However, the Club, representing as it did the unimportant world outside their fairy gates, occupied too small a proportion of their days for him to put his misgivings into words, and not until Digby Maur came to the Station did a certain incident drive him to her with protest-framing lips.
Digby Maur was not his real name. Everybody knew that. But whether his mother had called him Maung Man, or whether his father was truly a connection of a certain Digby St. Maur, who had retired from the country with a string of exciting letters after his name, was never, so to speak, put on paper. People said things and people winked or maintained a priggish silence. Anyhow, Somebody had manipulated the wires of State to make a Government Servant of the man who called himself Digby Maur; who had received most of his education in a type of school connected with the Missions, and whose brain, if not his character, was inherited from one who did not come forward to share the resultant fruits of it.
In appearance Digby Maur was unexpected. Tall, supple, small-boned, his skin weakly tea-coloured and with hair so black and shiny that it might have been enamelled on to his head, his eyes were fine and slanted very little under their dark brows; his mouth was weak and romantically bitter.
He was a man with a grievance, and a passionate aptitude for slashing canvas with the warm bright hues of the Eastern land to which one of his parents belonged. His talent for drawing had smoothed the way for those who had placed him in a profession where it could be exercised in moderation. The Turneresque fruits of his recreation did not concern them.
But they did concern Ferlie, to whom he showed them, and enthralled her. For her he unbandaged his secret wounds. He understood that the world in general considered his nebulous father had done the decent thing by him. What was his grouse? What more could the fellow expect? All unknown to them, and him, his paternal grandfather had achieved a great reputation as an artist before he died. As things were, his own canvases told Digby much.
"If I'd only had the chance!" he said to Ferlie. "The power is within me. I feel it. And I know that I could make my mark; perhaps found an entirely new school of painting! Japan has, long ago, evolved her own style. It has outstripped primitive India and Burma. Say you believe in me! The faith of even one human soul would be an inspiration."
"Take it," Ferlie's admiring gaze told him, fixed upon a sure, swift, impressionistic splashing of Gul Mohur trees against a faintly emerald sky. The pictures spoke to her in some subtly intimate manner; she, the unswerving huntress after all elusive beauty.
She and Digby began to hold long colour-struck conversations and, under fire of her encouragement, he neglected his office table for his easel.
To a few discerning eyes, in the modern Art Schools of England, his latent genius might have been apparent, but to the handful of earth-bound treasure-seekers in the out-stations to which Digby was ever sent, the paintings remained somewhat incomprehensible efforts at self-expression.
Ferlie glimpsed the tragedy behind them; wondered complicated things about little Thu Daw and finally submitted to sit for an impression of herself, full-length against a background of those same fiery branches of blossom.