"Yes—I should like to, Rob, but Mota must take me to wash my hands, and make myself tidy." Exit Mota, with an air of importance, solemnly leading the new lady to her own apartment, the nursery.
The supper was cold, and excellent; if "the new lady" ate little, she absorbed a good deal. The homely comfort, the good plain food (and Robert always so difficult to please, and so fastidious at home!), the bright young people, with their complete absence of self-consciousness. They carried on most of the conversation, chiefly about tennis, photographs, and the demise of the dhoby's cow. Mota offered the guest a mango, not merely off her own tree, but her own plate! Pedro gave her a vivid description of the latest college cricket match, where he had made four runs! Mallender gravely considered the little party, and the chief guest. The children were doing their utmost to entertain Daddy's friend from England—the plain middle-aged childless woman, who discoursed with painful effort, on prickly heat, punkahs, and the miseries of a journey by rail, with the thermometer at 99.
The Major was evidently upset, his nerves were on wires; he sipped an iced peg, and talked spasmodically, but was as a rule silent, and unquestionably ill at ease. Mrs. Dixon found herself still bewildered. She was not accustomed to sit at the same table with soft-voiced, distinguished ladies, who wore diamond rings, and pearls the size of peas; moreover she felt instinctively, that this unexpected visitor was the forerunner of a break-up!
Mallender had been a guest at many suppers; suppers gay, and suppers grave, but never at one that for electrical atmosphere, awkwardness, or dramatic possibilities, approached the present meal!
He observed the long stealthy glances, cast by Mrs. Rochfort, at a large coloured photograph which hung exactly opposite to her seat; the portrait of a lovely young woman, dressed in the fashion of ten years previously—the face was so vivid, and so radiantly happy, that it seemed impossible to think of the original, as lying under a flat gravestone, in Panjeverram cemetery. It was a picture of Maddalena de Rosa, the mother of the three lively children who sat at table with Sophy Rochfort and her faithless husband.
Mota—who for her age, was preternaturally sharp—had intercepted the new lady's furtive glances, and exclaimed:
"Oh—I see you are looking at the picture; it is our pretty mother; she is dead this long, long, time, before I was born"—the Major shifted uneasily in his chair, and was about to interpose, but the child chattered on in her shrill piping treble, "An old woman comes here sometimes. The ayah knows her, she is her friend, and she gives ayah money, she says, she is our great-grandmother, and brings flowers, and lays them before the picture, and cries and moans, and cracks her fingers over my head; she is very black—and——"
At this moment, Mallender with a jerk of his elbow, knocked over his tumbler and wine-glasses; the subsequent commotion, and his voluble apologies, changed the topic—and possibly saved his host from an apoplectic seizure! Immediately after this exploit, the gallant guest (determined to give no further opening for Mota's disclosures) embarked on a series of animated questions, respecting Mrs. Rochfort's celebrated "Poms"; their prizes, weight, age, and the various shows at which they had been triumphantly exhibited; his assumed enthusiasm and Mrs. Rochfort's explanations, carried them on safely, till the end of the meal.
Immediately after supper, the master of the household motored his wife back to the Madras hotel, and when he returned in the middle of the night, he found his guest still awaiting him.
"Well—it's all settled!" he began at once, "and I've to thank you. If I'd followed my own instinct, I believe I'd have thrown up the sponge and cut and run, to Australia. We propose to stay in the Hills till September, and then go home. Sophy is crazy about Mota, and intends to pass her off as the orphan of a very dear friend, no one would ever suspect the child of anything but pure English blood."