In the dusky October evening they stood waiting at the train, she and Mr. and Mrs. Winters. She had forced herself to learn to leave Paul alone sometimes. It was not very far, not really. The house stood just beyond the village, and if she put him on a quilt upon the floor and locked the door, he must be safe. But even so, she left her heart behind to guard him, and now she stood impatiently.
They were silent and somehow forlorn in the dusk, the three of them. “If I’d been listened to at first,” Mrs. Winters said now and then, but Mr. Winters said nothing at all and Joan could not talk for thinking of Rose. Rose had gone away so sure of God’s will. But she was not saved alive. The train came whistling and pounding in, and paused a second at the wayside station. It was a great through train that did not commonly stop at a small place unless someone asked it, and that was seldom. But it stopped to bring home from very far this tall stooping gray-haired young man, holding in his arms a wailing baby. Beside him, clinging to his coat, was a small thin boy in a brown cloth suit, looking in steadfast silence at all he saw. They stood far down upon the platform, their few worn bags about them. Joan saw them first and went running.
“Oh, give me the precious little thing!”
She took her from him, this fragment from Rose, this child her sister Rose had given her. It was unutterable comfort to hold her close at last. “You’re home, my darling,” she murmured. “David, my darling, you’re home. Oh, how tired you all look!”
“To the bone,” the man said. He gave her the baby but he still clung to David’s hand.
“Well, well,” Mr. Winters was saying. “Well, here you are.”
“My mother and father died,” said David, “so they couldn’t come with us.” His voice was sudden and clear out of the darkness.
In the evening she sat listening to John Stuart. She had brought the children home with her and bathed them and fed them. It had been her sacrament, the bathing of their childish flesh, the giving of the bread and milk. She had washed and comforted the wailing baby and soothed her chafed limbs. She had heated the creamy milk and fed it to her and watched her small worn face settle into sleep. Across from her, David sat watching. “My Uncle John doesn’t know how to make Mary stop crying.”
“Uncles don’t, so well,” she said. She looked at him, waiting, ready for worship of him. But she must not hurry him. His mind was full of images she did not know. She must wait until he showed himself.
“Are we going to live here?”
“Yes, David.”
“There’s no wall.”
“No wall at all. You can run as far as you like. Only come home to me at night.”
He sighed deeply and freely. “I want to go to bed.”
“Yes, your bed is all ready, a new bed specially for you.”
“I can bathe myself. I haven’t had my amah bathe me for a long time now.”
“You shall do everything for yourself.”
He looked up from his bowl of bread and milk. “I know milk runs from a cow. Once my father told me that. But I haven’t seen it.”
“This ran fresh today for you and Mary and Paul.”
He lay clean and fed between the sheets made fragrant by the sun, waiting for John Stuart. “I’d rather not go to sleep without saying my prayers to my Uncle John.”
She was glad she had said to John Stuart, “You’d better come down the first evening.” She heard his footsteps soon.
“David’s waiting,” she said. They went upstairs together. But he had not been able to wait after all. He was asleep, lying on his side, his thin little hand under his cheek. The man hesitated. “I won’t wake him to say his prayers tonight.”
“No,” she said quietly. “Sleep will do more for him, after all.”
Downstairs she and John Stuart sat by the fireplace and she lit the logs. He sat as though he were exhausted, making no move to help her. When the fire was blazing he looked about the small quiet room and brought his eyes to her as she sat waiting for him to speak.
“You don’t know what this means,” he said. “The quiet — the stillness about the house. I keep listening.”
“For what?” she asked. That was the look on his face, the look of listening.
“For the cries of people,” he answered. “For strange separate cries — screams which no one goes to still, a child crying so that I know it’s in pain, people quarreling, the drone of priests, the angry mob. The sea dashing against the ship woke me so often in the night. It was like that roaring. When the bandits burst the city gates it was like that — a swelling roar — I saw them hew Rob down. He called out something to me. I couldn’t hear it, in the noise. But I couldn’t have gone to him. I was bound to a bamboo and they were carrying me away.”
She stared at him, trying to see what he was telling her. He was talking in a quiet remote voice, gazing into the fire.
“But how did you escape?”
“I had a friend among them,” he answered, “a man who had been in my hospital. He tied me himself, loosely, and whispered to me not to resist. So I let him tie me. They burned my hospital. I have to begin again from the bottom. Nothing’s left. They tore everything to pieces.”
She thought suddenly of the peach-colored satin nightgown she had given Rose. In its way it had been precious to her — a small delicate something that was precious. She had never had another so pretty. There had been no one to give her such things, and she could not afford them. But the crowd had torn it and thrown it away. It was wasted after all.
“You’re not going back!” she said.
He was holding his hands to the fire and around the narrow wrists where his cuffs had slipped up she saw deep scarified marks, still purple, where ropes had ground away the flesh.
“Yes, I’m going back — the people there need a hospital. There’s no hospital in a thousand miles.” He smiled a little. “Maybe that’s why I go back, because I seem important there. Here I’d be one of hundreds — a country doctor, maybe. There I’m specialist, surgeon and everything. It’s become a mania with me to save lives. I don’t know what for—”
“See what they did!” she whispered.
“It’s a curious thing,” he said slowly, almost faintly, “the fellow who saved me talked almost like a Christian. Do you know, he made me think of Rob. He was so young and so anxious to do good — you know, serve the common people. The odd thing was he thought they were right to kill. He had it all worked out. He wasn’t crazy at all. He was good in his way. He thought he was doing his duty. He used to talk about it in the hospital. And it was through him that I found the children afterwards. The amah had taken them to her home in the village. They weren’t hurt — they were there several days before I could get them out. She dressed them up like the village children. I don’t believe David realizes much. She covered his face when — when they took his mother — and she got him right away.”
She could not speak.
“Yes, I must go back,” he said, sighing.
But for the moment they sat sheltered in this still small house in the center of the wild and noisy world. She asked him no more. When he rose to go she said quietly over their handclasp, “You will come again sometime? This is more than passing?”