Читать книгу His Excellency's English Governess онлайн

75 страница из 90

“I could soon make friends with those island fellows if I had them by myself,” remarked Charlie as they rowed away, with rather a wistful look back at the shore.

“But, my dear boy, why don’t you, then?” cried Lady Haigh, with marked inhospitality. “Go over by yourself and live among them until we get the ship off. We could easily let you know when we were ready to start, and we should get on quite well without you.”

“Yes, do go if you would rather,” said Cecil.

“It’s likely, isn’t it?” was his sole reply, and no more was said. Under ordinary circumstances, Lady Haigh felt sure, he would have been off to those islanders for a week or a month, even though it had involved the sacrifice of all his interests in life, and the fact that he did not succumb to their attractions now showed that there was some very potent influence at work to detain him. What that influence was, Lady Haigh had no difficulty in guessing. Charlie’s behaviour as his cousin’s escort had been most exemplary, but she did not flatter herself that it was her society he sought. Charlie could never have been anything but a gentleman, but the assiduous way in which he had attended upon Cecil and herself since they had left Cairo bespoke something more than mere politeness. He had found out the way to catch Cecil’s attention now, and he used it. He was full of the most enthralling anecdotes and stories, narratives of his own adventures, and accounts of the queer people he had met in his wanderings, and he proved that his tales were as potent to interest a graduate of London University as a knot of listeners in a Cairo coffee-house. It was he who, by his extraordinary yarns, whiled away the long days on the island; and they were very long sometimes, for both ladies were anxious to reach their journey’s end, and chafed somewhat at the enforced detention. Happily there was no fear that the interruption to their voyage would cause anxiety to their friends, for the ways of the coasting steamers were known to be so erratic that no one would think of theirs as missing for a long time, and by that time they would probably have been picked up by the next regular steamer from Karachi; but to Cecil, who was nervously anxious to get to her work, the delay was a weary one. Under these circumstances Charlie’s power of discoursing for hours together came as a great relief. Cecil laughed at him in public, and in private teased him occasionally, in a dignified way, about his extraordinary flow of conversation; and yet felt, though she never confessed it to herself, that Baghdad would not be quite the land of exile she had pictured it, and endured the long delay very philosophically on the whole.