"Did I, my dear?" replied her spouse. "Oh, yes! I remember you put it in my minim glass because I was working in my shirt-sleeves. Then I wanted the glass. So it got withered and the head snapped off."
Dr. Dillon laughed--his usual dry laugh. "That is one of the many tragedies which come from the delusion all women have that flowers can't be out of place."
[CHAPTER XII]
THE CHURCH MILITANT
When Roshan Khân had joined those two great stabilities, Faith and Love, into one passionate desire for Vincent Dering's damnation, he had meant to follow the English etiquette on such occasions, and keep his aspiration to himself.
But it had been impossible for him instantly to rejoin the society in which he found himself; that is, a society which shared that fundamental crime--which more even than any definite jealousy had roused his anger against Captain Dering--of being alien to his creed, his customs, his code of conduct towards women. So he had wandered off into the garden again, shadowed by old Akbar's incredulity, curiosity, and sympathy; until, partly from sheer impatience, but mostly from sheer inherited habit of employing such as Akbar Khân in anything approaching an intrigue, he had made a clean breast of the situation.
Even the latter, however, had, as it were, shied at the extreme novelty of the idea when it was first mooted; but, by degrees, its vast possibilities of advantage to faithful old retainers overpowered his abject terror at the bare idea of Father Narâyan suspecting such a thing. The old master, he told himself, was old, indeed! God only knew if he would last a year or a day; therefore it would be well to ensure the favour of the new mistress. And there could be no harm in sounding her as to what course that favour would follow. One could never tell with a woman; and his wicked, experienced old eyes had caught many a hint of Anâri Begum in Laila's childhood. Perhaps she had changed since she went to Calcutta. He could but try.
So when, on the morning after the ball, Laila, in obedience to her pious resolve to do nothing really wrong, had bidden him--with threats of vengeance if he betrayed the fact of their having come at all--remove and return certain trays of clothes and jewels which had been smuggled by someone into her room, he had fallen at her feet, confessed falsely that he was the offender, and besought her not to impose so unmerited a disgrace on his employer, who had been actuated by the ordinary rules of native etiquette which prescribed some recognition of his cousin, the head of his family.
Naturally enough, this brought the girl's curiosity, long restless, to his aid; and she sat listening to the many things he had to tell her, with that faintly mysterious smile of hers. And as she listened, she watched a pigeon, all jewelled about its bosom in rainbow hues, and with a dainty little pair of silver jingles about its jasper feet, which was coquetting and pirouetting to attract the attention of its neighbours on the wide marble sill of her latticed window. For Laila had a room in the upper storey all painted, carved, and set with little balconies, which was worthy of any king's favourite. And Father Ninian, mindful lingeringly of the fine ladies' boudoirs of his youth in Rome, had filled it, against her return from school, with all the prettiest spoils of the palace. Sèvres vases, rare old cabinets, quaint carved tables which had been brought thither for the dead Nawabs; treasures that were also, inevitably, of the king's-favourite type,--therefore unlike the owner of the room, as she sat in her white muslin frock, heavy-eyed, almost sallow, from the last night's dissipation.
"So she--my grandmother, you say--was a dancing-girl--a real dancing-girl?" Even her surprise and curiosity were listless. Yet the next moment, while Akbar was protesting the superiority of Anâri Begum over all the dancing-girls of his vast experience, she had burst into a sudden laugh, uncovered one of the trays with kicks which sent first one, then the other of her bronze slippers flying, seized on a pair of silver anklets, and there she was centring a Persian rug spread on the marble floor as if she had been born to it. Coquetting, pirouetting, with a challenging clash, a half-impudent jerk of the jingles, for all the world like the pigeon on the window-sill.