They got her out, between them; fussed over her and laughed at her; and then went off together for Roy's racquet.
She stood in the silvery sunlight watching them till they disappeared round the corner of the house. Not surprising that Nevil said—"No hurry!" If he would only wait...! He was still too young, too much in love with India—with herself. Yet, had he already begun inditing sonnets, even to the most acceptable eyebrow, her perverse heart would doubtless have known the prick of jealousy—as in Desmond's day.
Instead she suddenly knew the first insidious prick of middle age; felt dazed, for a mere moment, by the careless radiance of their youth; to them an unconsidered thing: but to those who feel it relentlessly slipping through their fingers ...
Her small fine hands clenched in unconscious response to her thought. She was nearing forty. In her own land she would be reckoned almost an old woman. But some magic in the air and way of life in this cool green England seemed to keep age at bay: and there remained within a flame-like youth of the spirit—not so easy, even for the Arch-Thief to steal away....
CHAPTER V.
| "The bow saith to the arrow, 'Thy freedom is mine.'" |
| —Rabindranath Tagore. |
And while Lilámani reasoned with the son—whose twofold nature they had themselves bestowed and inspired—Nevil was pacing his shrine of all the harmonies, heart and brain disturbed, as they had not been for years.
Out of the troubled waters of family friction and delicate adjustments, this adventurous pair had slid into a haven of peace and mutual understanding. And now behold, fresh portent of trouble arising from the dual strain in Roy—the focal point of their life and love.
Turning in his stride, his eye encountered a head and shoulders portrait of his father, Sir George Sinclair: an honest, bluff, unimaginative face: yet suddenly, arrestingly, it commanded his attention. Checking his walk, he stood regarding it: and his heart went out to the kindly old man in a quite unusual wave of sympathetic understanding. He saw himself—the "damned unsatisfactory son," Bohemian and dilettante, frankly at odds with the Sinclair tradition—now standing, more or less, in that father's shoes; his heart centred on the old place and on the boy for whom he held it in trust; and the irony of it twisted his lips into a rueful smile. By his own over-concentration on Roy, and his secret dread of the Indian obsession, he could gauge what his own father must have suffered in an aggravated form, blind as he was to any point of view save his own. And there was Roy—like himself in the twenties, but how much more purposeful!—drawn irresistibly by the lure of the horizon; a lure bristling with dangers the more insidious because they sprang from the blood in his veins.