They thought that Brand wanted to be left to himself, and to give him time to unhitch his horse they made a pretense of hanging about in the doorway while Bosworth searched his pockets for a pipe he had no mind to light.
But Brand turned back to them as they lingered. “You’ll meet me down by Lamer’s pond tomorrow?” he suggested. “I want witnesses. Round about sunset.”
They nodded their acquiescence, and he got into his sleigh, gave the horse a cut across the flanks, and drove off under the snow-smothered hemlocks. The other two men went to the shed.
“What do you make of this business, Deacon?” Bosworth asked, to break the silence.
The Deacon shook his head. “The man’s a sick man — that’s sure. Something’s sucking the life clean out of him.”
But already, in the biting outer air, Bosworth was getting himself under better control. “Looks to me like a bad case of the ague, as you said.”
“Well — ague of the mind, then. It’s his brain that’s sick.”
Bosworth shrugged. “He ain’t the first in Hemlock County.”
“That’s so,” the Deacon agreed. “It’s a worm in the brain, solitude is.”
“Well, we’ll know this time tomorrow, maybe,” said Bosworth. He scrambled into his sleigh, and was driving off in his turn when he heard his companion calling after him. The Deacon explained that his horse had cast a shoe; would Bosworth drive him down to the forge near North Ashmore, if it wasn’t too much out of his way? He didn’t want the mare slipping about on the freezing snow, and he could probably get the blacksmith to drive him back and shoe her in Rutledge’s shed. Bosworth made room for him under the bearskin, and the two men drove off, pursued by a puzzled whinny from the Deacon’s old mare.
The road they took was not the one that Bosworth would have followed to reach his own home. But he did not mind that. The shortest way to the forge passed close by Lamer’s pond, and Bosworth, since he was in for the business, was not sorry to look the ground over. They drove on in silence.
The snow had ceased, and a green sunset was spreading upward into the crystal sky. A stinging wind barbed with ice-flakes caught them in the face on the open ridges, but when they dropped down into the hollow by Lamer’s pond the air was as soundless and empty as an unswung bell. They jogged along slowly, each thinking his own thoughts.
“That’s the house . . . that tumble-down shack over there, I suppose?” the Deacon said, as the road drew near the edge of the frozen pond.
“Yes: that’s the house. A queer hermit-fellow built it years ago, my father used to tell me. Since then I don’t believe it’s ever been used but by the gipsies.”
Bosworth had reined in his horse, and sat looking through pine-trunks purpled by the sunset at the crumbling structure. Twilight already lay under the trees, though day lingered in the open. Between two sharply-patterned pine-boughs he saw the evening star, like a white boat in a sea of green.
His gaze dropped from that fathomless sky and followed the blue-white undulations of the snow. It gave him a curious agitated feeling to think that here, in this icy solitude, in the tumble-down house he had so often passed without heeding it, a dark mystery, too deep for thought, was being enacted. Down that very slope, coming from the grave-yard at Cold Corners, the being they called “Ora” must pass toward the pond. His heart began to beat stiflingly. Suddenly he gave an exclamation: “Look!”
He had jumped out of the cutter and was stumbling up the bank toward the slope of snow. On it, turned in the direction of the house by the pond, he had detected a woman’s foot-prints; two; then three; then more. The Deacon scrambled out after him, and they stood and stared.
“God — barefoot!” Hibben gasped. “Then it is . . . the dead . . . ”
Bosworth said nothing. But he knew that no live woman would travel with naked feet across that freezing wilderness. Here, then, was the proof the Deacon had asked for — they held it. What should they do with it?
“Supposing we was to drive up nearer — round the turn of the pond, till we get close to the house,” the Deacon proposed in a colourless voice. “Mebbe then . . . ”
Postponement was a relief. They got into the sleigh and drove on. Two or three hundred yards farther the road, a mere lane under steep bushy banks, turned sharply to the right, following the bend of the pond. As they rounded the turn they saw Brand’s cutter ahead of them. It was empty, the horse tied to a tree-trunk. The two men looked at each other again. This was not Brand’s nearest way home.
Evidently he had been actuated by the same impulse which had made them rein in their horse by the pond-side, and then hasten on to the deserted hovel. Had he too discovered those spectral foot-prints? Perhaps it was for that very reason that he had left his cutter and vanished in the direction of the house. Bosworth found himself shivering all over under his bearskin. “I wish to God the dark wasn’t coming on,” he muttered. He tethered his own horse near Brand’s, and without a word he and the Deacon ploughed through the snow, in the track of Brand’s huge feet. They had only a few yards to walk to overtake him. He did not hear them following him, and when Bosworth spoke his name, and he stopped short and turned, his heavy face was dim and confused, like a darker blot on the dusk. He looked at them dully, but without surprise.
“I wanted to see the place,” he merely said.
The Deacon cleared his throat. “Just take a look . . . yes . . . We thought so . . . But I guess there won’t be anything to see . . . ” He attempted a chuckle.
The other did not seem to hear him, but laboured on ahead through the pines. The three men came out together in the cleared space before the house. As they emerged from beneath the trees they seemed to have left night behind. The evening star shed a lustre on the speckless snow, and Brand, in that lucid circle, stopped with a jerk, and pointed to the same light foot-prints turned toward the house — the track of a woman in the snow. He stood still, his face working. “Bare feet . . . ” he said.
The Deacon piped up in a quavering voice: “The feet of the dead.”
Brand remained motionless. “The feet of the dead,” he echoed.
Deacon Hibben laid a frightened hand on his arm. “Come away now, Brand; for the love of God come away.”
The father hung there, gazing down at those light tracks on the snow — light as fox or squirrel trails they seemed, on the white immensity. Bosworth thought to himself “The living couldn’t walk so light — not even Ora Brand couldn’t have, when she lived . . . ” The cold seemed to have entered into his very marrow. His teeth were chattering.
Brand swung about on them abruptly. “Now!” he said, moving on as if to an assault, his head bowed forward on his bull neck.
“Now — now? Not in there?” gasped the Deacon. “What’s the use? It was tomorrow he said — .” He shook like a leaf.
“It’s now,” said Brand. He went up to the door of the crazy house, pushed it inward, and meeting with an unexpected resistance, thrust his heavy shoulder against the panel. The door collapsed like a playing-card, and Brand stumbled after it into the darkness of the hut. The others, after a moment’s hesitation, followed.
Bosworth was never quite sure in what order the events that succeeded took place. Coming in out of the snow-dazzle, he seemed to be plunging into total blackness. He groped his way across the threshold, caught a sharp splinter of the fallen door in his palm, seemed to see something white and wraithlike surge up out of the darkest corner of the hut, and then heard a revolver shot at his elbow, and a cry —
Brand had turned back, and was staggering past him out into the lingering daylight. The sunset, suddenly flushing through the trees, crimsoned his face like blood. He held a revolver in his hand and looked about him in his stupid way.
“They do walk, then,” he said and began to laugh. He bent his head to examine his weapon. “Better here than in the churchyard. They shan’t dig her up now,” he shouted out. The two men caught him by the arms, and Bosworth got the revolver away from him.
The next day Bosworth’s sister Loretta, who kept house for him, asked him, when he came in for his midday dinner, if he had heard the news.
Bosworth had been sawing wood all the morning, and in spite of the cold and the driving snow, which had begun again in the night, he was covered with an icy sweat, like a man getting over a fever.
“What news?”
“Venny Brand’s down sick with pneumonia. The Deacon’s been there. I guess she’s dying.”
Bosworth looked at her with listless eyes. She seemed far off from him, miles away. “Venny Brand?” he echoed.
“You never liked her, Orrin.”
“She’s a child. I never knew much about her.”
“Well,” repeated his sister, with the guileless relish of the unimaginative for bad news, “I guess she’s dying.” After a pause she added: “It’ll kill Sylvester Brand, all alone up there.”
Bosworth got up and said: “I’ve got to see to poulticing the gray’s fetlock.” He walked out into the steadily falling snow.
Venny Brand was buried three days later. The Deacon read the service; Bosworth was one of the pall-bearers. The whole countryside turned out, for the snow had stopped falling, and at any season a funeral offered an opportunity for an outing that was not to be missed. Besides, Venny Brand was young and handsome — at least some people thought her handsome, though she was so swarthy — and her dying like that, so suddenly, had the fascination of tragedy.
“They say her lungs filled right up . . . Seems she’d had bronchial troubles before . . . I always said both them girls was frail . . . Look at Ora, how she took and wasted away I And it’s colder’n all outdoors up there to Brand’s . . . Their mother, too, she pined away just the same. They don’t ever make old bones on the mother’s side of the family . . . There’s that young Bedlow over there; they say Venny was engaged to him . . . Oh, Mrs. Rutledge, excuse me . . . Step right into the pew; there’s a seat for you alongside of grandma . . . ”
Mrs. Rutledge was advancing with deliberate step down the narrow aisle of the bleak wooden church. She had on her best bonnet, a monumental structure which no one had seen out of her trunk since old Mrs. Silsee’s funeral, three years before. All the women remembered it. Under its perpendicular pile her narrow face, swaying on the long thin neck, seemed whiter than ever; but her air of fretfulness had been composed into a suitable expression of mournful immobility.
“Looks as if the stone-mason had carved her to put atop of Venny’s grave,” Bosworth thought as she glided past him; and then shivered at his own sepulchral fancy. When she bent over her hymn book her lowered lids reminded him again of marble eye-balls; the bony hands clasping the book were bloodless. Bosworth had never seen such hands since he had seen old Aunt Cressidora Cheney strangle the canary-bird because it fluttered.
The service was over, the coffin of Venny Brand had been lowered into her sister’s grave, and the neighbours were slowly dispersing. Bosworth, as pall-bearer, felt obliged to linger and say a word to the stricken father. He waited till Brand had turned from the grave with the Deacon at his side. The three men stood together for a moment; but not one of them spoke. Brand’s face was the closed door of a vault, barred with wrinkles like bands of iron.
Finally the Deacon took his hand and said: “The Lord gave — ”
Brand nodded and turned away toward the shed where the horses were hitched. Bosworth followed him. “Let me drive along home with you,” he suggested.
Brand did not so much as turn his head. “Home? What home?” he said; and the other fell back.
Loretta Bosworth was talking with the other women while the men unblanketed their horses and backed the cutters out into the heavy snow. As Bosworth waited for her, a few feet off, he saw Mrs. Rutledge’s tall bonnet lording it above the group. Andy Pond, the Rutledge farm-hand, was backing out the sleigh.
“Saul ain’t here today, Mrs. Rutledge, is he?” one of the village elders piped, turning a benevolent old tortoise-head about on a loose neck, and blinking up into Mrs. Rut-ledge’s marble face.
Bosworth heard her measure out her answer in slow incisive words. “No. Mr. Rutledge he ain’t here. He would ‘a’ come for certain, but his aunt Minorca Cummins is being buried down to Stotesbury this very day and he had to go down there. Don’t it sometimes seem zif we was all walking right in the Shadow of Death?”
As she walked toward the cutter, in which Andy Pond was already seated, the Deacon went up to her with visible hesitation. Involuntarily Bosworth also moved nearer. He heard the Deacon say: “I’m glad to hear that Saul is able to be up and around.”
She turned her small head on her rigid neck, and lifted the lids of marble.
“Yes, I guess he’ll sleep quieter now. — And her too, maybe, now she don’t lay there alone any longer,” she added in a low voice, with a sudden twist of her chin toward the fresh black stain in the grave-yard snow. She got into the cutter, and said in a clear tone to Andy Pond: “‘S long as we’re down here I don’t know but what I’ll just call round and get a box of soap at Hiram Pringle’s.”
THE blinding June sky of Africa hung over the town. In the doorway of an Arab coffee-house a young man stood listening to the remarks exchanged by the patrons of the establishment, who lay in torpid heaps on the low shelf bordering the room.
The young man’s caftan was faded to a dingy brown, but the muslin garment covering it was clean, and so was the turban wound about his shabby fez.
Cleanliness was not the most marked characteristic of the conversation to which he lent a listless ear. It was no prurient curiosity that fixed his attention on this placid exchange of obscenities: he had lived too long in Morocco for obscenities not to have lost their savour. But he had never quite overcome the fascinated disgust with which he listened, nor the hope that one among the talkers would suddenly reveal some sense of a higher ideal, of what, at home, the earnest women he knew used solemnly to call a Purpose. He was sure that, some day, such a sign would come, and then —
Meanwhile, at that hour, there was nothing on earth to do in Eloued but to stand and listen —
The bazaar was beginning to fill up. Looking down the vaulted tunnel which led to the coffee-house the young man watched the thickening throng of shoppers and idlers. The fat merchant whose shop faced the end of the tunnel had just ridden up and rolled off his mule, while his black boy unbarred the door of the niche hung with embroidered slippers where the master throned. The young man in the faded caftan, watching the merchant scramble up and sink into his cushions, wondered for the thousandth time what he thought about all day in his dim stifling kennel, and what he did when he was away from it . . . for no length of residence in that dark land seemed to bring one nearer to finding out what the heathen thought and did when the eye of the Christian was off him.
Suddenly a wave of excitement ran through the crowd. Every head turned in the same direction, and even the camels bent their frowning faces and stretched their necks all one way, as animals do before a storm. A wild hoot had penetrated the bazaar, howling through the long white tunnels and under the reed-woven roofs like a Djinn among dishonoured graves. The heart of the young man began to beat.
“It sounds,” he thought, “like a motor . . . ”
But a motor at Eloued! There was one, every one knew, in the Sultan’s Palace. It had been brought there years ago by a foreign Ambassador, as a gift from his sovereign, and was variously reported to be made entirely of aluminium, platinum or silver. But the parts had never been put together, the body had long been used for breeding silk-worms in — a not wholly successful experiment — and the acetylene lamps adorned the Pasha’s gardens on state occasions. As for the horn, it had been sent as a gift, with a choice panoply of arms, to the Ca?d of the Red Mountain; but as the india-rubber bulb had accidentally been left behind, it was certainly not the Ca?d’s visit which the present discordant cries announced . . .
“Hullo, you old dromedary! How’s the folks up state?” cried a ringing voice. The awestruck populace gave way, and a young man in linen duster and motor cap, slipping under the interwoven necks of the astonished camels, strode down the tunnel with an air of authority and clapped a hand on the dreamer in the doorway.
“Harry Spink!” the latter gasped in a startled whisper, and with an intonation as un-African as his friend’s. At the same instant he glanced over his shoulder, and his mild lips formed a cautious: “‘sh.”
“Who’d you take me for — Gabby Deslys?” asked the newcomer gaily; then, seeing that this topical allusion hung fire: “And what the dickens are you ‘hushing’ for, anyhow? You don’t suppose, do you, that anybody in the bazaar thinks you’re a native? D’y’ ever look at your chin? Or that Adam’s apple running up and down you like a bead on a billiard marker’s wire? See here, Willard Bent . . . ”
The young man in the caftan blushed distressfully, not so much at the graphic reference to his looks as at the doubt cast on his disguise.
“I do assure you, Harry, I pick up a great deal of . . . of useful information . . . in this way . . . ”
“Oh, get out,” said Harry Spink cheerfully. “You believe all that still, do you? What’s the good of it all, anyway?”
Willard Bent passed a hand under the other’s arm and led him through the coffeehouse into an empty room at the back. They sat down on a shelf covered with matting and looked at each other earnestly.
“Don’t you believe any longer, Harry Spink?” asked Willard Bent.
“Don’t have to. I’m travelling for rubber now.”
“Oh, merciful heaven! Was that your automobile?”
“Sure.”
There was a long silence, during which
Bent sat with bowed head gazing on the earthen floor, while the bead in his throat performed its most active gymnastics. At last he lifted his eyes and fixed them on the tight red face of his companion.
“When did your faith fail you?” he asked.
The other considered him humorously. “Why — when I got onto this job, I guess.”
Willard Bent rose and held out his hand.
“Good-bye . . . I must go . . . If I can be of any use . . . you know where to find me . . . ”
“Any use? Say, old man, what’s wrong? Are you trying to shake me?” Bent was silent, and Harry Spink continued insidiously: “Ain’t you a mite hard on me? I thought the heathen was just what you was laying for.”
Bent smiled mournfully. “There’s no use trying to convert a renegade.”
“That what I am? Well — all right. But how about the others? Say — let’s order a lap of tea and have it out right here.”
Bent seemed to hesitate; but at length he rose, put back the matting that screened the inner room, and said a word to the proprietor. Presently a scrofulous boy with gazelle eyes brought a brass tray bearing glasses and pipes of kif, gazed earnestly at the stranger in the linen duster, and slid back behind the matting.
“Of course,” Bent began, “a good many people know I am a Baptist missionary” — (“No?” from Spink, incredulously) — “but in the crowd of the bazaar they don’t notice me, and I hear things . . . ”
“Golly! I should suppose you did.”
“I mean, things that may be useful. You know Mr. Blandhorn’s idea . . . ”
A tinge of respectful commiseration veiled the easy impudence of the drummer’s look. “The old man still here, is he?”
“Oh, yes; of course. He will never leave Eloued.”
“And the missus —?”
Bent again lowered his naturally low voice. “She died — a year ago — of the climate. The doctor had warned her; but Mr. Blandhorn felt a call to remain here.”
“And she wouldn’t leave without him?”
“Oh, she felt a call too . . . among the women . . . ”
Spink pondered. “How many years you been here, Willard?”
“Ten next July,” the other responded, as if he had added up the weeks and months so often that the reply was always on his lips.
“And the old man?”
“Twenty-five last April. We had planned a celebration . . . before Mrs. Blandhorn died. There was to have been a testimonial offered . . . but, owing to her death, Mr. Blandhorn preferred to devote the sum to our dispensary.”
“I see. How much?” said Spink sharply.
“It wouldn’t seem much to you. I believe about fifty pesetas . . .
“Two pesetas a year? Lucky the Society looks after you, ain’t it?”
Willard Bent met his ironic glance steadily. “We’re not here to trade,” he said with dignity.
“No — that’s right too — ” Spink reddened slightly. “Well, all I meant was — look at here, Willard, we’re old friends, even if I did go wrong, as I suppose you’d call it. I was in this thing near on a year myself, and what always tormented me was this: What does it all amount to?”
“Amount to?”
“Yes. I mean, what’s the results? Supposing you was a fisherman. Well, if you fished a bit of river year after year, and never had a nibble, you’d do one of two things, wouldn’t you? Move away — or lie about it. See?”
Bent nodded without speaking. Spink set down his glass and busied himself with the lighting of his long slender pipe. “Say, this mint-julep feels like old times,” he remarked.
Bent continued to gaze frowningly into his untouched glass. At length he swallowed the sweet decoction at a gulp, and turned to his companion.
“I’d never lie . . . ” he murmured. “Well — ”
“I’m — I’m still — waiting . . . ”
“Waiting —?”
“Yes. The wind bloweth where it listeth. If St. Paul had stopped to count . . . in Corinth, say. As I take it — ” he looked long and passionately at the drummer — “as I take it, the thing is to be St. Paul.”
Harry Spink remained unimpressed. “That’s all talk — I heard all that when I was here before. What I want to know is: What’s your bag? How many?”
“It’s difficult — ”
“I see: like the pigs. They run around so!”
Both the young men were silent, Spink pulling at his pipe, the other sitting with bent head, his eyes obstinately fixed on the beaten floor. At length Spink rose and tapped the missionary on the shoulder.
“Say — s’posin’ we take a look around Corinth? I got to get onto my job tomorrow, but I’d like to take a turn round the old place first.”
Willard Bent rose also. He felt singularly old and tired, and his mind was full of doubt as to what he ought to do. If he refused to accompany Harry Spink, a former friend and fellow-worker, it might look like running away from his questions . . .
They went out together.
The bazaar was seething. It seemed impossible that two more people should penetrate the throng of beggars, pilgrims, traders, slave-women, water-sellers, hawkers of dates and sweetmeats, leather-gaitered country-people carrying bunches of hens head-downward, jugglers’ touts from the market-place, Jews in black caftans and greasy turbans, and scrofulous children reaching up to the high counters to fill their jars and baskets. But every now and then the Arab “Look out!” made the crowd divide and flatten itself against the stalls, and a long line of donkeys loaded with water-barrels or bundles of reeds, a string of musk-scented camels swaying their necks like horizontal question marks, or a great man perched on a pink-saddled mule and followed by slaves and clients, swept through the narrow passage without other peril to the pedestrians than that of a fresh exchange of vermin.
As the two young men drew back to make way for one of these processions, Willard Bent lifted his head and looked at his friend with a smile. “That’s what Mr. Blandhorn says we ought to remember — it’s one of his favourite images.”
“What is?” asked Harry Spink, following with attentive gaze the movements of a young Jewess whose uncovered face and bright head-dress stood out against a group of muffled Arab women.
Instinctively Willard’s voice took on a hortatory roll.
“Why, the way this dense mass of people, so heedless, so preoccupied, is imperceptibly penetrated — ”
“By a handful of asses? That’s so. But the asses have got some kick in ’em, remember!”
The missionary flushed to the edge of his fez, and his mild eyes grew dim. It was the old story: Harry Spink invariably got the better of him in bandying words — and the interpretation of allegories had never been his strong point. Mr. Blandhorn always managed to make them sound unanswerable, whereas on his disciple’s lips they fell to pieces at a touch. What was it that Willard always left out?
A mournful sense of his unworthiness overcame him, and with it the discouraged vision of all the long months and years spent in the struggle with heat and dust and flies and filth and wickedness, the long lonely years of his youth that would never come back to him. It was the vision he most dreaded, and turning from it he tried to forget himself in watching his friend.
“Golly! The vacuum-cleaner ain’t been round since my last visit,” Mr. Spink observed, as they slipped in a mass of offal beneath a butcher’s stall. “Let’s get into another soukh — the flies here beat me.”
They turned into another long lane chequered with a criss-cross of black reed-shadows. It was the saddlers’ quarter, and here an even thicker crowd wriggled and swayed between the cramped stalls hung with bright leather and spangled ornaments.
“Say! It might be a good idea to import some of this stuff for Fourth of July processions — Knights of Pythias and Secret Societies’ kinder thing,” Spink mused, pausing before the brilliant spectacle. At the same moment a lad in an almond-green caftan sidled up and touched his arm.
Willard’s face brightened. “Ah, that’s little Ahmed — you don’t remember him? Surely — the water-carrier’s boy. Mrs. Blandhorn saved his mother’s life when he was born, and he still comes to prayers. Yes, Ahmed, this is your old friend Mr. Spink.”
Ahmed raised prodigious lashes from seraphic eyes and reverently surveyed the face of his old friend. “Me ‘member.”
“Hullo, old chap . . . why, of course . . . so do I,” the drummer beamed. The missionary laid a brotherly hand on the boy’s shoulder. It was really providential that Ahmed — whom they hadn’t seen at the Mission for more weeks than Willard cared to count — should have “happened by” at that moment: Willard took it as a rebuke to his own doubts.
“You’ll be in this evening for prayers, won’t you, Ahmed?” he said, as if Ahmed never failed them. “Mr. Spink will be with us.”
“Yessir,” said Ahmed with unction. He slipped from under Willard’s hand, and outflanking the drummer approached him from the farther side.
“Show you Souss boys dance? Down to old Jewess’s, Bab-el-Soukh,” he breathed angelically.
Willard saw his companion turn from red to a wrathful purple.
“Get out, you young swine, you — do you hear me?”
Ahmed grinned, wavered and vanished, engulfed in the careless crowd. The young men walked on without speaking.
In the market-place they parted. Willard Bent, after some hesitation, had asked Harry Spink to come to the Mission that evening. “You’d better come to supper — then we can talk quietly afterward. Mr. Blandhorn will want to see you,” he suggested; and Mr. Spink had affably acquiesced.
The prayer-meeting was before supper, and Willard would have liked to propose that his friend should come to that also; but he did not dare. He said to himself that Harry Spink, who had been merely a lay assistant, might have lost the habit of reverence, and that it would be too painful to risk his scandalizing Mr. Blandhorn. But that was only a sham reason; and Willard, with his incorrigible habit of self-exploration, fished up the real one from a lower depth. What he had most feared was that there would be no one at the meeting.
During Mrs. Blandhorn’s lifetime there had been no reason for such apprehension: they could always count on a few people. Mrs. Blandhorn, who had studied medicine at Ann Arbor, Michigan, had early gained renown in Eloued by her miraculous healing powers. The dispensary, in those days, had been beset by anxious-eyed women who unwound skinny fig-coloured children from their dirty draperies; and there had even been a time when Mr. Blandhorn had appealed to the Society for a young lady missionary to assist his wife. But, for reasons not quite clear to Willard Bent, Mrs. Blandhorn, a thin-lipped determined little woman, had energetically opposed the coming of this youthful “Sister,” and had declared that their Jewish maid-servant, old Myriem, could give her all the aid she needed.
Mr. Blandhorn yielded, as he usually did — as he had yielded, for instance, when one day, in a white inarticulate fury, his wife had banished her godson, little Ahmed (whose life she had saved), and issued orders that he should never show himself again except at prayer-meeting, and accompanied by his father. Mrs. Blandhorn, small, silent and passionate, had always — as Bent made out in his long retrospective musings — ended by having her way in the conflicts that occasionally shook the monotony of life at the Mission. After her death the young man had even suspected, beneath his superior’s sincere and vehement sorrow, a lurking sense of relief. Mr. Blandhorn had snuffed the air of freedom, and had been, for the moment, slightly intoxicated by it. But not for long. Very soon his wife’s loss made itself felt as a lasting void.
She had been (as Spink would have put it) “the whole show”; had led, inspired, organized her husband’s work, held it together, and given it the brave front it presented to the unheeding heathen. Now the heathen had almost entirely fallen away, and the too evident inference was that they had come rather for Mrs. Blandhorn’s pills than for her husband’s preaching. Neither of the missionaries had avowed this discovery to the other, but to Willard at least it was implied in all the circumlocutions and evasions of their endless talks.
The young man’s situation had been greatly changed by Mrs. Blandhorn’s death. His superior had grown touchingly dependent on him. Their conversation, formerly confined to parochial matters, now ranged from abstruse doctrinal problems to the question of how to induce Myriem, who had deplorably “relapsed,” to keep the kitchen cleaner and spend less time on the roofs. Bent felt that Mr. Blandhorn needed him at every moment, and that, during any prolonged absence, something vaguely “unfortunate” might happen at the Mission.
“I’m glad Spink has come; it will do him good to see somebody from outside,” Willard thought, nervously hoping that Spink (a good fellow at bottom) would not trouble Mr. Blandhorn by any of his “unsettling” questions.
At the end of a labyrinth of lanes, on the farther side of the Jewish quarter, a wall of heat-cracked clay bore the inscription: “American Evangelical Mission.” Underneath it a door opened into a court where an old woman in a bright head-dress sat under a fig-tree pounding something in a mortar.
She looked up, and, rising, touched Bent’s draperies with her lips. Her small face, withered as a dry medlar, was full of an ancient wisdom: Mrs. Blandhorn had certainly been right in trusting Myriem.
A narrow house-front looked upon the court. Bent climbed the stairs to Mr. Blandhorn’s study. It was a small room with a few dog-eared books on a set of rough shelves, the table at which Mr. Blandhorn wrote his reports for the Society, and a mattress covered with a bit of faded carpet, on which he slept. Near the window stood Mrs. Blandhorn’s sewing-machine; it had never been moved since her death.
The missionary was sitting in the middle of the room, in the rocking chair which had also been his wife’s. His large veined hands were clasped about its arms and his head rested against a patch-work cushion tied to the back by a shoe-lace. His mouth was slightly open, and a deep breath, occasionally rising to a whistle, proceeded with rhythmic regularity from his delicately-cut nostrils. Even surprised in sleep he was a fine man to look upon; and when, at the sound of Bent’s approach, he opened his eyes and pulled himself out of his chair, he became magnificent. He had taken off his turban, and thrown a handkerchief over his head, which was shaved like an Arab’s for coolness. His long beard was white, with the smoker’s yellow tinge about the lips; but his eyebrows were jet-black, arched and restless. The gray eyes beneath them shed a mild benedictory beam, confirmed by the smile of a mouth which might have seemed weak if the beard had not so nearly concealed it. But the forehead menaced, fulminated or awed with the ever-varying play of the eyebrows. Willard Bent never beheld that forehead without thinking of Sinai.
Mr. Blandhorn brushed some shreds of tobacco from his white djellabah and looked impressively at his assistant.
“The heat is really overwhelming,” he said, as if excusing himself. He readjusted his turban, and then asked: “Is everything ready downstairs?”
Bent assented, and they went down to the long bare room where the prayer-meetings were held. In Mrs. Blandhorn’s day it had also served as the dispensary, and a cupboard containing drugs and bandages stood against the wall under the text: “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden.”
Myriem, abandoning her mortar, was vaguely tidying the Arab tracts and leaflets that lay on the divan against the wall. At one end of the room stood a table covered with a white cloth, with a Bible lying on it; and to the left a sort of pulpit-lectern, from which Mr. Blandhorn addressed his flock. In the doorway squatted Ayoub, a silent gray-headed negro; Bent, on his own arrival at Eloued, ten years earlier, had found him there in the same place and the same attitude. Ayoub was supposed to be a rescued slave from the Soudan, and was shown to visitors as “our first convert.” He manifested no interest at the approach of the missionaries, but continued to gaze out into the sun-baked court cut in half by the shadow of the fig-tree.
Mr. Blandhorn, after looking about the empty room as if he were surveying the upturned faces of an attentive congregation, placed himself at the lectern, put on his spectacles, and turned over the pages of his prayer-book. Then he knelt and bowed his head in prayer. His devotions ended, he rose and seated himself in the cane arm-chair that faced the lectern. Willard Bent sat opposite in another arm-chair. Mr. Blandhorn leaned back, breathing heavily, and passing his handkerchief over his face and brow. Now and then he drew out his watch, now and then he said: “The heat is really overwhelming.”
Myriem had drifted back to her fig-tree, and the sound of the pestle mingled with the drone of flies on the window-pane. Occasionally the curses of a muleteer or the rhythmic chant of a water-carrier broke the silence; once there came from a neighbouring roof the noise of a short cat-like squabble ending in female howls; then the afternoon heat laid its leaden hush on all things.
Mr. Blandhorn opened his mouth and slept.
Willard Bent, watching him, thought with wonder and admiration of his past. What had he not seen, what secrets were not hidden in his bosom? By dint of sheer “sticking it out” he had acquired to the younger man a sort of visible sanctity. Twenty-five years of Eloued! He had known the old mad torturing Sultan, he had seen, after the defeat of the rebels, the long line of prisoners staggering in under a torrid sky, chained wrist to wrist, and dragging between them the putrefying bodies of those who had died on the march. He had seen the Great Massacre, when the rivers were red with French blood, and the Blandhorns had hidden an officer’s wife and children in the rat-haunted drain under the court; he had known robbery and murder and intrigue, and all the dark maleficence of Africa; and he remained as serene, as confident and guileless, as on the day when he had first set foot on that evil soil, saying to himself (as he had told Willard): “I will tread upon the lion and the adder, the young lion and the dragon will I tread under foot.”
Willard Bent hated Africa; but it awed and fascinated him. And as he contemplated the splendid old man sleeping opposite him, so mysterious, so childlike and so weak (Mrs. Blandhorn had left him no doubts on that point), the disciple marvelled at the power of the faith which had armed his master with a sort of infantile strength against such dark and manifold perils.
Suddenly a shadow fell in the doorway, and Bent, roused from his dream, saw Harry Spink tiptoeing past the unmoved Ayoub. The drummer paused and looked with astonishment from one of the missionaries to the other. “Say,” he asked, “is prayer-meeting over? I thought I’d be round in time.”
He spoke seriously, even respectfully; it was plain that he felt flippancy to be out of place. But Bent suspected a lurking malice under his astonishment: he was sure Harry Spink had come to “count heads.”
Mr. Blandhorn, wakened by the voice, stood up heavily.
“Harry Spink! Is it possible you are amongst us?”
“Why, yes, sir — I’m amongst. Didn’t Willard tell you? I guess Willard Bent’s ashamed of me.”
Spink, with a laugh, shook Mr. Bland-horn’s hand, and glanced about the empty room.
“I’m only here for a day or so — on business. Willard’ll explain. But I wanted to come round to meeting — like old times. Sorry it’s over.”
The missionary looked at him with a grave candour. “It’s not over — it has not begun. The overwhelming heat has probably kept away our little flock.”
“I see,” interpolated Spink.
“But now,” continued Mr. Blandhorn with majesty, “that two or three are gathered together in His name, there is no reason why we should wait. — Myriem! Ayoub!”
He took his place behind the lectern and began: “Almighty and merciful Father — ”