He shook his head.  “It was wrong of me to ever bring you here,” he said sadly.  “But I did not know—­I would never have believed.”  Then wrath took hold of him—­the awful, cold anger of the Puritan that hates evil as a concrete thing, to be ripped apart with steel.  “God’s wrath shall burst on Howrah!” he declared.  “Sodom and Gomorrah were no worse!  Remember what befell them!”

“Remember Lot!” said Rosemary.  “Come away!”

“Lot stayed on to the last, and tried to warn them!  I will warn the Resident!  Here, give me my writing things—­where are they?”

He pushed her aside, none too gently, for the fire of a Covenanter’s anger was blazing in his eyes.

“There are forty thousand British soldiers standing still, and wrong—­ black, shameful wrong—­is being done!  For a matter of gold—­for fear of the cost in filthy lucre—­they refrain from hurling wrong-doers in the dust!  For the sake of dishonorable peace they leave these native states to misgovern themselves and stink to high heaven!  Will God allow what they do?  The shame and the sin is on England’s head!  Her statesmen shut their eyes and cry ‘Peace, peace!’ where there is no peace.  Her queen sits idle on the throne while widows burn, screaming, in the flames of superstitious priests.  Men tell her, ‘All is well; there is British rule in India!’ They are too busy robbing widows in the Isle of Skye to lend an ear to the cries of India’s widows!  Corruption—­superstition—­murder—­lies—­black wrong—­black selfishness—­all growing rank beneath the shadow of the British rule—­how long will God let that last?”

He was pacing up and down like a caged lion, not looking at Rosemary, not speaking to her—­speaking to himself, and giving rein to all the rankling rage at wrong that wrong had nurtured in him since his boyhood.  She knelt still by the chair, her eyes following him as he raged up and down the matted floor.  She pitied him more than she did India.

When he took the one lamp at last and set it where the light would fall above his writing pad, she left the room and went to stand at the street-door, where the sluggish night air was a degree less stifling than in the mud-plastered, low-ceilinged room.  As she stood there, one hand on either door-post to remind her she was living in a concrete world, not a charred whisp swaying in the heat, a black thing rose out of the blackness, and the toothless hag held out a bony hand and touched her.

“Is it not time yet for the word to go?” she asked.

“No.  No word yet, Joanna.”

CHAPTER IX

Now, God give good going to master o’ mine,
God speed him, and lead him, and nerve him;
God give him a lead of a length in the line,
And,—­God let him boast that I serve him!