"I've told you I like you, Mr. Amber." Impulsively she extended her hand. "Good-night."
He bowed and put his lips to it; and she did not resist.
CHAPTER XIV
OVER THE WATER
Ram Nath, patient and impassive as ever, had the tonga waiting for Amber before the Residency. Exalted beyond words, the American permitted himself to be driven off through Kuttarpur's intricate network of streets and backways, toward a destination of which he knew as little as he cared. He was a guest of the State, officially domiciled at the designated house of hospitality; without especial permission, obtained through the efforts of the Resident, he could sleep in no other spot in the city or its purlieus. He was indifferent, absolutely; the matter interested him as scantily—which is to say not at all—as did the fact that an escort of troopers of the State, very well accoutred and disciplined, followed the tonga with a great jangling of steel and tumult of hoofs.
He was in that condition of semi-daze which is the not extraordinary portion of a declared lover revelling in the memory of his mistress's eyes, whose parting look has not been unkind. Upon that glance of secret understanding, signalled to him from eyes as brown as beautiful, he was building him a palace of dreams so strange, so sweet, that the mere contemplation of its unsubstantial loveliness filled him with an exquisite agony of hope, a poignant ecstasy of despair. It was too much to hope for, that she should smile upon him in the morning…. Yet he hoped.
Unconscious of the passage of time, he was roused only by the pausing of the tonga and its escort before the Gateway of the Elephants—the main octroi gate in the northern wall of the city. There ensued a brief interchange of formalities between the sergeant of his escort and the captain of the Quarter Guard. Then the tonga was permitted to pass out, and for five minutes rattled and clattered along the border of the lake, stopping finally at the rest-house.
Alighting in the compound, Amber disbursed a few rupees to the troopers, paid off Ram Nath—who was swift to drive off city-wards, in mad haste lest the gates be shut upon him for the night—and entered the bungalow. An aged, talkative, and amiable khansamah met him at the threshold with expressions of exaggerated respect, no doubt genuine enough, and followed him, a mumbling shadow, as the Virginian made a brief round of inspection.
Standing between the road and the water, the rest-house proved to be moderately spacious and clean; on the lake-front it opened upon a marble bund, or landing-stage, its lip lapped by whispering ripples of the lake. Amber went out upon this to discover, separated from him by little more than half a mile of black water, the ghostly white walls of the Raj Mahal climbing in dim majesty to the stars. A single line of white lights outlined the topmost parapet; at the water's edge a single marble entrance was aglow; between the two, towers and terraces, hanging gardens and white scarp-like walls rose in darkened confusion unimaginable—or, rather, fell like a cascade of architecture, down the hillside to the lake. A dark hive teeming with the occult life of unnumbered men and women—Salig Singh the inscrutable and strong, Naraini the mysterious, whose loveliness lived a fable in the land, and how many thousand others—living and dying, working and idling, in joy and sadness, in hatred and love, weaving forever that myriad-stranded web of intrigue which is the life of native palaces …
The Virginian remained long in rapt wondering contemplation of it, until the wind blowing across the waters had chilled him to the point of shivering; when he turned indoors to his bed. But he was to have little rest that night. The khansamah who attended him had hardly turned low his light when Amber was disturbed by the noise of an angry altercation in the compound. He arose and in dressing-gown and slippers went to investigate, and found Ram Nath in violent dispute with the sergeant of the escort—which, it appeared, had builded a fire and camped round it in the compound: a circumstance which furnished food for thought.