CHAPTER X.
RETURN TO SARAWAK.
In 1854, after eighteen months' stay in England, during which time my husband worked as deputation for the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, we returned to Sarawak, via Calcutta, in one of Green's sailing vessels, for we were too large a party to afford the overland route.
Besides ourselves and our baby, we had two young ladies who wished to try and teach the Malay women in their homes, and to help with the day-scholars at the mission-house. Only one of these ladies reached Sarawak; the other left us at Calcutta, and married there eventually. The Rev. J. Grayling and Mr. Owen, a schoolmaster, also went with us, and a young friend who was put under my charge, and lived with us for some years on account of his health.
For nurse I had an old Malay woman who had taken some children to England from Singapore, and wanted to return. She was a capital sailor, and always able to carry Mab about however rough the sea was. Nothing could exceed her devotion to the child, but she had contracted a bad habit of always sharing the sailor's grog by day, and requiring a tumbler of hot gin and water before she went to bed. This was a great trouble to me, but I never saw her tipsy till we were staying at the Bishop's palace at Calcutta. Ayah, having been in the bazaar buying presents for her children, was brought back lying senseless in a palanquin. The Bishop, who was in the hall when the bearers set the palanquin down, exclaimed, "Oh! that woman has cholera! take her away."
However, she was kindly cared for by the servants, and appeared the next day without any shame, bringing "a toy for missy." All my lecture was quite thrown away—she "had only taken a glass of grog in the bazaar, and they had put bang into it, so of course it made her insensible; but it was no fault of hers." This curious old woman was a Mahometan, therefore her tipsiness was inexcusable. She practised the habit of alms-giving, however, not only with her own money but mine. She used to say I did nothing in that way for the salvation of my soul, and, as she loved me, she must do it for me. I remember seeing a beggar-woman with twin babies, who used to sit in the streets of Kensington with Mab's bonnets on the babies' heads. Ayah gave them for my sake. Indeed, she was notorious in Kensington, because she could not resist treating boys to ginger-beer, and I sometimes had the mortification of seeing Ayah with a small crowd at her heels, and my baby kissing her little hands to them as Ayah desired her.
We only spent a week in Calcutta. The object of our going there was that the Bishop, in conjunction with Bishop Dealtry of Madras, and Bishop Smith of Victoria, should consecrate my husband Bishop of Labuan; but the Bishops had not reached Calcutta, and their arrival was uncertain. We were anxious to get to Sarawak, and could not wait for them; so it was decided that Frank should return by himself in the autumn, and we should proceed as quickly as we could. Sad news reached us from Kuching. Our dear friend Willie Brereton, who had done so much for the Sakarran Dyaks, was dead of dysentery. There was no medical man when my husband was away.
Our Rajah had been very dangerously ill of small-pox, and had only a Malay doctor, who was devoted but ignorant. Happily Mr. Horsburgh, with medical books to aid him, came to the rescue in time, but the return of the physician of soul and body was much desired. I see, by my journal, that after a weary passage of twenty-four days in a sailing vessel from Singapore, we reached Sarawak on the 25th of April. Mr. Horsburgh came to fetch us from the mouth of the river in the Siam boat, a long boat with a house in it, which the Rajah brought with him from Siam after his embassy to that country. Mr. Horsburgh told us that all the chief Government officers were away, looking for Lanun pirates on the coast; but we had plenty of kind greetings from the Christian Chinese, who came about us in the bazaar, and all the school-children came running down the hill with Mrs. Stahl, who almost screamed for joy at our return. The house looked nicer than ever, for the trees had grown up about it, and I felt most vividly that this was our chosen home, endeared to us by many sorrows, but the place where we had received much blessing from God, and where our work lay, and perhaps some day its reward, in the Church gathered from the heathen into Christ's fold. We were not long alone; the next day Mr. Chambers arrived from Banting with a party of seven baptized Dyaks.
We had brought all sorts of beautiful things from England for the Church. A carpet to lay before the altar, a new altar-cloth, also painted shields for the roof. Our friends in England had furnished us with a box of clothes for the Dyaks, cotton trousers and jackets, and gay handkerchiefs for their heads. We always dressed the Christians for baptism—it was a sign of the new life they professed at the font; but we did not expect them to wear clothes generally, except their own chawats, nor was it to be desired until they knew how to wash them. We had also brought a beautiful magic lantern with a dissolving-view apparatus for our people's amusement and instruction, for some of the slides were painted by Miss Rigaud to illustrate the life of our Lord, and there were many astronomical slides also. All these treasures brought us numerous visitors. The Chinese Christians were all invited to a feast at our house, after which the magic lantern was exhibited, and we were glad to find that our school-children could explain all the Scripture slides quite correctly.