The Burmese looked with curiosity on the fair, youthful lady, bound, like himself, to the Andaman Islands. Oscar heard the man muttering to himself, “I wonder what bad thing _she_ has done? She doesn’t look like one of our sort.”
“The lady has done nothing bad,” said Coldstream; “she only goes into exile because she will not desert her husband.”
“My boy’s mother is not like that,” observed the Burmese with a gloomy smile; “she would never go across the black waters for me, though it was through her that I got into all this trouble.”
“What did you do?” asked Oscar, who saw that the manly-looking fellow seemed inclined for conversation.
“A rascally Mussulman pulled off the veil of my boy’s mother. I was not going to stand that, so I stuck my knife into him. But he did not die,” added the Burmese.
“Are you not glad that he did not die?” asked Oscar.
“Not I,” was the fierce reply. “I would as soon be hanged as sent across the black waters. If the thing came over again, I’d do just the same as I did.”
Io, in the meantime, had gone up to the Bengali woman, who, in her soiled _sari_, was crouching on the deck in an attitude of hopeless dejection.
Io made the most of her little stock of Bengali; her gentle, winning manner went further than her words. She at length made the convict look up, and, after a considerable time, drew from her something like the following tale:――
“The children’s father[5] did not love me. He wanted a boy, and only girls came――one, two, three, _four_ girls! The last was very little; I could carry her in my hand――like that. I could give her no nourishment; baby was thin――you could count all her bones. She cried all day and all night. Baby’s father was angry at the crying; he said he would throw her into the Ganges. So I put her under water; and a sahib saw it, and gave me into the charge of the sepoys. If I had put a little poison into baby’s mouth, no one would have known anything about it.”
“How horrible!” exclaimed Io, intuitively drawing back. “How could you hurt your own baby?”
“I did not hurt her; I put her to rest,” said the woman, who was utterly unconscious of having committed a sin.
Io went and compared notes with her husband, who had had a long talk with the Burmese convict.