He went over to her and touched her on the arm.
She was alert in an instant, and looking in his face answered his mute question fiercely.
"It is a girl--a useless girl! What need to wake thee for such bitter news? The woman is accursed."
The quick assent rising to his lips was stilled by a little cry from within the quilt. Something--he knew not what it was--thrilled him and kept him silent.
"Is--is it pretty, mother?" he asked, sheepishly, after a while.
The old lady eyed him with suspicious scorn.
"See for thyself, ninny," she replied, shortly.
Gunesh Chund felt a distinct disappointment as he looked down at his first-born. He had forgotten what new-born babies were like since the days when, as a boy, he was admitted to such sights. This one struck him as ugly, or at least as less pleasing than a lamb or a calf.
"God send it be not ill-looking, mother!" he blurted out in a tone of alarm.
She laughed, still in the same short and scornful fashion.
"Lo! there never was a plain woman among us. The child is well enough, and favours thee. Is it not enough that it should be a girl?"
He did not hear the latter sentence. Accustomed in all things to accept his mother's fiat, he was lost in trying to trace the likeness to himself, and, to aid his efforts, drew a reflective forefinger over the featureless face, feeling, as he did so, that strange thrill at his heart again. Suddenly, as he neared the mouth, the lips trembled and a little red tongue shot swiftly on his finger-tip. He burst into a great roar of delighted laughter.
"Didst never see a child suck before, O Gunesh Chund, _lumberdar?_"[1] retorted the old woman, crossly, as she tucked the baby away again. He felt abashed, but the laughter had left him at peace with all mankind.
This was too much. The stern old lady rose to her full height and faced him. Her grey hair, disordered by the night's watching, escaped from the close folds of her veil, and the quilt slipping from her showed her tall, erect as a girl. She threw out her right hand in declamation:
"Thou art no better than a woman thyself, O Gunesh! To ask after Veru, the wife of disgrace! Thou shouldst not have thought of her. Were it not better she were dead? Ungrateful! wicked! For she must be wicked to frustrate my prayers and alms. Lo, have I not fulfilled her every wish these nine months past? And now 'tis 'How is Veru?' forsooth, and no thought of the mother who has slaved in vain. But this is an end. She is accursed, and thou must bring a new wife to the hearth if thou wouldst not lose thine own soul, and the soul of those who begat thee. Leave Veru her girl, and be kind to her, if thou art a ninny. There are other women in the world who can bear sons."