“And so,” said he, at last, “they are to be married before Christmas?”
“Yes; that is the plan.”
“And then she will return with him to India, I take it”
She rodded.
“Poor girl! And has she not one friend in all the world to tell her what a life is before her as the wife of a third—no, but tenth-rate official—in that dreary land of splendour and misery, where nothing but immense wealth can serve to gloss over the dull uniformity of existence, and where the income of a year is often devoted to dispel the ennui of a single day? India, with poverty, is the direst of all penal settlements. In the bush, in the wilds of New Zealand, in the far-away islands of the Pacific, you have the free air and healthful breezes of heaven. You can bathe without having an alligator for your companion, and lie down on the grass without a cobra on your carotid; but, in India, life stands always face to face with death, and death in some hideous form.”
“How you terrify me!” cried she, in a voice of intense emotion.
“I don’t want to terrify, I want to warn. If it were ever my fate to have a marriageable daughter, and some petty magistrate—some small district judge of Bengal—asked her for a wife, I’d say to my girl, ‘Go and be a farm servant in New Caledonia. Milk cows, rear lambs, wash, scrub, toil for your daily bread in some land where poverty is not deemed the ‘plague;’ but don’t encounter life in a society where to be poor is to be despicable—where narrow means are a stigma of disgrace.’”
“Joseph says nothing of all this. He writes like one well contented with his lot, and very hopeful for the future.”
“Hasn’t your niece, some ten or twelve thousand pounds?”
“Fifteen.”