ru? Dost thou know what she will think of, living
beside thee in the wood? Dost thou think, it will be thou? Alas, poor
ugly Babhru, it will be he. And every time she sees thee, she will
compare thee and him, thy body with his body, thy eyes with his eyes.
Her lips would never touch thee without thinking of his own. Thou wilt
only love what he rejected, and bite at the very place which the monkeys
bit before thee when they threw the fruit away. The taste would be so
bitter that thy love would turn to hatred in a day. She would loathe the
very sight of thee, and every time she looked at thee, her eyes would
tell thee, thou wert so ugly and contemptible in comparison with him.
They have flung thee the relic of a life that they would not take away,
merely in derision. Wilt thou live even with a victim that despises
thee? Half dead and half alive, like a lizard mangled by a passing crow,
and left to writhe: a deer, struck by an idle hunter, left wounded in
the jungle, unable even to procure its death, to ebb away its life
through burning days and black intolerable nights, eyed by the vultures
sitting by. And thou wouldst be the vulture? Thou wilt only be a jackal,
eating what the lion leaves. What! live beside her, knowing that another
is buried in her heart. Wilt thou feed, like a dog, even on the bodies
of the dead? Poor Babhru, dost thou not understand. She cast thee off
and left thee for a lover that she never will forget, and living like a
vampire in her body that is dead, he will utterly despise thee, laughing
at thee in her eyes. Ah! Wilt thou actually wait to understand, till a
little Atirupa comes, to spit, exactly like his father, in thy face?

VI

And as Babhru listened, all at once the words of Chamu as he went away
rose up and stood before him, as if they had lain waiting, and as it
were sleeping in his soul, till roused into recollection by her own. And
suddenly, the veil, formed by his own devotion to Aranyani and his own
self-annihilation, that hid from him the truth, was lifted from his
eyes. And he saw himself suddenly as in a mirror, mocked, and scorned,
and as it were a very target for the contempt and derision of Chamu, and
his master, and even of herself. And his heart swelled suddenly with
such a flood of shame, and anger, and the bitterness of his own
inferiority, that it almost broke in two. And his face fell: and his
eyes, that were fixed on Aranyani, grew darker and ever darker, as if
night at