ou
shalt learn how I stole her away from thee, in spite of thee, as
presently I will come to rob thee also of thy life. And I will
embitter thy life, and poison it, first: and then I will take it away.

III

And yet, strange indeed was the way that I met her. I cannot tell,
whether it was a reward or a punishment for the deeds of a previous
birth. For the joy of it would have been cheap, bought at the price of
a hundred lives: and yet the sorrow is greater than the joy. And it
happened thus. I was roaming through the world, with my lute for my
only companion. For all men know, as thou must also, that I turned my
back upon my hereditary kingdom, and quarrelled with all my relations,
and left them, all for the sake of my lute. For ever since I was a
child, I have cared for absolutely nothing but my lute, and as I
think, I must have been a Gandharwa[8] in the birth before, since the
sound of the tones of its strings, touched by the hand of a master
musician, leads me like an ox that is pulled by a cord, the very
moment I hear it, and I stand still, like one that listens with tears
in his eyes to the memory of the voice of a friend that is dead. Ha!
very wonderful are the influences of a forgotten birth! For I was an
anomaly, behaving not according to my caste, which was that of a
Rajpoot; and not music, but fighting, was my proper work, and my
religion.[9] And it was as if my mother had been caught sleeping in
the moonlight on the terrace of the palace in the hot season by some
king of the Widyadharas passing by, and looking down from the air. For
heavenly beings often fall into such temptations, and even an ascetic
would have found it hard to laugh at the arrows of Manobhawa, coming
in the form of such a feminine fascination as hers, lying still in the
lunar ooze at midnight, with her head pillowed on her arm. And yet,
for all my music, I was the tallest and strongest of all my clan, and
a hunter, when I chose, that could bear fatigue even better than a
Bhil.

And then at last there came a day when the King my father sent for me.
And when I came, he looked at me with approval, and he said: Thou art
a man at last. And yet they tell me, thou dost nothing all day long
but sit playing thy lute. Canst thou really be my son, or art thou
some musician's brat, foisted into my son's place by some dark
underhand intrigue, when I was looking the other way? For who ever
heard of a Yuwaraja,[10] destined to sit upon the throne w