DHRITARASHTRA Our own son, Duryodhana? GANDHARI Yes! DHRITARASHTRA This is a terrible boon for you, his mother, to crave! GANDHARI The fathers of the Kauravas, who are in Paradise, join me in beseeching you. DHRITARASHTRA The divine Judge will punish him who has broken His laws. But I am his father. GANDHARI Am I not his mother? Have I not carried him under my throbbing heart? Yes, I ask you to renounce Duryodhana the unrighteous. DHRITARASHTRA What will remain to us after that? GANDHARI God's blessing. DHRITARASHTRA And what will that bring us? GANDHARI New afflictions. Pleasure in our son's presence, pride in a new kingdom, and shame at knowing both purchased by wrong done or connived at, like thorns dragged two ways, would lacerate our bosoms. The Pandavas are too proud ever to accept back from us the lands which they have relinquished; therefore it is only meet that we draw some great sorrow down on our heads so as to deprive that unmerited reward of its sting. DHRITARASHTRA Queen, you inflict fresh pain on a heart already rent. GANDHARI Sire, the punishment imposed on our son will be more ours than his. A judge callous to the pain that he inflicts loses the right to judge. And if you spare your son to save yourself pain, then all the culprits ever punished by your hands will cry before God's throne for vengeance,--had they not also their fathers? DHRITARASHTRA No more of this, Queen, I pray you. Our son is abandoned of God: that is why I cannot give him up. To save him is no longer in my power, and therefore my consolation is to share his guilt and tread the path of destruction, his solitary companion. What is done is done; let follow what must follow! [_Exit._ GANDHARI Be calm, my heart, and patiently await God's judgment. Oblivious night wears on, the morning of reckoning nears, I hear the thundering roar of its chariot. Woman, bow your head down to the dust! and as a sacrifice fling your heart under those wheels! Darkness will shroud the sky, earth will tremble, wailing will rend the air and then comes the silent and cruel end,--that terrible peace, that great forgetting, and awful extinction of hatred--the supreme deliverance rising from the fire of death. 33 Fiercely they rend in pieces the carpet woven during ages of prayer for the welcome of the world's best hope. The great preparations of love lie a heap of shreds, and there is nothing on the ruined altar to remind the mad crowd that their god was to have come. In a fury of passion they seem to have burnt their future to cinders, and with it the season of their bloom. The air is harsh with the cry, "Victory to the Brute!" The children look haggard and aged; they whisper to one another that time revolves but never advances, that we are goaded to run but have nothing to reach, that creation is like a blind man's groping.