"No—we couldn't." There was a new gravity in Roy's tone. "As I said, she probably knows all about it. That's her way. She understandeth one's thoughts long before." The last in a lower tone—his eyes dwelling on her portrait above the mantelpiece: the one in the studio window-seat.
And Broome thought: "With all his brains, the man's hardly astir in him yet; and the boy's still in love with her. This notion may be an unconscious outlet. A healthy one—if Nevil can be got to see it that way."
After a perceptible pause, he said quietly: "Remember, Roy, just because she's unique, she can't be taken as representative. She naturally stands for India in your eyes. But no country can produce beings of her quality by the score——"
"I suppose not." Roy reluctantly shifted his gaze. "But she does represent what's best in the Indian spirit: the spirit that people over here might take more pains to understand."
"And you are peculiarly well fitted to assist them, I admit—if Father's willing to bear the cost of your trip. It's a compact between us. The snare of your A1 dinner shall not have been laid in vain!"
They sat on together for more than an hour. Then Broome departed, leaving Roy to dream—in a blue mist of tobacco smoke—the opal-tinted ego-centric dreams of one-and-twenty.
And to-night one dream eclipsed them all.
For years the germ of it had lived in him like a seed in darkness—growing with him as he grew. All incidents and impressions that struck deep had served to vitalise it: that early championship of his mother; her tales of Rajputana; his friendship with Desmond and Dyán; and, not least, his father's Ramayána pictures in the long gallery at home, that had seized his imagination in very early days, when their appeal was simply to his innate sense of colour, and the reiterate wonder and beauty of his mother's face in those moving scenes from the story of Sita—India's crown of womanhood....
Then there was the vivid memory of a room in his grandfather's house; the stately old man, with his deep voice, speaking words that he only came to understand years after; and the look in his mother's eyes, as she clapped her hands without sound, in the young fashion he loved....