The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [90]
Ash hired a tonga and set off in pursuit, but as the pony proved to be a jaded animal and incapable of any speed, he failed to overtake them. Having spent an anxious and exhausting afternoon driving about Bombay making fruitless inquiries at a number of hotels and clubs, he was left with no alternative but to make for the railway station and await them there.
The mail train was not due to leave until the late evening, so he spent the intervening hours loitering unhappily in the entrance hall and anathematizing himself for a selfish, unthinking clod who was in every way unworthy of such a superlatively lovely creature as Belinda. Only last night he had told her that if she would entrust her future to him, he would love and cherish her for ever and do everything in his power to make her happy. Yet at the first test he had failed her. What must she be thinking of him and where had she gone?
Belinda and her mother had, in fact, gone to the house of an acquaintance who lived within easy reach of the harbour, where they had spent the day; it being too hot, in Mrs Harlowe's opinion, for sight-seeing, and of course there was no question of Belinda being allowed to go out alone. They left for the station after an early supper and arrived to find Ash on the platform, though unfortunately for him, not alone. His luck was plainly out that day, because had they arrived five minutes earlier he would still have been standing forlornly by the ticket office. But Ala Yar had friends in the city and he had taken Zarin and Mahdoo to visit them, leaving Gul Baz to make all the necessary arrangements at the station. The three men had driven up in a tonga not five minutes before the arrival of Mrs Harlowe and her daughter, which could not have been more unfortunate, as seeing them in animated conversation with her betrothed, Belinda not unnaturally concluded that he had spent the day with them, preferring their company to her own and making no attempt to find her.
Anger and unshed tears formed a hot hard lump in her throat, and despite her training and the fact that the platform was crowded with travellers, baggage coolies, and vendors of food and drink, if she had possessed an engagement ring she would at that moment have torn it off and flung it in Ash's face. Deprived of such an outlet for her wounded feelings, she was preparing to sweep past him with her head in the air, when unkind fate sent her a weapon that few women, in these circumstances, could have resisted making use of.
It was to prove, in long run, one of those trivial incidents that can change the character and course of events in the lives of many more people than those immediately involved, though no one, least of all Belinda, could be expected to know that. She merely saw a chance of repaying Ash in his own coin, and took it; and young George Garforth – he of the Grecian profile and Byronic curls – hurrying down the platform in search of his carriage, found himself being greeted with every appearance of delight by the girl to whom he had already lost his heart. Overcome by this reception, he now lost his head as well.
A combination of love, shyness and an acute sense of inferiority had hitherto prevented him from expressing his devotion, and though Belinda admired his looks, she considered him deplorably dull and had agreed wholeheartedly with Amy Chiverton's malicious observation that ‘poor Mr Garforth would have made an excellent tailor's dummy’. Such looks ought, by rights, to have bestowed confidence, if not conceit, on their owner. But George Garforth quite obviously lacked any trace of either quality, and was not only painfully unsure of himself, but apt, at times, to be unbelievably gauche, pushing himself forward in an unseemly manner at quite the wrong moments, and then retreating in scarlet-faced confusion that created even further embarrassment. Ash, who rather liked him, had once said, ‘The trouble with George is that he was born with one skin too few, so everything seems to touch him on the raw.