His thoughts ran again on Rahas.
Dicky glanced round the lawn.
“He isn’t about now,” he said carelessly. “He’s a little dried-up German with dyed hair and moustache; seventy, if he’s a day.”
“Did you ever meet here a man named Rahas?”
“Rahas! Oh, yes. He’s a sort of commission agent, who gets any Indian thing you want, from a pound of Assam tea to an elephant. Why, you know him, of course; for he lived in the same house with Mrs. Lauriston before you married her,” rattled on Dicky, encouraged by George’s lenity.
“Does he ever speak of her—my wife?”
“No, he won’t. I began to chaff him once; only a harmless word or two,” he went on hastily, seeing a change in his companion’s face, “And he—well, he got all sorts of dark colours, and his eyes spat fire. I think he once went in for being a sort of rival, you know—at least, I mean before you knew her.”
“Have you seen him to-day?”
“Yes, I think he’s talking to Chl—the Princess—now somewhere. No, by Jove, here she is.”
From where they were standing in the verandah they could hear the rustle of the silver fringe, and the tipity-tap of high-heeled shoes on the polished floor. She was a little woman, this famous personage, though it was only by comparison that you could discover the fact; for she bore herself with the easy dignity of a queen, and before he saw more of her than a golden head and a robe of buttercup silk peeping between draperies of black lace, he knew without debate that he had seen so much grace of movement in no English woman, and only in one who was not English. As she advanced through the long room in a very leisurely manner, a couple of spaniels playing about her feet, a painted fan in her hands, he found that he was waiting for her near approach with something stronger than curiosity. First his involuntary admiration of her carriage was changed suddenly, without warning or definite thought, into a sick disgust that grew, with the next few steps she took, into horror equally without cause, without explanation. Then his blood stood still, hot and fiery, in his veins, and seemed to be scorching his body, as the horror became in a moment a definite, devilish dread, so ghastly that the mind refused it as a thought, and the lips were paralysed and could give it no vent. When at last she reached the open window, and the mild evening light showed him her face without disguise, he saw nothing but the outline he had seen in silhouette against the window in his own house on the day he and Nouna entered it.