Page:Quartette - Kipling (1885).djvu/23

 to this"—my temper was getting the better of my good manners, and I only just checked upon my lips a most uncomplimentary adjective—"place."

For all reply my host rose and threw away the end of his cheroot. "Shall we go to my wife's room for a cup of coffee?" he asked. I felt foolish enough as I followed him along the verandah and entered a charming room, which in any civilised place would have been the drawing-room, but which, as I afterwards discovered, was in this primitive region simply called "Madam's room."

The aesthetic craze, if it existed at all, was in its earliest infancy at the time of which I write, and most certainly had not acquired strength to travel across land and sea. But by some prophetic instinct of selection, the young Englishwoman whose lot was cast in far-away Eastern Bengal had brought together for the decoration of her sitting-room a harmonious variety of objects which would have filled an art collector with envy. As I paused on the threshold, involuntarily paying tribute to the influence at once soothing and exhilarating of one of the most attractive rooms I had ever seen, the planter, interpreting the effect produced upon me in his own fashion, laughed lightly.

"Funny, isn't it?" he said. "But I let my wife have her own way in everything inside these walls. Whitewash and matting are good enough for me; but Laura likes carpets and curtains and what she calls pretty things, though most of them seem to me uncommonly ugly."

Before I could speak a word of the admiration I felt, Laura, who was seated on a low chair by a couch, on which lay a sleeping child, imposed silence by a pretty gesture, her finger on her lip. She apologised for the presence of the little creature. "Little Norah was restless," she said; "and I brought her here, thinking she would sleep better." She rose to give us the coffee which stood upon a small table by her side, and as she did so the child stirred upon its pillow.

"You will forgive me," she said, turning to me, "If I say good night and take baby away?" She lifted it from the couch, and made a lovely picture as she held out her hand to me, the baby on her left arm, its head lying upon her shoulder.