CHAPTER XXIV
HANNAH SANBURN.
There is a narrow bridge, swung high above a noisy stream, that forms the only practicable gate to Tilgaun. On the Tilgaun side is a high mound that resembles a look-out post, with a big prayer-flag on top that might be the defiant emblem of an army. The track leads below that mound, across a hollow, and climbs again toward the mission, more than a mile away.
As Ommony rode across the bridge behind the leading Tibetan he was aware of faces peering from the top of the mound beside the prayer-flag. When he was midway over the bridge the faces disappeared. When he reached the foot of the mound there were six Bhutani mission girls standing in a row on the rim of the hollow.
They wore the Marmaduke Mission costume, which is made from one piece of daffodil-yellow fabric woven on the mission looms. Their hair was decked with flowers, and they were laughing, that being a part of old Marmaduke’s legacy, he having had a notion that to laugh with good reason, is two-thirds of an education. The other third is harder to acquire, but comes much easier because of laughter; or so said Marmaduke, who had considered many pigs, that perished.
They were not so poised and self-reliant as the Lama’s dancing girls, but they looked marvelously better than the common run of Hill women, and as different from ordinary mission converts as a live trout is from a dead sardine. At a glance it was obvious that nobody had told them they were heathen in their blindness; somebody had shown them how to revel in the sunshine and to wonder at the wine-light of gloaming. It was conceivable that they had studied nature’s mirth instead of watching frogs dissected with a scalpel, and had learned to be amused with each existing minute rather than to meditate on metaphysical conundrums.
But they had their heritage nevertheless. Their eyes were on Dawa Tsering. It was just as well that there were six of them together.
Dawa Tsering, gasconading on pony-back with his feet within nine inches of the ground, called two of them by name, inquired about a third who was not there, and asked whether they had forgotten him.
“I know a good way to remind you who I am!” he boasted, and got off the pony to act the satyr among wood-nymphs. Ommony checked him curtly. He protested:
“I tell you, Ommonee, the gods make free with women and the devils do the same! It is ridiculous to pretend we are better than gods and devils. What are women for, do you suppose?”