"I feel as if I had this moment arrived," said Muriel Smith, as she looked down into the garden from a balcony which jutted out upon one side of the wide flight of marble steps that led upwards to the loggia of the palace. "Yet I know I've been here for hours. I wonder when the sheer beauty will cease to--to take my breath away. You understand, don't you?"
"Yes!" assented Vincent Dering, half grudgingly. He would rather not have understood more than others. But he did; that was the worst of it.
He was looking his best in the old cavalry uniform of grey, and silver, and cherry colour, all laced, embroidered, and glittering with epaulettes, sabretasche, and high stock,--the uniform of a hundred years ago, when adventurers ruled half India, and Englishmen were demi-gods. It seemed to have brought something of their pride and recklessness, something of the dreams they dreamt into his whole bearing, as he stood leaning over the balustrade gazing fixedly at the scene before him. It was beautiful indeed! Beautiful with that unearthly stillness which only comes to illuminations in a windless Indian night. The lines on lines, the curves on curves of tiny lights which outlined each pillar and arch, each buttress and recess of the palace, the battlemented wall of the garden, and the turreted town rising above it, were steady as the stars. The fine fret of the acacia trees, showing white against the purple of the sky, was still as if carved in stone. There was no flicker in the soft radiance, which made the solid marble seem translucent, illumined mysteriously from within.
The very shadows slept. Such scented shadows, clinging to the burnished orange trees, hidden in the wilderness of roses, dreaming on the perfumed cushions of the quaint balconies and cupolas which overhung the river.
But it did not sleep. It moved, sliding on and on ceaselessly.
So did the water which dimpled and tinkled--after Heaven only knew how many sad years of silence and decorum--over the fretted marble water-slides.
How it laughed and babbled to the cunning coloured lights placed behind it! And the fountains below, rising out of the water-maze,--where there was but room for the flying feet of a laughing girl on the marble ledges between the lotus-leaves,--laughed and tinkled, also, as they sent showers of diamonds back on the pale blossoms.
The "jewel in the lotus" indeed!
There was no colour to be seen anywhere. Only that soft, steady, white radiance, those soft, sleeping, black shadows. Except in the drifting water-maze, and the drifting men and women around it.
Restless, both of them; going on and on. Whither, and wherefore? It was an idle question, Vincent told himself, if the move brought, as it did here, fresh laughter, fresh colour.