"You are unkind, Mademoiselle," he answered, with the hurt sensitiveness of a snubbed child.
"I did not mean to be unkind. There are so many wonderful things in India, Rajah, that I hesitated a moment to endorse your opinion. Still—yes, it was a fine sight. You should always play polo, Rajah. It suits you better than fêting prima ballerinas in London restaurants."
He looked at her and saw that she was serious, and her seriousness mitigated the dubiousness of her compliment. He would have preferred it in the reversed sense, but he had to take what was offered him.
"I was not really alluding to myself at all," he said, naïvely, "but to the game. The game's the thing."
"Yes—and the man who plays it," she answered. She was smiling faintly, and he indulged in a flattered self-consciousness until he realized that the smile was a reminiscent one, and that she was looking through him to some invisible picture of her thoughts. Whereupon, Rasaldû hastily reverted to Mrs. Compton, whom also he feared, but in a lesser degree. Her tongue was sharp, but at least she did not attract him, and consequently her powers of offence were of a less painful order.
Sigrid Fersen did not notice his dejection. She was looking at Meredith, who at that moment had entered the awning. He still wore his clerical clothes, having come straight from the little chapel, where every afternoon he held his service. It was rare that more than one person should represent the congregation. Sometimes he managed to collect a few convert school-children, but always Anne Boucicault was there, devout and trembling, her brown eyes following his every movement with the reverence of a passionate believer in the initiated and anointed priest. That hour in the day was very dear to Owen Meredith. He believed that it was a religious ecstasy which flooded him as he listened to her low voice give the responses—or at least a pure joy in their fellowship in the one faith. He had not realized how lifeless and empty his own prayers could be without the inspiration of her presence. Now a kind of fear oppressed him—a fear of himself, a doubt in his own spiritual integrity. For this afternoon, she had failed him and he had failed himself. He had held the service, according to the law which he had made for himself, sparing no detail, but his heart had been dead. Now, as he saw her, it started to life again, to the knowledge of pain. She sat beside Colonel Boucicault, and there was that in her attitude which reminded Meredith of a frightened animal cowering under the threat of the lash. All the charm of youth had been twisted out of her by some invisible, iron-handed suffering. And without that charm, she was a drab, colourless little soul, almost ugly. But Meredith did not see that she was ugly, only that she was ill and unhappy. He thought he understood. As he came and sat beside her, she shot a quick, frightened glance at him.
"Father did not wish me to come," she said, in a hurried whisper. "He was fearfully angry about some letter——"
More she could not say. And even that much would have been dangerous, had not the man beside her been sunk in a sullen, inattentive brooding. She dared say nothing of the appalling scene which had followed on the receipt of that ominous official document, and which had left them stupefied and bruised and sick. In the final phase, Boucicault had forbidden her chapel attendance, not because he disapproved, or cared, but because he knew that she wanted to escape him. And all the afternoon he kept at her side, taking an ugly delight in her wincing, broken subservience, and in the knowledge that he held her with him in his self-created atmosphere of fear and hatred.
But Meredith believed he knew more of her pallor than she even hinted at.
"I met Ayeshi on the way here," he said. "He gave me the news. Tristram is on his way back."