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--"

That was a frequent saying of the Captain's about the States. Twice a
year at least, he was accustomed to make the voyage to New York.... The
truth was, the old man felt a yearning for something the years and
India had given Bedient. He felt much more than he said, and often
regarded the young man, as one rapt in meditation.... His interest in
Gobind and the Himalayas was insatiable; much more eagerly did he
listen regarding the Punjab than about the ports he had known so
well--and the changes that had passed under the eyes of the young man
in Manila and Japan.... When Bedient was relating certain events of
days and nights, that had become happy memories through the little
things of the soul, Captain Carreras would start to convey the
indefinite desires he felt; then suddenly, the deep intimacy of his
revelations would appear to his timid nature, and even in the mothering
dark, the panic would strike home--and he would swing off with pitiful
humor about goats or some other Island affair....

Bedient had an odd way of associating men whom he liked with mothers of
his own imagining. Happily discovering fine qualities in a man, he
would conjure up a mother to fit them.... Often, he saw the little
Englishwoman whose boy had taken early to the seas.... She was plump
and placid in her cap; inclined to think a great deal for herself, but
still she allowed herself to be kept in order mentally and spiritually
by her husband, whose orthodoxy was a whip. Perhaps she died thinking
her tremulous little departures were sure attractions of hell and
heresy. Bedient liked to think of her as vastly bigger than her mate,
bigger than she dreamed--but alone and afraid.

SEVENTH CHAPTER

_ANDANTE CON MOTO_--FIFTH

For the first time in his life, Bedient learned what America liked to
read.... All the finer expressions of the human mind and hand gave him
deep joy. His love and divination for the good and the true were the
same that characterized the rarest minds of our ancestors, who had
access only to a few noble books in their formative years. And
Bedient's was the expanded and fortified intelligence of one who has
grown up with the Bible.

Each ship brought the latest papers, periodicals an