Star of India by Alice Perrin (ereader ebook txt) 📗

with him just when she felt he most needed her care.

"We Indian mothers have always that trial to meet—separation from either husband or children, and it never seems to be taken into account by those at home who don't have to face it. Personally we were lucky in finding a nice place for Philip and Grace till they were old enough to go to school, but then the holidays were always on my mind; relations are sometimes so injudicious. Fortunately the children had character, both of them, and as my husband rose in the service I was able to come home more frequently to see them. Dear Philip was such a clever boy!"

"He is a very clever man!" quoth Miss Baker emphatically, "and how well he has got on!"

"He was always ambitious; he mapped out his own career from the very first—got a scholarship for his public school and again at Oxford, and passed very high for the Civil Service. He could have stayed at home, but he preferred to take India, and his father and I were very glad. Life in an office would not have suited him; he was a sportsman at heart as well as a student."

[Pg 296]

"No wonder you are proud of him——"

Lady Flint dropped her fan; Miss Baker picked it up, deferentially, and as she restored it Lady Flint thought the girl's hair very pretty, though it was a pity, in her opinion, that she wore it cut short. A possibility crept into her mind that was not altogether distasteful: was there likely to be "anything" between Miss Baker and her beloved son? Though Miss Baker had no connection with India beyond her brief visit to the country, she seemed a warm-hearted, sensible child, and certainly she appreciated Philip! Lady Flint was aware that Lord Redgate was a very rich man, which might be a barrier; if not of course it would be nice to feel that Philip and his wife need never be worried over money matters; in the case of Grace's marriage that had been a satisfactory element, who could deny it?—though she would not have had either of her children influenced in the least degree by worldly advantages.

She felt her way gently. "How would you like to live in India?" she inquired, and she saw the girl flush as she answered decidedly: "I should simply love it!"

"Perhaps your father will take you there again for a visit some day?"

"I went alone, you know—that time. And if I ever go again it will not be on a visit; I shall go to stay."

Lady Flint looked a little puzzled. "But what would your father say to that?"

"My father never interferes with anything I want to do."

[Pg 297]

"Dear me!" said Lady Flint.

The door opened and the men came into the room. Philip made straight for his mother and Miss Baker, who whispered hurriedly: "Lady Flint, may I come and see you?"

"Do, my dear, I am always at home on Sundays. I shall be very pleased to see you. Come next Sunday if you can." And she made a mental note to keep Philip at home next Sunday afternoon. If the two young people were mutually attracted she would help on the courtship to the best of her powers; but she rather wished Miss Baker were not a rich man's daughter, and not an Honourable—it would mean that Philip, like Grace, might be absorbed into a world she did not understand.

"I have been hearing all about you!" exclaimed Dorothy, looking up at Philip as he stood beside them. "How tiresome and naughty you were, and how you wouldn't work, and gave such a lot of trouble after you grew up!"

They all laughed, and Philip glanced affectionately at his mother, a glance that endeared him the more to the long-limbed girl in the green gown....

Then a well-known pianist who was of the party consented to play, and silence was enforced on the audience. Once at the piano the musician continued to give unlimited samples of his own compositions, and Philip, though he thought the fellow made an unconscionable noise, welcomed the respite from conversation. Again he felt depressed, inert, unreasonably impatient with the well-fed, well-dressed throng that had met together merely to eat and drink[Pg 298] and to impress each other with their own importance. They were all so self-satisfied in their several ways! He made up his mind that he would get away from London as soon as he could do so without hurting his parents' feelings; go somewhere to fish by himself; he had no use for crowds like this.

"You will come and see us?" repeated Miss Baker when at last farewells became general. "Come and dine quite quietly, just ourselves. When will you come?"

He could hardly plead a press of engagements, yet he was seized with the reluctance to tie himself that so often attacks the newly returned Anglo-Indian; everyone was in such a hurry at home, he wanted to feel free, but evasion was impossible, and a near date was decided upon.

Going home with his father and mother in the hired brougham he said: "I wonder how Grace can stick that kind of life!"

"So do I," agreed the General.

"But her friends are all so clever," protested Lady Flint; she had never before felt so well disposed towards Grace's world; "and most of them do something."

"Nothing that really matters, except the doctor lot," growled Sir Philip, puffing at one of his son-in-law's excellent cigars. "Upon my word, I felt thankful I was a bit deaf when that music master, or whatever he calls himself, began hammering on the piano. And as for that fellow Redgate—all I can say is that if he made himself, as he boasts, he made a mistake."

[Pg 299]

"Well, dear, his daughter seems a very nice girl. You think she is nice, don't you, Philip?"

Philip answered casually: "Oh, she's all right, as long as she gets her own way."

Lady Flint ventured to announce that Miss Baker was probably coming to tea on Sunday, and Sir Philip said he hoped her father was not coming too. "If he is," he added truculently, "I shall go out."

How tiresome they both were, thought poor Lady Flint; perhaps the dinner had something to do with it, certainly it had been very rich, and far too much of it. The General was sure to have eaten all the things that he knew disagreed with him, and of course Philip was not accustomed to such elaborate feasts.

[Pg 300]

CHAPTER X

Philip did not carry out his intention of leaving London as soon as escape could be accomplished without hurt to his parents' feelings. He felt as though helpless in the grip of some mysterious conspiracy that from day to day left him with hardly an hour that he could call his own.

"London is an awful place," he complained to his mother; "the smallest errand runs away with the best part of a day, buying socks and shirts for example, not to speak of boots and the tailor! Trades-people seem to take a delight in obstructing one at every turn. If you wish to buy a pair of gloves in comfort you have to be prepared to spend hours over it, what with going and coming and hunting about for what you really want!"

"Dearest boy, how you do exaggerate!" argued Lady Flint, fondly. "But I know what you mean. I always felt the same for the first month after I got home from India. Life is so different out there; plenty of space and no trouble over trifles, though one hardly calls setting oneself up in necessaries exactly a trifle anywhere. You ought to go to the dentist, too, and see a doctor, and have your eyes tested. Don't leave all that to the end of your leave, or the last month will be worse than the first. And your father thinks you ought to attend a levee."

"My teeth are all right, I'm not ill, and I can[Pg 301] see perfectly well; also I am not going to attend a levee," he assured her firmly; he could not have explained his condition of mind to his mother even had he desired to do so; he could hardly account for it to himself. He felt restless and listless at the same time; he hated the crowds in the streets and the shops, the appointments to see relations that his mother cajoled him into making, the little luncheons and teas with aunts and cousins who were all so much more delighted to see him than he was to see them; and Grace was a nuisance; she dragged him hither and thither, tied him down to engagements without his permission, told him, when he protested, that he wanted "waking up." Miss Baker, to his surprise, was ever ready to aid and abet Grace in making up theatre and supper parties—always something—Sandown, Ranelagh, the Park, endless "tamashas"; Miss Baker appeared to have forgotten all her unworldly theories, and to be as keen on gaiety as the rest of them; and wherever they went he found himself at her side. Philip began to suspect his sister of match-making; the suspicion became a certainty one evening when he had accompanied her unwillingly to a great "crush" in Carlton House Terrace, which, to him, was just a kaleidoscope of colour and jewels, and a pushing, chattering throng.

The blaze of light, the crowd, and the scents, and the closeness of the atmosphere, despite blocks of ice and electric fans, confused and depressed him; he stood moody and resentful as Grace greeted her friends, kept introducing him: "My brother from India," and he had to listen and reply to vapid[Pg 302] remarks about heat and snakes, and how interesting it must be to live in India, and so on; till at length, in desperation, he interrupted a conversation his sister was holding with a being whose coat-front was bespattered with orders, to tell her he meant to go home.

"This is more than I can stand," he said with suppressed impatience; "I'm off!"

"Oh, Philip, do wait; Dorothy is sure to be here presently, and then you'll be all right." Her eyes roved round the brilliant scene. "She was to meet us here, you know. You can't disappoint her."

"She won't be disappointed."

"Of course she will be. Philip," she added, with serious intention, "don't be a fool!"

"What do you mean?" he began hotly, but just then they were swept asunder by new arrivals, and as he turned to flee he encountered Miss Baker at the head of the stairs. He felt that a web was being woven around him; now he understood what they were all driving at—Grace, and his mother, and yes, Dorothy herself!—for as he met her eyes shining with welcome he realised that she, with everyone else, awaited but one outcome of their friendship. How blind he had been; he cursed his own denseness.

As a matter of course she attached herself to him. "Where shall we go? It's too early for supper, and I don't feel inclined to sit and listen to music. Let's find some comfortable corner where we can talk in peace."

[Pg 303]

"I am making for a comfortable corner farther away," he said petulantly; "I'm going home!"

"Oh!" her dismay was patent, "and when I've only just come? I've got something to tell you, something thrilling! Look here, I know this house well. Come along, follow me!"

What else could he do? Morosely he followed her, feeling rather as if he were walking in his sleep, through a door, along a passage, up a few steps, and they were alone in a pretty boudoir that was cool and quiet, fragrant with flowers, away from the crowd and the noise.

"Now we are safe! Give me a cigarette." Dorothy settled herself in a deep chair; the gleam of her hair against a pile of purple cushions, her long white arms and slender outline presented a striking picture, as Philip could not but note as he stood before her on the hearthrug. Had it not been for the disturbing idea that had taken definite shape in his mind this evening he would have felt soothed, contented, very much at home with her. As it was, he began to distrust his own powers of resistance. Either he must get out of London at once, or he would be forced seriously to consider the question of asking Lord Redgate's daughter to be his wife. If, as he could not help assuming, she expected him to propose to her sooner or later, opposition from her father was not to be anticipated. Dorothy would have her own way—given the chance. The fact that he was now actually contemplating the possibility startled him. What a mean brute he must be! He