_ PHASE II. THE VISIONARY GLEAM
CHAPTER V
"The bow saith to the arrow, 'Thy freedom is mine.'"
--RABINDRANATH TAGORE.
And while Lilamani reasoned with the son--whose twofold nature they had themselves bestowed and inspired--Nevil was pacing his shrine of all the harmonies, heart and brain disturbed, as they had not been for years.
Out of the troubled waters of family friction and delicate adjustments, this adventurous pair had slid into a haven of peace and mutual understanding. And now behold, fresh portent of trouble arising from the dual strain in Roy--the focal point of their life and love.
Turning in his stride, his eye encountered a head and shoulders portrait of his father, Sir George Sinclair: an honest, bluff, unimaginative face: yet suddenly, arrestingly, it commanded his attention. Checking his walk, he stood regarding it: and his heart went out to the kindly old man in a quite unusual wave of sympathetic understanding. He saw himself--the "damned unsatisfactory son," Bohemian and dilettante, frankly at odds with the Sinclair tradition--now standing, more or less, in that father's shoes; his heart centred on the old place and on the boy for whom he held it in trust; and the irony of it twisted his lips into a rueful smile. By his own over-concentration on Roy, and his secret dread of the Indian obsession, he could gauge what his own father must have suffered in an aggravated form, blind as he was to any point of view save his own. And there was Roy--like himself in the twenties, but how much more purposeful!--drawn irresistibly by the lure of the horizon; a lure bristling with dangers the more insidious because they sprang from the blood in his veins.
Yet a word of warning, spoken at the wrong moment, in the wrong tone, might be disastrously misunderstood; and the distracting sense of being purely responsible for his own trouble, stung him to renewed irritation. All capacity for work had been dispelled by that vexatiously engaging son of his, with his heart in India and his head among the stars....
Weary of pacing, he took out his pipe and sat down in the window-seat to fill it. He was interrupted by the sound of an unmistakable footstep; and the response of his whole being justified to admiration Lilamani's assurance that his hidden trouble implied no lightest reflection on herself. Lilamani and irritation simply could not co-exist within him; and he was on his feet when she opened the door.
She did not come forward at once. Pushing it shut with both hands, she stood so--a hovering question in her eyes. It recalled, with a tender pang, the earlier days of worshipful aloofness, when only by special invitation would she intimately approach her lord.
That she might guess his thought he held out his arms. "Come along--English wife!"
It had been their private password. But her small teeth imprisoned her lip.
"No--King of me--Indian wife: making too much trouble again!"
"Lilamani! How dare you! Come here."
His attempt at sternness took effect. In one swift rush--sari blown backward--she came: and he, smitten with self-reproach, folded her close; while she clung to him in mute passionate response.
"Beloved," she whispered. "Not to worry any more in your secret heart. I told--he understands."
"Roy----? My darling! But
what----?" His incoherence was a shameless admission of relief. "You couldn't--you haven't told him----?"
"Nevil, I have told him all. I saw lately this trouble in your thoughts: and to-day it came in my mind that only I could speak--could give command that--one kind of marriage must
not be."
He drew her closer, and she suppressed a small sigh.
"Wasn't the boy angry?"
"Only at first--on account of me. He is--so very darling, so worshipping--his foolish little Mother."
"A weakness he shares with his father," Nevil assured her: and in that whispered confession she had her reward. For after twenty-three years of marriage, the note of loverly extravagance is as rare as the note of the cuckoo in July.
"Sit, little woman." He drew her down to the window-seat, keeping an arm round her. "The relief it is to feel I can talk it all over with you freely. Where the dickens would we be, Roy and I, without our interpreter? And she does it all unbeknownst; like a Brownie. I
have been worrying lately. The boy's clean gone on his blessed idea. No reasoning with him; and the modern father doesn't venture to command! It's as much as his place is worth! Yet
we see the hidden dangers clearer than he can. Wouldn't it be wiser to apply the curb discreetly before he slips off into an atmosphere where all the influences will tug one way?"
It was the sane masculine wisdom of the West. But hers--that was feminine and of the East--went deeper.
"Perhaps it is mother-weakness," she said, leaning against him and looking away at a purple cloud that hung low over the moor. "But it seems to me, by putting on the curb, you keep only his body from those influences. They would tug all the stronger in his soul. Not healthy and alive with joy of action, but cramped up and aching, like your legs when there is no room to stretch them. Then there would come impatience, turning his heart more to India, more away from you. Father had that kind of thwarting when young--so I know. Dearest one, am I too foolish?"
"You are my Wisest of Wise.--Is there more?"
"Yes. It is this. Perhaps, through being young and eager, he will make mistakes; wander too far. But even if he should wander to farthest end, all influence will
not tug one way. He will carry in his heart the star of you and the star of me. These will shine brighter if he knows how we longed--for ourselves--to keep him here; yet, for himself, we let him go. I have remembered always one line of poetry you showed me at Como. 'To take by leaving, To hold by letting go.' That is true truth for many things. But for parents truest of all."
High counsel indeed! Good to hear; hard to act upon. Nevil Sinclair--knowing they would act upon it--let out an involuntary sigh and tightened his hold of the gentle, adoring woman, whose spirit towered so far above his own.
"Lilamani--you've won," he said, after a perceptible pause. "You deserve to win--and Roy will bless you. It's the high privilege of Mothers, I suppose, to conjure the moon out of heaven for their sons."
"Sometimes, by doing so, they nearly break their hearts," she answered very low.
He stooped and kissed her. "Keep yours intact--for me. I shall need it." Her fingers closed convulsively on his--"England will seem sort of empty--without Roy. Is he dead keen on going this autumn?"
"Yes--I am afraid. A little because of young impatience. A little because he is troubled over Dyan; and he has much influence. There are so many now in India dragged two ways."
Nevil sighed again. "Bless the boy! It's an undeniable risk. And what the family will say to our Midsummer madness, God knows! Jane can be trusted to make the deuce of a row. And we can't even smooth matters by telling her of our private precaution----"
"No--not one little
word."
Lilamani sat upright, a gleam of primitive hate in her eyes.
Nevil smiled, in spite of secret dismay. "You implacable little sinner! Can't you ever forgive her like a Christian?"
"No--not ever." The tense quiet of her tone carried conviction. "Not only far-off things, I can never forget--nearly killing me and--and Roy. But because she is always stabbing at me with sharp words and ugly thoughts. She cannot ever forgive that I am here--that I make you happy, which she could not believe. She is angry to be put in the wrong by mere Hindu wife----" She paused in her vehement rush of speech: saw the look in Nevil's face that recalled an earlier day; and anger vanished like a light blown out. "King of me--I am sorry. Only--it is true. And
she is Christian born. But I--down in my deepest places I am still--Rajputni. Just the same as after twenty-three years of English wife, I am still in my heart--like the 'Queen who stood erect!'"
On the word she rose and confronted him, smiling into his troubled eyes; grace of girlhood and dignity of womanhood adorably mingled in her pose.
"Who was she?" Nevil asked, willingly lured from thoughts of Jane.
"Careless one! Have you forgotten the story of my Wonder-Woman--how a King, loving his Queen with all his soul, bowed himself in ecstasy, and 'took the dust off her feet' in presence of other wives who, from jealousy, cried: 'Shameless one, lift up the hands of the King to your head.' But the Queen stood erect, smiling gladly. 'Not so: for both feet and head are my Lord's. Can I have aught that is mine?'"
The swiftness of transition, the laughing tenderness of her eyes so moved him--and so potent in her was the magical essence of womanhood--that he, Sir Nevil Sinclair, Baronet, of Bramleigh Beeches, came near to taking the dust of her feet in very deed. _