Part 31 (1/2)
REX ET IMP:
I
”Rex will get on all right,” said Muriel Alexander pettishly, ”you know quite well, Horace, that so long as he has old Bisvas he wants nothing else. Look at him now! He is quite happy, and the old man would die rather than let any harm happen to the child.”
Horace Alexander frowned slightly as he looked through the wide set door of his office room to the verandah beyond. It was a very neat, natty, office room, severely correct and Western in its pigeon-holes, its files, its elegant upholstered chair at the further side of the writing table ready for the confidential visitor. No guns defiled it; no tennis bats, no half-used box of cigars, no general litter of unofficial male humanity such as most Indian office rooms in the past have permitted, was to be seen within the precincts sacred to duty, for Horace Alexander was that curious product of modern times, a clever and advanced man, bent upon progress, who stickles for the commonplace conventional etiquette in all things. So he stirred uneasily at the sight he saw beyond his office doors, dropped his eye-gla.s.ses and put them on again petulantly.
Yet it was rather a pretty sight.
A red-haired, fuzzy-headed child of four or five, small, but strong and st.u.r.dy, seated with the utmost dignity oh a red velvet cus.h.i.+on, his broad freckled face wearing an expression of conscious majesty, part of which was doubtless due to the insecurity of a gilt paper band which was perched on his goldy-red curls.
Before him, in an att.i.tude of prayerful adoration, squatted a very very old man. At his full height he must still have been tall, and the bent shoulders were broad; broad enough to show up the line of war-medals on the breast of his orderly's coat. They gave the new scarlet cloth a certain personal _cachet_ and toned down its official garishness.
”Come here, Rex!” called Horace Alexander, and the child rose at once.
Though high-spirited and a bit of an imp, he was a reasonable, obedient, little chap enough; obedient because he was reasonable.
”What's that you've got on your head?” queried his father irritably.
”It's my c'wown,” replied Rex cheerfully. ”Bisvas cut it out for me; and he's goin' to put b'wown paper to make it 'weal stiff--c'wowns onghter be stiff, 'weal stiff, oughtn't they? an' he's going to put things on it like the pictures in the papers, an' then I shall be a 'weal King, shan't I?”
”No, my boy!” said his father sharply. ”Crowns don't make kings; remember that always. There was Charles the First----”; then he paused, recognising he was out of the child's depth; and the cult of the weaker brother was not often forgotten by Horace Alexander. It was the secret of his popularity; but how he managed to reconcile it with his pa.s.sion for progress remained rather a mystery to some people.
”And what were you doing,” he continued.
”I wasn't doin' nothin' except be king,” replied the child; ”but Bisvas was doin' '_durshan_.' What is a '_durshan_,' daddy, 'weally?”
The childish forehead was all puckered beneath its crown, and Rex's father, for all he was ent.i.tled to linguistic letters after his name, hesitated.
”Sight,” he began, ”ur--appearance--ur--aspect----”
But Rex shook his head in disapproval. ”Bisvas says it's just for all the same as seein' G.o.d--didn't you, Bisvas?”
The liquid Urdu to which the little fellow's voice turned, echoed through the suns.h.i.+ne to where the tall old trooper, risen to his full height, stood smiling.
”Huzoor! so it is, without doubt. The sight of a King is even as the sight of a G.o.d. It is a revelation of the Most High.”
”Good Lord!” muttered Horace Alexander under his breath, yet with an amused smile. ”The child will grow up a feudal serf combined with a feudal lord, if we don't take care, Muriel! He is too much with old Bisvas--You'd better take him with you--or--or not go.”
His wife did not even frown: her position was too a.s.sured in the household for her to be even alarmed. ”Of course I must go. I must wear my new frocks. Besides, you forget I'm President of the Veiled-Women's-Guild, and they are going to present a casket. And there isn't room in the Hotel for Rex--I was lucky to get _one_ for myself this morning--besides, it would be bad for him. Of course, when you were going with tents and all that it was different; but now that you've been told to stop--Really, Horace, it is most annoying! What can it mean? There is nothing wrong in the district, is there?”
Horace Alexander's eyegla.s.s dropped again. It generally did when he was asked for a personal opinion; not from any lack of decision in the man himself, but from that habit of relying on collective as against individual thought which distinguishes so many clever men nowadays; as if the mediocre ma.s.s could ever outvalue superior sense.
”I cannot conceive that anything serious can be wrong,” he began, then paused almost pathetically before the certainty that his district was admittedly the best managed in the province. ”However,” he continued, virtuously remembering that the communication which stopped his going to the Big Durbar was strictly confidential, ”that is neither here nor there. I have my orders, so that ends it, and----” he glanced out to the verandah where the ”_durshan_” had re-commenced--”I suppose Rex had better remain, if you think it safe. I shall be very busy----”
His wife laughed, and stooping over his chair, kissed the top of his head; it was a trifle bald.
”You dear old stupid,” she said kindly. ”You've nothing to do with it.
I wouldn't leave him if it wasn't for old Bisvas! You and I, Horace, have grown out of--what shall I call it--feudal relations--but we can understand them. You don't suppose I leave the boy in your charge, do you? No! My dear man! you're not up to it. But Bisvas! Bisvas was your grandfather's servant when he was a boy, and he swears Rex is the living image of '_Jullunder Jullunder baba_,' whom, I verily believe, he mixes up with Alexander the Great! It doesn't do the child any harm, though it makes him a bit autocratic now. He'll grow out of being King at school. And really it is a pretty sight to see him with his bodyguard of those marvellous old dodderers Bisvas rakes up from the bazaar----”
”I've seen them,” replied her husband gloomily. ”I'd have sent them about their business if they hadn't been old pensioners--and in uniform----”