“But there must be. We don’t live in tents, do we?”
“We live in mud huts,” Bruce said softly, “and live on goat.”
“But roast kid is perfect. Daddy and I particularly like it.”
“In Sumnee it is—imperfect,” Bruce remarked grimly.
But though they railed, Lucilla Crespin caught a warm undercurrent of affection, of pleasant memories and zesty anticipations in the raillery. Every woman owns to liking India greatly; most men pose as disliking it—while they are there; but ask the Anglo-Indian “home now for good,” when you run across him in the Strand, just there at Charing Cross where we all meet each other sooner or later—and he’ll tell you, if he’s English-honest, that he is homesick for India, rains, droughts, natives and all; and watch the face of the long-service Anglo-Indian going home for the last time, going home to inheritance, increased fortune and ease perhaps—watch his face and his eyes as the P. and O. or troop-ship pulls off from Bombay or Madras or down the Hugli, and he takes his long last look at the sweltering East! You will not need to ask him.
They were having afternoon tea on deck, Malta two days behind them—the sun-awnings were up now, and ices were served at eleven and three—and Crespin said as he held his cup up for her to fill it again, “Never mind, Lu, you shall have a garden of sorts, and these blighters shall dig it, while you and I sit under the veranda punkah and eat mango-ices and stone-cold pumelos. You shall have all the comfy home things, every one of them. And perhaps you won’t quite hate poor old rotten Sumnee. I shall like Sumnee now.”
“You, you lucky beggar—of course you will. Who wouldn’t, in your shoes?” Bruce grumbled. “But perhaps we’ll like it better too—now—” he added more cheerfully. “And we’ll teach you how to play parlor polo, and how to make toothsome chupatties out of mud and cocoanut fat, and how to eat mangoes without a bib on, and, if you’ll let us, come to tea every day, and tiffin on Sundays, and dinner quite often, we’ll give you curly daggers and beetle-work lace curtains and bunches of cactus dahlias and crushed torquoise things from the Vale of Kashmir, Lucknow enamels—fish-pattern ones, Bokhara cloths, Poona trays, Benares brass-work, Deccan snakes (tin, not live ones) and peacock-feather fans, thousands and thousands of peacock feathers, painted leather Bikanir vases and glass bangles, and tin toe-rings to make your drawing-room beautiful.”
“But, you mustn’t,” Lucilla Crespin told him firmly. “I intend our home to be absolutely English. There shall not be even one thing in it that isn’t quite English, not one that hasn’t come from home.”
“Right-o!” Bruce consented. “We’ll forgive you, so long as you ask us to tea every day and tiffin on Sundays, and dinner very often. And you and I will sit on the veranda under the punkah, and eat mango-ices and chilled pumelos, while Crespin and Crossland dig your garden and swear at each other.”
“I shall not have a punkah,” Mrs. Crespin said severely. “I shall have nothing, I tell you, that we do not have at home. Our home is going to be an English home.”