Queen Lucia | Page 9

but still there was the
medium of the post.
"Ecco indeed!" she said. "It puts me in rather a difficult position, for I
must send out my invitations to my garden-party today, and I really
don't know whether I ought to be officially aware of this man's
existence or not. I can't write to Daisy Quantock and say 'Pray bring
your black friend Om or whatever his names proves to be, and on the
other hand, if he is the sort of person whom one would be sorry to miss,
I should not like to have passed over him."
"After all, my dear, you have only been back in Riseholme half an
hour," said her husband. "It would have been difficult for Mrs
Quantock to have told you yet."
Her face cleared.
"Perhaps Daisy has written to me about him," she said. "I may find a
full account of it all when I open my letters."
"Depend upon it you will. She would hardly have been so wanting in
proper feeling as not to have told you. I think, too, that her visitor must
only have just arrived, or I should have been sure to see him about
somewhere."
She rose.
"Well, we will see," she said. "Now I shall be very busy all afternoon,
but by tea-time I shall be ready to see anyone who calls. Give me my
letters, Caro, and I will find out if Daisy has written to me."
She turned them over as she went to her room, and there among them
was a bulky envelope addressed in Mrs Quantock's great sprawling

hand, which looked at first sight so large and legible, but on closer
examination turned out to be so baffling. You had to hold it at some
distance off to make anything out of it, and look at it in an abstracted
general manner much as you would look at a view. Treated thus,
scattered words began to leap into being, and when you had got a
sufficiency of these, like glimpses of the country seen by flashes of
lightning, you could hope to get a collective idea of it all. The
procedure led to the most promising results as Mrs Lucas sat with the
sheets at arm's length, occasionally altering the range to try the effect of
a different focus. "Benares" blinked at her, also "Brahmin"; also
"highest caste"; "extraordinary sanctity," and "Guru." And when the
meaning of this latter was ascertained from the article on "Yoga" in her
Encyclopaedia, she progressed very swiftly towards a complete
comprehension of the letter.
When fully pieced together it was certainly enough to rivet her whole
attention, and make her leave unopened the rest of the correspondence,
for such a prelude to adventure had seldom sounded in Riseholme. It
appeared, even as her husband had told her at lunch, that Mrs Quantock
found her cold too obstinate for all the precepts of Mrs Eddy; the True
Statement of Being, however often repeated, only seemed to inflame it
further, and one day, when confined to the house, she had taken a book
"quite at random" from the shelves in her library, under, she supposed,
the influence of some interior compulsion. This then was clearly a
"leading."
Mrs Lucas paused a moment as she pieced together these first sentences.
She seemed to remember that Mrs Quantock had experienced a similar
leading when first she took up Christian Science. It was a leading from
the sight of a new church off Sloane Street that day; Mrs Quantock had
entered (she scarcely knew why) and had found herself in a Testimony
Meeting, where witness after witness declared the miraculous healings
they had experienced. One had had a cough, another cancer, another a
fractured bone, but all had been cured by the blessed truths conveyed in
the Gospel according to Mrs Eddy. However, her memories on this
subject were not to the point now; she burned to arrive at the story of
the new leading.

Well, the book that Mrs Quantock had taken down in obedience to the
last leading proved to be a little handbook of Oriental Philosophies, and
it opened, "all of its own accord," at a chapter called Yoga. Instantly
she perceived, as by the unclosing of an inward eye, that Yoga was
what she wanted and she instantly wrote to the address from which this
book was issued asking for any guidance on the subject. She had read
in "Oriental Philosophies" that for the successful practice of Yoga, it
was necessary to have a teacher, and did they know of any teacher who
could give her instruction? A wonderful answer came to that, for two
days afterwards her maid came to her and said that an Indian gentleman
would like to see her. He was ushered in, and