Page:Max Havelaar; or, the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company (IA dli.granth.77827).pdf/94

 the table, which was covered with a white cloth, and well furnished with viands. Rather impatiently from time to time, in the words of Mrs. Bluebeard’s sister, he asked the mandoor—[that is, the chief of police, and officials under the Assistant Resident]—if there was nothing to be seen. Then he got up, tried in vain to make his spurs clatter on the hard clay floor of the ‘pendoppo,’ lighted his cigar, and sat down again. He spoke little; but could have spoken more, for he was not alone.I do not refer to the twenty or thirty Javanese servants, ‘mantries,’ and overseers, who sat squatting on the ground in the ‘pendoppo,’ nor to the numbers who incessantly ran in and out, nor to those of different rank, that held the horses outside, or rode on horseback;—the Regent of Lebak himself, Radeen Adhipatti Karta Natta Negara, sat facing him. To wait is always tiresome: a quarter of an hour seems an hour; an hour half a day, and so on. Verbrugge might have been more talkative. The Regent of Lebak was an intelligent old man, who could speak on many subjects with sense and judgment: one had only to look at him to be convinced that most of the Europeans who came in contact with him had more to learn from him than he from them. His clear dark eyes contradicted by their fire the weariness of his features and his grey hairs. What he said was generally well considered, which is indeed generally the case with cultivated Orientals; and you perceived, if you were in a conversation with him, that