can he go? He must come back! He is mine!"
XIX
After a short while Mahendra, in his new lodgings, got a letter in a well-known hand. He would not open it in the midst of the turmoil of the day, but kept it over his heart in his breast pocket. As he was passing and repassing from hospital to lecture-room and lecture-room to hospital, the conceit occurred to him that a dove bearing a message of love was nestling at his breast. How softly it would coo in his ears when awakened later on!
In the evening when Mahendra was alone in his room he lit his lamp and settled himself comfortably in his chair. He then brought out the letter warm from his body. For a time he did not open the cover but kept looking at the superscription. He knew there could not be much inside. It was not likely that Asha would be able to give precise expression to her sentiments—he would have to divine her tender thoughts from her shaky letters and unsteady lines. His name in Asha's childish hand on the envelope made it seem to him set to music—the heavenly music vibrating from a loving woman's tender heart.
In these few days of separation, the weariness of constant intercourse, the irritation due to petty household worries, had completely disappeared from Mahendra's mind, and the happy memories of the days of their first love shone brightly in their place, round Asha's ideal image enshrined in their midst.
Mahendra lingered over the envelope as he slowly tore it open, and caressingly touched the letter with his lips. The paper was fragrant with his favourite scent, which entered his heart like a yearning sigh.
Mahendra unfolded the letter and began to read it. But what was this! The writing was childish, but not the language. The hand was uncertain but not the sentiments! This was the letter:
Lord of my heart! Why do I remind you by this letter of her whom you went away to forget? Why does the creeper which you ruthlessly tore off and cast on the ground shamelessly seek to cling to you again?
Was it my fault, my beloved, that you once did love me? Did I ever dare to dream that such good fortune would be mine? Whence and why did I come into your life—who ever knew or thought of me before? Had you not smiled on me, had I but been allowed to serve you as your handmaid, would I have complained or blamed you? What was it in me that attracted you, my beloved, what made you raise me so high? And if out of the cloudless sky came the thunder-bolt, why did it not reduce my wretched heart to ashes?
How much have I suffered, how much have I pondered over, in these few days—and yet one thing I have not understood. Need you have left home on my account—could you not have cast me from you where you were? Or if that could not be, was there no place in the wide world whither I could have fled—drifting away as I drifted to you?
What letter was this—whose the message? Mahendra had no doubts on that score. He sat rigid and motionless with the letter in his hand, like one who is suddenly paralyzed. Pursuing one line as he had been with the full force of his emotion, this blow from the opposite direction came as a collision which threw him off and entirely crumpled him up.
He read the letter over three times. What had been a distant fancy seemed to become near and real. The comet which had dimly risen on his horizon now threatened to spread its flaming tail over the whole sky.
It was of course Binodini's. The simple Asha had imagined she was writing her own letter. Ideas which had never crossed her mind seemed to awake in her as she wrote to Binodini's dictation. "How could Binodini," she thought, "so clearly find out and put into words exactly what I was feeling." Asha felt drawn closer than ever to her bosom friend on whom she had to depend for the very words which seemed to express the pain in her heart—so helpless was she!
Mahendra left his chair with a frown. He was trying to feel angry with Binodini, but succeeded only in getting annoyed with Asha. "What a little silly!" thought he, "how trying a wife for her husband." And to prove the truth of this he sat down to read the letter over again.
He tried to read it as a letter of Asha's, but the language refused to call up for him the memory of the artless Asha. A ravishing suspicion bubbled up like wine after the first few lines. The tidings of a love, hidden yet revealed, forbidden yet proffered, poisonous yet sweet, intoxicated him. He felt he wanted to hurt himself with a knife to come back to his senses out of its overpowering influence. He brought his fist down with a bang on the table and
