The Naulahka | Page 6

would ask her not to bother her little head about him: he saw more in her than he did in real estate or politics just then he knew what he was about.
'I know,' returned Kate. 'But you forget what a delicate position you put me in. I don't want to be responsible for your defeat. Your party will say I planned it.'
Tarvin made a positive and unguarded remark about his party, to which Kate replied that if he didn't care she must; she couldn't have it said, after the election, that he had neglected his canvass for her, and that her father had won his seat in consequence.
'Of course,' she added frankly, 'I want father to go to the State legislature, and I don't want you to go, because if you win the election, he can't; but I don't want to help prevent you from getting in.'
'Don't worry about your father getting that seat, young lady!' cried Tarvin. 'If that's all you've got to lie awake about, you can sleep from now until the Three C.'s comes to Topaz. I'm going to Denver myself this fall, and you'd better make your plans to come along. Come! How would it suit you to be the speaker's wife, and live on Capitol Hill?'
Kate liked him well enough to go half credulously with him in his customary assumption that the difference between his having anything he wanted and his not having it, was the difference between his wanting it and his not wanting it.
'Nick!' she exclaimed, deriding but doubtful, 'you won't be speaker!'
'I'd undertake to be governor, if I thought the idea would fetch you. Give me a word of hope, and you'll see what I'd do!'
'No, no!' she said, shaking her head.'My governors are all Rajahs, and they live a long way from here.'
'But say, India's half the size of the United States. Which State are you going to?'
'Which----?'
'Ward, township, county, section? What's your post-office address?'
'Rhatore, in the province of Gokral Seetarun, Rajputana, India.'
'All that!' he repeated despairingly. There was a horrible definiteness about it; it almost made him believe she was going. He saw her drifting hopelessly out of his life into a land on the nether rim of the world, named out of the Arabian Nights and probably populated out of them. 'Nonsense, Kate! You're not going to try to live in any such heathen fairyland. What's it got to do with Topaz, Kate? What's it got to do with home? You can't do it, I tell you. Let them nurse themselves. Leave it to them! Or leave it to me! I'll go over myself, turn some of their pagan jewels into money, and organise a nursing corps on a plan that you shall dictate. Then we'll be married, and I'll take you out to look at my work. I'll make a go of it. Don't say they're poor. That necklace alone would fetch money enough to organise an army of nurses! If your missionary told the truth in his sermon at church the other night, it would pay the national debt. Diamonds the size of hens' eggs, yokes of pearls, coils of sapphires the girth of a man's wrist, and emeralds until you can't rest--and they hang all that around the neck of an idol, or keep it stored in a temple, and call on decent white girls to come out and help nurse them! It's what I call cheek.'
'As if money could help them! It's not that. There's no charity or kindness or pity in money, Nick; the only real help is to give yourself.'
'All right. Then give me too! I'll go along,' he said, returning to the safer humorous view.
She laughed, but stopped herself suddenly. 'You mustn't come to India, Nick. You won't do that? You won't follow me! You shan't.'
'Well, if I get a place as rajah, I don't say I wouldn't. There might be a dollar in it.'
'Nick! They wouldn't let an American be a rajah.'
It is strange that men to whom life is a joke find comfort in women to whom it is a prayer.
'They might let him run a rajah, though,' said Tarvin, undisturbed; 'and it might be the softer snap. Rajahing itself is classed extra hazardous, I think.'
'How?'
'By the accident insurance companies--double premium. None of my companies would touch the risk. They might take a vizier, though,' he added meditatively. 'They come from that Arabian Nights section, don't they?'
'Well, you are not to come,' she said definitively. 'You must keep away. Remember that.'
Tarvin got up suddenly. 'Oh, good-night! Good-night!' he cried.
He shook himself together impatiently, and waved her from him with a parting gesture of rejection and cancellation. She followed him into the passage, where he was gloomily taking his hat from its wonted peg; but he would not even let her