Gunga's proud head drooped.
"Perhaps we were too hard on the boy. If we had had more time for thought it might have been different," she said, in a broken voice.
"Shall I give him a message when I write?" asked Bopaul whose curious, modern philanthropy made him ready and almost anxious to heal the breach.
"Ah, do, my son!" replied Gunga, with sudden hope. "Tell him that I will come soon and talk to him at the mission house. I have so much to say. There is work for him at Bombay. Tell him that though he is lost to his father, to his religion, to the State—though he is an outcaste and an exile, his mother remains his mother still. Nothing, nothing that gods or men may devise, can ever deprive a woman of the rights of motherhood when once a child is born to her!"
CHAPTER XXIX
Mrs. Hulver was busy cleaning and folding an old uniform. The door of her room was closed and locked whilst she was thus occupied. With many sighs she passed the brush over the well-worn cloth and smoothed out the creases.
"An iron would do it good; but it must go for the present as it is. It won't do for the uniform to be seen just now. To think what the master would say if he knew that the poor young man was in the house all the time! He would give me a month's notice as sure as my name is Maria Hulver! But there, as William used to say"—the William in her mind was the wearer of the uniform in the old days—"'What the eye doesn't see, the heart doesn't grieve for.' God forgive me for loading up young William's shoulders with that canteen racket, and him as innocent as a new-born babe! But as William—that was my third—used to say: 'If the dhoby donkey were shown half the load that was meant for its back, it would die of terror.' Young William shall never know if I can help it that he was the hero of a canteen fight."
She wrapped the uniform in an old linen towel, tucking in bits of camphor on every side, and laid the relic of by-gone days in the bottom drawer of her wardrobe. A knock at the door startled her. She closed the drawer hastily, put away the brush and went to see who called her.
"Miss Eola! Come in, miss. Were you wanting to speak to me?"