Now she stood at the top of the beautiful broken steps under the dense shade of the very trees where the mutineers ambushed, and he was below, beckoning her.
“Well done, well done!” he said, as she came slowly down to where holy Ganges lips the lowest step. “This was a great experiment. You could never have come here alone,—I could not have brought you until now, and I had to fight the repugnance in you, but here you are. You see? We have been putting stepping-stones, you and I, each from our own side, and now the bridge is made and we hold hands in the middle. You can come anywhere now. And listen—I too am learning to go where I have never been. The world will be open to us soon.”
He looked at her with glowing eyes—the eyes of the explorer, the discoverer, on the edge of triumph.
“But why here—in this horrible place?” She shrank a little even from him as she looked about her. He laughed:
“That is no more now than a last year’s winter storm. They know. They were not afraid even then. They laugh now as they go on their way. Be happy, beloved. They are beyond the mysteries.”
Of that dream, she carried back to earth the word “beloved.” Who had said it, she could not tell, but in the dark—the warm friendly dark—there was someone who loved her, whom she loved with a perfect union. Was it—could it be V. Lydiat? She did not know. Also she remembered that she had dreamed the Massacre Ghaut at Cawnpore, and took pains to search for pictures and stories of the place to verify her dream. Yes—it was true. Things were becoming clearer.
Also, her power in writing increased very noticeably about this time. V. Lydiat was recognized as holding a unique place amongst writers of the Orient. On the one side were the scholars, the learned men who wrote in terms of ancient Oriental thought, terms no ordinary reader could understand, and on the other, the writers of the many-faceted surface, the adventurers, toying with the titillating life of zenana and veiled dangerous love-affairs,—a tissue of coloured crime. V. Lydiat recorded all, and with a method of his own which approached perfect loveliness in word and phrase. The faiths of the East were his,—in India and China alike his soul sheltered under the Divine Wings, at home in strange heavens, and hells which one day would blossom into heavens. As he and Beatrice Veronica had posed stepping-stones until they met in the middle, so he built a splendid bridge across the wide seas of misunderstanding between east and west, and many souls passed across it going and coming and were glad.
“I’m only a pioneer,” he said to Beatrice Veronica one day (she could dream the day as well as the night) sitting in the gardens of the Taj. “You too. It will be done much better soon. See how we are out-growing our limitations and feeling out after the wonders of the sub-conscious self, the essential that hands on the torch when we die. Die? No, I hate that word. Let’s say, climb a step higher on the ladder of existence. Every inch gives us a wider view of the country. You see?”
She liked that “You see?” which came so often. It was so eager—so fraternal in a way. Yes, they were good comrades, she and V. Lydiat.
“Do you know I write for you?” she ventured to ask. “I have often wondered if you speak as unconsciously as I write.”