In Kali's Country Part 4

"The missionary memsahib, master. Please let me get her."

"A missionary! Would a missionary come to my house?" he asked in scorn.

Blackmore-Sahib had seen the missionary lady often, for she was one of the very few Europeans in the city, but he never had spoken to her. He knew missionary principles and he felt that he and Nona in her eyes were worse than the Hindus "in their blindness." He had always avoided a missionary's path; now he would not ask for help!

Even if he should humble his pride and do so, he felt that no Christian would come to him, for were not he and Nona without the law?

"No, she would not come," he said emphatically.

"Yes, master, she will come. I know she will come. See how ill my mistress is! Hear her moans!" and the faithful ayah wrung her hands in grief. "Oh, let me go to get her."

"Is she a doctor?" he asked. "Does she give medicine?" he went on, trying to make the native woman understand.

"No, she is not a doctor, but she gives medicines," the woman replied enigmatically.

There was no doctor within reach. If this woman could help Nona, had he any right to let his pride keep him from at least asking for her help? Blackmore-Sahib reasoned it out slowly. Although he was sure that she would not come, he must do all that he could to help the sick woman and so he must ask the missionary to come.

"Go!" he said finally to the ayah and as she sped down the road he continued his pacing and his thoughts. His thoughts turned strangely, after the interruption, to his boyhood home and his boyhood days when even a lie, a wrong word, or an unkind deed had hurt him almost as much as his mother. But his mother had died when he was only a lad and after that had come school and then India and--Nona.

The change from the rigid morality of a well-trained boy living under the eye of a law-abiding people, to the moral thoughtlessness and neglect of a man far away from the reign of aught but the law of the conqueror among an inferior people; the change from the conventional obedience to the social customs of a Christian land, to the unconventional disregard of all Christian customs in a heathen land, had come so gradually that Blackmore-Sahib had never before realized how different he was in moral integrity from what he had been in that boyhood home and how different he must be in reality from what his mother had imagined that he would be in her fond dreams about the future. Had India by her enervating climate, by the ease with which she gratifies the sensual side of man's nature, and by the intellectual loneliness in which she makes her foreign rulers live--had India by these means warped his moral sense? Or had his good life in Christian England been a foolish fanaticism and was his life here the true living of a free soul?

Blackmore-Sahib was startled at the presence of such questionings in a mind which heretofore had accepted his conduct and life unquestioned. But at that moment there stole upon him the memory of a sweet white face, drawn with pain and the sound of a low but earnest voice saying, "My boy, I am going away--to leave you alone.

Be strong and brave and good." These memories as they mingled in his mind and ears with the picture of a beautiful, dark face full of suffering into which he had looked that very morning and the sound of sharp moans still coming through the half-closed bungalow door, worked strange havoc within him.

Although his thoughts had carried him far, only a few moments had actually pa.s.sed when, hearing quick steps beyond the compound wall, he came to a halt and saw an English woman hurry in at the gate, followed by the panting ayah.

"Good-afternoon, Mr. Blackmore," spoke a pleasant English voice. "I am not a physician, but I'll do the best I can."

Blackmore-Sahib followed clumsily, as a man does in a house of illness, after the energetic little figure that went straight to Nona's room. There the missionary spent much time examining her patient and it was with anxious eyes that she finally looked at the man as he sat near the door.

"It is a serious case. I have seen just one like it before," she said. "But since it is impossible to get a real physician I will do the best I can. Will you kindly send me a couple more servants and order several tubs of hot water got ready? Then, please, go away for a gallop and do not come back for several hours. I don't believe you know much about sickness and a good ride will brace you up, for you will have to watch with her to-night, I think." The last was said with a smile as she started quickly and quietly about her preparations.

At the end of two hours he met her at the bedroom door.

"She is more comfortable, but it will be a hard fight. I shall stay here to-night. I don't dare trust the case to any one else yet."

In the morning, when at five o'clock he was wakened from a fitful sleep by a rap at his door, the same voice said, "She is resting now. Will you come and watch her while I go home for a short time? I cannot leave her alone with the servants, for they are either too tired or too stupid to obey instructions this morning."

About seven she returned and all day long, sometimes by turns, sometimes together, they watched and waited, doing all they could to help Nature bring back peace to the poor suffering body.

About the middle of the morning he asked her how she had gained her medical skill. Then she told him of her life in India and how she had found that by helping the sick she could most easily reach the hearts of the people. She told of spending one furlough in a hospital at home for training. Seeing that the conversation did not annoy the patient and that it seemed to interest the man, she went on telling about her work and the joys and sorrows that she had experienced as a missionary. Not one word of preaching! She simply told of her life as if talking to an old friend. There was not a sign that she had recognized anything unusual in this household or seen anything to condemn. He began to wonder if she knew and yet he felt that she did know. She talked about England and the home she had hoped to go to the next year; but no one had been found to take her place and she could not go until there was some one to work for her people. He was surprised at the light in her eyes when she said: "I'll not leave them without some one to care for them even if I have to put off my home-going all my life."

She talked of Christ so freely and of her own religious beliefs so naturally that he felt that her speech grew out of her life and he did not resent the personal religious element in her conversation which he had always avoided and resented in others.

But while she was talking in low tones or listening to him as he, in turn, told of his home in England, she kept a keen eye on her patient. About eight o'clock at night a change came. The moaning stopped; the restless brown hands grew still; the breath came regularly; and Nona slept a quiet, restful sleep. The memsahib, on her knees beside the bed, looked up at the big, burly, white man standing on the other side of the narrow couch. "She will get well,"

she said simply. "And now--now"--she stammered with difficulty, "you will marry her, won't you?"

As the astonished man gazed into her wistful, earnest face a slow resolve grew in his own. The coming of this strong, wholesome woman into his life, the revival of the memories of his boyhood, the face of his mother, never entirely forgotten, and now clear and vivid before his very eyes, and, more even than all these, the dawning consciousness of the Presence in which his life had been lived and was now being judged cleared away all his ethical confusion, revealed to him the evil of his past life and begat in him a great desire for cleansing and a high purpose to make amends for the past.

And so when the missionary memsahib said to him, "You will marry her, won't you?" his astonishment slowly gave way to a sense of high moral purpose. After a silence which revealed the struggle within, he replied in a firm voice, "I will! and may G.o.d bless you."

With these words the man dropped upon his knees on the other side of the bed and his head rested for a moment on the pillow very close to the beautiful brown face there. Then, without asking permission, the missionary prayed a simple prayer of thanksgiving for the life of the woman and a request for a blessing upon her English brother and herself that they might shape their lives after the character of Christ and live according to Christian laws.

Then the missionary slipped quietly out of the room, for the danger was over and the servants could take as good care of their mistress as could she. But she promised the anxious ayah as she went away that she would come in from time to time for a few days to see that all went well.

Two weeks from that day an Englishman stood with a Hindu woman by his side in a missionary's parlour and there a quiet wedding ceremony was performed. To the bride it meant nothing, but to the bridegroom it meant an entire change in his life and heart.

Several years later an English gentleman bore unflinchingly the embarra.s.sment--and worse--of introducing an Indian wife to his English family at home. Tenderly he sheltered her from all annoyances and apparently with pride he took her from place to place in the homeland. Only one person, a missionary from India, home on a long-delayed furlough, guessed that the journey was one prolonged torture to the man who, from a high sense of duty to a woman who could not even comprehend it, was making her all amends in his power for a wrong which, also, she did not comprehend.

"I don't understand why he married a native," one of the Englishman's relatives remarked to a friend. "Otherwise he is a perfect Christian gentleman and an honour to the family."

The missionary, who chanced to overhear the remark, in her mind erased the "otherwise."

V

Mundra

"Mundra!" a harsh voice screamed from the door of the mud house.

"Mundra, child of the devil, come here. Where are you, spending all your life in laziness and I working hard to put rice into the mouth of a G.o.d-cursed creature like you!"

There would have been no need for more than the first call, if the old woman had simply wanted the child to come to her, for at the first sound of the voice the little thing had started up from the dirt of the road where she had been lying and, gathering the sari, in which she had been wrapped, up around her hips and waist, had moved hastily towards the speaker. But the woman seemed to be giving vent to her own ill nature in an evidently customary and certainly vivid way.

"You vile object of the G.o.ds' wrath! To be sleeping when every decent creature is at work!

"Bring water," the old woman commanded fiercely and with a thrust of her foot sent the child, who had reached the door by that time, reeling in the direction of a large bra.s.s water pot which stood in a corner of the mud porch.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "For a few moments she managed to keep up the straining movement"]

Evidently too wise and too tired for words, the little creature, recovering her balance, quietly but not without great difficulty, lifted the big, bra.s.s jar and, putting it upon her head, started off down the village street.

The small, dark, thin figure walked very straight because of the jar on the head, not from any sense of pride, for what had Mundra to be proud of? Not a single ornament so dear to the hearts of India's women did the child wear; her sari was but a dirty cloth; and her head was shaven. Little girls of her own age with clinking anklets and glistening jewels drew away their gay garments from any possible contact with hers as she came near and stepped to one side of the street with their water jars. The men who came towards her along the road carefully turned away so as to avoid her shadow as she pa.s.sed them. And no one addressed her except as a small boy now and then pointed a finger at her and called out the same words which the men muttered to themselves as she pa.s.sed them--"Cursed of the G.o.ds."

As she paused to rest for a moment under the shade of the great peepul tree which protects the emblems most sacred to the Hindu villager, even the priest, who tended the various small shrines beneath the great tree, muttered a curse and moved quickly to the other side of the gnarled trunk where a coolie, clad only in soiled white loin cloth and dirty pink turban, was winding a garland of marigolds about one of the sacred stones. The worshipper's attention, attracted by the sudden movement of the priest, was drawn to Mundra and he in turn, muttering, paused in his acts of worship until the contaminating presence should be withdrawn.

When the child reached the well, she had to wait at a distance until all the others there had filled their vessels and gone. Then she filled her own and, without a.s.sistance, although it took a dreadful struggle, raised it to the necessary position on her head.

But the child was so accustomed to all this treatment and so tired that she scarcely noticed how the people acted. Her body ached all over, from hard work and blows, even to her very heart, which really ached hardest of all. Just one short year before Mundra had been one of the happy, bejewelled girls of this very town and everybody had smiled at her and pa.s.sers-by had called her "Blest of the G.o.ds." But now how different! Her father had been of the weaver caste and when she had been about ten years old, no native ever knows his exact age, she had been married to a man in the same caste. And at that time, less than one year before, she had gone to her husband's home a welcomed bride, the very home to which she was now returning in disgrace, and her mother-in-law had been pleased with her and greeted her with kind words, the very same woman who but a few moments before had kicked her away with curses.

At the time of Mundra's wedding the people had been anxious because rain had not come and the crops were dying. Therefore, with grain still at famine prices from the year before, conditions had been bad in the district where she lived. So it had not been a surprise when, soon after the wedding, among these ill-fed natives had come the ever-expected and ever-dreaded cholera. In the early days of the scourge Mundra's father and mother had died. At first their death had meant little to the child for she was no longer a part of their household. But soon death did take one whose going meant at once more to her, almost more, than the loss of her own life. One morning her husband, a strong man of about thirty, was stricken. By nightfall another body had been placed upon the funeral pyre and Mundra was a widow.

Mundra, and she alone, had caused the death of her husband; so thought every one in the village and so thought the child herself, brought up in Hinduism. Now she realized the death of her parents, for had they been alive she would have been sent back to them at once. But since they were dead she had to be kept as a despised member of the household of her mother-in-law, practically a slave there, with all the hardships and abuse usually attendant upon the lot of such an one. Her hair had been cut off; her pretty jewelry had been taken from her; her coloured saris had been sold to a neighbour; and in place of all these belongings she had been given a few yards of white cotton to wrap about her and part of a ragged blanket for a bed. But Mundra could have stood all this hard treatment, hard as it had been, and even gladly would have slept on the mud porch with the cattle or in the street with the dogs, if only every one had not hated her and shunned her as foul and unclean, if only some one had loved her, if only some one had even spoken kindly to her sometimes or smiled upon her.