"She will not die to-day or to-morrow," Roy retorted with Olympian assurance. "Courage, little mother,"—he addressed the girl—"you shall have food, you and the sonling."
As she raised herself, clutching at his arm, he became uncomfortably aware that her rags of clothing were probably verminous; that his chivalrous pity was tinged with repulsion. But pity prevailed. Supporting her to a neighbouring stall, he bought fruit, which she devoured like a wild thing. He begged a little milk in a lotah and gave her money for more. Half dazed, she dropped the money, emptied the small jar almost at a gulp, and flung herself at his feet, pressing her forehead on his dusty boot; covering him with confusion. Imperatively he bade her get up. No result. So he stooped to enforce his command....
She had fainted.
"Help, mother—quick!" he appealed to an elder woman who hovered near the stall, and responded, instinctively, to the note of command.
As she stooped over the girl he said in low rapid tones: "Listen! It is an order. Give warm food to her and the child. Take her to the Burra Sahib's compound. There she will be cared for. I will give word."
He slipped two rupees into her hand, adding: "Two more—when all is done according to order."
"Hai! Hai! The Sahib is a Son of Princes," murmured the favoured one, reflecting shrewdly that eight annas would suffice to feed those poor empty creatures; and gathering up her light burden she bore it away—to Roy's unfeigned relief.
Would Thea scold him—or uphold him, he wondered,—having committed himself. The whole thing had been so swift, so unreal, that he seemed half a world away from the green Residency garden, with its atmosphere of twentieth-century England, scrupulously, yet unconsciously, preserved in a setting of sixteenth-century India. And Roy had a strain of both in his composition.
Across the road Bishun Singh—tolerant of his Sahib's vagaries—was still chatting with the potter; a blare of discord in a minor key announced an approaching procession; and there, in talk with the bangle-seller, stood the cause of these strange doings; keeping a curious eye on the mad Englishman, but otherwise frankly unconcerned. Again there dawned on Roy the conviction that he had seen that face before. It was not in India. It was linked with the same sensations, in a milder form. It would come in a moment....
It came.