Page:The Wreck.djvu/235

This page needs to be proofread.

CHAPTER XLVI

Ramesh's future was now a blank. He had nothing to look forward to, no regular work, no settled habita- tion. It must not be supposed that he had completely forgotten Hemnalini. Rather, he had cast the thought of her aside.

"The cruel blow that Fate has dealt me has made me permanently unfit for this world's affairs," he said to himself."A blasted tree is out of place in a green wood."

He sought relief in travel and flitted restlessly from place to place. He surveyed the pageant of the Ben- ares ghats from a boat on the Ganges. He proceeded to Delhi and ascended the Kutub Minar; thence to Agra where he visited the Taj Mahal in the moonlight From Amritsar, with its Golden Temple, he journeyed to Rajputana and made pilgrimage to the shrines on Mount Abu. Neither body nor mind had any rest while the roaming spirit possessed him.

But at last nostalgia set in and his thoughts turned to home — ^the peaceful home of his childhood, now almost forgotten, and the ideal home of his whilom im- agination. When the call became too insistent, the wanderings by which he had hoped to assuage his misery came to a sudden end. He secured a seat in the next Calcutta-bound express and with a prodigious sigh took his place in the train.

Ramesh had been some days in Calcutta before he nerved himself to set foot in Kalutola. One day he went as far as the entrance to the lane in which he had lived, and on the following evening he summoned

231

Digitized by Google

This article is issued from Wikisource. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.