“Nigger” still seemed to ring in my ears, as I gazed still as if fascinated in the handsome pale-brown eastern face, and I said feebly, just about in the tone of voice in which some contemptible young found-out sneak of a schoolboy, who was trying to hide a fault with a miserable lie, might say, “Please, sir, it wasn’t me—”
“I never insulted you, or called you so.”
His face changed like magic, and he bent low over my pillow, as he cried excitedly, and with a passionate fervour in his voice, which almost startled me—
“Never! never, sahib.”
He paused, frowned, and then his face lit up again, and he uttered a merry laugh.
“You see,” he cried, “I am one of the conquered race. You have been our masters so long that it comes natural to say sahib. But that is at an end now; we are the masters, and the reign of the great Koompanni is at an end.”
A pang of misery ran through me at these words, which were uttered with so much conviction that I felt they must be true.
After a few moments, and from a desire to say something less weak than my last poor feeble utterance, I said—
“Was it not you who saved my life when that sowar was going to cut me down?”
“Yes,” he cried excitedly. “If he had killed you, he should not have lived another hour.”