"Sir Lancelot," she said at last, "I am very sensible of the honour--"
"Don"t--for heaven"s sake," he interrupted. "That is--excuse me--bunk.u.m."
She felt glad of the faint resentment which came to her aid. "I am, all the same," she continued; "but it is impossible. Perhaps if I did not look forward as I do; perhaps if I only sought happiness; but--" she clasped her hands tightly and the militant look came back to her face--"I am sworn to another work--the n.o.blest work of all--to bring light to those that sit in darkness."
Lance gave an odd little laugh, full of bitterness. "You leave me out in the black night, anyhow," he said.
True enough, in one way, for the quick dusk had closed in around them; but as he spoke, a great white shaft of light like a moon-ray shot, almost as if in denial--widening on its way, from the shadowy stretches beyond the river; shot waveringly, as if uncertain, until, focussing itself full on the verandah, it turned the dusk to day.
"The search-light!" cried Mrs. Smith, clapping her daintily gloved little hands. "Eugene will be so pleased. He couldn"t positively swallow a mouthful at lunch because, when he thought all was right, something went wrong. That"s why he didn"t come, Miss Shepherd," she added, for the light had effectually joined the scattered groups into one. "I positively couldn"t tear him away, but I made him promise to turn the thing on here if he succeeded. And he has. Isn"t it splendid?"
Mrs. Campbell looked doubtful. "It"s just too much like the last day, comin" unawares, and makin" a" things manifest, for my taste. An" I wonder what Dr. James will say to it?"
"I wonder what the natives will say to it?" said Vincent Dering, looking across at Lance.
"Say!" echoed the tart lady. "I know what they should say--that, of course, we know a great deal more than they do."
"And, besides," added a new and gushing voice, "it is so beautifully, suggestively true. We have the light, we can light them."
"Oh! but that _is_ such a bother," came Laila Bonaventura"s full-throated tones. "I hate having to see things I don"t care to see.
I much prefer to have my own candle, don"t you?"
She had been finding it dull work waiting for her guardian"s return from the dining room, even though Vincent had, now and again, found opportunity for a word or look. He took advantage of one now to say, "It will be pleasanter by and by, won"t it? We must settle the time before you leave."
"What time?" asked Muriel Smith, who happened to overhear his undertone. She had been vaguely curious at their apparent avoidance of each other, their occasional lapses into familiarity, ever since she had challenged them at the Viceroy"s party.
"Time!" echoed Vincent, coolly. "Of that new song, of course. Come in, Miss Bonaventura, let us decide about it."
The girl swept up her long lashes solemnly. "I should think a twelve beat would be best, really. It is safer when there are so many accidental notes."
His face, as he led the way to the piano, was a study. If she had lived her life in a vaudeville at the _Folies Bergeres_ she could scarcely have been more at home in intrigue, yet her absolute sincerity and unconsciousness of wrongdoing was as palpable. On the whole, he felt vexed; the more so because the vaudeville dialogue proved unnecessary, since a sudden concentration of the party to hear the verdict of the Adullamites, who at that moment came out of the dining room, would have given them ample time for more dignified conversation.
Erda was in the front rank of the eager little crowd, her hopes, her enthusiasms, heightened by the deliberate choice she had just made, when Dr. Campbell, as the recognized head, began to speak. They had come unanimously to the conclusion, he said, that absolute revolt at this late hour would be unwise. Whether Father Ninian Bruce was justified, by the circ.u.mstances, in his adverse report was another matter. Personally he denied it; nor did he propose that they should sit down quietly under the interference. They were only forbidden to preach in Eshwara. Therefore they had come, again unanimously, to the resolution of leaving Eshwara for the time in a body. It would be a solemn protest; and they could thus render both to Caesar and to G.o.d, since they could preach at other pilgrim stations on the road. It would be a n.o.ble protest which was certain of proving blessed.
The words roused no little enthusiasm, mingled with undoubted relief in most cases; but Erda, standing beside her cousin, said in an undertone, "Did you a.s.sent to that, David?"
"I suggested it," he answered, in a louder voice, not without some self-satisfaction. "It appeared to me to meet the exigencies of the case admirably, and it will be very useful, let me tell you, at home.
It will emphasize the difficulties and dangers we have to contend against. It will show our meek reasonableness, and then--" he looked round with a jubilant smile--"it seems to me such a beautiful idea that the only result of this attempt to gag us will be that the thousands of poor benighted souls will have a chance of hearing the Truth in many places instead of one."
But Erda"s voice broke in on the hum of applause almost harshly, filling the room with its defiance. "I think it cowardly; I would fight--if I were a man."
"You would beat Jean Ziska"s drum!" laughed Vincent Dering, rising from the music stool where he had been holding Laila"s hand under cover of the new song,--an occupation which always made him feel as if all the wine of life had gone to his head. "You refused my sword just now, Miss Shepherd, so I place my drumstick at your disposal."
So, with a reckless gaiety, he seized on a painted tambourine which good Mrs. Campbell had hung as an ornament on the wall,--it was bedaubed with two white lilies and a b.u.t.terfly rampant,--and catching up a teaspoon from the table, he began to sing in his pretty, light-comedy voice, "Oh! dem golden slippers!" while the tambourine, under his skilful drumming, throbbed to the words:--
"Golden slippers on a golden stair, Golden slippers on my tired feet, Golden slippers dat we all mus" wear Becos" dey are so sweet."
He sang well, he played better; and both voice and drumming echoed out through the open windows.
"They are singing in the _missen_," said the people in the courtyard to the pilgrims, who were still gathering to the miracles, like moths round a candle. "It is not wise to listen; folk become as they are, if they do."
Some of the pilgrims laughed and some stopped their ears; but even so, the throbbing of the tambourine was in the air.
"Golden slippers on a golden stair, Golden slippers on my tired feet, Golden slippers dat we all mus" wear."
CHAPTER XVI
ECHOES
If the twopenny-halfpenny tambourine--which had been bedaubed with its white lilies and rampant b.u.t.terfly by a suburban maiden lady for a mission sale, and, remaining over from that, had been bought in at half price by Mrs. Campbell for the adornment of her drawing-room,--had been indeed Jean Ziska"s famous drum, Eshwara could hardly have been more restless than it was on the night after Vincent Dering had sung, "Oh!
dem golden slippers!" to its accompaniment. The tune had occurred to him in an instant, without thought, simply as one he had sung more than once when doing bones and tambourine in a n.i.g.g.e.r troupe at a soldiers"
sing-song. He had meant nothing by; it and yet the words,
"Golden slippers on a golden stair, Golden slippers dat we"se got to wear,"
fitted their environment; that atmosphere of effort after something beyond, above the real, the actual; the inevitable climbing of a golden stair, the inevitable wearing of the golden shoes, the inevitable search after the golden gates which, found, will open upon Paradise.
True, the Paradise differed to each pair of yearning eyes and weary feet; but the longing for it as a personal gain, spiritual or bodily, was identical.
For Paradise is the Desire of the World still; whether men find it in the good they lost, or the Love which lost it for them.
And in Eshwara that night the desire rose strenuously, militantly.
Erda, packing her boxes in haste, since she and her aunt had arranged to start with the others at dawn, felt as if she had, at last, closed her hand firmly on the plough. There could be no looking back now. The golden slippers were on her feet, the golden stairs before her, the golden gates within sight. She had said good-by to Lance without a quiver. She even smiled softly, tenderly, as she set an unopened deal box to go with her others. It was one which the Reverend David had brought with him from England, and which had been made over to her, not without nods and winks, smiles and suspicions of tears, from her aunt.
For it contained the wedding dress. It was a Moravian wedding dress of the old style, to suit Erda"s fancy; and she had been quite anxious to see the delicate white muslin robe and the quaint little cap, with its bunch of orange blossoms, which was to mark her as both bride and matron. But it had seemed a pity, in careful Mrs. Campbell"s opinion, to unpack it only to repack it, and run the needless risk of crushing its daintiness. So there in its box it lay still, untouched, unseen.
There would be real orange blossoms and to spare, the girl told herself with a smile, in the garden at Herrnhut; for so the summer resting-place of the mission had been called in deference to the Moravian extraction of those who had built it and started the Christian settlement in the tiny valley in which it stood. This lay some thirty miles up the Hara, beyond the first range of hills; and the river, fresh from its mad rush from the snows beyond, ran through it slackly, peacefully, before beginning its long, swift, yet smooth, slide down the dark ravine which cleft the outer range, until it ended in the plains at Eshwara.
It was at Herrnhut that, every year, in turns of two months during the hot weather, the missionaries exchanged work in the bazaars for the lighter labor of the agricultural settlement. Naturally, therefore, it was looked on as a sort of holiday house; but this year it would be something more. It would be the headquarters of fight, the centre of the resistance which was to use the Commissioner"s order to cease firing as an excuse for a more determined skirmishing. For it stood right on the pilgrims" road. Indeed, Erda and the other rebels would have to travel a good eight-and-twenty miles along that very road itself before coming to the slack water where they could cross the river by a ferry, and finish their journey through the level fields on its further side to Herrnhut, with its homelike, peaceful surroundings.
The memory of them came to Erda, making her sense of that inevitable climbing of the golden stair after righteousness more acute; since she had to face a good-by to them also. And sooner than she had expected, for the breaking up of winter work a week earlier than usual, owing to this secular interference, had made David, eager to begin anew, plead for a speedier wedding. So there were only two or three days left, at most.
The knowledge, however, brought her no doubt; it helped her, rather, to a greater certainty.
She had done right. Her feet were indeed upon the golden stair!
And in the other houses of the mission, where everyone was disregarding sleep in the striving after something that was more to them than sleep, the atmosphere was electric also, the thoughts militant.
So they were in the streets, the alleys of the town; for on the bridge of boats--that bridge which spanned the broad expanse of water between the city and the great plain of India--the pilgrims were pa.s.sing, now, in an unending stream--to take up their places as near as might be to the Pool of Immortality, where, with the dawn, the water would rise miraculously for the cleansing of sin.
"_Hari! Hara! Hara! Hari!_"