Page:Tales of Bengal (Sita and Santa Chattopadhyay).djvu/61

Rh told at that time how she would be married into this very family, and how this little one would be all in all to her?

At thirteen, during her first visit to her husband's home, her husband died and she became a widow. That very year, her husband's sister was married and went away to her father-in-law's house. The mother, stricken by the great sorrow of her son's death, took to her bed, never to leave it again. Thus left alone, in his third year, the baby clung to Surama, his sister-in-law, as his only stay. That is why she, a darling of her parents, could not go back to them and seek even a few days' solace away from that desolate home of her husband. The ever unhappy Bengali widow, Surama, took the boy into her life as her very own. If she had searched into her mind, she would have found no answer to the question of what Gopal was to her. He was not her son, not her brother, nothing; but still he was her all, the delight of her heart, the apple of her eye. She could, no doubt, recall the face of her husband,—the handsome blushing youth, who came one day in a palanquin of state, while the conches blew and the nahabat played, and in crimson bridal silk stood by her side. That sweet face still illumined a corner of her heart. But the happy memory of a single festal day cannot fill a woman's heart. She wants a living touch, and if memory alone is to be her stay, it must be the memory of a whole man, a full man, round whom a thousand pleasures, pains, tears and smiles, whims, fancies, caprices and moods, have clustered. She never had that mate of a brief festal day amid these. Thus it was round this boy that all the raptures of union and the pangs of separation sounded their notes. The husband smiled still, loved by her fancy like a distant god; but this boy, her daily companion, stood near her heart, filling with a living human touch the aching void in her life. Rh