"Why did you not come to-day to sweep the yard?" asked Ananda.
"I was forbidden by the big mistress. The order has been given that no one is to speak with your honour or approach your room. To-morrow night I will come and bring the herdsman with his cow."
The following morning Ananda wrote another letter which he posted himself in the town. It was addressed to Dr. Wenaston, Principal of the College of Chirapore; and the long epistle he had prepared for his father remained in his writing case undelivered.
CHAPTER IX
A soft, balmy air brushed the blossoms of the eucharis lilies, and swept over the delicate green maidenhair fern growing under the shade of the verandah of the Principal's house. Out in the broad sunshine the blue ipomea, the morning glory of the Indian garden, opened its mass of azure blooms and spread a gorgeous mantle over the bamboo trellis that supported it.
The plump rounded figure of Mrs. Hulver, Dr. Wenaston's housekeeper, appeared on the raised verandah, followed by the butler. She was a widow and had been married three times, a fact that no one of her acquaintance was permitted to forget.
Her father was a British soldier of Scotch birth; and her mother a Eurasian. In her youth Maria had some pretensions to good looks. It was the prettiness of youth so often seen where the blood of the east and the west is mixed. Her small regular features and olive complexion could make no claim to beauty in her mature middle age, when her figure had lost its delicate proportions and gained in amplitude. The eyes alone were unaltered. She had her Scotch father's grey eyes with his keen glance. Nothing escaped them, as the servants knew by experience; and when they failed to elucidate a domestic mystery her inherited shrewdness came to her assistance.
At the age of sixteen a marriage was made for her by her mother, who chose a prosperous and not over-scrupulous overseer in the Public Works Department named William Delaine. He was more than double the age of his bride; and had lived long enough to put together a nice little property in houses and land. There were no children, and when he died ten years later he left everything to his widow.
Her second marriage was to an Englishman, whose regiment was stationed at Bangalore. Corporal William Smith was a reserved man of a thoroughly British temperament, endowed with a rugged honesty that despised any sort of evasion of the truth in speech or action. Uncompromisingly straightforward he did much to carry on the early training of Maria's mind begun by her father. She was very happy with William Smith in a placid way, and bore him a son who was educated in the barrack-school and in due time drafted into the drummer-boy corps attached to the regiment. Later the boy enlisted and followed in the footsteps of his father. William Smith was about to take his pension and return to England when he was struck down with malarial fever; and for the second time in her life Maria became a widow.