Chapter V: Part 5

The life web of Theodosia McSolomon was short but vividly painted and could only be picked and plaited together from different angles of the globe. To begin with, she was brought up strictly, straitly, and even sanctimoniously by her father and mother, who were Presbyterian Minister and Ministress in a secluded corner of the County Armagh in Ireland. It was called Gortaherrin. She grew up to honour her father and mother, though she could hardly have wished the long days promised in the land for such servitude. She could hardly have desired long life in their lifetime, for she served them more as a slavey than as a daughter. Her brother Theophilus helped her with the harder work in the kitchen until he went to college, whereupon she sank into the position of servant except on Sundays, when she occupied the front pew at the Meeting House. It remained a sign to her of salvation, social as well as celestial.

She grew into graceful girlhood, tall, and healthy as the wild rush under the sweetening sky; waxen-white, not the white of sickness, but the white of the hawthorn’s limelight bloom on the hedgerows in spring. Her nature stayed deliciously unspoilt, for she had never known a kind word or a kind action, nor expected either. She lived on buttermilk and eggs, and turf-baked soda-bread. She seemed content with her fate, but for no particular reason except that fate was not discontented with her. She had the essentials of life without a single extra. Face-powder, love-letters, corsets were of the Devil! She was not unhappy, for she had never known what it was to be happy. And healthier she grew and fairer and more wiry in all her curving limbs, but her hair was not wire. It was best described as spun primrose petals; spun into a thin silken weft. It was of a texture that made the daffodil look coarse and the yellow-wagtail seem painted. The closest clue in nature was the glint of the full harvest moon on the yellow shooks of the bogland corn when ripe and reaped. It was as thin and nearly as transparent as a thread of baby’s spit, each hair of her. And she wore it in the shape of a little tight unwieldy bun like a tennis ball that has collected cobwebs.

Her garments were ghastly. One annual skirt. Mother’s old hats trimmed with ribbon. Father’s cast combinations patched and reefed with thick darning thread. A scarecrow’s purgatory in sum! The good girl sincerely did not wish to be any expense to her dear parents. She was given no opportunity to be so. Mother would have liked to have been affectionate, but affection had been mangled out of her. She asked nothing of a life in which she perceived nothing. All was in the life to come. Without meaning it, she weighed like wet washing on Theodosia. Father was always as erect as an arrow and as indeflectible as the Grace in which he was imbued and abounding. He stood in Grace up to the ear-lobes. His high hat was smooth with Grace and his boots were greased therewith. His only trouble in life was how to give unto others out of his over-abundance of Grace. Mother had Grace, sufficient for salvation, though father had had his doubts of her once, returning from their honeymoon. Theodosia ought to have had Grace, for everything humanly possible had been done to instil the divine condiment into her soul. However, she had always been a very unresponsive child. Even at her baptism she had not cried, to the amazement and disappointment of the old Irish woman who held her and believed that departing demons should cause screams in the normal way. Apparently they had preferred to stay. And later Theodosia’s honey-coloured hair had given further anxiety to the old woman who had tended her with some goats and hens in childhood. It was not quite the same colour as the scutched flax which yellow hair should resemble. It was stranger still. Her mother must have been overlooked by the fairies before Theodosia was born. Farmers’ maids would never let her see the churn or a new-born calf for fear of blinking the milk or overlooking their cattle. They thought her hair unlucky. It was not a decent human colour.

In the vacation her brother brought home a fellow-student from Trinity, Josiah McWherry. He was a lithe and likely lad. All day Josiah and Theophilus studied for the Ministry, and in the evening they conversed with the Minister’s family. The Minister was of great use to the boys on any point of philology or philosophy. He had swept gold medals into the full of his student’s cap. On Sunday nights he would only talk Doctrine, and he was still fervent against Unitarians, with whom there had been great controversy in his youth. He used to talk about the great Doctor Hanna--“Roaring Hanna.” And he always ended upon a great orthodox note: “As the Father is God, so is the Son God, and the Holy Ghost is God.” He was a Trinitarian to the backbone, and would have stood stiffer than a stake in the flames. However, there was nothing except Unitarians and Papists for him to feel stiff about in his young day. Home Rule and women’s bicycling came later. Spiders scuttled and beam-lice somersaulted when he spoke on either of those subjects. One was the destruction of the Union with England, and the other of the marriage-union. He would not give Home Rule to Papists or to women. It was by the firelight, listening to Dr. McSolomon, that Josiah first saw the glint of silvery golden-grey in Theodosia’s hair. When she leaned over the blazing turf, the red light played through the long plaits. They were allowed to be let down in the evening, and the effect by fire was like mulled claret poured over melting butter--not that Josiah knew the joys of claret at any temperature. But he looked long and often at the primrose hair and contrasted it with the flower face, which was always as white as snow--white as the fuller’s earth, thought Josiah scripturally. But he kept his thoughts to his presbytical self, and not till he returned to Trinity did he indite a series of sensible letters concerning sights in Dublin, which Theodosia was allowed to read after perusal by each parent in turn. Naught suspecting or imagining, she wrote a nice answer full of Gortaherrin news, and a pleasant, callow correspondence was opened between the Manse and that famous seat of learning in Dublin. Correspondence was encouraged, as it gave city news to the old birds. Josiah returned for the next vacation, and ventured to propose to Theodosia. She accepted him from a mixture of ingrained modesty and obedience. Her parents were not informed owing to her total innocence, and took no suspicion until an incautious love-letter sent to her (care of a romantic local post-mistress) and sewed into Theodosia’s pillow was found by Theodosia’s mother and handed to Theodosia’s father, who was unable to speak for several days. He always acted slowly and deliberately. Hasty wrath or unweighed reprobation was neither in his policy nor of his temperament. Theodosia was not lectured or beaten or accused of any specific crime, but she was locked into her bedroom for a fortnight and nourished upon the bread of affliction and the water of tears. The letter received no allusion at home, but she never received another. Josiah McWherry wrote four Sundays in succession and received no answer. Puzzled, he stopped writing. She obviously did not enjoy reading in ink what she had allowed him to whisper over the firelight or when she was washing the delph. He was a faint lover.

She took her medicine well, though she imagined she had touched the outskirts of romance. A gentle thrill had attuned her, though Josiah had only proposed a nice arrangement for her, a sort of transfer in domestic service for the future, and she had wrongfully kept it from her parents. Love was a term of mixed meaning to her. Love was something peculiar to God, and mortals who indulged in love got into trouble. God so loved the world that He had damned most of their neighbours, the Roman Catholics for sure, and the more-worldly Episcopalians, who went to the Horse Show and Monte Carlo to spend their rents. Theodosia came out of her room chastened. The rod of John Calvin had been thrust under her milky skin. It was a priceless skin, for which many a woman of the world would have flayed her own in exchange. It was as clear and clean as wind-flowers reflected in the moonlight water.

She had not seen her father during the fortnight. He was waiting for her in his study. With one terrible frown he absolved and abolished the past. Then he revealed the future. Correspondence of any kind was forbidden. She must promise never to write to Josiah again, and she promised, giving her simple word, that was as adamantine as that of Medes and Persians. She had undoubtedly written more than one love-letter herself, or Josiah would not have been beguiled into his evil communications. Dr. McSolomon regarded her as a lapsed child until she had atoned. Grace might still be applied mercifully. Grace had been noticed to reside to a fuller degree than usual in a neighbouring minister, Mr. Caleb McRoarty, a sober, steady and godly-minded widower living in those circumstances which never receive the meed of pity and attention accorded to the state of widowhood. When has a merry widower been bespoken? Mr. McRoarty might be expected to call any day and press his suit, which Theodosia was reminded needed no pressing. She would have a chance to become mistress of her delph and her mangle, and to preside over a Manse of her own.

This was the second time Theodosia felt her life stirred to the core. It gave her intense repulsion and she shrank like a flower into its half-opened bud. When Mr. McRoarty called, she wished for the first time that she had never been born, but she showed no tremor, no protest, no scene. She had a deep feeling that her life must turn far otherwise, and, when her parents left her in the kitchen with Mr. McRoarty she heard him with present smiling and absent mind. He was well-meaning and inclined to be absorbent. The first touch of absorption was pain to Theodosia, but in the circumstances Mr. McRoarty believed his caress had been not only permissible but acceptable. He embraced her over and over. It was his way of clinching a bargain. He had already given her father a cow. It was an exchange in kind, and Theodosia seemed willingly his. Sentiment might be thrown into the bargain. But his clutching arms tore down the curtain, and she suddenly glimpsed life in a Manse with this black-coated but fangless gorilla. He was not cruel or vicious to look at, not very amorous even, unless it was of her hair, which he fastened into a plait and rubbed over his mouth. Theodosia started like a sensitive human violin. She could not bear to be scraped by those large hands, though they thumbed the Gospel; or kissed by those thin lips, though anointed with the dew of a thousand sermons. She shivered and writhed until he stopped. She stood in a stupor without saying a word till he went out and bade good night to her complacent parents.

Then the break came. Hurrying into the kitchen she washed until she had washed her face clean and clean, and brushed until she had brushed his stickiness out of her hair. What was she to do? She felt like wax that could not rid itself of his impression. She blew out the candle and still saw him gibbering round her in the dark with the horrible agility of old men who momentarily believe themselves young. His flaccid kisses still sounded in her ear-drums. She lit the light again and determined to write to Josiah, who was living with his father in Belfast. Yet she had promised, and to break a promise was to go to Hell. Then the elfin element in her made a nudge. Why not send Josiah an empty envelope? It was a sign to be interpreted and it was not exactly writing a letter. She addressed an envelope and wrote nothing within. But would he understand that it meant an empty heart, blank despair and appeal for help? But the fairy part of her worked like a charm. She snipped off a primrose tress of her hair, placed it inside the envelope and ran with it in the night to the post office. She couldn’t have written less. She couldn’t have sent more. And she had not broken her Christian word!

Josiah had the courage or curiosity of youth to understand, for he came over from his father’s Manse three days later. She was lucky enough to see him in the road before he took the turn into the Manse. She ran to meet him and to tell him all. When they came to the Manse door, her father was waiting. He did not seem to mind Josiah’s arrival, and let him stay to supper, questioning him kindly about his examinations. Josiah found himself alone with the old man and plucked courage to mention his case. “Theodosia and I had kind words together last vacation and I hope you did not mind the letters I could not help writing to her. I know she showed them to you.”

Dr. McSolomon smiled a deep and saturnine smile. He so seldom smiled that the motion produced a little stiffness in his face for the rest of the evening. When it was time for Josiah to leave, he informed him quietly that Mr. Caleb McRoarty had made successful application for Theodosia’s hand and that he intended marrying them himself the next month. As a matter of fact Dr. McSolomon had only intended to inform Caleb of this the next morning. That evening Josiah informed Theodosia. This was the third shock she had felt in her life, pleasurable or otherwise. Pleasurable had been the coming of Josiah to Gortaherrin, far from pleasurable the wooing of Caleb; but the bare announcement of her marriage with Caleb, though the greatest shock of all, gave her neither pleasure nor pain. It conveyed the emancipation of disaster.

Everything was combining to the decisive moment, even Caleb who had shot his bolt too soon. She had felt his horrid hook, like the minnow grazed by the rusty pin of a schoolboy’s coarse fishing line. If it were not for the memory of that foul embrace she would have remained and swallowed the fate her parents designed for her; unconsentingly no doubt; ruefully resentful perhaps, and cowed unto humiliation, and certainly embittered to all time. In thirty years she thought she would probably resemble her mother, a bootmat in disposition, and rather like an old boot in shape. Her hair would become like her mother’s, snowy white. While there was colour in her hair, it seemed there was hope.

Hope for what? Josiah had already started walking down the drive. She slipped from the kitchen door across the fields and awaited him in the high road. When she acted, she always acted without thinking, out of a lonely and gallant instinct. She was of the blood of the martyrs of the Covenant, and then the fairy in her bade her not lose the man she had once summoned out of the void by casting with a lock of hair. She went and she met him hasting away with that lock clutched in his hand. When she glimpsed it she knew that fate was blazing her path. He had hardly risen to the moment, but it was her fate, not his, that possessed the moment. Perhaps he had no fate, only a soul and that a cut and dried and preserved specimen. Perhaps she had no soul, only a tremendous fate. She simply told him that she was coming with him to the station, and at the station she told him she would come with him to Belfast, where he was living with his father, and in Belfast she intended to tell him she would marry him. He began nervously counting the money in his pocket as soon as she broached Belfast. There was just enough to bring them both there. He trembled counting it to the station master. She noticed his emotion and pressed his other hand. She could feel her lock of hair rustling between his damp fingers, and she knew it was well. They sat and talked for two wonderful hours to each other in the ill-lit third-class compartment, and even in the dirty oil-light her hair assumed supernatural glow. Their plan was unsophisticated. They would join hands before his father and swear themselves man and wife according to the marriage law of Scotland. They did so on arrival and remained the night under the roof of the surprised Josiah Senior, Theodosia sleeping with the still more surprised Mrs. Josiah Senior, while father and son discussed the next move in the kitchen. They decided that Dr. McSolomon must be faced with a clean breast, the fullest apology must be offered and humble entreaty made to suffer their marriage to remain. They both agreed that Theodosia, knowing her father so well, was the proper person to carry this out.

Next morning, Theodosia was singularly and poignantly recalled from the realm of romance to acute realism, when she left the bedroom of Mrs. Josiah Senior for the breakfast table and heard her bold rescuer suggest that she should return and explain matters to her father. She sat shyly and silently, wondering and watching. Then she shook her tangled head and Mr. Josiah Senior said that he would take the journey to prepare the way for her, and he was as good as his word. He returned late in the evening and reported that terms were possible though the wrath of Dr. McSolomon was terrible. He learnt from the mother that he had deliberately cursed his daughter, and a frightened farm-girl had expressed the fears of the household by saying that his curses had killed the house spiders in their webs! On learning that some form of service, some rag of respectability, had been clutched by the sinful pair in the presence of a Minister of the Gospel, he had remained silent for an hour and had then declared that since the neighbours, assisted by the romantic postmistress and the Episcopalian station master, had already put the gossip over ten parishes that his daughter had run away with another Minister’s son, Josiah had better marry her outright and keep her for ever. He made no conditions except that Josiah should go abroad with her or, if he continued to work for the Ministry, go on the mission field. He forbade utterly Josiah or Theodosia setting foot within Gortaherrin Manse until the hour of their death or his, but he held out the appetising suggestion that he would come and unite them finally under their new roof in Belfast.

That delicate and indelible scene actually occurred. Josiah had had the presence of mind to leave the house by the back entrance when he sighted the rectangular Minister of Gortaherrin standing at the doorstep. There could be no description of the hard white mask in his face save that every angle was an acute angle. The gesture with which he had smoothed his grey silky beard was an indication that he considered scandal had been averted by narrow margins, though his brother Minister showed him the large, unseductive bed in which Theodosia and Mrs. Josiah Senior had passed and continued to pass night time. Next to scandal, Dr. McSolomon hated most the sense of being thwarted, and Theodosia had thwarted him bitterly. She had raised a power before which domestic tyranny had failed and the walls enclosing the Manse had fallen like the walls of Jericho. Bitterly he thought of Rahab and the scarlet thread which that ingenious lady had shown from her window, and he cursed Rahab and Theodosia in the same breath. He declined to see or bless his daughter, but, to save allusions in the local paper and his good name from the postmistress, he was willing to be present with his wife at a public ceremony and the sooner the better. Josiah agreed to take Theodosia into the foreign mission field, and the rite took place in accordance with the Presbyterian Church of Ireland. Josiah took Theodosia to be his lawful wedded, lawful bedded wife, and slept with a gentle primrose cloud about his head. Neither before nor after the ceremony did Theodosia’s father speak to her except for one terrible moment when for the first time they were alone in the waiting-room of the railway station, and Theodosia, greatly moved, threw herself on her knees to ask a father’s blessing, if not his forgiveness. But Dr. McSolomon never unbent, though at least he spoke two words: “Shoo, Whore!”

He was of the iron calibre of the Covenanter, indeflectible of Grace and inexorable of judgment. When his eye offended him he plucked it out, and when his daughter offended him he vomited her overseas. It was very doubtful to him now whether she would save her soul, but at least he had saved appearances. He was of the relentless stock that breeds martyrs and of the blood that crieth against Nineveh. But home scandal is worst.

* * * * *

The Reverend Josiah McWherry and Mrs. Theodosia McWherry had passed four years on the Mission in China. They had had a stiff and rather a dull time, as it were sowing tame oats. They had struggled and scraped and saved to make ends meet, for there had been born to them three children, and Theodosia was expecting to complete her book by adding a synoptic fourth to Masters Matthew, Luke and Mark McWherry. Josiah saved souls and halfpennies with equal avidity. If the extreme opposite of spendthrift is a theological virtue, it was his. The expenses of mission life were formidable though a Society in Chicago advanced a bounty of fifty pounds on every child born in the mission field. So economical were the evangelising pair that they actually saved a little on the bounty won for each child. Theodosia understood that they were putting aside the money needed to revisit Ireland and never grudged the pinch in dress or food. Besides, she thrived on the rice, and her skin was still unspoilt by the sun and her hair remained the colour of pale primrose. Suave Orientals observed her beauty with a polite wonder. Though they were quite untouched by the Reverend Josiah’s God, they secretly observed and admired Josiah’s goddess. Josiah became mechanical, with his mind set and focused on the double task of saving Chinks in his tin chapel and tin in his chink-box. Chink, chink! The lot of a missionary is not a particularly happy one. His fellow whites succeed in living down any notion he may instil into the East of the moral perfections of home Christendom. He himself ceases to believe in Europeans, and the Orientals seldom begin to believe in him. It is the working of the old paradox, that Christianity began as an Oriental religion, a sublime teaching of the Desert, and, when brought back to the East in Western trousers and upon elastic-sided boots, becomes unrecognisable there as religion at all. The puzzled Orientals observed domesticated missionaries preaching from a pulpit of middle-class mind and second-class comfort One Who abandoned Mother and declined wife. The McWherrys were as unsuccessful as might have been expected in the task of presenting a suburban Calvin to the children of Confucius, and were intensely relieved by a call to minister to a semi-European community in Hong-Kong. It sounded pleasantly provincial after the frontier misery of the Mission, and they accepted the call. They took the first steamer down the coast out of the little Chinese port; Matthew, Luke and Mark with them. There was the additional reason that Hong-Kong was provided with white doctors, and Theodosia stood in need of one in about two months’ time. They agreed that the call must be providential. They were two days at sea and never out of sight of the coast, when Theodosia was prematurely seized with pangs and premonitions. Her condition grew more serious and it became obvious that she would arrive at Hong-Kong with an addition to their party, for whom no ticket had been provided, and, as Josiah calculated with panic, no bounty could be claimed. For the high seas are extra-diocesan and a child born at sea cannot be described truthfully or even theologically as born on the mission field. Theodosia lay calmly in her berth showing no traces of panic nor pain. But Josiah’s panic was considerable. It was financial. Though he sat sympathetically holding her hand, he was harassing his wretched mind with the agonising chances of losing fifty pounds, if she were quickly and successfully delivered at sea. It was not only unlucky, he felt, but it was unchristian to let an innocent family be deprived of their right to so great a sum. It was even intolerable. But any minute it might be so.

The day grew into night, and a long harassing darkness began for both. Morning came and nothing serious had happened. Theodosia only thought of the child. Josiah only thought of the bounty. He looked out upon the smooth sea and beheld a land which was never quite out of sight. The ship’s doctor was of opinion that her child would not be born that day but would certainly appear before they reached the landing stage of Hong-Kong. It set Josiah thinking and finally he went on the bridge and suggested to the captain that it would please the powerful Missionary Societies if he took his ship into the nearest port for the event. Land doctors had naturally more experience than sea doctors of such cases. Of course he had heard of such things as “Water Babies” and he laughed nervously. He was terribly anxious for the sake of his wife. The captain only remarked that he knew no port within three days’ journey except Hong-Kong.

At noon Josiah was feeling as desperate as a Minister of Providence feels it is right to feel, and again he mounted the bridge. This time he demanded to be put ashore in the long-boat with his wife. He had consulted her and she had vaguely consented, believing they were not far from their destination. “My wife is anxious to be put ashore before her baby is born. I insist on our being placed in the long-boat.” The captain only remarked that in such circumstances a sea doctor was better than no doctor at all. It might look very calm, though it did happen to be the season of the year for typhoons. However, he consented and ordered the ship’s stoppage. He was aware of the propriety of not offending the Missionary Societies. They provided a great deal of traffic on the coast. His action could be interpreted as an attempt to save human life and he would allow a crew of three to row the lady with her husband ashore. The three children, Matthew, Mark and Luke, were left with the stewardess.

Theodosia was carried out of the bowels of the comfortable ship and lowered down the companion ladder into a bed prepared in the stern of the long-boat. The shore did not look more than an hour’s row away. With broad grins the two seamen began rowing toward land, while a third steered, and Josiah continued his indefatigable attentions in the stern. As the boat drew away from the ship, the light of the sinking sun flickered and rested a moment on an untidy tress of primrose hair. It was the last detail visible to a few curious and pitying passengers who stood watching from the main deck--a gleam of primrose hair disappearing rapidly into the Yellow Sea.

* * * * *

As a matter of fact Theodosia suffered less mental agony on this crazy trip with Josiah than during their elopement to Belfast. Then her mind had been on the rack. Now it was only her body that suffered as the slow pain got hold of her and she lay back under an open sky festooned with the gathering indigo of virulent storm. Shore was considerably farther than the atmosphere had let them imagine, and, though it remained clearly visible, they did not seem to have drawn closer during the first hour. Another hour passed and once or twice a tremor shot through Theodosia’s body while she uttered not the ghost of a groan. Each time he felt her quiver, Josiah felt fifty pounds being wrenched out of his pocket. The very tide under the churning boat seemed to be drifting away with his well-earned bounty. Her very hair seemed like a bunch of melting yellow sovereigns to his feverishly anxious sight. From time to time he urged the rowers with imprecations, mild but loud. Land drew decidedly nearer and the outlines of the harbour he had visioned were taking shape in his eyes. Even if the baby were born on the landing stage, the bounty might yet be won. Josiah unfortunately had no sporting sense or he might have been as thrilled as the native seamen by the gamble he was making. It was a woman’s life against fifty pounds! Theodosia rapidly passed beyond all emotion save pain.

“Ahoy! Boat Ahoy!” descended upon them through a megaphone. They held their rowing and then their breath. Above them towered a great liner through the yellow misting, immense, massive and majestic. It was slowly bearing down upon them. Transfixed with dread, Theodosia watched with the helpless feeling growing upon her that the mighty ship would cut the child within her into halves. For herself she had no thought, and Josiah had no thought for her either as he stood up and shouted “Ahoy! Ahoy! Ahoy!” The liner deliberately stopped and a companion ladder was lowered. For the second time that day Theodosia found her child-bed the cynosure of a sympathetic passengers’ deck. By this time she was feeling weird as in a dream. Some strange destiny was approaching her in that mighty ship of the high seas. She found herself hoisted through the air, taken into a comfortable stateroom and treated for starvation and shipwreck by three stewardesses. The rowers and Josiah were similarly treated in the saloon, and discovered to be thirsty rather than hungry. A real thrill was supplied to the lazy and luxurious passengers when it was announced at dinner that the rescued lady had been delivered of a child! As a rule European ladies do not choose the China seas as the best place for an accouchement or an open boat in typhoon weather as the most propitious surroundings. It seemed rather remarkable and caused talk amongst the crew, who were the first to learn the underlying cause from their rescued mates. The grim truth began to circulate through the ship, from crew to officers, from stewardesses to lady passengers, from pursers to gentlemen in the smoking-room. The indignation was spontaneous and summary. Josiah received morally freezing shoulder blades wherever he turned.

Meantime Theodosia lay in a comfortable bed, for the first time in her life. She was placed in one of the state-rooms of the royal suite, which a Persian Prince courteously placed at her disposal. Her experiences were widening. She had experienced child-birth before, but she had never drunk champagne. It had the dizzier effect. Then they brought her fruit and titbits daily. Ladies in beautiful clothes came to watch and wash the baby. A purse was subscribed to provide him with a loving cup. The baby cried and crowed without realising the fluke that had dropped him into a bed of clover, whereas he might have easily been tossing like a broken eggshell in the China seas. The captain of the ship and the Persian Prince applied for the position of godparent, and were present at the baptism, performed by the ship’s chaplain with distilled water. The whole ship was interested. The only person unnoticed on the occasion was Josiah. Theodosia was particularly pleased that the Prince had accepted the position of godfather. What would Gortaherrin have thought?

Oddly enough the captain was an atheist and the Prince was no less than the living head of one of the great Mohammedan sects, who venerated him as a remote descendant of the Prophet, and believed him incapable of sin and ready of miracle. His bath-water was collected very carefully every morning by worshippers and dispatched in sealed cans for the degustation of the faithful--throughout Pan Islam. Some was sipped in the Afghan hills and some was swallowed in the Sahara. In India it was administered as a powerful spiritual tonic at the moment of death. The lower classes used it to cure diseases. But its main virtue was internal, and the faithful had acquired almost a taste for the scented Parisian soaps in which the Prince was pleased to cleanse his body. The salaciousness of his instinct was perhaps offset by the saponaceousness of his hide.

He was by chance one of the first to welcome Theodosia when she was brought on deck. She was stretched under an awning, while ladies took turn to hold silk parasols between her and the breeze. She lay with her white skin shining like a river-run salmon, fresh and fruitful, unflecked and unflushed--while her primrose hair moved delicately in the warm air. It was a colour that the Prince had never seen before in his long experience of light-skinned women, European or Eurasian. And he studied it as he would have studied the water of a diamond or the wine in a ruby. Theodosia was quite unconscious of his admiration. Two things stood clear in her soul. Her baby lived, and her love for Josiah was dead, dead as that money bounty. But the present hour felt like Paradise.

Unconsciously and then consciously her mind had shed Josiah. She had overheard the unceasing indignation of the passengers who came to pet the baby. Women looked at her as though she had suffered some great martyrdom for her sex or for her religion, or as though she had been rescued from the arena. Men bowed with tender smiles or stood eyeing her as though she were some fair form of fish pulled out of the sea. Josiah used to creep about her with an expression that might have called for pity, had there been anyone to pity. But of all on shipboard none pitied and none pardoned. Theodosia only asked him what there was to pardon. She was perfectly cheerful and politely hoped Josiah was not as sick as he looked.

There was always some new friend to talk to her and she never felt ashamed, for her old clothes had been put aside for ever. The first class passengers collected a trousseau for her. For the first time in her life she had sampled the soft delight of wearing the finest French underwear, fringed with gossamer lace and spliced with tyrianthine ribbons. Her body was massaged every day by rhythmic fingers, and her legs were encased in silk stockings of so fragile and transparent a web that the colour of her veins was apparent. She was laid upon cushions and given winsome wines that made her gay or sleepy and deliciously aware at intervals of a new world and new impulses. She knew continual pleasure and happiness for the first time in her life. She was surprised to find herself flooded by such tender and luxurious emotions. Life had always been rugged and hard, with a hardness against which she had never kicked. It was only once in her life that she had desired with desire, and that desire had been fulfilled. She had wilfully compelled Josiah to come to her and take her away to Belfast. She could never desire again as she had desired then. She acquiesced now in whatever life brought her of weal or woe. She had not shrunk from pain and death, when it seemed to be her portion. When fate flowered, she did not decline the lovely pleasure. She had endured the Chinese mission without a murmur; filth, discomfort, poverty, lonely childbearing and her queer dread of the Orientals. She always had a quiet fear they would get her some day. She had read of Boxers. Now her life had taken a wonderful twist, thanks to Josiah’s idiocy and greed. She learnt that she would be deposited by the liner in Japan in a few days.

The Prince was particularly active in his attentions and curious as to her future. He hung about in a wonderful dressing gown, an heirloom in his family, contrasting with the London trousers and boots below. Josiah showed no emotion except anxiety as to who would pay for the return trip. That was rather unexpectedly settled by the Prince, who, after some entrancing conversations with Theodosia and a very heart-to-heart talk with Josiah, proposed to pay Josiah’s journey back and to give Theodosia a much needed holiday, at his expense also, in Honolulu and California, whither the ship was bound. Josiah said he was the only gentleman on board. He was certainly the only one to speak to Josiah.

Theodosia’s glowing health and acquiescence of mind enabled her to recover quickly from the creasing of childbirth. She took her children naturally. They had come as a consequence of her immense and primitive desire to escape from Caleb McRoarty. China was another consequence and she had accepted the rough and tumble of her lot. Even when Josiah had thrown her into an open boat she had not uttered one repining word. She had not desired comfort or even life. She had always felt she was paying a penalty. And now it all turned to this, the admiration and adoration of a whole ship. It was a far cry from Belfast, and Gortaherrin had shrunk into a point upon the other side of the globe. Josiah had dwindled into something incredibly small. All feeling for her father had died in the waiting-room at the railway station in Belfast, when he cursed her for her harlotry, and now it had died for Josiah for whom she had given up her father. She felt as much for Josiah as for the skinned body of one of the kids she used to see hanging at the Irish crossroads. As for her mother, she was only the ridiculous rag-accompaniment to her father. Theodosia was primitive and could grasp only one thing at a time. Once Josiah had been the one and absolute idea, and now he had shivered to nothingness. He had come to her on the wings of her great desire, the desire of the bird to escape from the cage. He had been the wings of her desire and she did not mind seeing them crumpled now. At least they had carried her to the empyrean. She watched his ghostlike face hanging round her cabin. He really looked like a goat’s ghost if there were such things, ridiculous, inane and unwanted.

A new idea had come into her life. She was enjoying it! The great physical wrench she had endured combined with the beautiful clothes, in which she was dressed, to give her the glorious emotion of the chrysalis when it has been bred to butterfly. She was lying on the deck at delicious ease. Her feet were encased in white, gold-brocaded shoes, and her body lapped in a rose dress faintly frothed, as it were, by a shawl of lighter pink falling from her shoulders. Flesh-coloured were her silk stockings and like a web of rosy silk was her flesh. The two plaits of her primrose hair attracted so much attention that she left them hanging. They were rather like the pollened antennæ of some florivorous insect; their soft sheen like the pellucid cinnamon of the rain-washed sunset of spring. She had rather despised her natural coloured hair compared to the bright hennas and auburns and chalybeates of the ladies aboard. It never occurred to her that hers was the only undyed foliage and her face the only unrouged petal in the first-class dining saloon. But it had been obvious to every man with taste on the ship, and the Prince was a man of exquisite taste as well as of highly religious sensibilities.

One day he approached her not for the first time truly, but for the first time they discussed religion. The idea of accompanying him on a holiday had charmed and absorbed the innocence of her mind. She had felt no remorse in sending Josiah back from Nagasaki, nor had Josiah felt any qualm when the Prince, with the generosity that a great Christian nobleman might not have shown, had paid him the forfeited bounty out of his own pocket in consideration of the plucky attempt Theodosia had made to save it. Fifty pounds was nothing to him. He had given eight thousand the previous month for a French race-horse. The only prick of conscience she felt was her desertion of the new mission-post even for a month. The children could remain with Josiah, except the baby, and His Serene Highness played with Baby too charmingly. How surprised she was to learn that he was the head of a great religion. She found herself growing sad at the thought of his perdition. But it was satisfactory and a little wonderful to be arguing with the head of a real Mohammedan sect. It would be a good chance to find out how Moslems really felt towards Presbyterian principles. Perhaps?--and her heart leaped--she might be able to convert this prepossessing Prince. How wonderful! He was a sort of Senior Moderator in his own community, and must have untold influence.

* * * * *

They were together. “If you are a Mohammedan,” she asked him, “are you not a teetotaller?” “No, I always drink wine.” “But the example must be wrong for your followers?” she queried. “They never drink wine, but they do not mind me doing so. They believe that by saying a few words I can always change wine into water betwixt the cup and the lip. They are very faithful.” Theodosia shivered. She felt like having tea with Antichrist. But he was so sweet playing with Baby. She dared ask him if he had many wives. No white man had ever dared ask him such a question, much less a white woman; and he had known a gamut of one and a gallery of the other. He trembled with rage, and then with amusement. He had never met a white woman like this before, and a missionary’s wife as well. He had always shared the official contempt for missionaries and the official indifference to their wives. He had the Oriental’s disgust for the wives of professed holy men. In fact, a Maharajah’s hundredth concubine seemed less displeasing to him and to God than the missionary’s lady with her black jet brooch, and Jumble Bazaar written all over her clothes. “Yes,” he told Theodosia, “I have many wives at home, and they are all good friends.” Theodosia looked at this heathen with great pity. “Would you never give up the poor dear ladies and let them become Christian?” “I do want to give them up and to marry one nice Christian instead,” the Prince stated with a delicious smile. Theodosia woke to possibilities. “They need a Queen among them to instruct and help them,” he added, “a white golden-haired Queen.” He was watching how she would take it. She clapped her hands. “How splendid! They could all become Christian. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you married a white lady. How I should like to be her!”

The Prince hardly knew whether he was talking to a schoolgirl full of the “Arabian Nights,” or to a very mysterious and self-concealed courtesan. But he knew that he was fascinated and not merely drawn fleshward. It was moonlight, and the Pacific Ocean was full of filtering sounds and suppressed purples. From time to time a great phosphorescent sheet shot across the ship’s track like the sea’s luminary echo or defiance of the moon. Butterfly by day and moth by night, Theodosia felt freed of her shell, and the name of her shell was Josiah.

The Prince was beginning to see his way. At Honolulu he suggested that Theodosia should return with him to Persia instead of continuing to California. Theodosia was quite willing and began to visualise a new future. Though the Prince had hinted that she might become the white Queen he had alluded to, it was clearly impossible as she herself was married, and then he was possibly married in some queer way to all those dark ladies. An extra one might not make a difference for him, but it would puzzle the Belfast Presbytery. In the end he proposed, with his unfailing tact, that she should enter his harem as English governess to his wives. She could share their limited life and, if she liked, she could consecrate herself to their conversion. All Theodosia’s scruples were overcome at a puff, and she began to feel as radiant in conscience as in body and mind. She no longer felt she was acting treacherously to Christ and Kirk. Under her conscience, however, a subconscience warned her and a subconsciousness tempted her to unknown delight, and, when she succumbed again and again, the very warning became an overwhelming delight or expectation of delight. All this occurred in the undebating and unchallenged recesses of her soul, where modern ideals and primitive instincts keep company.

As long as she talked a little religion every day with the Prince, Theodosia felt that all was justified. Josiah only made two converts a year in China. She might really devote six months to a convert so important as the Prince. It was true that he would only talk religion when she refused to hear him on any other subject. He preferred to tell her of Parisian theatres, and his race-horses and the splendours of his royal palace. He found himself unaccountably checked every time he tried to touch sex, though she allowed his ebony hands to move on her canary-coloured hair. Though she was deeply versed in her Scriptures and had an eye for his soul, he had a number of arrows in his Moslem quiver which surprised her. And this it was that surprised him most. The only thing she ever asked him for was his soul. White women with whom he went even as short a trip as London to Paris generally asked for pearls. But to go to Honolulu and back and be asked to become a Presbyterian was a rich experience. And he desired her exceedingly. With hushed desire he desired.

Woman though she was, she mistook his desire for her body for nervousness on behalf of his own soul. Religion often confuses a woman with her own halo. She asked him delightfully what could hold him back from Christianity, or why she might not smooth away any particular difficulty. He smiled his catlike smile and asked: “You say that Allah childed by Miriam the Virgin?” Theodosia nodded. “And the Child was God?” Another nod. “Then the Only God became many Gods?” “Only two!” she threw in a little hastily, for he sharply rapped: “And the Holy Ghost, of whom you were speaking yesterday?” “Yes, the Holy Ghost also is God,” she admitted, “but no others.” “Allah is become three Gods then,” he said, and spoke no more. Sometimes she would have persuaded him that the Son also was God and the Holy Ghost, God, but he stroked her and soothed her enthusiasm with Oriental calm. “I would find it far easier to believe that Miriam the Virgin is God,” he said one evening. “Gracious!” quoth the daughter of the Manse, “do not become a Roman Catholic, whatever you do.” He laughed. “You have so many different Churches among the Christians, and so many Gods, that I cannot discern which is right.” Yet he always seemed to be laying his difficulties at her feet, when he lowered his head on her shoulder. She showed no repulsion, which was to him astonishing. Never had he met white woman the like. “Women are to me religion,” he continued. “The great prophets have made it a choice between women and religion. I have found that they are the same.” She did not quite understand his meaning, but she quickly composed the only meaning attachable to his words in their circumstances. He must be fond of her and, because he was fond of her, he must want to become a Christian, she assumed. She looked round into the high-bred dusky face on her shoulder and without moving her lips touched his with her mouth. She intended it as a friendly little act of gratitude, as though she were stroking the nice old tame tiger behind bars in the Dublin Zoo. At most he might have purred. The effect on the Prince was, however, different. He tossed his lighted cigar into the sea like a tiny redheaded rocket. Then he caught her mouth between his lips and drew it slowly into his, while his arms crept round her body, and his ring-jewelled claws spread themselves on her chest like a panther holding its surprised prey. She saw his face slowly rise from hers, and in the dark his feline teeth flashed with tiny but exquisitely set diamonds. She kept quite cool, though dimly realising how romantic a Governess she would be expected to be.

* * * * *

In Persia Theodosia came into her fairy own. Geographically she knew not where she was, within hundreds of miles. She had been brought inland by native bearers, had been carried in litters, with her baby, and finally thrown amongst the ladies of the harem. There she had been clothed in Eastern dress and looked to herself like a perpetual Christmas card. She was strangely remote from any idea of a Presbyterian missionary. Her feet, cased in rich-smelling morocco, were no longer the elastic-sided feet of those who bring good tidings upon the mountain-tops. The dusty, rusty dresses of the Jumble Sale were no more. The thread-worn skirts were replaced with something more in accordance with the surrounding Jungle. Her mother’s black jet brooch had been destroyed or lost by the Prince, who gave her pearls instead. She wore them for his pleasure, half stripping herself at night in order to keep cool--pearls in long strings, falling festoons, white waves of pearls. He liked to watch her concealing her modesty behind their dangling sheen, and she would lie back like a flower which has weathered long vernal frosts and is bursting bud more brightly for the delay. In that tropical Asian summer she bloomed like a flower of the Irish spring. And her hair was in perpetual flower, summer or winter, with its strange and indescribable coloration, milk of dandelion, cream of marigold or quintessence of honey. It gave the Prince a queer religious exaltation.

Theodosia did not fail to fall in love with her lover. It had all come with such a rush. Not until she was ensconced in his harem did she realise that he intended her to occupy the position of a favourite wife, and that even among the dark ladies she was favourite, and that his holy favour was upon her. In the Palace and the Palace gardens she was accounted something divine. Servants fell prostrate before her. Days of wonderful ease and luxury followed. Weird sights and colours came to her through slitted shutters. Theodosia was clothed in Oriental dress by silent slaves every morning, though when she dined with her Prince a vitiation of taste insisted on Parisian gowns. He was really a dazzling creature, not handsome but forceful and intoxicating in his converse and behaviour. Gorgeous was his dress, taken clean out of the “Arabian Nights,” though at moments he wore beautifully tailored London suits, which Theodosia used to mistake for the first signs of Christian disposition. She had given up the attempt to convert him. He always listened with agreeable politeness and then countered with something too unexpected or upsetting for words. Indulgently he would hear what were to him the utterly preposterous doctrines of Irish Presbyterianism, and then quietly inquire how any Prophet, however well spoken of in Belfast, could be the bodily son of Allah. Or he would quote cleverly from the Scriptures and the Koran until she was so muddled that she knew not which he was drawing argument from. And when challenged on a doctrine she would coyly refer to John Knox or John Calvin, and once she referred to her father’s great hero, Dr. Hanna of Belfast, and the Prince asked if Hanna was a lady preacher, and laughed her to scorn.