In an inner chamber is Smâyâtee, rocking a little boy to sleep in a rude Laotian crib, with a mystic Hindoo triform suspended over it,—she cannot make up her mind to put him into the European cradle which stands close by; she fears some secret evil influence may lurk about its pretentious aspect,—and the boy, with his finger in his mouth, looks at his mother as if he felt she was divinely beautiful, and could not bring himself to shut his dreamy eyes for the light upon her face.
SMÂYÂTEE.
Nai Dhamaphat has become a convert to the Roman Catholic faith, but his pagan wife cannot be persuaded to forsake the gods who have brought her so much happiness, to whom her father sacrificed his brave life, and therefore she has raised an altar in her nursery to Dâvee and Dhupiyâ and Indra. Her father's ashes, too, rest here in a golden pagoda; but with the true, loving, tender veneration of her womanly nature, she has exalted over them all, in a niche on either side of the altar, an image of the Christ, and another of the Virgin Mary with her infant Son in her arms. These, in their symmetry and beauty, are to her the most beautiful of the gods upon her altar. In those porcelain images of the Christ, and the Mother with her tiny Infant, she feels that there is something higher, purer, loftier, than in the forms of her own dear gods, and she bows in worship, and trembles at the height to which her thoughts of that Mother and her Son elevate her soul.
Her religion, you can see at a glance, is not a gloomy one like that of her ancestors. There is a smile all over the chamber, and happiness all over her sweet face. Loving everything in her purity, worshipping everything in her humility, morning and evening she raises her eyes and her heart from those sombre old gods of hers to the tender ones of her husband; and this quiet pagan city has never before been lighted up with such a gleam of heaven upon earth as when her evening prayer bursts into song:—
"To Thee are all my acts, my days,
And all my lore, and all my praise,
My food, my gifts, my sacrifice,
And all my helplessness and cries.
Dâvee! leave my spirit free,
And thy pure soul bequeath to me
Unshackled. Let me in thine essence share,
Let me dwell in thee forever,
And thou, O Dâvee! dwell in me."