There, she prayed for her son. She did not consciously connect him with the foreign father who might, any day, desert her for a woman of his own race, and legitimately deny all that linked him to his former life. She prayed quaintly, mechanically, regarding the proceeding in the light of a charm, and with no very clear idea as to who should hear the prayer. The priests should know. But the priests, indeed, if they knew anything up at their bare stone monastery, should have taught that the Master could not hear the cry of human suffering or desire, even if he would, since he had obtained the final Silence, "where beyond these voices there is peace." But, to Hla Byu, spirits there must be—Someone, Anyone. Prayer could do no harm, anyway, and might certainly do good. Contemplation was not for the Burman-in-the-street, but any follower of the Buddha can hold a wooden rosary and repeat two thousand times in a dull monotone, some such golden truth as that "Honesty is the best policy," before leaving the lighted Pagoda and going back to the bazaar to cheat his brother.
At least, her creed gave some outlet to those emotions which the practical things of life cannot satisfy.
She was richer than Cyprian, who had none. The simple honesty of her beautified their relationship. Nature, surely, must have meant just this simplicity between the sexes in ministering to each other's needs. He knew that Ferlie would have been struck with the hypocrisy of Society-life in the big towns of Burma.
There the white women-folk knew of such as little Hla Byu but pretended ignorance. No aspiring mother would encourage her daughter to join hands with an ex-public-school boy at the beginning of his career and flit away into the jungles to share the making of his future. That was Hla Byu's part. But, later, when the same future was assured, when the public-school boy had become submerged in the fever-eaten official with a bank-book and, possibly, a passion-ravaged past, then it was the turn of some clear-eyed débutante to receive with thankfulness God's gift of a good man's love—and his motor-car.
* * * * * *
Cyprian's face, bent over the official note-paper upon which he had been idly sketching while listening to the klop-klop of the postman's mule mounting the hill, was less lean now and far less strained. The great bitterness curving the corners of his mouth was contradicted by the level calm with which his eyes looked out across to the horizon despite their awareness that the Lot had fallen unto him in a rugged ground.
A slight stir in the vicinity of the waste-paper basket caused him to turn his head, and, with an oddly detached air, he surveyed for some moments the explorations therein of a naked baby.
Its creamy amber skin shone like satin in the sunlight, relieved by its stiff cap of black hair. And the eyes riveted suddenly upon Cyprian's were widely set apart and, most incongruously, most tellingly, blue.
The man, unexpectedly, with a brusque movement of his head, shook down the eye-glasses he used to correct his astigmatic vision when concentrating for long upon close writing, and the small inquiring face receded, mercifully blurred.
But its marked and precocious intelligence remained branded upon his mentality as if somebody had pasted an imperfectly-developed photograph there.