Four days later we were in Agra. A time there was when the name would have been the key of dreams to me; now it stood for John’s headquarters. I was rejoiced to think I would look again upon the Taj; and the prospect of living with it was a real enchantment; but I pondered most the kind of house that would be provided for the General Commanding the District, how many the dining-room would seat, and whether it would have a roof of thatch or of corrugated iron — I prayed against corrugated iron. I confess these my preoccupations. I was forty, and at forty the practical considerations of life hold their own even against domes of marble, world-renowned, and set about with gardens where the bulbul sings to the rose. I smiled across the years at the raptures of my first vision of the place at twenty-one, just Cecily’s age. Would I now sit under Arjamand’s cypresses till two o’clock in the morning to see the wonder of her tomb at a particular angle of the moon? Would I climb one of her tall white ministering minarets to see anything whatever? I very greatly feared that I would not. Alas for the aging of sentiment, of interest! Keep your touch with life and your seat in the saddle as long as you will, the world is no new toy at forty. But Cecily was twenty-one, Cecily who sat stolidly finishing her lunch while Dacres Tottenham talked about Akbar and his philosophy. ‘The sort of man,’ he said, ‘that Carlyle might have smoked a pipe with.’
‘But surely,’ said Cecily reflectively, ‘tobacco was not discovered in England then. Akbar came to the throne in 1526.’
‘Nor Carlyle either for that matter,’ I hastened to observe. ‘Nevertheless, I think Mr. Tottenham’s proposition must stand.’
‘Thanks, Mrs. Farnham,’ said Dacres. ‘But imagine Miss Farnham’s remembering Akbar’s date! I’m sure you didn’t!’
‘Let us hope she doesn’t know too much about him,’ I cried gaily, ‘or there will be nothing to tell!’
‘Oh, really and truly very little!’ said Cecily, ‘but as soon as we heard papa would be stationed here Aunt Emma made me read up about those old Moguls and people. I think I remember the dynasty. Baber, wasn’t he the first? And then Humayon, and after him Akbar, and then Jehangir, and then Shah Jehan. But I’ve forgotten every date but Akbar’s.’
She smiled her smile of brilliant health and even spirits as she made the damaging admission, and she was so good to look at, sitting there simple and wholesome and fresh, peeling her banana with her well-shaped fingers, that we swallowed the dynasty as it were whole, and smiled back upon her. John, I may say, was extremely pleased with Cecily; he said she was a very satisfactory human accomplishment. One would have thought, positively, the way he plumed himself over his handsome daughter, that he alone was responsible for her. But John, having received his family, straightway set off with his Staff on a tour of inspection, and thereby takes himself out of this history. I sometimes think that if he had stayed — but there has never been the lightest recrimination between us about it, and I am not going to hint one now.
‘Did you read,’ asked Dacres, ‘what he and the Court poet wrote over the entrance gate to the big mosque at Fattehpur-Sikri? It’s rather nice. “The world is a looking-glass, wherein the image has come and is gone — take as thine own nothing more than what thou lookest upon.”’
My daughter’s thoughtful gaze was, of course, fixed upon the speaker, and in his own glance I saw a sudden ray of consciousness; but Cecily transferred her eyes to the opposite wall, deeply considering, and while Dacres and I smiled across the table, I saw that she had perceived no reason for blushing. It was a singularly narrow escape.
‘No,’ she said, ‘I didn’t; what a curious proverb for an emperor to make! He couldn’t possibly have been able to see all his possessions at once.’
‘If you have finished,’ Dacres addressed her, ‘do let me show you what your plain and immediate duty is to the garden. The garden waits for you — all the roses expectant —’
‘Why, there isn’t one!’ cried Cecily, pinning on her hat. It was pleasing, and just a trifle pathetic, the way he hurried her out of the scope of any little dart; he would not have her even within range of amused observation. Would he continue, I wondered vaguely, as, with my elbows on the table, I tore into strips the lemon-leaf that floated in my finger-bowl — would he continue, through life, to shelter her from his other clever friends as now he attempted to shelter her from her mother? In that case he would have to domicile her, poor dear, behind the curtain, like the native ladies — a good price to pay for a protection of which, bless her heart! she would be all unaware. I had quite stopped bemoaning the affair; perhaps the comments of my husband, who treated it with broad approval and satisfaction, did something to soothe my sensibilities. At all events, I had gradually come to occupy a high fatalistic ground towards the pair. If it was written upon their foreheads that they should marry, the inscription was none of mine; and, of course, it was true, as John had indignantly stated, that Dacres might do very much worse. One’s interest in Dacres Tottenham’s problematical future had in no way diminished; but the young man was so positive, so full of intention, so disinclined to discussion — he had not reopened the subject since that morning in the saloon of the Caledonia — that one’s feeling about it rather took the attenuated form of a shrug. I am afraid, too, that the pleasurable excitement of such an impending event had a little supervened; even at forty there is no disallowing the natural interests of one’s sex. As I sat there pulling my lemon-leaf to pieces, I should not have been surprised or in the least put about if the two had returned radiant from the lawn to demand my blessing. As to the test of quality that I had obligingly invented for Dacres on the spur of the moment without his knowledge or connivance, it had some time ago faded into what he apprehended it to be — a mere idyllic opportunity, a charming background, a frame for his project, of prettier sentiment than the funnels and the hand-rails of a ship.
Mr. Tottenham had ten days to spend with us. He knew the place well; it belonged to the province to whose service he was dedicated, and he claimed with impressive authority the privilege of showing it to Cecily by degrees — the Hall of Audience today, the Jessamine Tower tomorrow, the tomb of Akbar another, and the Deserted City yet another day. We arranged the expeditions in conference, Dacres insisting only upon the order of them, which I saw was to be cumulative, with the Taj at the very end, on the night precisely of the full of the moon, with a better chance of roses. I had no special views, but Cecily contributed some; that we should do the Hall of Audience in the morning, so as not to interfere with the club tennis in the afternoon, that we should bicycle to Akbar’s tomb and take a cold luncheon — if we were ............