“Is our Heaven your God, and is your God our Heaven?” she inquired.
“They are one and the same,” he replied.
“But Little Sister Hsia told me they are not,” she retorted. “She always told us to believe on the one true God, and not in our Heaven. She declared them not the same.”
“In a temple there are always a few foolish ones,” he said gently. “There is only one true God. He has many names.”
“Then anywhere upon the round earth, by whatever seas, those who believe in any God believe in the One?” she asked.
“And so are brothers,” he said, agreeing.
“And if I do not believe in any?” she inquired willfully.
“God is patient,” he said. “God waits. Is there not eternity?”
She felt a strange warm current pass through him and through her. But it did not begin in him, and it did not end in her. They seemed only to transmit it, from the ends of the earth to the ends of the earth.
“Heaven is patient,” she repeated. “Heaven waits.”
Upon these words they parted. Brother André tied his books into a worn black kerchief and put them under his arm. She stood at the door of the library watching him as he walked across the court. His great form was beginning to stoop, as though his grizzled head were a burden upon the vast shoulders. Or, she told herself, perhaps it was because more and more he walked with his eyes fixed upon the path just ahead of him. Seldom did he lift his head to see what lay at the end of the road.
She turned and went back into the library as her habit was when the lessons were over. She sat sometimes for as much as an hour to fix in her mind the things which Brother André had taught her, to read again what they had read together, to look at the pictures he had left, to consider the words he had spoken.
But this day she had scarcely sat an hour when she heard loud voices shouting in the outer courtyards, and she lifted her head to listen. Whatever it was, Ying would bring her the message of it. In less than the framing of her thought she saw Ying come running into her court. She was wailing and crying and she threw her apron over her face and wept.
Madame Wu rose at once, and the book she had been holding dropped to the floor. Something very evil had come about. She thought of Liangmo, her eldest son. But this morning he had left the house as usual. She thought of Mr. Wu. Then Ying was on the threshold. She pulled the apron from her face and cried out, “Alas — the foreign priest!”
“What of him?” Madame Wu asked sharply. “He left here but a few moments ago.”
“He has been struck down in the street,” Ying cried. “His skull is cracked open!”
“Struck down?” Madame Wu’s voice was an echo.
“It is those young men,” Ying sobbed. “The Green Band — the evil ones! They were robbing the moneylender’s shop, and the priest saw the moneylender crying and cursing Heaven, and he stopped to save him and the young men came out and beat him over the head, too.”
Madame Wu had scarcely heard the name of the Green Band. But she knew that those were young ruffians who roamed the country roads and the city streets. The land steward had always on the bills an item, “For fee to the Green Band.”
“Where is Brother André?” she exclaimed.
“They have carried him into his own house and he lies on his bed, but the gatekeeper is here and says he asks for you,” Ying said.
“I must go,” Madame Wu said. “Help me with my robe.”
“I will order the bearers,” Ying cried.
“No, there is no time,” Madame Wu said. “I will take a ricksha at the gate.”
All the house knew a few minutes later that Madame Wu had for the first time in her life gone to a place which was strange to her, the house of the foreign priest. She sat erect in the ricksha, and behind the runner’s back she said, “I will pay you double if you double your usual speed.”
“Triple me and I will triple my speed,” he cried over his shoulder.
Far behind her Ying came in a second ricksha, but for once Madame Wu did not think of what people might say. She had the one thing in her mind, that she must somehow reach his side in time to hear his voice speak once more and give her direction for the rest of her life.
So she stepped out at the plain unpainted wooden gate set in the midst of a brick wall and without looking at anything she went within. An old woman waited, weeping.
“Where is our elder brother?” she asked.
The old woman turned and led her into a low brick house, through an open door, across a court filled with crowding, sobbing children, into a room.
There upon a narrow bamboo bed Brother André lay. Ragged men and women from the streets were standing about him. They parted to let Madame Wu come to his bedside and, as though he felt her presence, he opened his eyes. His head was rudely bandaged in a coarse white towel, and the blood was running from under it down his cheek and soaking the pillow under his head.
“I am here,” she said. “Tell me what I must do.”
For a long moment he could not speak. He was dying. She could see the emptiness at the bottom of his dark eyes, and then she saw his will gather there in light. His lips parted, his breast rose in a great breath as he gazed at her.
“Feed my lambs,” he said distinctly.
Then she saw death come. The breath ceased, the eyelids flickered, the will withdrew. His great body shuddered, and he flung out his hands so that they hung over the sides of the bed and struck upon the cold brick floor. She stooped and picked up his right hand, and a ragged man stepped forward and took up his left, and they stood holding these two hands. She stared across the body into the man’s eyes. He was nothing, nobody, a servant, a beggar. He looked at her timidly and put down Brother André’s hand gently on the stilled breast, and she laid the right one over it. The children came running into the room and swarmed about the bed that was now a bier, all crying and calling, “Father — father!” She saw that they were all girls, the eldest not more than fifteen, and the older ones were carrying little ones who could not walk. They leaned on Brother André and felt him with their little hands, and stroked his beard, and they took the edges of their coats and wiped the blood from his face, and they kept on crying.
“Who are you?” she asked in a strange quiet voice.
“We are his lambs,” they cried in a disorderly chorus.
“Strays,” the ragged man said. “He picked the little ones up from outside the city wall where they are thrown. The big ones are runaway slaves. He took in anybody.”
She wanted to weep alone and for herself because he was dead. But the children were flinging themselves upon him, their arms wrapping him.
“Oh, he’s cold,” a little girl sobbed. The tears were shining on her cheeks. She held his hand to her wet cheek. “His hand is so cold.”
Madame Wu stood immobile in the midst of this strange family. Then it occurred to her that she did not yet know all that had happened.
“Who brought him to his bed?” she asked in a low voice.
The ragged man beat his breast. “It was I. I saw him fall. Everyone on the street was frightened. The Green Robbers ran when they saw him dying. The moneylender put up his shutters and went into his house. But I am only a beggar, and what have I to fear? This foreign priest often gave me a little money, especially in winter. And sometimes he brought me home into this house at night and I slept here until morning, and he gave me food.”
“You carried him here!” she said.
“These brother beggars and I,” he said. She saw half a dozen ragged fellows. “He is too big for one or two to carry.”
She looked down on Brother André’s peaceful face. She had come, hoping for a few words for herself. Instead he had said, “Feed my lambs.” Here were all these children. She looked at them, and they looked back at her. With the quick instinct of children they watched her, transferring their hopefulness from Brother André’s silent figure to her motionless but living frame.