"Will you forsake the black-bearded foreign devil?"
"Pastor MacKay has never done me anything but good. He healed me when I was sick. He saved my son's life when he had the fever. Why should I forsake him?"
The cords were drawn more tightly. The blood oozed out around his nails and along the edges of the bamboo.
"Will you give up the barbarian's religion and go back to the gods our ancestors worshipped from of old?"
"The gods our ancestors worshipped are only idols. They cannot see or hear or understand our prayers. I cannot go back to them. I believe in Jehovah God, maker of heaven and earth——"
A rifle butt fell with a sickening thud on his head and, with the blood still oozing from his finger-tips, Tan Siong lay senseless on the earth. His tormentors rushed off to find other victims to rob and maltreat.
So the morning wore away. There were about forty families of Christians. Probably the majority of the individuals in them escaped with their lives, and by keeping in hiding did not suffer torture. But all lost their possessions. Many were put to the test of indescribable physical agony. Yet they did not deny their faith.
There were two, a man and his wife, so humble that they thought they might be overlooked. They could not flee. They were both between sixty and seventy years of age. The wife's feet, crushed and broken by being bound for a lifetime, would not bear her in flight. Her husband, with a devotion rare in a Chinese and the more beautiful because of its rarity, determined to stay with her and meet his fate whatever it might be. They hoped that their insignificance might save them.
But Lim Tsu had for many years been a maker of idols. Then he had lost faith in those gilded bits of wood or plaster he had so long offered to others to worship. He had heard strange words from some native Christians. Then he had heard them from the lips of the foreign pastor. After long hesitation he gave up the beliefs of his fathers, gave up the practices of a lifetime, what was harder still, gave up the means of a livelihood, and accepted the Christian faith. From that hour Lim Tsu was a marked man. He was the worst of renegades.
His name and that of his wife, Oo-a, were nearly the last upon the communion roll, for they had been but recently received. When they were read out a howl like that of a pack of wild beasts went up from the mob, and with one consent they flocked pell-mell towards the humble cottage of the former image-maker. He heard them coming, and with his aged wife met them outside the door. Was it something in the calm demeanour of the old couple, standing quietly there with the summer sun shining on their whitening heads, which awed them? The ones in front paused, irresolute. Those behind pressed them forward.