"Oh," he replied, blankly. "Yes, there are a lot of you--I mean--of them, in Eshwara, aren't there?"
Her face set suddenly, her mouth grew almost stern. "Not enough, Mr. Carlyon; not half enough," she replied. And the militant ring of her voice, belying the peaceful professions of the previous moment, made him look at her curiously, recognizing that he had touched some quivering nerve of mind. "If you knew Eshwara as I know it," she went on, passionately, "you would say so too; I'm sure you would."
The bronze eyes, meeting his blue ones, though they gave nothing back but kindly, almost boyish, surprise, seemed satisfied. She turned suddenly and stretched her right hand over the river which slipped oilily past the wall below, as they stood beside the balustrade of the loggia. "Look!" she said, impulsively. "Do you see that straight white thing floating down the curve of the current yonder? It isn't a log; those others are; plenty of logs come down the rivers from the forests in the hills, for they don't catch all, you know, at the government wood-station. And so the people here catch the runaways in the backwater, and get paid for them. But that--" She paused and her other hand gripped the balustrade hard; then she turned back to him with a faint apology. "Why should I bother you? Let us talk of something else. There is no reason why I should talk of these things to you so soon, or, indeed, at all."
"I'd rather you did," he put in quickly. It was the truth. A sudden curiosity had come to him, a sudden desire to know more, to think more. He was less of a boy than he had been five minutes before. "I--I hope you will," he added; "really I do--I--I--" He felt his manhood as he had never felt it before, and yet, in a way, he was more forgetful of it. The girl opposite him was womanhood incarnate to him, and yet, in some mysterious way, beyond it, above it.
"You and I must be about the same age, I expect," he said, with a half-perplexed frown, "but you have seen a lot more than I have. I wish you'd tell me, please!"
The straight white glint in the water was just disappearing behind one of those balconies overhanging the river, where there was only room for a pair of lovers.
"It is a dead girl, Mr. Carlyon," she said in a low voice. "She was in my school. Her people were very bigoted--Brahmins in a temple--but they let her be taught to read, because she was betrothed to an educated man. Last year she was married--she was but a child still--and I have only seen her once or twice since. Then"--the voice paused a second. "She was very frightened, poor little Premi, at what was coming. 'I shall die, Miss-sahib, I shall surely die,' she said to me the very last time I saw her; so I promised--I am a medical missionary, Mr. Carlyon. But when the time came, they would not let me in. I--I went to the husband--he is an educated man--you may have heard of him--Rama-nund, a great speaker,--he writes, too, and all that--but he said he was helpless with the women; and I am not sure either if he wished it himself--they don't know their own minds. So poor little Premi and her baby--Oh!" she broke off with an infinite pain in her voice--"it is so hard--so hard for both."
Her face, set riverwards, was soft, yet stern; full of fight, yet full of pity, and Lance thought of a virgin martyr in the illustrated 'Lives of the Saints' with which his grandmother, Lady Carewe, had been wont to still his boyish unrest on Sunday afternoons. Yet there was something beyond that self-concentrated devotion in this face; something that took him back further still to the days when he had sobbed out his childish hurts in his mother's arms.
"She was ill all yesterday and the day before--they told me there was no hope of either--they just let them die. And they always put them in the river--they have iron rings round their wrists and ankles to prevent them coming back to harm the men--" She paused and turned to Lance swiftly. "Isn't it true that there are not enough of us--that we want more women to teach them what--"
"But I does!" came a high childish treble, forcing itself irresistibly even on the attention of these two; "I 'ikes 'oo twenty 'fowsand times better than dad, an' I 'ikes Captain Dering ten 'fowsand times better too; an' so does 'mum--don't 'oo mummie?"