What Doyle always told himself that he must do with regard to Miss Daye was to approach her in the vein of polished commonplace—polished because he owed it to himself, commonplace because its after effect on the nerves he found to be simpler. Realising his departure from this prescribed course, he fervently set himself down a hectoring idiot, and looked round for Colonel Daye. Colonel Daye radiated the commonplace; he was a most usual person. In his society there was not the slightest danger of saying anything embarrassing. But he was not even remotely visible.
“Believe me,” said Rhoda, with sudden divination, “we shall be lucky if we see my father again in half an hour. I am very sorry, but he really is a most unnatural parent.” There was a touch of defiance in her laugh. He should not lecture her again. “Where shall we go?”
“Have you seen the acting?”
“Yes. It’s a conversation between Rama and Shiva. Rama wears a red wig and Shiva wears a yellow one; the rest is tinsel and pink muslin. They sit on the floor and argue—that is the play. While one argues the other chews betel and looks at the audience. I’ve seen better acting,” she added demurely, “at the Corinthian Theatre.”
Doyle laughed irresistibly. Calcutta’s theatrical resources, even in the season, lend themselves to frivolous suggestion.
“I could show you the Maharajah’s private chapel, if you like,” she said.
Doyle replied that nothing could be more amusing than a Maharajah’s private chapel; and as they walked together among the rose bushes he felt every consideration, every scruple almost, slip away from him in the one desire her nearness always brought him—the desire for that kind of talk with her which should seal the right he vaguely knew was his to be acknowledged in a privacy of her soul that was barred against other people. Once or twice before he had seemed almost to win it, and by some gay little saying which rang false upon his sincerity she had driven him back. She assuredly did not seem inclined to give him an opportunity this afternoon. It must be confessed that she chattered, in that wilful, light, irrelevant way that so stimulated his desire to be upon tenderly serious terms with her, by no means as her mentor, but for his own satisfaction and delight. She chattered, with her sensitiveness alive at every point to what he should say and to what she thought she could guess he was thinking. She believed him critical, which was distressing in view of her conviction that he could never understand her—never! He belonged to an older school, to another world; his feminine ideal was probably some sister or mother, with many virtues and no opinions. He was a person to respect and admire—she did respect and she did admire him—but to expect any degree of fellowship from him was absurd. The incomprehensible thing was that this conclusion should have any soreness about it. For the moment she was not aware that this was so; her perception of it had a way of coming afterwards, when she was alone.
“Here it is,” she said, at the entrance of a little grotto made of stucco and painted to look like rock, serving no particular purpose, by the edge of an artificial lake. “And here is the shrine and the divinity!”
As a matter of fact, there was a niche in the wall, and the niche held Hanuman with his monkey face and his stolen pineapple, coy in painted plaster.
Miss Daye looked at the figure with a crisp assumption of interest. “Isn’t he amusing!” she remarked: “‘Bloomin’ idol made o’ mud’!”