Yet there was not even a b.u.t.terfly to be seen hovering over the flowers. All was still, all was silent, until Vincent Dering"s careless laugh echoed through the stillness, the silence.
"Can"t you imagine it--all lit up--they used to put coloured lamps behind the cascades, I"m told, and play "Catch who can" up and down and all around the place! On the whole I expect they enjoyed themselves--better than the type-writing girls of to-day do, for instance."
"Got beastly sick of enjoying themselves before they had done with it, I expect," replied Lance, succinctly, "especially if there was always such a confounded strong smell of orange blossoms. Bah! I"d prefer a polecat; but," he gave a distasteful glance at his companion, "I believe you like strong scents."
"Why not?" laughed Vincent Dering, drawing out a handkerchief deluged with white-rose, and sniffing at it, "it"s a harmless taste," here his jest pa.s.sed to earnest, and his eyes took a half soft, half cynical expression,--"so"s the other, in a way. It isn"t altogether despicable to let yourself loose in Paradise without an _arriere pensee_ of flaming swords. Especially if you can give pleasure to someone else thereby. One could act Romeo and Juliet nicely in this garden. And have your choice of balconies, too," he continued, returning to jest, "even if the young woman--"
He glanced back as if to verify his remark from the _facade_ of the palace, but what he saw behind him brought a sudden straightening of his lounge, and rather an elaborate doffing of his sailor hat; for he was always a trifle ornate in his courtesy towards women, and the girl who stood within a pace or two of him was distinctly attractive, if--even at the first glance--a little too bread-and-b.u.t.tery for his taste; too young, too clumsy as to waist, too ma.s.sive in the contours of face and figure. For Captain Vincent Dering"s taste had remained constant for the last three years to a different type of beauty; a type which, for the first time in his life, had made him sentimental, romantic, more or less unselfish. Still the girl was handsome, even in that babyish frock of starched white muslin, girt about with a yellow silk sash. The dress, he told himself,--for he was a connoisseur in _chiffons_, and had a pretty turn for painting in addition--would have been better soft, and creamy; but thank heaven! the sash was not blue, like the marker of the missal she carried in her hand. It might have been; for it was impossible to fathom the lack of all sense of fitness in some women. Yet the result would have been to take all the ivory tints from this girl"s complexion, and leave it jaundiced. And the ivory was charming.
"I am Miss Bonaventura," she began in a set way, which convinced Captain Dering that she had been sent to say those very words, and none other; "my guardian, Father Ninian Bruce, will be here directly. Won"t you come upstairs to the drawing-room? I am sorry we did not know it was so late."
"It is our fault; we are disgracefully early," put in Captain Dering.
"I told Carlyon--" then he paused, feeling curiously at a loss before the girl"s look of stolid gravity.
"Perhaps your watch is too fast," she suggested, "and then my guardian likes to go by the sun. He says it never needs winding up. But I think it is inconvenient, when everybody else has a watch. It is always better to do as other people do."
Her voice was very sweet and full; but a country-bred accent spoilt its beauty, and brought a grimace to Captain Dering"s face, as he and his companion dutifully followed the speaker up one of the curved flights of steps, which led from the plinth to a wide loggia on the second storey. Like the room seen through its arches, this was lavishly decorated with fragments of looking-gla.s.s fashioned into flowing designs with gilt stucco. The afternoon sun, at this height shining full into the loggia, made it a veritable star chamber.
"What a charming place," went on Captain Dering in his best manner.
"Doesn"t it remind you of the Arabian Nights, Carlyon?"
A sudden vague surprise and interest came to the girl"s face, lightening it infinitely.
"Have you read the _Alif Laila?_" she asked. "My _moonshi_ brought it--I have to learn Urdu, you know, because my guardian thinks I ought to be able to speak to the people, as he does--and I wanted to read it, because it is my name, you see--Laila--it means "night," I believe--but my guardian did not wish it. He gave me the "Mirror of Virtue" instead.
It is a very, very long--"
Her almost childish garrulity ceased in a faint flush over the ivory of her face, and she reverted to her lesson, and her indifference--"The other people will be here directly; but they will come from the city, across the tunnel, and go straight into the drawing-room. Would you like to come in there, or stay here?"
"Oh! stay here, please!" said Vincent, desperately. The young woman was getting on his nerves.
"Then perhaps you would like to try the piano?" persisted Miss Bonaventura. "My guardian has it brought out here on Wednesday afternoons, because it sounds well among the arches. Will you try it?"
Her hand--it was ivory also, Vincent observed, and had long filbert-shaped nails--held the cover of the keyboard open stolidly; and Lance Carlyon, feeling a bit desperate also, said appealingly:--
"Do, Dering. He is a nailer at the piano, I a.s.sure you, Miss Bonaventura, and he sings too."
"So my guardian--" she began, when Vincent"s patience gave way and, with a perfect devil of exasperation roused in him, he sat down on the music-stool and with a crash burst into a naughty little love song he had picked up at Brindisi on the way out. He did it simply to soothe himself; so, to do him justice, he nearly fell off the music-stool in horror when, at the refrain of the second verse, a very full round _mezzo-soprano_ joined in it with a _verve_ and _abandon_ far exceeding his own.
He scarcely knew whether to apologize, or go on; but Miss Bonaventura apparently had no doubts. She finished with a gay little _staccato_ note which would have made her fortune at a music hall, and then turned to the accompanist with a smile which showed an absolutely flawless set of teeth. "What funny words; but I like them, and the tune too. What is it called? I should like to get it and sing it to my guardian."
Vincent, who had begun a stammering regret that he had not remembered her nationality, altered his phrase, with a sense of relief, to "You know Italian very well, I suppose, Miss Bonaventura?"
She returned to her indifference immediately. "My guardian and I speak it. He loves Italy and the Italians. He knew my grandmother there. She was a princess; but he never speaks of her, so I don"t know very much about it. Only Mother at the convent said that my guardian--"
She was off, gaily, on the childishly confidential tack again, when the sight of someone coming up the stairs made her veer towards dignity once more. "There is my guardian," she said; "he is very sorry to have kept you waiting."
Evidently this was the last bit of her lesson, for she closed the piano with great decision.
The figure which came slowly towards them was that of a very old man, yet one older, by many years, than his looks. For he was still straight, save for a slight stoop in the neck; but this, by the backward poise of the head thus made necessary to enable his brown eyes to meet all things, after their habit, squarely, if softly, gave him an air of alertness. He was dressed in an ordinary black _soutane_, but wore a fine white embroidered muslin skull-cap, such as natives wear, instead of a black one. His grey hair showed, still luxuriant, beneath it; and the wide sash of faded lilac silk, with ta.s.selled ends, which was tied in a bow about his waist, set off his still slim and still graceful figure.
"I hope my little girl has been doing the honours properly," he began, pausing a pace or two from the young men, and not offering to shake hands; but his voice was a welcome in itself, and had that nameless _cachet_ of absolute good breeding which makes offence impossible.
There was a slight hesitancy in it too, now and again, which was overcome by a look that took the listener into its confidence, and appealed for friendly forbearance--"but she is only just back from school at Calcutta, and the good nuns did not see much company, did they, Laila?" Then in an undertone of solicitude he added, in Italian, "Didst tell them, _cara mia?_--didst remember it all?"
Laila Bonaventura looked at him with a faint resentment. "I think so, guardian," she replied, in English. "Didn"t I?"
The last came with such swift, almost savage, challenge of voice and eyes, that Vincent Dering, the recipient, felt glad of the diversion caused by the arrival, through the drawing-room, of some more guests to claim the attention of the host and hostess, and so leave him in peace.
"I say, that girl has got splendid hair, hasn"t she?" he said in an undertone to Lance, as they stood a little apart, watching the new comers.
"That tall one, you mean--don"t admire it. Puts me in mind of that devil of a chestnut who nearly killed me at polo; a chestnut with white stockings; awfully handy, but--"
He paused as Father Ninian came up to them. "You can scarcely know any of your neighbours as yet, Captain Dering," began the old man with the ceremony of a past age, "so perhaps you will give me the privilege of presenting you to some of our good mission ladies."
"Thanks," replied Vincent, hastily. "But I see my old friend, Mrs.
Walsall Smith, coming in. I must just go and shake hands. But I"m sure Carlyon--"
Lance shot a perfectly pathetic glance after his Captain, who moved off to meet a delicate-looking fair woman who at that moment came in with Dr. Dillon; the latter taken possession of and monopolized by an exceedingly pretty child of five, who had evidently inherited her mother"s fragility.
"Delighted, I"m sure," murmured Lance, following his leader dejectedly.
"Miss Erda Shepherd, Mr. Lancelot--I am right, am I not--Carlyon?"
It was the tall girl with the red-brown hair, of course. She had bronze eyebrows, too, and bronze eyes--nice ones. He saw so much as he made his bow, while Father Ninian stood looking first at the girl, then at the young man; and as he looked his fine old hands were clasped as if they held something very precious. It was a habit of his.
"I hope you will like each other," he said in his kind old voice; and then, ere he moved away, his hands fell apart for an instant as if giving something. "Peace go with you, my children," he said with a smile.
Lance felt a queer, unaccustomed thrill travel from the nape of his neck to his boots, pausing by the way at his heart. It was an unusual method of introduction, certainly; yet somehow it relieved the shyness which generally beset him at such functions. He found himself looking frankly into the bronze eyes, and something in them made him say, almost involuntarily:--
"That was rather a jolly way of beginning to be friends. I mean--" The shyness came back with a rush; he blundered horribly.
"Very," put in the girl, interrupting him quite simply. "I hope it will be peace. I always hope that. You know I am a missionary."
"Oh," he replied, blankly. "Yes, there are a lot of you--I mean--of them, in Eshwara, aren"t there?"
Her face set suddenly, her mouth grew almost stern. "Not enough, Mr.
Carlyon; not half enough," she replied. And the militant ring of her voice, belying the peaceful professions of the previous moment, made him look at her curiously, recognizing that he had touched some quivering nerve of mind. "If you knew Eshwara as I know it," she went on, pa.s.sionately, "you would say so too; I"m sure you would."
The bronze eyes, meeting his blue ones, though they gave nothing back but kindly, almost boyish, surprise, seemed satisfied. She turned suddenly and stretched her right hand over the river which slipped oilily past the wall below, as they stood beside the bal.u.s.trade of the loggia. "Look!" she said, impulsively. "Do you see that straight white thing floating down the curve of the current yonder? It isn"t a log; those others are; plenty of logs come down the rivers from the forests in the hills, for they don"t catch all, you know, at the government wood-station. And so the people here catch the runaways in the backwater, and get paid for them. But that--" She paused and her other hand gripped the bal.u.s.trade hard; then she turned back to him with a faint apology. "Why should I bother you? Let us talk of something else.
There is no reason why I should talk of these things to you so soon, or, indeed, at all."
"I"d rather you did," he put in quickly. It was the truth. A sudden curiosity had come to him, a sudden desire to know more, to think more.
He was less of a boy than he had been five minutes before. "I--I hope you will," he added; "really I do--I--I--" He felt his manhood as he had never felt it before, and yet, in a way, he was more forgetful of it. The girl opposite him was womanhood incarnate to him, and yet, in some mysterious way, beyond it, above it.
"You and I must be about the same age, I expect," he said, with a half-perplexed frown, "but you have seen a lot more than I have. I wish you"d tell me, please!"
The straight white glint in the water was just disappearing behind one of those balconies overhanging the river, where there was only room for a pair of lovers.
"It is a dead girl, Mr. Carlyon," she said in a low voice. "She was in my school. Her people were very bigoted--Brahmins in a temple--but they let her be taught to read, because she was betrothed to an educated man. Last year she was married--she was but a child still--and I have only seen her once or twice since. Then"--the voice paused a second.
"She was very frightened, poor little Premi, at what was coming. "I shall die, Miss-_sahib_, I shall surely die," she said to me the very last time I saw her; so I promised--I am a medical missionary, Mr.