She had been roughly used she knew, for her arms felt wrenched and bruised, her head throbbed painfully, there was an acute smarting about her lips, and a peculiar acrid, pungent, bitter taste in her mouth, while when she placed her hand to her lips she withdrew it stained with blood.
She shuddered and looked round at the Malay women, some of whom were standing, some squatted about on the bamboo floor, watching her with a gratified smile in their faces, and one and all evidently without the slightest sympathy for her state.
“What—what have you done?” she panted, with anger now taking the place of fear. “You shall be punished—bitterly punished for this!”
For answer there was a merry laugh, and the women chatted to each other; but one of the girls who had been Helen’s attendant rose and left the room, to return in a few minutes with a large braes basin of clear cold water and a cotton cloth.
Helen tried hard to check her sobs, and gladly availed herself of the opportunity to bathe her eyes, finding as she did so that one of her lips smarted and bled quite profusely; there was a wretched sensation too about the lower part of her face, and her teeth ached violently.
“They shall be bitterly punished for this!” she cried, furiously. “What have they done?”
Then, like a flash, as she saw the girl who held the basin smile mockingly, she knew what had taken place, and with a piteous cry she placed her hands to her mouth, to find that her surmise was correct; the second girl laughing heartily, and fetching the hand-glass to hold upon a level with the prisoner’s face.
The cold wet dew gathered upon Helen’s brow as she gazed at the strange countenance before her. It was not that which she knew so well, and upon whose handsome features she had been wont to gaze with half-closed eyes and with a smile of satisfaction at its beauty; for there before her was the face of a noble-looking Malay woman, between whose swollen lips she could see the filed and blackened teeth considered so great a perfection to her toilet; and with a piteous cry Helen covered her eyes with her hands, shrank back upon her couch, and sobbed forth:
“What would he think of me now?” Humbled as she was by the treatment she had received, and agitated by her position, Helen Perowne had enough of the old nature left to suffer terribly upon every question relating to her personal appearance. It was a dreadful shock to find that she had been completely transformed, as it were, into a woman of the country—one of those upon whom she had been accustomed to look with such disdain; but the shock was surpassed by the sensation of misery to find that her self-worshipped beauty was gone, as it were, for ever. Her greatest enemy could not have inflicted upon her a more cruel pang; and one constantly-recurring question kept repeating itself:
“What would he say to me now?”—he; and it was not of Captain Hilton, her father, or any of her rejected lovers that she thought, but always of the Resident. What would Neil Harley think of her if he could see her distorted features? He could not recognise her, of that she felt sure, and in her agony of mind a complete change took place in her feelings. But an hour ago she had watched window and door, listened to every sound, however slight, and interpreted it to mean the coming of help—of Neil Harley and her father to fetch her away. But how could she wish for them to come now? Why should she be taken away? Instead of Helen Perowne, the beauty of the station, they would find, and would not recognise, a swarthy native woman, whose aspect would repel them, and they would be ready to doubt her word should she assert who she was.