“Still I hope he won’t bring ’em here. We want no more British troops in Khemistan, Mrs Ambrose. When we came here three years ago it was doing one injustice in order to do another. We wanted to use Khemistan as a stepping-stone to get at Ethiopia, and when we had done it we refused to go away. We forced a treaty upon the Khans, and we kept this place. Do you wonder that the sight of more redcoats would convince ’em that we meant to take the whole country?”
“I’m crushed! I’m crushed!” she held up her hands suppliantly. “But please, I don’t want to take the whole country—nor any of it, except perhaps a paddock big enough to put up some jumps in.”
“How can you be so childish, my dear?” demanded her husband impatiently, but Colonel Bayard bent his head with a deferential gesture.
“No, my dear Ambrose, I am justly rebuked. As Mrs Ambrose sees, I am liable to grow improperly warm on this subject. But she will pardon me when she learns the nature of my charge here. I stand as guardian, ma’am, to the entire ruling family, and I swear I love ’em as if they were my own children.”
“The whole lot of ’em—from frowsy old Gul Ali down to little fat Hafiz-Ullah,” assented Richard.
“Your husband may laugh at me, ma’am, but I swear he values the friendship of my dear Khans as much as I do.”
“Do I? Well, you know my opinion,” said Ambrose dispassionately. “Good sportsmen, most of ’em, but precious tough customers.”
“Only where they have been wrongly handled——” and off the two men went again into a discussion of the character, public and private, of the Khans of Khemistan. The house seemed to present a bewildering complexity of uncles and brothers and nephews, but Eveleen gathered that Gul Ali Khan, the eldest brother—or uncle?—was the acknowledged head of a confederacy of rulers, though the position would not necessarily descend to his children, but to the eldest male member of the family who happened to be alive at his death. The arrangement seemed to have its temptations for enterprising young Khans not overburdened with scruples, and Colonel Bayard was persuaded that on Gul Ali’s death there would be a tussle for the chiefship between his brother, Shahbaz Khan, and his son, Karimdâd. But when he had reached this interesting point, he suddenly awoke again to Eveleen’s presence. “My dear Mrs Ambrose, you must be bored to death! Pardon me.”
“I love listening to it,” she assured him truthfully, but she rose and collected handkerchief and fan. If only he would disregard her presence as completely as he did that of the silent statuesque servants behind the chairs, how much she might learn of this new life to which she had come! There was a touch of reproach in her manner as she passed him, and he saw it. Mrs Ambrose interested him. What could be the reason of the evident coolness between her and her husband? he asked himself, as he looked after the graceful figure with its pale draperies, and the crown of dark hair, insecurely fastened, as it appeared, with a high Spanish comb.
“What can it be?” he wondered as he returned slowly to his place, remembering the obvious wrath and disquiet with which Richard Ambrose had asked for leave to Bombay on urgent private affairs, and the embarrassment with which he had requested permission to bring his wife back with him if necessary. “Quite a suitable age for Ambrose—I was afraid he might have got caught by a schoolgirl; and must have been uncommonly pretty a few years ago—is so now, indeed. Most elegant woman, and very agreeable—really charming manners—and fond of him——”