I am a wretched woman."
"Then tell me everything now."
Kusum gravely told her story in a firm unshaken voice. She waded
barefooted through fire, as it were, with slow unflinching steps, and
nobody knew how much she was scorched. Having heard her to the end,
Hemanta rose and walked out.
Kusum thought that her husband had gone, never to return to her again.
It did not strike her as strange. She took it as naturally as any other
incident of everyday life-so dry and apathetic had her mind become
during the last few moments. Only the world and love seemed to her as a
void and make-believe from beginning to end. Even the memory of the
protestations of love, which her husband had made to her in days past,
brought to her lips a dry, hard, joyless smile, like a sharp cruel knife
which had cut through her heart. She was thinking, perhaps, that
the love which seemed to fill so much of one's life, which brought in
its train such fondness and depth of feeling, which made even the
briefest separation so exquisitely painful and a moment's union so
intensely sweet, which seemed boundless in its extent and eternal in its
duration, the cessation of which could not be imagined even in births to
come--that this was that love! So feeble was its support! No sooner does
the priesthood touch it than your "eternal" love crumbles
into a handful of dust! Only a short while ago Hemanta had whispered to
her: "What a beautiful night!" The same night was not yet at an end, the
same yapiya was still warbling, the same south breeze still blew into
the roam, making the bed-curtain shiver; the same moonlight lay on the
bed next the open window, sleeping like a beautiful heroine exhausted
with gaiety.
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