OH! DEM GOLDEN SLIPPERS!

"If I were a man--I would fight."

The words were spoken by Erda Shepherd as the two young men entered the drawing-room of the mission house.

"Let me fight for you!" said Captain Dering, in his most ornate style, as, in the pause following on the interruption of their arrival, he went forward to shake hands. "My sword is always at the service of the ladies."

Then a certain feeling, as of electricity in the air, a certain look on the faces round him--for most of the mission workers had already arrived--warned him that this was no jesting matter, and he continued in better taste, "I trust there is nothing wrong?"

"Wrong!" echoed Erda, who in a mechanical, absolutely indifferent manner was shaking hands with Lance; "Yes! grievously wrong!"--her voice was almost strident in its decision--"hideously wrong!"

Here Dr. James Campbell, who had been laying down the law to a group of other black coats, came up and put the telegram he was holding into Captain Dering's hand.

"Perhaps you can explain this," he said severely, "we generally have to thank the military authorities for such interference."

"Not in this case, so far as I am concerned," replied Vincent, after a glance at the first sentence. Then he read on, everyone else in the room silent, expectant.

It was from the Commissioner, saying, that from private information given him, he regretted that, in the interests of peace, he must, as magistrate, forbid any street preaching or public profession of faith during the next two days. Feeling was running high in many ways, and it was necessary to be extremely cautious.

"I can assure you, sir," said Vincent, handing back the telegram, "I am not the informant. At the same time"--here he faced about to the room generally--"I think the Commissioner is right. Our government is neutral--"

"Neutral!" interrupted the Reverend David Campbell, whose blonde face was flushed with excitement. "If it were neutral we would not complain. But does this prohibition extend to the priests of other religions? No! a thousand times, no! It is only another instance of the fact, that we, who have the strongest claim on a Christian government--"

"Possibly," put in Captain Dering, "but I am only a soldier. I do not ask questions. I obey."

"And we are soldiers too," said Dr. Campbell, weightily, "and our orders are to be instant in season and out of season."

A little murmur of approval ran through the company. There was a militant look on every face, a militant ring in every voice, as they discussed what ought to be done. The women workers, with Erda at their head, went solid for defiance,--only Mrs. Campbell making the reservation "if James approved." So did some of the men, notably David Campbell, who passed from one group to another, his pale blue eyes a-glisten with enthusiasm.

Erda's followed him with such approval, that Lance crossed over pugnaciously to where she stood, with a pretty flush on her cheeks, listening.

"It is a pity you haven't got Jean Ziska's drum, Miss Shepherd," he said. "By Jove! how you would bang it! Then, right or wrong, there would be a high old row, and that would just suit me!"

"There can scarcely, Sir Lancelot,"--she paused on the title with a strain after contempt which did not somehow come off,--"be a question as to right or wrong in this case."

He gave a kindly, almost indulgent laugh. "There never can be, really, of course. One is bound to be right, the other wrong. The mischief is to know t'other from which! Now I expect the sixty thousand nobles, and the grand-master who were left dead on the field, and the two thousand poor devils who got drowned in the river besides, and all the others--you know about 'em, of course, and you must admit he was a bloodthirsty chap at any rate!--had got a musical instrument of some sort, too. You can't fight without a band, Miss Shepherd, specially drums and fifes. But Jean Ziska was blind; so he could only hear his own music."

"And I hear it, too," she said superbly, with all the more defiance, because his words touched her innate sense of justice, as they did so often.

As she spoke, the not unusual sound--considering that one side of the mission house gave on the city--of a native tom-tom drifted in through the open window, causing Lancelot's eyes to brim over with smiles.

"That isn't it, anyhow, is it, Miss Shepherd?" he said. "I saw that drum-banger as I came past just now--the funniest old dried stick of a Brahmin you ever set eyes on. And you know those 'round the mulberry bush,' fairy-ring, endless circles of men and women hand in hand we used to cut out of newspaper when we were kids? Well, he was using gilt paper, and trying to make a miracle out of the 'biz'! One god, he said, in many; the outline being the same, and the eye of faith sufficient to fill in the details of divinity! The people were buying them by dozens for the half of nothing. I asked 'em why, and they said as toys for their children. So I expect it will be the endless circle of boys and girls again--don't you? For, you know," he went on in the confidential voice which, dimly, she recognized was for her alone, "I've never been able to find out the least difference in kids. I talk to the little beggars when I'm out shooting, you know, and--well! the boys are just as much boys as I used to be--"

Used to be! Yet once again, for the hundredth time at least since they had first met, barely a month ago, his youth, his boyish, whole-hearted, healthy zest in life made her eyes soft; made her feel, with all the true womanhood in her that, if she ever had a son, she prayed he might be like this. And something else she recognized--not for the first time, either; namely, that boyish, almost thoughtless as he was, puzzling himself not at all with the problems of life, you could never dip below the surface without finding him, as it were, there before you; finding him clear-eyed, ready to treat the shady side of things as he treated the light side; that is, with an absolutely limpid honesty.

So, as she stood silent, checked in her desire to check, Father Ninian, who had just entered with Laila, came up to greet her, and having done so, turned to Lance with kind eyes and voice.

"Captain Dering has just told me that we have to call you Sir Lancelot Carlyon. I am sorry for the cause, since your uncle was a man who made the world better by being in it;--as--as you will. It is a fine old name, Sir Lancelot! It carries with it a fine inheritance of honour; therefore I can wish no better wish for the world, as well as for yourself, than that you may hand it on to your son. So, peace be with you!" His clasped hands unfolded themselves for a space as he passed on, leaving those two once more standing together with that sense of being singled out for friendship which had come to them in the beginning.

And this was to be the end of it? Even to her it seemed impossible. To him it made the impossibility certain.

"Miss Shepherd," he said suddenly, "I have something I must say to you this afternoon. Come into the verandah, after you have done pouring out the tea, and let me say it."

There was so much of command in his voice that she might have resented it, had not Father Ninian's voice risen at that moment; firmly, yet with its usual faint hesitancy, in words which made everyone in the room pause to listen.

"I, and I only, am responsible, Dr. Campbell. I gave the Commissioner the information on which he has acted," here he raised his hand against interruption. "I have been fifty years at Eshwara; fifty times have I seen the pilgrims pass to the 'Cradle of the Gods' listening peacefully to your preaching. But this year there is something new." He paused to put on his spectacles, yet the keenness they brought to his face was dimmed by wistfulness. "I cannot quite tell what it is. There is something beyond the things I know, though these are many--small, it is true, but cumulative. Still, this is certain; the pulse of the people beats irregularly to-day, and that means danger to the body corporate. It may pass; yet the faintest stimulus may upset the whole balance of the organism. So, my friends, as our cause is eternal, as we have time--"

"Time!" interrupted David Campbell, passionately, "but now is the appointed time. Think, sir, how many of these poor deluded souls, striving after salvation, may die upon the road to their false gods--none can know how many better than you, who--"

The old priest looked at the young one with a whole lifetime of sad wisdom in his face. "Yes!" he said, softly, "for I am very old. I have seen half a world die upon its road to the 'Cradle of the Gods.' Die--though we have not the courage to say so,--with their faces set to the eternal goal of humanity; to the finding of something we have lost. And something keeps us all back. What is it? Have we the secret more than they, who say, as we do, that it is sin?"

His voice had fallen into a strangely musical rhythm, so that Dr. Campbell's, following it, seemed harsh indeed.

"We know we have. We have the certainty--we are missionaries of that certainty--"

"And I--to my shame be it said," interrupted Father Ninian, with a curious return to worldly courtesy as he removed his spectacles, "have never tried to make a convert; therefore I can scarcely hope to persuade you; but if, gentlemen, I might be allowed to talk the matter over with you--"

"A most sensible suggestion," assented Dr. Campbell, looking round on his younger, less experienced colleagues; "I should be loth to act hastily, and give occasion to the scoffer. Mamma, will you send our tea into the dining room?"

The pure practicality of the last words seemed to relieve the general tension, and Vincent Dering--who had been looking horribly bored--seeing the piano open, sat down to it, as the dissentients moved off into their cave of Adullam, and began to play, "La Donna É mobile;" saying, with a laugh:--

"Cherchez la femme! Depend upon it, Mrs. Campbell, there is a woman at the bottom of it. I know from personal experience that she is always fatal to my peace and pulse on any road."

Erda Shepherd, holding her head very high, crossed over to pour out the tea; whereupon Vincent, being mischievously inclined, suddenly changed the tune to "Where'er you walk," which he played daintily, purely, altogether charmingly, so causing Muriel Smith, who had lately joined the party, to relax her faint frown at his remark.

"Miss Shepherd objects," he went on provokingly. "She doesn't believe in men fighting for women. She scorned the offer of my sword in favour--excuse me for having overheard--of some drum or another. What was it, Miss Shepherd? I really only heard Lance say you would like to bang it."

Erda flushed all over her face. "I was only alluding to Jean Ziska's drum, which was sounded to call the Hosts of the Lord to arms."

Mrs. Campbell gave a fine, hearty shudder. "My dear," she said, "why can ye not leave that gruesome tale alone? For it's just an awful tale, Mrs. Smith. As if he could not be content with doing his duty in this life, but must leave his skin behind for the next generation."

"We have biblical warranty for that sort of thing, Mrs. Campbell," said the sharp-voiced lady who owned the small black coat. "Elijah left his mantle."

"Hoots!" interrupted Mrs. Campbell, scornfully. "We all have to leave our body-wear, but a skin's different altogether. It sou'd just have gone to the grave with him, honest man, dust to dust, ashes to ashes. I've often heard Dr. James say there was nothing in the world for tying the hands o' the leevin' like dead men's dispositions. They're just a mortification indeed to a' concerned."

There was always something about the good lady's comfortable common-sense which made further discussion difficult, and the talk wandered into less rugged paths until, the time for leisure from Erda's duties as tea-maker being close at hand, Lance went out deliberately into the verandah which overhung the river, or rather the spit of sand-bank which jutted out from this, the turning-point of the city's triangle. On the right, the wall, set with its temple spires, trended away to meet the bridge, on the left to join the line of the palace, the bathing-steps, the Fort. In front of him, as he stood leaning over the balustrade at the western end of the verandah, lay dull streaks of sand, bright gleams of water, and beyond them--dim, mysterious--was the great level plain of India, on whose scarce distinguishable edge the sun was setting behind a bank of deep purple cloud. It was a long, low, almost level bank, outlined sharply against the sea of golden-green light above it. There was scarcely a hint of sunset fire save in a trailing chain of little fleecy golden flocks, which stretched away from the purple of the clouds into the deepening purple of clear sky overhead.

Lance, waiting, watched that clear, almost level, outline, until, as clouds do when gazed at fixedly, it took shape for him as the body of a dead warrior half-covered by a pall. The straight sweep yonder was the shield, still held upon the arm, the peak of shadow below it was the mailed feet. There was the curve of the throat; the head thrown back; the feathery plumes of the helmet. The whole world seemed his bier; the stars, just trembling into sight, the watch-lights round it.

"Do you see?" he asked, as Erda joined him. "From the great deep to the great deep he goes."

She recognized the quotation; and though she had come out full of determination to deny the glamour of their mutual comprehension, it claimed her in a second.

"Yes!" she answered quickly, and pointing to the trailing drift of cloudlets, added, "bound by gold chains about the feet of God."

He turned to look at her then, forgetting fancy in a sudden certainty.

"I thought I had something to tell you," he said, "but I think you know it already, don't you?"

"Yes!" she answered, held captive still by that inevitable understanding. "I think I do."

He paused a moment; then going back to the now fading likeness of that dead "King of the Dead," continued: "Then that ends it so--so far as I am concerned. But it remains as an excuse for my asking a question. Miss Shepherd, why are you going to marry your cousin?"

She had known this was coming. "For a great many reasons," she began boldly; then paused, wishing for the first time that these reasons had been fewer, feeling that the possession of but one would have made speech easier. "To begin with, it has been the dream of my life."

He turned on her with an amaze which was almost ludicrous. "What! to marry him?"

She frowned angrily. "No! To work--to help--to give my sympathy--to stand hand in hand with someone who, as he does, gives himself, as I do, to the great work. To someone whose life will be mine--whom I can respect and admire and--and love--in the best sense of the word--" Her voice, gaining confidence from its own statements, rose almost passionately.

Lance looked at her with his clear eyes, and nodded. "Yes! I quite understand. But what has that to do with marrying him? How will the--the great Work be furthered by your having to look after the house and all that? And it isn't as if you couldn't give the help and sympathy without marrying a fellow. Even the love--at least I think so. Now, I want to marry you, because--"

"Yes,--" she said severely, as he paused--she felt glad to change places with him in the witness box--

"Because, to begin with, it doesn't seem possible for me to live my life--I mean my everyday life, trying to rub along, you know, without doing any harm; keeping things going as--as my people have always kept them, unless you help me. And then--" he paused again--"from the first moment I saw you, you reminded me--" he paused so long this time that a faint wonder as to what he was going to say next made her heart beat, as she watched him leaning over the balcony, looking dreamily at that fading likeness of a dead 'King of the Dead.'

"I don't suppose anyone had a happier, jollier childhood than I had," he said suddenly, "though I was an orphan. I lived at Tregarthen, you know." He turned to her as he spoke, and smiled. "You should have seen my grandfather and grandmother, Miss Shepherd. They were like the double Christmas number of an illustrated paper! She used to boast that she never saw a naughty child; and she never did, for the dear old lady always walked out of the room promptly when we tried it on. I remember it used to take the starch out awfully, having no audience. But it was the same in everything. It beat even a boy to be really bad in that house, somehow. Yes! we had jolly times! You would have liked it--you would like it now"--he turned swiftly and held out both hands--"Come to it!--Come, and be Lady Carlyon as she was! People may say all that means nothing, but it means everything to a woman to be able to count on an inheritance like that for her--" he broke off as some of the others came out into the balcony, and bending closer to her, went on in a low voice, "I've said nothing of my love--you know all that--and I think--Yes--" his voice took a note of certainty--"I think you--you like me well enough--don't you?"

There was something so truth-compelling in his face, his voice, that she felt thankful for the tepid word like--

"I like you very much, Sir Lancelot," she said, trying not to let her voice betray the absolute tenderness she felt, "but, as you told me just now, that is no reason why I should marry you."

"It is at least as good as yours for marrying him," he broke in quickly. "At least it has to do with you--with me--with our happiness--with mine at any rate! Do you remember when you first told me your name--The World's Desire I called it--the woman with the red-gold hair, the red-gold hem to her garment, the red-gold apple in her hand--you are that to me--Erda! give me my heart's desire--"

His voice--low, quick, passionate--thrilled through her. She saw herself as she had seen herself then.

"Yes! it has to do with you, with me!" she echoed desperately, "but only we two."

"No!--" he interrupted--"with more than that, surely!"

In the pause which followed, one vision faded in another, and her own wish, that if she ever had a son he might be as this man, came to make her remember Father Ninian's words, "I can wish no better wish for the world!"

But Father Ninian could not have said so to her. She could do better for the world in the other life, the other work. The very self-sacrifice of it attracted her, vague though the sense of that was, as yet.

"Sir Lancelot," she said at last, "I am very sensible of the honour--"

"Don't--for heaven's sake," he interrupted. "That is--excuse me--bunkum."

She felt glad of the faint resentment which came to her aid. "I am, all the same," she continued; "but it is impossible. Perhaps if I did not look forward as I do; perhaps if I only sought happiness; but--" she clasped her hands tightly and the militant look came back to her face--"I am sworn to another work--the noblest work of all--to bring light to those that sit in darkness."

Lance gave an odd little laugh, full of bitterness. "You leave me out in the black night, anyhow," he said.

True enough, in one way, for the quick dusk had closed in around them; but as he spoke, a great white shaft of light like a moon-ray shot, almost as if in denial--widening on its way, from the shadowy stretches beyond the river; shot waveringly, as if uncertain, until, focussing itself full on the verandah, it turned the dusk to day.

"The search-light!" cried Mrs. Smith, clapping her daintily gloved little hands. "Eugene will be so pleased. He couldn't positively swallow a mouthful at lunch because, when he thought all was right, something went wrong. That's why he didn't come, Miss Shepherd," she added, for the light had effectually joined the scattered groups into one. "I positively couldn't tear him away, but I made him promise to turn the thing on here if he succeeded. And he has. Isn't it splendid?"

Mrs. Campbell looked doubtful. "It's just too much like the last day, comin' unawares, and makin' a' things manifest, for my taste. An' I wonder what Dr. James will say to it?"

"I wonder what the natives will say to it?" said Vincent Dering, looking across at Lance.

"Say!" echoed the tart lady. "I know what they should say--that, of course, we know a great deal more than they do."

"And, besides," added a new and gushing voice, "it is so beautifully, suggestively true. We have the light, we can light them."

"Oh! but that is such a bother," came Laila Bonaventura's full-throated tones. "I hate having to see things I don't care to see. I much prefer to have my own candle, don't you?"

She had been finding it dull work waiting for her guardian's return from the dining room, even though Vincent had, now and again, found opportunity for a word or look. He took advantage of one now to say, "It will be pleasanter by and by, won't it? We must settle the time before you leave."

"What time?" asked Muriel Smith, who happened to overhear his undertone. She had been vaguely curious at their apparent avoidance of each other, their occasional lapses into familiarity, ever since she had challenged them at the Viceroy's party.

"Time!" echoed Vincent, coolly. "Of that new song, of course. Come in, Miss Bonaventura, let us decide about it."

The girl swept up her long lashes solemnly. "I should think a twelve beat would be best, really. It is safer when there are so many accidental notes."

His face, as he led the way to the piano, was a study. If she had lived her life in a vaudeville at the Folies BergÈres she could scarcely have been more at home in intrigue, yet her absolute sincerity and unconsciousness of wrongdoing was as palpable. On the whole, he felt vexed; the more so because the vaudeville dialogue proved unnecessary, since a sudden concentration of the party to hear the verdict of the Adullamites, who at that moment came out of the dining room, would have given them ample time for more dignified conversation.

Erda was in the front rank of the eager little crowd, her hopes, her enthusiasms, heightened by the deliberate choice she had just made, when Dr. Campbell, as the recognized head, began to speak. They had come unanimously to the conclusion, he said, that absolute revolt at this late hour would be unwise. Whether Father Ninian Bruce was justified, by the circumstances, in his adverse report was another matter. Personally he denied it; nor did he propose that they should sit down quietly under the interference. They were only forbidden to preach in Eshwara. Therefore they had come, again unanimously, to the resolution of leaving Eshwara for the time in a body. It would be a solemn protest; and they could thus render both to CÆsar and to God, since they could preach at other pilgrim stations on the road. It would be a noble protest which was certain of proving blessed.

The words roused no little enthusiasm, mingled with undoubted relief in most cases; but Erda, standing beside her cousin, said in an undertone, "Did you assent to that, David?"

"I suggested it," he answered, in a louder voice, not without some self-satisfaction. "It appeared to me to meet the exigencies of the case admirably, and it will be very useful, let me tell you, at home. It will emphasize the difficulties and dangers we have to contend against. It will show our meek reasonableness, and then--" he looked round with a jubilant smile--"it seems to me such a beautiful idea that the only result of this attempt to gag us will be that the thousands of poor benighted souls will have a chance of hearing the Truth in many places instead of one."

But Erda's voice broke in on the hum of applause almost harshly, filling the room with its defiance. "I think it cowardly; I would fight--if I were a man."

"You would beat Jean Ziska's drum!" laughed Vincent Dering, rising from the music stool where he had been holding Laila's hand under cover of the new song,--an occupation which always made him feel as if all the wine of life had gone to his head. "You refused my sword just now, Miss Shepherd, so I place my drumstick at your disposal."

So, with a reckless gaiety, he seized on a painted tambourine which good Mrs. Campbell had hung as an ornament on the wall,--it was bedaubed with two white lilies and a butterfly rampant,--and catching up a teaspoon from the table, he began to sing in his pretty, light-comedy voice, "Oh! dem golden slippers!" while the tambourine, under his skilful drumming, throbbed to the words:--

He sang well, he played better; and both voice and drumming echoed out through the open windows.

"They are singing in the missen," said the people in the courtyard to the pilgrims, who were still gathering to the miracles, like moths round a candle. "It is not wise to listen; folk become as they are, if they do."

Some of the pilgrims laughed and some stopped their ears; but even so, the throbbing of the tambourine was in the air.