“I do not understand you, Mr Harley,” she said, coldly; but he noticed that she could hardly manage to contain the annoyance she felt at his cavalier manner.
“Don’t you?” he said, smiling and half closing his eyes. “As you please, most chilling and proud of beauties. What lucky men those are who find themselves allowed to bask in the sunshine of your smiles! There, that is the proper, youthful way of expressing it poetically, is it not?”
“If you wish to insult me, pray say so, Mr Harley, and I will at once leave the room,” said Helen, in a low voice, as if wishful that the Rajah should not hear her words, but making the Malay’s countenance lower as he saw the familiar way in which she was addressed.
“Insult you? All the saints and good people past and to come forbid! It is you who, after making me your slave, turn from me, the elderly beau, to listen to the voice of our dusky charmer. I don’t mind. I am going to chat and listen to little Grey Stuart. I shall be patient, because I know that some day you will return to me cloyed with conquests, and say, ‘Neil Harley, I am yours!’”
“I do not understand you,” she cried, quickly.
“Let me be explicit then,” he said, mockingly. “Some day the fair Helen will come to me and say, with her pretty hands joined together, ‘Neil Harley, I am tired of slaying men. I have been very wicked, and cruel, and coquettish. I have wounded our chaplain; I have slain red-coated officers; I have trampled a Malayan sultan beneath my feet; but I know that you have loved me through it all. Forgive me and take me; I am humble now – I am yours!’”
“Mr Harley!” she exclaimed, indignantly. “How dare you speak to me like this in my father’s house.”
As she spoke her eyes seemed to flash with anger, and he ought to have quailed before her; but he met her gaze with a calm, mastering look, and said slowly:
“Yes, you are very beautiful, and I do not wonder at your triumph in your power; but it is not love, Helen, and some day you will, as I tell you, be weary of all this adulation, and think of what I have said. I am in no hurry; and of course all this will be when you have had your reign as the most beautiful coquette in the East.”
“Mr Harley, if you were not my father’s old friend – ”
“Exactly, my dear child; old friend, who has your father’s wishes for my success with his daughter – old friend, who has known you by report since a child. I have been waiting for you, my dear, and you see I behave with all the familiarity accorded to a man of middle age.”
“Mr Harley, your words are insufferable!” said Helen, still in a low voice.
“You think so now, my dear child. But there: I have done. Don’t look so cross and indignant, or our friend the Rajah will be using his kris upon me as I go home. I can see his hand playing with it now, although he has it enveloped in the folds of his silken sarong in token of peace.”
“I beg you will go,” said Helen, contemptuously; “you are keeping the Rajah away.”
“Which would be a pity,” said the Resident, smiling. “He is a very handsome fellow, our friend Murad.”
“I have hardly heeded his looks,” said Helen, weakly; and then she flushed crimson as she saw Mr Harley’s mocking smile.
“Doosid strange, those fellows can’t come into a gentleman’s drawing-room without their skewers,” said Chumbley, coming up and overhearing the last words. “I say, Miss Perowne, you ought to have stayed and heard the doctor give us a lecture on Ophir and Solomon’s ships. Capital, wasn’t it, Hilton?”
“Really I hardly heard it,” replied the young officer, approaching Helen with a smile; and the Resident met the lady’s eye, and gave her a mocking look, as he rose and made place for the new-comer, who was welcomed warmly. “I was thinking about our hostess, and wondering how long it would be before we were to be emancipated from old customs and allowed to enter the drawing-room.”
“Yes, it is strange how we English cling to our customs, and bring them out even to such places as this,” said the lady, letting her eyes rest softly upon those of the young officer, and there allowing them to stop; but giving a quick glance the next moment at the Rajah, who, with a fixed smile upon his face, was sending lowering looks from one to the other of those who seemed to have ousted him and monopolised the lady’s attention.
“I never felt our customs so tedious as they were to-night,” said Captain Hilton, earnestly; and bending down, he began to talk in a subdued voice, while the gentlemen proceeded to discuss mercantile matters, the probability of the neighbouring Malay princess – the Inche Maida – taking to herself a lord; the latest move made by the governor; and other matters more or less interesting to the younger men.
At last Chumbley, seeing that Harley was chatting with Grey Stuart, crossed over to the doctor’s little lady, who had rather a troubled, uneasy look in her pleasant face as she watched her brother, the chaplain, hanging about as if to catch a word let drop by Helen now and then.
Volume One – Chapter Nineteen.
Signs of the Times
“Well, Mrs Bolter,” drawled Chumbley, “who’s going to carry off the prize?”
“What prize?” cried the little lady, sharply.
“The fair Helen,” said the young man, with a smile.
“You, I should say,” said Mrs Bolter, with more asperity in her tone.
“Chaff!” said Chumbley; and he went on, slowly, “Won’t do, Mrs Doctor; I’m too slow for her. She had me in silken strings for a week like a pet poodle; but I soon got tired and jealous of seeing her pet other puppies instead of me, and I was not allowed to bite them, so – ”
“Well?” said the doctor’s wife, for he had stopped.
“I snapped the string and ran away, and she has never forgiven me.”
“Harry Chumbley,” said the doctor’s wife, shaking her finger at him, “don’t you ever try to make me believe again that you are stupid, because, sir, it will not do.”
“I never pretend to be,” said the young man, with a sluggish laugh, “I’m just as I was made – good, bad and indifferent. I don’t think I’m more stupid than most men. I’m awfully lazy though – too lazy to play the idiot or the lover, or to put up with a flirting young lady’s whims; but I say, Mrs Doctor.”
“Well?” said the lady.
“I don’t want to be meddlesome, but really if I were you, being the regular methodical lady of the station, I should speak seriously to Helen Perowne about flirting with that nigger.”
“Has she been flirting with him to-night?” said the lady eagerly.
“Awfully,” said Chumbley – “hot and strong. We fellows can stand it, you know, and if we get led on and then snubbed, why it makes us a bit sore, and we growl and try to lick the place, and – there’s an end of it.”
“Yes – yes – exactly,” said the lady, thoughtfully.
“But it’s my belief,” continued Chumbley, spreading his words out so as to cover a good deal of space, while he made himself comfortable by stretching out his long legs, lowering himself back, and placing his hands under his head – a very ungraceful position, which displayed a gap between his vest and the top of his trousers – “it’s my belief, I say, that if Beauty there goes on playing with the Beast in his plaid sarong, and making his opal eyeballs roll into the idea that she cares for him, which she doesn’t a single pip – ”
“Go on, I’m listening,” said the doctor’s lady.
“All right – give me time, Mrs Bolter; but that’s about all I was going to say, only that I think if she leads him on as she is doing now there will not be an end of it. That’s all.”
“Well, busy little Grey,” said the Resident, merrily, as he seated himself beside the