Desmond said nothing. If Roy loved him more for one quality than another, it was for his admirable gift of silence.
FOOTNOTES:
[18] Dress of honour.
CHAPTER XIV.
"Yet shall I bear in my heart this honour of the burden of pain—this gift of thine."—Rabindranath Tagore
It was the last day of the year; the last moon of the year, almost at her zenith. Of all the Christmas guests Lance alone remained; and Thea had promised him before leaving, a moonlight vision of Amber, the Sleeping Beauty of Rajasthán. The event had been delayed till now, partly because they waited on the moon; partly because they did not want it to be a promiscuous affair.
To Thea's lively imagination—and to Roy's no less—Amber was more than a mere city of ghosts and marble halls. It was a symbol of Rajput womanhood—strong and beautiful, withdrawn from the clamour of the market-place, given over to her dreams and her gods. For though kings have deserted Amber, the gods remain. There is still life in her temples and the blood of sacrifice on her altar stones. Therefore she must not be approached in the spirit of the tourist. And, emphatically, she must not be approached in a motor-car; at least so far as Thea's guests were concerned. Of course one knew she was approached by irreverent cars; also by tourists—unspeakable ones, who made contemptible jokes about 'a slump in house property.' But for these vandalisms Thea Leigh was not responsible.
Her young ones, including Captain Martin, would ride; but, because of Arúna, she and Vincent must submit to the barouche. So transparent was the girl's pleasure at being included, that Thea's heart failed her—knowing what she knew.
Roy and Lance had ridden on ahead; out through the fortified gates into the open desert, strewn with tumbled fragments of the glory that was Rajasthán. There, where courtiers had intrigued and flattered, crows held conference. On the crumbling arch of a doorway, that opened into emptiness, a vulture brooded, heavy with feeding on those who had died for lack of food. Knee-deep in the Mán Sagar Lake, grey cranes sought their meat from God; every tint and curve of them repeated in the quiet water. And there, beside a ruined shrine, two dead cactus bushes, with their stiff distorted limbs, made Roy think suddenly of two dead Germans he had come upon once—killed so swiftly that they still retained, in death, the ghastly semblance of life. Why the devil couldn't a man be rid of them? Dead Germans were not 'in the bond.'...