“What shall I do with you?” she said uncertainly.
“Lady, what did our father tell you to do?” a thin little girl asked anxiously. She held a fat cheerful baby in her arms.
Madame Wu could only answer the truth. “He said I was to feed you,” she said.
The children looked at one another. The thin little girl shifted the baby to the other arm. “Have you enough food for us all?” she asked gravely.
“Yes,” Madame Wu said.
Still she continued to stand, looking at the little girls.
“There are twenty of us,” the little thin girl said. “I am fifteen years old — at sixteen he provides for us.”
“Provides for you?” Madame Wu repeated.
The old woman had come in now. “At sixteen he finds them homes and good husbands,” she said.
They were speaking as if the big quiet figure on the bed was still alive.
Madame Wu looked at Brother André. His eyes were closed, and his hands were folded on his breast.
“Come away from this room,” she said abruptly. “All of you! Leave him in peace.”
They went out obediently, beggars and children and the old woman, and only she was left. At the door Ying stood stiffly. “Go away, Ying,” Madame Wu said.
“I will stand outside the door,” Ying replied.
Madame Wu closed the door. What she was doing would cause gossip. Why should a lady wish to be alone with a foreign priest even when he was dead? She did not care. He was neither foreign nor a priest to her now. He was the only being she had ever met whom she worshiped. Old Gentleman had taught her much. But Old Gentleman had feared many things. Brother André feared no one. He feared neither life nor death. She had never thought of him as a man when he was alive, but now that he was dead she saw him as a man lying dead. In his youth he must have been extremely beautiful. His great body lying outstretched before her had the proportions of majesty. His skin was pale and in death was growing translucently clear.
Suddenly she recognized him. “You whom I love!” she murmured in profound astonishment.
This recognition she made, and in the instant she accepted it she felt her whole being change. Although she did not move, her body tingled, her blood stung her heart, and her brain was clear. Her whole frame grew light and strong. She lifted her head and looked about the room. The four walls stood, but she felt free and whole. Upon his bier the body lay as it had since he died, but now looking down upon it she knew that he had escaped it. She was skeptic to the soul. Not in years had she entered a temple or burned incense before a god. Her father had cleansed her of the superstition common to women, and Old Gentleman had finished the work. She did not now believe in an unseen God, but she knew certainly that this man continued.
“André.” She said his name to him in a low clear voice, and never again would she call him brother. “You live in me. I will do my utmost to preserve your life.”
The moment she had said these words peace welled up in her being. It was so profound, so quieting, so contenting, that for the first time in her life she knew that never before had she known what peace was. Standing motionless in the bare room before his shell, she felt happy.
Nor was this happiness a trance. It was an energy which began to work in her mind and in her body. There were certain things which she must do that now became perfectly plain to her. His dead body must be buried, not with priests and prayers. His few possessions must be disposed of, and this she herself would do. Then simply she would continue to do whatever he had been doing.
She went tranquilly from the room and into the other room where Ying and the old woman, the beggars and the children were waiting. She sat down on one of the wooden chairs.
“Now as to his funeral,” she said. “Did he leave any directions?”
They looked at one another. The children were awed and said nothing. The old woman sobbed and wiped her eyes with her apron. “Certainly he never thought of dying,” she exclaimed, “nor did we think of such a thing as his death.”
“Does he have relatives anywhere?” Madame Wu asked. “If so, I suppose we should send his body to them.”
No one knew of relatives. He had simply come here an unknown number of years ago and had never gone away again.
“Did he get letters?” Madame Wu asked.
“When he did, he never read them,” the old woman said. “He let them lie about unopened, and I took them after a while and sewed them into the children’s shoe soles.”
“And did he never write letters?” Madame Wu went on.
“Never,” the old woman said.
“And you,” she said to the beggar, “did he never speak to you?”
“Never of any who belonged to him,” the leader replied. “We spoke only of people in the city and the country round about who needed help in some fashion.”
Madame Wu considered this. André belonged wholly to her. There was no other. She would buy a plain black coffin. As for the land, she would bury him in her own land. She thought of a favorite spot upon a certain hillside that circled some of the rice fields. There a gingko tree grew, very old, and she always rested in its shade when she went out to watch the spring planting.
She rose. “I will go this afternoon and see that the grave is dug.”
The children and the old woman looked at her anxiously as she rose, and she understood their anxiety. What, they were all thinking, was to become of them?
“This house,” she said, looking about the bare rooms, “does it belong to him?”
The old woman shook her head. “It is a rented house,” she said, “and we got it very cheap because it is haunted. Nobody else wants to live in it because it is inhabited by weasels, who carry the spirit of evil ones. But evil spirits feared him, and here we have lived safely for very little cost.”
“He owns nothing?” she asked.
“Nothing except two changes of garments. One he wore and one I washed. He has a few books and his cross. Once he had a very pretty image nailed to a wooden cross, and he hung it on the wall of his room above his bed. But it fell down one night and broke, and he never got another. He had a rosary, but one of the children played with it and the string broke, and he never put it together again. Some of the beads rolled away and were lost, and he said that he did not need it any more.”
Madame Wu was looking about the room as the old woman talked.
“What is in that black box?” she asked, and pointed her middle finger.
The old woman looked. “That is a magic voice box,” she said. “He used to listen to the voices in the night.”
Madame Wu remembered that he had told her of it. She approached the box and put her ear against it and heard nothing.
“It speaks for no one else,” the old woman explained.
“Ah, then we will bury it with him,” Madame Wu said.
“There is one more thing he possesses, and it is magic, too,” the old woman said hesitatingly. “He told us never to touch it.”
“Where is it?” Madame Wu asked.
The old woman crawled under the bed and drew out a long wooden box. She opened it, and there lay an instrument like a pipe.
“He held it to his right eye whenever the night was clear and he looked into Heaven,” she said.
Madame Wu knew at once that this was his means of gazing at stars. “I will take that with me,” she decided. “And now bring his books to me,” she said, “and let his garments and the cross be buried with him. As for this house, let it be returned to the owner. Tell him I say it is exorcised and clear now of evil. He can rent it again at a good price.”