His intelligent delight in pictures and books commended him to Nevil; but, at twelve and a half, skating, tramping, and hockey matches held the field. Sometimes--when it was skating--Tara and Chris went with them. But they made it clear, quite unaggressively, that the real point was to go alone.

Day after day, from her window, Lilamani watched them go, across the radiant sweep of snow-covered lawn; and, for the first time, where Roy was concerned, she knew the p.r.i.c.k of jealousy,--a foretaste of the day when her love would no longer fill his life. Ashamed of her own weakness, she kept it hid--or fancied she did so; but the little stabbing ache persisted, in spite of shame and stoic resolves.

Tara and Christine also knew the horrid pang; but they knew neither shame not stoic resolves. Roy mustn't suspect, of course; but they told each other, in strictest confidence, that they hated Desmond; firmly believing they spoke the truth. So it was particularly vexatious to find that the moment he favoured them with the most casual attention, they were at his feet.

But that was their own private affair. Whether they resented, or whether they adored, the boys remained entirely unconcerned, entirely absorbed in each other. It was Desmond's opinion of them that mattered supremely to Roy; in particular--Desmond's opinion of his mother. After those first puzzling remarks and silences, Roy had held his peace; had not even shown Desmond her picture. His invitation accepted, he had simply waited, in transcendent faith, for the moment of revelation. And now he had his reward. After a prelude of mutual embarra.s.sment, Lance had succ.u.mbed frankly to Lady Sinclair's unexpected charm and her shy irresistible overtures to friendship:--so frankly, that he was able, now, to hint at his earlier perplexity.

He had seen no Indian women, he explained, except in bazaars or in service; so he couldn't quite understand, until his own mother made things clearer to him and recommended him to go and see for himself. Now he had seen--and succ.u.mbed: and Roy's very private triumph was unalloyed. Second only to that triumph, the really important outcome of their glorious Ten Days was that, with Desmond's help, Roy fought the battle of going on to Marlborough when he was twelve--and won....

It was horrid leaving them all again; but it did make a wonderful difference knowing there was Desmond at the other end; and together they would champion that doubtfully grateful victim--Chandranath. Their zeal proved superfluous. Chandranath never reappeared at St Rupert's. Perhaps his people had arrived at Desmond's conclusion, that he was not the right "jat" for an English school. In any case, his disappearance was a relief--and Roy promptly forgot all about him.

Years later--many years later--he was to remember.

After St Rupert's--Marlborough:--and just at first he hated it, as he had hated St Rupert's, though in a different fashion. Here it was not so much the longing for home, as a vague yet deepening sense that, in some vital way--not yet fully understood--he was different from his fellows But once he reached the haven of Desmond's study, the good days began in earnest. He could read and dream along his own lines. He could scribble verse or prose, when he ought to have been preparing quite other things; and the results, good or bad, went straight to his mother.

Needless to say, she found them all radiant with promise; here and there a flicker of the divine spark: and, throughout the years of transition, the locked and treasured book that held them was the sheet-anchor to which she clung, till the new Roy should be forged out of the backslidings and renewals incidental to that time of stress and becoming. What matter their young imperfections, when--for her--it was as if Roy's spirit reached out across the dividing distance and touched her own. In the days when he seemed most withdrawn, that dear illusion was her secret bread.

And all the while, subconsciously, she was drawing nearer to the given moment of religious surrender that would complete the spiritual link with husband and children. As the babies grew older, she saw, with increasing clearness, the increasing difficulty of her position.

Frankly, she had tried not to see it. Her free spirit, having reached the Reality that transcends all forms, shrank from returning to the dogmas, the limitations of a definite creed. In her eyes, it seemed a step backward. Belief in a personal G.o.d, above and beyond the Universe, was reckoned by her own faith a primitive conception; a stage on the way to that ultima Thule where the soul of man perceives its own inherent divinity, and the knower becomes the Known, as notes become music, as the river becomes the sea. It was this that troubled her logical mind and delayed decision.

But the final deciding factor--though he knew it not--was Roy. By reason of her own share in him, religion would probably mean more to him than to Nevil. For his sake--for the sake of Christine and Tara and the babies, fast sprouting into boys--she felt at last irresistibly constrained to accept, with certain mental reservations, the tenets of her husband's creed; and so qualify herself to share with them all its outward and visible forms, as already she shared its inward and spiritual grace.

The conviction sprang from no mere sentimental impulse. It was the unhurried work of years. So--when there arose the question of Roy's confirmation, and Tara's, at the same Easter-tide, conviction blossomed into decision, as simply and naturally as the bud of a flower opens to the sun. That is the supreme virtue of changes not imposed from without.

When the given moment came--the inner resolve was there.

Quite simply she spoke of it to Nevil, one evening over the studio fire.

And behold a surprise awaited her. She had rarely seen him more deeply moved. From the time of Roy's coming, he told her, he had cherished the hidden hope.

"Yet too seldom you have spoken of such things--why?" she asked, moved in her turn and amazed.

"Because from the first I made up my mind I would not have it, except in your own way and in your own time. I knew the essence of it was in you. For the rest--I preferred to wait till you were ready--Sita Devi."

"Nevil--lord of me!" She slipped to her knees beside him. "I _am_ ready.

But oh, you wicked, how _could_ I know that all the time you were caring that much in your secret heart."

He gathered her close and said not a word.

So the great matter was settled, with no outward fuss or formalities.

She would be baptized before Roy came home for the Easter holidays and his confirmation.

"But not here--not Mr Sale," she pleaded. "Let us go away quietly to London--we two. Let it be in that great Church, where first the thought was born in my heart that some day ... this might be."

He could refuse her nothing. Jeffrey might feel aggrieved when he knew.

But after all--this was their own affair. Time enough afterwards to let in the world and its thronging notes of exclamation.

Roy was told when he came home. For imparting such intimate news, she craved the response of his living self. And if Nevil's satisfaction struck a deeper note, it was simply that Roy was very young and had always included her Hindu-ness in the natural order of things.

Wonderful days! Preparing the children, with Helen's help; preparing herself, in the quiet of her "House of G.o.ds"--a tiny room above the studio--in much the same spirit as she had prepared for the great consecration of marriage, with vigil and meditation and un.o.btrusive fasting--noted by Nevil, though he said no word.

Crowning wonder of all, that golden Easter morning of her first Communion with Roy and Tara, with Nevil and Helen:--unfolding of heart and spirit, of leaf and blossom; dual miracle of a world new made....

END OF PHASE I.

PHASE II.

THE VISIONARY GLEAM

CHAPTER I.

"Youth is lifted on Wings of his strong hope and soaring valour; for his thoughts are above riches."--PINDAR.

Oxford on a clear, still evening of June: silver reaches of Isis and Cher; meadows pied with moon daisies and clover, and the rose madder bloom of ripe gra.s.ses; the trill of unseen birds tuning up for evensong; the pa.s.sing and repa.s.sing of boats and canoes and punts, gay with cushions and summer frocks; all bathed in the level radiance that steals over earth like a presence in the last hours of a summer day....

Oxford--shrine of the oldest creeds and the newest fads--given over, for one hilarious week, to the yearly invasion of mothers and sisters and cousins, and girls that were neither; especially girls that were neither....

Two of the punts, clearly containing one party, kept close enough together for the occupants to exchange sallies of wit, or any blissful foolishness in keeping with the blissfully foolish mood of a moonlight picnic up the river in 'Commem.'

Roy Sinclair's party boasted the distinction of including one mother, Lady Despard; and one grandfather, Cuthbert Broome; and Roy himself--a slender, virile figure in flannels, and New College tie--was poling the first punt.

As in boyhood, so now, his bearing and features were Nevil incarnate.

But to the shrewd eye of Broome the last seemed subtly overlaid with the spirit of the East--a brooding stillness wrought from the clash of opposing forces within. When he laughed and talked it vanished. When he fell silent, and drifted away from his surroundings, it reappeared.

It was precisely this hidden quality, so finely balanced, that intrigued the brain of the novelist, as distinct from the heart of the G.o.dfather. Which was the real Roy? Which would prove the decisive factor at the critical corners of his destiny? To what heights would it carry him--into what abyss might it plunge him--that gleam from the ancient soul of things? Would India--and his young glorification of India--be, for him, a spark of inspiration or a stone of stumbling?

Broome had not seen much of the boy, intimately, since the New Year; and he did not need spectacles to discern some inner ferment at work. Roy was more talkative and less communicative than usual; and Broome let him talk, reading between the lines. He knew to a nicety the moment when a chance question will kill confidence--or evoke it. He suspected one of those critical corners. He also suspected one of those Indian cousins of his: delightful, both of them; but still....

The question remained, which was it--the girl or the boy?

The girl, Aruna--student at Somerville College--was reclining among vast blue and pink cushions in the bows, pensively twirling a j.a.panese parasol, one arm flung round the shoulders of her companion--a fellow-student; fair and stolid and good-humoured. Broome summed her up mentally: "Tactless but trustworthy. Anglo-Saxon to the last b.u.t.ton on her ready-made Shantung coat and the blunted toe of her white suede shoe."

Aruna--in plain English, Dawn--was quite arrestingly otherwise. Not beautiful, like Lilamani, nor quite so fair of skin; but what the face lacked in symmetry was redeemed by lively play of expression, piquante tilt of nose and chin, large eyes, velvet-dark like brown pansies. The modelling of the face--its breadth and roundness and upturned aspect--gave it a pansy-like air. Over her simple summer frock of carnation pink she wore a paler sari flecked with gold; and two ropes of coral beads enhanced the deeper coral of her full lower lip. Not yet eighteen, she was studying "pedagogy" for the benefit of her less adventurous sisters in Jaipur.

Clearly a factor to be reckoned with, this creature of girlish laughter and high purpose; a woman to the tips of her polished finger nails. Yet Broome had by no means decided that it _was_ the girl----

After Desmond--Dyan Singh: each, in his turn and type, own brother to Roy's complex soul. Broome--in no insular spirit--preferred the earlier influence. But Desmond had sped like an arrow to the Border, where his eldest brother commanded their father's old regiment; and Dyan Singh--handsome and fiery, young India at its best--reigned in his stead. The two were of the same college. Dyan, twelve months younger, looked the older by a year or more. Face and form bore the Rajput stamp of virility, of a racial pride, verging on arrogance; and the Rajput insignia of breeding--noticeably small hands and feet.

He was poling the second punt with less skill and a.s.surance than Roy.