“It was very good in you to wait so long,” said Mrs. Coldstream. “I have kept you an unreasonable time, but I could not quiet the poor child at once. Now she has cried herself to sleep.”
“How is it that you could talk to her, my rosebud?” asked the doctor. “I was astonished to hear you speak Karen. I know hardly anything of that language myself, just enough to ask a few medical questions when Karens find their way to the dispensary. These people are scattered amongst the Siamese and Burmese like poppies amongst corn.”
“Which are the poppies, which the corn?” asked Io in her old playful way. “From what Oscar has told me, it seems that these Karens are a race whom both Siamese and Burmese conspire to oppress, but who are more to be trusted than either.”
“It may be so,” said the doctor.
“My smattering of their language is easily accounted for,” continued Io. “On my husband’s first return to England, nearly three years ago, he brought with him a little Karen boy, whom he had rescued from some horrid Siamese tyrant. After our engagement, when Oscar was obliged to return to Moulmein, he left this boy in my charge, the poor little fellow being too ill to travel.”
“A kind of big keepsake to keep your lover in mind, I suppose,” observed Pinfold, “like a miniature framed in ebony.”
“I liked the child for his own sake as well as his master’s,” said Io. “I talked a great deal with him, taught him something, and he taught me his language in return. I was sorry that he only knew Karen, for that is not what is most spoken here; but I thought that to learn it was better than learning nothing, and, curiously enough, the first native in Moulmein with whom I have to do is a Karen. You cannot think how much pleased I was when I found myself understood by the motherless girl.”
“You’ll be making a match one of these days between your two brown protégés,” said the doctor gaily.
“Ah no; the poor dear boy sleeps in an English churchyard,” replied Io with a sigh. “Oscar has had a little monument placed over his grave—a cross, for the boy died a Christian.”
“Well, now, let us speak of Oscar himself,” said the doctor, who felt little interest in the death and burial of a brown Karen boy. “I want you to answer some questions about his health, for he has grown paler, and thinner, and graver. It is not natural that a man should look ten years older in less than ten months. Do you think that your husband is ill?”