Forgetting everything else, Roshan stole softly past the sleeping Lance, and went down the stairs.
The canoe was not there.
Then Captain Dering must have taken it and gone--whither?
There was but one place whither he was likely to go alone at that hour of the night; one place, a stair like this leading up to a balcony over the river where he had gone once before with a woman, a woman in a dress which marked her for what she was, really--a dress that marked her secluded--which made this, shame unutterable!
Roshan's impotent fury rose hot at the inexpressible humiliation. The thought of Captain Dering and Laila alone in that balcony meant but one thing to his inherited ideas. No glaze of romance was possible. It was shame unutterable, irredeemable. Shame that must be revenged without delay. So, forgetting everything else in the world except this, he passed the sleeping Lance once more, hurried back to his quarters for his revolver, and only stopping to see that one chamber at least was loaded, made his way to that door which he knew would be on the latch.
That patient, eager crowd was still thronging the courtyard as he crossed it, pausing a moment beside the great gun which centred the union-jack of raised paths.
The "Teacher of Religion!"
Ay! they needed a teacher, needed a lesson; these aliens, these usurpers, these depravers of women.
Yet, in sober truth, Vincent Dering, at that moment sitting in the little balcony alone with Laila Bonaventura, felt quite virtuous. They had just come in from the garden, where they had been strolling and whispering, and now, as they sat together, without a word, scarcely a thought, in the faint light of the young moon and a red jewelled hand-lamp--which Laila, with that unfailing instinct of hers for all that matched the passionate mystery of the place, had set in a carved niche, where it looked like a votive offering to the unseen image of a saint--Vincent could feel the warm ivory of her cheek against his own, hear the soft chink of her jewels as they slid towards him, following the soft warm curves on which they lay. The red light of the lamp glittered faintly in red stars on the myriad facets of looking-glass with which the vaulted roof above them was adorned. It fell, reddening the red lights on the gold-stiffened crimson waves of her dress, that sent such a bewildering perfume to cloud his senses with passionate content.
A vast tenderness, a vast triumph, surged through him at the thought of her. Who dared to judge her by the narrow standards of to-day--she, who had gone back boldly to realities!