"You forget," came Rosamond's dreamy voice in reply, "I should not have been alive to grace Sir Arthur's pyre. My ashes would have mingled with other ashes long, long before.... Oh, I'm not so sure," she went on, again fitting a delicate hand into the sinister prints, "I am not sure that it was not a kind law in the end."
"Gracious!" cried the irrepressible Aspasia, with a shriek and a laugh. And then she whispered, all bubbling mischief, into Bethune's ear: "The poor Runkle, he is not as bad as all that, after all!"
Then, at sight of his face, she suddenly fell grave; and the two stood looking at each other. Bethune had first been startled by Lady Gerardine's look and accents even more than by the words themselves. The next moment, however, he mentally shrugged the shoulder of contempt.
Whom did she think to take in by her affectation of sensibility, this languid, self-centred creature in the midst of her chosen luxury?
Thus, when his eyes met Aspasia's, they were sad with the scorn of things, sad for the sordid trickeries of the soul of her on whom the love of his dead friend had been lavished.
Sir Arthur, with touching unconsciousness of the interlude, was once again affectionately sustaining his wife. Then, as the procession moved on once more, Baby, troubled and discomfited—she could have hardly explained why—moved childishly close to Raymond Bethune, and shivered a little.
"I am glad to be getting away from this haunted place and this uncanny country," she whispered again. "I feel sure I should have ended by making one of these dreadful natives stick a knife into me. I am always plunging in upon their feelings and offending their castes, and all the rest of it. Just look at Saif-u-din's face—Runkle's new secretary—I never saw such a glare as he threw upon us all just now. I suppose he thought we were making fun of their precious suttee!" Aspasia's idea of native distinctions was still of the vaguest.
Bethune turned the keen gaze of the conscious dominator upon the man that Aspasia had indicated with her little indiscreet finger. The red-turbaned, artistically draped figure, with the noble dusky head and the fan-shaped raven beard, was striding in their wake with a serene dignity that looked as if nothing could ever ruffle it. Had he been ruffled? Had the glare existed merely in Aspasia's imagination? While recognising a Pathan (whose contempt for the Hindoo probably exceeded Baby's own), Bethune knew that it was quite possible the irritable pride of the mountain man had taken fire at some real or fancied slight; but the betrayal could have been no more than a flash.
The Major of Guides smiled to himself. He knew his native: the man who will never give you more than an accidental peep of the bared blade in the velvet sheath—no, not till he means to strike! About this fellow, a splendid specimen of the noblest race, a creature cut out of steel and bronze, there was, he thought, a more than usual sinister hint of the wild nature under all the exquisite manner and the perfect self-restraint; and he found himself regarding him with the complacent eye of the connoisseur. The artistic lion-tamer likes his lions savage.
As he looked he wondered once and again how one so evidently a son of the warlike Pathans could have sought the pacific calling of secretary.