It is not to be supposed that the Padhani women look upon their toilsome tasks as a hardship: nature, and the decrees of evolution, have endowed them with superb health and strength, and they are wont, as they carry the most astonishing loads, to sing joyous choruses, and so lighten their toils. Every one who has been to Naini Tal is familiar with the sight of a string of Padhani women, short-kilted, showing a span of brown skin between their bodices and skirts, and singing in unison.
They never seem to weary of their choruses, and Captain Trenyon of the Forest Department, and his khansamah, Bijoo, never tired of looking at them as they passed below his bungalow with swaying hips and jaunty carriage. They were a trifle darker than their Rajpoot sisters (quod tune, si fuscus Amyntas), and they might have been akin to Pharaoh's daughter, she who was "black but comely."
Now, Bijoo was a Padhani, and he took more than a casual interest—such as Captain Trenyon's, doubtless, was—in the laughing and singing crowd that filed below the captain's house several times a day. Chiefest among them, and distinguished by her beauty and her stature, was Chandni; and, ere the season was over, Bijoo purchased her from her crippled father for ten rupees, and, thereafter, Captain Trenyon turned his back on the Padhani traffic of the Mall to watch Chandni instead, as she helped Bijoo to clean the silver; and the songs of the Padhani women attracted him no more.
The following year, before the snows of February had cleared off from Shere-ke Danda and Larya Kata, Chandni returned alone to the house of her father, Thapa, at Serya Tal. It was night when she pushed back the thatch door of his hut, which was in darkness within, and called him by name:
"It is I, father, Chandni, thy daughter."
"Moon of my Heart!" said the old man, waking from his sleep, and he would have "lifted up his voice and wept," as is the manner of all orientals when greatly moved, but she prevented him by the impressiveness of her "Choop, choop! father; proclaim not my return to the village!"
"Where is Bijoo, the man thy husband?"
"Nana Debi alone knoweth, my father, and I have come back to thee."
"Is he dead, little one?"