第39章 Ram Dass(2)

The truth was that the poor fellow felt as if his gods had intervened,and the kind little voice came from heaven itself.At once Sara saw that he had been accustomed to European children.He poured forth a flood of respectful thanks.He was the servant of Missee Sahib.

The monkey was a good monkey and would not bite;but,unfortunately,he was difficult to catch.He would flee from one spot to another,like the lightning.He was disobedient,though not evil.

Ram Dass knew him as if he were his child,and Ram Dass he would sometimes obey,but not always.If Missee Sahib would permit Ram Dass,he himself could cross the roof to her room,enter the windows,and regain the unworthy little animal.But he was evidently afraid Sara might think he was taking a great liberty and perhaps would not let him come.

But Sara gave him leave at once.

"Can you get across?"she inquired.

"In a moment,"he answered her.

"Then come,"she said;"he is flying from side to side of the room as if he was frightened."

Ram Dass slipped through his attic window and crossed to hers as steadily and lightly as if he had walked on roofs all his life.

He slipped through the skylight and dropped upon his feet without a sound.Then he turned to Sara and salaamed again.The monkey saw him and uttered a little scream.Ram Dass hastily took the precaution of shutting the skylight,and then went in chase of him.

It was not a very long chase.The monkey prolonged it a few minutes evidently for the mere fun of it,but presently he sprang chattering on to Ram Dass's shoulder and sat there chattering and clinging to his neck with a weird little skinny arm.

Ram Dass thanked Sara profoundly.She had seen that his quick native eyes had taken in at a glance all the bare shabbiness of the room,but he spoke to her as if he were speaking to the little daughter of a rajah,and pretended that he observed nothing.He did not presume to remain more than a few moments after he had caught the monkey,and those moments were given to further deep and grateful obeisance to her in return for her indulgence.This little evil one,he said,stroking the monkey,was,in truth,not so evil as he seemed,and his master,who was ill,was sometimes amused by him.He would have been made sad if his favorite had run away and been lost.

Then he salaamed once more and got through the skylight and across the slates again with as much agility as the monkey himself had displayed.

When he had gone Sara stood in the middle of her attic and thought of many things his face and his manner had brought back to her.The sight of his native costume and the profound reverence of his manner stirred all her past memories.It seemed a strange thing to remember that she--the drudge whom the cook had said insulting things to an hour ago--had only a few years ago been surrounded by people who all treated her as Ram Dass had treated her;who salaamed when she went by,whose foreheads almost touched the ground when she spoke to them,who were her servants and her slaves.It was like a sort of dream.

It was all over,and it could never come back.It certainly seemed that there was no way in which any change could take place.

She knew what Miss Minchin intended that her future should be.

So long as she was too young to be used as a regular teacher,she would be used as an errand girl and servant and yet expected to remember what she had learned and in some mysterious way to learn more.

The greater number of her evenings she was supposed to spend at study,and at various indefinite intervals she was examined and knew she would have been severely admonished if she had not advanced as was expected of her.The truth,indeed,was that Miss Minchin knew that she was too anxious to learn to require teachers.

Give her books,and she would devour them and end by knowing them by heart.She might be trusted to be equal to teaching a good deal in the course of a few years.This was what would happen:

when she was older she would be expected to drudge in the schoolroom as she drudged now in various parts of the house;they would be obliged to give her more respectable clothes,but they would be sure to be plain and ugly and to make her look somehow like a servant.

That was all there seemed to be to look forward to,and Sara stood quite still for several minutes and thought it over.

Then a thought came back to her which made the color rise in her cheek and a spark light itself in her eyes.She straightened her thin little body and lifted her head.

"Whatever comes,"she said,"cannot alter one thing.If I am a princess in rags and tatters,I can be a princess inside.

It would be easy to be a princess if I were dressed in cloth of gold,but it is a great deal more of a triumph to be one all the time when no one knows it.There was Marie An{}toinette when she was in prison and her throne was gone and she had only a black gown on,and her hair was white,and they insulted her and called her Widow Capet.

She was a great deal more like a queen then than when she was so gay and everything was so grand.I like her best then.Those howling mobs of people did not frighten her.She was stronger than they were,even when they cut her head off."

This was not a new thought,but quite an old one,by this time.