“Oh, Miss Wade,” she would say, clasping her hands, and looking up into Hilda's eyes with her own empty blue ones, “you ARE so funny! So original, don't you know! You never talk or think of anything like other people. I can't imagine how such ideas come up in your mind. If I were to try all day, I'm sure I should never hit upon them!” Which was so perfectly true as to be a trifle obvious.
Sir Ivor, not being interested in temples, but in steel rails, had gone on at once to his concession, or contract, or whatever else it was, on the north-east frontier, leaving his wife to follow and rejoin him in the Himalayas as soon as she had exhausted the sights of India. So, after a few dusty weeks of wear and tear on the Indian railways, we met him once more in the recesses of Nepaul, where he was busy constructing a light local line for the reigning Maharajah.
If Lady Meadowcroft had been bored at Allahabad and Ajmere, she was immensely more bored in a rough bungalow among the trackless depths of the Himalayan valleys. To anybody with eyes in his head, indeed, Toloo, where Sir Ivor had pitched his headquarters, was lovely enough to keep one interested for a twelvemonth. Snow-clad needles of rock hemmed it in on either side; great deodars rose like huge tapers on the hillsides; the plants and flowers were a joy to look at. But Lady Meadowcroft did not care for flowers which one could not wear in one's hair; and what was the good of dressing here, with no one but Ivor and Dr. Cumberledge to see one? She yawned till she was tired; then she began to grow peevish.
“Why Ivor should want to build a railway at all in this stupid, silly place,” she said, as we sat in the veranda in the cool of evening, “I'm sure I can't imagine. We MUST go somewhere. This is maddening, maddening! Miss Wade—Dr. Cumberledge—I count upon you to discover SOMETHING for me to do. If I vegetate like this, seeing nothing all day long but those eternal hills”—she clenched her little fist—“I shall go MAD with ennui.”
Hilda had a happy thought. “I have a fancy to see some of these Buddhist monasteries,” she said, smiling as one smiles at a tiresome child whom one likes in spite of everything. “You remember, I was reading that book of Mr. Simpson's on the steamer—coming out—a curious book about the Buddhist Praying Wheels; and it made me want to see one of their temples immensely. What do you say to camping out? A few weeks in the hills? It would be an adventure, at any rate.”
“Camping out?” Lady Meadowcroft exclaimed, half roused from her languor by the idea of a change. “Oh, do you think that would be fun? Should we sleep on the ground? But, wouldn't it be dreadfully, horribly uncomfortable?”
“Not half so uncomfortable as you'll find yourself here at Toloo in a few days, Emmie,” her husband put in, grimly. “The rains will soon be on, lass; and when the rains are on, by all accounts, they're precious heavy hereabouts—rare fine rains, so that a man's half-flooded out of his bed o' nights—which won't suit YOU, my lady.”
The poor little woman clasped her twitching hands in feeble agony. “Oh, Ivor, how dreadful! Is it what they call the mongoose, or monsoon, or something? But if they're so bad here, surely they'll be worse in the hills—and camping out, too—won't they?”
“Not if you go the right way to work. Ah'm told it never rains t'other side o' the hills. The mountains stop the clouds, and once you're over, you're safe enough. Only, you must take care to keep well in the Maharajah's territory. Cross the frontier t'other side into Tibet, an' they'll skin thee alive as soon as look at thee. They don't like strangers in Tibet; prejudiced against them, somehow; they pretty well skinned that young chap Landor who tried to go there a year ago.”
“But, Ivor, I don't want to be skinned alive! I'm not an eel, please!”