His Honour, and a Lady

by Sara Jeannette Duncan

“And so this is where you think His Highness comes to say his prayers?” Doyle said, smiling.

“Perhaps he has a baboo to say them for him,” she returned, as they strolled out. “That would be an ideal occupation for a baboo—to make representations on behalf of one exalted personage to another. I wonder what he asks Hanuman for! To be protected from all the evils of this life, and to wake up in the next another maharajah!”

He was so engaged with the airiness of her whimsicality and the tilt of the feather in her hat that he found no answer ready for this, and to her imagination he took the liberty of disapproving her flippancy. Afterwards she told herself that it was not a liberty—that the difference in their ages made it a right if he chose to take it—but at the moment the idea incited her to deepen his impression. She cast about her for the wherewithal to make the completest revelation of her cheaper qualities. In a crisis of candour she would show him just how audacious and superficial and trivial she could be. Women have some curious instincts.

“I am dying,” she said, with vivacity, “to see how His Highness keeps house. They say he has a golden chandelier and the prettiest harem in Bengal. And I confide to you, Mr. Doyle, that I should like a glass of simpkin—immensely. It goes to my head in the most amusing way in the middle of the afternoon.”

“His ideal young woman,” she declared to herself, “would have said ‘champagne’—no, she would have preferred tea; and she would have died rather than mention the harem.”

But it must be confessed that Philip Doyle was more occupied for the moment with the curve of her lips than with anything that came out of them, except in so far that everything she said seemed to place him more definitely at a distance.

“I’m afraid,” he returned, “that the ladies are all under double lock and key for the occasion, but there ought to be no difficulty about the champagne and the chandelier.”

At that moment Colonel Daye’s tall grey hat came into view, threading the turbaned crowd in obvious quest. Rhoda did not see it, and Doyle immediately found a short cut to the house which avoided the encounter. He had suddenly remembered several things that he wanted to say. They climbed a flight of marble stairs covered with some dirty yards of matting, and found themselves almost alone in the Maharajah’s drawing-room. The Viceroy had partaken of an ice and gone down again, taking the occasion with him; and the long table at the end of the room was almost as heavily laden as when the confectioner had set it forth.

“A little pink cake in a paper boat, please,” she commanded, “with jam inside”; and then, as Doyle went for it, she sat down on one of Pattore’s big brocaded sofas, and crossed her pretty feet, and looked at the chromolithographs of the Prince and Princess of Wales askew upon the wall, and wondered why she was making a fool of herself.

“I’ve brought you a cup of coffee: do you mind?” he asked, coming back with it. “His Highness’ intentions are excellent, but the source of his supplies is obscure. I tried the champagne,” he added apologetically: “it’s unspeakable!”