Sunshine is reflected in wonderful glory from the head of the great silver image of the Adi Buddh. Sunshine is flooding the temple, glorifying the stolid idols that are standing around, and streaming on the floor and over the quiet figure of the girl. Her face assumes an ashy hue, and she again puts out her arms and draws her mother down to her.
"O mother, pray to the Virgin Mother for me," says the girl, "to tell P'hra Jesu that I am innocent."
The pagan mother makes no reply, but bends an agonized look on her dear child's face, and the girl's face becomes grayer in the floods of sunlight. Her fingers twitch and quiver around her mother's neck.
The priests are hushed, and the temple is more and more flooded with light; and the faint, sweet, pleading voice of the girl is again heard: "Mother, dear mother, pray to P'hra Jesu that he shut not the heavenly gates upon me"; and the strong love of the mother conquers her religious scruples, and, lying there with her head cushioned on the bosom of her dying child, she raises her voice and prays:—
"O thou who art called P'hra Jesu, free my child from sin. O forgive her, sacred One. She has loved thee to the last. She believes in none but thee. Be thou her God, and shut not, O shut not thy heavenly gates upon her, even though they shut her out forever from my sorrowing heart and eyes."
At the utterance of those strange syllables falling from the lips of a Buddhist mother in the most solemn of the temples of the Buddha, a marvellous change passed over the face of the dying girl; the gray pallor of death gave place to a heavenly light, and a faint but lovely smile irradiated her pale lips. She opened her eyes and gazed enraptured upon some vision that seemed to float before her. "O mother, mother," cried the exulting voice of the girl, "I see P'hra Jesu and P'hra Buddha; P'hra Jesu is above and P'hra Buddha is below, and the two mothers, Marie and Maia[43] are sitting side by side, and they are all smiling and calling me upward, upward." And Rungeah stretched out her arms and closed her eyes, the gray pallor returned; her spirit fluttered for a moment, and then was gone forever. But the smile never left her lips.
She was buried with the rites of the Roman Catholic Church, with her rosary and the golden image of Christ on her bosom, by a French priest from the other side of the village of Tâmsèng.
Two years after, a man was taken in the act of plundering the jewels of a princess of Siam, as she was travelling in her boat to Ayudia, and on his trial he confessed that he was a Christian, that he had been betrothed to Rungeah's sister, whom he had murdered for the sake of her jewels, and then fled to Ayudia, whence having gambled away all the proceeds of his spoils, he once more returned to Bangkok and robbed the chapel of Tâmsèng. He offered to deliver up the jewels, etc., if his life should be spared. His request was granted, but he was condemned to life-long imprisonment, while the crown and the diadem are once more to be seen on the brows of the figure of the Christ and the Virgin Mary, and the gold and silver candlesticks again light up the altar of the little chapel of Tâmsèng.
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