Although Travers lost no time in setting to work on the task of calling a new and suitable club-house into existence, he realized immediately that, do what he would, he could not hope for completion before the lapse of a considerable time, and this period of waiting did not suit his plans. Already on the day after the Rajah's reception he had arranged for a return of hospitality which was to take place in his own grounds and to be on an unusually magnificent scale. The European population of Marut shrugged its shoulders as it saw the preparations, and observed that if Travers had been as generous in the first place there would never have been any need to have sought for support from a foreign quarter—at which criticism Travers merely smiled. The club-house was, after all, only a means to a very much more important end of his own.
Rajah Nehal Singh of course accepted the invitation sent him, and scarcely a week passed before the eventful evening arrived toward which more than one looked forward with eager anticipation—not least Mrs. Cary, who saw in every large entertainment a fresh opportunity for Beatrice to carry out her own particular campaign. It was therefore, as Mrs. Cary angrily declared, a fresh dispensation of an unfriendly Providence that on the very same day Beatrice fell ill. What malady had her in its clutches was more than her distracted and aggrieved mother could say. She sat before her writing-table, playing idly with a curiously cut stone, and appeared the picture of health. Yet she was ill—she repeated it obstinately and without variation a dozen times in response to Mrs. Cary's persistent protests.
"You don't look ill," Mrs. Cary exclaimed in exasperation as, arrayed in her newest wonder from Paris, she came to say good-by. "I can't think what's the matter with you, and you won't explain. Have you got a pain anywhere?—Have you a headache? For goodness' sake, say something, child!"
Beatrice looked at her mother calmly, and a curious mixture of bitterness and amusement crept into her expression as her eyes wandered over the bulk in mauve satin to the red face with the indignant little eyes.
"What do you want me to say?" she asked. "I can't explain pains I haven't got."
"If you haven't got any pains, then you aren't ill."
Beatrice laughed.
"That shows how ignorant you are of the human constitution, my dear mother," she said. "The worst illnesses are painless—at least, in your sense of the word."
"I am not so ignorant as not to know one thing—and that is you are simply shamming!" burst out the elder woman, with a vicious tug at her straining gloves. "Shamming just to aggravate me, too! You do it to spite me. You are a bad daughter—"
Beatrice turned round so sharply that Mrs. Cary broke off in the middle of her abuse with a gasp.