailed, "where are you gone? Had you been alive could your father have ever thought of leaving me? For your sake he would have borne with me even if I had been a bad and quarrelsome woman. He would have overlooked for your sake a hundred faults in me. Come, my sweet one, oh, come and be the comforter of your poor unhappy mother. Oh, pity and return! Cannot one, who is dead, be restored to his sorrowing mother?"

With bended knees and joined palms she implored God why He could be so cruel to her. "Say Thou, O God", she continued, "what I have done to deserve this punishment. My child I have lost, my husband has left me! Oh, why could his heart be turned against me who loved him better than life itself! How happy we were, how well we loved each other. His love had turned our home into an Eden, and I thought myself the happiest of women in the world. Oh, it is so hard!—so hard! To have won the greatest joy that life can give—and then to lose it all!"

It seemed to her that God was cruel, and she could do nothing but weep. So she wept and cried, and she prayed God to end her sorrows by putting an end to her existence.

Leaving his wife Gobindalal walked pensively to the outer house. He felt the