Caste by W. A. Fraser
page 90 of 259 (34%)
page 90 of 259 (34%)
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Barlow turned her face up, and the moonlight showed vagrant pearls that lay against the olive cheeks, now tinted like the petals of a rose. Then from a service point of view, and as a matter of caste, Barlow went _ghazi_. He drooped his head and let his lips linger against the girl's eyes, and uttered a superb common-place: "Don't cry, little girl," he said; "I am seven kinds of a brute to bother you!" And Bootea thought it would have been better if he had driven a knife into her heart, and sobbed with increased bitterness. Once her fingers wandered up searchingly and touched his throat. Barlow casting about for the wherefore of his madness, discovered the moonlight, and heard the soft night-air whispering through the harp chords of trees that threw a tracery of black lines across the white road; and from a grove of mango trees came the gentle scent of their blossoms; and he remembered that statistics had it that there was but one memsahib to so many square miles in that land of expatriation; and he knew that he was young and full of the joy of life; that a British soldier was not like a man of Hind who looked upon women as cattle. There did not obtrude into his mental retrospect as an accusation against this unwarrantable tenderness the vision of the Resident's daughter--almost his fiancée. Indeed Elizabeth was the antithesis in physical appeal of the gentle Gulab; the drawing-room perhaps; repartee of Damascus steel fineness; tutored polish, class, cold integrity--these things associated admirably with the unsensuous Elizabeth. Thoughts of her, remembrances, had no place in glamorous perfumed moonlight. So he set his teeth and admonished the grey Turcoman, called him the |
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