“Princess—oh, Princess of the wide, wide world!”
Then he arose and took her gently to his breast and folded his arms about her and looked at her long. Through the soft and high-bred comeliness of her lovely face had pierced the sharpness of suffering, and Life had carved deeper strong, set lines of character. An inner spirit, immutable, eternal, glorious, was shadowed behind the pools of her great eyes. The high haughtiness of her mien was still there, but it lay loose like some unlaced garment, and through it shone the flesh of a new humility, of some half-frightened appeal leaping forth to know and prove and beg a self-forgetting love equal to that which she was offering.
He kissed the tendrils of her hair and saw silver threads lurking there; he kissed her forehead and her eyes and lingered on her lips. He hid his head in the hollow of her neck and then lifted his face to the treetops and strained her bosom to his, until she thrilled and gasped and held the child away from harm.
And the child awoke; naked, it cooed and crowed with joy on her soft arm and threw its golden limbs up to the golden sun. Matthew shrank a little and trembled to touch it and only whispered:
“Sweetheart! More than wife! Mother of God and my son!”
At last fearfully he took it in his hands, as slowly, with twined arms, they began to walk toward the cabin, their long bodies and limbs touching in rhythm. At first she said no word, but always in grave and silent happiness looked up into his face. Then as they walked they began to speak in whispers.
“Kautilya, why were you silent? This changes the world!”
“Matthew, the Seal was on my lips. We were parted for all time except your son was born of me. That was my fateful secret.”
“Yet when first the babe leapt beneath your heart, still you wrote no word!”
“Still was the Silence sealed, for had it been a girl child, I must have left both babe and you. Bwodpur needs not a princess, but a King.”
“And yet even with this our Love Incarnate, you waited an endless month!”
“Oh, silly darling, I waited for all—all; for his birth, for news to India, for your freedom. Do you not see? There had to be a Maharajah in Bwodpur of the blood royal; else brown reaction and white intrigue had made it a footstool of England. If I had not borne your son, I must have gone to prostitute my body to a stranger or lose Bwodpur and Sindrabad; India; and all the Darker World. Oh, Matthew—Matthew, I know the tortures of the damned!”
“And without me and alone you went down into the Valley of the Shadow.”
“I arose from the dead. I ascended into heaven with the angel of your child at my breast.”
“And now Eternal Life makes us One forever.”
“Immortal Mission of the Son of Man.”
“And its name?” he asked.
“ ‘Madhu,’ of course; which is ‘Matthew’ in our softer tongue.”
Crimson climbing roses, bursting with radiant bloom, almost covered the black logs of wide twin cabins, one rising higher than the other; the darkness of the low and vine-draped hall between caught and reflected the leaping flames of the kitchen within and beyond. Above and behind the roofs, rose a new round tower and a high hedge; the fields were green and white with cotton and corn; the tall trees were softly singing.
Old stone steps worn to ancient hollows led up to the hall and on them loomed slowly Matthew’s mother, straight, immense, white-haired, and darkly brown. She took the baby in one great arm, infinite with tenderness, while the child shivered with delight. She kissed Matthew once and then said slowly with a voice that sternly held back its tears:
“And now, son, we’se gwine to make dis little man an hones’ chile.—Preacher!”
A short black man appeared in the door and paused. He looked like incarnate Age; a dish of shining water lay in one hand and a worn book in the other. He was clad in rusty black with snowy linen, and his face was rough and hewn in angry lineaments around the deep and sunken islands of his eyes.
The preacher read in the worn book from the seventh chapter of Revelation:
“After these things I saw four Angels standing on the four corners of the earth”—stumbling over the mighty words with strange accent and pronunciation—“and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes!”
Then in curious short staccato phrases, with pauses in between, he lined out a hymn. His voice was harsh and strong, and his breath whistled; but the voice of the old mother rose clear and singularly sweet an octave above, while at last the baritone of Matthew and the deep contralto of Kautilya joined to make music under the trees:
“Shall I—be car—
ried to-oo—the skies
on flow-ry be-eds
of ease!”
Thus in the morning they were married, looking at neither mother nor son, preacher nor shining morning, but deep into each other’s hungry eyes. The voice of the child rose in shrill sweet obbligato and drowned here and again the rolling periods:
“—you, Kautilya, take this man … love, honor and obey—”
“Yes.”
“—Towns, take this woman … until death do you part?”
“Yes—yes.”
“—God hath joined together; let no man put asunder!”
Then the ancient woman stiffened, closed her eyes, and chanted to her God:
“Jesus, take dis child. Make him a man! Make him a man, Lord Jesus—a leader of his people and a lover of his God!
“Gin him a high heart, God, a strong arm and an understandin’ mind. Breathe the holy sperrit on his lips and fill his soul with lovin’ kindness. Set his feet on the beautiful mountings of Good Tidings and let my heart sing Hallelujah to the Lamb when he brings my lost and stolen people home to heaven; home to you, my little Jesus and my God!”
She paused abruptly,
