Robbins gave me that look of condoling forbearance which had nearly driven me mad for a week and beguiled the _babee_ away promptly, as if I had been a fractious child. I was, however, only a jilted man. A badly jilted man, whose jilting was of the kind which becomes almost comic from sheer excess of tragedy. To be brief, I had gone down on ten days' leave to Bombay to meet and marry the girl to whom I had been engaged for two years. Robbins, who was coming out in the same ship with her, was to have been best man. We had certainly been in love with each other when we last met; at least, if I was not, I have never been in love at all. If she was not, then I have never seen a girl in love. I wish to be absolutely fair in the matter, so I will confess that, as I went to meet her, I knew myself to be less emotional than I had been two years before. I had even vague qualms as to whether this sort of thing was quite wise. I was, to put it curtly, in the mental condition in which every man about to marry a _fiancee_ whom he has not seen for two years must be. Presumably her mental condition was similar. But whereas I had to spend the three weeks preceding the irrevocable step in a jungle station where any novelty must necessarily be attractive, she spent it in an environment which gave her endless opportunities of seeing other men, and comparing them with me, and her ideal. The result being that she found she was in love with some one else. Being frank and honourable she told me the truth, with a kind of blank dismay. She did not offer to fulfil her engagement. How could she? when from the beginning to the end, from her first confession that I was her ideal, to her last letter, then in my breast pocket, the whole fabric of our future lives had been built by us on our belief in the permanence of this selfsame love of ours.

We could only look in each other's eyes and wonder what was the matter with the foundations of our round world.

Robbins said I behaved splendidly. In truth I was too much stunned at first to realise what it actually meant, and then a certain contempt for them both, especially for the man who came and offered me a shot at him, made me magnanimous. I merely offered in my turn to be best man at the wedding, and was only deterred from doing so by the feeling that it was theatrical, and by Robbins suggesting that I had better have some ice on the back of my head. He meant well, did Robbins, and insisted on accompanying me on what was to have been my wedding tour; for I had my ten days' leave, and I was in no hurry to go back to the gossiping little station where the bungalow I had furnished for her lay waiting a mistress.

Yes! Robbins meant well, and by sheer counter-irritation kept me going. There was a honeymoon off the same ship which came up country with us stage by stage, and the efforts Robbins made to prevent me from seeing its bliss were pathetically comic. The bride and bridegroom wore neat, new, brown-leather shoes, and she had a new brown-leather handbag, just like one which I had carried for my _fiancee_ before she explained the situation. As I sate opposite them I wondered savagely if my face had worn the idiotic smirk of sheer content visible on the man's, and I tucked my own new brown shoes under the seat. They looked so forlorn beside Robbins' big boots. For all that, I combated all condemnation of the delinquents for the first three days. The only honourable theory of marriage being that based upon a mutual and romantic love, it would be unjust because of a single mistake, to blame any one for acting in accordance with a belief which had made Englishmen and Englishwomen what, thank G.o.d, they were. In fact I was badly, brutally moral, until, coming out into the hotel verandah during one of our rests by the way, I happened on the bride and bridegroom looking at the moon.

Then the primeval desire to murder rose up, seized me, and held me.

Why hadn't I taken the scoundrel's offer and killed him? I was a good shot; and Robbins, as an army doctor, an excellent second. Then I could have married the bride-widow, or spurned her, as I preferred.

There was really, I told myself, no logical foothold between this and being best man. If marriage was an affair of love, these two were right, and the part designed for me by Providence obviously that of second fiddle. If not, they were wrong, and I had a right to claim redress. To shilly-shally, feeling at once hurt and magnanimous, was absurd. I had lain awake, afterwards, debating half in jest, half in earnest, whether I should send Robbins back to the wedding with my cartel, or go myself with a set of silver salt-cellars in a velvet case. But underneath my jest and earnest lay a keen yet vague desire to understand, to find some solid spot on which to rest. I had still been debating the question, when, to please Robbins, who liked me to have no time for thought, we had driven out next morning to these ruins. The country through which we drove had been the ordinary Rajputana country; flat--or nearly so--dry, rocky. Then we had come to a spiky, spiny, roach-back hillock, over which the dead town sprawled, half buried in its own dust, half lost in the sunshine.

I had been watching Robbins' big boots all the way, so I was in a bad temper. Apart from other causes, however, I had some excuse for threatening to kill the guide. For the Hall of Audience to which we had just climbed was, briefly, one of those places which make some of us nineteenth-century folk remember the warning given long ago to an eager reformer to take the shoes from off his feet, since the ground whereon he stood had already been made holy by other hands than his. Yet it was plain almost to bareness. Devoid utterly of any of that ornamentation telling of human hopes and fears, likings, dislikings, and ideals, which men all over the world strive wistfully, hopelessly, to make permanent by carving them in stone. But it was a miracle of light and shade, with its triple ranks of square stone columns--rose-coloured in the sunshine about their feet, blood red in the gloom of arches about their heads--standing like sentinels round a Holy of Holies which was roofed only by the open sky, and floored level to the marble pavement surrounding the still pool, with clear, cool water. And through the outer arches, on all sides, showed that indefinite glare, and dust, and haze, faintly yellow, faintly purple--that burden and heat of the Eastern day in which millions are born, and toil, and die--which seems to swallow up the real India and hide so much of it from Western eyes.

I had just got so far in my appreciation of the indefinable charm of the place, when Robbins returned to stand beside me and look down on the br.i.m.m.i.n.g water.

"Curious!" he said, "at the top of a hill like this. I wonder what's the reason of it?"

"Those of uncultivated mind, sirs," replied New India, promptly, "hold it by reason of Grace-of-G.o.d. We who through merciful master's aid have acquired hydraulics prefer system of secret syphons; though the latter belief is optional."

"If that man remains here," I remarked aside to Robbins, "I refuse to be held responsible for my actions. Take him away and see the rest of the ruins. I am going to stop here--this is enough for me."

They went off together, the guide babbling of modern equity. The last words I heard were a quotation: "Boots not to say, O Justice! what asperities have not been committed in Thy name!"

Perhaps. No doubt dreadful things had been done even in this Hall of Audience, though it lay very still now; very silent in the sunshine.

I sate down on the base of a sentinel column and looked at the sky, mirrored at my feet, wondering what other things the water had seen.

So by degrees the question seemed to clamour at me. What had been done there? What was it? What gave the place its charm for me? For it had a charm, an infinite charm.

I gave an impatient shrug of my shoulders at the sound of footsteps.

Robbins need not surely watch me as if he feared I might commit suicide; though the water certainly looked inviting. But it was not Robbins. It was an old man with a shaven head, and a very clean saffron-coloured cloth, coming through the pillared ranks with a bra.s.s _poojah_ basket like a big cruet-stand in his hand. My mind misgave me instantly. He was far too clean for a real ascetic, and there was a bogus air about him as of one expecting tourists and their alms. In addition he came straight towards me, and squatting down by the edge, within reach absolutely of my contaminating shadow, began to mutter prayers.

I rose disgusted; but my first movement showed me I was at any rate partly mistaken, for he turned his head, startled at the sound. Then I saw he could not have known I was there, for he was blind. I saw also that the basket which he had set down contained nothing but the star-like flowers of the wild jasmine.

"Whom are you going to worship?" I asked instantly, for I was a connoisseur in ceremonies, having spent years of study over the ancient cults of India.

He stood up instantly and salaamed, recognising the accent of the master. "No one, _Huzoor_," he replied. "I am only going to make Mother atma her crown."

"atma!" I echoed. "Who was she?"

A half-puzzled, half-cunning look came to his face. "It is a long story, _Huzoor_; but if the Cherisher of the Poor will give his slave a rupee--"

Returning to my first impression of him, I was about to move away, when he added plaintively: "I tell it better than the _baboo_, _Huzoor_, but now-a-days he comes with the _sahibs_. So my stomach is often empty. May G.o.d silence his tongue!"

The desire pleased me. It matched my own. And as I paused, I noticed that the old man, who had squatted down again, had begun to thread the jasmine flowers on some link which was invisible from where I stood.

"What are you using to thread the flowers?" I asked curiously.

"A woman's hair, _Huzoor_. It is always the hair of a woman who has died, but whose child has lived, that is used for Mai atma's crown.

Shall I tell the story, _Huzoor?_"

"Was she beautiful?" I asked irrelevantly, why I know not.

"I do not know, _Huzoor_," he replied. "Am I not blind?"

The answer struck me as irrelevant also, but I went on idly, feeling, in truth, but small interest in what I was convinced must be some hackneyed tale I had heard a hundred times before, since I was given to the hearing of tales.

"Is it about this place?" I asked.

He shook his head again. "I do not know, _Huzoor_. It is about Mai atma. Shall I tell the story?"

"You seem to know very little about the story, I must say. How do you know it is about atma?"

He smiled broadly. "It is about Mai atma, sure enough. The _Huzoor_ will see that if he lets me tell the tale."

I clinked a rupee down among the jasmine flowers and bid him fire away, and be quick about it.

He began instantly, plunging without any preface into a curiously rhythmed chant, the very first line of which gave pathetic answer to my irrelevant question, and at the same time showed the cause of the old man's ignorance. It ran thus:--

"O world which she has left, forget not she was fair."

Vain appeal when made in the oldest known form of Arya-Pali--the dialect in which the edicts of Asoka are carved--and of which not one man in ten million, even in India, knows the very existence. I happened to be one of the few, and though at the time I could naturally only gather the general outline of the chant, I subsequently took it down word for word from the old man's lips. Some pa.s.sages still remain obscure; there are yawning gaps in the narrative, but taking it all in all, it is a singularly clear bit of tradition, preserved, as it were, by the complete ignorance of those who pa.s.sed the words from lip to lip. Roughly translated, it runs thus:--

"O world she left, forget not she was fair; so very fair. Her small kind face so kind. Straight to the eyes it looked, then smiled or frowned. About her slender throat were gold-blue stones. Gold at her wrists; the gold hem of her gown slid like a snake along the marble floor, coiled like a snake upon the water's edge.

"By night she asked the stars, by day the sun, what they would have her do.

"I was her servant sitting at her door, Watching her small feet kiss the marble floor; Reading the water mirror's heaven-learnt lore.

"O world she left, remember she was Queen!

"For atma ruled a queen ere she was born, her widowed mother wasting nine long months to give her life ere following the King.

"O atma mata! strike thy servant blind, He and his sons for ever, lest they find Thy face within the crown their fingers bind.

"Hark! how her voice comes echoing through the Hall, 'Who hath a claim to-day 'gainst me or mine?' (There was a dainty jewel at her breast, kept time in sparkles to her lightest word.)

"'Who hath a claim'--her small, kind face so wise!

"O atma mata! strike thy servant blind, He and his sons for ever!"