"Huzoor! so it is, without doubt. The sight of a King is even as the sight of a God. It is a revelation of the Most High."
"Good Lord!" muttered Horace Alexander under his breath, yet with an amused smile. "The child will grow up a feudal serf combined with a feudal lord, if we don't take care, Muriel! He is too much with old Bisvâs--You'd better take him with you--or--or not go."
His wife did not even frown: her position was too assured in the household for her to be even alarmed. "Of course I must go. I must wear my new frocks. Besides, you forget I'm President of the Veiled-Women's-Guild, and they are going to present a casket. And there isn't room in the Hotel for Rex--I was lucky to get one for myself this morning--besides, it would be bad for him. Of course, when you were going with tents and all that it was different; but now that you've been told to stop--Really, Horace, it is most annoying! What can it mean? There is nothing wrong in the district, is there?"
Horace Alexander's eyeglass dropped again. It generally did when he was asked for a personal opinion; not from any lack of decision in the man himself, but from that habit of relying on collective as against individual thought which distinguishes so many clever men nowadays; as if the mediocre mass could ever outvalue superior sense.
"I cannot conceive that anything serious can be wrong," he began, then paused almost pathetically before the certainty that his district was admittedly the best managed in the province. "However," he continued, virtuously remembering that the communication which stopped his going to the Big Durbar was strictly confidential, "that is neither here nor there. I have my orders, so that ends it, and----" he glanced out to the verandah where the "durshan" had re-commenced--"I suppose Rex had better remain, if you think it safe. I shall be very busy----"
His wife laughed, and stooping over his chair, kissed the top of his head; it was a trifle bald.
"You dear old stupid," she said kindly. "You've nothing to do with it. I wouldn't leave him if it wasn't for old Bisvâs! You and I, Horace, have grown out of--what shall I call it--feudal relations--but we can understand them. You don't suppose I leave the boy in your charge, do you? No! My dear man! you're not up to it. But Bisvâs! Bisvâs was your grandfather's servant when he was a boy, and he swears Rex is the living image of 'Jullunder Jullunder baba,' whom, I verily believe, he mixes up with Alexander the Great! It doesn't do the child any harm, though it makes him a bit autocratic now. He'll grow out of being King at school. And really it is a pretty sight to see him with his bodyguard of those marvellous old dodderers Bisvâs rakes up from the bazaar----"
"I've seen them," replied her husband gloomily. "I'd have sent them about their business if they hadn't been old pensioners--and in uniform----"
Muriel laughed again. "Such uniforms! But they are magnificent to the child and he's magnificent to them. It's all right, Horace. He is as pleased as Punch, because I've allowed him, as he can't go to Delhi, to have a sham coronation here."
"My dear!" protested her husband; but at that moment an old-fashioned buggy, with a flea-bitten Arab in the shafts, drew up, and Mrs. Alexander discreetly withdrew before an official visitor.