As he was thinking about these things, Hoosanee came to meet him with a message from the English ladies. They had sent to know if his Excellency the rajah would do them the honour of joining them at their evening meal. He smiled at the punctiliousness of the invitation, answered it with a ready assent, and, about half-an-hour later, found himself on the marble staircase that led up to the pillared hall of the zenana.
A little to his surprise, he saw that the hall was empty, and he was about to throw himself down on one of the settees and wait, when a murmur of voices from the daïs, which was hidden by a screen of palms and lilies from the body of the hall, attracted his attention. He went on to the foot of the steps that led up to it, and there stopped for a moment, half paralysed with surprise. As a picture nothing could have been more beautiful and striking than the scene upon which his eyes rested. The ladies were to dine on the daïs, and the centre of its space was occupied by a table, where flowers and rich tropical fruits and sweetmeats, with sparkling glass and silver, were laid out on snowy linen. At the head of the table, on a low couch, draped with embroidered stuffs, a figure that seemed to concentrate upon itself all the light in the room was reclining. It was that of a woman, dressed in a loose robe of white and gold. Her head, from which the veil had fallen back, was propped up on a little hand, so delicate in its blue-veined transparency that the burden seemed to be too heavy for it; her pale face, overspread at this moment by a faint tinge of colour, looked out from its halo of golden hair, with the purity and stillness of a saint in a mediæval altar-piece, and her lips were moving in low, impassioned words that throbbed through the silence like a prayer. Meanwhile, at a little distance from the couch, his large hands with their curiously knotted joints clasped round his knees, and his dark, strongly-marked face lit by deep eyes which shone with a dreamy light turned meditatively towards hers, sat a figure so different that it might have been placed there for a foil.
But it was not this that made the half-unconscious watcher start and pause, and feel, for a moment, as if his senses had been playing him a trick. It was that in the difference there was a likeness. In the solemn fire that seemed to kindle these two faces, in their meditativeness, in their dreamy enthusiasm, there was something which brought them together. Vishnugupta, the proud Indian mystic, and the simple English girl who had looked the King of Terrors in the face, and, for the sake of another, had vanquished him, met that night on a common ground of sympathy.
"Then by strange art she kneaded fire and snow
Together, tempering the repugnant mass
With liquid love——"
The words sprang to his mind as he gazed. He went forward, and the spell was broken. Grace looked up, gave a little start, as if she had just awoke from a dream, and held out her hand with a radiant smile of welcome.
Vishnugupta rose, bent his head with the proud humility of the Brahmin, drew his robe about his head, and, making answer neither by word nor sign to the rajah's entreaty that he would stay for a little while, passed slowly out of the apartment.
The priest had scarcely gone before there came a flutter of garments and a gay noise of laughter and voices in eager conversation from behind the screen that separated the hall and the sleeping-rooms. Then Lucy's little saucy face appeared above the palisade that bordered the daïs.
'Has he gone?' she whispered.
'Do you mean Vishnugupta?' said Tom, laughing at her mysterious expression.