"Then I will resign my charge, and say good-bye."
When they had shaken hands he went round to the other verandah where her baggage lay, and looked at the wooden box. Was it a wedding-cake? Even that might be better than life in the home to which she was going, though, for all he knew, the latter might suit her admirably. Then he went and kicked his heels at the station in order to be out of the way, for the bungalow only boasted one room.
[CHAPTER II.]
The dawn of another day was just breaking, when the rattle and clatter which had formed an accompaniment to Belle's wakeful dreams all night long, ceased at the last stage out from Faizapore. Belle stepped out of the palki-gharri to stretch her cramped limbs, and looked round her with eyes in which sleep still lingered.
A mud village lay close to the road, and from an outlying hut the ponies, destined to convey her the remaining five miles, struggled forth reluctantly. The coachman was furtively pulling at some one else's pipe; a naked anatomy, halt and blind of an eye, dribbled water from an earthen pot over the hot axles; two early travellers were bathing in a pool of dirty water. Belle standing in the middle of the glaring white highway, instinctively turned to where, in the distance, a slender church-spire rose above the bank of trees on the horizon. That was familiar!--that she understood. Born in India, and therefore a daughter of the soil, she could not have been further removed in taste and feeling from the toiling self-centred cosmogony of the Indian village in which she stood, had she dropped into it from another planet. So, alien in heart, she passed through the tide of life which sets every morning towards a great cantonment, looking on it as on some strange, new picture. Beyond all this, among people who ate with forks and spoons and went to church on Sundays, lay the life of which she had dreamed for years. The rest was a picturesque background; that was all.
A final flourish of an excruciating horn, gateposts guiltless of gates, a ragged privet hedge curving intermittently to a bright blue house set haphazard, cornerwise, in a square dusty expanse,--and the journey was over.
It was not only her cramped limbs that made Belle feel weak and unsteady as she stood before the seemingly deserted house. Suddenly, from behind a projecting corner, came a wrinkled beldame clad in dingy white bordered with red. With one hand she grasped a skinny child dressed in flannel night garments of Macgregor tartan, with the other she held up her draggling petticoats and salaamed profusely, thus displaying a pair of bandy, blue-trousered legs.
Belle looked at her with distinct aversion. "I think I have made a mistake," she said; "this can't be Colonel Stuart's house."
The woman grinned from ear to ear. "Ar'l right, missy ba. Mem sahib comin'. This b'y sonny baba." She broke in on the whining wail of her voice (which made Belle think of a professional beggar) to apostrophise her charge with loud-tongued abuse for not saying good morning to his "sissy."
Belle gasped. Could this dirty dark boy be her brother Charlie? Then a sudden rush of pity for the little fellow whose big black eyes met hers with such distrust, made her stoop to kiss him. But the child, reluctant and alarmed, struck at her face with his lean brown fingers and then fled into the house howling, followed full tilt by his aged attendant.