The looked-for mail-day arrived. Harold brought in to his wife three letters bearing the English post-mark. Alicia singled out the one which was not in a familiar hand; these sprawling characters she guessed to be traced by her cousin, from whom she had never before had a letter. Miranda—seated on the ground, her favourite position still, though she had always a chair at meals—watched with anxiety in her fine dark eyes the face of her cousin. She seemed to know, as by instinct, that the letter which Alicia was perusing related to her own fate. The letter, which was read aloud, ran as follows:—
“My dear Coz,—I am sure that you have shown wonderful ingenuity in ferreting out this sister of mine. I was never so astonished in my life as when I found that I had one. The whole story is like a sensation novel or a transformation scene in a pantomime. But when the novel is closed, or the curtain falls on Columbine, the whole thing is over, and nothing remains to be done. This affair of Miranda is a different and much more difficult matter. You ask me if I wish to have my sister home to be educated in England; you give me to understand that she is a kind of raw material (silk in the cocoon, I suppose) which her friends are to work up into satin. The girl can’t read, write, or spell, cannot yet use a knife and fork, does not know a word of English, and prefers squatting on the floor to lolling on a sofa like a lady! What on earth could I do with such a heathenish sister?”
“I should like to punch that fellows head!” exclaimed Robin, his eyes flashing with indignation. “He may have a head to be punched, but he certainly has not a heart.”
Miranda looked at her angry bhai with alarm. “There must be something very dreadful indeed in that letter,” thought the poor girl. “I am afraid that I have a cruel white brother in England.”
“Let’s hear the rest of the letter,” said Harold; and Alicia resumed her reading:—
“I could not introduce to my wife and her acquaintance a girl—a widow, you say—who might startle us by plunging her hand into a fricassee, or whooping like a Red Indian.”
“What does the fellow mean by that?” fiercely interrupted Robin.
“Oh, I suppose that Gilbert classes all sorts of Indians together,” laughed Alicia: “he was always a thoughtless boy. I daresay that he thinks that our Premi wears a coronet of feathers, and perhaps a chaplet of human teeth.” Again the lady read on,—
“Then if any respectable school would admit this wild widow, there are no funds to support her there. Government has agreed to do something in consideration of what was lost in the Mutiny; but what is fifteen pounds per annum in England? hardly enough to pay a dancing-master’s fees. No, no; the wild widow had far better keep where she is. Perhaps you could find another black husband to suit her.”
Robin struck his clenched fist on the table with such violence that he threw over a tumbler, and smashed a plate, and filled Miranda’s young heart with vague apprehensions.