"_Mai_ Gungo!" said Julia severely, as, on her way out, she found the mother-in-law surrounded by her gossips, exhibiting the baby to them with great pride, "you must look to Kirpo; she thrives not. And give her the baby--she pines after it."
"The Miss doth not understand," flounced Gungo. "What can Kirpo do with a baby? She is a fool; besides, a mother like that hath evil influences till the time of purification hath passed."
Ten days afterwards the mistress of the school told Julia that Kirpo had the fever, and they did not think she would recover. It was never safe for such as she to have sons, and nothing else was to be expected.
Perhaps it was not; for Julia found her on the bare ground of the courtyard where she had been set to die. The oil lamps flared smokily at her head and her feet, and _Mai_ Gungo, with the fortnight-old baby in her arms, cried "_Râm! Râm!_" lustily. But the girl lingered in life, turning her head restlessly from side to side on Mother Earth's bosom.
"Give her the baby--only for a minute," pleaded Julia with tears in her eyes. _Mai_ Gungo frowned; but a neighbour broke in hastily--
"Ay! give it to her, gossip, lest in her evil ways she returns for it when she is dead."
So they laid the baby beside her; but the restless head went on turning restlessly from side to side.
Before they could fetch it from the Mission compound Kirpo was dead.
The rains had fallen late, bringing unusual greenness to the stretches of waste-land, and unusual promise of harvest to the bare, brown fields where man and beast were hard at work, day and night, ploughing, harrowing, sowing, watering. Waiting--that integral part of Indian husbandry--had yet to come, but the memory, almost the dread of it, lurked ever in the slow brains of the labourers. In mine also, alien and uninterested though it was; for surely no one who has seen a Jât cultivator, tall, meagre, soft eyed, wandering amongst his green wheat, waiting for Râm to send rain, can ever forget the incarnate tragedy of the sight.
The sun was setting cloudless in a sea of light, that still flooded the scene with the brightness of noon, though the shadows lengthened in swift strides. I was sitting on a wide flight of steps leading down into a small tank closed in on all sides by masonry. Viewed thus, with the mass of brick work surrounding it, this square of placid water reflecting back the lemon-coloured sky, the fringe of dull _farâsh_ trees, and the gilded spires of the temple rising above them, showed like a small Dutch picture set in a heavy, deep-recessed frame. On the opposite side a woman in a saffron veil was filling her brass pot, and on the trumpery stucco arcades of the temple-plinth were painted blue elephants, gingerbread tigers, and spidery monkeys. Round and round the central spire the iridescent breasts of the whirling pigeons glinted in the level rays.