The Native Born | Page 9

and wonders. It is I who am the stranger!"
"Hush!" she said, in a voice of curious pain. "Hush! Let us go back. We must dance--whether we will or not."
He followed her without protest. The very rustle of her muslin skirts over the fallen leaves made for his ears a new and fantastic music.
Close behind them wandered the two captains, Webb and Saunders, arm in arm. At the entrance to Colonel Carmichael's Memorial Webb stopped, and, striking a match against the door, proceeded to light his cigar. The tiny flame lit up for an instant the languid patrician features.
"A cigar is one's only comfort in a dull affair like this," he remarked, as they resumed their leisurely promenade. "Awful wine, wasn't it?"
"Awful. The Colonel is beginning to put on the curb--or his lady. It's the same thing."
"It will be better when the club comes into existence," said Webb, blowing consolatory clouds of smoke into the quiet air.
"It is to be hoped so. Spunky devil, that Travers. Wonder how he means to do the trick. He knows how to pick out a pretty partner, anyhow."
"That Cary girl? Yes. Wait till the heat has dried her up, though. She'll be a scarecrow, like the rest of them. By the way, what were her people?"
"Heaven knows--something in the D.P.W., I believe. The mother was dressed in the queerest kit."
"I heard her talking about 'the gentlemen,'" remarked Webb, laughing, as they went up the steps of the bungalow together.
The Memorial was once more left to its shadows and silence. At the edge of the compound a group of natives peered through the fencing, watching and listening. Their dark faces expressed neither hatred nor admiration, nor sorrow, nor pleasure--at most, a dull wonder.
When they were tired of watching, they passed noiselessly on their way.
CHAPTER III
NEHAL SINGH
The Royal apartment was prepared for the suffocating midday heat. Heavy hangings had been pulled across the door which led on to the balcony, and only at one small aperture the sunshine ventured to pierce through and dance its golden reflection hither and thither over the marble floor. The rest was hidden in the semi-obscurity of a starlit night, which, like a transparent veil, half conceals and half reveals an untold richness and splendor.
At either side slender Moorish pillars rose to the lofty ceiling, and from their capitals winking points of light shimmered through the shadows. Fantastic designs sprang into sudden prominence on the walls, shifting with the shifting of the sunshine, and at the far end, raised by steps from the level of the floor, stood a throne, alone marked out against the darkness by its bejeweled splendor. Of other furniture there was no trace. To the left a divan formed of silken cushions had been built up for temporary use, and on this, stretched full length on his side, lay an old man whose furrowed visage appeared doubly dark and sinister beneath the dead white of his turban. His head was half supported on a pillow, and thus at his ease he watched with unblinking, unflagging attention the tall, slight figure by the doorway.
It was the Rajah himself who had let in the one point of daylight. It fell full upon his face and set into a brilliant blaze the single diamond on the nervous, muscular hand which held the curtain aside. Apparently he had forgotten his companion, and indeed everything save the scene on which his eyes rested. Beneath the balcony, like steps to a mighty altar, broad and beautiful terraces descended in stately gradations to a paradise of rare exotic flowers, whose heavy perfume came drifting up on the calm air to the very windows of the palace. This lovely chaos extended for about a mile and then ended abruptly. As though cultivated nature had suddenly broken loose from her artificial bounds, a dark jungle-forest rose up side by side with the flowers and well-kept walks, and like a black stain spread itself into the distance, swallowing up hill and valley until the eye lost itself in the haze of the horizon. Within a few hundred yards of the palace a ruined Hindu temple lifted its dome and crumbling towers into the intense blue of the sky. And on garden, jungle, and temple alike the scorching midday sun blazed down with pitiless impartiality.
For an hour the Rajah had remained watching the unchanging scene, scarcely for an instant shifting his own position. One hand rested on his hip, the other held back the curtain and supported him in a half-leaning attitude of dreamy indolence. Against the intensified darkness of the room behind him his features stood out with the distinctness of a finely cut cameo. A man of about twenty-five years, he yet seemed younger, thanks, perhaps, to his expression, which was extraordinarily untroubled.
Thought, poetic and philosophic, but