“I don’t know why it should be. We make a good deal of show, too, though in a different way; but I doubt if we are any better than they. In fact, it is more than possible we are actually worse. But John Bull has a fine, hearty, overgrown, schoolboy contempt for anything he can’t understand, and to him the bowings and prostrations enjoined by the Moslem form of worship is sheer nonsense. For my part, I am not sure it is not even too refined for him.”
“Perhaps. I have often thought that to these people we must seem something worse than Pagans. I hardly wonder at their fanatical hatred of us.”
“Neither do I, the more so that our attitude towards them is for the most part well exemplified in the remark made to me by a fine wooden specimen of John Bull the other day coming down the Red Sea. Two or three of these travelling traders had got up on the forecastle, and were praying towards Mecca. ‘Ever see such humbug in your life?’ says this chump. I said I had, and far greater humbug; in fact, couldn’t see any humbug in the present performance at all. Oh, but it was all on the surface! How did he know that? I asked him. Oh, because they would lie and cheat and so forth. But so would nine-tenths of the English commercially engaged, I answered. Whereat he snorted, and moved off. He thought I was a fool. I knew he was one.”
“Very much so,” assented Vivien. “I detest that wooden-headedness which no amount of moving about the world will ever teach to think. And now that those two good people are through with their devotions, it is time I got home again. Oh, Meran Buksh, ghora lao!”
The syce sprang to execute this order, and in a minute Vivien’s pony was before her, ready to mount.
“Why this is the first time you have ever put me on a horse,” she said, as Campian seemed to be arranging her skirt with minute care, “and how well you did it.”
“Thanks,” he said. “There. I hope you will not have too hot a ride home. Good-bye.”
“Good-bye. You will be coming up to see us again soon, I suppose, or we shall be going to see Mrs Upward. You are going to make some stay, are you not?”
He replied in the affirmative, and, looking at her as she sat there with easy grace, he felt that never had his self-possession been in greater peril. Cool and fresh and sweet in her light blouse and riding-skirt—her glance full and serene meeting his—the flush of health mantling beneath the soft skin, she was a picture in her dark, brilliant attractiveness, framed against the background of savage rocks and ragged junipers.
“Good-bye,” was all he said.