Sunshine is reflected in wonderful glory from the head of the great
silver image of the Adi Buddh. Sunshine is flooding the temple,
glorifying the stolid idols that are standing around, and streaming on
the floor and over the quiet figure of the girl. Her face assumes an
ashy hue, and she again puts out her arms and draws her mother down to
her.
"O mother, pray to the Virgin Mother for me," says the girl, "to tell
P'hra Jesu that I am innocent."
The pagan mother makes no reply, but bends an agonized look on her
dear child's face, and the girl's face becomes grayer in the floods of
sunlight. Her fingers twitch and quiver around her mother's neck.
The priests are hushed, and the temple is more and more flooded with
light; and the faint, sweet, pleading voice of the girl is again
heard: "Mother, dear mother, pray to P'hra Jesu that he shut not the
heavenly gates upon me"; and the strong love of the mother conquers her
religious scruples, and, lying there with her head cushioned on the
bosom of her dying child, she raises her voice and prays:--
"O thou who art called P'hra Jesu, free my child from sin. O forgive
her, sacred One. She has loved thee to the last. She believes in none
but thee. Be thou her God, and shut not, O shut not thy heavenly gates
upon her, even though they shut her out forever from my sorrowing heart
and eyes."
At the utterance of those strange syllables falling from the lips of
a Buddhist mother in the most solemn of the temples of the Buddha, a
marvellous change passed over the face of the dying girl; the gray
pallor of death gave place to a heavenly light, and a faint but
lovely smile irradiated her pale lips. She opened her eyes and gazed
enraptured upon some vision that seemed to float before her. "O mother,
mother," cried the exulting voice of the girl, "I see P'hra Jesu and
P'hra Buddha; P'hra Jesu is above and P'hra Buddha is below, and the
two mothers, Marie and Maia[43] are sitting side by side, and they are
all smiling and calling me upward, upward." And Rungeah stretched out
her arms and closed her eyes, the gray pallor returned; her spirit
fluttered for a moment, and then was gone forever. But the smile never
left her lips.
She was buried with the rites of the Roman Catholic Church, with her
rosary and the golden image of Christ on her bosom, by a French priest
from the other side of the village of Tâmsèng.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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