“Oh, it’s sad, her being so young, and the little baby,” she was moaning.
“The child may escape,” the doctor replied. “Nature is careful of the newly born.” He turned to David again. “Mr. MacArd, you must live now for the child. Go away and rest — or pray.”
David hesitated, and obeyed. He left the room and went down the hall to his study, and when he had closed the door, he fell on his knees to pray not with words but with all the agony his heart could hold that his beloved might live.
In the little compound church the Fordhams gathered the few Indian Christians, and he heard the wailing of their prayers through the hot December day and all through the night. …
Sometime near dawn the nurse touched his shoulder.
“She’s gone, Mr. MacArd.”
He lifted his head. While he prayed that she might live, Olivia had died! He rose to his feet, his mind dazed, his heartbeats shattering his body.
“There’s nothing more you can do now,” the nurse said. “Try to think of your little boy.”
But he could only think of Olivia. He gasped a few words, staring down at the nurse.
“I must see her again—”
“No, no — think of the boy, sir—”
She held his arm, and before he could reply, they heard the sound of sad singing. Someone had already run across the compound and told the Christians that death had come and they lifted their voices in the Christian hymn, “Nearer, my God, to Thee.”
It was foreign music to them, the tune was uncertain, and suddenly it was drowned in a wild wailing throughout the compound. Every servant and every neighbor was crying aloud until the instinctive human sorrow of India, always brimming and ready to run over, broke into the old music of the centuries.
“Ram — Ram is true—”
The cry of desperate faith in the presence of death rang like a shriek through the dawn, the old heathen words welled up out of the heart of India and David heard them and did not lift his head.
The plague swept through Poona and one out of every ten of Poona’s people died. Among them were Darya’s two sons, and when they were dead Leilamani and her baby daughter followed them, and Darya was left alone in the beautiful house built over the fountain of living water.
But David had his son.
Part III
X
THE SUN WAS SINKING into the Red Sea in a fury of dying color. Heat smouldered along the horizon, it inflamed the half clouded sky and as the sun touched the water the hot light ran across the smooth sullen water like liquid metal.
“I haven’t seen such a sunset since I left India,” he said.
“It is terrifying,” the girl said thoughtfully.
She was slim and white clad, English, her fair hair drawn back from the pale oval of her face. He was tall and slender of shoulder, his hair was a bright auburn, and his eyes were grey and deepset. Both of them, Ted MacArd and Agnes Linlay, were going home. They had met in ship fashion, attracted to each other because they had come from India and were going back again. Her father was Governor-general in an eastern province, and had his father been an ordinary missionary she might not have allowed herself to continue the casual friendship begun soon after she came aboard. Everybody in India knew David MacArd, the famous missionary, who was Ted’s father. Besides, he was the grandson of the great MacArd, the American financier. Nevertheless, though he was pleasant, equally at ease with the dancing set as with the missionaries who clung to him, she did not know how far she wanted the friendship to go; neither, she felt, did he. He did not pursue her and yet when she appeared on deck after tea he was there as though he had been waiting for her. Yet she was not sure that he had been.
“How do you think of India?” he asked rather abruptly.
She lifted her accurate brown eyebrows. “Meaning?”
“Is it home or isn’t it?”
She gave honest thought to the answer. “I don’t know. I want to see my parents again, of course, and in a way where they are is home. I am not sure that I really want to see India, and yet bits of memories fly into my mind, and did, all the time I was away. You know, early morning when the air is still cool and I hear the bulbul singing in the garden, or evening and the dusty sunset, and the ayah folding my clean clothes.”
“And the wailing music in the night,” he added.
“I wonder why there is always music in the night,” she agreed.
“So many people—”
“I know.”
They were silent, gazing into the flaming sky from which the sun had suddenly disappeared. The fiery stream faded from the oily sea and the curves of the ship’s wake caught long lines of crimson afterglow.
“Perhaps we are never quite at home anywhere,” she said. “When we’re in India, we talk of going home somewhere else, England for me, America for you. When we’re there — at least when I was in England, I was always thinking of India.”
“So was I when I was in America.”
Back of the sunset was the country he had left, his own and peculiarly dear because he had been so much in exile. Once during the ten years he had been there he had gone back to spend a vacation with his father in India, and twice his father had come to visit him. He had had a good time at school, first at prep and then at college, although he could still remember how he had cried secretly when he left Poona, at twelve. But he had soon forgotten that, and his old grandfather had been fond of him and had bought him anything he wanted. He had spent his vacations with his grandfather in the old Fifth Avenue house, now so out of fashion and yet so comfortable. He had not been lonely, because he had brought friends home with him, and besides, he had always felt the life of the house and the family and been proud of it. When his father came back there were the three generations of MacArds together, although the two women who had been the links between them were dead. He had studied their portraits often, both women beautiful and aristocratic, his grandmother gentle and his mother proud.
“Though your mother changed,” his father had said once when they stood together before Olivia’s portrait. “She was a proud young girl but after our marriage the pride disappeared, for some reason, and she was often very humble and sweet.”
“Did she change or you, Father?” Ted had asked.
“I don’t know,” his father replied. “India doesn’t leave a man unchanged, certainly.”
That summer, only two years ago, his grandfather had exerted himself, feeble as his massive frame had become. There had been a reconciliation of some sort between his father and his grandfather and he was glad for it. Then he had been half afraid to tell his grandfather that he, too, wanted to go back to India. But his grandfather had not protested.
“I don’t know what you see in that damned country, but do as you please.” That was what he had said in his grumbling way and then he had said in a voice suddenly strong, “The second time it doesn’t hurt. Children don’t pay for their keep and I’ve learned to manage alone.”
Nevertheless it had been a happy summer. His grandfather had even talked of opening the long closed Maine house but in the end they had simply stayed together in town, and he enjoyed being with his father. The two older men had talked and he had listened, as usual. He was not a great talker except in that superficial chatter of his own generation. Perhaps that was India again. He held a world of memories within himself which other young men knew nothing about, and which he could not explain to them for they had nothing wherewith to understand, memories of the close black nights in his childhood when he woke to see the tiny oil lamp at his ayah’s bed burning in a flicker scarcely larger than a lit match and yet which made him feel safe, memories of the endless slow moving stream of white-garbed people in the streets outside the mission compound, or of the students at his father’s school, stopping to fondle him and practice their English upon him. He could still remember the smell of clean brown skin when they wrapped him in their arms, a smell as fresh as new cut grass on the lawns because being Hindu they ate no meat and he could remember, too, how dark were their eyes, and how the whites were tinged with blue. He remembered above all the endless kindness toward him. He had not missed his mother’s love, no, nor his busy father, so often absent, because there had been many people everywhere to love him and caress him and hold him in their arms. That was his first memory now when he thought of India, the boundless outgoing love, not because of what he was but simply because he was a child and perhaps because he was motherless. Women in the streets, old grandmotherly women, and younger mother women going to the well to fetch water, jars on their heads as they walked, and sister girls all knew him and paused to speak to him, to give him a bit of fruit or an Indian sweet, and he accepted all and he ate foods which would have frightened his father had he known, but there was much Ted never told his father or anyone and that he shared alone with India. He understood early that his India and his father’s India were two different countries, and for him there was only one, his own.