"All the same--making such a point of it seems like an insult--to you----"

"No, Roy. _Not_ to say that----" The flash in her eyes, that was almost anger, startled and impressed him more than any spoken word. "No thought that ever came in your father's mind could be--like insult to me. Oh, my dear, have you not sense to know that for an old English family like his, with roots down deep in English soil and history, it is not good that mixture of race should come twice over in two generations. To you--our kind of marriage appears a simple affair. You see only how close we are now, in love and understanding. You cannot imagine all the difficulties that went before. We know them--and we are proud, because they became like dust under our feet. Only to you--Dilkusha, I could tell ... a little, if you wish--for helping you to understand."

"Please tell," he said, and his hand closed on hers.

So, leaning back among her cushions--speaking very simply in the low voice that was music to his ears--she told....

The telling--fragmentary, yet vivid--lasted less than half an hour. But in that half-hour Roy gleaned a jewel of memory that the years would not dim. The very words would remain....

For Lilamani--wandering backward in fancy through the Garden of Remembrance--revealed more than she realised of the man she loved and of her own pa.s.sionate spirit, compact of fire and dew, the sublimated essence of the Eastern woman at her best.

Yet in spite of that revealing--or rather because of it--rebellion stirred afresh. And, as if divining his thoughts, she impulsively raised her hand. "Now, Roy, you must promise. Only so, I can speak to Dad and rest his mind."

Seizing her hand, he kissed it fervently.

"Darling--after all that, a mere promise would be a fatuous superfluity.

If you say 'No Indian wife,' that's enough for me. I suppose I must rest content with the high privilege of possessing an Indian mother."

Her radiant surprise was a beautiful thing to see. Leaning forward, she took his head in her hands and kissed him between his eyebrows where the caste-mark should be.

"Must it be October--so soon?" she asked.

He told her of Dyan, and she sighed. "Poor Dyan! I wonder? It is so difficult--even with the best kind--this mixing of English education and Indian life. I hope it will make no harm for those two----"

Then they started, almost like lovers; for the drooping branches rustled and Tara stood before them--a very vision of June; in her straight frock of Delphinium blue; one sh.e.l.l-pink rose in her hat and its counterpart in her waist-belt. Canvas shoes and tennis-racquet betrayed her fell design on Roy.

"Am I despritly superfluous?" she queried, smiling from one to the other.

"Quite too despritly," Roy a.s.sured her with emphasis.

She wrinkled her nose at him, so far as its delicate aquiline would permit. "Speak for yourself, spoilt boy!"

But she favoured him with her left hand, which he retained, while she stooped over the hammock and kissed Lilamani on both cheeks. Then she stood up and gently disengaged her hand.

"Christine's to blame. She guessed you were here. I came over in hopes of tennis. It's just perfect. Not too hot."

"Still more perfect in here, lazing with Mummy," said graceless Roy.

"I disown you, I am ashamed!" Lilamani rebuked him only half in jest.

"No more lazing now. I have done with you. Only you have to get me out of this."

They got her out, between them; fussed over her and laughed at her; and then went off together for Roy's racquet.

She stood in the silvery sunlight watching them till they disappeared round the corner of the house. Not surprising that Nevil said--"No hurry!" If he would only wait...! He was still too young, too much in love with India--with herself. Yet, had he already begun inditing sonnets, even to the most acceptable eyebrow, her perverse heart would doubtless have known the p.r.i.c.k of jealousy--as in Desmond's day.

Instead she suddenly knew the first insidious p.r.i.c.k of middle age; felt dazed, for a mere moment, by the careless radiance of their youth; to them an unconsidered thing: but to those who feel it relentlessly slipping through their fingers ...

Her small fine hands clenched in unconscious response to her thought.

She was nearing forty. In her own land she would be reckoned almost an old woman. But some magic in the air and way of life in this cool green England seemed to keep age at bay: and there remained within a flame-like youth of the spirit--not so easy, even for the Arch-Thief to steal away....

CHAPTER V.

"The bow saith to the arrow, 'Thy freedom is mine.'"

--RABINDRANATH TAGORE.

And while Lilamani reasoned with the son--whose twofold nature they had themselves bestowed and inspired--Nevil was pacing his shrine of all the harmonies, heart and brain disturbed, as they had not been for years.

Out of the troubled waters of family friction and delicate adjustments, this adventurous pair had slid into a haven of peace and mutual understanding. And now behold, fresh portent of trouble arising from the dual strain in Roy--the focal point of their life and love.

Turning in his stride, his eye encountered a head and shoulders portrait of his father, Sir George Sinclair: an honest, bluff, unimaginative face: yet suddenly, arrestingly, it commanded his attention. Checking his walk, he stood regarding it: and his heart went out to the kindly old man in a quite unusual wave of sympathetic understanding. He saw himself--the "d.a.m.ned unsatisfactory son," Bohemian and dilettante, frankly at odds with the Sinclair tradition--now standing, more or less, in that father's shoes; his heart centred on the old place and on the boy for whom he held it in trust; and the irony of it twisted his lips into a rueful smile. By his own over-concentration on Roy, and his secret dread of the Indian obsession, he could gauge what his own father must have suffered in an aggravated form, blind as he was to any point of view save his own. And there was Roy--like himself in the twenties, but how much more purposeful!--drawn irresistibly by the lure of the horizon; a lure bristling with dangers the more insidious because they sprang from the blood in his veins.

Yet a word of warning, spoken at the wrong moment, in the wrong tone, might be disastrously misunderstood; and the distracting sense of being purely responsible for his own trouble, stung him to renewed irritation.

All capacity for work had been dispelled by that vexatiously engaging son of his, with his heart in India and his head among the stars....

Weary of pacing, he took out his pipe and sat down in the window-seat to fill it. He was interrupted by the sound of an unmistakable footstep; and the response of his whole being justified to admiration Lilamani's a.s.surance that his hidden trouble implied no lightest reflection on herself. Lilamani and irritation simply could not co-exist within him; and he was on his feet when she opened the door.

She did not come forward at once. Pushing it shut with both hands, she stood so--a hovering question in her eyes. It recalled, with a tender pang, the earlier days of worshipful aloofness, when only by special invitation would she intimately approach her lord.

That she might guess his thought he held out his arms. "Come along--English wife!"

It had been their private pa.s.sword. But her small teeth imprisoned her lip.

"No--King of me--Indian wife: making too much trouble again!"

"Lilamani! How dare you! Come here."

His attempt at sternness took effect. In one swift rush--sari blown backward--she came: and he, smitten with self-reproach, folded her close; while she clung to him in mute pa.s.sionate response.

"Beloved," she whispered. "Not to worry any more in your secret heart. I told--he understands."

"Roy----? My darling! But _what_----?" His incoherence was a shameless admission of relief. "You couldn't--you haven't told him----?"

"Nevil, I have told him all. I saw lately this trouble in your thoughts: and to-day it came in my mind that only I could speak--could give command that--one kind of marriage must _not_ be."

He drew her closer, and she suppressed a small sigh.

"Wasn't the boy angry?"

"Only at first--on account of me. He is--so very darling, so worshipping--his foolish little Mother."

"A weakness he shares with his father," Nevil a.s.sured her: and in that whispered confession she had her reward. For after twenty-three years of marriage, the note of loverly extravagance is as rare as the note of the cuckoo in July.