“For myself, it does not matter.  ’He buries His workmen, but carries on His work.’” The man spoke in a heavy, broken voice, as though it were his body that suffered.  “But it comes hard to hear, from a young man, so good a friend, after many years”—­The deep-set eyes returned, and with a sudden lustre, made a sharp survey from face to face.  “If I have made my flock a remnant—­aliens—­rejected—­tell me, what shall I do?  Tell me.  I have shut eyes and conscience, and never meddled, never!—­not even when money was levied for the village idols.  And here’s a man beaten, cast into prison—­”

He shoved both fists out on the table, and bowed his white head.

“My safety is nothing.  But yours—­and his.—­To keep one, I desert the other.  Either way.”  The padre groaned.  “What must I choose?”

“We’re all quite helpless,” said Heywood, gently.  “Quite.  It’s a long way to the nearest gunboat.”

“Tell me,” repeated the other, stubbornly.

At the same moment it happened that the cries came louder along the river-bank, and that some one bounded up the stairs.

The runner was Rudolph.  All morning he had gone about his errands very calmly, playing the man of action, in a new philosophy learned overnight.  But now he forgot to imitate his teacher, and darted in, so headlong that all the dogs came with him, bouncing and barking.

“Look,” he called, stumbling toward the farther window, while Flounce the terrier and a wonk puppy ran nipping at his heels.  “Come, look at them!  Out on the river!”

CHAPTER XIII

THE SPARE MAN

Beyond the scant greenery of Heywood’s garden—­a ropy little banyan, a low rank of glossy whampee leaves, and the dusty sage-green tops of stunted olives—­glared the river.  Wide, savage sunlight lay so hot upon it, that to aching eyes the water shone solid, like a broad road of yellow clay.  Only close at hand and by an effort of vision, appeared the tiny, quiet lines of the irresistible flood pouring toward the sea; there whipped into the pool of banyan shade black snippets and tails of reflection, darting ceaselessly after each other like a shoal of frightened minnows.  But elsewhere the river lay golden, solid, and painfully bright.  Things afloat, in the slumberous procession of all Eastern rivers, swam downward imperceptibly, now blurred, now outlined in corrosive sharpness.

The white men stood crowding along the spacious window.  The dogs barked outrageously; but at last above their din floated, as before, the high wailing cries.  A heaping cairn of round-bellied, rosy-pink earthen jars came steering past, poled by a naked statue of new copper, who balanced precariously on the edge of his hidden raft.  No sound came from him; nor from the funeral barge which floated next, where still figures in white robes guarded the vermilion drapery of a bier, decked with vivid green boughs.  All these were silent.