“Now, you Christian dog, before I cut your throat show me how this Christ of yours can be a god!”
“Is it necessary,” replied the missionary faintly, “to light a candle in order to show a man the midday sun?”
Which was possibly what saved his life, and the lives of his wife and child. Your Moslem adores and understands such figurative answers. So he left the Reverend Mr. Carew lying half dead in the blackened doorway and started cheerfully after a frightened convert praying under the compound wall.
CHAPTER III
IN EMBRYO
A child on the floor, flat on her stomach in the red light of the stove, drawing pictures; her mother by the shaded lamp mending stockings; her father reading; a faint odour of kerosene from the glass lamp in the room, and the rattle of sleet on roof and window; this was one of her childhood memories which never faded through all the years of Ruhannah’s life.
Of her waking hours she preferred that hour after supper when, lying prone on the worn carpet, with pencil and paper, just outside the lamp’s yellow circle of light, her youthful imagination kindled and caught fire.
For at that hour the magic of the stove’s glowing eyes transformed the sitting-room chairs to furtive watchers of herself, made of her mother’s work-table a sly and spidery thing on legs, crouching in ambush; bewitched the ancient cottage piano so that its ivory keys menaced her like a row of monstrous teeth.