“You think so now, my dear child. But there: I have done. Don’t look so cross and indignant, or our friend the Rajah will be using his kris upon me as I go home. I can see his hand playing with it now, although he has it enveloped in the folds of his silken sarong in token of peace.”
“I beg you will go,” said Helen, contemptuously; “you are keeping the Rajah away.”
“Which would be a pity,” said the Resident, smiling. “He is a very handsome fellow, our friend Murad.”
“I have hardly heeded his looks,” said Helen, weakly; and then she flushed crimson as she saw Mr Harley’s mocking smile.
“Doosid strange, those fellows can’t come into a gentleman’s drawing-room without their skewers,” said Chumbley, coming up and overhearing the last words. “I say, Miss Perowne, you ought to have stayed and heard the doctor give us a lecture on Ophir and Solomon’s ships. Capital, wasn’t it, Hilton?”
“Really I hardly heard it,” replied the young officer, approaching Helen with a smile; and the Resident met the lady’s eye, and gave her a mocking look, as he rose and made place for the new-comer, who was welcomed warmly. “I was thinking about our hostess, and wondering how long it would be before we were to be emancipated from old customs and allowed to enter the drawing-room.”
“Yes, it is strange how we English cling to our customs, and bring them out even to such places as this,” said the lady, letting her eyes rest softly upon those of the young officer, and there allowing them to stop; but giving a quick glance the next moment at the Rajah, who, with a fixed smile upon his face, was sending lowering looks from one to the other of those who seemed to have ousted him and monopolised the lady’s attention.
“I never felt our customs so tedious as they were to-night,” said Captain Hilton, earnestly; and bending down, he began to talk in a subdued voice, while the gentlemen proceeded to discuss mercantile matters, the probability of the neighbouring Malay princess—the Inche Maida—taking to herself a lord; the latest move made by the governor; and other matters more or less interesting to the younger men.
At last Chumbley, seeing that Harley was chatting with Grey Stuart, crossed over to the doctor’s little lady, who had rather a troubled, uneasy look in her pleasant face as she watched her brother, the chaplain, hanging about as if to catch a word let drop by Helen now and then.