Mr. Thole did not relish the conversation, and broke it off abruptly. Throwing away his cigar, he pushed his chair back from the table, and said in rather a dictatorial tone to Mr. Hartley, “Now, sir, I am ready to hear about the business which brought you hither.”
Mr. Hartley felt that the preceding conversation had been an unfortunate introduction to what was coming, for Mr. Thole had resumed all his official stiffness. However, there was nothing to be done but to make a clear, concise statement of all that had led him to suspect that Miranda Macfinnis, daughter of a merchant, supposed to have been murdered with her parents about twelve years before in the Mutiny, was at present shut up in a zenana at Talwandi, and, as a widow, treated with cruel harshness and neglect.
Mr. Thole listened with stern gravity, neither stirring a muscle nor interrupting by a single question until the missionary had produced all the slender information that he possibly could give on the subject. When Mr. Hartley stopped, the commissioner coldly asked, after a brief pause, “Have you anything more to communicate, sir?”
“Nothing more at present,” was the reply.
“Then allow me to say that Mr. Hartley has not shown all the discrimination and judgment which might have been expected from one of his experience in bringing before me a case which has not a leg to stand on,” said the commissioner, with a touch of impatience. “Your daughter-in-law, a young lady who, as you own, possesses slight knowledge of Urdu, hears a woman in a zenana shout out thrice what she is pleased to consider an English word. It was probably the praise of some of her myriad gods, _jai_ (victory) being easily mistaken for ‘joy,’ The girl is white; but that is not the slightest proof of European origin—some Kashmiris and Pathans, as every one knows, having complexions perfectly fair. You would have me give weight to the evidence of a youth who owns that he always considered the girl an Afghan, and who would never have thought of her as anything else, had it not been put into his head that the widow may be a European. And on such cobweb evidence as this you would have me to do what would justly make me the most unpopular man in the Panjab, cause probably a serious tumult, and expose me to Government censure!” Mr. Thole’s voice rose to a more indignant pitch at each clause in his speech till it reached a climax in the peroration: “No, sir; I have too much regard for the interests of Government and my own honour to violate the sacred privacy of a Hindu zenana by a demand for the production of one of its inmates on an absurd suspicion confirmed by not even the shadow of truth!” Mr. Thole pushed back his chair and angrily rose from the table.