“How know you that?”
“Did I not see your lips move and your eyes look up when you approached me on arriving?”
“True, I prayed to Jesus,” said Mamba, “that I might be made use of to help you, or you to help me.”
“Then your prayer is doubly answered,” returned the old man, “for we can each help the other. I can give you food and lodging. You can carry a message to Tamatave for me.”
“That is well. I shall be glad to help you. What is your message?”
“It is a message to the missionary, Ellis, if you find him still there; but even if he is gone you will find a praying one who can help me. Long have I prayed to the lord that he would send one of his people here to take my message. Some came who looked like praying people, but I was afraid to ask them, and perhaps they were afraid to speak; for, as you know, the Queen’s spies are abroad everywhere now, and if they find one whom they suspect of praying to Jesus they seize him and drag him away to the ordeal of ‘tangena’—perhaps to torture and death. But now you have come, and my prayer is answered. ‘He is faithful who has promised.’ Look here.”
The old man went to a corner of the hut, and returned with two soiled pieces of paper in his hand.
Sitting down, he spread them carefully on his knees. Mamba recognised them at once as being two leaves out of a Malagasy Bible. Soiled, worn, and slightly torn they were, from long and frequent use, but still readable. On one of them was the twenty-third Psalm, which the old wood-cutter began to read with slow and intense interest.
“Is it not grand,” he said, looking up at his young guest with a flush of joy in his care-worn old face, “to think that after this weary wood-cutting is over we shall dwell in the house of the Lord for ever? No more toiling and hauling and splitting; above all, no more sin—nothing but praise and work for Him. And how hard I could work for Him!”
“Strange!” said Mamba, while the old man gazed at the two soiled leaves as if lost in meditation, “strange that you should show this to me. I have come—but tell me,” he said, breaking off abruptly, “what do you wish me to do?”