The Fugitive Part 25

But what brings you here alone, Mother of kings?

KUNTI

I have a boon to crave.

KARNA

Command me, and whatever manhood and my honour as a Kshatriya permit shall be offered at your feet.

KUNTI

I have come to take you.

KARNA

Where?

KUNTI

To my breast thirsting for your love, my son.

KARNA

Fortunate mother of five brave kings, where can you find place for me, a small chieftain of lowly descent?

KUNTI

Your place is before all my other sons.

KARNA

But what right have I to take it?

KUNTI

Your own G.o.d-given right to your mother's love.

KARNA

The gloom of evening spreads over the earth, silence rests on the water, and your voice leads me back to some primal world of infancy lost in twilit consciousness. However, whether this be dream, or fragment of forgotten reality, come near and place your right hand on my forehead. Rumour runs that I was deserted by my mother. Many a night she has come to me in my slumber, but when I cried: "Open your veil, show me your face!" her figure always vanished. Has this same dream come this evening while I wake? See, yonder the lamps are lighted in your son's tents across the river; and on this side behold the tent-domes of my Kauravas, like the suspended waves of a spell-arrested storm at sea. Before the din of tomorrow's battle, in the awful hush of this field where it must be fought, why should the voice of the mother of my opponent, Arjuna, bring me a message of forgotten motherhood? and why should my name take such music from her tongue as to draw my heart out to him and his brothers?

KUNTI

Then delay not, my son, come with me!

KARNA

Yes, I will come and never ask question, never doubt. My soul responds to your call; and the struggle for victory and fame and the rage of hatred have suddenly become untrue to me, as the delirious dream of a night in the serenity of the dawn. Tell me whither you mean to lead?

KUNTI

To the other bank of the river, where those lamps burn across the ghastly pallor of the sands.

KARNA

Am I there to find my lost mother for ever?

KUNTI

O my son!

KARNA

Then why did you banish me--a castaway uprooted from my ancestral soil, adrift in a homeless current of indignity? Why set a bottomless chasm between Arjuna and myself, turning the natural attachment of kinship to the dread attraction of hate? You remain speechless. Your shame permeates the vast darkness and sends invisible shivers through my limbs. Leave my question unanswered! Never explain to me what made you rob your son of his mother's love! Only tell me why you have come to-day to call me back to the ruins of a heaven wrecked by your own hands?

KUNTI

I am dogged by a curse more deadly than your reproaches: for, though surrounded by five sons, my heart shrivels like that of a woman deprived of her children. Through the great rent that yawned for my deserted first-born, all my life's pleasures have run to waste. On that accursed day when I belied my motherhood you could not utter a word; to-day your recreant mother implores you for generous words. Let your forgiveness burn her heart like fire and consume its sin.

KARNA

Mother, accept my tears!

KUNTI

I did not come with the hope of winning you back to my arms, but with that of restoring your rights to you. Come and receive, as a king's son, your due among your brothers.

KARNA