In despairing patience, his mother carries him like a child into the sun,
where he sits by the roadside in the shortening shadows of each forenoon.
The world passes by--a woman to fetch water, a herd-boy with cattle to
pasture, a laden cart to the distant market--and the mother hopes that some
least stir of life may touch the awful torpor of her dying son.
17
If the ragged villager, trudging home from the market, could suddenly be
lifted to the crest of a distant age, men would stop in their work and
shout and run to him in delight.
For they would no longer whittle down the man into the peasant, but find
him full of the mystery and spirit of his age.
Even his poverty and pain would grow great, released from the shallow
insult of the present, and the paltry things in his basket would acquire
pathetic dignity.
18
With the morning he came out to walk a road shaded by a file of deodars,
that coiled the hill round like importunate love.
He held the first letter from his newly wedded wife in their village home,
begging him to come to her, and come soon.
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