This was the cue for further grand talks—­pajamas and darkness.  Often, if it were not too late, they would hear the natives singing in their cabins.  The haunting elemental melody of the African curiously blended with the tuneful and cavalierish songs of Spain and fitted into the majestic nights.  The darkies sang to the heart of flesh.  In such moments, Equatoria was at her loveliest for Bedient—­but the clear impersonal meditations did not come to him.  In a hundred ways he had been given understanding during the first fortnight, of that something he had missed the first night on the Island.  These people were infant souls.  They were children, rudimentary in every thought.  Theirs were sensations, not emotions; superstitions, not faiths.  Their consciousness was never deeper than the skin.  And fresh from his spacious years in India, where everything is old in spirit, where more often than not the beggar is a sage,—­to encounter in this land of beauty, a people who were but babes in the thought of God—­gave to Bedient the painful sense that his inner life was dissipating.  There was no Gobind to restore him.  It was as if the Spirit had favored the East; that Africa and the Western Isles had been cast apart as unfit for the experiment of the soul.

Moments of poignant sorrow were these when Bedient realized he was not of the West; that he irrevocably missed the great inner content of India, and would continue to hunger for it, until he returned, or coarsened his sensibilities to the Western vibration.  This last was as far from him as the commoner treason to a friend.  There were moments when he feared Captain Carreras almost understood.  That dear old seaman through his solitudes, his natural cleanness and kindness, his real love, and more than all, through those vague visions which come late to men of simple hearts—­had seemed, from several startling sayings, to touch the very ache in the young man’s breast.  These approaches were under the cover of darkness: 

“There was something about you then, Andrew,” (meaning the long-ago days at sea,) “I haven’t been able to forget....  Damme—­I haven’t done well here—­”

Bedient bent forward, perceiving that “here” meant his earthly life, as well as Equatoria.

“I should have stayed over yonder and sat down as you did—­before you did.  Here”—­now the Captain meant Equatoria alone—­“I have thought of my stomach and my ease.  My stomach has gone back on me—­and there is no ease.  Over there, I might have—­oh, I might have thought more—­but I didn’t know enough, early enough.  And you did—­at seventeen, you did!  That’s what made you.  They’re all mad up in The States, and they’re just little children down here....  I might have profited in India—­”