It was at Herrnhut that, every year, in turns of two months during the hot weather, the missionaries exchanged work in the bazaars for the lighter labor of the agricultural settlement. Naturally, therefore, it was looked on as a sort of holiday house; but this year it would be something more. It would be the headquarters of fight, the centre of the resistance which was to use the Commissioner's order to cease firing as an excuse for a more determined skirmishing. For it stood right on the pilgrims' road. Indeed, Erda and the other rebels would have to travel a good eight-and-twenty miles along that very road itself before coming to the slack water where they could cross the river by a ferry, and finish their journey through the level fields on its further side to Herrnhut, with its homelike, peaceful surroundings. The memory of them came to Erda, making her sense of that inevitable climbing of the golden stair after righteousness more acute; since she had to face a good-by to them also. And sooner than she had expected, for the breaking up of winter work a week earlier than usual, owing to this secular interference, had made David, eager to begin anew, plead for a speedier wedding. So there were only two or three days left, at most.
The knowledge, however, brought her no doubt; it helped her, rather, to a greater certainty.
She had done right. Her feet were indeed upon the golden stair!
And in the other houses of the mission, where everyone was disregarding sleep in the striving after something that was more to them than sleep, the atmosphere was electric also, the thoughts militant.
So they were in the streets, the alleys of the town; for on the bridge of boats--that bridge which spanned the broad expanse of water between the city and the great plain of India--the pilgrims were passing, now, in an unending stream--to take up their places as near as might be to the Pool of Immortality, where, with the dawn, the water would rise miraculously for the cleansing of sin.
"Hârî! Hârâ! Hârâ! Hârî!"
The cry was almost incessant, but the eye could see little, for the moon was young, the night dark.
"Hârâ! Hârî! Hârî! Hârâ!"
Hour after hour it came, that cry on the dread Creator, the dread Destroyer. Monotonous, patient, almost indifferent, yet absolutely insistent.
The golden-shod feet of the pilgrims, after whose souls the missionaries yearned, were on the golden stair also, and their golden gates would open at the 'Cradle of the Gods'; must open, hidden though the goal was by mist when it was day, by darkness when it was night.