“But me want to see her, she not sleep till I come to her and sing and tell her the old stories. Take me to her, sahib, take me, and Sundran love you very dear.”
“I can’t do that, Sundran; she is a long way from here. But she is quite safe. I am going to marry her, so you may be quite sure she is safe. Mrs. Ellis trusts me, so you can.”
“But, sahib, Missee Ellis not know her so long as me. I come with her from her country with the Mammee Countess, her mother. She always have me, she love her old nurse. Sahib, take me to her.”
But George was looking upon the woman with more and more distaste. Hers was the pernicious influence which, working by the spells of early association, of wild fable, of romantic devotion, had filled Nouna’s young mind with its prejudices, had excited her imagination by its dangerous pictures, and had made her blind and deaf to all the better influences around her.
“I cannot indeed,” he said gravely. “I am going straight back to my own rooms now. It would take me another hour to drive you first to the house where she is staying, and by that time your mistress would be fast asleep.”
The woman noticed the increased coldness of his tone, and recognised the uselessness of further entreaty. She tried another tack.
“Sahib,” she whispered lower than ever, in a wheedling tone, with a glance all round the hall and a particularly careful scrutiny, by the light of the lamp, of the chinks of the doors, “if you take me to Missee Nuna, if you tell me where she is, I take you to Sahib Rahas, I tell you where he is.”
George started, and the offer confirmed him in his resolution to have nothing to do with this woman. He thought it proved conclusively that she had been bought by Rahas, but that she was willing to betray him if she could get her price; and though he did her the justice to believe in the sincerity of her devotion to her young mistress, he knew how much more harm than good it was likely to do his poor little fiancée. As he repeated that it was impossible for him to comply with her request, the dark face of the Indian woman grew hideous with baffled passion. She retreated a few paces and showed her teeth at him like an angry ape; then twirling her lamp twice round her head with some muttered, inarticulate words, as if she were repeating an incantation, she turned her back upon him and slunk stealthily up stairs like a wild animal thwarted in a search for its young.
George left the house with shuddering thankfulness that Nouna had escaped from her perilous associations. “Marriage, thank heaven,” thought he, “works such changes in a woman that it will drive them all out of her head and fill her heart and mind with new thoughts and feelings.”
And of course he forgot that marriage can work changes in a man too.