Farrell, on the point of entering the house, overheard and turned. "Is that so? Why, I thought that gateway was in Kathiapur."
"I've heard of a Gateway of Swords in Kathiapur," Raikes admitted.
"Never been there, myself."
"Kathiapur?"
"A dead city, Mr. Amber, not far away—originally the capital of Khandawar. It's over there in the hills to the north, somewhere. Old Rao Rutton, founder of the old dynasty, got tired of the place and caused it to be depopulated, building Kuttarpur in its stead—I believe, to commemorate some victory or other. That sort of thing used to be quite the fashion in India, before we came." Raikes fell back, giving Amber precedence as they entered the Residency. "By the way, remind me, if you think of it, Colonel Farrell, to get after the telegraph-clerk to-morrow. There's a new man in charge—a Bengali babu—and I presume he's about as worthless as the run of his kind."
Amber made a careful note of this information; he was curious about that babu.
In the drawing-room Raikes and Farrell impressed Clarkson for three-handed Bridge. Sophia did not care to play and Amber was ignorant of the game—a defect in his social education which he found no cause to regret, since it left him in undisputed attendance upon the girl.
She had seated herself at a warped and discouraged piano, for which Raikes had already apologised; it was, he said, a legacy from a former Resident. For years its yellow keys had not known a woman's touch such as that to which they now responded with thin, cracked voices; the girl's fine, slender fingers wrung from them a plaintive, pathetic parody of melody. Amber stood over her with his arms folded on the top of the instrument, comfortably unconscious that his pose was copied from any number of sentimental photogravures and "art photographs." His temper was sentimental enough, for that matter; the woman was very sweet and beautiful in his eyes as she sat with her white, round arms flashing over the keyboard, her head bowed and her face a little averted, the long lashes low upon her cheeks and tremulous with a fathomless emotion. It was his thought that his time was momentarily becoming shorter, and that just now, more than ever, she was very distant from his arms, something inaccessible, too rare and delicate and fine for the rude possession of him who sighed for his own unworthiness.
Abruptly she brought both hands down upon the keys, educing a jangled, startled crash from the tortured wires, and swinging round, glanced up at Amber with quaint mirth trembling behind the veil of moisture in her misty eyes.
"India!" she cried, with a broken laugh: "India epitomised: a homesick, exiled woman trying to drag a song of Home from the broken heart of a crippled piano! That is an Englishwoman's India: it's our life, ever to strive and struggle and contrive to piece together out of makeshift odds and ends the atmosphere of Home!… It's suffocating in here. Come." She rose with a quick shrug of impatience, and led the way back to the gardens.
The table had been removed together with the chairs and candles; nothing remained to remind them of the hour just gone. The walks were clear of servants. Their only light came from the high arch of stars smitten to its zenith with pale, quivering waves of light from the moon invisible behind the hills. Below them the city hummed like a disturbed beehive. Somewhere afar a gentle hand was sweeping the strings of a zitar, sounding weird, sad chords. The perfumed languor of the night weighed heavily upon the senses, like the woven witchery of some age-old enchantment….