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Updated: June 13, 2025
Whatever Quita's failings, or her attitude to himself, there could be no shelving the fact that he was her husband: the guardian of her good name, the one man on earth who could claim the right to criticise her conduct. Her probable repudiation both of his criticism, and his right to offer it, did not, in his view, justify him in standing aloof, if need for speech should arise.
Is he the sort that would be likely to understand . . our very incomprehensible position?" Honor took a leather frame from the table beside her, and put it into Quita's hands. "If you are any judge of faces, that's the best answer I can give you." Quita scanned the picture abstractedly for several seconds. "Yes. He'll do," was her verdict.
And, better than these, in Quita's esteem, was the wide street itself, packed with the noisy, leisurely life of an Indian city: goats and cattle; women and children; open bullock-carts that seemed to have all eternity to travel in; princely-looking Afghan traders in long coats and peaked turbans; Waziris, with keen, Jewish faces framed in greasy locks that fell upon their shoulders; the sais from his tail-board shouting ineffectual commands to make way for the Sahib; long-legged fowls, leaping and fluttering up under the pony's nose; pariahs, lazily insolent, almost allowing the wheel to graze thigh-bone or paw, before they condescended to loaf away to a fresh resting-place; and over all an arch of blue, so deep and passionate as to be almost vocal; and pervading all, the indefinable, unforgettable smell of the East: a smell compounded of musk, spices, open drains, and humanity.
He did so on the spot, dropping the shreds of paper reflectively among the smouldering logs upon the hearth; while Honor hurried to the sick-room, with her fragment of news: the room in which Lenox had almost died of cholera, and in which Quita's ring had been restored to her finger sixteen months before.
"You're a long way ahead of that, I fancy," Lenox remarked, with an odd change of tone. For a statement of that kind Richardson had no answer. He could only acknowledge it with a rueful smile that did not lift the shadow from his eyes. There were no sunbeams caught in Quita's 'bits of sea water' just then; and for a while silence and tobacco-smoke reigned in the room.
For many days past he had been angered by the suspicion that in this affair of portrait painting, the subject counted for too much; and now, when he ought to have been relieved, he found his anger rekindled to white heat by Quita's frank confession that his friend whose heart had been wrenched from him by her so-called 'method' counted for nothing at all.
Prompted by Colonel Mayhew, the Chumba Rajah, a shy taciturn boy of sixteen, had despatched a formal invitation, hoping that the Residency party would honour him with their company at the Palace on the evening of their arrival from Dalhousie; though in truth he wished them anywhere else in the world; and Colonel Mayhew, who was by no means too old to enjoy a spasmodic daylight flirtation with a woman of Quita's intelligence, had devised the native menu mainly for her delectation.
Thus, while the Battery absorbed his mornings, Tibet made unlawful inroads upon his afternoons and evenings; and the narrow margin of leisure thus left to him did not by any means satisfy Quita's healthy appetite for companionship.
"Well . . I've no time to scold you now," he said, looking unspeakable things at her. "Wait till I get you to myself, . . that's all!" This short colloquy, carried on in an undertone, did not reach Quita's ears. "What sort of a man is this Paul?" she asked as Honor returned to her chair. "I don't know his other name!
He was enjoying, for the first time in his life, the mere pleasantness of a woman's intimate companionship; in Quita's case a companionship full of incident, of delicate reticences, alternating with unexpected revelations of thought and feeling; and through it all a frank interest in everything that concerned himself, which is perhaps the subtlest form of coquetry.
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