She sat down quietly and folded her hands in the manner, he suddenly perceived, of the Indian girls among whom she had lived. He saw, too, that she wore a sari as she often did, but now it seemed to him that he had seen her in no other garb since she came home from school.
“What will you do when you go to America to college and cannot wear a sari?” he asked lightly.
“Father,” Livy said, “I do not wish to go to America.”
Now he was really disturbed. “Of course you must go, Livy. Your grandfather would be very angry if you did not go. And your great-grandfather put money in trust expressly for you, before you were born.”
Livy looked at Jatin from the corners of her long, dark eyes, asking him to speak for her.
“Sir,” Jatin said and cleared his throat. “Sir, we are in great distress. She and I — we have fallen into the wish to marry one another.”
“We have fallen in love,” Livy said distinctly.
“Yes, it is so,” Jatin said, and taking courage now that the difficult word was spoken, his words came in a rush, liquid and fluent, overwhelming his diffidence. “It cannot be helped, Mr. MacArd, sir. It is the logical sequence, the inevitable outcome of the teachings of our childhoods. You have taught us to love one another, she has learned at your feet, sir, to regard all human beings as equal, alike children of God. And I, sir, taught in MacArd Memorial school in Poona, there took courage to cease to be a Hindu as my own father was, and I was converted by the great Jehar and nourished by Daryaji toward independence. I do not fear to love her. I glory in our courage. We are the fruit of all that has gone in the past, we are the flower of our ancestry, the proof of our faith!”
His fervid eyes, his glowing words, the impetuous grace of his outstretched hands, the long fingers bending backward, the thumbs apart and tense, the white palms contrasted against the dark skin, all were too Indian, and in one of the rare moments of revulsion which Ted considered his secret sin, he was now revolted and sick. What — his Livy, his darling daughter? None of his other children had her beauty or her grace, or her brilliant comprehending mind. She alone was all MacArd, and was she to give up everything for this alien man? For a moment his soul swam in darkness. No, and forever no! He had given his life to India in Vhai, but Livy he would not give. It was not to be asked of him. This was a cup which even the saints had not to drink, and Jesus, the celibate, who had never a child, could make no such demand.
“No!” The word burst from him. “I cannot allow it.”
Jatin’s hands dropped. He turned to Livy and they exchanged a long look, his despairing, hers hardening to anger.
“Livy,” her father demanded. “Have you told your mother?”
“Yes,” Livy said, “and she said she did not dare to tell you. But I dare.”
He got to his feet. “Where is your mother?”
“In the sewing room,” Livy said.
He went away, the door curtain swinging behind him, and Livy stretched out her arms to Jatin.
“I shall never give you up,” she cried under her breath, “Jatin, faith, hope, and love, but the greatest of these is love—”
He turned away his head. “Not our love.”
“Yes, our love,” she insisted. She went to him, she put her arms about him and held his head against her breast.
Under his cheek, he felt the quickening beat of her heart.
XVII
“YOU SEE FOR YOURSELF that it is impossible,” Ted insisted.
“Oh, yes, I see,” Ruth agreed indistinctly. She had not stopped her sewing, though she knew as soon as he came in that Livy had told him. Well, he had to know.
She lifted her eyes from the seam. “What are you going to do about it?”
“What are we going to do about it,” he corrected her. Without waiting for her reply, he went on, inconsistently, “I shall buy steamship tickets for the first boat that sails from Bombay. We are all going to America. I shall put Livy in a girls’ college.”
“Livy isn’t really a girl any more,” Ruth said. “She’s grown a woman, the way they do here, so fast.”
“She’s a girl in years and in mind,” he said. “When she gets to America, she will take her place among other girls.”
He got up from the bamboo chair where he had flung himself, walked up and down the room and sat down again, waiting for Ruth to agree with him. But she sat silently sewing, as he had seen her do hundreds of times through the years of their marriage. She found a spiritual calm in sewing, he supposed. A good wife, he knew, and he had learned to love her without ever being in love with her.
Yet what was love? One could not plant a palm tree in the courtyard with another person without in a sense feeling a sort of love, and he and Ruth had done everything together, building the house and rearing the children, teaching and preaching and carrying on the clinic, isolated by what they were, two white people in a world of darkness. They had believed in the goodness of what they did, they were sure of their faith, and absorbed in their purpose, he did not stop to ask if he loved Ruth as once he had dreamed of loving a woman. All men dream, he told himself, and the reality was best, for reality alone was unselfish in love. Exhausted often in the parched climate, fatigued often beyond endurance by the desperate demands of the people, he and Ruth clung to one another, and each maintained the other in steadfastness. And this, too, was love, a love which bore visible fruit in hundreds of human lives.
Oh, she could sit silent like this forever while she sewed!
“Well,” he said impatiently, “have you any other plan?”
“No,” she said slowly, “I don’t know that I have. It’s just that I hate to leave Vhai. I guess you’re right, Ted. We had better take her away from India.”
“Will you tell her or shall I?”
“You had better do it,” she said, and did not lift her head.
So he told Livy the next evening, his heart soft and hard together. He sat on the veranda, in the swiftly passing twilight, watching her toss a ball with Sara, the only one of his children who was still a child. Sara was like his great-grandfather, a fiery, bone-thin child who passionately loved her elder sister. He kept his eyes on Livy, graceful in her soft rose-pink sari, moving here and there with gliding steps to catch the rag ball Sara threw wilfully here and there.
“Livy!” he called through the dusk.
“Coming,” she replied.
She seemed in good mood, her soft oval face was cheerful and she came at once. India was her climate, the heat did not depress her, she looked fresh and cool, though the night was humid.
“Sit down, daughter,” he said.
She sank on the bamboo couch near him and Sara, deserted, cried in a high childish voice that wound itself into the singing rhythm of Indian speech, “It will soon be dark, come and play, Livy.”
“This is for you, too,” the father said.
She came and squeezed herself between them. “What have I done?” she demanded.
“Nothing,” the father said.
“It is I who have done something,” Livy said smoothly. “It is I who have been naughty and now Father is going to punish me.”
“Livy is not naughty,” Sara insisted. “Never she is naughty.”
“Sometimes I am,” Livy said. Her dark eyes hardened and glowed, and she turned them sidewise upon her father, but he refused the challenge.
“It can scarcely be called a punishment to go to America, and that is what we shall do. I have written for the tickets and the gateman has posted the letter already. Perhaps we must go even in a very few days.”
Sara clung to Livy’s waist and tightened her arms. To go to America was at once a dream and a dread. She had asked hundreds of questions about America and sometimes she lay awake in the night to think about that beautiful and even imaginary place, but now that her father said so coolly, “I have written for the tickets,” Vhai was immediately too dear to leave, even though in America snakes did not crawl in the garden, nor scorpions hide in the shoes at night.