"Only got back this afternoon—marvellous fine shooting—two tigers and a cheetah. I got the tigers myself—magnificent specimens. The biggest made a devilish fine fight; if it hadn't been for my mahout I mightn't be here now. Sorry to have kept you waiting."
"Not a bit of it," Compton assured him in his languid, incoherent way.
"Seems a special sort of affair. Anything up?"
Compton stroked his little moustache. There were times when the Rajah's Anglo-Saxon brevity jarred on him. Moreover, for other reasons, he felt disinclined to be communicative.
"No—nothing special," he said.
"All right. I'm ready."
For all his apparent good-humour, Rasaldû was in a sulky mood. The tiger-hunt had been the expression of an incoherent rage and sense of unforgivable humiliation which Gaya had found amusing and not at all serious. But to Rasaldû the whole matter had been serious. He had dispensed European hospitality the while retaining an entirely Oriental mentality. Sigrid Fersen had been in part his guest. Her marriage was therefore an insult and a gibe. She had made fun of him. In his own language, "she had made a fool of him." And he was not given either to forgetting or forgiving.
And now a fresh slight had been put on him. They had gone in without him. They had deprived him of that sense of grandiose arrival which was the most pleasing part of any entertainment. It made him, at least for a moment, the person of paramount importance.
His round face was therefore creased with sulkiness as he reached his place at the Comptons' table. Not even the beauty and promise of the display soothed him. Mary Compton had borrowed and been within an ace of stealing in order to produce a result which would soften the bitterest opposition. But she had counted without the Oriental character. Rasaldû merely bowed in her direction, then, before seating himself, he looked round, making the most of his moment.
Barclay sat immediately opposite him in the centre of the table, with Sigrid on his right hand. Outwardly he had borne himself coolly enough, accepting his conspicuous place of honour with an air of rather insolent ease. But below the surface the whole man had been tense, agonized, quivering with memories of past humiliations. In every glance, in every word, he read the disparagement which his instinct knew was still in arms against him. He had won. He could look down the length of the table and tell himself that these people were here to meet him, to do him honour. He could remember the hour when his hostess had left him standing in the dust of her cart-wheels. He could look at Tristram and recall that twilight scene by the temple. Best of all, there was the woman beside him. He could turn to her white, quiet face with the memory of a night when these two had watched him slink out before them like a beaten dog.