Page:The further side of silence (IA furthersideofsil00clifiala).pdf/231

 The wanton cruelty of the notion was what chiefly struck her. The old native rulers had been oppres- sive, with hearts like flint and hands of crushing weight, but they had always been actualed by a personal motive, a motive which their people could recognize and understand, the sort of motive whereby the peasants felt that they themselves would have been impelled if their relative positions had been reversed. But why should the white folk covet her man? Why should they scheme to rob her of him, seeing that he was all she had, and they could have no need of him? Why, too, should they punish him with imprisonment for a calamity for which he was in no wise to blame? What abnormal and crim- inal instinct did the strangers hope to gratify by such an aimless piece of barbarity? In imagination she heard his fretful call, his mumbled speech, which none save she could interpret or understand; and the thought of the pitifulness of his condition, of his utter helplessness, if deprived of her love and com- panionship, aroused in her all the blind combativeness that lurks in all maternal creatures. In his de fence she would cast aside all fear and fight for him, as a tigress fights for her cubs.

Minah managed with difficulty to bribe au ok crone to tend Mamat for a day or two. Then she set off for Kuala Lipis, the lown at which, she had heard men say, the white men had their headquarters. Until she started upon this journey downcountry she had never quitted her own village, and to her the twenty miles of river, that separated her home from