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"But I know the thoughts of thy heart, O Lord and Master, white and fragrant as the lily-buds that opened to-day. Has thy wish changed?" "Nay, my wish is even the same, but it is not permitted to a man of two wives to be a follower of the spirit God." Dong-Yung had known it all along. This knowledge came with no surprise. It was she who kept him from the path of his desire!
"Even a small wife can be happy at times." Dong-Yung took out a little woven purse and paid over two coppers apiece to the flower-girl. At the gate the girl and the gate-keeper fell a-talking. "Is the morning rice ready?" called a man's voice from the room behind. Dong-Yung turned quickly. Her whole face changed.
In the peculiar quiet of mid-afternoon, when the shadows begin to creep down from the eaves of the pagodas and zigzag across the rice-fields to bed, Foh-Kyung and Dong-Yung arrived at the camp-ground of the foreigners. The lazy native streets were still dull with the end of labour. At the gate of the camp-ground the rickshaw coolies tipped down the bamboo shafts, to the ground.
There are bars and gates. The spirit of man must turn back in the searching, turn back to the images of plaster and paint." Dong-Yung let the wall of fog slide over her. She dropped her resistance. She knew. "Nay, not the spirit of man. It is but natural that the great God does not wish the importunings of a small wife.
Slowly she rose, and stood beside and a little behind Foh-Kyung. He had not blessed them. Faintly, from beyond the walls of the Christian chapel came the beating of drums. Devil-drums they were. Dong-Yung half smiled at the long-known familiar sound. "Your small wife?" said the priest. "Have you another wife?" "Assuredly," Foh-Kyung answered.
Dong-Yung hid away the plastered green-and-gold gods. Her heart was filled with a delicious fear. Her lord was even master of the gods. He picked them up in his two hands, he carried them about as carelessly as a man carries a boy child astride his shoulder; he would even have cast them into the fire! Truly, she shivered with delight. Nevertheless, she was glad she had hidden them safely away.
"We go to the house of the foreign priest to seek until we find the foreign God. Let us go side by side." Dong-Yung, stepping with slow, small-footed grace, walked beside him. "My understanding is as the understanding of a little child, beloved Teacher; but my heart lies like a shell in thy hand, its words but as the echo of thine.
Not since the building of the house and the planting of the tall black cypress-trees around it, a hundred years ago, had the sunlight touched the wall behind the kitchen gods. Dong-Yung sprang into life. She caught Foh-Kyung's sleeve. "O my Lord and Master, I pray you, do not utterly cast them away into the burning, fiery furnace! I fear some evil will befall us."
Foh-Kyung, in his long apricot-coloured garment, crossed the threshold of the kitchen, crossed the shadow and sunlight that stripped the bare board floor, and stood before the kitchen gods. His eyes were on a level with theirs, strange, painted wooden eyes that stared forth inscrutably into the eating centuries. Dong-Yung stood half bowed, breathless with a quick, cold fear.
The exaltation spread out from him to her, it tingled through their finger-tips, it covered her from head to foot. Foh-Kyung drooped her hand and moved. Dong-Yung leaned nearer. "I, too, would believe the Jesus way."
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