He was somewhat dashed at the gravity of David’s look. “That little Leilamani urged me in kindness, David, and it seemed to me, too, a good thing to do. Were you an Indian, David, it would be a matter of course, a tenderness, a proof of love between us. Is not your happiness my own?”
He put out his arms and embraced David by the shoulders, coaxing him with his eyes and his voice. This was Darya at his real self, his Indian self, always the deepest self and the self so near the surface that the English veneer disappeared completely. He was even speaking in Marathi, his native tongue.
“Ah, my brother, art thou angry with me? And what is it our Tukārām says?
‘Can my heart unmoved be,
When before my eyes I see
Drowning men?’
So I, beholding thee drowned in thy loneliness, did put out my hand on thy behalf and wilt thou hate me for this?”
It was impossible to be angry with him, and Darya, searching David’s face, caught the softening. Instantly he was lively again. He sprang up from the couch and confronted him, bending over with laughter, snapping his fingers while he laughed.
“And consider Olivia!” he cried in English. “Can you believe that anything I wrote would change her mind in the least? No, no, David, she is not like my gentle Leilamani. She will not come when you bid her come and go when you tell her to go. A noble woman, and beautiful, a wife to be proud of, but I warn you, she will always make up her own mind.”
David yielded. “Darya, you conquer by incessant talk. My mind whirls like a kaleidoscope. Let’s agree — you are always kind and though it is our western habit for a man to attend to his own love affair, I grant that you meant to help me.”
“And perhaps I did help you,” Darya declared triumphantly.
“We shall see,” David said, yielding again, because argument was futile. Darya would argue with relish and endlessly, recognizing no defeat. And he wanted to be in his own rooms alone, and read Olivia’s letter again. He wanted to make sure it was there where he had left it, locked in his desk.
Above all, he wanted to answer it immediately. He wanted to tell her to come at once, as quickly as she could. The words framed themselves aloud in his mind as he splashed his way through the rain and mud again to the mission house.
“Come, Olivia. Take the next boat, darling. I didn’t know it, but I have been waiting for you ever since I saw you last. I can wait no longer.”
The monsoons died away, the sun shone between the rains. The waiting earth sprang into instant growth and seeds that had lain in the dry soil waiting sprouted into the fresh green of fields and gardens. Time sped, the seasons telescoped, spring, summer and harvest rushed together and the surrounding beauty of the countryside beyond the city, and the mountains still beyond, brought an exaltation David had never known before. The Fordhams came back again, and with a generosity upon which they insisted, when he told them he was to be married, they moved out of the big mission house into a smaller one, long empty.
“You will be having a family and there’s only the two of us, now,” Mrs. Fordham said mournfully.
She helped him to furnish the house again for Olivia, but he would not allow anything beyond necessities.
“Olivia has a mind of her own,” he told Mrs. Fordham. “When I go to meet her in Bombay, she will want to buy things herself, I am sure.”
The Fordhams took away their modest bamboo and rattan furniture and he got along, furnishing only a few rooms from the Poona shops. Some of the Indian things were beautiful, he had not known how beautiful they were, for now Darya went with him and demanded that the best be shown him. He bought a few beautiful rugs, some inlaid silver, a low couch, and brocades so heavy with gold that insects could not destroy them! He bought also a huge English bed of teak with a hair mattress and a canopy of fine Indian muslin instead of a mosquito net, and he bought some teak chairs with woven seats. Teak was too hard for the termites to chew. Darya swept through the shops, arguing with the shopkeepers, and insisting upon Indian goods.
“Take these, David,” he commanded. “If Olivia doesn’t like them, she can return them. But I think she will like them.”
The house was changed, Darya arranged an opulence, and this without the furniture that he conceded Olivia should buy for herself. There was only the one English bedroom, but Darya declared the English shops in Bombay were better than these in Poona, they were the best in India, in fact, nearly as good as London shops, and much better than those in Calcutta.
Alone at night David knelt at the high new bed to say his evening prayers. He knelt upon a footstool because the rains had brought a host of insects into the house, and he did not like to be disturbed by spiders running along his legs or by a curious-minded lizard nibbling at his toes. There was also the horror of centipedes or scorpions to distract his mind from God. He felt earnest and anxious and he tried to prepare himself for the life ahead and he had two concerns. Olivia must be happy and he must take time to make her happy insofar as he was able. But, and this was the graver concern, she must not divide his mind or even his heart. She must join him in the divine direction under which he lived, she must deepen the consecration. Man and wife, they must work together for God. He would, he decided, firmly continue his way of life and his habits of prayer. He would be as he was, from the very moment they met, so that she would not see him only as her bridegroom, but also as the missionary.
And he prayed, “Teach me that I may teach, Oh God! Take Thou this mighty love I feel for her and keep it, lest it become my greatest treasure and separate me from Thee.”
His prayer went up and then he lay and dreamed of her and of how she would look when he waited on the dock in Bombay and the ship drew near, and he could see her face at last.
VII
OLIVIA STOOD AT EARLY dawn and gazed upon the shores of India. The sky was flushing pink over Bombay, the many lights were growing dim in the light of the rising sun and the sinking moon changed to a dead silver. A faint mist rose from the harbor and softened the outlines of the distant buildings. From it rose the massed outline of an old fort or castle, she could not tell which. The rosy mists, the pallid moon, the glow of new sunlight mingled to cast an atmosphere of mystery over the land.
The ship had anchored some two miles off shore, for the waters of the harbor were shallow, the captain had told her, and launches were coming to take the baggage and the passengers ashore.
She heard a man’s voice call as he passed. It was a young officer. “Ready, Miss Dessard?” He was an Englishman, and he yearned vaguely over the handsome American girl who was going out to marry a missionary. In intervals of a ball one night he had tried to probe as delicately as he could the mystery of this young woman. “I can only hope you will persuade your fiancé to leave that tragic country,” he had said. He was an Oxonian, a young man who hoped to better himself, one of England’s innumerable younger sons who were sent to India to find fortune if not fame.
“But you don’t leave India,” Olivia had said rather too astutely.
“Ah, but India’s our job,” the young Englishman had declared. “Besides,” he had added after a half moment’s thought, “it’s so hopeless being a missionary, you know, really it is. And only the worst Indians turn Christian.”
To this Olivia had said nothing, the music had begun again and she rose. She loved to dance and she knew that in Poona there would be no more of it. It had been lovely dancing on the ship, the rise and fall of the sea made one feel lighter than air….
“Quite ready,” she said calmly.