Love wakes desires you never may forget;
He shows you stars you never saw before;
He makes you share with him for evermore
The burden of the world’s divine regret:
How wise you were to open not, and yet—
How poor, if you should turn love from your door.
“There is just only one thing that all women are looking for,” said Madeline Stewart decidedly. “and that is—Love.”
Her thin, rather haggard face flushed as she spoke, the interest died out from her eyes. “Very few of us find it,” she added, and moved the tea things about on the tray with nervous hands.
“Well, what is Love?” interrogated the youngest person present, a slim long girl of sixteen years, whose dark brown hair swung free in a pig tail, and whose brown-stockinged legs—a constant source of disquietude to her sisters—were still gloriously uncovered. “Every one makes an awful fuss about it, and a lot is written round it that is ‘not nice’ for me to read, according to mother; but what is it when all is said and done?”
Madeline Stewart brought her dark eyes to bear on her youngest sister. She was the eldest of the three Mackenzie girls, and it was ten years ago now since she had left the old vicarage home to be married. She had been much the same age as Phyllis at that time, with the same untamed gaiety of spirits and unmanageable fund of curiosity. Ten years had wiped most of the spirit out; she had come back to her home a worn out disappointed woman, with tell-tale lines of grief and horror written on her face and a great well of abiding bitterness in her heart.
“The death of her husband has absolutely soured poor Madeline,” Mrs. Mackenzie was wont to explain placidly, but then Mrs. Mackenzie was not a woman who ever looked very deeply into things.
Perhaps Mr. Mackenzie had had his doubts as to the secret of Madeline’s grief, but he had learnt, after years of a life spent with Mrs. Mackenzie, never to attempt to explain things to her; besides he was not himself over much interested in his family. Madeline’s husband had left her enough money to enable her to pay towards her keep—that at least was something to be thankful for.
So Madeline kept the secrets of her ten years’ married life locked away behind the bitter indifference of her eyes. Once she had attempted to tell something of them to her mother, but the blank wall of placidity and comfortable resignation which that good woman put up as a protection against disturbing confidences, checked once and for all such an outpouring on Madeline’s part. Mother was unshakeably determined to believe that her eldest daughter was a broken-hearted widow. It was the correct assumption in such a case, and Mrs. Mackenzie habitually followed the correct road in life. And for the rest, whom could Madeline have confided in? Phyllis of the tangled hair and riotous skirts, whose voice from morning to night could be heard chanting or humming the latest musical comedy refrain; Mr. Mackenzie, withdrawn and severe, whom the family rarely saw except at meal times; or Lois? Lois who lay back now in the easiest chair, her toes just swinging free of the ground, her beautiful head resting against a carefully selected cushion of vivid cerise.
Lois—so Phyllis claimed—always carried that identical cerise-coloured cushion about with her; it set off to perfection the wonderful sheen of her black hair and the perfect whiteness of her skin. Lois had grey eyes, light in colour but shaded with heavy black lashes, and a perfect mouth, made for laughter and kisses and love. Made for other things as well if an observer took the trouble to think; for obstinacy lay in the set of the lips, obstinacy and pride and self-will. But none of these qualities had so far been called to the surface. Lois, Madeline had realized since her return, was for the present as placidly and dogmatically content with life as Mrs. Mackenzie. Besides Lois was engaged to be married, a thoroughly approved-of match; how could one break in there with the horror of unwanted confidences.
“Love is a delusion,” she was quoting lazily now in answer to Phyllis’ appeal and before Madeline had time to reply. “One that affects men worse than women.”
“You ought to speak with authority anyway,” retorted Phyllis. She sat up on the grass and flung her arms round her hunched up knees. “You and Robin have got it together. It appears to me to consist of kissing each other. I saw you two the other day when you didn’t know you were being watched—and I don’t know how you can bear it!”
“You ridiculous child,” Lois’ voice was calm, though a vivid colour had crept into her cheeks. “one has got to be kissed when one is engaged; you need not have added to the indignity by watching me.”
“Indignity!” Phyllis’ face showed blank surprise; “don’t you like doing it, Lois?”
“Of course not,” her sister replied; she settled her head more comfortably. “Would you?” The long lashes dropped and her eyes rested on the diamonds in the ring on her finger. It was a very beautiful ring and often consoled Lois for being kissed.
Madeline seemed to have dropped out of the question under discussion, but at this last remark of her sister’s she leant a little forward in her chair, her eyes, dark brown like Phyllis’, intent and worried in their expression.
“Do you ever realize, Lois, that you have no right to marry Captain Drummond if you feel like that. After all——”
Her words broke off, Lois’ calm eyes were studying her quizzically. “What on earth has not liking to be kissed got to do with matrimony?” she queried.
“Everything,” Madeline answered stiffly. “It may mean you don’t like the man, must mean you don’t love him. Oh, Lois—I——”
“Don’t get excited, Maidie,” Lois put in hastily; she put out a hand and patted the one nearest her—all the Mackenzie family were considerate to Madeline as the owner of a broken heart. “I really am very fond of Robin, but you know I never have been particularly fond of being kissed.”
“I know,” agreed Madeline slowly. “but this somehow is different. It is all your life, Lois. I feel sometimes as if I were standing aside and watching you walk on the edge of a precipice. I have tried to speak to mother, but her one argument is that Captain Drummond is so well off and such a good match, as if that counted.”
“Do you know anything against him?” asked Lois, her mouth set into rather hard lines, which made her on the sudden look far older than her twenty years. Phyllis was frankly gaping.
“No, oh no,” Madeline twisted her handkerchief into a ball and smoothed it out again. “but if you don’t love him it won’t matter to you how good he is. Oh, what is the use of my trying to explain—” her voice broke sharply, she stood up. “you won’t understand, why—how should you? But it is wicked of mother, wicked.”
She turned and went quickly across the lawn and they saw her disappear into the house.
Lois turned perplexed eyes, and a face that had lost a little of its serenity, on Phyllis.
“What on earth can have upset Madeline?” she queried. “Where did it all begin? I wasn’t listening to you two when you started talking.”
“I was talking about what I should do when I grew up,” explained Phyllis. “and saying I wouldn’t marry, and then Madeline said that thing about love and I asked what it meant. I expect,” she pondered a moment. “those sort of subjects make Madeline think of Tom. Do you remember much about him, Lois? Of course, I was only a baby when they were married.”
“I remember him all right,” Lois answered. “and I hated him like poison.” Her eyes narrowed, a little frown gathering between them. “Somehow,” she confided, “I don’t believe it is sorrow for the loss of Tom that has changed Madeline.”
“Oh, Lois,” Phyllis remonstrated. “Don’t you remember mother telling us about it the day before Madeline came home and how she said——”
“Mother!” Lois interrupted, a little contemptuously, though there was a certain amount of affection in her voice. “Mother is like an eiderdown quilt for sentiment.” Then she dismissed the subject and swung her feet free of the ground. “Anyway I wish Madeline wouldn’t worry about me and Robin, we are really quite happy in our own particular way. Trot along indoors, Phil, and see if you can find her; and ask Mary to bring out some more tea; Robin will be here in a minute or two and this lot must be quite cold.”
Phyllis scrambled to her feet obediently, nearly upsetting the tea tray in her efforts. “Any chance of tennis?” she queried, standing on one foot and scratching the back of a drowsy fox terrier with the other. “I’ll get Madeline to play if you and Robin will make a four.”
“I’ll see about it,” promised Lois languidly. “cut along now, there’s a good kid, I want to have a few minutes to myself before Robin arrives.”
The Mackenzies had lived in Greencroft Vicarage ever since the girls could remember, in fact Lois and Phyllis had been born within its walls. Madeline had come earlier, in the days before Mr. Mackenzie had a parish at all; but even her earliest recollections were connected with the grey square house perched on the hill above the village, with its untidy orchard running wild in grass and thistles and its small walled-in old-fashioned garden.
The lawn, which ran alongside the dining-room windows and between them and the kitchen garden, had been transformed into a tennis court in the days when Lois first blossomed into pigtails and nearly grown-up dresses. Lois had insisted on a tennis court, and Lois had as a matter of course achieved her desire. It may be that she was the strongest-willed person in the Mackenzie household, she was certainly the most tenacious in her wishes.
That had been the year before Madeline married: Lois—as she had informed Phyllis—remembered the time and the man with a vague hatred. She had resented his presence in their lives, for one thing because of the claim he made upon Madeline, who had until that moment been Lois’ devoted slave; but far more than that she disliked him personally, despite his suave manners, his free and easy terms of friendship with one and all. She had fought him once because he had wanted to kiss her, and she had emerged from the struggle triumphant, leaving the red marks of her nails on his face. Madeline had shed many tears over that episode, but it had left Lois unshakeably defiant in her attitude of hate.
Then Madeline had married and gone abroad, and as the days slipped into months and the months into years, her presence became but as a shadowy memory to Lois. Madeline of the bitter tongue and hard eyes, when she came back into the vicarage life, was a stranger; the two sisters never succeeded in regaining the spirit of good fellowship and absolute confidence that had bound them in the old days.
Lois, impetuous and self-willed as she was, stood very much alone in the house; Phyllis was too much of a baby to be a companion; Mother—Lois had something of a contemptuous affection for; her father stood apparently in awe of his beautiful daughter, and never attempted to cross her lightest wish. None of them gave her companionship in any sense of the word.
And life was dull at the vicarage; that was Lois’ real grouse against Fate. She had never been a very great reader; and through the long summer days there was nothing for her to do except lie out in a hammock in the sun and weave dreams or go for hot and exhausting bicycle rides with Phyllis, or knock tennis balls about on the badly-made court. Sometimes the young men of the country would come to call. They were very young—all the men left Greencroft when they grew up—very shy, rather afraid of Lois and more inclined to play with Phyllis. There were no little duties about the house for the girls to see to; Mrs. Mackenzie did all that was necessary; parish work Lois had always and openly detested, though Phyllis struggled valiantly every Sunday with a class of choir boys.
It is little wonder that Captain Drummond and his openly expressed devotion dawned upon Lois’ horizon as the most wonderfully hopeful event that had ever happened in her life. She was twenty, settling—as Phyllis described it from her sixteen-year-old advantage point—into old maidship; he was the first real man she had ever met. And he was in no sense of the word unpresentable; fairly tall, strongly built, with one of those attractively stern faces that tell one so little of the man behind. He had frank blue eyes that had a habit of staring rather intently at people he was talking to, and a very decided clean-cut mouth and chin. Here was a temper, too, not easy to rouse, but capable of very violent depths of feeling, yet the eyes and mouth were curiously gentle and gave the man when he smiled an odd expression of tenderness. And how he adored Lois! was not that a thing in itself sufficient to thrill her? He had loved her from the moment he first set eyes on her, and it is quite certain that on that particular afternoon he had had eyes for no one else.
They had met first of all at the garden party which was given once a year by Mr. Mackenzie to his parish, to which Captain Drummond—who was spending ten days’ leave with an elderly aunt in the neighbourhood—had been brought somewhat unwillingly. Lois was his fate; he had felt certain of that the moment his eyes met hers, and from that time he had loved her with the whole strength of a very passionate yet self-restrained nature.
The ten days leave was extended to a fortnight, prolonged itself to a month, and the old aunt looked on and smiled. Lois was a favourite in the neighbourhood, she was always pleasant to meet, pleasant to look at; Captain Drummond had income enough to marry whom he pleased. So the pretty idyll was encouraged on every side, and one may be sure that Mrs. Mackenzie took her share in the encouragement. In her wildest dreams of fancy, she had never hoped for such a match for one of her girls; of course Lois loved the man, what girl would be fool enough not to?
Not that her mother’s or the arguments of any one else would have had much effect on Lois had not her own inclinations tended towards marrying Captain Drummond. Until this very afternoon, however, she had never had two opinions on the prospect. She had known he would propose after the first fortnight of their acquaintance, she had been equally certain she was going to accept. They had been engaged now for three weeks, the day after to-morrow they were to be married; why had Madeline suddenly rushed in with her disturbing ideas, her intense theory of Love?
The frown deepened on Lois’ brow, the grey eyes, curiously capable of darkening with their owner’s mood, looked almost black, as she stared out in front of her. What was the secret that lay behind Madeline’s bitterness? Was it what married life had taught her—married life without love? The eyes lit with a gleam of humour and Lois jerked her head further back into the cerise of the cushion. Love—-what rot it was to lay such stress on such an abstract thing! she had lived quite happily without it so far, and Robin was a dear old thing. If love were really necessary for married life, no doubt she could manage to love Robin.
Not to like being kissed though—she kept that as a private reservation in the background of her thoughts, and as at that moment Robin arrived—further investigation into the matter had to be postponed.
Nevermore
Alone upon the threshold of my door
Of individual life I shall command
The uses of my soul.
— Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Perhaps the first real moment of doubt that Lois experienced was when the train slid out of Greencroft station, and drawing back from the window—after a last final wave to Phyllis, who had run the length of the platform beside their carriage—she knew herself definitely and finally alone with Captain Drummond. It was quite absurd, because of course she had often been alone with Robin before, but this time and in some strange way it was all different. She had a feeling that some event had closed in on them, cutting them off entirely from the rest of the world; as if they two were the only people alive, as if everything and everyone else had slipped away into nothingness, leaving her alone, absolutely alone with this man whose very presence for some inexplicable reason was filling her with ridiculous, physical fear. With a brave effort at self-control, because it would really be too childish to start her married life in a flood of tears, she settled herself in a corner seat, and without meeting Robin’s eyes essayed a pathetic attempt at jocularity.
“That’s done,” she said; the little laugh that followed was hopelessly nervous. “We are married, Robin.”
Robin Drummond caught his breath; there was such a wild tumult going on in his own mind that really speech was no easy matter. He did not in the least divine Lois’ feeling of distressing fear. For him this was the moment that he had been waiting for since the first day when he had seen her standing under the trees in the vicarage garden, her hat in her hand, her grey eyes dwelling on his with all sorts of dreams in their depths. She was his, now at last, after a day of excitements and noise and fuss, his alone and absolutely his.
Thoughts of this kind are hard for a man to put into words, Robin gave up the effort and would have contented himself by sitting down by Lois and pulling her into his arms. But at the first touch of his hands he noticed that she drew away from him, shrank, it almost seemed, as far as she could get into her corner.
“Please don’t, Robin,” she begged; he saw with a shock of contrition that her face was white and her lips quivering. “I can’t bear it for the moment. If you touch me I shall scream.”
The little hysterical laugh came again. “Just to please me, Robin,” for a moment the lashes lifted and he could catch a glimpse of very startled eyes. “would you go and sit in that far corner and read a paper? I want—I want to pull myself together.”
What a brute he had been not to realize before that she must be upset and over-wrought at parting with all her people and the old life.
He did not attempt to argue with or console Lois as some men might have done; he had learned to know her nearly as well as he knew himself. She had always shown him that at times the touch of his hand on hers was hateful to her. When she was overstrung and nervous like that, the wisest course for both of them was for him to leave her absolutely alone. At first he had been bitterly hurt by this side of her nature, but he had found that if left entirely to herself the mood would soon lift and Lois would be herself again, with dainty little endearing ways and cool smooth hand slipped back in his. It had been useless to try and explain to her his hurt feelings on the point; she simply could not understand why he should take as a personal affront what was to her merely a physical sensation.
“When I am feeling nervous, Robin, I can’t bear to have anyone near me, it isn’t only you,” was her unfailing argument.
So now he made no attempt to dispute her will but crushing down the tumult of his own feelings, betook himself to the selected corner and appeared entirely immersed in a newspaper, which she noticed he was however holding upside down.
The oppression of his nearness removed, Lois turned her back on the too evident privacy of their carriage and allowed her eyes to follow the sway and swing of the landscape as it rushed past them. Listlessly her mind went over the events of the day which had changed her from Lois Mackenzie to Mrs. Drummond.
“Not that I am changed,” her mind argued with itself, “I’m still Lois and I don’t really belong to Robin; I won’t belong to anyone but myself.”
Phyllis, who had shared Lois’ bed for the last time the night before the wedding, had been painfully agog with curiosity at a very early hour. At about five o’clock she had waked Lois up just to point out to her that that night Robin would be sharing her room.
“It is a funny idea, I think,” she confided. “having a man to sleep with you.”
Lois had blushed at the time, the thought now brought with it vivid uneasiness. Did married life mean that you never, never got away from the other person, never shut the door, not even at night, on the rest of the world, to be for awhile absolutely your own untrammelled self?
The atmosphere of the train was suddenly like a prison. She stirred uncomfortably and in answer to her movement Robin sighed and rustled the paper. He was waiting for her to turn round and be nice again; the consciousness of that hurried her thoughts on to the rest of the day’s proceedings.
After Phyllis’ vague suggestions and probing doubts a hurried interview with her mother had followed, just before they walked across to the church, and sandwiched in between visits of inspection from the various servants who were anxious to see the bride’s dress. Mrs. Mackenzie had not been very definite in any of her remarks; she considered the whole subject in rather doubtful taste and had only been driven to speak of it at all by the insistence of Madeline. Her own mother had been content to confine her advice to a whisper, which she spoke just before her daughter stepped into the carriage to drive off on her honeymoon. “Something surprising will happen, dear, it happens to everyone, so do not let it upset you.” That surely was sufficient information for any young wife to face the future with; it had been sufficient for herself. Madeline thought differently, but Madeline had undoubtedly imbibed most curious ideas during her ten years of married life. However, since Madeline insisted, Mrs. Mackenzie did her best.
“The great thing to remember about married life is not to worry your husband. There are some things that it is no use fighting with a man about. Remember, dear, that however strange it may seem to you, it is in reality quite natural, and we have it straight from the Gospels, where St. Paul says, ‘Wives, obey your husbands.’”
It was a curious jumble, mixed with such remarks as “Hold your head high, dear, when you are walking up the aisle, it makes the veil hang better,” and “Mind you have your glove off before it comes to that part of the service, it does make such an awkward pause otherwise.”
Then Madeline’s stern haggard face; she had stopped to kiss Lois at the church door, and her whisper, “God keep you, little sister, better than he kept me,” and Phyllis’ agitated surmise in the vestry, “I suppose you will be having a baby next, Lois,” and a confused recollection of her father’s voice and the words she had to repeat after him.
“To love, honour, and obey. Till death us do part.” The hot touch of Robin’s hand as he held hers and slipped the gold band into place, and then the music of the wedding march as they turned and walked together down the aisle.
It had been too large for her, her wedding ring. In cutting the cake afterwards it had slipped from her finger and rolled under the table.
“A bad omen,” Mary the housemaid had ejaculated before anyone could stop her. Well, it was on right enough now, Lois could feel it under her glove, almost cutting into her flesh.
With a shrill whistle and the jolting of brakes the train pulled up, and Lois realized that for some little distance past the landscape must have been consisting of houses and roofs and chimneys.
“Is it London?” she asked, glancing at Robin.
He put down his paper and came across to her. “Not quite yet,” he explained. “the next stop is Euston though. Feeling better, little girl?”
The sense of fear was beginning to wear off; after all this was only Robin, Robin her devoted admirer and sworn slave. Lois put out her two hands and let him hold them eagerly, her grey eyes smiling at him. “Yes,” she said. “the temper has worn off, Robin. Shall we go to a real live theatre to-night?”
“You want to?” he asked, “I half thought of having this our first evening all alone.” He saw her face fall. “Of course we’ll go,” he agreed. “we will sally out and get the tickets the minute we arrive.”
“A real theatre,” laughed Lois; the colour had swept to her face making it very lovely. “I have never been to one in all my life. Oh, Robin, I am going to like being married.”
They went to their first theatre together in the highest of spirits. Lois selected for the occasion a musical comedy which was then holding the town at Daly’s. Robin had taken rooms for a week at the Hotel Cecil, one big bedroom with windows that faced on to the embankment and over the river, and a smaller room opening off it as a dressing-room for himself. Lois had never seen such splendours as these rooms with their adjoining bath-rooms. She unpacked her modest trunk and called for Robin’s advice as to which of her evening dresses looked the grandest. “So as to live up to our surroundings,” she explained. She even allowed herself to be held in his arms while he assured her that it did not matter a tuppenny damn what she wore, as any way she was absolutely certain to be the most beautiful woman in London.
They dressed in their separate apartments, each a little self-consciously shy of the other, but in the end Robin had to be called in to fasten up the top hooks of her dress and lost his head a little over the charm of the whole affair. He had to be pulled up rather sharply because he was ruffling a most carefully arranged head of hair.
Then they went down to dinner arm in arm, Lois excitedly chattering, her eyes sparkling, a vivid colour in her cheeks. Just for a second, as Robin had held her in his arms after the dress incident, she had been conscious again of her sense of fear and she wanted to get away from it if possible; the prospect of a night shut up alone with Robin was assuming very alarming proportions.
The play, like most musical comedies, dealt mainly with love. The hapless damsel about to be wedded to someone she has no love for, the bold gipsy lover who wins her in the face of all obstacles, the happy reunions in the third act where everyone loves everyone else. The words of one of the songs caught Lois’ attention and lingered in her mind long after the fall of the curtain, and while she and Robin were driving back to the hotel in a taxi.
“Give him your roses, learn from him soon,
Sweeter is love than a rose in June.”
When she got upstairs to their room at the hotel the first thing she did was to fling open the window and lean out. The lilt of the song haunted her—“Sweeter is Love than a rose in June”—perhaps because of the words the air outside seemed scented with a very faint perfume of roses, and the room in contrast appeared oppressive and suffocating.
Suddenly she knew what it was; the sound of Robin as he moved about the adjoining room brought it to her mind. She was afraid, of what she did not know, but terrifying fear had taken possession of her heart and she was seized with an impulse to run away somewhere, anywhere, to hide from Robin. Hide where he would never find her or touch her, or look at her again. Then the click of the electric light being put out in the next room reached her, and with that ridiculous fear still straining at every nerve in her body, Lois turned to face the door by which her husband would come into the room.
To deal plainly, if they only married when they fell in love most people would die unwed. — R. L. Stevenson
“I don’t know what your father and I have done to deserve such disgrace.” Mrs Mackenzie sobbed heavily between the words, her plump face altered out of all resemblance to its usual placidity by the violence of her agitation.
Madeline, sitting a little further down the table, lifted quizzical eyes and glanced at the downbent head and heaving shoulders. Was there any use, she wondered, in trying to explain to her mother exactly what she had done to deserve the disgrace—if such it could be called—of Lois’ abrupt return to the family roof.
Lois had arrived back that morning by the early train, had even walked up the long way from the station because her coming had been unexpected and there was no one to meet her. White-faced but defiant she had burst in upon them at breakfast.
“I have come back, you see,” she had said; the defiance in her voice had wavered to despair; she had held out her hands to a bewildered, for the moment absolutely dazed, Mrs. Mackenzie. “Mother—oh, Mother!”
A storm of tears had taken the place of explanations. Phyllis had had to be hastily smuggled out of the room, too frightened by the strange occurrence even to argue; Mr. Mackenzie had taken himself off, deeming quite rightly that here was a woman’s affair, and now, with the breakfast dishes pushed hastily aside, the mother and her two daughters were facing the problem as best they could and each in her different way.
Lois’ tears had been short-lived; she was not a girl who cried easily or frequently, over-strained nerves, lack of sleep and food had been chiefly responsible for her outbreak. She had stated her case quite frankly and concisely once she had pulled herself together sufficiently to speak; she had not been told what marriage meant, she had not been prepared for it, she did not propose to put up with it.
“What do you propose to do then?” quavered Mrs. Mackenzie. Madeline had sat through the recital silent, her eyes on the table.
“I don’t know,” Lois spoke slowly. “but I shall not go back to Captain Drummond, nothing shall make me do that.”
Since there was no apparent sympathy to be extracted from either of her listeners, she rose to her feet again and went to stand by the window, her eyes on the green tennis court where Spot and Sandy, the two terriers, were having a battle royal.
Madeline uttered a suggestion presently, in answer to her mother’s wail.
“There will be no disgrace, Mother, don’t upset yourself needlessly; Lois will come round to see the common-sense view of things if she is given time!”
“What is the common-sense view of things?” Lois’ voice was hard, she swung round to face her sister. “That because I am married I should put up with a life that to me would be hateful?”
“Before God, dear,” Mrs. Mackenzie put in feebly—she mopped her eyes and blinked at her erring daughter. “Do try and remember your vows, that solemn service in church—‘Those whom God has joined together.’”
“Oh hush, Mother,” Lois interrupted passionately. “what has God got to do with it? And as for vows, one cannot be bound by vows that one has made in ignorance. I didn’t know what I was vowing, I didn’t know.”
“The common-sense view of it is not concerned with that.” Madeline spoke slowly, her eyes were studying the pattern of the tablecloth. “The point is—other girls have been through it—oh, believe me—in the same spirit as you, and have learnt to take life as they found it, even though it is so far away in reality from what they had dreamed. Women, generally speaking, have a lot of common sense.”
“Well, I haven’t,” stormed Lois, “I have a soul and a will of my own, which is more to the point, and I won’t give way or listen to what you call reason, I won’t, I won’t!”
“He is your husband,” Mrs. Mackenzie endeavoured again. “I mean you belong to him—”
“I don’t,” interrupted Lois, “I belong to myself, I would rather die than belong to anyone but myself.”
“My dear, I don’t know what to make of you,” remonstrated Mrs. Mackenzie; even tears apparently were to be of no use in this crisis. “You are behaving in a most extraordinary way. I have never heard of any girl doing such a thing before. Surely, Madeline, you are her elder sister, perhaps more able to understand her than I, cannot you find any arguments to show her how foolish and absurd she is being?”
Madeline lifted her head, her eyes as they met her mother’s were for the moment cruel with something not unlike contempt. Then she looked away again and faced the turbulent defiant figure at the window.
“It is better to give way with grace and dignity even if common sense does fail you, Lois,” she said. “There is one thing in this world that there is no use arguing against and that is life.”
“I will make my own life,” asserted Lois. “other people shall not make it for me.”
“It comes to the same thing in the end,” answered Madeline softly.
Lois looked at her across the room; their eyes met, and suddenly Lois remembered something that had been at the back of her mind ever since she had decided to come home.
“I don’t understand you, Madeline”; she came across towards her. “Somehow all through I have hoped that you would be on my side, that you would sympathize with me. Do you remember that afternoon in the garden when you spoke to me about Love? Mother is wicked, wicked, you said. I did not know what you meant then, I do now. You were afraid that this might happen—why?—unless you yourself knew what it meant to feel as I feel. And yet you don’t seem to be on my side—you——”
“I am on the side of common sense,” Madeline broke in softly; her eyes did not meet those of her sister. “Even though I understand,” she added under her breath.
Mrs. Mackenzie, feeling herself ignored, sniffed audibly. “I am sure I cannot understand either of you,” she ejaculated. “Girls never behaved in this peculiar way when I was young. We married when we were told or asked, and did our duty by our husbands, to the best of our ability. There was no nonsense talked about liking or not liking.”
“Did you love father just because you were told to?” asked Lois.
“I am sure I don’t know,” wailed Mrs. Mackenzie: “what odd questions you ask; he was my husband, of course I loved him.”
“Love walks hand in hand with common sense and duty,” put in Madeline.
Lois pushed back her chair and stood up, her eyes were on Madeline, she ignored Mrs. Mackenzie altogether. “Will you be quite honest with me, Madeline,” she asked. “as you used to be in the days before you married and went away? I know now—something that I have seen in your eyes has told me—that for you, love did not come hand in hand with duty or common sense. Do you advise me to go back and live as you lived? Please, Madeline, answer me honestly, do you advise me to go back?”
For a moment there was something very tense in the silence of the room, it seemed even to have spread to Mrs. Mackenzie who held her breath on a sob and sat transfixed, her eyes glued on Madeline. The elder girl’s face had stiffened to a mask as Lois had been speaking, her thoughts had wandered back into the past, her eyes were looking at the horror of those days. Presently she stirred ever so slightly, putting up her hands as if to rub the vision from her eyes, and Mrs. Mackenzie seized the opportunity to gulp noisily.
“Madeline,” entreated Lois; she was afraid of the look she had called to life on her sister’s face.
Then Madeline stood up, pushing back her chair with a steady hand. “Will you leave me to talk this out with Lois alone, Mother?” she said.
Mrs. Mackenzie dried bewildered eyes and rose to her feet. “Just as you think best,” she acquiesced, making her way slowly to the door. “I am sure I hope you will be able to put some sense into her.”
The two sisters sat silent for a while after the door had closed behind her. Lois had dropped back into her chair and was drumming her fingers on the table impatiently.
“Well,” she asked presently, glancing up at Madeline. “What arguments are you going to use to bring me to what mother calls my senses?”
“I was wondering,” began Madeline slowly “how I could best explain to you. You reminded me just now of that afternoon in the garden when we spoke of love; do you remember how I reproached myself, even then, for my lack of courage in not speaking out. Little sister—” she held out impetuous hands to Lois. “when I first came back to this house after my ten years of married life, my heart was hot and bitter with knowledge. I was going to have spoken to you then, to have told you a little of all that I had suffered—I had made up my mind that at least my example should save you from a like fate—but—” her voice broke abruptly, when she went on, it had sunk back to its ordinary level tone. “You had just got engaged, do you remember, it was the first piece of news that greeted me on my arrival, it seemed to choke back into my heart all my flood of warnings. How could I break your dream with my sad knowledge? Besides, what I said that day in the garden is true, Love is what we women all look for, I half hoped that you had found it. And I had learnt to know men in my life outside; your husband is a good man, I had no fear of letting you go with him.”
“Yes, he is good,” admitted Lois reluctantly. “I haven’t anything to say against him really, Madeline. It is only that I did not know and now I seem—it makes me feel as if I had been caught in a trap, fascinated by what I thought was love, just as a mouse is fascinated by the cheese. I can’t bear to be shut in,” she stood up, her hands working within one another. “Mother’s talk about vows before God, and duty, and wives obey your husbands, just makes me mad. I must find a way out, I must, I must.”
Madeline watched the feverish restless hands. “Have you talked to Robin at all?” she asked.
“No,” Lois admitted. “last night I made an absolute fool of myself, I did not know it was in me to cry so much, and this morning I did not see him, I left a note saying I was coming back here.”
Madeline came across to her sister, putting her hands on the younger girl’s shoulders. “Lois dear,” she said quietly. “you have got to go back. For all our sakes, for his sake, but for your sake most of all, you have got to go back.
The trap you are in is a very real one, the bars are difficult to break.”
“I can refuse to live with him,” said Lois stubbornly. “I can go up to London and earn my own living.”
Madeline shook her head. “You would still be married,” she said. “and he would still be married, each in a little separate cage of your own. It wouldn’t work; Lois, sooner or later one or the other of you would want to marry again. You may not believe it now, but none the less it is true, woman’s only real happiness lies through man. Settle down in your cage with a good grace; it will be wide enough to take all your world into soon.”
“You advise me to go back,” asked Lois, obviously wavering. “Madeline, you hated being married didn’t you?”
“I hated my husband,” said Madeline slowly; “if I thought marriage was going to mean that to you, Lois, I would fight with all my strength to keep you back from it. As it is, with all my heart, I do advise you to go back.”
This was the decision voted for firmly and decidedly by every member of the Mackenzie household except Phyllis. Phyllis had a vague idea that Captain Drummond must have ill-treated Lois; under the circumstances she certainly did not consider him a suitable companion for her beautiful sister. Her arguments were set aside, however, and on the evening of Lois’ return Mr. Mackenzie, with the authority of his wife behind him, was able to write a diplomatic note to the young husband.
Lois had been overtaken by a fit of homesickness: she had always been a very spoilt baby; he trusted his son-in-law would be patient with her and perhaps, since the time before they sailed was so short, he would not mind deferring the honeymoon, Lois had expressed such a desire to spend the remainder of the time available with her people. The letter ended with the hope that they might have the pleasure of seeing him at once, Lois was anxious to apologize for her abrupt departure.
The answer to this letter was a short curt note from Captain Drummond to the effect that he perfectly understood Lois’ wishes, and would himself return to fetch her as soon as he had settled an important matter that called for attention at his lawyers.
“The man has been made a fool of and very naturally resents it,” was Mr. Mackenzie’s comment. “troublesome little idiot that daughter of ours.”
It was an unsatisfactory state of affairs; what did matters to discuss with his lawyers mean? Despite their persuasions and Lois’ acquiescence, was disgrace not to be avoided? Mrs. Mackenzie swung between torturing hope and fear. Then on the fourth day after her return Lois received a stiffly worded note from Robin; he would be down by the 3.30 train that afternoon, their boat was due to leave on Saturday, he hoped Lois would be ready to come away with him then.
After all common sense is a very indefeasible thing when you really come up against it. Lois was beginning to be just a little annoyed with herself. Had she appeared an absolute idiot and what exactly would be Robin’s attitude? She was at least painfully shy at the thought of meeting him, and in the end Madeline received him alone, Mary—the amused and interested servant girl— showing him into the drawing-room with a broad smile and an intimation that she would find Miss Lois. Mr. and Mrs. Mackenzie, taking Phyllis with them, had tactfully decided to spend the afternoon out; they devoutly hoped that the whole ridiculous matter would be satisfactorily arranged before their return.
Madeline had been seated at the piano playing very softly to herself; as the door shut behind Robin she rose to her feet one hand still on the keys, her eyes meeting his across the width of the room.
“You’ve come,” she said. She moved out from behind the piano and came towards him. “Will you let me say something to you before you see Lois? in a way she has deputed me to explain.”
“Do you mean she refuses to see me?” asked Robin shortly; his eyes were a little hard, his face stern.
Madeline shook her head, also she put out a hand and touched his arm half timidly. “You are angry,” she said. “and hurt, it is only natural you should be; Lois has done a very stupid, to you it must seem a needlessly unjust thing.”
“She has hurt me damnably,” he answered; she noticed that his face flushed a dull red. “but I hardly think we need discuss that.”
He moved past her and sat down on a chair near the window staring out at the garden.
“No,” Madeline agreed quietly. “all that perhaps lies between you and her alone.” She looked at his face and away again. “I wanted to make you understand, if I could,” she added. “a little of Lois’ attitude.”
“Not very difficult is it?” asked the man, his hands clenched; “she has decided that she does not love me. Why did she ever pretend to?” There was exceeding bitterness in the cry.
“Lois did not pretend,” Madeline explained. “she simply did not understand. One of these days she will love you—if you will give her the chance—then both of you will be able to look back on this time together and laugh. No, wait—” she raised a protesting hand as Robin lifted his head to answer—“I want to tell you a little of my story, I am not sure that it will help you to understand, but at least it will make you a little gentler in your thoughts about Lois. I married younger than Lois, in fact I was only as old as Phyllis is now, very young, very full of dreams, very childish. I went away, as Lois went away, with mother’s vague whispers in my ear and amidst a shower of rice and good wishes. The man they had married me to was fifteen years older than I and vile beyond all words. Vile in mind, vile in soul, vile in body.”
She said the words so simply that for a second Robin thought he had mistaken her meaning and turned to look at her. It was evident she was not seeing him or anything else in the room; her eyes were fixed on something far away, and the horror depicted on her white face made his heart sick.
“Life became suddenly hell for me, the child of sixteen,” Madeline went on, speaking slowly like one asleep. “day in and day out terror and hate and shrinking compliance grew side by side in my heart; at night I would lie beside him praying for death while the sound of his breathing filled all my soul with loathing. Then he died—” Robin saw her whole figure relax, the horror fade out of her face, she turned towards him holding out her hands. “Who am I to judge of love?” she said. “and yet I know that you love Lois and that your love is what she needs.”
Robin stood up and took the hands held out to him. “I would cut off my head to please Lois,” he said earnestly, “but what can I do under the circumstances, how can I make her love me?”
“Take her back into your life, wipe out all this that has been between you, let her forget and start everything afresh,” Madeline answered quickly. Light steps were heard coming along the hall, a rather hesitating hand was laid on the handle of the door. “Thank God, Lois has married someone like you,” Madeline whispered before she turned away.
Lois’ heart was pounding in her throat, her knees were so shaky that she had to cling to the door handle for support when she had entered the room. She hardly noticed Madeline’s figure as it slipped past, her eyes had just glanced once at Robin; he seemed, even when her eyelids were down, to be filling the whole room. Waves of hot shame and bewildered feelings swept over her as she stood there head bent, the colour mounting to her cheeks; then his voice reached her from some great distance away, cool and surprisingly friendly.
“Well, Lois,” he said. “have you taken the news calmly about the boat sailing on Saturday? ready to go with me?”
Lois struggled with a ridiculous inability to answer. “I—” she began, “I—” she lifted her head for a moment, her eyes wide and piteous.
She was frightened of him, he realized, frightened as the child Madeline had been of that other man whom she had married. They had argued and persuaded her probably into coming back, into doing her duty, even as little Madeline had done hers with loathing and terror in her heart. If by any word or action he could at that moment have set her free and left her with the knowledge that they would never set eyes on each other again, Robin would have done it eagerly and gladly. But marriage is not thus easily disposed of, there was nothing to do except to tell this girl as quickly and plainly as possible that at least she need not be afraid of him.
“Listen, Lois,” he began; because of his firm determination to keep self-controlled his voice rang harsh and stern. “You are my wife, it is an unfortunate fact which cannot be done away with. But at least there is no reason why you should ever be afraid of me or dream that I shall ever in any way ask anything from you because you are my wife. Whatever you decide to do I will try and make things as easy for you as I can. There are—so far as I can see—only two possibilities; either you elect to stay at home, when it will be quite easy to find a reason why you should, and I shall be able to make you an allowance; or you come with me, when I give you my word of honour to fall in entirely with your views of life and never to try and disturb them.” His well-assumed indifference snapped, he had to turn away from her. “You can let me know some time this evening what you decide,” he said; “in any case there need be no more unpleasantness over it.”
“I have decided now,” whispered Lois.
“I want your own decision,” Robin reminded her. “not what other people have drilled into you as the correct thing to do. For heaven’s sake don’t imagine you owe me any duty, Lois.”
“It is my own decision,” answered Lois; she did not deem it necessary to confess to Madeline’s share in the matter. “I will come with you, please,” she ventured.
In yesterday’s reach, and to-morrow’s,
Out of sight though they lie of to-day,
There have been and there yet shall be sorrows,
That smite not and bite not in play.
— A. C. Swinburne
Belle Latimer lay stretched out her full length on the bed. Overhead a punkah flapped, with a jerk and squeak at each vigorous pull. Perched on the edge of the bed sat the ayah, her brown hands moving backwards and forwards along the length of the lithe uncovered limbs. Belle loved to lie like this, the punkah waking the faintest of breezes in the room, and the ayah’s soft cool hands massaging her.
High Indian noon reigned outside. Everything was panting under the glare of the sun; even the radiant goldmohur flowers that grew on the trees at the foot of the garden seemed to be shrivelling up under his touch. The garden ran down to a wall that encompassed it round, and at one side acted as a boundary mark to the sea, for Colaba—the military station of Bombay, is situated on a thin outrunning arm of the island. Crescent-shaped, barely a quarter of a mile across; it is washed on one side by the waves of the Indian Ocean and on the other by the calmer waters of the harbour.
Most of the officers’ bungalows are built along the seashore, so that they may have the benefit of whatever ocean winds may blow. Sometimes, in the monsoon, when the waves reared high, and white horses tossed their manes, the spray of the water would splash on to the top steps of the Latimers’ bungalow. Belle liked those wild furious waves, they woke some sympathetic chord in her nature. She liked the sea too, when it lay as it did to-day, a shimmering expanse of blue, with little tiny waves that murmured to each other and broke softly, as if saying Hush, hush! along the sands.
The murmuring waves, the flap-flap of the punkah, and the droning voice of the ayah, all blended together. For as she worked Rabhai sang softly, under her breath, a curious native chant, all in praise of the beauty of women and the hunger it can waken in the heart of man.
Belle lay and listened contentedly, almost she purred. She could understand the chant well enough, for Belle had lived most of her life in India. Her father and mother, having settled in an up-country station, had brought up their numerous family without any thought of sending them home for their education.
“The limbs of my mistress are wonderful,” droned the ayah. “like unto the white pillars of the temple; the nails of her feet shine like polished stones. What man could see such wonders and not swoon?”
“There is no man to see, fool,” interrupted Belle. She stretched her limbs and moved out of the ayah’s reach. “Of what use beauty without a man?”
Rabhai rubbed the palm oil off her hands on to her saree, and considered the question critically. She was more friend than servant to her mistress, for she had been Belle’s nurse in babyhood.
“There is always the master,” she suggested philosophically. “Truly of late his eyes have appeared holden to your beauty, since the night on which you so angered him with the police sahib. But, God knows, it is but a question of your brightening your face to his, and he will be again your slave.”
“I hate him,” answered Belle. She turned in the bed, propping her chin on her hands and gazing out through the door to where beyond the goldmohur at the gate she could catch a glimpse of dusty road. “Hate him,” she repeated viciously.
She had always hated him, it seemed to her, even from the very first when he had married her in the face of much earnest opposition from the brother officers in his regiment. For his friends had not considered that the eldest daughter of an up-country mill-owner was a suitable match for Captain Latimer; it was all very well to be friendly with those kind of people—it did not do to marry them.
But Captain Latimer had been impervious to advice or persuasion. He had fallen completely under the spell of Belle’s beauty, and he had romantic dreams of what their united loves would make of life. And she had always hated him! hated his slow smile, his weary eyes, his slightly-stooping shoulders. He was not a well-built man; he was a little too broad in the chest for his height, a little too long in the arms. Belle had all a native woman’s contempt for these failings.
Rabhai saw fit to remonstrate. “It is not wise to hate the lord of one’s life and the father of one’s child,” she argued. “There was love enough in the old days, when the sahib rode often to our bungalow.”
“There was never love,” Belle contradicted. “Think you I could love one so misshapen and plain of face as he? But I was not blind to the value of such a marriage.” She sat up in bed with a jerk, pushing the hair from her face. “And as for the child, I hate him too, hate, hate, hate, I tell you.”
Rabhai ignored the last outburst. She had no sympathy with her mistress on this point. To her, as to most native women, the child was sacred. What mattered the husband? It was possible to loathe a husband, but a child—that was another matter. Heaven send that the gods had not heard her mistress’s wild utterances.
“Captain Drummond sahib returns, so his bearer tells me this morning,” she announced presently, to distract her mistress’s train of thought. “He is to have the bungalow next to this.”
“Captain Drummond?” On the sudden Belle sat up, her feet swinging over the edge of the bed. “The bungalow next to ours!”
Her eyes shone curiously, making them look almost golden. The ayah nodded.
“So they say in the servants’ quarters, without doubt it is true.”
“Oh, Rabhai, thou slow fool,” exclaimed her mistress. “and all this time thou hast known it and said nothing. Quick, my clothes, and see to it that for to-morrow I have that best muslin from the dobhie, and to-night thou shalt brush my hair with that new oil that makes it shine like burnished copper.”
While Rabhai helped her on with her clothes Belle’s busy mind played over the important information she had just received. Captain Drummond—it was two years now since they had been together in an up-country station where the regiment had been quartered before its move to Bombay. He had been a nice-looking sympathetic boy, and Belle had played for his benefit the part of a misunderstood neglected wife. Captain Drummond had certainly admired her, and he had been sorry for her, for Belle was a good actress.
Out of friendship had grown something deeper, fiercer: the force of Belle’s passion had swept the boy off his feet for one brief hour and he had come to his senses startled and thoroughly ashamed. It had ended in his applying for a change of station and taking on the spot three months’ leave. It seemed almost the hand of Fate that he should be coming back now to live next door.
Outside on the veranda little Jimmy Latimer was having a wordy argument with the head chuprassi. Jimmy was a sturdy, rather self-contained youngster of five. He had taken after his father in appearance, but for his eyes, which were wonderful, amber-hued, like Belle’s. He had rather a sad little face in repose, with a mouth that drooped at the corners and eyes that looked as if they had been put in with a smutty finger; but when he smiled his whole face lit up wonderfully.
The argument in question had to do with whether Jimmy should be allowed to play with the head chuprassi’s knife, and Jimmy was using all his powers of persuasion and his sweetest smiles to achieve his purpose.
“My father shall promote thee,” he cajoled; see, Luxman, just for a moment, to hold in my hand and feel the weight of it. I will do no killing, I promise you.”
The chuprassi, a stately native, allowed a smile to creep over his stern countenance.
“Of a truth, little master, thou canst do no killing, the blade has not been sharpened these many months.”
Jimmy’s face fell slightly, but even unsharpened, a knife was always a knife.
“Then give it, Luxman, since there is no danger. Give it, or I shall cry, and thou knowest that angers the sahib.”
“Even so, little master, but with whom will he be angered?” Then, as he saw the small face flush and the lips begin to quiver, Luxman repented of his harshness. “There, there, lord of the house, thou shalt hold it, since thy heart is set on it. See——” with a stately gesture he drew out the curved heavy blade from his waist-belt, and laid it in Jimmy’s eager hands.
The child sprang to his feet, his eyes dancing, all thought of tears banished. “The sword, the sword,” he shouted jubilantly. “Now of a truth I am a man and will play at battles.”
“Only for a moment,” Luxman cautioned “Thou hast felt the weight, now give it back, little master, we will find some other game to play.”
But Jimmy shook his head, and before the chuprassi had quite realized his intentions he had turned, and with the knife clasped in his hand made off at full speed down the veranda.
Luxman rose to his feet with an expression of amused annoyance, but Nemesis was already on the small truant’s path. Just as he reached her door Belle stepped out on to the veranda, ready to receive callers, dressed in a gown of soft fluffy muslin. Jimmy, with head down, the knife aslant now, since he was well in the midst of a mimic battle, ran straight into her, the point of the weapon coming in contact with her dress, and making a wide jagged tear in one of the flounces.
Instant wild rage flamed into Belle’s face; she had never in her life learnt to control her temper, which was of the kind that flames into quick possession, and shakes the mind to madness.
“You little beast,” she screamed. With a strong hand she swung Jimmy from her and off his feet, so that he fell at the edge of the veranda, hitting his head against the side wall.
Jimmy raised a howl of fright and pain combined; his treasured knife had fallen from his hand and lay at Belle’s feet.
“How dared you give him a thing like that to play with,” she stormed, turning her attention to Luxman. “You deserve both of you to be beaten beaten, do you hear what I say?”
A chic at the further end of the veranda moved, and Major Latimer came out. His rather heavy white face habitually wore a somewhat cynical expression: the hair above his temples was white; that, and the slight stoop with which he carried himself, made him look many years older than his real age.
“What is the row, Belie?” he asked. Then his eyes lit on Jimmy’s huddled-up figure, and the expression of his face changed at once, sharpened and grew stern. “What have you been doing to the boy?” he demanded.
Belle had made a supreme effort at self-control; so far as her temper and Jimmy were concerned she had learnt to be afraid of her husband.
“Jimmy has been naughty as usual,” she explained. “he dashed at me with a knife which Luxman had given him and tore a huge hole in my dress. Naturally I tried to take the knife from him, and now he is howling about it.”
Latimer looked from the child’s figure to his wife’s rage-flushed face, and finally turned his attention to Luxman.
“Huzoor,” the man ventured. “of a truth it was my fault. The little master but played——”
“That will do,” Latimer interrupted. “take the chota sahib away and bathe his face. Jimmy, my son”—how quickly his voice fell on tenderness as he spoke—“you are too big a man to cry like that. Run along in with Luxman; when you are big enough not to cry you shall have a knife of your own.”
He stayed where he was while Luxman gathered up Jimmy and vanished into the house with him; then he would have turned back to his own room, but Belle stopped him.
“You pay no attention to my complaint,” she said stiffly. “Jimmy has been naughty, he has ruined a practically new dress and upset me very much, and all you say to him is, ‘You shall have a knife of your own some day.’”
Latimer turned to look at her: the cynicism had come back to his face, but his voice was friendly and impartial.
“It struck me, my dear, that Jimmy had been punished sufficiently for a fault which was after all probably an accident. He will have a nasty bruise on his head to-morrow.”
“You accuse me of hitting him, I suppose,” stormed Belle. “you have no thought of how he hurt me.”
“Did he hurt you?” asked Latimer, and for a second his eyes met hers.
“Oh no, I suppose I am telling lies,” retorted Belle, her hands clenched, rage mounting to her brain again. “You insult me always, always. Jimmy is better than I am; I am not good enough to be his mother; you are for ever spitting that in my face.”
Her voice was rising to a scream. Latimer shrugged his shoulders wearily.
“My dear Belle,” he remonstrated. “you really are being ridiculous. Why should I wish to insult you? I did not punish Jimmy, because I certainly did think you had been a little rough with him, and he appeared to me to be thoroughly frightened and hurt. Come now, admit that you did push him away rather roughly.”
“I admit nothing”; loud sobs were interfering with Belle’s speech by now. “except that I am tired of you and your spying, and your continued insults. I hate you and your child, God knows how I hate you!” Her voice cracked in a scream, she turned and rushed wildly into her bedroom.
He could hear her sobbing noisily in the next room, and the creak of the bed as she flung herself upon it. The lines grew deeper round his eyes and mouth. She hated him—why not say at once they hated each other? And yet they were man and wife, bound together by the strictest tie that exists on earth. What a hideous mockery it all was, to be sure!
There are few things harder to bear than to stifle every strongest inclination, every dearest hope; to shut the gate of life, to lock it and throw away the key. . . . The cruelty of it all seems almost beyond endurance. — Swetenham
Lois did her first journey to India on board a trooper. Robin had been given a detachment of men to take out as far as Aden, in return for which duty he and his wife were granted a free passage to Bombay. The boat was crowded, and double-berth cabins something of a luxury, Lois therefore went in among the juniors, and had to share a cabin with two other ladies. Both her companions were senior in rank and age to herself, one being the wife of a Major, the other the wife of a senior Captain. Lois found that being the junior under the circumstances involved a certain amount of discomfort; she had to take what the others left in the way of pegs and drawers, there was very little room for her box by the time the seniors had stored theirs away. Finally, to her was allocated the top bunk, which had to be reached by the aid of steps, and which was so near the roof that to sit up in it was an impossibility.
“If I am going to be seasick,” thought Lois as she scrambled to her lofty perch on the first night, “I shall make myself fearfully unpopular, because I certainly shan’t be able to get down that ladder in time.”
Her fears were however groundless, for she proved herself a very good sailor, and it was not long before she was devoutly grateful for the refuge which her upper bunk afforded. Never had she heard two women talk as Mrs. Stavery and Mrs. Goiram talked. They were bosom friends, with husbands in the same regiment, and unlimited memories of old scandals to fall back on when boardship life proved unprofitable. Lois, they either patronized or snubbed, more often they ignored her, and they were singularly frank in the matters which they discussed before her. Generally the talk would veer round to husbands, either their own or other women’s, and on these occasions Lois would lie with tingling cheeks, head buried in the pillow, glad that she had of her own free will withdrawn herself from this terrible sisterhood of wives. Thank heaven she had no stories to tell, no odd facts to recount! At others—well, Robin as a husband was disappointing and not so nice or companionable as he had been as a lover. She missed the old open admiration of his eyes, his unfailing belief in her perfection. Robin was polite to her, attentive to her comfort; she had no complaints to make about that, and yet—and yet—it was absurd, but she did feel at times as if something were missing.
They saw very little of each other in private. Robin would sometimes come and sit by her on deck, or accompany her on a constitutional, but a wall of restraint had risen between them, it tended to hamper the friendliness of their relations, and lay like a damp weight on their efforts at conversation. Quite early in the voyage Robin developed an apparent passion for bridge, and spent most of his days with other devotees of the game in the card-room. People were not slow to notice what was considered rather odd behaviour in a new husband, and one or two of the women would have been ready to sympathize with Lois had she not met their advances with studied indifference.
There was one other bride on board, and rather by common consent she and Lois were thrown very much on each other’s companionship. Estelle Waters had been married about six months, Lois discovered. She was a painfully shy and very nervous girl, a little older than Lois, though far more childlike in her attitude towards life. George, the husband, a large bullying type of man, was to her a god; she was very proud of him, but palpably a little afraid also.
“Does your husband approve of you powdering your nose?” she asked Lois once; the two were sitting on deck together and Lois had just finished titivating herself with the aid of a vanity bag mirror and a powder puff.
“Never asked him,” she answered with truthful indifference. “Why?”
“Nothing.” The other girl stammered a little over her answer, “Only George won’t let me. Not even when I told him Mrs. Rogers said it was good for prickly heat,” she added as an afterthought.
“What business is it of his?” asked Lois with wide-opened eyes.
Estelle gave a little gasp. “He says immoral women use powder,” she hurried out the reason.
“That is ridiculous, of course,” said Lois calmly. “and anyway I should not let him dictate to me if I were in your place. Wives are not children, or slaves, you know.”
“No, of course not,” Estelle agreed. Her voice however sounded singularly unconvinced, and Lois could see that her stringent remark had not borne fruit.
There was only one other person on board whose individuality stood out noticeably in Lois’ mind. A young subaltern, Jocelyn Denvers by name, a tall, well built, somewhat conceited youth, with amazing blue eyes and the longest lashes that Lois had ever seen in her life. There was just the faintest sweep to those eyelashes that gave his eyes a curiously pathetic look. He had a little golden moustache and very fine white teeth. Altogether he was certainly handsome, and above all, he possessed what is known as a way with women. From his earliest school days Denvers had always been attached to some woman; the day the boat called in at Malta he attached himself to Lois.
He had spent some time in studying her before that. He knew for instance that Lois and her husband were singularly unlike a regulation newly married couple. He had watched Lois sitting on deck alone, her book idle on her lap, her grey eyes gazing disconsolately at the far horizon. He had summed up Robin as rather a dull sort of good chap; there were depths in Lois’ character—Denvers felt sure—that it would take an artist like himself to plumb.
Every one made up parties to go on shore at Malta, the first place where a really lengthy landing had been possible. Denvers, by careful scheming, persuaded old Mrs. Rogers, wife of the Colonel in command, to make up a four with the Drummonds and himself. The Commandant, a much travelled veteran, had a rooted objection to landing anywhere. Once ashore it was quite palpably Drummond’s duty to escort Mrs. Rogers, and early in the afternoon Denvers succeeded in escaping with Lois from the rest of his party.
“There is a church here,” he pointed out to Lois. “that you simply must not miss. Mrs. Rogers hates churches; don’t call them back, we will catch them up at the tea place.”
Lois turned aside with him willingly enough, and together they wandered round the cool dimly-lit church, peeping into the various chapels, drawing each other’s attention to various points of interest. It was Lois who noticed the baby being held up to light the candles at the altar of the Virgin, and Denvers who espied the broken hearts tied to the hand of Mary Magdalene’s statue. Then they sat for awhile in the centre aisle to listen to the singing of the choir which Denvers assured Lois was one of the finest in Europe. Boys’ voices, high and piercingly sweet, one man with a wonderful tenor voice, the notes of which seemed to throb right down in his heart. Lois listened and stirred restlessly, turning to meet Denvers’ eyes and know herself vaguely uneasy at their message. Of course, by the time they reached the tea shop the other couple had given them up in despair, and it was absurd not to have tea, since probably by now Mrs. Rogers had insisted on a return to the boat and there would be no catching them up.
Night had fallen and the moon was making a path of silver across the sea when finally they rowed back to the “Himalaya.” Lois had a small twinge of conscience: would Robin be very anxious and worried? Then it passed and Denvers was holding out his hand to help her up the gangway.
“I have enjoyed Malta,” he whispered as the sway of the boat brought them close against each other. “You and I in that church together; it has given me something to dream about.”
Lois tried to summon up a laugh, but the thrill in his voice had shaken her. It was what she had missed from her husband’s voice since the night of their marriage, and quite suddenly she knew that she wanted to hear Robin speak to her like that again.
Jealousy is a fierce tyrant who walks about the realm of Love with a flaming sword. Wherever his blade touches, the flowers wither up and die; he holds up his shield and in a second it darkens life’s sky like a thunderstorm sweeping up in the face of a summer’s day. And the stronger the nature, the deeper the love, the more fierce is the power of jealousy. As Robin stood at the gangway and watched Lois and Denvers coming up the ship’s ladder he was conscious of an almost physical force that had seized him by the throat. He felt the blood pounding along his veins, and knew that the primeval man within was urging him to murder.
Then Lois reached his side, and he could hear Denvers’ cool voice explaining how they had stayed behind to see a church and thus missed the other couple.
“You ought to have waited a little longer, Robin,” Lois put in. “Coming back by moonlight was the best part of the trip, wasn’t it, Mr. Denvers?”
“Infinitely,” answered the other man; to Robin’s tortured nerves his voice seemed weighted with soft meaning.
“You are the last from shore,” he forced himself to speak abruptly. “It was rather risky, Captain Balfour is not the sort of man to wait five minutes for any one.”
“Dear lady, what a fearful scandal we have escaped,” laughed Denvers; “I must hurry up and find Mrs. Rogers; already she will be concocting all sorts of rumours about us.”
He went off down the deck, Lois turning to call something after him, and Robin clenched his hands. Jealousy was waking the passion to life in his heart as even love had not been able to do. He wanted to lay rough hands on Lois, to pull her into his arms, to feel her face against his, and the whole of her soft small body powerless in his grasp. When Lois turned to look at him she could see that his face was white and his mouth set in hard lines.
“Are you angry with us?” she asked. How the word—us—lashed at the flame of his anger. “I suppose it really was rather stupid to stay so late, but we did not realize the time.”
“Denvers was very entertaining, I gather,” agreed Robin, the extreme bitterness of his tone made Lois lift her eyes in a glance of surprised interrogation.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she answered. “He is always amusing, and then it was nice to be ashore again after having been on board for so long. There were some fascinating people came into the tea shop while we were there, women with such odd clothes, and——”
“And you would have missed the romantic row back in the moonlight if you had come earlier,” put in Robin.
“Romantic?” queried Lois; there was a faint note of sarcasm in her voice. It struck her that Robin was being rather silly and very cross over nothing in particular.
“Well, I suppose it was romantic, wasn’t it?” he asked. “Denvers has a reputation for romantic episodes.”
“I don’t consider that funny,” said Lois stiffly; she moved away from him down the deck.
Robin pulled himself together with an effort and followed, catching her up just as she got to the saloon doorway. “Lois,” he said, speaking hurriedly, “I am sorry for making a damned fool of myself. I—I—the truth is, I don’t like Denvers, I would so much rather see you going about with any one else.”
Lois turned to face him; a little spark of anger had set fire to her spirit of obstinacy. “Do you wish to order me not to be friends with whom I please?” she asked.
“You know it isn’t that,” Robin explained, “though for that matter, if I thought it would have any effect, I would order you where Denvers is concerned.”
“I am afraid your authority would be wasted,” said Lois sweetly, she must at least live up to the advice she had been so ready to give Estelle. “I do not intend to be dictated to about such things.” With a little swish of her skirts she turned and left him, passing down the saloon gangway.
Two minutes afterwards she would gladly have withdrawn her remark. She had not meant to fight with Robin, in fact the feeling in her heart towards him had been far otherwise. The moonlight on the water had stirred her romantically; he had been right in his deduction, only why had he been so stupid as to drag Denvers into the question? Why had he taken it into his head to display that vague show of much-to-be-resented marital authority? It really was most annoying.
During the night, as she lay in her straight little bunk listening to the swish swish of waves against the ship’s sides, Lois reviewed the incident and decided in her own mind that perhaps she had been partly to blame. Dear old Robin, how patient and good he had been to her all through, other husbands—she took a quick glance downwards at Mrs. Goiram’s sleeping form—dealt far otherwise with their refractory wives. . . . Mrs. Goiram had a vast repertoire of tales of husbands who extracted obedience by fair means or foul from their wives.
With a sigh Lois turned her attention to one very bright star whose light, with every swing of the ship, twinkled in at the porthole. To-morrow she would make it up with Robin, she would show him that if he really were worried about her friendship with Mr. Denvers it should cease. A smile stirred in the depths of her eyes. Robin really was a dear. She rather wished . . . With a consciousness that she was blushing and that the star was unduly inquisitive, Lois turned her back on the porthole and buried her face in the pillow. But sleep found her with the little smile transferred to her lips,
Among thy fancies tell me this,
What is the thing we call a kiss?
Alas for good intentions! Short of humbling her pride altogether, and Lois was not quite prepared for that, Robin was unapproachable next day. He seemed to have retired into a stronghold of sulks, and he never came near Lois except when other people were present. Denvers, on the other hand, was doubly attentive. His chair was alongside of Lois’ all day; he bribed the steward and won over the Captain into agreeing to a tea party on deck as a special method of pleasing Lois, who hated tea downstairs in the saloon where it was daily served. Robin was asked to the tea party of course, but he came for a very short time just at the end; the last rubber had taken longer than they expected, was his excuse.
Lois was doing the honours of the tea table with Denvers in close attendance, waiting on her slightest need. As she handed his cup to Robin, her eyes met his for a moment, and it is to be noted to her credit that she then and there made her final effort at reparation.
“You haven’t taken any exercise to-day, Robin,” she said. “you will have to walk round and round the deck twenty times with me after tea.”
“I am afraid I can’t,” he replied stiffly, “I have promised the Colonel another game before dinner.”
“It is no use, Mrs. Drummond,” laughed Denvers. “You can’t wean them from the habit once they catch it. Bridge isn’t a game, it is a disease.”
Lois had flushed, she felt as if Robin had purposely snubbed her in public. The anger his action roused swamped for the time being all desire for a reconciliation, and that evening Lois walked the deck with Denvers as her companion.
Denvers had no scruples as to his conduct and very little curiosity as to where it would end. Boardship to him was essentially the place for a flirtation. He threw himself as usual heart and soul into the adventure; before the boat reached Port Said, a three days’ journey from Malta, he could quite honestly describe himself as passionately in love with Lois. Her clear grey, changeable eyes haunted his dreams; the touch of her hand, or her skirts as they brushed against him, thrilled him. There was no reason why he should make an effort at controlling his inclinations. Lois was married apparently to a man for whom she did not care; a married woman with an unappreciated husband is always willing to take on a lover. That was Denvers’ creed, as his world had taught it to him.
Lois spent the day ashore with him at Port Said. By this time a chaperone was plainly in the way and they dispensed with asking Mrs. Rogers. Robin had somewhat savagely declined to come. Lois was aware that only a great deal of self-restraint had prevented him from asking her not to go either. She rather admired his self-control, and yet regretted it; it gave her no chance to disobey, and she had a wild desire to fight with Robin since he was so palpably determined not to be friends.
Port Said, apart from the little gloom occasioned by Robin’s attitude, proved an enjoyable excursion. It was her foretaste of the East, and the spell was not slow in closing round Lois. She loved the quaint streets with their shaded crowded pavements, the Arab men so stately in their walk and bearing, the veiled women, who shuffled past with keen bright eyes peeping out from behind their coverings. Port Said was dirty and noisy and smelt as only an eastern crowded town can smell under a blazing sun, but it palpitated with life, with colour and mystery, the mystery of East and West meeting and yet not mingling.
Lois and Denvers hired a couple of donkeys and rode round the sights of the town, to the accompaniment of strange shrill cries, and terms of endearment, used by the donkey boys in their efforts to make the steeds progress. The young man in charge of Lois’ donkey had attained to a smattering of English, chiefly proper names, which he used indiscriminately, with a flashing smile as each fresh effort produced a laugh from Lois or Denvers.
“Hasten then, Mother Lily Langtry,” he would bawl, whacking the rear part of Lois’ donkey with a stick. Or, “Go on, most beauteous Lady de Bathe.”
Why these two names were so popular Lois could not imagine, but every donkey appeared to be called by one or the other.
They had lunch in the swagger hotel of the place where most of the rest of the “Himalayan” passengers had gathered, and afterwards a party of them visited a neighbouring gambling saloon where Denvers, after varying fortunes, succeeded in losing three guineas. Tea in a cafe on the harbour front followed, and then they rowed back to the ship just in time to see the last of the coaling, and to watch the almost naked black carriers running up and down the planks from the coal hulk to the ship carrying their bags of coal, the whole scene illumined by flares of torchlight and looking rather like a picture of Dante’s Inferno.
From that date onward Lois seemed to see less and less of Robin, every one on board ship scented the scandal and by degrees it came about that she and Denvers spent their days together and practically alone. Lois was aware of the feeling in the air, and though she paid no apparent attention to it, none the less it undoubtedly angered her. She did not attempt to explain her conduct, not even to herself. She was hurt by Robin’s attitude of indifference, bewildered by the calm manner in which Denvers appropriated her society, and—as in the case of most boardship flirtations—she just let things drift. It was very difficult to do anything else, since Robin was unapproachable and Denvers would not be snubbed.
So things went on until the evening of the ship’s arrival in Bombay. A break up concert had been arranged for that evening, but Denvers had persuaded Lois to desert the serried ranks of listeners, and had carried their two chairs into the shadow of the Captain’s bridge, close to the bulwarks.
“It will be Bombay and good-bye to-morrow,” he told her. “Does it make you a little sad I wonder? You are so difficult to understand; has anyone ever told you before that your eyes are full of riddles?”
It was a wonderful night, with great stars in a purple sky and phosphorescence breaking up the deep black of the waters with flashes of fairy light.
“No,” Lois admitted. “what sort of riddles do you mean?” she asked.
“Ah, now, that is giving me a chance at guessing, isn’t it?” whispered Denvers; he drew his chair a little nearer hers and stared up at her. “They are quite black to-night,” he went on, “like deep pools, and right away at the very back of them there is a tiny little spark alight, like the reflection of a star. Sometimes they are so grey and clear it almost seems as if a man would be able to look through them, right into your heart. Why do you sometimes veil your heart with black shadows? I like your eyes better when they are grey.”
“Really,” said Lois, she summoned up a little laugh. “How ridiculous you are, Mr. Denvers! everyone’s eyes look black in this kind of light, even yours.”
“Do they?” asked Denvers; he leant back in his chair again with a sigh. “Sometimes,” he said, “I am driven to wonder if you have a heart at all.”
From inside the saloon someone was singing, even the very tinkling notes of the piano were unable to spoil the beauty of the girl’s voice. People had gathered from all parts of the deck and out of the card room to listen.
“Give me your hand, that I may press it gently,
And if the others see, what matter they?
Gaze in mine eyes with thy sweet eyes intently,
As once in May, as once in May.”
The last notes lingered as if the air would be sorry to lose them, and Lois stirred, her hand lying along the arm of the chair showed up a white blur in the darkness.
Denvers moved till his fingers lay over hers. “Give me your hand,” he repeated softly after the singer.
Lois did not move, her hand lay passive under his, her very acquiescence waking hope in his heart. Then the girl’s song finished, and Denvers, lifting the hand under his to his lips, kissed it lightly, lingering a little over the caress.
“The riddle of your eyes, and the riddle of your heart is one and the same,” he whispered; “some day I shall be able to read them both together.”
With an abrupt movement Lois stood up; she was on the second intensely ashamed of herself and annoyed with him. She had just caught sight of Robin’s figure moving back into the card room, and it seemed as if he had paused on his way for a second to stare into the shadows where they were. Had he seen them, she wondered, and noticed Denvers’ action?
“What ridiculous nonsense you indulge in,” she spoke sharply to the man at her side, who had risen to his feet too. “and how dared you kiss my hand?”
“But I would dare much more than that,” Denvers answered. His face was very close to hers, she could feel his breath stirring across her cheek. “I would dare my soul and more to kiss your lips.”
Lois turned to face him. “That is not true,” she said quickly. “Oh, I know we two have been playing at love, it makes me ashamed when I think of it. But you don’t love me, I know enough about it to know that you don’t love me.”
“Don’t I,” the man answered softly, his arms had gone round her, he had drawn her close against him. “Don’t I?” he repeated, and suddenly he bent to her face in the darkness and kissed her lips.
In the tumult of the moment, while she struggled away from him, Lois was only conscious of one thing. A memory had invaded her mind, a memory of Robin when he had gathered her into his arms on that first night of their life together, and again it seemed to her as if the air was alive with terror and heavy with the scent of roses.
The transient sorrow you cause me now
Will pass away in the distance dim,
But Love is a god—and I wonder how
You will make your peace with him.
— Lawrence Hope
Bridge was an impossibility to Robin that evening, the atmosphere of the saloon seemed stifling. After the second rubber he pushed his cards to the centre of the table and stood up.
“I am sorry,” he said. “but it is no use. I am playing vilely to-night, and luck is dead against me.”
“You are holding bad cards,” acknowledged Manders, his partner, a young unmarried subaltern; “it is fairly late, too, and as to-morrow will see us awake fiendishly early, I am not averse to turning in myself.”
“By Jove,” agreed another man. “to-morrow sees Bombay, doesn’t it? Well, we have had a peaceful voyage, but for the occasion upon which old Barker had to tell Mrs. Stannard to keep her offspring in order.”
“Barker does not stand any nonsense,” grunted Colonel Rogers, who had made up the fourth at bridge. “and he knows how to manage women, which is more than can be said for that young man,” he nodded his head in the direction of Robin’s retreating back.
“Drummond is having a rotten time,” put in Manders quickly. “but what is a man to do if his wife insists upon flirting with another fellow?”
Colonel Rogers raised his bushy eyebrows. “Beat her, my lad,” he advised calmly. “and smash the other fellow’s head in. It is what I would have done in my day. It is a great pity that violent measures of this sort have gone out of fashion; strength, and the power to use it, are two things that women have always respected.”
“That is all very well,” argued Manders. “but one can’t go up to another man and hit him with one’s fists. Duels were another matter, but they are outside the law.”
“My boy,” said Colonel Rogers firmly. “if you had a wife and caught her kissing, or being kissed by, another man you would probably see things so red that you would have a shot at murder unless the other man ran away.” He sucked at a very strongly flavoured cigar. “When a man can’t hit out.” he ended the discussion. “it is a damned bad look-out for his peace of mind, for the devils of hell are let loose inside him.”
Had Robin remained he could have borne witness to the truth of that epigram. The devils of hell were certainly at work within his brain, and he was not in a position to give vent to his feelings by hitting Denvers. That would not alter Lois’ attitude in the matter. She had shown only too plainly in the last ten days that she had no objection to Denvers loving her, and it was not to be expected that she had resented his kiss. Robin’s eyes, inflamed by jealousy, could draw only one conclusion from the scene he had accidentally witnessed. Lois had never loved him, her attitude towards marriage proved that; he had been a fool to imagine—even though Madeline had pretended to support the theory—that in time Lois might learn to love him.
For a second a wave of pity took the place of the rage that swayed Robin’s soul. It was devilish hard lines on Lois, for whatever way the three of them turned in this tangle of their lives, she would probably be the one to suffer most. Then jealousy pushed aside pity again. Why had she chosen Denvers? Why had she flirted so assiduously, and played false with the faith due to her husband?
At that moment Lois, coming along the deck by herself, since she had dismissed Denvers somewhat peremptorily, caught sight of Robin leaning against the bulwark, and came across to say goodnight. With Denvers’ kiss still tingling on her lips, she was half mindful to unburden the whole incident to her husband, but something in the stiff politeness of Robin’s tone as he answered her first remark drove all thoughts of confession away. Lois altered her intention immediately. She made a laughing allusion to the attractions of the bridge room over music.
“But you came out to hear Miss Watson’s song, didn’t you?” she asked, “her voice was lovely to-night.”
“Yes,” answered Robin shortly. He turned away, because he could not let his eyes rest on her face and not give way to the passion of rage which her calm deceit had fanned to life again.
Lois stood for a moment or two beside him undecided. It occurred to her that Robin had witnessed Denvers’ rash action, and that he was furiously angry. Then she dismissed the idea as absurd—after all their part of the deck had been in shadow.
“Well, good-night,” she ventured presently, “we get in very early to-morrow morning, don’t we? I am longing to see Bombay, and to stop living on board a ship.”
“Good-night,” answered Robin, ignoring the rest of her sentence.
Lois left him on that, with a little impatient sigh. Robin was really very tiresome at times. He had made her feel ridiculously like a child conscious of some crime that has yet to be discovered. “If he saw Mr. Denvers kissing me,” she argued. “he ought to ask me about it, and then I would tell him exactly how angry it made me feel. What is the use of a husband if he cannot help you in a thing like this?”
She was tempted to go back before she started undressing, and have it out with Robin, but in the end she decided that his present mood was too unapproachable for the venture. None the less the unconfessed secret made her climb into her bunk in a very depressed frame of mind. She had been so completely shaken out of her self-possession by Denvers, his kiss had wakened such a tumult of feelings in her heart, that far into the night she lay sleepless with wide-open eyes and bewildered mind, trying to disentangle the whirl of her thoughts.
About two o’clock in the morning she fell asleep, dreaming a funny hurried dream all about a mountain which she was laboriously trying to climb. On the very top of it she could dimly discern Robin—he seemed to be leaning towards her holding out his arms. But the dream mountain heaved and grew between them, sharp stones cut her feet, briers caught at her clothes to hold her back. Then suddenly it seemed as if a mist blinded her eyes, and Robin was lost to view, so that she struggled forward, still assiduously climbing, but with all hopes of ever reaching him wiped from her heart.
Robin spent the greater part of the night walking up and down the deck, trying to make up his mind what would be the best course to pursue. Lois must attain her freedom in some way or other, of that he was convinced. The question that required settling was how best to achieve it. He was unwilling to let her go; there was that inclination to be fought with in the first instance, for even his anger against her had not quenched the love in his heart. She was his wife, and he loved her; one side of his nature clamoured for the right to hold her his own in the face of everything. Why should he stand aside and let her go? Finally, the jumble of his thoughts settled down to two definite decisions, one prompted by love, the other insisted on by jealousy. He would let her go, arrangements should be made by which she could return to England within the next three months, there need be no scandal over that. She would go back to her own people, and when the right period of time had elapsed, he would apply for a divorce with as little fuss as possible. After that? Well, after that she would be free to do as she liked, it would only be one year out of her life that he had wasted.
In the meanwhile—here jealousy took strong possession—while she lived under his name, in his house, she must keep faith with him, there must be no more love-making with Denvers. That was pushing a man too far.
The problem being thus settled very bitterly against his own happiness, Robin went downstairs to change and pack, for already the searchlight from the Colaba lighthouse was visible on the horizon, and the ship’s stewards were busy bringing the luggage on deck.
Lois came out of her dream after two hours’ troubled sleep, to find that the ship had stopped.
“It must be Bombay,” she thought, and on the instant slipped from her bunk to stand on tiptoe and peer out of the porthole over Mrs. Goiram’s slumbering form.
Dawn was abroad in the sky. The sea lay almost without a ripple on its broad expanse, bathed in a soft glow of pink. The dark purple of the horizon was tinged with gold, and lying against this background, Lois could discern the first far-away signs of land. Low mountains that sloped away into the skies, a distant view of Bombay harbour, the island scarce discernible from the mainland. Yet even as she watched, some long ray of sunlight touched upon the buildings and towers of the city, which now showed white amidst the darkness of the palms and trees.
The stoppage of the ship’s engines had disturbed most of the passengers. Lois could hear the people next door moving about and talking, even Mrs. Goiram presently stirred and grunted.
“Land in sight?” she queried, noticing Lois’ intent efforts to peer out of the porthole.
“Yes,” Lois assented, drawing in her head. “And it is wonderfully beautiful. There are green trees and green mountains; I have always thought of India as all blinding sun and dust, something like the Suez Canal.”
“Oh, Bombay is full enough of trees,” Mrs. Goiram admitted. She turned over on her other side, displaying a sad lack of interest in the view, “I suppose we have stopped to take on the pilot. It will be quite four hours before we are really in.”
“I shall dress and go on deck,” announced Lois, “every moment the outside world is getting more beautiful.”
“Humph,” grunted Mrs. Goiram. “when you have done as much of India as I have, you will realize the truth of the saying which describes Bombay as being the most beautiful sight in the world when one is watching it disappearing behind the stern of an England-bound ship. You will be very much in the way on deck,” she added. “they are probably getting the luggage up.”
Despite this word of advice, Lois carried outlier intention, and half an hour later saw her emerging up the saloon stairs. The ship was under way again by then, slipping through the water with no movement save the throb, throb of her great engines. Bombay lay so near that the odd shape of her land, spread like a crescent moon upon the waters, was lost to sight. Houses and official buildings had grown separate and distinct; tall palms reared their heads against the sky line on Malabar Hill; large steamers and small boats of every description were discernible in the harbour.
Lois found the deck in confusion, as Mrs. Goiram had foretold. The hatchway of the luggage hold was open, stewards and lascars and sailors hurried backwards and forwards with various articles of luggage. She stood for a little in the saloon doorway, for the deck chairs had all been piled away in heaps, then catching sight of Robin directing the disposal of their luggage from a vantage point on the deck, she moved across and joined him.
“It is perfectly lovely, isn’t it, Robin?” she asked. The memory of her dream stirred across her mind, and she was suddenly glad to have him near her, to know him within reach.
“Yes,” he answered briefly, “Bombay is commonly called Bombay the beautiful. That is Colaba, where we shall live, over there.”
He pointed to the low-lying finger of land that curves out, forming one point of the crescent moon.
“I am afraid I shall be late in getting off,” he went on. “I have been given a batch of men and luggage to land. But my bearer will be meeting us with the trap; you can go straight on with him.”
“I would rather wait for you,” Lois suggested; “you won’t be so very long, will you, Robin?”
“Just as you like,” he agreed curtly. “only I am afraid you will find the bunder very hot and noisy.”
An hour later the ship swung to her anchor in her allotted space, and all the bustle of landing had commenced. Lois found herself going ashore in the same tug as Denvers. He came and stood beside her as they neared the shore.
“I have never hated the end of a voyage before,” he said, intently looking down at her, “I wish it were about to begin all over again.”
“Why?” asked Lois lightly, with raised eyebrows. “Personally, I am very glad it is finished. I was getting tired of only having a deck to walk on.”
“It means saying good-bye to you,” Denvers answered, his voice suitably lowered on the last two words. “That is hell to me.”
Lois stirred restlessly, feeling herself flush. “Please don’t talk nonsense, Mr. Denvers,” she said quickly. “If you and I are going to remain friends you must be sensible.”
“Then we are to be friends! You have forgiven me after last night?” he whispered. Estelle Waters had drifted towards them; he had had to drop his voice to a whisper.
“Had I anything to forgive?” Lois asked carelessly, and she met his eyes defiantly. “Anyway,” she went on, “I can forgive most things except being bored, and when people are not sensible it does bore me.”
She turned from him to Mrs. Waters. “Are you stopping for a day or two, or going straight through?” she asked.
“George hasn’t decided,” the girl answered. She was studying Lois and Denvers with awestruck eyes. George had that morning enlightened her as to the depravity of Lois and her lover, and Estelle in coming in contact with them experienced some of the joys of a nervous visitor to the Chamber of Horrors. Her presence effectually silenced any further private conversation between the two, and in the end Denvers had to depart after a perfunctory hand-shake and a brief good-bye.
After that Lois found herself taken in charge by a tall severe-looking Mohammedan, who salaamed with great dignity before her, announced that he was Drummond’s sahib bearer, and suggested that she could wait in greater comfort for the sahib if she would come with him and take her place in the dog-cart. Lois followed his guidance obediently, and climbed into the seat of the cart, which was standing in the shade of one of the luggage sheds. Another native servant was in charge of the conveyance, squatting at the horse’s head, brushing away the troublesome flies with a long hair whisk.
The sun was very hot, the glare blinding. Lois sat back, blinking even in the shade, watching the crowd of volubly excited natives as they passed and re-passed, squabbling over their shares of the luggage. Bullock carts passed along the road, the drivers, scantily attired, sitting astride on the centre pole, digging with bare toes now at this bullock, now at that, thumping the poor patient beasts with their heavy sticks, frequently resorting to the much-abused practice of tail twisting. Noise abounded everywhere. The natives shouted at the bullocks, they shouted shrill abuse at each other, they yelled apparently for the sheer joy of making a noise.
Lois caught sight of Robin presently, pushing his way through the crowd. His severe-looking servant trotted beside him, and an army of luggage coolies followed, each having taken care to carry as little as possible.
“I hope you haven’t been very bored,” he said as he came alongside. “We can get off now. Abdul can see to our luggage; it will have to come along in a bullock cart.”
“I haven’t had time to be bored,” protested Lois. “it is all so exciting and strange. I am loving it, Robin, every bit of it, even the sun—though it does make one screw up one’s eyes, doesn’t it?”
Robin had moved round to the other side of the dog-cart, and had one foot on the step ready to climb in, just as a chuprassi ran across from the other side of the road, holding out a note.
“For the Memsahib,” he said, a certain interrogation in his voice, since he was not certain of the fact. “from Denvers sahib.”
Robin took the note; a stiffness had fallen over his face, his eyes were hard. He glanced at the address and handed the letter up to Lois. Then he climbed into his seat and took the reins.
“There will be no answer,” he said sharply to the man in Hindustani.
The pony started with a little jerk, and as it turned in answer to the guiding rein, its head nearly came in contact with a coolie crossing the road. The man jumped back with a start, not in time, however, to escape the sharp cut of Robin’s whip as he slashed out at him. The man squealed with pain as the thong caught him.
“Robin,” cried Lois, and her voice was sharp with horrified surprise. “What are you doing? Did you mean to hit that man?”
“Yes,” Robin answered; she saw his face was dead white, his eyes blazing. “He got in my way, damn him!”
But even with Denvers’ letter lying unopened on her lap, Lois was blind to the huge force of jealousy that had for the moment driven the man beside her nearly mad.
“We quarrel and part,” said the woman;
“That is Friendship,” said the man.
“We quarrel and we do not part,” said the woman;
“That is Love,” said the man.
— Anon.
The bungalow which the Drummonds were to occupy was a small low-roofed building surrounded on its four sides by a wide veranda and built under the shade of an enormous goldmohur tree. Lois thought she had never seen anything so beautiful as that great tree with its graceful thin-fingered foliage and its flaming reddish-gold flowers, which when the petals fell covered the small garden with specks of radiant colour. The bungalow consisted of three rooms; the centre room, running the full width of the bungalow, being divided by a screen, the front part serving as a drawing-room and the back as dining-room, with, at the back of that again, the servants’ veranda. The other two rooms with their attendant bath-rooms and dressing-rooms lay on either side of the central apartment. Wide, light rooms, with long doors shaded by chics that opened on to the veranda. Sparsely furnished, since the more space there is in a room the more chance there is of keeping it cool; their floors lined with Chinese mattings, no rugs of any sort, or curtains on the wall to gather heat and dust.
Behind each bedroom lay the dressing-room, and opening off from that again the customary mud-paved bath-room, with its large tin movable bath, a hole in the wall being the primitive method by which the bath water escaped.
A row of servants were drawn up in a line to welcome the dog-cart as it turned in at the garden gates. In command of the party was a fat stately gentleman arrayed in spotless linen, who announced himself as the cook and took it upon himself to introduce the rest of the staff. There was the table boy, the hamal—the knife and lamp cleaner, two punkah coolies, two malis, three syces, the sweeper, and—last but not least—“a most honest woman,” as the cook described her, who had been introduced by the ayah next door and who craved the honour of attending to the revered new mistress of Drummond sahib’s bungalow.
“Do I need a maid, Robin?” asked Lois in some bewilderment. “and do we really have all these servants?”
Robin, who had not addressed a word to her since the whip-slashing episode, nodded. “You will want a woman of sorts,” he said. “I expect Abdul has engaged her, she will be all right. As for the others, I leave all that to Abdul. Pay him so much a month for servants, and he gets as many as he can for the money. They love living in crowds. If you will excuse me now, I will go and have a look at the ponies; you choose which room you would like in the house and settle down.”
Lois would have liked to have gone and looked at the ponies also, but Robin too evidently wanted to get off by himself, so rather mournfully she found her own way into the house. She was sitting disconsolately on the edge of the bed in one of the rooms while the ayah fidgeted round unpacking her bag, when Robin ran up the steps of the veranda about a quarter of an hour later. She heard him move into the centre room and his voice giving orders sharply in Hindustani, then he came across the veranda and she could see him standing outside her door.
“Shall we have lunch now, Lois?” he asked.
Lois put up quick hands to her hat, and rose to her feet. “I won’t be a minute, I was just tidying my hair,” she answered somewhat untruthfully.
The lunch was a silent meal, and the depression of her new surroundings had by now settled so firmly on Lois that she struggled on the verge of tears. England and the old life were such miles away, Robin and she were going to be alone now for good, the friendly companionship of the other ship’s passengers had fallen away.
“What do you care about doing?” asked Robin towards the end of the meal.
“I don’t know, what does one do?” asked Lois. The sound of tears had invaded her voice. Robin glanced across at her, and his forehead wrinkled in a frown.
“The women folk generally lie down till four or thereabouts. I should advise you to, I expect you are tired. You can have a nice warm bath when you get up; tell the ayah about it now, and the luggage will have arrived by then, you will be able to get a change. After that, would you care about driving down to the Yacht Club for tea?”
A ray of light glinted across Lois’ gloom. Denvers in his note had mentioned the Yacht Club, and most of her fellow-passengers from the “Himalaya” would be gathered there for tea.
“Yes, I would like that,” she agreed. “And I think I will go and lie down. I believe I am tired; I know I am horribly depressed.”
How could she be so seemingly frank, and yet be hiding such guilt in her heart? Robin stood up and watched her pass out of the dining-room, and for the time being it seemed as if hurt anger had for good and all ousted the love from his heart.
Their evening at the Yacht Club did nothing to appease his temper. Denvers was of course there, and very much to the front. He joined them at their table on the lawn as soon as they were seated, and Lois and he carried on a cheerful conversation between themselves. Then Colonel and Mrs. Rogers came and joined the party; after a time Mrs. Rogers moved away to say good-bye to some people, and Colonel Rogers suggested that Robin should come and have a drink with him at the bar. Lois and Denvers were therefore left to walk the lawn alone together.
They said good-bye, Robin could only suppose, away in the dark corner of the lawn where the lights from the veranda and the band could not reach. His eyes had followed them as far as sight was possible; it seemed to him hours before they emerged again into the light.
His jealousy on this occasion, however, was unnecessary. Denvers and Lois had sauntered to the end of the lawn, and had stayed there for a little because it was fascinating to watch the lights and moving crowd of people framed by the black waters of the harbour.
“So after all I have not read the riddle of your eyes,” Denvers said presently, his voice pitched to just the right level of sentiment.
“There isn’t anything to read,” Lois answered lightly. “I told you that before.”
“Oh, no,” he spoke for the moment half seriously. “it isn’t that, it is just that I was not the right man. You were not quite sure about it, were you, until I kissed you, then you knew in a flash. Some women cannot bear to be kissed—except,” he hesitated a moment and glanced at her. “by the right man.”
“I don’t like being kissed by anybody,” Lois answered stiffly. It was too dark for him to see the colour sweep to her face. “Shall we go back now, Mr. Denvers?”
“And I am forgiven anyway?” asked Denvers, as they moved again into the light; “you will write me down a friend, won’t you, Mrs. Drummond?”
“Why, of course,” laughed Lois, holding out her hand. “Always the best of friends so long as you are sensible.”
A silent dinner spent opposite a man who never lifted his eyes to look at her, and who answered every remark with a curt monosyllable, brought Lois back speedily to her original depression. When she stood up finally, pushing away an untasted cup of coffee, she could not resist what she by this time guessed would be a disturbing shot at Robin.
“I suppose I may as well go to bed now. You are dreadfully dull to-night, Robin; I half wish I had asked Mr. Denvers back to dinner, he does at least talk.”
She did not wait to see the effect of her remark, and it was perhaps as well. Robin sat on while the servants cleared the table, his face white and dangerously sullen. He was conscious himself of feeling too furiously angry and hurt to think clearly. Of one thing he was certain, affairs could not be allowed to go on as they were, he would have to talk them out with Lois and know exactly where they both stood. He drank his coffee methodically, half hoping it would clear his brain and soothe his temper; then he rose, and going along to the room Lois had selected for herself, pushed up the chic and entered.
Lois was sitting on the edge of the bed, a kimono wrapped round her and with her hair down, watching the ayah unpack. She, too, was feeling cross and ill-used. When Robin entered she stared up at him with an expression of intense annoyance.
“I know there are not any doors,” she said, “but you might at least call out before you come in.”
“I want to speak to you,” he answered stiffly, ignoring her complaint.
“Not here and now,” she argued.
“Yes, here and now.” The ayah had stopped in her work and was staring at them. “Get out,” Robin spoke to her in sharp Hindustani. “the memsahib will send for you when she needs you.”
“But, Robin,” Lois had risen slowly from her seat on the bed. “Surely to-morrow will do for this momentous talk. I am tired and”—she caught sight of her vision in the glass and put up quick hands to gather up her hair—“half undressed. I think it is a little unnecessary, this——”
“Intrusion,” interrupted Robin, “I suppose that is the word you are looking for. After all, this is my wife’s bedroom—I presume I have a certain right here.”
The colour had mounted to Lois’ face; she had turned aside and with rather nervous fingers was attempting to impart some semblance of tidiness to her hair. A woman always feels terribly undressed so long as her hair is down.
“Look here, Lois,” Robin went on, speaking quickly. “I can’t stand things much longer. You and I have got to come to some sort of an understanding. I married you because I loved you. It means a good deal to a man that, more than you have believed. Well, you know how you have taken my love. Marriage, you have decided in rather a sweeping way, is degrading. Because I loved you I have stood aside and tried to accept your views. God knows, I hoped that one day you would come to your senses; I hoped that one day you might love me. I don’t take much pride to myself for what I did, any decent man would have done the same; only there are a great many men who would have resented the ridiculous position you have put me in, who might even have tried force to bring you to your senses.”
Lois had stood half turned away up till then. She was feeling ashamed of herself, and a little sorry for Robin. The last sentence, however, woke the devil of unconquered pride in her heart. As she faced round on him her cheeks were faintly pink, her eyes shining like stars.
“Force,” she said, and laughed a little on the word. “You could not have made me live with you; you could not make me now.”
She hesitated on the word ‘make’; her eyes had fallen from his. Perhaps she intended to imply that by softer methods she might be won.
Robin missed that point, however. Her laugh had as it were slapped him across the face; the blood was pounding along his veins, shaking him almost with its violence. And Lois was very beautiful, standing before him, eyes lowered, mouth rebellious. The soft folds of her kimono fell apart at the throat, showing a faint vision of filmy lace and delicate white skin. It was barely a second that they stood like that opposite each other, then self-control—stretched to breaking-point before that—snapped altogether in Robin. Before Lois had had time to realize his action even, he had caught her arms in a grip of iron and drawn her against him. Every fighting instinct in her came to her aid, but she was quite helpless in his hands, the ring on one of his fingers cut into her arm and caused her almost agony. Lois tried to shut her eyes from his face, but they seemed hypnotized, she could move them no more than she could move her body.
He held her so for a space, her whole body bruised by the contact, his eyes burning into hers, then swiftly, ruthlessly, he stooped till his lips found hers.
The resistance died out of Lois’ heart; she lay in his arms limp and quiescent, and when he drew back for a second, the fright of absolute surrender showed in the eyes she lifted to his.
Perhaps that rather piteous glance more than anything else served to bring Robin to a consciousness of what he was doing. He let go his hold abruptly, and Lois, feeling her knees a little shaky under her, collapsed on the bed, a dejected figure hands covering her face.
“I am sorry,” Robin spoke in rather jerky sentences, he kept his eyes away from the forlorn figure on the bed. “I was mad for the moment, you made me mad. I was a brute to use my strength against you like that. I came in to tell you that I saw you and Denvers the other night on the deck. I know that you love each other, and I have worked it all out in my mind. Only you make it very hard for me, Lois. I have tried to arrange it so that there need be no scandal or unpleasantness for you. If you went to Denvers now there would be an awful fuss, he would have to leave the regiment, and he probably hasn’t much money outside his pay to live on. In a month or two you can go home, no one will think anything of that, and after you have been at home for a little we can settle about the divorce with as little noise as possible.”
He paused and glanced at her. Lois had not stirred. On the white arms where the kimono sleeves had fallen back he could see the red angry marks of his hands. She looked so childish, so fragile, sitting hunched up on the bed, her hair falling free again about her shoulders.
“Lois,” he pleaded, “I don’t expect you to forget or forgive this night in a hurry. You woke the beast in me, he lies near the surface in most of us, and you have goaded mine pretty often of late. But I am sorry, dear, most dreadfully sorry; it shall never happen again, I give you my word on that.”
He waited a minute or two to see if she had any answer for him, but Lois stayed with face obstinately covered, so finally he lifted the chic and stepped out.
As it fell to behind him Lois lifted her head and stared at the place where he had been standing. Hurt pride and anger, fright and pain, struggled for supremacy in her thoughts against one other feeling. Could love, then, be a thing like this, strong and cruel, yet able to win a woman’s heart by terror and pain?
With a sob of shame Lois pushed the traitor thought aside and rose to her feet, but she was too shaken to stand, besides which pride and courage suddenly deserted her, and with a storm of tears that came happily to ease the torture of her mind she fell back on the bed, burying her face against the cool pillows.
So the ayah found her later on, when she crept back to the room to see if her mistress required anything and to arrange the mosquito nets for the night. Lois had cried herself to sleep by then, and the ayah, with a native’s disregard of conventionalities, forbore to wake her. She suspected that there had been a row, which was not very wonderful, and she contented herself by letting down the mosquito curtains and tucking them in.
Outside on the veranda, her mission finished, the ayah came upon Robin leaning against the railing staring out at the sea. Curiosity or a feminine desire to comfort caused her to pause beside him for a moment.
“The memsahib sleeps like a child, Huzoor,” she ventured.
“Bahut achchha,”1 answered Robin, without turning round. “Bring your bedding across and sleep to-night in the memsahib’s room, she may need you.”
Since all that I can ever do for thee
Is to do nothing, this my prayer must be;
That thou may’st never guess and never see
The all endured this nothing done costs me.
— Owen Meredith
Morning brought a flood of conflicting emotions. Lois was awake very early; five o’clock was just striking when she first sat up, conscious of a night of disturbed dreams and some trouble that had followed her into the land of sleep. Then her eyes fell on the folds of her black silk kimono, and on the instant she remembered her quarrel with Robin, the end of their brief struggle, and his kiss. At that memory a wave of colour and heat flooded her face, the marks on her arms where his hands had held her were still painful and developing amazing colours of blue, green and yellow. She tried to imagine herself furiously angry against him; pride had undoubtedly been severely injured, but her heart was perilously weak and prone to tears on the subject and she dismissed it finally, deciding not to think of it at all. Then she turned her attention to her surroundings, and slipped out of bed the better to inspect them.
The ayah still slumbered, her form rolled up like a huge cocoon and stretched on the floor at the foot of Lois’ bed. The chics at the doors had been rolled up in the night to let in as much of the cool night air as possible, and by these inlets a gentle breeze invaded the room, infinitely cool and refreshing, blowing straight from off the sea.
Lois tiptoed to one of the doors, and stood looking out. The sun had just risen and already the goldmohur flowers stood out flaming with colour against a hard bright sky of blue. But for the rest, the neighbouring gardens with their trees and shrubs, the slow moving sea, the stretch of level sand, all seemed subdued and softly coloured, the sun had not as yet filled the whole earth with his glare. At the bottom of the garden the mali was already busy watering some of his pet plants before the sun should touch them. His brown body, bare save for a scanty enough loin cloth, moved deftly about among the flower beds, and in his hand he carried a very inadequate watering pot, which had constantly to be refilled from a bucket of water planted in the centre of the drive. As he worked he chanted a queer disturbing drone full of the most impossible semitones, and every now and then he would straighten his body and hurl abuse at a couple of dogs who were taking too keen an interest in one of the flower-beds.
It was probably one of these shrill shouts that had wakened Lois in the first instance, but she bore the man no grudge. The world was very fascinating at this early hour, and man the gardener seemed somehow to fit into the picture.
When she turned from her contemplation the ayah was awake, and having rolled up her own bedding into a small bundle, was sleepily putting up the mosquito curtains of Lois’ bed.
“Do you always sleep on the floor?” Lois asked.
“If memsahib needs me. I bring my bed with me,” she answered, pointing to the bundle.
“Yes, but isn’t it very hard?” asked Lois.
“Sometimes my bones ache,” the woman agreed gravely. “In my own room I have now a charpoy, it is indeed more comfortable.”
“Well, you needn’t sleep in my room again,” Lois assured her. “I don’t know why you did last night.”
“By the orders of the sahib,” the woman replied, as she stooped to gather her bedding under her arm. “I go now to fetch the memsahib’s tea,” she added.
On her way out she let down the door chics as an intimation to the household that the memsahib was awake, and immediately the room fell into soft chequered gloom. Bed was of course the only sensible place at such an early hour, but somehow Lois was restless and agog to discover the new wonders of her domain.
The view from the one small window in the bath-room she found quite enthralling. It opened on to what was seemingly a little native village; a row of mud huts and outside each hut a group of natives very much in a state of undress washing, pouring the water for the most part over their bodies, scanty clothes and all, and then vigorously rubbing themselves all over. Little streams of water ran and gathered on the ground in all directions, but the householders appeared to be quite impervious to the mess they were making outside their own habitations.
Presently Abdul, immaculate as usual, stepped out of one of the largest huts—Lois was to learn afterwards that it was the cook-house,—bearing in his hands the morning tea tray. He moved across to the house with it, the ayah following, and Lois, unwilling to be caught as a peeping spectator, had to step back quickly into her own room.
Early morning tea was delightful, crisp buttered toast and marmalade, a selection of fruit, oranges, plantains and a pine-apple. Half-way through her meal a discreet cough made her look up, and through the chic she could see Abdul’s figure,
“The sahib sends salaams,” he announced gravely. “does the memsahib ride this morning?”
Lois’ eyes fell again on the bruises, showing so clearly now against her white skin, and her face stiffened.
“No,” she answered briefly, “I shall not ride.”
Abdul salaamed and turned away, but he was back again in a moment.
“The sahib will breakfast at nine,” he said. “will that hour suit the memsahib?”
“I shall breakfast in here,” said Lois.
Not till she had seen Robin depart in full dress uniform, apparently to report himself to the colonel, did Lois emerge from her bedroom. She had no definite plan of action before her. Just to ignore Robin and keep out of his way as much as possible, which had been her first intention, she was beginning to see as absurd, yet pride clamoured for some recognition. She could not let him think she had forgiven his brutal—brutal was undoubtedly the right description—treatment of the night before. He ought to be the one to bend the knee and plead for friendship, since his had been the hand to violate it so horribly. This morning she had been counting up her small hoard of money, money that was really hers, that had not been given to her by Robin. It was pitifully small, there could be no question of running away from her husband, she would have to borrow the money to go, and that would indeed be ridiculous. For just one second her thoughts touched on Denvers, but even her childish anger could realize that appealing to him for help or sympathy would be absurd. She even had to smile a little as she remembered Robin’s ridiculous suggestion that after she had been divorced she could marry Denvers.
At that moment Abdul disturbed the trend of her thoughts by seeking her out where she sat on one of the veranda chairs, her hands idle on her lap. Abdul by now thoroughly disapproved of his new mistress, but he was none the less of the opinion that she had better be encouraged to do her part in the housekeeping. He came, therefore, attended by Joseph the cook, and behind Joseph staggered the cook’s boy, a huge basket of market provender on his head, a live fowl tied by the legs and dangling from one hand. The procession came to a pause opposite Lois, Abdul and the cook salaaming, the fowl raising its head in a supreme effort on an anguished squawk.
“Memsahib will no doubt do the bazaar,” announced Abdul in punctilious English of which he was not a little proud. Joseph was busy helping the boy to lower his basket, the fowl had been laid sideways down on the veranda, one bead-like eye glinting at its tormentors, its poor little heart heaving in violent emotion.
Lois ignored Abdul’s stately question.
“How dare you tie a fowl up like that and carry it upside down?” she asked, “let it go at once.”
Abdul, though he understood the words more or less, could only stare in astonishment. Joseph and the cook’s-boy were able to appreciate the ring of indignation in the memsahib’s voice, and, conscious of some unknown crime, gazed round them in bewilderment.
“Let it go,” commanded Lois; this time she pointed an accusing finger at the fowl.
Joseph was seized with an inspiration; he prodded the recumbent bird, and with an ingratiating smile informed Lois that it was fat and tender.
But Lois swept him aside; in a tornado of wrath she left her chair and knelt on the floor. Gathering the struggling fowl into her arms, she proceeded to wrestle with the knotted string round its legs. The knots proved obdurate, and in despair she paused, feeling the fluttering growing weaker and weaker under her hands.
“It’s dying,” she half sobbed. “dying, and I can’t undo this beastly string. Oh, you are brutes, brutes, to have tied it up like this.”
There was a clatter of ponies’ hoofs, and Robin drew rein at the foot of the steps. Dismounting quickly, he joined the group on the veranda.
“What is the matter?” he asked quietly. His eyes were able to take in the trouble at a glance. Abdul’s annoyed countenance, Joseph and the cook-boy’s bewildered stare, Lois’ crouched up figure, her white face, the dirty ruffled fowl on her lap.
All differences were forgotten for the moment, “Robin,” Lois exclaimed, lifting eyes full of tears to his, “this fowl, they have tied its legs together, they were carrying it upside down. It is dying of fright and exhaustion, and I can’t undo the string.”
“That is soon done,” he answered. With perfect gravity he knelt down beside her, using his little knife to cut through the string. “It will be all right, Lois, once it is free, don’t worry about it, dear.”
With a final flutter and a shriek of liberty, the fowl fluttered from their hands and scurried down the steps into the garden.
“There,” said Robin softly, regretful to break the spell, for one of Lois’ hands still clung to his. “It is none the worse for the adventure, is it? See that you never bring anything like that in front of the memsahib again,” he spoke sharply to the servants. “and clear away these things. Abdul, what need was there to trouble the memsahib on the first day?”
Abdul salaamed gravely. “It is the bazaar sahib,” he pointed out; “I thought the memsahib would wish to take charge.”
“Well, don’t think again,” retorted Robin; “you have always done the bazaar for me, be good enough to go on doing it till you are told to stop.”
Abdul salaamed again, a slow smile illuming his countenance. “Without doubt that will be better,” he murmured, then he wheeled to depart, his retinue following him.
Lois had risen to her feet; as Robin turned to look at her she stepped a little away from him, her hands behind her back. Her mute antagonism hurt him, yet he managed to smile at her, and when he spoke his voice was amused.
“We aren’t carrying on the feud, are we?” he asked, “it is a little absurd, Lois, at least let us be ordinary friends for our time together.”
He was so seemingly unrepentant that Lois sought about for words to abash him.
“I can’t trust you,” she answered. “you have shown me that you are stronger and that you will not scruple to use your strength.” She paused, and for one second her eyes met his and she felt ashamed.
“Is that all I have shown you?” he asked. “After all, my strength did not do you very much harm, did it? Anyway it is a horrible subject, I was absolutely and utterly in the wrong. I am not even asking you to forgive me, Lois, I only want you to ignore it for the time being so that we can lead some sort of life together, you and I, for the next three months.”
“And if we are friends,” Lois hesitated a little on the words. “you promise——”
“I’ll swear,” he interrupted quickly. “though since you do not trust me I am afraid it won’t help you much. But I do not think you need be afraid, Lois, I have learnt my lesson.”
“Then——” her speech was never finished, for Abdul stood in the doorway salaaming.
“Tiffin is ready,” he announced, his eyes discreetly lowered.
“Lunch,” explained Robin. “shall we go in together, Lois?”
He bowed before her as if it had been a dinner party and he had been told off to take her in, and half reluctantly Lois laid her hand on his arm. So together and very gravely they entered the dining-room.
Who shall say what is said in me,
With all that I might have been dead in me.
— Tennyson
Major Latimer met Lois first at a tea party given by old Mrs. Rogers at the Yacht Club a week or two after the “Himalaya’s” arrival in Bombay. Mrs. Rogers, the wife of the Colonel in command at Colaba, had adopted Lois in a motherly fashion on board ship. Not that she entirely approved of the girl’s conduct with Denvers, about that she agreed with Colonel Rogers, who said that what Lois required most was a well delivered smacking; but that apart she had developed an affection for Lois, and Drummond had always been one of her pet subalterns. Perhaps she rather leaned towards the hope that her beneficent influence might serve to straighten out matters for the young couple, and anyway—as she pointed out to Colonel Rogers—no good would come of her disapproval if it merely took the form of rigid avoidance, for in that case it was more than likely that Lois would fall into other hands and be still more unwisely encouraged in her foolish course.
The Yacht Club is the social gathering place of Bombay. Here in the cool of the evening the people gather to partake of tea at the little tables set out along the sea wall, for the Yacht Club lawn juts out on to the waters of the harbour. In one corner of the lawn the bands of the regiments take it in turns to play day and day about; business men look in late of an evening for bridge or scandal; harassed civilians call to collect their wives after office; the young men drop in after polo or some such strenuous game to shed the light of their presence on the expectant and welcoming fair sex. And outside the club precincts, gathered together on the Apollo Bunder, are the carriages of the humbler folk, the non-members of the club, the Parsee and Eurasian community. Outside the pale, they can still enjoy the music and amuse themselves by watching society disport itself on the lawn.
Mrs. Rogers, like a great many more motherly and well-meaning hostesses, had an unfortunate propensity for bringing together at her parties the most unblendable selection of guests. For one thing she paid surprisingly little attention to the gossip of the place and was generally therefore unaware of the latest social feuds. Not infrequently she would invite to her house on the same evening two ladies who for quite ten days had been dead cuts. Mrs. Rogers moved through all these pitfalls with bland unconsciousness, and indeed it was not always safe to open her eyes to such things, because then, more often than not, she would speak out her mind to the two people in question.
On this occasion she had elected to ask the Drummonds, because she liked Lois and was sorry for Drummond; and the Latimers because she liked and most sincerely pitied Latimer. Two young men made up the rest of the party; one of these being Belle’s latest victim, but of this Mrs. Rogers was blissfully ignorant.
Having gathered her incongruous tea party round her she introduced everyone to everyone else by a wave of the hand, settled herself in a chair and gazed round her with a little sigh of satisfaction.
“Can anyone tell me,” she asked the party at large. “why India is called The Land of Regrets? Personally, I feel and always have felt, that it is the most pleasant place in the world.”
Her cheery placid voice broke the spell which had been gathering round Latimer from the moment when, on being introduced to Mrs. Drummond, he had lifted his eyes and seen Lois for the first time. Somehow, the girl’s face, the faint coloured cheeks, the grey eyes, had awakened in him for the moment a feeling of sharp intolerable regret. Not until after he had spoken in answer to Mrs. Rogers’ question did he realize all that had gone to prompt his reply.
“It is a Land of Regrets for many reasons,” he said, speaking slowly, “millions of graves dug for dead hopes and dead dreams, make their claim for that title.”
Belle laughed sharply. “Good gracious, why this wail of tragedy?” she asked, her voice edged with contempt.
“I have always taken it to mean,” Colonel Rogers weighed in with a welcome diversion. “that all the while you were out here you regretted not being at home or somewhere else.”
“Or,” broke in Chanter, one of the subalterns. “that you know when it comes to leaving you will go on regretting you can’t get back.”
Lois’ eyes had stayed on Latimer. He had, she thought, a nice interesting face and a distinctly unpleasant wife. Knowing him so very slightly she could hardly describe the feeling he woke in her as pity, yet she did feel sorry for him.
“I suppose one can have dead hopes anywhere and everywhere?” she queried. “isn’t it rather a shame to lay the blame of their deaths on India?”
Again Mrs. Latimer laughed. “My husband, Mrs. Drummond,” she explained, “thinks that no good thing can come out of India. He is always pretending to forget that he met me here.”
“People like India when they first arrive,” interposed Simpson, the second young man of the party. “The glamour of the East and so forth. To me it has grown to be like the waters of Babylon. I could weep for a sight of Oxford Street or the Bank.”
“Why not Piccadilly while you are about it?” suggested Chanter irreverently. Simpson with his languid eyes and perpetual intrigues was no favourite with the subaltern community.
Everyone laughed and the conversation floated into more impersonal channels. Latimer suggested presently to Lois that they should go for a stroll on the lawn. Belle had already vanished with Mr. Simpson in attendance, Colonel Rogers had escaped in the direction of the bar, Robin and Chanter were amusing Mrs. Rogers.
“Everyone takes exercise on the lawn between six and seven,” Latimer explained to Lois. “you can see from the crowd that we shall be in the fashion. As a matter of fact I believe it is the only exercise you ladies do take.”
“What about dancing,” laughed Lois. “and riding? I positively ride every morning.”
She rose and moved before him on to the lawn.
“Do you?” asked Latimer eagerly; “have you done any of the long rides yet, out to the Maim woods for instance? I suppose Captain Drummond has shown you that favourite beauty spot.”
“As a matter of fact,” there was a little hesitation in the words because Lois was, in the very admitting of it, conscious of a sense of disappointment. “Robin hasn’t been able to take me anywhere; he has to be on parade,” she explained. “I take a syce with me, but I can’t speak his language, and he only seems to know one ride, along Back Bay I think it is.”
“Will you let me join you one morning?” asked Latimer, “we could ride out to Maim and I will have the trap sent out to meet us so that we can drive home, it might be too hot for you otherwise.”
“I should love it,” said Lois decidedly.
They stopped at the end of the lawn, and stood for a minute or so before turning to watch the searchlight from one of the men-of-war stationed in the harbour. Now here, now there, it flashed, a broad beam of light upon the darkness, showing first the huddled houses of the bazaar, then lingering as if loath to leave it on the outlines of some quaint native craft. Even as they watched, it moved steadily towards them, and presently they stood bathed in its light for one second before it passed on its way.
“That is against the regulations,” laughed Latimer; there was, however, a trace of bitterness in his words. “We are always telling the Navy to be careful about exposing the scandals which the shadows of this lawn conceal.”
Lois laughed in answer, but her eyes stayed on the black shadows that had gained possession once more of the water in front of them.
“It is just coming to me,” she said, “a feeling or something from out of the night. I believe I do know what you meant by calling India a Land of Regrets. There is something mysterious and depressing about the night out here.” She turned to him suddenly; in all her life she had never been so sorry for anyone as she was for this man with his stern ugly face, his ungainly figure. “When shall we go for our first ride?” she asked. “I have an idea we are going to be great friends.”
“I am sure we shall be,” he answered; they were making their way back slowly to the centre of the lawn where Mrs. Rogers could be seen saying good-bye to her party. “Shall we say to-morrow, it is never too early to begin a good thing, is it?”
“Very well, to-morrow then,” Lois agreed; she gave him her hand for a moment. “I’ll start about six, will that be early enough?”
“Plenty,” he answered. “I’ll be waiting for you along our road.”
“I am going for a long ride to-morrow,” Lois informed Robin on their way home, “with Major Latimer. You had better not wait breakfast for me, I may be late.”
“Where are you going?” he asked. Robin had been for the last ten days provokingly cheerful and friendly.
“To Maim, I think the name is,” Lois answered; she stole a side glance at him from under her lashes. “It will be nice having someone to talk to,” she said.
A little frown gathered on Robin’s face but he did not turn to look at her. “I could have ridden with you any morning,” he said “if you had asked me.”
Lois shrugged her shoulders ever so slightly, yet he noticed the movement. “I thought you had parades,” she said. “besides I hate asking people to do things.”
“Really, Lois,” Robin began impetuously, then he choked the words back. It was no use fighting with her since she took an apparent delight in rousing him to displays of temper and then being shocked or hurt at the result. “I thought you realized,” he ended on a calmer note. “that I should hardly care to push myself forward as a companion without being asked. Latimer is a good fellow,” he added, changing the conversation: “I used to know him years ago when they were first married.”
“Why did he marry her?” queried Lois. “I think she is a terrible woman.”
“She is wonderfully good looking,” was Robin’s unexpected reply; “perhaps she shows a little too plainly that she finds Latimer a bore, but to like your husband is not the first duty of matrimony, is it?”
This final remark he delivered after they had drawn up at the steps of their house and Lois was already half way up. She could therefore pretend not to hear them, but she was none the less a little disquieted by them. Could Robin really see no difference between her position and that of a woman like Mrs. Latimer?
Good friends, beware, the only life we know
Flies from us like an arrow from the bow.
The caravan of life is moving by,
Quick to your places in the passing show.
— R. Le Gallienne
Something that resembled a council of war was taking place on the Latimers’ veranda. Belle, dressed in the flimsiest of garments, since the day was at its hottest hour, lay in a hammock swung between two poles. At her side squatted Rabhai with one deft hand on the hammock string to keep it gently moving, while in front stood the Drummonds’ ayah, her saree pulled half across her face, a sly discreet smile on her lips, looking from Belle to Rabhai and back again as she spoke.
“As thou desired me to,” she was saying, “I have kept watch on the Mem, and of a truth since the first night, when she wept and besought him to stay and he paid no heed to her pleading, Drummond sahib has altogether avoided her. Abdul is much concerned at the matter; it brings not luck nor a good name to the house when a husband and wife are at variance. And of late Abdul will have it that the sahib’s mood is strained to breaking point; he is difficult to please, and nothing that is done is right in his eyes.”
She paused for breath and Rabhai stopped her rocking for a moment.
“The new wife is no rival then, Mem, even as I said to you. I had this knowledge from the first, ’tis easy to see.”
“What of the woman?” asked Belle. Her thoughts where Lois was concerned had always been vindictive.
“As to her,” Lois’ ayah continued glibly. “of a truth there are many tears shed. She desires without doubt to obtain favour in the eyes of her lord.”
“She must indeed be badly in need of men since she even looks with favour on my husband,” Belle agreed languidly. “I have heard enough of her tale, Rabhai. Take the woman away and pay her the rupees as promised, also say to Govind that if Drummond memsahib calls I will see her, but to every one else I am Danvaza bund hai.”2
The two native women slipped away into the house and Belle, left alone, was free to weave the busy plot in her brain. Drummond should be won back to her and held by no uncertain chords this time; she had quite decided that; he was the one thing in her life that she cared for more than she cared for herself. To feel his lips on hers, his hands about her, was the dream which had come to haunt her with redoubled force since they had met again. Her intrigue with young Simpson had fallen at once into the background. Belle in love was absolutely single-minded in her aim; desire had wakened a fever in her blood, she would stop at no crime, shrink from no meanness to get at what she wanted. And she was clever enough to lay her plans carefully. She was friendly and sympathetic to Robin, that was all; the past lay behind them buried and forgotten. She was at some pains to make him believe that. The phrase. “your wife,” was constantly on her lips.
Robin therefore had been helped to the conclusion that she was as beautiful as ever and infinitely more sensible. He found her pleasant and soothing as a friend, and if the truth were to be known he was—as Abdul had noted—on edge with the rest of life. He needed some companionship which would take his thoughts away from dwelling continually on his own problem. He and Lois rarely saw each other now without silly little disagreements that pointed on both sides to strained nerves and aching hearts, and in the meanwhile they drifted further and further apart.
Lois was of the two the less unhappy. She had her hours of depression certainly, when she would own herself responsible for all that was amiss in their lives. More often—with a splendid disregard of truth—she was inclined to lay all the blame on Robin’s shoulders and to account herself an ill-used, misunderstood woman. Robin was so tiresome and stand-offish, so difficult of access, hedged round by a stern wall of pride. Sometimes she was driven angrily to believe that he really disliked her; more than once or twice that thought brought with it a wave of fear. But all this she contrived very well to hide, and outwardly her behaviour to Robin was calm and icily reserved. For the rest she enjoyed the social life of Bombay, had grown to love their low thatched bungalow and dusty garden, appreciated very much her friendship with Major Latimer.
Their rides together were of daily occurrence now, and Lois had met Jimmie and made an instant conquest of his young heart. Whenever it was possible Jimmie would slip across the dividing compounds and spend the morning in close attendance on Lois. He was a good, if rather strange little boy. Lois grew to lean on his companionship through the hot morning hours which she would otherwise have found rather monotonous. And sooner or later in the day Latimer would join them, either to fetch Jimmie away or to see that Jimmie was not bothering too much, and once there it was only natural that he should stop and have a talk. So daily, hourly almost, the chords drew slowly round his heart. He played with fire knowingly, content to let it eat into his own life so that it left Lois’ existence fair and untouched.
Of Mrs. Latimer Lois saw very little. She had taken a great aversion to Belle on their first meeting. It may be that something of jealousy went to aid her dislike, for Robin was irritatingly inclined to praise that which Lois most disliked. He said he considered Mrs. Latimer good-natured and kind-hearted—two qualities that Lois was certain she did not possess—and he undoubtedly found her pleasant to look at and attractive to talk to.
“I don’t know how you can,” Lois somewhat stormily asserted on one occasion; “the way she looks at men makes me feel positively sick sometimes.”
She was sorry for the remark even before she had finished saying it, and Robin made no reply, contenting himself by glancing at her and away again.
Still, even if you dislike a lady and she happens to be the wife of your husband’s major you must at least be decently polite to her. Lois bowed to this dictum, well drilled into her by kindly Mrs. Rogers, and as she turned out of her compound gate into that of the Latimers on this particular morning she was resolving to be really amiable if Mrs. Latimer should happen to be in. It was hot walking; even under her huge green umbrella Lois could feel the sun; but the two bungalows lay so close together that it seemed ridiculous to take out the trap for such a short journey.
As she mounted the top step of the Latimers’ bungalow, however, Lois rather regretted her energy. The walk had made her warm, her face would doubtless be unbecomingly flushed, and Mrs. Latimer was one of those women whom even the hottest weather was unable to affect.
In that supposition Lois was correct, for as Belle sailed into the cool darkened drawing-room a minute or two later she was looking fresh and beautiful like some wonderful hot-house plant, the colour in her eyes and hair the most radiant thing about her.
“How sweet of you to come,” she murmured, holding Lois’ hand, “and you must have walked, poor thing, you are quite hot. Come and sit under the punkah. I will call for a drink; what would you like?”
“Nothing, thank you,” answered Lois, a little stiffly; she felt at a disadvantage and was piqued at the knowledge. “I am not really hot, though I expect my face does look red, it was the glare.”
“You had a sun umbrella?” questioned Belle; she had sat down on a chair near her guest and was leaning forward all friendly interest. “It is not very safe to brave the sun at this time of day; when you know India better you will know how dangerous the sun can be.”
Lois laughed. “Your husband is always warning me against sunstroke,” she admitted. “but this morning with such a little way to come it seemed absurd to bring the trap out. Don’t you ever ride, Mrs. Latimer?” she queried, branching into another subject.
Belle shook her head, her long supple fingers were smoothing out a fold of her dress. “I gave it up years ago,” she said. “when Jimmie was born. My husband is so delighted at finding once more a companion for his rides. I am afraid I never was of very much use to him, we have so little in common.”
“He has been very kind about coming out with me,” Lois put in hastily, “my morning rides used to be very dull.”
“Robin does not go with you”; there was a curious inflection on the first word. Lois felt herself flushing; how dare the woman talk of her husband as Robin?
Belle seemingly noticed the flush, her quizzical eyes surveyed Lois for a second. “I have known your husband so long and called him Robin from the first,” she drawled. “do you mind?”
“Of course not,” prevaricated Lois. “why should I? He always has parades and things,” she went on, answering the first question last.
A little smile curved the corners of Belle’s lips. “Husbands are awful sticklers for duties so far as their wives are concerned,” she said. “I have often noticed it. Have you met Jimmie?” she asked presently; “are you fond of little boys?”
“Jimmie is a dear,” Lois could at last answer with frankness. “He often trots across for a game in the morning. And talking about sunstroke, aren’t you afraid of the sun affecting him?”
“No, nothing affects Jimmie,” Belle’s voice sounded a little sarcastic. “He is like the proverbial cat of nine lives. Are you fond of children? I suppose it won’t be long before you have one of your own. I often used to chaff Robin because he used to be so envious of Jimmie.”
Lois rose to her feet, really the woman was quite insufferable, there was no use trying to be friends. Belle watched her without rising herself.
“Now I have offended you I suppose,” she laughed lightly, “I am always forgetting that a really English person does dislike talking about babies before they come; I have been brought up almost entirely out here, and somehow we look at things so differently. Babies are—what is it called?—the natural consequences of matrimony.” She laughed again at her own joke and stood up. “Are you going?” she said. “Anyway it was sweet of you to call, I hope we shall be better friends one of these days.”
She held out her hand and Lois took it, hiding her reluctance under social politeness. “Good-bye,” she said, ignoring Belle’s last remarks. “I am glad to have found you in.”
It was a stilted polite lie. Belle stood on the steps watching the slim white-clad figure disappearing down the drive. The smile on her face faded to a frown.
“She is a little fool,” she whispered. “but she is pretty and I hate her. Not more than she hates me though.”
That thought brought back a smile of triumph, and with a shrug of her shoulders Belle turned back into the house.
The Drummonds’ compound when Lois reached it was ringing with shrill unearthly shrieks, issuing it would appear from one of the huts in the servants’ quarter. So piercing and full of pain were the sounds that Lois paused for a moment on the veranda, afraid and a little undecided as to what to do. Catching sight of her white figure from the door of his room Robin came out and joined her.
“Some one is having an unpleasant time,” he stated cheerfully; “wonder what Abdul is doing to allow a row of this sort.”
“Abdul had leave this morning,” Lois explained; it was a relief to have Robin at hand if murder was being done on the premises. “Oughtn’t we to go and see what is happening, Robin?”
The shrieks were becoming a little subdued but none the less poignant because of their weakness.
“I’ll go and see if you like,” agreed Robin.
He vanished through to the back of the house, and Lois could hear his calm sensible voice shouting out something above the tumult. His presence appeared to bring with it an instant cessation of hostilities. Curiosity prompted Lois to follow him and view the scene of disaster.
The servants’ huts at the back of the bungalow formed what was practically a little village. Every domestic, Lois had discovered by now, possessed a wife and family, to say nothing of grandparents and countless cousins. Most of this numerous progeny was gathered on the open space before the huts as Lois stepped out on to the back veranda; but the principal figure of the tragedy was a slim slip of a girl who lay her full length on the ground emitting a series of smothered sobs. Her husband, a burly harsh-visaged man, whom Lois could recognize as Robin’s head syce, stood over her, his face working with rage, a very stiff-looking stick held in his hands.
Robin was addressing the man in terms of rather fluent abuse and his lecture seemingly bore fruit, for after some words of muttered explanation the syce stooped and lifting the girl by one arm pushed her roughly into the doorway behind them.
Robin came back to Lois, a glint of amusement in his blue eyes.
“She forgot the onions in her husband’s curry,” he explained gravely, “he was only chastising her. According to himself she is a new wife and has to be broken in.”
“Robin,” gasped Lois, her face flamed to indignation. “you mean he was beating her with that stick?”
“Not really hard, I don’t suppose,” Robin’s tone was conciliatory, “anyway I have told him he is not to do it again. He is a bad-tempered devil but an awfully good syce.”
“And you,” Lois’ voice shook with scorn. “you did nothing to him. Oh, if I had been a man, if you had been a man for that matter, you would have snatched the stick away from him and beaten him, beaten him till he howled for mercy.”
“My dear girl,” Robin ventured to remonstrate. “He hasn’t really hurt the girl. He is extremely fond of her, all his pay—so Abdul says—goes to buy his wife ornaments.”
“Is that any excuse?” asked Lois, “is that your real idea of how a husband ought to treat his wife? You make me feel so horribly, so bitterly ashamed of being a woman sometimes.” Her voice broke, Robin stared at her in frank amazement.
“It seems I never can do right, Lois, I am always having extraordinary effects on you. What is it you want me to do in this case?”
Lois turned to him eagerly. “Have the man up and beat him,” she said, “beat him as he beat that poor girl. Don’t you see that is what you ought to do, don’t you see that would be justice.”
“I can see it would be damned ridiculous,” answered Robin shortly, “and I am afraid I do not propose to do it. I have very old-fashioned ideas about not interfering between husband and wife.”
He turned abruptly into the house, leaving Lois too amazed and indignant for further words. Never had Robin shown her so plainly before his contempt for her opinions.
But we, we were the foolish folk
Who thought to-day was sweet.
— Anon.
A fortnight after the wife-beating episode which had roused Lois to such furious indignation, Ranji, the husband in question, sat hunched up on the floor of his hut gazing with fixed misery at the thing he loved best in the world. The fact that he had often seen good to chastise her with a stick weighed not at all in the balance against his love for his wife. He loved Dawn in the Sky with the whole strength and force of his heart; loved her for her quaint charm, for the laughter and mirth she had brought to his house, for her little clinging ways and soft endearments. Yesterday they had gone junketing, the two of them, to the bazaar. They had disobeyed stringent orders by the outing, for rumour had it that the bazaar was tainted with some strange terrible disease and the sahibs had issued warnings that it was dangerous for the servant folk to go into the bazaar. Just as if every man’s death was not written in the book of Fate from the day of his birth, and as if there was any use being cautious against the will of the Gods!
Yet for himself Ranji would have been content not to go—like most big men he had a nature prone to docile obedience—but Dawn in the Sky had set her heart upon the venture. So finally he had given in to her persuadings and they had sallied forth, Dawn in the Sky keeping three paces to the rear of her lord and master, her slim body pulsating with joy because she had succeeded in persuading him to do something for her sake against the regulations.
They had not tarried long in the bazaar, because undoubtedly a spirit of gloom did hang about the place, and both in going and coming they met a disturbing number of funerals. Still Dawn in the Sky purchased the anklets she had set her heart on, and she gazed her fill at the bazaar world, its ever-shifting crowd of colours, the buyers and sellers in the market-place.
Ranji had one conversation with a friend of his which disturbed him. Govind, his friend, had lost three relations by what the natives called the “Quick Death,” and, according to his account, what was even worse than the death itself was the manner in which the sahib logue had taken a government control of the business, and were refusing to allow the people to die in peace and sanctity. Hospital—was the dread word that passed from mouth to mouth! To have to die in a hospital added a horrible weight of anguish to the Quick Death!
Dawn in the Sky had lagged a little on the way home, moving Ranji, with his conscience by now thoroughly awake, to a sharp remonstrance.
“Thou wouldst come,” he grumbled at her. “Heaven send we meet not the sahib or memsahib; what excuse can I make for the disobedience which thou hast forced on me?”
He had been inclined to carry on his anger for the rest of the evening, even after his meal had been set out before him lusciously full of onions. But all that vanished when later in the night he woke to the knowledge that Dawn in the Sky was ill. She lay flat on her back, her fingers plucking restlessly at the thin covering across her chest, her dark head turning from side to side, her lips keeping up a quick senseless chatter.
He had given her water, he had knelt by her side holding her to him, trying in vain to make her staring bright eyes meet his own, to still the restless flutter of the tiny fingers. And his heart had known fear, horrible, black, sharp fear.
Towards morning the girl seemed to fall asleep—it was really unconsciousness, but Ranji was happily ignorant of that. At least she was quiet; he was able to lay her head back, soft pillowed on some of his own garments. What was he to do? that was the torturing question. From the moment when he had come to a knowledge of her illness one word had haunted him—hospital! If others came to know of her sickness, if the sahib heard, he would order her removal at once. They would carry her away from him, white hands would sully the beauty that was now all his! And if it was Death, and the gods were averse to mercy, of what use was a hospital or the white men’s medicine?
Mechanically he went about his morning’s work, grooming and saddling Robin’s pony, leading it round to the front steps, squatting—apparently calm and unconcerned—at its head till such time as Robin should be ready, and all the while the fear inside his heart thumped out its pitiless message. Dawn in the Sky was dying, dying, dying—of what use is love against Death!
He went back to the hut after Robin had ridden away, pausing at the door to call out some jocular remark to one of the other servants. By this time there was only one idea in his head, to keep secret her illness: at least she should be his till death claimed her.
Perhaps his own brain was reeling under the steady advance of the sickness, for as he closed the door of the hut behind him it seemed to him as if the small figure in the corner raised itself to a sitting position and held out its arms to him. With a hoarse sound of joy in his throat he staggered across the room to her. But Dawn in the Sky lay still and stiff, she had not stirred since he had left her, only her head had rolled off the pillow and her eyes were open, no longer staring, but fixed and glassy. The film of Death had robbed them of their beauty for once and all.
Ranji knelt down by her side, and pushed the head gently back into position. Her face struck chill against his hands, and he shivered, yet no cry broke from his lips. The fact was accomplished, the gods had spoken! Dawn in the Sky was dead—immediately the hopeless, apathetic calm with which natives view death surrounded him.
His name shouted outside brought him to his feet quickly, and though he was conscious of a dumb pain that accompanied every movement, he hurried outside and round to the front of the bungalow to take over the charge of the pony Robin had just brought back. His actions were mechanical, and he swayed a little as he stood. Robin came to the conclusion that the man was drunk, and summoned Abdul to inquire into the subject.
“The Baboo doctor is coming this morning to inspect the compound,” he ended his inquiries by telling Abdul; “see that the place is clean and decent. He will look into all the houses, you had better tell the servants to be prepared. It is plague inspection.”
So tersely can great tragedies be explained. For three weeks now plague had raged through the bazaars and outside native villages of Bombay. The people died as they worked, as they walked along the streets, as they sat round their daily meals. The old and the young, the men, the women, and the children! The deaths were too many to keep count of, the bodies at the burning ghats lay stacked one above the other for fuel, and assistants ran short before such an accumulation of work. Government had coped with the difficulty, after the first shock of surprise was over, in a masterful way. Huge plague camps and hospitals sprang into being on every open space and maidan, along the sea front, at the back of the polo ground, wherever room could be found.
Doctors and nurses, inspectors and civil workers of all kinds flung themselves into the breach and worked day and night. Worked, it must be noted, against overwhelming difficulties, for the people were distrustful and terrified at all forms of help. A rumour spread broadcast through the bazaar that the plague was a visitation sent expressly by the sahib logue; it was fully believed that the hospitals were merely slaughter-houses. Therefore the government workers slaved at their rescue work under very unfavourable conditions. The sick had to be carried by force to the hospitals, shrieking and sobbing for mercy as they went. Small wonder that nine out of every ten died, driven mad by fear in addition to everything else. And wherever possible the natives combined to conceal cases of the disease, and it was a common occurrence for an inspector to find—say among a family gathering or a group of card-players—a corpse or two propped up to resemble life among the others. Then there were the veiled and purdah women, rules of caste and religion clamouring for recognition even in the face of death. It needed infinite patience and tact to breed a spirit of trust and confidence amongst such surroundings.
Plague inspection, for instance, was one of the fancied insults that natives of all classes resented bitterly. They could, for one thing, see no use in it. Plague, if it came amongst them, came at the will of the gods, no amount of precaution could be of use in the face of Fate!
Abdul sallied forth to the back quarters to give out Robin’s orders relating to the said inspection with a very bad grace. His announcement caused a ferment of life in the mud huts, all the women remonstrating shrilly with their respective spouses. Only Ranji’s door remained closed to the general excitement, and from his room there came forth no sound.
The doctor baboo, a short stumpy little man with an apologetic manner and well-oiled hair, was accompanied in his tour of inspection by Robin. At the door of Ranji’s hut there was a certain amount of trouble, because continued knockings brought no reply, and the door had been barred in some way from the inside.
“His wife isn’t purdah, is she?” Robin inquired of Abdul; “he did not seem to mind us seeing her the other day when she had made a mistake about onions. Call out to him that I am here with the doctor baboo, and that if he doesn’t open the door I shall have it broken down.”
Almost as if in answer to the words, the door opened and Ranji confronted them. His face had taken on a curious green shade, his eyes were dull and lifeless, something like froth had gathered at the corners of his mouth. As he lifted his hand to salaam Robin he lurched against the door.
“What is the wish of the sahib?” he asked thickly.
The doctor baboo uttered a sharp sound under his breath. “Plague!” he ejaculated, summing up the man’s appearance at a glance. Robin turned quickly to the crowd of servants.
“Each of you to your own house,” he ordered sharply. “I heard what you said, Baboo, do you think you are right, the man is certainly ill?”
“I can tell it at a glance, sir,” the baboo explained, his manner, if anything, more apologetic than ever. “that green hue on the face, the froth at the corners of the mouth, are all symptoms. Into the bargain, I should say the man was dying.”
“Dying,” Robin turned quickly to the figure in the doorway. “Sit down, Ranji,” he ordered quietly; “this is the doctor baboo, he will see what can be done for you.”
He advanced towards the door, but Ranji made no movement to get out of the way. “The wife sleeps,” he muttered thickly, “I do not wish her to be disturbed.”
“The woman,” remarked the baboo at Robin’s elbow. “has probably got the disease too, very likely she is dead.”
His voice was unsympathetic. Robin felt a wave of rage against him; why could he not bring more feeling into this heart-breaking work?
Ranji’s eyes implored his sahib. Then perhaps he realized the uselessness of his defence, for suddenly he took a staggering step away from the door and fell his full length on the ground, his hands just touching Robin’s boots.
“Huzoor,” he wailed. “of what use to hide the truth? She is dead, and I—I die. Let him not touch her, let him not carry her body to the hospital. Huzoor, huzoor!” His voice shrieked and failed suddenly.
Robin stooped quickly. “Listen, Ranji,” he said. “I give you my word nothing shall be done to hurt either you or her. Only you must be quiet, we have all to do what the doctor sahibs tell us when we are ill.”
“They will defile her, they will take us to the hospital, our hearts and livers will be cut from our bodies,” groaned Ranji.
“They shall do nothing of the sort,” promised Robin. “and if they take you to the hospital, I shall come with you, I promise you that.”
The rest of the servants were horribly and frankly terrified. The Quick Death had come amongst them; who would be the next to die? Robin called a council outside and with Abdul to make his speech clear to them pointed out that if they were obedient and wise there was no reason why the infection should spread. Anyway, he added, there was no use any of them trying to run away. The bungalow and compound were in quarantine, no one would be allowed to leave it. He advised them to get about their work as quickly and calmly as possible.
The anxious group dispersed slowly; the hospital bearers, hastily summoned by the baboo, took possession of Ranji and Dawn in the Sky’s body, and Robin ran into the bungalow for a minute just to tell Lois not to be needlessly alarmed and to acquaint her of the fact that he was going to take Ranji to the hospital.
“But isn’t it dangerous and infectious?” asked Lois. “why do you have to go?”
“I don’t exactly have to go,” Robin explained. “but there is no danger of infection or very little for us Europeans, and Ranji will feel better, poor devil, if I am with him. He is mortally afraid of hospital, and after all he has been a jolly good syce; can’t very well refuse, can I?”
So Robin walked to the hospital behind the dhoolie that carried Ranji there, and he stayed with the man till the end, which was not long in coming. He had to explain his presence to a somewhat surprised English doctor who did the rounds just after Ranji was admitted.
“Good servant,” Robin put it bashfully. “and seems to feel less scared so long as I stay beside him.”
The doctor paused for a moment in his busy rush and smiled grimly. “He trusts you it seems,” he commented; “wish to God we could infect some of that trust into the rest of our patients. It is dreary work putting out your best and being met always with fear.”
“They don’t understand,” Robin explained. “Ranji here had some mad yarn about his heart being cut out or something.”
The doctor nodded. “I know,” he said. “if you could peep into their minds you would see me and my fellow-doctors as devils incarnate. Oh well,” he shrugged broad shoulders and turned away. “It all comes to the same thing in the end I suppose. Pilot your particular protégé to a peaceful end and get out of this quick; it is no place for anybody who doesn’t have to be in it.”
You would have felt my soul in a kiss,
And known that once if I loved you well,
And I would have given my soul for this,
To bur forever in burning hell.
— A. C. Swinburne
Ranji died barely half an hour after his admission to hospital, and Robin, changing into the clothes which Abdul had brought and laid out for him in the doctor’s rooms, dismissed the dog cart and elected to walk home. He wanted the sharp exercise to help him shake off the mood of depression produced by the scenes he had just gone through. He was sorry for the doctors; it must be terrible to see men die by their hundreds with ghastly fear tugging at their hearts, haunting their last moments. To feel them shrink from you so long as they had strength to shrink, to realize that they only dreaded the hands you held out to help.
Anyway he was glad he had gone with poor old Ranji; the man had been a good servant; it would be difficult to entirely fill his place.
Lois was waiting for Robin on the veranda. She had spent a very restless two hours. The panic from the servants’ quarters had infected her, even Abdul had been shaken out of his usual haughtiness and the ayah had frankly and openly dissolved in floods of tears. Her sobs, punctuated by gruesome details of death, had proved too much for Lois’ nerves and she had ordered the woman out of her room and told her not to come back till she had recovered. Then, news of the affair having spread, as news will amongst native servants, Mrs. Rogers drove round to see if she could do anything to help.
“Plague,” she remarked, settling herself down on a comfortable chair in the drawing-room. “I hear it is getting a little out of hand, my dear. I know it must be bad because Tom is packing me off to Matheran.”
“But there is no danger to us, is there?” Lois queried.
“I am not so sure.” Mrs. Rogers spoke ponderously. “In India there is always danger. The people are panic-stricken; who knows what mayn’t break out at any moment? Hasn’t your husband suggested your going away?”
“Oh, yes,” Lois admitted. “but he had thought about it before all this started. He says the hot weather would be bad for me.”
Mrs. Rogers sighed. “What hypocrites men are, to be sure. Where does he propose to send you?”
“To England,” Lois explained.
Mrs. Rogers sat up straight and looked at her.
“You won’t go, of course,” she said.
“I don’t know,” Lois hesitated on the words.
“I shall hate leaving, but I suppose——”
“Fudge!” interrupted Mrs. Rogers. “you can’t go, and that is the long and short of it. Don’t you see, haven’t you tumbled to what his idea is?”
Lois glanced at her, flushing slightly. Was it possible that Mrs. Rogers, dense in most things had so far fathomed Robin’s intentions? The elder woman swept aside such fears by her next remark.
“My dear,” she said, speaking with unusual solemnity, “I do not hold with making a nuisance of myself, but when it is a case of real trouble I am always quite firm with Tom. ‘I’ll go away,’ I say to him, ‘if it will make you any happier, but I will not go out of call.’ That is why I am going to Matheran; it is a horrid hole, but it is only a day’s journey from here.”
“Trouble?” asked Lois. She looked and felt slightly puzzled.
“You probably have not realized,” Mrs. Rogers nodded. “that your husband’s ideas about the hot weather are due to the fact that plague is assuming nasty proportions in Bombay. He wants to get you out of danger, that is what it is.”
“But——” began Lois. Mrs. Rogers interrupted again.
“I know husbands, dear,” she conceded; “mine never shows any anxiety about my feeling the heat unless there is something else afoot. You had better come to Matheran with me,” she ended. “you can’t go home, it is like deserting your post.” She stood up eyeing Lois suspiciously. “Don’t you love that nice husband of yours the least little bit in life?” she asked.
The red flew to Lois cheeks this time; she stood up too, tidying her work with nervous hands. “I will ask Robin about Matheran,” she said with surprising meekness. “If he will let me I should love to come.”
But despite Mrs. Rogers’ backing up Lois waited to receive Robin somewhat nervously. What would he say to her request, how would he greet her desire to remain out in India? For that matter, unless she hauled down her flag and surrendered the heights of her position entirely, how was she to explain her attitude to him?
Robin’s first words rather opened a way for her, for without knowing it he let her see the trouble in his mind.
“This means plague in Colaba,” he said; “I wish I had taken your passage weeks ago and that you were right out of it.”
“But you said it wasn’t infectious,” Lois reminded him.
“I know that,” he agreed. “only it is unpleasant and tragic; there is no reason why you should even have to hear of it. I’ll go down and see about your passage to-morrow.”
He rose rather wearily from his chair and Lois seized her opportunity.
“Robin,” she said quickly, “I have been trying to make up my mind to tell you something all to-day. I—I don’t want to go home, please, I want to go to Matheran with Mrs. Rogers.”
She stood in front of him holding herself very erect, hands clenched tightly in front of her.
“But——” suggested Robin. She interrupted him.
“I have got to say more than just that, haven’t I?” she asked, “I have got to make you understand that there never was any truth in what you thought about me and Mr. Denvers. I would not explain at the time, I was too angry, but really and truly we don’t want—I mean we never did think of anything like you thought.”
“You do not wish to go home?” asked Robin; he was not looking at her, his tone was not particularly friendly.
“Please no,” whispered Lois.
“What do you propose to do?”
“Mrs. Rogers has asked me, I would like to go with her,” Lois said. Robin was not giving her any assistance. How could she say—“I would like to stay with you”?
“I see,” agreed Robin; he turned on his heel without even glancing at her. “You must do as you like, Lois. I should have thought——”
Whatever his idea was he left it unsaid and passed into the house leaving her standing there with the colour in her cheeks and the tears smarting in her eyes.
She had no opportunity of guessing how her sudden change of plans had upset Robin’s hardly won peace of mind. Late that night when the rest of the household had gone to bed he was still wandering about his room arguing the matter out with himself. Then presently his restlessness took him outside and down the front steps to pace up and down the drive. Since Lois had apparently no desire for freedom or Denvers, what was it she did want? Was she going to be content to live for always as they were doing now? He was not content, hot blood rebelled within him. Daily the need of her placed him on the rack; her little friendlinesses, her half efforts at flirtation but served to tighten the screws and make the torture more acute. He had been almost looking forward to the time when once and for all he should know her to be definitely beyond his reach. Surely in time, away from her immediate presence his heart would find peace. Whereas now—everything combined against him; the soft, darkly luminous night, the scent of flowers in the air, the strange glowing stars with their reflections in the purple mass of sea!
He paused for a moment at the gate of his bungalow and was surprised to feel his breath coming a little fast, as if he had run quickly upstairs or as if some fright had suddenly called his senses into action. How still everything else was! Lois had evidently gone to bed; the lights in the surrounding bungalows burnt dim. Then suddenly his own name, spoken very low, thrilled through the silence, and with a start he turned to find Mrs. Latimer at his side.
She stood quite close to him, the dim light there was glinted on the white dress she wore and caught at the spangled veil she had flung over her hair. She seemed to have borrowed an ethereal beauty from the night. Robin caught his breath, he knew he was staring at her yet he found it difficult to look away.
“What on earth are you doing out at this time of night, Belle?” he asked, using her name for the first time since they had met again.
Belle smiled a little at the sound. “I don’t know,” she answered, “something called to me to come out; perhaps it was an inward knowledge that you were here. I have always said we were twin souls, haven’t I, Robin? My soul heard your soul calling and I came out to you.”
“If you believe in that kind of thing.” Robin essayed a laugh, but it sounded forced and unnatural.
“Of course I do,” Belle went on, speaking slowly. “Don’t you, Robin? Wasn’t your heart strange and restless just now? I could almost hear it beating in time with the pulse of the world.”
“What nonsense you talk,” whispered Robin. He hardly realized himself that he whispered. The woman was perilously near him, some scent that she had on mixed with the perfume of the flower-laden tree overhead, he could feel her body brush against his arm.
“It is not nonsense,” she asserted: “listen!” she caught at his hand, holding it close pressed against the tumultuous throb of her heart. “Mine is beating to the same tune as yours, Robin.” Her face swept up to his, he could feel her warm breath on his cheek.
“You strange, wild thing,” he answered jerkily. “what a heart you have got, it fairly jumps against my hand.”
“Your hand, Robin,” she whispered. Almost unconsciously he had thrown the other arm round her and was holding her whole body crushed against his.
Lips found lips during that strange mad moment and the world swayed round Robin as he kissed her. Then the dream fell away and on the sudden he realized the part he was playing.
He would have pushed her away from him, but he could feel that she swayed and he feared that she might fall, so he had to continue holding her while his brain sought out some excuse with which to explain his conduct.
“The night has got into both our brains,” he essayed finally. “Those stars and your eyes. You have got most wonderful eyes at night, Belle.”
With a well simulated sigh of intense fatigue Belle drew herself away from his encircling arm and passed her hands across her face.
“I am a little silly,” she said, smiling at him, a pathetic catch in her voice. “It is the stars as you say, Robin. Let’s forget it, it is not the first time we have been mad together, is it? She turned away. “Good-night, twin soul,” she said softly, catching her breath on something half a laugh, half a sob. “Twin soul!”
She vanished into the shadows of her garden and Robin, after waiting a minute or two, turned and walked back to the bungalow. What had just occurred had hardly served to still the tumult of his blood. The scent of her hair, the cool touch of her lips, went with him as a very insistent memory.
If the injured one could only see your heart you may be sure that he would understand and pardon; but, alas, the heart cannot be shown, it has to be demonstrated in words. — R. L. Stevenson
No further discussion passed between Robin and Lois on the matter of her home-going, and ten days later Lois left for Matheran with Mrs. Rogers. Robin’s attitude during those days had driven her back into a chill circle of reserve. She was beginning to realize that if they were ever to come together again it would have to be by a complete humbling of her own pride. Robin would meet no half advances, he was deaf and blind to all her little efforts at conciliation. If she could only have plucked up sufficient courage to have gone to him frankly and said, “See, Robin, what a mistake I have made, I want your love, I have wakened to the reality of life. Take me, forgive me, love me,”—then perhaps he would have listened. But like a great many other people Lois would have preferred to win her victory without passing through the dust of battle. She found it very difficult to own herself in the wrong; she was always hoping for some fortunate event such as she had read of in novels, where the hero and heroine are brought together by the simplest and yet most far-reaching accident. Time and again she imagined herself in his arms, just wakening to consciousness after having been flung from the dog-cart or some such vehicle: then as she stirred to life she would whisper his name perhaps and lift passionate lips to his kiss! And his arms would gather her close to his heart and all else would be forgotten and forgiven!
So much for imagination! In reality nothing came to her assistance and she left for Matheran with a hurt realization that Robin was really glad to say good-bye to her.
He came to the station to see her off and stood talking and laughing with Colonel and Mrs Rogers and the Latimers. Major Latimer was taking Jimmie to Matheran, where the child was to be left in the charge of his ayah but under Mrs. Rogers’ motherly eyes. Belle had elected to stay down for the hot weather. As a general rule she was the first to go, but as the heat affected her very little there was really no reason for this yearly migration, and Latimer had not argued about the matter when she expressed a desire to stay. The royal road to peace was to let Belle do exactly as she pleased—he had discovered that long ago.
“You won’t let Jimmie make too much of a nuisance of himself, will you, Mrs. Drummond?” Belle gushed at Lois. “He is so devoted to you, and sometimes he can be most tiresome.”
“He never worries me,” Lois answered stiffly. She was beginning to hate Mrs. Latimer very heartily.
“And we will look after your husband for you and see he is not dull,” Belle added; she turned soft languishing eyes on Robin. “You will look in whenever you want to, won’t you? we shall always be glad to see you.”
“Me too, Mrs. Latimer,” put in Colonel Rogers before Robin could answer. There was a little twinkle in his shrewd eyes.
“Of course,” agreed Belle. Some of the softness had, however, gone from her voice. “I believe I shall be about the only lady left in Bombay, I shall have to be a mother to all you men.”
“Humph,” grunted Mrs. Rogers. “you will find Tom a prickly person to mother, Mrs. Latimer, and as for his asking himself to dinner and things, don’t you believe him. When I am away in the hot weather he spends his time off duty dressed in a bath towel. I hope you won’t encourage him outside his own compound in that kit.”
Everyone laughed and there was a general movement, the party breaking up into little family groups to say good-bye. Robin politely hoped Lois would not be tired by the journey nor find Matheran too deadly dull.
“It is not much of a place for riding,” he informed her. “still I have sent the pony up, he will be there almost as soon as you are.”
“Thank you,” said Lois. Behind Robin she was aware of the Latimer group and of the fact that Mrs. Latimer was all the time watching them covertly. Mrs. Rogers had already said her good-byes and was in the carriage settling just where everything should be put.
Lois under Belle’s watchful mocking eyes took her courage in both hands.
“Good bye, Robin,” she whispered, and stood a little on tip-toe to kiss the cheek nearest her.
Surreptitious and swift it was, but still a kiss! Robin flushed oddly and for a moment their eyes met. Then Lois spoilt it all, heaven alone knows what fiend of malice stood at her elbow to prompt her.
“I had to,” she told him. “everyone is looking at us, we must pretend.”
The something that had leapt to life in Robin’s eyes died away again.
“I see,” he said gravely; “good-bye, Lois, have as good a time as you can.”
Then she had to shake hands with Colonel Rogers and Mrs. Latimer, and at last the train was off, gliding slowly from the great station. Lois had a final fleeting vision of Robin. Mrs. Latimer had drawn near him and was saying something, he had turned with half a smile to answer.
Mrs. Rogers sat back in her seat with a jerk. She and Lois were sharing a carriage while Jimmie and Major Latimer travelled in another.
“I can’t bear that Latimer woman,” she confided to Lois. “I have tried to like her because I am fond of Major Latimer, but she is hopeless. Did you hear her airing her virtuosity because she is staying down. We all know that the hot weather doesn’t upset her sort, Matheran would probably give her a cold. Mother them, indeed! I hope I can trust Tom to leave her entirely alone.”
Lois did not answer, her mind was too fully occupied with the mournful fact that Robin had not even troubled to watch her out of sight.
The journey up to Matheran proved very tiring.
So long as they were in the train it was painfully and airlessly hot, and Lois developed what Mrs. Rogers called a sick headache. She had to lie full length on one of the seats, while Mrs. Rogers moved ponderously about the carriage, opening and shutting now this window and now that to avoid the sun as the train swayed in its journey. At Neral they changed from the train and commenced their journey up the hill.
The moment you step from the train at Neral you are surrounded by a fighting noisy throng of coolies. The rest of the journey to Matheran has to be done either in a chair hammock, swung between two poles and carried by six or eight coolies, or on horseback; all the luggage has to be carried up on the coolies’ shoulders. That is why fighting occurs; there are swarms of coolies all eager to be employed but anxious at the same time to obtain the lightest and easiest of the parcels, which is after all only natural.
Mrs. Rogers was more than able to cope with the tumult. She descended amongst them like a whirlwind, making free use of the point of her sunshade to clear a path for herself and Lois.
“I want eight coolies and a big chair,” she announced. “but six men can carry this memsahib, she is very light.”
“Oh, please,” put in Lois. “let me have as many as they like, I should hate to feel that they are struggling under me.”
“Struggling, my dear,” Mrs. Rogers sniffed. “they are as strong as horses, and anyway it couldn’t take more than six boys to carry you. Look at that man over there with my box, it is quite light I happen to know, because I tried it myself before we started, yet just observe his antics.”
Certainly the man in question would have wrung the stoutest heart to pity. He was indulging in a pantomime before Mrs. Rogers’ butler; first lifting the box with a great effort, then completely sagging under its apparent weight till he was perfectly flat beneath it. He had almost succeeded in his object when it was frustrated by one of his mates, seeing here an opportunity of gaining some money and much kudos from the sahib logue. This second man, before the first actor had realized his intentions, dashed in sideways, removed the box from off the recumbent back, set it on his own shoulders, and was off down the road at a rapid trot in the wake of some of the other laden coolies.
“There,” said Mrs. Rogers. “that shows you how heavy it was, and Narrayan was just going to be stupid enough to give in to that other man.”
Having watched their various items of luggage vanish out of sight one after the other, and having superintended the mounting of the servants, who were all of them to ride up the hill, Mrs. Rogers and Lois turned back into the station refreshment room and joined Major Latimer and Jimmie at tea, which the latter was tucking into with unfeigned enjoyment.
Lois rather regretted on her way up the hill that she had not elected to ride with the Latimers. Her swinging chair had been comfortable enough to start with, but it was a cramping position to stay in for long, and none of her coolies smelt particularly nice. The hill path they were struggling up wound in and out, sometimes almost turning back on itself, and when it did that she could catch a glimpse of Mrs. Rogers’ chair just in front of her. Mrs. Rogers had apparently fallen asleep, quite oblivious of the grunts and groans of her coolies or of their very frequent grumbling complaints amongst each other.
Matheran is one of the smallest hill stations and not far enough removed from the plains nor cool enough in the hot weather to be really popular with the residents of Bombay. It is in reality a forest-covered hill; the few houses are built in roughly cleared spaces, the paths are cut through tropically thick jungles. Matheran boasts no roads that can be used for wheel traffic and even the riding is not good. Very few of the roads allow of a good chest-expanding gallop, the turns are frequent and dangerous, the paths in many places very steep and stony. But the place is beautiful, and the jungle a mass of varied coloured splendour. Every now and then the roads, winding through this close shadowed foliage, open out on to the edge of sloping precipices, where waving tree tops reach right down into the valley and lose themselves in the rolling map of the plains. Here and there a range of hills, wide lengths of level broken in places by the thin streak of silver that denotes a river, and then again more plains and more hills till sight is lost in the vague blue of eternal distance.
All this Lois did not see that first evening. It was quite dark before the coolies came to a final halt and, lowering the chair, announced that they had brought the honoured Mem to the end of her journey and that they trusted since they had carried her well and swiftly there might be some bucksheesh for them. The hotel which had been selected by Mrs. Rogers as the best and biggest in Matheran stood on the most prominent cleared space in the station. A long, rambling building, low and dimly lit, surrounded by a colony of little houses. The bedrooms and private sitting-rooms are separated from the principal building in these up-country hotels, and in this way it is possible to have a little house which is practically your own with the added convenience of having all the housekeeping done for you.
It is dreary and depressing arriving late at night, tired out and with a bad headache, especially when everything seems to combine for your discomfort. The hotel was very badly lighted, and seemed almost deserted. After Jimmie had been safely bestowed in bed Major Latimer and the two ladies found their way across to the dining-room escorted by a servant with a hurricane lamp. Dinner was lukewarm and indifferently served, the rest of the guests having had theirs fully an hour earlier and having all of them departed to their separate bungalows for the night.
Lois was glad to creep into her own small bed at last and put out the lamp, which had persistently smoked all evening to add to the general gloom. A wind was moving through the trees outside, rather a sad prolonged whisper; from somewhere far away down in the distant bazaar a dog howled in answer to the faint yap yap of the jackals. Was Robin dining with Mrs. Latimer, Lois wondered, about the last thought to cross her mind before she dropped asleep, or was he spending the evening alone and perhaps—faint hope—rather missing her? Matheran was a horribly depressing place; she had an inward conviction that she was going to dislike it intensely.
Lord, Thy most pointed pleasure take,
And stab my spirit broad awake.
— R. L. Stevenson
Long-legged, wild-haired Phyllis had blossomed into a young lady. Lois’ home letters dealt largely with this important fact.
“Little Phyllis has grown so pretty,” Madeline wrote. “but she is difficult to manage, and finds home life dreadfully dull. I often wonder when she will burst forth in rebellion.”
Mrs. Macdonald wrote in the same strain, but more explicitly. Phyllis had beauty, she ought to marry well; Mrs. Macdonald was relying upon Lois to open up the field of matrimony to her youngest sister. “Would Lois have Phyllis for a season, they had saved enough money to take her passage and buy a trousseau. The prospect had not as yet been mentioned to Phyllis, but there was little likelihood of her refusing such an invitation.”
It complicated the situation. Lois had refrained from telling the home people of the strained relations between herself and Robin, perhaps because she herself had daily hoped they would adjust themselves. But her stay in Matheran was laying a cold shadow of doubt upon her hopes. Robin wrote very seldom, crisp polite notes, dealing with the weather and the unrest which was still seething in Bombay over the plague regulations. He did not mention missing her, nor the possibility of her return.
She wrote finally with regard to Phyllis, but his answer was unsatisfactory. The cold weather was a long way ahead, he thought they had better make no plans about it.
Out of his silence and reserve she gathered the idea that he was still formulating a plan to send her home. Her own stubbornness had brought her to a position from which there seemed no escape.
And Matheran was dull, she had plenty of time for remorse and regret. The days were monotonously the same, and the only thing to compensate Lois for the rest of the dreariness was the wonderful beauty of the place.
Mrs. Rogers, however, was woefully prosaic about the views and panoramas which held Lois enthralled.
“Beautiful sunset, dear,” she would agree with one rapid glance at the pink-flushed sky and amazing glory of purple-clad hills. “But do let us get on, there is that horrible Parsee family who have been chasing us all afternoon, they are just coming round the corner.”
Mrs. Rogers had a horror of Parsees; she ranked them in her mind with Jews, and like a great many people with prejudices, Mrs. Rogers had a distinct aversion to Jews. Matheran was certainly overrun with Parsees. Personally Lois considered them rather fascinating. She liked the sedate, decorous men with their curiously-shaped shiny hats, and the women with their fluttering many-hued sarees.
“They are quite good-looking,” she would point out to Mrs. Rogers, “and really not a bit objectionable.”
Mrs. Rogers would sniff in reply. “Look at the way they turn their toes out,” she would say. “that gives them away to begin with, and then just think of their horrible propensity for being rich. They are Jews all right, and really Matheran is getting almost unlivable in.”
As Mrs. Rogers did not ride, and as she walked as little as possible, Lois found herself thrown for companionship almost entirely upon Jimmie.
He was a quaint little boy, full of strange fancies and the dream ideas of a childhood spent very much alone. His brain was always busy with inventions of his own, largely coloured by native legends of ghosts and gods. He said his prayers every night, under Mrs. Rogers’ careful tuition, to a Deity whom he once described to Lois as “The Government God,” but his faith in this personality was dim compared to the radiant belief which he bestowed upon the fairy tale gods of the Hindus. Shiva, Ganesh, Krishna, he had their names all pat, he could tell Lois wonderful tales of their doings and powers. And he was a bundle of nerves, with imagination strained beyond its limit. The dark, for instance, held terror for him, ghosts and fearful demons lurked behind every shadow. He would cry himself ill with fright if left alone in the dark and sometimes even in his sleep the terror would encompass him, and he would wake up screaming for help.
Yet he proved an amusing companion to take about with one, for he spoke and understood the language like a native, and he had no shyness of the country people. He would converse with all and sundry on their rides abroad, gleaning most curious scraps of knowledge and passing them on to Lois.
There was one day when both of them, unattended save by Jimmie’s bearer, invaded the bazaar in search of some brass ornaments which Lois was anxious to purchase. Jimmie could be trusted to bargain with a bazaar man down to his last farthing, and he did it in a most ingratiating manner, there was never any ill-feeling about it.
It was unfortunate that Lois should have chosen to select as the only thing she really cared for on the stall a quaint misshapen little brass figure, because the shop-owner was for some reason or other greatly averse to parting with it. Lois could not understand the conversation, but she could see that Jimmie was having to put forward all his powers of persuasion, and that Govind, the bearer, was apparently disturbed and adding his share of argument to the discussion. A crowd had collected in the narrow dusty street to watch the mad sahib logue. Their faces were impassive, but from time to time one or other of them would throw in a word of assent or dissent to the shop-owner’s arguments. Mrs. Rogers would certainly disapprove of their coming in contact with this crowd of natives if she were to hear of it.
“Jimmie,” Lois suggested, tugging at her champion’s arm to get a hearing. “if it is more money the man wants give it to him; I don’t mind paying a little more.”
Jimmie turned a heated face up to her. “It isn’t money he wants at all,” he explained. “it is something I don’t understand about this not being a nice sort of god for you to buy. It is Govind’s idea, I don’t know why he interfered. I was just going to get it for you for three rupees.”
“Not a nice sort of god for me to buy,” laughed Lois. “how ridiculous! How did Govind say it, Jimmie?”
Jimmie’s face was untouched by mirth. “Govind was rude to the shopman,” he admitted. “He said, ‘Son of a dog, why offerest thou the love god to such as she?’”
“And the shopman?” asked Lois.
“He said,” continued her interpreter. “‘Have white women naught to do with love?’ I don’t quite understand what it is all about, but perhaps we had better not buy it, Auntie Lois. Govind says it will bring ill-luck.”
“Nonsense,” said Lois firmly; she felt herself flushing. “Tell Govind not to be ridiculous, and let’s take the image and get away from here. It is hot, Jimmie, and I am tired of being stared at by all these people.”
“All right,” agreed Jimmie; he turned abruptly to the shopman, waving aside the still expostulating Govind. “We will take this then,” he announced, picking up the figure and handing across three rupees. “The white mem is not afraid of native love gods.”
He added the last for his own benefit, just to show he had understood the preceding conversation. The crowd tittered in reply, and the shopman addressed a parting conciliatory remark to Govind.
“Thou art over cautious for the white folk, brother. Their love and our love, it is a different matter. How know you that the arm of Krishna can reach to her?”
“Aye,” a voice in the crowd added. “that is surely true. We know nothing, and the gods say naught.”
Jimmie tried hard to glean some further information from Govind on the way home, but the man had relapsed back into sulky disapproval.
“What use for further words, little master?” was his only answer. “the memsahib has her will.”
“But will it bring ill luck, Govind?” Jimmie wheedled.
Govind shrugged his shoulders; his eyes for a second glanced at Lois; he was not ignorant of the gossip in the servants’ quarters.
“Who knows, little master?” he said. “sometimes the girls of the bazaar pray to such a god as this,” he indicated the parcel in Lois’ hand. “and he brings them a lover, and Love is not always lucky.”
Mrs. Rogers’ opinion on the subject when sought was neither enlightening nor comforting.
“I should throw the nasty thing away,” she advised in Jimmie’s presence. “it is singularly ugly, and if that is all you went to the bazaar for you might have been better employed.”
To Lois, after Jimmie had trotted away to his own room, she added: “Ill luck, nonsense, my dear! The truth of the matter is that there is probably something connected with this image that Govind knows of and—being a well-trained servant—he does not think it nice. Most of the legends and rites connected with their so-called love god are frankly indecent. If you insist on keeping it, I should keep it out of sight, so that the other servants don’t see it.”
So the grotesque Krishna went to take up his residence at the very bottom of Lois’ ribbon drawer, under a pile of handkerchiefs and sweet-scented sachets. If Govind had been asked he would have said that even from such concealment Krishna would be quite capable of working his spells, but Govind was not asked, and there to all intents and purposes the matter dropped.
Meanwhile Lois wrote as diplomatically as was possible to the home people. Would they leave the matter of Phyllis’ visit over for a little: Lois might herself be coming home. Of course, she would love to have Phyllis, and as soon as her own plans were definitely settled she would write at once. “They will think me a selfish beast,” she thought mournfully. “but I can’t help it; what else is there for me to do?”
It was a day or two after the bazaar incident that Mrs. Rogers first spoke to Lois about Robin. The subject arose out of a letter which Mrs. Rogers received from her husband, announcing his intention of coming up to Matheran for a week-end.
“Have tried to persuade Drummond to come with me,” the letter went on, “but to tell you the truth, Mary, that young man is most unusually busy hanging round the Latimer woman. I don’t like the look of things, and that is a fact.”
“Why don’t you write to your husband and suggest that he should pay us a visit,” Mrs. Rogers asked Lois that evening, as the two sat out on the veranda after dinner. “Bombay is very hot, Tom says. It does them good to have a week-end in the hills.”
“I don’t suppose he could get leave,” answered Lois.
“Rubbish, a week-end isn’t leave, my dear. You ought to make him come.”
“I’ll write and suggest it,” said Lois evenly.
Mrs. Rogers gave an impatient sigh, and laid her hand for a moment on the girl’s lap. “I would like,” she said. “to shake you, to give you a very severe shaking. You seem to me to be surrounded by a wall of ice and it takes a pickaxe to get at the heart of you. Won’t you realize, child, that you are on the high road to making a mess of your life?”
Lois turned to face the older woman. “It isn’t comfortable being in ice,” she said rather tragically. “one cannot help one’s nature, can one?”
“My dear,” Mrs. Rogers began impulsively, then she checked herself. “After all, you know your own business best,” she conceded.
A sudden desire for confession swept over Lois. “Will you let me tell you something of my ice house,” she asked, “you won’t understand or condone—as I look back I find it hard to excuse myself—but at the time——”
Mrs. Rogers put out quick hands. “Yes,” she said. “tell me, it will go far towards thawing you, and that will be something gained.”
“I started married life wrong,” Lois began slowly. “It was not what I had expected or had been taught to believe, and I suppose I must be made different from other girls. I am not awfully affectionate by nature, I don’t feel things; or perhaps it is my icicle of a heart that gets in the way. Anyhow, marriage came as a shock to me, I thought it horrible and disgusting. I suppose I did not really love Robin then, at least not as——”
“Not as you love him now,” Mrs. Rogers interrupted. “I quite understand, poor funny little girl.”
Lois had slipped from her chair and sat on the top step of the veranda, her hands clasped in her lap, her eyes watching the shadows of the trees.
“As I love him now,” she repeated after Mrs. Rogers. Something seemed to snap in her heart at the spoken word, and the knowledge of its truth flooded her whole being with soft warmth.
“We have never lived together,” she went on, speaking a little hurriedly. “since that first night. Robin was very good to me, and at first things seemed to be going very well. I was quite happy and contented, I thought I always should be. It is only just lately, because I know he is shutting me out of his life, that I feel I need something more from him.”
“What about Robin?” asked Mrs. Rogers, “was he quite happy and contented, do you think?”
Lois turned to look up at her. “I don’t know,” she admitted, “I never stopped to think. He seemed content to be friends.” She flushed suddenly, remembering their first night in Bombay and the fierce hunger of his kiss.
“Poor Robin,” was Mrs. Rogers’ only comment, and for a moment or two they sat silent. Then Lois leant forward, putting her hand on the other woman’s.
“Have you understood at all?” she asked; “do you altogether blame me?”
Mrs. Rogers patted the hand held out to her. “My dear,” she said gravely. “of course I understand; most women would, I think. Only whenever it comes to dwelling on our own feelings we become selfish. Robin has been through a hard time, I fancy you are ready to admit that now, and don’t you think it is your duty to make the first move.”
“I know,” Lois admitted; she hesitated a moment, “and I have tried, Mrs. Rogers, really and truly I have tried, but Robin is awfully proud.”
“You mean he won’t take hints or see any half advances,” Mrs. Rogers smiled. “I am not surprised at his attitude. Don’t you think that asking for forgiveness is rather due from you to him?”
“I don’t see that.” Lois’ voice fell back on stubbornness. “He might meet me half way; it is very humiliating to have to plead for something——”
“For something,” Mrs. Rogers interrupted. “which you have once rejected with scorn. Child, child, pride is a most horrible mistake between two people who love each other.”
She rose to her feet. “Once,” she said, “I was in very much the same position as you, only, thank God, I had the sense to swallow my pride in time. Good-night, child, you are not quite in the mood yet to listen to sense, or I would stay and talk to you, but anyway I’ll leave a piece of advice for you to ponder over. There is no pride in the world which it is worth your while to weigh against the love of the man you love. We women are built that way.”
She moved away into her room, but for a long time Lois sat on where she was, her eyes staring into the dark. A memory of Madeline’s words had waked in her mind, the night seemed to be whispering them with a thousand soft voices—
“There is only one thing that we women are looking for, and that is Love.”
I shall go my ways, tread out my measure,
Fill the days of my daily breath
With fugitive things not good to treasure,
Do as the world does, say as it saith.
— A. C. Swinburne
There were times when Robin hated himself and the whole world with a passionate hatred for the power which had caught him so surely in its clutches, and which was everyday leading him nearer and nearer to the brink of destruction. Yet to a casual observer it would have appeared that he put up very little show of resistance, and indeed there was a stubborn spirit of defiance in his attitude towards his own conscience. To have expressed it in his own words—he was fed up with life and he didn’t care a damn what happened.
Under the circumstances, and since he had virtually disclaimed all responsibility, there was no one else who could very well display alarm at what was occurring. Latimer was away on duty with a detachment of the regiment in Poona; Colonel Rogers, though distinctly uneasy at the trend of affairs, was neither aware of their intense seriousness nor quite in a position to cope with them. A man’s private morals are not in the keeping of his Colonel, it is only open scandals that can be dealt with at headquarters.
So Robin drifted, and daily and hourly Belle tightened the cords round him. She was like a spider, smothering her victim in the long soft streamers of her web ere she commenced to devour him. More tersely put, hers was an influence like some subtle drug which gradually and by insidious sweet advances takes complete possession of a man’s body and soul.
And she undoubtedly loved Robin; in this lay the elements of tragedy, for real love which has to be satisfied by secret channels has little joy in its being. Belle’s whole nature, passionate heart and mind aflame with desire, flung itself forth at the man’s feet. She lived for the stolen kisses of his lips, for their prearranged carefully concealed meetings. Unless he had hated her, and Robin had never done that, sooner or later her passion was bound to achieve its desire and wake in him an answering flame.
They saw very little of each other in public because Belle had a cautious desire to avoid as much gossip as possible. Not because it was likely to have the slightest effect upon her; she had always gone her own way regardless of the conventions, but because she was careful for Robin’s peace of mind. As much as possible he must be allowed to drift; if their friendship became the subject of open comment it might too abruptly bring home to him the truth of his position.
Most evenings, however, she contrived to be at her gate as Robin came home from mess and he naturally stopped and talked to her. Generally, he would walk back to the house with her and come in for a minute or two’s talk and a whisky and soda. Then the minutes would slip into an hour and that hour lose itself in the next, and the man and woman would draw nearer and nearer to each other, the conversation falling on to long pauses, eyes meeting, hands touching.
“Just we two alone in the world,” as Belle whispered one evening. She had slid to the ground at his feet, her body resting against his knees, the waves of her scented hair not far from his lips.
“Yes, but the world is there all the time, Belle,” Robin answered, “we can’t get away from it.”
She stirred against him with a little sigh. “There is no one in the world that cares for you or me though,” she whispered. “that makes us almost alone, doesn’t it?”
He made no answer and she went on speaking almost to herself. “There is no one in the world that matters, only us two, and I love you, Robin. I wonder if you will ever wake up to the reality of how much I love you. If you wanted me to die for you I should do it, oh so gladly, if only first of all you had given me a little love to take away into the darkness with me.” She lifted her face quickly to his. “Let us forget the world for tonight, Robin, let it be just we two.”
The man’s face above her flushed, he caught her to him roughly. “I forget most things,” he said. “when you look at me like that. The scent in your hair makes me drunk I think.”
Belle laughed, a little breathless sound of joy. “Oh, Robin, Robin,” she remonstrated. “what a prosaic way to say things. It isn’t the scent of my hair that makes you feel drunk, it is just all of me and my love for you, and perhaps just a tiny little bit of love in you for me.”
Her lips were close against his. “Of course I love you,” he answered jerkily, and for the moment, with her heart beating out its message against his, the words seemed true.
They were recalled from their dream by the sound of feet on the gravel, followed by a discreet fit of coughing on the part of the intruder. Robin struggled free from Belle’s encircling arms and stood up. Instinctively he stepped between her and the approaching person. “Koi-hai?”3 he shouted.
“Huzoor,” Adbul’s voice answered from the gravel. “The Colonel sahib has sent a message. The regiment is to march to the bazaar, there is trouble. I deemed it well to fetch the sahib since the Colonel sahib is riding this way for him as soon as ready.”
“Very well,” Robin cursed inwardly at the man’s calm knowledge of his whereabouts. “get my kit out and order the pony.”
“Everything is prepared, Huzoor,” Abdul answered. He had not advanced any further, and Robin could only see a faint shadow of him, but the man’s presence embarrassed him oddly.
“You can go then,” he ordered brusquely, “I will come at once.”
The shadow salaamed and vanished. Robin turned to Belle.
“I have got to go,” he said; “I am sorry, Belle, the world after all refuses to be ignored.”
Belle had risen to her feet; as he turned away she laid a hand on his arm. “Robin,” she whispered, “promise you will come back; don’t let the world snatch you from me altogether. I’ll wait for you. Promise me, Robin, that sooner or later you will come back.”
Robin looked down at her; she was very beautiful in the dim light, the thrill of her passionate kisses was still with him. And after all why not? Other people before him had thought the world well lost for love, and it would settle his difficulty with Lois once and for all. Robin raised the hand on his arm to his lips and kissed it.
“I promise,” he answered, and Belle meeting his eyes knew that the last milestone had been past, and that the gates of her paradise were opening to her at last.
There was a letter from Lois waiting for Robin when he reached his bungalow. It had been written just after her talk with Mrs. Rogers, and there was much that could have been read between the lines and in the little stiff sentences had Robin been in the mood to do so.
“Could not you get leave and come up here for a day or two?” she wrote; “it would be very nice, and Mrs. Rogers says you ought to because it must be very hot in Bombay. The hotel is quite nice now we are used to it, and it is empty just now. Do come if you can,” the letter ended somewhat wistfully; “I have something I very much wish to say to you and it is no use trying to write it.”
“About her sister,” concluded Robin and tossed the note aside. The decisive step which he was proposing to take with Belle would put an end to little Phyllis’ season. He had a sudden regretful memory of Phyllis and the vicarage garden, and then, startlingly clear, a vision of Lois as he had first seen her, the cool shadowed grey eyes, the soft hair, the little smile that stirred the corners of her mouth when he spoke to her.
God! that vision brought pain. It was like a sudden flash of light across his heart, and under its radiance all other thoughts and feelings faded away. What was his passion for Belle worth brought face to face with this memory? Then the pain passed and the old dull ache of resentment took its place. At least Belle was warm and human and he had given his promise.
All this time he was changing rapidly from his mess kit into the uniform which Abdul had laid out for him, and when Colonel Rogers announced his arrival by a stentorian shout, Robin was ready to join him. The two, putting their ponies to a canter, hurried down to the parade ground.
“It is these wretched Mohammedans and Hindus again,” Colonel Rogers informed him in jerky shouts. “one or other of them went and beat a drum, or several drums, outside the other’s temple while service was going on. That is only an excuse, though, to hide the deeper trouble. They are all armed with lathies and there has been a fair amount of slaughter done. I hear the gunners have been ordered to bring out a gun or two just to clear the streets.”
“They are not up against us then,” queried Robin.
“You just put your nose into the bazaar my lad and see. The root of the trouble is of course plague inspection. It keeps the poor devils in a constant state of irritation, and mind you, I don’t blame them. Well, here we are. You are to take your men straight down to the market square and wait for further orders.”
The regiment marched down to its destination through streets that might have belonged to a city of the dead. Not a sound, beyond that of their own feet, broke the silence of the night, except once when they had to draw aside to let the field guns pass them. Moonlight lay over everything; the day had been exceptionally hot, and now the earth was covered with a fantastic veil of mist.
The big open space round Crawford market was full of soldiers and police, sailors from the gunboat in the harbour, and a detachment of the native regiment from Marine Parade. Law and Force and Order were gathered together, but there did not appear to be any sign of the rebellious multitude they had been called out to suppress.
“Where is it all happening?” Robin asked a naval officer who came to a pause beside him.
“Down towards the docks, I believe,” the other answered, “they have killed a round dozen of the police; that is why we have been disturbed in our night’s slumber.”
“Have the Mohammedans and Hindus joined forces then?” asked Robin.
The other nodded. “I don’t think they mind very much who they fight now, they have gone what we call—blood mad. We get that amongst our own men sometimes, don’t we?”
“There is to be no blood-shedding to-night,” Colonel Rogers joined in. “We are ordered to effect peace and quiet with as little display of force as possible. The guns are just out to frighten, not to fire. You will remember that, Drummond, won’t you. Rub it in to your men that even if they are attacked they are to hit back very gently.”
“All right,” laughed Robin; “luckily Tommy Atkins is a good-natured fellow on the whole.”
The truth of this assertion was proved to him later on when he and the men under him were ordered to clear one of the most congested streets. A fighting mass of undistinguishable forms filled it; wild yells and shrieks resounded on the air. The crowd moved now this way and now that, but it seemed to make no progress, and narrow as the street was, from every window in the houses on either side partisans leant out joining in the fray by hurling abuse and missiles at the swaying mass beneath.
Robin halted his men in a street opening off the larger one and gave them his instructions.
“Just remember they are only armed with sticks,” he ended. “and it has never been our job to fight an unarmed enemy. We don’t want to do any killing, we want just firmly and gently to make them move on and disperse.”
The men laughed; so far they were regarding the whole thing in the light of an amusing excursion, but the good temper which Robin had boasted of was tested very severely before they emerged hot and triumphant at the other end of—what was by then—an almost deserted street. It had taken them nearly two hours to achieve this result and there were a good many casualties to show for it. Two of the company had been knocked out completely; a great many bore vivid signs of the contest, and Robin himself had received a nasty cut across his head and face.
The detachment of the native regiment, which was merely acting as an escort for prisoners and which had taken no actual part in the fighting, came along presently in charge of a cheery fat-faced subaltern to collect Robin’s captures. With them came a doctor and a contingent of the Red Cross.
“You have had a warm time, haven’t you?” the latter asked Robin. “This has been the worst corner, I believe. Any of your men killed? Colonel Rogers has lost two.”
“I don’t think so,” Robin answered. “one or two have been laid out by nasty knocks but I don’t fancy it is anything serious.”
“That is a nice beauty spoiler you have got on your own face,” the doctor commented. “better come along and let’s dress it for you. You will be here all to-morrow and the next night from what I can see. We have opened a dispensary in the street just behind this.”
“I will look in later then,” Robin agreed. “when we have settled down a bit.”
The doctor hurried off in answer to a call from one of his men and the fat subaltern strolled across to Robin.
“Got your little lot,” he announced, “thirty alive and eighteen dead. We have got close on 400 in the lock-up already. We ought to knock off, I think, the jail won’t hold any more; they are stacked one above another as it is. Well, so long, we’ll pay you another visit in the morning.”
He tramped off with his prisoners and escort and the street fell back on to quiet again. From somewhere quite near sounds of a battle could still be heard, but their own peace was not again disturbed and the men bivouacked themselves as comfortably as possible along the length of the street. Robin propped himself up against a slightly elevated doorway, from which position he could give instant warning of fresh trouble should there be any signs of it, but as a matter of fact the remainder of the night passed most peacefully and the early morning sun looked down upon a subdued and greatly chastened bazaar.
. . . But a man needs must move,
Keep moving—whither, when the star is gone,
Whereby he steps secure nor strays from Love?
— R. Browning
The next day dawned blazingly hot but with no fresh signs of life from the rioters. Three hours of hand-to-hand fighting had soothed their religious spirit, and the number of lives which had been lost, to say nothing of the hundreds of their fellows under arrest, had had a very sobering effect upon even the most militant of the crowd. One by one, dejected, limping, and weary beyond measure they crept back to their respective houses, the soldiers on guard in the streets greeting their return with good-natured chaff.
“We will be out of here by twelve,” Colonel Rogers informed Robin on an early flying visit. “Just tell the men to get what food they can for the time being, the natives are opening the shops again.”
So Tommy Atkins, cheerfully and with a kindly disregard of the feud which had been between them, went shopping in the bazaar, hailing his past foeman in very bad Hindustani as “Brother.”
Robin found his way to the doctor’s dispensary early in the morning. The cut across his forehead was throbbing perniciously and had landed him with a very bad headache. He was stiff and feverish into the bargain after his uncomfortable night.
“You go to bed, young man, the minute you get home,” the doctor ordered him, “and I should think a week end in the hills will do you no harm.”
“He is free to go,” Colonel Rogers put in; “I wired for Latimer last night, he will probably report himself this morning.”
Robin winced away a little from the rough but steady hands of the doctor. “I shall be all right,” he asserted, “after a sleep. It is fiendishly hot to-day, though, isn’t it?”
“It’s a bit warm,” the doctor agreed—he stood away admiring his handiwork on Robin’s head—“just wait awhile though, presently the bazaar will start smelling, you have no idea what it can be like under a hot weather sun at midday.”
“Don’t want to,” grunted Colonel Rogers, “wish to heaven they would dismiss us, I shall have half my men on the sick list as it is.”
The doctor chuckled. “You are about right there,” he said. “Tommy Atkins is being a little careless about his breakfast. I heard one man say to another this morning as he came out of a shop—that he would never try mixing honey and sardines again, they did not seem to go well.”
“Good Lord,” groaned Colonel Rogers, “I was afraid things like that would happen if I gave them free leave to forage.”
“Oh, well, they have got to feed,” consoled the doctor, “and in my experience they have cast-iron insides most of them. Rum devils they are too: one of them was in here this morning with a long complaint about having had to sleep on the pavement and the rats of the neighbourhood had gnawed his hair.”
“What did he want you to do about it?” asked Robin; “I should have thought a claim for compensation to headquarters would have been more to the point. Item 1. While on duty, loss of hair through rats.”
“His head had no business on the pavement in the first case,” asserted Colonel Rogers.
“Well, anyway he did not suggest compensation to me,” went on the doctor, “he wanted it disinfected, which I did. Have you had any breakfast, young man?”
“Not yet,” acknowledged Robin, “I am not exactly hungry, and honey and sardines have not tempted me.”
“Quite so, but you will take some coffee under my paternal eye.”
He went off to order it, and Colonel Rogers smothering a huge yawn, stood up.
“I will go and see if I can get any news about our departure,” he announced. “It is all damned nonsense keeping us broiling here. If Latimer comes along hand over your men to him, Drummond, and cut home yourself. Don’t want you on the sick list.”
“I am all right, sir,” Robin insisted; he struggled to his feet to show the truth of his remark.
Colonel Rogers glanced at him and grunted. “You will do as you are told,” was his parting shot; “if Latimer does turn up I order you to go home.”
He had hardly left the dispensary five minutes when Latimer arrived.
“Anyone here,” he asked, putting his head round the door. “Hulloa, Drummond, wounded in the fray? I have got a note for you from my wife, something about tea at the Yacht Club; if the Empire fell Belle would have tea at the Yacht Club. How are things here, all the fun over?”
“It seems so,” Robin admitted. He took the note held out to him, and because Latimer seemed to be waiting for him to open it tore it across with rather nervous fingers.
“My own darling,” Belle wrote, “Latimer has come back, he is bringing this down to you. I think something broke in my heart when he came into my room this morning. I can’t go on like this, Robin, you must take me away. Last night you promised, didn’t you? the breath of your kiss is still warm on my hand. To-night, if we do not see each other before, I will slip down to the end of the garden when we are all supposed to be in bed. Till then, heart of my heart, goodbye.”
Robin did not read it all, he skimmed it quickly, then slipped the note into his pocket. It struck him as unpleasant that Belle should have chosen her husband to be the bearer of such a letter. It lay in his pocket as heavy as lead, the weight making him ashamed and uneasy before Latimer.
“Nasty knock on your head,” Latimer was proceeding, “you had better let me take on duty for you.”
“If you don’t mind,” answered Robin. Undoubtedly when he stood up the room swayed round him and something in his head was pounding with an agonizing force. “The Colonel said I was to hand over to you when you came along.”
“Right,” agreed Latimer, “I’ll go forward and report. Take my dog-cart home, Drummond, it is outside doing nothing.”
“Yes, that will be best,” supplemented the doctor, who had just returned with the coffee; “drive home and go straight to bed. You will have to stay quiet if you don’t want your temperature to run up.”
Robin knew himself incapable of further argument, so with as little delay as possible the doctor saw him ensconced in the Latimer dog-cart. He had to send one of the Red Cross orderlies in attendance, just to prop Robin up and see that he did not fall out, and he gave the man sharp instructions as to what was to be done for Robin’s comfort on his arrival home.
Belle was on the veranda of her house as the dog cart turned into the Drummonds’ drive. She saw the propped-up figure on the seat next the driver, and in an instant her mind jumped to the worst possibility that could have occurred. It took her scarce two minutes, for caution flew to the winds on the wings of fear, to run down her own drive and up the other, and she arrived at the steps practically at the same time as the dog-cart. Robin indeed was being assisted up them by the orderly and Abdul, who had hurried forth to receive him.
With abrupt decision Belle swept aside the astonished orderly, and caught Robin’s arm in her hands. “You are wounded,” she said. “My God, Robin, Robin, say you aren’t dying.”
“Of course not,” answered Robin somewhat thickly—the pain in his head was so bad he was hardly conscious of what he said. “Right as a trivet, Belle, only want some sleep. Get along back, girl, you mustn’t stay here. I have got your letter, I won’t forget my promise, we will think out some plan after I have had a sleep.”
He swayed against Abdul, who put strong arms round him.
“The sahib is weak with pain, memsahib,” he said, speaking in Hindustani to Belle, “it were well to leave him to me.”
“It is only a question of sleep, Belle,” Robin added. “You must go, dear, it does not look well for you to be here.”
“As if I cared what looked well,” stormed Belle, “when you are ill.” Then a change came over her, for after all it was with what was best in her that Belle loved Robin. “Still, I’ll go, Robin; only send someone to tell me how you are from time to time.”
She bent quickly and brushed her lips against his hand, then, without further argument, turned and hurried back down the drive. Robin collapsed into Abdul’s arms, and the servant had to summon the orderly’s assistance to carry his master indoors.
“It is ill to play with other men’s wives,” that worthy whispered his opinion of the scene just witnessed.
Abdul silenced him with an awe-inspiring glance. “Such things are not for thy mouth,” he said sternly. “Keep a still tongue and thine eyes shut when a woman hangs upon the lips of a man who is not her husband. That is, if she be not thy woman,” he added as a sop to morality.
A man must stand by his master,
Till one of the two is dead.
— R. Kipling
Robin was ill for about a fortnight. No one wrote to inform Lois of the fact; Colonel Rogers was away on a trip to Poona, and Belle had persuaded Latimer into the belief that she was sending Lois a daily chronicle, which was, of course, untrue. The fever raged high in Robin for the first week, he was delirious most of the time, and orderlies from the hospital were on duty with him night and day. Then, as suddenly as it had come, the fever left him, and, weak as a child, the strongest instinct in him a desire for sleep, Robin struggled back to life.
It was during this convalescence that Belle completed her almost certain victory. She had not been allowed near him at the beginning, but as soon as the doctor issued directions that Robin was to be allowed visitors and that the great need was to rouse him from his lethargy, Belle was hardly ever away from him. She was the only lady in Colaba, the role of sick nurse was permissible, and put a clog upon the wheel of scandal. And Robin became as wax in her hands, she made her presence needful to him, he was as near loving her as he could ever be.
On the tenth day of his illness Robin was promoted to a chair in the veranda, and the doctor spoke authoritatively about ten days’ sick leave in the hills. For the first time since his return to consciousness—her name had been frequently on his lips during the delirium—Robin thought of Lois. He remembered that he had never answered the letter in which she had said she was so anxious to see him. That was no doubt why she had not written since. He did not for a moment imagine that Lois knew of his illness and was ignoring it, he fancied she had too much respect for the conventions to do that.
It hardly seemed worth while to write to her now. If he followed the plan which Belle had mapped out for them, the news would travel fast enough to Lois. Lois would not have to go on pretending any more; he passed over that thought a little bitterly; it would be the end of their tempestuous, disastrous married life. It would mean the end of a good deal for him in reality, his career, his life with the regiment, his friends and mess-mates.
The future scarce stood the test of inspection. Robin closed his eyes to it wearily; at least he had money and he would be able to make Belle happy. What ridiculous wonderful happiness Belle was counting on!
They were to go away together as soon as he could travel. Ostensibly Belle was to start on a trip to Matheran to see Jimmie, but she would change at a small station half-way along the route, and from there cut across country to join Robin. She was sending her ayah on a day ahead to make all arrangements. Robin was to make the journey to the hills by tonga, travelling through the cool of the early mornings and pausing for the day and part of the night at the Dak bungalows along the road. Belle’s idea was to catch him at Dasgaon; from there they were to write and inform Latimer and Lois of their intentions, and then proceed by slow degrees down towards the nearest seacoast town. After that Belle’s plans were vague and rose-tinted. England, she supposed, or perhaps a trip round the world. She did not really care, she would have Robin with her—that coloured all the future with gold.
Abdul viewed the arrangements for Robin’s journey with suspicion. He could see no real reason why his sahib should choose such a lengthy way of reaching the cool of the hills. True, the doctor had given his permission, saying that if the sahib took the journey quietly the tonga travel would probably be better for him than the train. Still Abdul was not satisfied. Vague rumours coming from the Latimers’ servants kept him uneasy. He had no particular reverence for Lois, but he certainly considered her a more suitable and pleasant mistress than Belle. Besides, Abdul knew enough of regimental codes to realize how fatal Belle would be to his master’s career, and Abdul was very jealous of the prestige of his sahib.
One day, therefore, after much consideration, Abdul decided that he must act, and having obtained an hour’s leave journeyed to the bazaar. The greater part of the better native town was by this time out of quarantine, sanitary measures had beaten back and taken control of the plague. In the innermost heart of the native city it might still reign triumphant—dirt and overcrowding and congested air are all its servants—but in the better-class quarters it had of late hardly claimed any victims.
Abdul’s errand was directed to the principal street of the shopping district, he was in fact in search of a letter-writer. Not an over-expensive scribe, and yet one who could write in the English tongue. Something of a luxury this last requirement, and one that called for the expenditure of three rupees, and even then there was some haggling before the man consented to be beaten down to such a price. That weighty matter settled, Abdul squatted down on the pavement beside his collaborator and gave over his mind to the dictating of a really telling letter.
“Honoured mem,” he instructed as an opening, then paused for a long time framing the next sentence.
The letter-writer, a brisk business-like looking person with inquisitive eyes and well-oiled hair, dipped his pen in and out of the ink and flicked blots on to the pavement impatiently.
“Best give the matter into my hands,” he suggested presently, “I can make sentences in the beat of a pulse.”
Abdul eyed him sceptically. “I want none of thy phrases,” he asserted; “see that thou writest according to my command, or there will be no rupees gained. I am not able to write, but I can understand enough to read.” It was a lie, but excusable under the circumstances.
“I, thy humble servant, take up this pen to inform you that the sahib has been most grievously ill.”
It was a long effort, and Abdul paused for breath while the letter-writer’s pen scratched and crawled over the paper.
“As soon as the sahib can travel we journey up to the hills by tonga from across the harbour by the road which passes Nagottona and Dasgaon, but the sahib is in much need of someone to go with him on so long a journey.”
“Forgive thy servant for so much presumption,” suggested the letter-writer. “It were surely well to add something to that effect.”
Abdul gave gracious assent to the addition, and pondered earnestly as to what would be the best way of ending the letter up.
“Come quickly to join the sahib,” he selected finally, “that in the sunshine of thy presence he may be restored to full strength.”
“Now the envelope,” he ordered. He had the letter in his hand and was making a very fair pretence at reading it word by word.
“No mention was made of an envelope,” argued the letter-writer. “It will cost another eight annas, brother, I am not here to work for charity.”
Abdul glared at him. “How didst thou think I would send the letter?” he asked. “Is not an envelope as necessary as a fire when we would cook. What robbers’ talk is this of eight annas?”
The other shrugged his shoulders, and with thoughtful guile produced out of his wallet an envelope of distinguished proportions lined with brilliant red paper, together with an insignificant plain white one.
“Of a truth, brother,” he remonstrated, “I have no wish to rob thee, since annas are so scarce in thy hand. See, I will give thee this one,” he indicated the plain envelope, “and make no charge.”
Abdul’s eyes were fixed on the more glorious effort. “What of that?” he questioned.
The letter-writer picked it up hastily and stuffed it back into his wallet.
“’Tis expensive,” he explained, “though my heart melts towards thee I cannot give it free.”
“How much?” asked Abdul tersely.
The scribe took a glance at his face and decided on caution. “For you, it shall be four annas,” he acceded, “though I lose thereby fully one-half its worth.”
Abdul murmured an uncomplimentary remark, but he paid down his extra four annas, and the envelope, addressed with many twirls and flourishes to Mrs. Drummond, Ripon Hotel, Matheran, was his.
There remained but to purchase a stamp and post, and this Abdul accomplished on his way home. What its effect would be, whether it would succeed in its purpose, that had to be left with the fates. Abdul at least was conscious of a duty bravely done.
But all on which I set such store,
I’d give back now for evermore,
If I could only know once more
Those happy hours my heart lived through
With Love and you.
— Song
Jimmie stood on tiptoe, peering into Lois’ top drawer of ribbons, pocket-handkerchiefs, and laces. He loved pretty things, and tidying Aunt Lois’ ribbon drawer was a favourite amusement of his.
“May I have it out on the floor and sort things?” he begged.
Lois was sitting in a rocking-chair at the open doorway. She had a book on her lap, but she was not reading. Jimmie’s question brought her out of her dream with a start.
“Have what out?” she asked. “Oh, my ribbon drawer. Yes, sonny, if you like, only don’t mess it up too fearfully.”
“I am going to tidy it,” corrected Jimmie gravely, “and I will give each little pile a scent sachet to itself, everything will smell lovely then.”
He was diligent and silent for a time, and Lois returned to her book. It was difficult, though, to keep her attention on the printed lines, and presently she let the volume fall with a sigh, her eyes and mouth despondent.
Jimmie glanced up at her. He was a child very quick to notice depression in other people.
“Why do you keep your love-god hidden away, Auntie Lois?” he asked. “I have just found him at the very bottom of the drawer.”
Lois answered the question without lifting her eyes. “He is ugly, Jimmie,” she said, “I am half sorry I bought him.”
“Oh, but—” Jimmie struggled to his feet, the image clasped in his hand, and crossed over to her. “He is not really ugly, at least not his face, and Govind says——”
He paused, and Lois put an arm round him, drawing him close to her. “Well, what is it Govind says?” she teased; “you know, Jimmie, he simply crams up your head with silly stories.”
“Most of them are true,” Jimmie asserted gravely. “He says the love-god may get cross if you pay no attention to him; he says that the native girls are most particular never to offend him, if they do he takes their lovers from them.”
“Well, but I am not a native girl,” Lois explained. She took the image from Jimmie’s hot little hands and laid it face upwards on her lap. “I don’t believe in love-gods and such people; neither do you, Jimmie, not really and truly.”
“Sometimes I do,” Jimmie confided, and pressed a little nearer to her. “I shouldn’t make him cross, Auntie Lois,” he touched the figure with protective hands. “If he must stay in the drawer, let me give him a very nice sachet to lie on.”
“You little heathen,” laughed Lois. Then for a second her mood changed, and she caught Jimmie to her. “Give him anything you like, darling,” she whispered, “ask him to be nice to me.”
“Very well,” agreed Jimmie with intense seriousness. “I don’t suppose it is too late. He will probably understand you did not know about him, because no one had told you.”
He escaped from her arms back to his work on the floor just as Mrs. Rogers came into the room. She carried two letters in her hand; one was open, she had been reading it, the other she tossed on to Lois’ lap.
“It is a funny thing,” she commented, “in this letter Tom distinctly says—he has just got back to Bombay, you know—that Mrs. Latimer is coming up to Matheran. You haven’t heard that Mummie is coming, have you, Jimmie?”
The boy shook his head. “Mummie never writes,” he said. “Daddy sends me pictures through the post. And I don’t think Mummie would come up here,” he was quite grave over the information; “she hates where we are, she calls it a horrid hole.”
Lois was examining the letter on her lap. “It is post-marked Bombay,” she said, “but I can’t imagine who it can be from. It is such an odd-looking envelope.”
“My dear woman, open it and see,” suggested Mrs. Rogers. She had sat down in a chair near Lois, and turned to the third sheet of her letter.
Lois followed the injunction with listless hands. She had been hoping for a letter from Robin, it was very impolite and unkind of him not to have answered her last. The letter-writer’s elaborate scrawl took her a minute or two to decipher; in fact, she read the words twice before she grasped their meaning or who they were from. Then she stood up abruptly, the open sheet fluttering to the ground.
“I shall have to go to Bombay,” she said, speaking hurriedly. “Robin has been ill, that is why I have not heard before.”
Mrs. Rogers glanced up from her letter, but before answering Lois she turned to Jimmie. “Leave those things, Jimmie,” she said, “and run along to Govind, it is very near your tea time.”
Jimmie rose obediently. Mrs. Rogers was a person he never attempted to argue with. “Don’t put the drawer away, Auntie Lois,” he paused to say on his way out, “I can come back and finish tidying when I have had tea.”
As his small figure vanished down the veranda Mrs. Rogers looked up at Lois. “Sit down again, child,” she said, “I have news in my letter which you have got to face. Who is your letter from?”
Lois stooped and picked up her letter from the floor. “It is from Abdul,” she explained, “our butler and Robin’s man. He tells me Robin has been ill. Is he much worse, are you trying to break something to me?”
“No,” answered Mrs. Rogers, “at least nothing of that sort. Your husband is better; Tom says he has applied for six months’ leave.”
“Then what do you mean?” asked Lois, “what are you hinting at? Oh, please, please tell me.”
“Sit down again,” suggested Mrs. Rogers, “and I will read you exactly what Tom says. The part about you begins just here. ‘I am really more worried than I like to say about the Drummond affair. Apparently the lad has been very ill, after that riot business when he got a knock on the head. For a week he was in charge of two hospital orderlies, but after that and through his convalescence Mrs. Latimer took entire charge. The scandal was marked enough before; under the pretence of sick nursing she threw away all pretence. Most of us can see which way the wind is blowing, though no one can say for certain when and where it will end.’”
“He means,” whispered Lois with dry lips, “that Robin and Mrs. Latimer are in love with each other.” She moved a little away from Mrs. Rogers and stood looking out of the door. “I don’t believe it,” she said, “I can’t believe it.”
Mrs. Rogers sighed, she was smoothing out the folds of her husband’s letter. “Robin is after all a man,” she suggested, “and only human.”
“Yes, but this—” Lois swept round upon her—” this would be a low, mean thing to do. To take another man’s wife, a man in the same regiment as yourself, who is your friend. I won’t believe it, I won’t.”
“It seems to me,” put in Mrs. Rogers drily, “that the woman is taking him. My dear,” she stood up and put a hand on Lois’ shoulder, “your husband loved you; I am an old woman and I have grown clever at reading the signs of love. You pushed his love from you, by your own confession you threw what he offered you back in his face. Were you thinking that for ever he would be content to worship you in silence and from afar? This other woman loves him, that too has been pretty plain for people who had eyes to see. If anyone is to be blamed for this unhappy affair, I don’t think it is either of them.”
“You would blame me?” asked Lois; surprised indignation sounded in her voice.
“Yes, you,” Mrs. Rogers agreed calmly.
Lois broke away from her. “But why, why?” she asked. The words choked in her throat; she stood struggling with sharp tears.
“Because you had one of the best things in the world offered you,” Mrs. Rogers answered, “and you turned your back on it. Oh, my dear, my dear, my principles tell me I ought not to be sorry for you, and yet I am. The question is, What do you propose to do next?”
Lois made a brave effort at conquering her tears. “What can I do?” she whispered, “just make as little fuss as I can about it, slip out of his life and leave him to make it afresh.”
“It is not what I should do.” Mrs. Rogers’ voice sounded strangely stern.
“You don’t suggest—+” Lois began. Mrs. Rogers interrupted.
“I suggest nothing,” she said, “I merely leave it to you. If you are going to go on as you have begun, wrapped round in an armour of pride, you will leave him to make his life afresh. Do you realize what that will mean to him? He will have to leave the regiment, throw up his career, slink away to some place where he is not known, take upon himself the burden of this woman’s companionship.”
“But he has chosen her,” Lois suggested in some bewilderment. “You are forgetting that.”
“Chosen her,” snorted Mrs. Rogers. “I am afraid I am going to lose my temper with you; I had better go. Only just let me remind you that as the Latimer woman is coming here, Robin will be by himself for the next few days; and if you decide to go you will have to start in an hour to catch the Bombay mail at Neral.”
With which abrupt information she went from the room.
Lois stayed where she was, a battle-royal waging in her heart. Could she really do as Mrs. Rogers suggested? Throw pride and dignity and reserve to the winds and follow Robin. Supposing he repulsed her, supposing he had really transferred his love to the other woman, who had been so ready to love him? The quick sharp voice of impulse argued against such timorous thoughts. “Try anyway,” it urged, “what does it matter if your pride does get hurt, haven’t you had enough of being proud? He will go out of your life for good and all if you don’t make some sacrifice to hold him back.”
Five minutes later, when Jimmie ran back into the room he found his Aunt Lois feverishly packing her bag.
“Are you going away, Auntie?” he asked. “Mrs. Rogers has ordered your chair to be here in half an hour.”
“Yes,” Lois answered, “I am going away. I have to go to my husband; he hasn’t been well, you see, and perhaps he needs me.”
“I see,” assented Jimmie gravely. “If one is ill one always wants the people one loves.”
He stood beside her watching her flushed cheeks, the tell-tale stain of tears round her eyes. Presently he slid a soft hand into hers, pressing near in childish sympathy.
“Auntie Lois,” he suggested, there was an odd little quaver in his voice. “Let me put the love-god in your bag, to take away with you, to bring you luck.”
Without waiting for a reply he trotted over to the drawer and rescued the image from the soft seclusion he had resigned it to.
The love-god! Lois caught her breath on a sob. “Oh, Jimmie,” she said, “you funny little soul. Very well, put it in, dear, I need all the luck it can possibly bring me.”
Hush, on my lips I feel a ghost-like kiss—
I have forgotten? Oh, I lied, I lied.
— Anon.
The Dak bungalow at Dasgaon, which lies a two days’ march from Bombay, is the most beautiful of the Government rest houses built along the length of the road from Nagottano to Partabghur. These rest houses are a relic of the days before railways came to India, when travelling consisted of long marches generally taken in bullock carts, the bungalows being built with just the stretch of a good day’s march between them. A night’s march it was more often, for people travelled through the night and sheltered from the heat of the day.
The bungalows are all built on one pattern, square and low, with mud floors and walls and sometimes a thatched, sometimes a tin roof. They have three ample-sized rooms, two being bedrooms with their adjoining bath-rooms. Then there are quarters for the servants, and stables for the horses at the back, and a khansama in charge of the whole concern, who generally keeps fowls and can kill a chicken for your meal at a minute’s notice.
As a general rule these houses by the way are not beauty spots; Dasgaon is the exception. It stands sheltered by the most wonderful mango trees, and just by the veranda steps grows a bush of datura lilies. The great bell-like flowers when they are in bloom cover the whole bush. In front of the bungalow stretches a miniature lake, spread over with water lilies, and because of the water there are trees gathered all round, giving the garden the appearance of an oasis, soft-shadowed, heavily scented.
A small native village lies on the other side of the lake, but the inhabitants never invade the precincts of the Dak bungalow. The latter has the reputation of being haunted, for one thing. There is an English child’s grave under the mangoes, a hapless little visitor who died many years ago from snake bite, and the natives hold that the ghost of a child is of all ghosts the most to be avoided. Because a ghost child is lonely and afraid, it cries for companionship, and if it but get the chance it will catch at you with its cold dead hand and drag you with it back into the grave! Even the khansama at Dasgaon will not sleep on the premises unless the house has a visitor.
Belle and Robin arrived together a little late on the evening of the second day. Robin had branched aside off his own route to meet Belle, and that had made his day’s journey longer and later than it need have been. Abdul had been sent on ahead with Robin’s riding pony, for Robin was going to do some of the journey on horseback as soon as he felt fit enough.
In the interval between his own arrival and that of his sahib’s, Abdul heard all there was to know about the ghost child. Openly he treated the tale with scorn, but in his heart of hearts he put up a prayer that if the ghost child was really looking for a companion she might select Belle. Abdul was conscious of a great hate against Belle; his heart was bitter because of the weight of shame and disaster which she was surely bringing on his sahib’s house.
Belle was pleased to be entirely enraptured with Dasgaon. She came up the steps of the bungalow clinging to Robin’s arm, and on the top step she turned to look down at the datura blossoms, and beyond them again at the lotus lake and heavy foliaged trees.
“It is Paradise, isn’t it, Robin?” she said, “and you and I are just within the gates. Oh, my love”—she would have flung her arms round him and drawn his head down to a level with her lips, but Robin was painfully conscious of Abdul’s disapproving eyes. He wished now that he had not brought the old man with him; it would have been better to have dismissed him
He brushed a very hasty kiss on Belle’s cheek, therefore, and murmured something about—“Take care, dear, the servants are watching.”
Belle laughed good-naturedly: as yet no cloud had come across the radiance of her sky.
“How shy you are, Robin,” she teased, “silly boy! As if one ever paid any attention to natives.” She sank gracefully into a chair and held out her hands to him. “Come and sit down beside me; haven’t you got lots to say to me? Do you realize, dear, you haven’t seen me for two whole days?”
It was rather dreary work, this constant playing of a part. Robin bent hastily and kissed the hands held out to him.
“I am very bad at talking, Belle,” he said, “I am afraid you will find that out. Anyway, I must go just now, dear one, Abdul is waiting to show me the arrangements he has made. I want you to be as comfortable as possible, having brought you out to this wilderness.”
“‘And wilderness were paradise enow!’” Belle quoted softly. “Very well then, Robin, run along, but for heaven’s sake find some employment for Abdul which will keep him busy and out of our sight. He acts on you like a chaperon. And order dinner out here, dear,” she added, “just looking at that water seems to make one cool.”
They had dinner later on, as she suggested, out on the veranda, at a small table, so that hand could touch hand when—as Belle put it—Abdul was not looking. Belle had changed from her travelling-dress into a gown of soft shaded crêpe de Chine, gold in colour, with a wide belt of gold tissue and a gold rose at her breast. She was looking very beautiful. Robin was conscious of the same scent about her which he had noticed on the night when he had first kissed her. Regrets, and the uncomfortable knowledge that he was only playing a part, deserted him as he watched her; he seemed even to forget Abdul’s embarrassing proximity, and Belle led him through the maze of his own feelings with all the old subtleties of woman.
Old as the hills, old almost as the world itself! The flushed cheeks, the tremulous mouth, the eyes that sought for his, and yet seemed fearful of his glance.
After dinner and the table had been cleared away Belle evinced a desire to go for a walk just down to the bottom of the garden, to look at the moon’s reflection on the water.
“It isn’t safe, dear,” Robin told her, “Abdul was telling me before dinner that the place is infested with snakes. There is an English tomb under those trees, some kiddie that died of snake bite.”
Belle shivered and drew close against him.
“A snake in our paradise,” she whispered, “don’t let’s go then, let’s sit on the top step here and you can put your arm round me and hold me close against your heart. Chairs are so stiff and ordinary, aren’t they? Has Abdul gone, dear, can you kiss me at last?”
Could he kiss her? His senses surged up in him, past, future, regrets and fears, dead dreams and dead hopes, all merged in one glowing present as lip met lip. Then presently Belle drew back and laid her face against his shoulder, so that the fragrance of her hair added fuel to the flame of passion in his heart.
“Do you remember, Robin,” she asked after a minute or two, “that evening in the veranda of my house when I said that you and I were alone in the world, and you wouldn’t agree? The world is there just the same, you argued.”
“We can ignore it,” answered Robin, his voice harsh, for by her very words she had dispelled a little of his dream.
“But it still exists for you,” Belle argued. She drew a little away from him, he could see her eyes shining in the dark shadows of her face.
“Nothing exists for me but you when you are in my arms,” he assured her, and tried to draw her close to him again.
But Belle resisted, a curious perverseness in her could not let the matter rest.
“I have to be so close against your heart, Robin, before you quite forget. For me—you are all the world, everywhere and always.” She sighed and came back to his arms. “I wonder what your wife will do about it?” she asked.
She should not have mentioned Lois. Like a sudden cold shadow his wife’s image slid between Robin’s passion and this other woman, turning what had been a violent flame to dead, clogging ashes.
“Divorce me, I suppose,” he answered stiffly, “what else can she do?”
Belle was conscious of the change in his voice. She lifted her head quickly.
“Robin”—her voice was sharp with fear—“you are sure you love me, aren’t you? You don’t regret anything? Oh, my love, my love, I can’t bear to hear your voice stiffen when you speak of her.” She sat up very straight, her hands clasped on her lap. “I want all of you, Robin, not just to be loved as men love women sometimes, a moment’s passion that dies out as soon as it has been satisfied. I want you to love me with your heart and soul and mind. If I were to find out,” suddenly her voice had gained the dignity of tragedy, “that after all you did not love me, I think I should kill myself or you.”
“Of course I love you,” Robin reiterated. He put his arms round her again, and buried his face against the soft darkness of her hair, trying to recall the very real feeling that had swayed him a minute or two before. “A man has got to think a little more of the outside world than a woman, Belle. It is my business to make life as pleasant for you as possible. I get hot all over when I think of what you will have to face, the scandal, the discomfort of being outcast, for a time at least.”
“As if that counted,” Belle turned and clung to him. “You are my world, Robin, nothing else matters in the least.”
They sat silent after that, close held, but the first fine rapture of their nearness to each other had fled. It was as if a thin small cloud had floated across the moon, dimming for awhile her radiance, blotting out the reflections in the lake, and the clean-cut beauty of the shadows thrown by leaf and flower.
Life is mostly froth and bubble,
Two things stand like stone—
Kindness in another’s trouble,
Courage in your own.
— A. L. Gordon
Lois reached Bombay the day after Robin had left. She had sent a telegram in advance from Neral, it was lying unopened on the veranda table when she arrived. Robin had only taken Abdul and an under boy with him, the rest of the servants assembled as soon as they heard the wheels of Lois’ carriage.
“Yes, the sahib had gone. He had left no word as to his return. Abdul had gone with him. The sahib had been ill, oh very ill, but he was now quite well again.”
Lois could only gather this information in scraps, because their English was limited and her own Hindustani indifferent. What was she to do? How was she to follow Robin? A sudden brilliant thought came to her as she stood there undecided. She would send for Major Latimer; he had always been a very good friend to her, and it would show him too that she at least did not believe the gossip of Bombay. Probably he would plan out the journey for her and make all arrangements.
Quick as the thought Lois summoned the mali and told him to run across to Latimer sahib’s bungalow and give him her salaams. If the sahib was not there the man was to go on up to the mess and find him.
Major Latimer was at home, however, and answered her message in person.
He was indeed a little bewildered at the summons, because for one thing he imagined Lois to be miles away in Matheran, and for another he had that morning received a letter from Belle which she had written from the train, and in which she had announced her intention of leaving him and going to Captain Drummond. His first instinctive feeling had been one of relief, before regrets for the scandal to the regiment and pity for Lois took its place. The last-named was not as vivid as it might have been because Major Latimer did not think that Lois cared very much for her husband. Still the whole thing would be undoubtedly unpleasant for her, and Drummond. Drummond—poor devil, he had entirely smashed up his life. Latimer had always liked Drummond; he did not blame him very much for this incident, though the rest of their world would certainly describe it in very harsh words.
With all this at the back of his mind, a little undecided as to what course to take—for as yet Major Latimer had kept Belle’s information to himself—Lois’ presence was certainly unexpected. Even if she also had heard why had she come to Bombay? And above all, why had she sent for him?
He went of course at once. Lois was waiting for him in the dismantled drawing-room, she had not even taken off her travelling-hat. After her months in the hills she was looking radiantly well despite the journey and her anxiety.
“Oh, Major Latimer,” she greeted him, “it is good of you to come. I am so worried, and I thought you wouldn’t mind helping me.” She scarce paused for breath. “Robin has been ill, and I knew nothing at all about it till yesterday, then Abdul, of all people, wrote me. I simply had to come at once, and even now I have got here too late. He has left on his journey to the hills.”
She knew nothing of Belle’s news; the truth came to Latimer in a flash as she spoke, her eager eyes on his. It woke a perplexed wonder in his mind. What was he to do? He could hardly be the one to tell her.
“I want to go after him as quickly as I can,” Lois was explaining; “couldn’t I catch him up if I arranged for relays of fresh ponies and went straight through? He is travelling by road, you know, to Partabghur.” She paused a moment and a faint flush dawned in her cheeks. “It will seem quite mad to you,” she said, “but the truth is Robin and I had had a quarrel, oh, such a stupid silly quarrel”—she put her hand impetuously on his arm—“that is why I want to get to him in such a hurry. He must think it was horrid of me to have nursed my spite when he was ill, and the truth is I didn’t know and I was too proud to write and ask. Do you understand,” there was a little catch in her breath, “or do you think it is very odd of me to confide all this in you?”
Latimer came out of his perplexities with a start. Every moment his thoughts were getting more twisted and confused.
“When did you leave Matheran?” he asked somewhat stupidly, just to give himself a little more time to think.
“Last night,” Lois answered. “I must have passed Mrs. Latimer on the journey. She will be up there to-day, won’t she?”
“Yes,” he answered slowly, “she ought to be up there by now.” Then quickly he turned to her. “I will go and see about arrangements at once, Mrs. Drummond, we can start almost immediately. You are ready, aren’t you?”
“Quite,” Lois agreed, “but why we——”
“I am coming with you if I may,” he answered. “You could not very well do the trip across country alone, especially as you want to hurry. I’ll take you out and come back with Drummond’s ponies, he won’t mind lending them.”
“Oh, but why should you bother?” asked Lois. An onlooker was hardly what she had planned for in her meeting with Robin.
“I am afraid I must,” he answered her gravely, “and it is no bother anyway. Will you meet me down at the bunder in two hours’ time; we have got to get across the harbour you know and start our tonga journey from Nagottano. I am just going over to explain matters to the Colonel.”
A sudden decision had come to him. As he hurried round seeing to the various things that had to be settled before they could start it matured into a fixed intention. Why should Belle be allowed to spoil this other girl’s life? He remembered the first time he had met Lois, the sharp pang of regret her grey eyes had wakened in his heart. Such a girl as this he could have loved cleanly and purely had not Belle already seared all love from his heart. And Drummond— Belle would certainly ruin Drummond’s life. Latimer had seen it happen to such dozens of young men; but in all the other cases Belle had tired and the victim had been flung aside before his ruin was complete. Only in this case she had stuck her talons in firmly; it would take a great deal to make her let go.
So much he realized; only all that had to be left to fate. If Drummond loved his wife, he would realize when he saw her what a fool he had been. On what Lois would do when she discovered the truth of her husband’s journey hung the whole balance of the plot.
Colonel Rogers glanced curiously at Latimer when he explained what he wanted his leave for. “Quite right,” he agreed, “the girl can’t go alone, and I am glad that she has realized at last that her place is by his side. Young wives are problematical people these days, aren’t they?”
The rest of Latimer’s arrangements were soon made and he had been waiting for Lois on the bunder quite ten minutes before she arrived. They crossed the harbour on the R.A. steam launch, and during the crossing Latimer explained to Lois the plans he had mapped out.
“I hope we can travel straight through,” he said, “and that ought to see us catching him up some time to-morrow. I am afraid you will be dreadfully tired though; have you ever done a tonga journey before?”
“No,” Lois admitted, “but being tired does not matter in the least, and I shall probably sleep all night; you don’t know what a lot it takes to keep me awake.”
“You won’t sleep in a tonga,” he assured her; “still I don’t see how else we are to do it. If we break the journey anywhere it will just mean that he is keeping a march ahead of us.”
“Oh no, please let us go straight through,” begged Lois, “and if I am very tired and dishevelled,” she laughed a little, “Robin will be more ready to forgive me, won’t he? It is very stupid to fight with people and then be proud over it, isn’t it, Major Latimer?”
“Very,” he agreed. His eyes rested for a moment on her face. “One ought always to be ready to make it up.”
Lois sighed. “That is just it, but sometimes one is ever so eager to make it up and the other won’t, unless one goes on one’s knees.”
“Then isn’t it better to get into that humiliating position as quickly as possible,” suggested Major Latimer, “it is much easier to do if one does it quickly. Besides,” a shadow of seriousness came over his face, “men in particular are awfully apt to do very stupid things if the person they love persists in being angry with them.” He laughed abruptly. “I am giving you quite a fatherly lecture, and here we are, anyhow. Now begins the really trying part of your journey.”
A tonga stood waiting for them at the Nagottano landing-stage, and, according to Latimer’s servant, who had crossed the harbour in advance, a special runner had been sent on to have ponies ready for them at the next stopping-place.
“They run practically as fast as these knock-kneed ponies can get along,” Latimer explained to Lois, “and in addition they will probably scoot across country. We’ll be all right, I expect.”
Lois was examining the vehicle in which she was to travel. A tonga is essentially an up-country conveyance. In big cities like Bombay it is not met with at all, but in the country round and especially in the hill stations every one owns a tonga. To look at, it is a curiously shaped vehicle, low and very broad, swung on two large wheels with a centre pole, to which a pair of ponies are harnessed. Its seats are placed back to back; the one in front accommodating the driver and one passenger, and the one at the back two passengers. Luggage of a small description can be stowed away under the seats, and most tongas are furnished with a white, green-lined hood which can be bodily lifted off if desired.
Even under the shadow of this sun-guard Lois found the first part of their journey suffocatingly hot. She had been settled as comfortably as possible in the back seat of the tonga, Major Latimer travelling in front; but even at its best it could not have been described as comfortable. The wheels were unrubbered, the ponies trotted or cantered, or hobbled along as the fancy took them and always out of step with each other, the tonga jerked and bumped and jerked again from one side of the road to the other. The sun, blazing in a cloudless sky, was blinding, and merciless dust swept and swarmed over everything.
Lois had a headache and a backache and a temper ache long before the first stopping-place was reached. The constant slashing of the driver’s whip, the way he jerked at the wretched ponies’ mouths, worked on her nerves deplorably. Major Latimer made very few attempts at conversation, wisely enough, though now and then he would draw her attention to the quaint little mud-built wayside shrines, or a holy man sitting in the dust of the wayside.
At noon Latimer called a halt under the shade of huge banyan trees to give the ponies a breather and as an excuse for lunch.
“You are tired already,” he chaffed Lois, “and you simply must eat some lunch.”
“Not tired, only stiff,” she argued, “and the sun on the road makes one’s eyes ache, doesn’t it?”
“I ought to have brought along some green glasses for you,” Major Latimer answered, “haven’t you a veil of any sort among your luggage?”
Of course she had; how stupid of her to have forgotten it. She unearthed it, a long green scarf, from her bag, and in doing so displaced Jimmie’s carefully tucked away idol. Anyway the veil added a little to her comfort, and once or twice during the afternoon she found herself nodding with sleep behind its cover.
At the first dak bungalow Latimer insisted upon a two hours’ pause, a wash, and a good dinner.
“You shall sit in a comfortable chair for a little,” he said. “I am not sure I ought not to make you go and lie down.”
Lois laughed at him. “I certainly won’t,” she assured him, “I have had several sleeps this afternoon already. I have discovered a way to sleep quite comfortably in a tonga.”
“It is a discovery which ought to be patented then,” said Latimer. “I am sure no one else has ever found it.”
They had a dinner, an excellent one considering the limitations of the khansama’s pantry, and after dinner they sat out on veranda chairs, and Latimer had a smoke.
It was much pleasanter driving along after dinner in the cool of the night with a great wonderful moon above. Their new supply of ponies were better matched, too, and the driver was too sleepy or too amiable to interfere with them much.
“Do you remember,” Lois asked Major Latimer, “our first tea party at the Yacht Club, and how we agreed about the night in India being depressing?”
“Yes,” he answered, “Mrs. Rogers started the discussion, didn’t she, something about India being a land of regrets.”
Lois nodded. “I think I am falling in love with it more and more every day. And to-night, after that dreadful glare we have been through, isn’t the night and those black shadows under the trees lovely? What time shall we get to Dasgaon, Major Latimer?”
“About six,” he told her, “that is to say, bar accidents.”
They fell back on silence after that, each busy with their own thoughts, and presently Lois dropped asleep. Rather an uneasy jolted slumber through which moved strange dreams of Robin and the love-god, muddled and curiously perverse as most dreams are.
But Major Latimer stayed awake at his post, sucking at an unlit pipe, with his eyes on the road in front of him. The course he proposed taking involved self-sacrifice more or less, since, if it succeeded, it meant once more a dreary and unprofitable existence, with Belle enraged and bitter to keep him company.
Light love’s extinguished ember,
Let one tear leave it wet,
For one that you remember,
And ten that you forget.
— A. C. Swinburne
Robin was awake very early. So early that the moon still reigned outside, her white light struggling for supremacy with the faint lines of pink that the dawn was throwing across the eastern horizon. He would get up, he decided, put on some clothes and take one of the ponies for a good sharp gallop. He could saddle it himself, he had seen where everything was the night before. A quick gallop in the cool before the sun was up would be just the thing for him, it would drive away the horrible depression that was pervading his heart.
Most of his plan was carried out successfully, for Belle slept heavily. The sound of his ponies’ hoofs, however, invaded her dreams, bringing her close to the point of waking, and for a second or two she struggled with a terrible nightmare, in which Robin was galloping away from her while she followed on foot along a road strewn with heavy sharp stones that cut her feet and bruised her horribly whenever she stumbled. Then it seemed to her that with a superhuman effort she reached him, and as she put out her hand to grasp the bridle of his horse Robin turned to look at her, and his face was a dead face! Robin’s face with the flesh all shrivelled and seared, and with wicked eyes that gleamed and glinted like the eyes of a snake!
That woke her; with a sob of sheer terror she sat up in bed pushing the vision from her and calling his name, “Robin, Robin.”
There was no answer, and for a second she stayed quite still, waiting to wake from the horror that held her. Robin was not beside her. He had probably wakened earlier than she had, and had been afraid to disturb her, so he had just slipped away quietly. There was nothing in that to alarm her. Was it then just because her dream was so vivid that she felt afraid, horribly afraid, or was it because—! With a shudder of revulsion she pushed the thought from her. Robin loved her, of course he loved her! What was it she had said to him last night? “If I found you did not love me I should kill myself or you.” And how had he answered? “Of course, I love you.” Why then just this morning should the words wake in her memory with such a false sound?
With this jealous doubt racking her mind Belle turned in the bed facing towards the door and called his name again. “Robin, Robin.” At first very softly, and then louder and louder. There was no answer, the servants’ quarters were apparently too far off to hear, or surely some of them could have told her where the sahib was. Fear and anger combined gripped at Belle’s heart. Like a flash she was out of bed, her bare feet on the uncarpeted floor and without waiting to throw anything round her she ran out on to the veranda.
In her dream, she remembered now, there had been the sound of horses’ hoofs. Could it be possible that Robin had ridden away from her; ridden away because he repented of his choice, because his heart still hungered for that other woman? Sobbing his name by now, distraught with this new idea, Belle ran from room to room of the bungalow; hurting herself against unseen obstacles, tripping up once altogether over the lintel of a door.
She picked herself up from that, on the sudden sobered to intense quiet, and found her way out on to the veranda again. It was light there, she could see its length and breadth, the white lilies on the datura bush at the foot of the steps, the shadows in the garden, the faint glimmering blur of the lake.
One thing her eyes missed in their slow survey, a small sleek ribbon of brown that lay coiled up on the path her feet would take should she decide to go forward to the edge of the veranda.
Belle stood undecided. Robin was not in any of the rooms of the house, where could he be? Was it a game of hide and seek he was teasing her with? if so the joke was hardly kind. Perhaps she imagined that she saw something stirring across the darker shadows beyond the datura bush, perhaps in reality a faint white shape did slip back out of the new dawning light, back into the shadows of the white child’s tomb! Anyway, half hesitatingly, Belle took a step or two forwards.
The coiled slimness reared a delicate thin head and watched her movements with bright eyes. Another step and she had touched too near him for safety. Quick as lightning the coil straightened out into a sinuous line of life, the head darted forward, and Belle felt a sharp stab of agony just above her ankle. She stopped paralysed. A thin streak was gliding as quickly as a snake can glide out of sight over the edge of the veranda!
Belle watched its progress with a hypnotized stare of horror, then as a slight rustling of leaves told of its arrival under cover she realized to the full what had happened to her, and scream after scream shrieked through the air.
This time her cries did attract attention. Abdul with the khansama and one or two of the syces dashed through the house from the back, and gathered round her. They made no attempt to touch her; for one thing her appearance was a little terrifying, for another they felt them selves face to face with mystery, and wished to have as little to do with it as possible. The khansama’s knees were knocking together with fright.
“’Tis the ghost, brother,” he whispered to Abdul, “of a certainty ’tis the ghost. It has laid its cold hand upon her, and she is mad.”
Belle had shrieked herself dumb by now, only little breathing moans came from her lips, her face was convulsed, froth had gathered at the corners of her mouth and her eyes were dilated, wild with an agony of fear. She swayed a little towards them as they closed round her, and immediately they shrank back, so that she staggered on for a few steps and then fell, merciful unconsciousness sweeping over her as she lay there with stiffening lips that once again tried to call his name.
Abdul, of the four servants, was the least moved. He was not, despite his prayers, a very firm believer in ghosts and he was beginning to have a very shrewd suspicion of what had happened to Belle. As she fell he slipped past her into the bedroom and stood looking round.
It was quite empty, where then was the sahib? One of the syces brought him news as to that on the moment. The sahib’s pony had been taken from the stables, the sahib must have saddled it himself and ridden away without disturbing anybody.
For a moment Abdul paused. It was just possible that Robin might have gone somewhere to obtain assistance for Belle, but after a moment’s thought that suspicion could be dismissed as improbable. Why should he have gone off in secret? surely he would have roused the servants to give what help they could in his absence? No, the probability was that the sahib had gone forth earlier than usual for his morning ride, very likely he had left the woman asleep, since he had evidently been anxious to make as little noise as possible. The fate which had overtaken the memsahib was unknown to the sahib then, and had occurred since his departure.
With his suspicions hardening to certainty, Abdul went back to the veranda. The other servants had made no attempt to touch Belle; they stayed far off and talked to each other in awe-struck whispers. She lay as she had fallen, seemingly unconscious, save that now and again her whole body jerked. One of these movements had thrown her face forwards on the floor and her left ankle lay exposed, swollen and red, as if it had been badly wrenched. Abdul glanced at this sharply, then his eyes travelled along the veranda floor till they lit on what they sought, the thin scarce visible track of the snake’s progress through the dust.
Again Abdul looked at Belle. Fright and shock were largely responsible for her state; the thing to do would be to shake her to life, to force brandy, as much brandy as she could swallow, down her throat, to drag her to her feet and to ward off by every means in their power the dangerous grip of numbing slumber which the poison had thrown over her. Once he had seen the sahib save a dog thus that had been bitten by a cobra. If he did all that perhaps she might live; the possibility was faint; but if he did nothing, if he pretended fright and the lack of knowledge which the other servants were displaying, then undoubtedly the woman would die—die swiftly and painlessly; the worst of her agony was already over.
Abdul’s mind wandered far in just that moment’s pause of indecision. He saw the regiment marching past and his sahib’s place taken by another officer; he saw his own prestige, his weighty importance in all backdoor discussions, slightly damaged by just a touch of the shame which would lie upon his sahib’s household through this woman. All this he saw and more, and in the seeing his mind was made up. With an immovable face Abdul went back to the bedroom and returned with a sheet which he arranged over the body on the floor. Then he crossed over to the other servants.
“Of a truth,” he said, “some horrible strange death has come upon her, there is naught here that we can do.”
“Shall we not run forth,” queried one of the syces, “and see if by any chance we can find the sahib?”
Abdul let his eyes wander over the expanse of country bathed now in sunlight. “Of what use?” he answered, “who knows which road he took? Besides, the Fates have spoken, we can do naught.”
“’Tis horrible,” shuddered the khansama, “I am afraid to wait here, brother, far rather would I run miles to find the sahib.”
Abdul glanced at him scornfully. “Since thou art afraid,” he said, “get you gone, all of you, go and hide in the village or where it pleases you. I will keep watch beside the body till my sahib returns.”
The others slunk away, shamefacedly, but greatly relieved in their hearts to go, and Abdul was left alone. He took up his station on the top step and he did not look again at the body behind him. What thoughts ranged through his head it would be hard to say; his eyes were unfathomable and showed very little signs of remorse.
Two hours later Robin rode back. He had galloped the pony hard, they were both of them hot and tired, and if Robin had not succeeded in becoming cheerful he had at least won back to a certain sense of calmness. He swung off the pony at the foot of the steps and Abdul rose to greet him.
“Is the memsahib awake?” asked Robin. He looked from Abdul’s face to those of the other servants who had gathered together at the sound of his arrival. “What is the matter with all of you? has anything happened?”
“Some strange sickness has fallen on the Mem,” Abdul answered. A shiver of fear passed over the other servants; they whispered among themselves.
Robin had run up the steps and his eyes had fallen on the sheet-covered figure on the floor. “Belle,” he said, “what can have happened, Belle, my God!”
With quick hands he pulled the covering off and lifted the body into his arms. The head fell back limp and lifeless; fear was still stamped upon it because she had died so horribly afraid, but already the set calm of oblivion was wiping all other expression from her face. Her hair fell over his arm like a cloud, stirring him to quick, passionate regret for her lifelessness. Abdul stood beside them, his eyes narrowed, his mouth set hard as he watched. At least she was dead. He had known a second’s fear as Robin turned the body over, but in this respect God had been good! Without doubt she would have died in any case, yet Abdul had to stiffen his face as he looked at her; he felt almost like a murderer confronted by his dead.
The other servants had drawn a little nearer, the khansama even venturing to air his theory as to the ghost. Robin laid the body down gently and stood up.
“You damned fools,” he said harshly, “wasn’t there one of you who had the sense to see what it was? Abdul you? Only yesterday you told me the place was infested by snakes; didn’t you know, couldn’t you guess?”
Abdul dragged his eyes away from the dead face. “I had no knowledge, sahib,” he answered. “The memsahib lay like this when we first found her, what was there for us to do?”
What indeed? The other servants did not venture to contradict his statement.
Robin carried Belle himself—he would not let the servants touch her—into the bedroom and laid her back on the bed, her hair spread out over the pillow, her cold, dead hands stiff at her side. Her face was rapidly becoming beautiful again; he could close the staring eyes so that the lashes laid their line of shadow across her waxen cheeks. Great overwhelming pity surged in him as he stood looking down at her. He had not loved her, sooner or later he would have failed her, for her love had been a very jealous and searching flame. She would not have stayed content with the second best from his heart. And now she was dead; the wild tumult of her passionate need hushed! She would never ask anything more from him, there was no further need for his pretence.
The servants crept one by one away leaving him alone. He could kneel down by the side of the bed and lay his hand for a moment on the cold hand nearest his. He had never loved her, yet some of him was altogether hers, it was as if she had cut a small piece from his life and taken it with her into the land of shadows!
He who shall pass judgment on the records of our life is the same that formed us in frailty.
— R. L. Stevenson
“These poor brutes can’t go another step and that is a fact,” acknowledged Major Latimer. He stood at the back of the tonga peering in at Lois. “What is to be done now?” he asked.
Lois stirred sleepily. For the last ten minutes she had been more soundly asleep than during the whole of the rest of the journey. “What is wrong?” she asked, “why can’t they go any further?”
“Sheer exhaustion, I am afraid,” answered Latimer; “I expect they weren’t fit at the start. I won’t allow the man to flog them as much as he thinks necessary, so he has now tied a rope round the left-hand pony’s leg and is dragging it along. Trying to drag, that is to say, it is quite immovable even on three legs.”
“Oh, please don’t let him do that,” begged Lois; she struggled fully awake at the thought, “What time is it, are we nearly there?”
“It is about 4 a.m.” he replied, “and I suppose we are about six miles off. The only thing I can think of is to make the driver run on and tell Drummond we are here, but it would probably be better if I went myself, this man is such a fool. I don’t like the idea of leaving you, though.”
“I am not a bit alarmed at the prospect,” Lois assured him, “the driver won’t bite, will he?”
She disentangled herself from her rugs and stepped out onto the road beside him. “It is like a desert, isn’t it?” she asked; “there is not a thing in sight except—oh, ever so far away— that small clump of trees.”
“That is Dasgaon,” he told her.
“I suppose I couldn’t walk with you,” she ventured. The long white dusty road seemed to stretch for miles before it reached the clump of trees.
“Certainly not.” Latimer’s answer was decisive. “Despite your sleep, Mrs. Drummond, you are looking fagged out this morning. No, if you really don’t mind I’ll pack you back into the tonga, impress the gentleman in charge of the ponies that I will flay him alive if he leaves you, and go forward myself as speedily as possible. I ought to do it in an hour and a half, there and back.”
“Very well,” agreed Lois, “I am only sorry to be such a fearful nuisance to you; I dare not argue against any of your arrangements.”
“If you are at all frightened at being left——” Latimer began. She stopped him with a little laugh.
“Of course I am not, don’t be absurd, Major Latimer.”
“All right then,” he said, “I’ll go. As a matter of fact I know this driver of old; he is an awful idiot, but he is absolutely to be trusted.”
On the whole he was not sorry, for this chance would enable him to arrive at Dasgaon by himself. All night he had stayed awake thinking of their journey’s end. Now Fate had made a decided move in his favour. He would be first in the field with Drummond and Belle; the three of them might be able to think out a plan which would save Lois from some of the unpleasantness. Not that Belle would be amenable to such an idea; he was building all his hopes for a happy settlement on Robin’s real love for Lois, and he did not even know that that existed. Once or twice in the night a foreboding whisper had told him that he was out on a fool’s errand; two hours now would see it settled one way or the other.
He was thoroughly hot and tired by the time he reached the end of his march. For the past hour the sun had flamed abroad and a thick layer of dust covered him from head to foot. He waited a minute or two before entering the house. The place seemed deserted and silent; supposing Drummond and Belle had already moved camp. It would be disappointing if they had, because this chance would not be likely to occur again, and he was tired of the problem as to what was going to happen.
With a shrug of his shoulders and a hardening of his whole face, which always denoted a row with Belle in the near future, Latimer went forward, brushing past the beauty of the datura bush with unobservant eyes. The whole house seemed strangely quiet, but there were signs of its being inhabited. A long gold-tinselled scarf, which he recognized as Belle’s, lay on a chair; the door into one of the rooms was open, he could see clothes lying about. Conscious that his present position amounted almost to spying Latimer retreated to the top step and raised his voice.
“Koi hai,” he shouted, “is anybody about?”
Almost immediately, from all parts as it were, servants gathered, wide-eyed, wide-mouthed, to stare at him. The same look of fear and consternation was written on all their faces. Latimer felt himself moved to a sudden desire for laughter. Really this adventure of his was something after the nature of a French farce. Then beyond the circle of servants’ faces he caught sight of Robin, and the farce merged at once into grim tragedy.
For a second or more the two men stared at each other, Latimer’s face hot and flushed from his exercise, Robin’s drained of all colour, white and ghastly. Then one after the other the servants vanished and the two men were alone.
Latimer turned aside to lay his hat down on a chair. It seemed to him as if neither of them would find any words to say so long as they faced each other, and he was horribly sorry for Robin.
“You will think me quite mad and unusual,” he began, with his back still turned, “giving chase to my wife like this, but the truth is, Drummond——”
Robin’s voice interrupted him, cutting across his explanation like a knife. “Don’t say anything against her, she is dead,” he said.
Latimer swung round. He did not for a moment doubt the truth of the statement, it stared at him out of Robin’s face. “Dead,” he repeated. “Good God, Drummond, when? where? how?” Robin moved forward and sank into a chair resting his head on his arms. “This morning,” he answered; “we got here last night you know. I went for a ride this morning and came back to find her dead. She must have been walking about on the veranda with bare feet and come across a snake. She cried out as she fell, but Abdul says when he ran to her she was practically dead.”
He ceased speaking and again the curious heavy silence which Latimer had first noticed fell around them. Dead! Belle dead! The hot quick heart silenced, the turbulent spirit stilled! He could not pretend to sorrow, yet death—even when it means release—must always leave the living a little hushed and stunned. Robin sat very still, his hands covering his face. What did Belle’s death mean to him? Latimer wondered as he watched.
He put his question into words presently, crossing over to Robin’s side, letting his hand rest for a second on the younger man’s shoulder.
“You did not really love her, Drummond,” he said simply; “what made you do this thing?”
Robin rose to his feet. “If she were alive,” he answered harshly, “you might have the right to ask that question; as she is dead it lies between us two.”
Latimer shook his head. “No,” he said, “my right remains, I think, and apart from all that, there is your wife.”
He watched the flush flame and fade in Robin’s face. “Your wife has got a big right, Drummond,” he reminded him.
“I don’t think so,” Robin spoke stiffly; “of course you do not know all the facts of the case and I do not propose to lay them before you, but at least you may know that my wife takes not the slightest interest in me.”
“I wonder if you have any idea why I am here, Drummond,” Latimer asked. He did not look at Robin, his eyes seemed very busy following out the tracery of the wicker work on the chair. “My own possible affection for my wife, the desire to avoid a regimental scandal, shocked morality, or curiosity? Which of all these things do you think it is?” He lifted his eyes suddenly and looked at Robin.
The younger man’s eyes fell away. “I don’t know,” he admitted, “God knows, I owe you an apology, Latimer, at least you have put me in the position of feeling an absolute cad.”
“Yes,” agreed Latimer, “and yet that was not my motive either. I came for what might seem a stupid and ridiculous reason, because of a girl’s clear eyes; because I wanted if possible to prevent the shadow of shame and unhappiness from touching on her life.”
Robin was staring at him. Latimer met the look very gravely. “You want the truth a little plainer, don’t you?” he asked; “you shall have it. I came because your wife asked me to.”
“My wife?” Robin whispered.
“Not in so many words,” Latimer explained. “She does not as yet know about Belle; she had heard you were ill and she hurried back to Bombay to find you gone. She was very anxious to catch up with you, you had had a quarrel—she did me the honour to explain her reason: more than anything else in the world she wanted to make it up. I could have told her then, for Belle had written me of this move, and yet I did not. Before it had not worried me very much, but as I stood looking down into her eyes it came upon me in a flash. Your wife loves you, Drummond, and that is why I am here.”
“And even if she did”—Robin’s eyes travelled back to the room in which the dead woman lay—“what did you hope would come of it?”
“I don’t know,” Latimer admitted. “I have been arguing with myself all the way here. Perhaps I was placing my hopes on the fact that you did not love Belle; that this move was probably only a desperate idea evolved out of unhappiness. You had been alone all the hot weather—you had been ill——”
“And you thought that a sufficient excuse?” asked Robin; his voice was bitter.
“I am not sure I was searching for an excuse,” answered Latimer. “I was looking for a loophole of escape. I hoped I could persuade Belle to see the foolishness, the unpleasantness, of her position.”
“You would have taken her back?” interrupted Robin.
The other man’s eyes met his, very grave and steadfast. “Of course,” he said, “even as I propose to do now. She is my wife, Drummond.”
“What would you like me to do?” Robin spoke after a minute’s silence: “I have sent one of the servants to fetch a priest from the Roman Catholic mission which lies a few miles from here. He ought to be back at any time. I thought——” His voice trailed into silence.
Latimer waited a little before he answered. His eyes for the moment wore on the long dusty road he had just tramped along; they saw a vision of the broken-down tonga and Lois’ eager and impatient face. Belle had scored a great triumph in her death, he was thinking, it made it difficult for him to say to Robin—Go to your wife, she is waiting for you. He could not see very clearly what course Drummond could take, it was all overshadowed by the fact of Belle’s death. She had entrenched herself behind such strong walls of reverence and pity.
“Is there any reason why anyone should know anything of all this?” he asked finally, “it will mean such a lot of talking and unpleasantness.”
“You don’t think I want to escape anything?” Robin answered fiercely—“that I am not as prepared to face the music as I was before—that I shall be willing to shield behind her death?”
“My dear lad,” Latimer stopped the flow of hot words patiently, “for the moment I was not thinking of you at all. I was thinking a little of myself and still more of your wife. The truth is, Drummond, I have got something to tell you which perhaps I ought to have put first. I did not undertake this journey with a lunatical idea of getting you two to repent. I came because your wife insisted upon coming and I had not got the heart to tell her why she had better not.”
“Lois,” whispered Robin, “here, with you?”
“Not exactly. Our tonga broke down about six miles from here and I walked on alone. I was not sorry for the chance as a matter of fact.”
“Lois,” Robin repeated. He did not seem to have heard the other’s explanation. “Lois!” He turned and walked to the edge of the veranda, clenching his hands on the rail till his knuckles showed out white.
Latimer watched him in his fight for self-control; then suddenly acting on the impulse of the moment he crossed abruptly to Robin’s side.
“Drummond,” he said, “will you not go to your wife? she is waiting for you, she loves you or her eyes have lied once or twice to me. You—I am sure of it on this instant—love her. This has been a hideous mistake. Do you think I don’t know that in dying Belle has succeeded in glorifying it a little? You think me brutal in my remarks, but it is perfectly true. When I said just now that no one need know, I was speaking of the regiment, I am not asking you to include your wife. She must know; but go to her, tell her yourself, let her hear it from your own lips, not from those others that will be so ready to blame you.”
“I can’t go to her,” Robin answered, “it is too late, you do not understand.”
Latimer put his hand on the younger man’s arm. “You must go,” he said sternly, “you have got to drown self for a bit; what you owe to her is so far and above everything else. Play the man, Drummond. It is not always easy, sometimes we have got to set our teeth to do it.”
Robin turned to face him. “You would have me go to her straight from this?” he asked.
Latimer did not answer. He was looking at a cloud of dust that had gathered on the road; even as he watched it took shape and assumed the proportions of a dog cart drawn by one pony and coming along the road at a good gallop. It must be the priest from the mission. Where had the man joined the high road? Had he passed Lois, and if so, had she been content to let him go without asking for a lift? The thought struck him dumb, he could only stand where he was, staring. Robin had sunk back into a chair, his head buried in his arms. So they stayed till the trap rattled to a standstill at the foot of the garden and Latimer could see that his fears had been realized.
The priest, a short, stout, elderly man clambered down slowly. Lois was easily ahead of him. She ran straight up the steps to Major Latimer.
“What has happened?” she asked jerkily; he could see it was an effort for her to keep self-controlled. “Please tell me the worst at once, is Robin dead?” Her eyes fell on Abdul standing just behind, and she turned to him. “Abdul, the sahib, where is he? take me to him at once.”
Robin had lurched to his feet, his face ghastly, his eyes staring at her. With a deferential salaam Abdul answered the appeal which had left Latimer silent.
“The sahib is well, memsahib, he stands behind you.”
Lois turned, she was too perturbed and agitated to notice Robin’s distraught appearance or anything unusual in his stiff upheld figure. With a little cry, which ended perforce in a sob, for she had been fighting against tears for so long, she ran to him, clinging to him, her face against his coat, her hands eager and glad to touch him and know him safe.
“I have been so fearfully upset,” she whispered between her tears; “the old fat man told me he had been sent for someone who was dead. I thought it was you, Robin, I thought it was you.”
Perhaps some knowledge that all was not yet well came upon her even as she held him, for suddenly her hands fell from him, and she stood away.
“What is the matter?” she asked a little piteously; her eyes travelled from Robin to Latimer and back again. “Why are you standing and just staring at me like this?”
The fat priest had climbed the last step and stood a little puffed from his exertions, hat in one hand, while with the other he mopped a heated brow.
“I came as quickly as I could,” he spoke very carefully, because—being French—English was a little difficult to him, “and I am also a doctor. The message certainly gave me to understand someone was dead, but I always prefer to have to use my services as a doctor.”
“I—” began Robin; Latimer interrupted.
“The message was quite correct,” he said; “someone is dead,” his eyes went straight to Lois and held hers as he finished the sentence. “My wife was bitten by a snake this morning, and died within an hour.”
The priest made a little clucking noise in his throat. “What a pity,” he said, “and monsieur could do nothing?”
“I had gone out for a ride,” Latimer went on, “the servants were too afraid to touch her; when I came back she was dead.”
“It was the will of God,” the old priest answered simply, a certain dignity had fallen upon him. “Will you take me to her, monsieur?”
Latimer nodded, neither of the other two had made a sound or movement. “Will you come this way?” he said, and turned to lead the priest to the room out of which Robin had come. With a grave face Abdul stepped before them, and held the chic aside. Latimer and the priest stepped into the hushed stillness of the bedroom, and Abdul let the chic fall to behind them with a little rustle.
And I would keep while yet I can
Man’s faith in Love, lest at the last
I lose love’s faith in man.
— Anon.
Lois had not moved from her first attitude of petrified horror. She felt as if someone had taken a whip and hit her across the face with it. The shock kept her silent and still, she was not even thinking very much. First there had been the relief of knowing that Robin was not dead, for indeed when the priest had told her of his mission she had known blind absolute fear. The quick sound of the ponies’ feet on the ground, the jerking and rumbling of the mission-cart wheels, had all sounded the same message to her heart. “Robin is dead, dead, dead.” Then had come the almost cruel joy of finding him alive, and now—now— She had lived through too much in the last hour, her brain staggered away from this new difficulty.
Abdul moved silently and discreetly across the veranda and vanished from sight. Robin and she were alone at last, and Robin had turned away and was standing with his back to her, facing on to the garden. How hot and vivid the sun had become outside! every flower on the datura bush stood out a patch of flaming white. They were very beautiful, of course, and yet their beauty seemed to hurt her eyes, and suddenly they made her think of Belle. Belle, who was lying dead in the room beyond, Belle and Robin! What Mrs. Rogers had told her and she had refused to believe was true then, Belle and Robin had loved each other, they had gone away together, it was Robin who had gone for the ride that morning, and come back to find Belle dead!
All her thoughts and hopes and plans crumbled round her as she realized this, it would be no use now to tell him the words she had been planning and rehearsing for the last few days. Belle had conquered, what did Death matter? you can love people even though they are dead. For a second Lois’ heart flamed up to a hot heat of jealousy. She hated Belle dead, more than she had hated her alive. Then that feeling passed and she could realize only the cold uselessness of her pride which she had so gladly meant to sacrifice. There was nothing left but pride; she would pull it round her and wrap herself in it again, Robin need never know how near she had been to wavering.
Rather blindly she stumbled to a chair and sat down, all thought of tears banished, her hands fast locked in her lap. At the movement Robin turned round to her.
“Lois,” he began hoarsely, “God knows I wouldn’t have had you mixed up in this for worlds. It is hell to see you sitting there with that look on your face.”
Lois did not glance up at him. “I can hardly be expected to smile about it,” was all she said
“No,” he admitted bitterly, “do you want any explanations; there does not seem to be much use talking about it, does there?”
“I think you had better tell me,” she answered again.
Robin shrugged his shoulders. “There is not much to tell. We had decided to come away together; she was not over happy in her life, and I—well, I didn’t imagine that it would matter very much to anyone what I did. I thought you would divorce me; Latimer would have given her her freedom, we intended to get married as soon as possible.”
“I see,” said Lois. “What do you propose to do now? it must be rather a shock to have all your plans upset like this.”
The irony in her voice touched him on the raw, yet he could make no answer to it. “Whatever you like,” he spoke dully. “Major Latimer wishes it all to be kept a secret, he was telling me that before you came. I suppose we ought to agree to that. You will probably think it is because I myself wish to escape the scandal; why should I fling myself against what you think? But if we do as he wants you will have to let me take you back to Bombay at least.”
“And after that?” The question seemed forced from her, she sat stiff and straight, staring in front of her.
“As soon as possible you shall sail for home,” he answered. “You may not believe it, Lois, but all the time I had a mistaken idea at the back of my mind that by my move I was making life easier, smoother for you.”
“For me,” Lois laughed, the sound was out of place between them. “You have gone a curious way to make things smooth for me.” She stood up. “We had better do as Major Latimer wishes,” she said; “can we start at once?”
Robin took a step towards her. “Lois,” he said, his voice broke harshly, “will you tell me one thing? Why did you follow me, why are you here?”
For a moment her eyes met his, and almost the knowledge of how he was suffering drove her to compassion. Instinctively she wanted to put out her hands and say: “Because I loved you, Robin, because I wanted to win you back.” The words trembled on her lips, but new-roused pride stood guardian of her speech.
“I hope you won’t think,” she answered, “that I knew anything of all this. I had a letter from Abdul to say that you had been ill, I thought perhaps you needed me, so I came.”
“It wasn’t because you loved me?” whispered Robin.
The red flamed to Lois’ cheeks, her mouth set in hard lines. “Have you any right to ask that question?” she answered.
Robin turned away; the small flame of hope which, despite the horror of his situation, Major Latimer’s words had wakened in his heart, flickered and went out.
“I will go and see about the tonga for our return journey,” he said dully. “Abdul can follow behind with my things.”
He went abruptly into the house, and Lois sat back in her chair. From the room behind the chic now that there was silence in the veranda she could hear the priest’s voice reading aloud. The mali came along presently, his arms already full of leaves and flowers, to despoil the datura bush of some of its lilies. At the side of the house under the same tree as the little white child’s tomb the coolies were digging another grave. As she sat there Latimer came out and joined her.
“You are going back?” he asked simply.
Lois nodded. “I suppose so,” she said.
Latimer stayed silent for a second, his eyes were an the busy gravediggers. “I am sorry for all this,” he spoke slowly, “it will make things harder for you. There is just one thing I want you to understand, though, Mrs. Drummond. I knew my wife was here, I had had a letter from her the same morning you sent for me.”
“You knew,” gasped Lois, “then why didn’t you tell me, why did you let me come?”
Latimer met her bewilderment gravely. “For one or two reasons,” he answered. “Chiefly, I think, because it suddenly dawned on me that you loved your husband.”
“You thought it would make no difference to love?” Lois asked.
“Nothing makes any difference to love,” he told her. “You are hurt and angry just now; in a little you will realize the truth of my words.”
“She will always be between us,” Lois argued. Latimer put a hand quickly on her arm.
“A very faint shadow,” he said; “poor Belle if she had lived she would have learned how faint her shadow was in his life. You have no reason to be jealous, Mrs. Drummond.”
“Why do you say that?” Lois asked; “he must have loved her, he was leaving me for her.” Her tone changed abruptly. “I have no right to speak like this to you, I am sorry. How you must hate us, we have hurt you so much.”
“No,” Major Latimer shook his head; “I can’t lay claim to being very hurt, but on the other hand I am horribly sorry for you two young people. I am afraid you are going to act in blind anger. Don’t do that, Mrs. Drummond, don’t let this smash up your life altogether. Forgive and forget, believe me it will pay in the long run.”
One might forgive, but how could one forget? That was the thought that clamoured for expression in Lois’ mind. She did not speak it though, for at that moment the fat old priest joined them on the veranda.
“Poor lady,” he breathed, “God grant her soul has found peace. The funeral is to be at once, monsieur; I regret to hurry you, but I have several cases of sickness at the mission, and I must return at once. Ah, here are the flowers,” he turned to greet the mali who was approaching, his arms laden with the blossoms Lois had watched him gather. “I ordered them to be plucked,” his tone was a little apologetic, “she lies so beautiful in death, it seemed only right she should have beautiful things like these to cover her.” He took the flowers from the mali, and held them out to Lois. “Will madame not put them about her friend?” he asked.
“No,” Latimer interrupted abruptly, “Mrs. Drummond is upset and nervous, you must not ask her.”
A sudden decision had come to Lois. “Let me do it,” she spoke to Major Latimer and held out her arms for the flowers. “It will be the beginning of my forgiveness,” she said so low that only he caught the words.
And indeed pity woke to life amidst the stiffness of her pride, as she stood looking down at the sheet-covered figure, the dead white face.
How unwilling Belle must have been to die, how tenaciously she would have clung to Robin had she lived! But even with pity came the slow resentful thought that after all Belle had conquered, and by dying had she not stamped her memory the more securely on Robin’s heart?
Lois could find no answer to her question in the cold beautiful face, but after she had arranged the flowers, the lilies resting between the clasped hands, she knelt down for one minute by the side of the bed.
“You took him from me,” she whispered. “You always wanted to do it, and you succeeded, now let him come back, for he is mine, really mine.”
So Belle was buried under the shade of the trees in her Paradise. Her grave was lined with flowers and leaves, flowers were heaped over her in glorious profusion. Latimer, Lois, and Robin stood side by side while the priest read through the service in a curious sing-song chant, then Latimer stepped forward, letting fall the first handful of earth on the mound of flowers, and at a sign from the priest the native diggers set to work refilling the grave.
Lois turned to Robin, the thought to comfort him was in her mind. “Will you take me away now, Robin?” she asked, “we need not wait any longer, need we?”
“No,” he spoke in a dazed stupid way, “there is no reason for us to stay.”
He turned quickly, he had not seen her outstretched hand, and strode away in the direction of the house.
“In the midst of life we are in death,” the old priest murmured at Lois’ side. “Come, madame, our work is done, let us leave monsieur with his dead.”
He peered up into her face as together they made their way back across the compound. “Madame,” he said, “it is for me a liberty to say the thing, yet you will excuse me because I am old and a priest. You hated the dead woman, I saw it in your eyes, yet you laid the flowers about her with tender hands, and you knelt in prayer at her side. The good God will have noticed that.”
“I prayed only for myself,” Lois put in quickly.
The priest nodded. “Even so, madame, but that is as it should be. We who live are more in need of help than they who have crossed the blackness and whose souls stand one journey nearer the throne of light. Good-bye, madame. I make no doubt that God will have heard your prayer, seeing that you prayed at a moment when you had conquered hate.”
Robin and Lois did not see Latimer again before they started. The priest, it appeared, had offered to put him up at the mission for a day or two, and the invitation had been accepted. There was nothing more the Drummonds could do for him. Abdul had done a very speedy packing up, and was already on his way with the luggage cart. They were to go straight through, it had been decided, just as Latimer and Lois had done on the outward journey, and as Abdul had had an hour’s start he would probably be waiting for them at the first stop with a dinner prepared.
Till the end of her life the pictured memory of the Dasgaon Dak bungalow was to live in Lois’ heart. The straight white road which runs through the clump of huge trees, the lily-covered lake of stagnant water, the untidy deserted garden and the vivid bush of datura lilies growing at the foot of the steps. The bungalow stood out in glaring contrast to the dark leafy shadows round it, she could see it a blur of light long after individual things had vanished from sight. She was numb and tired out with all she had been through, she could only realize just dimly that even if she did forgive and forget as Latimer had urged—even if by Love’s strength she should reach once more to Love’s kingdom, something would have gone out of her life which she could never hope to reclaim.
It was as if the butterfly soul of love had been caught in cruel hands and had only won through to freedom with all the soft velvet shimmer rubbed from his wings. Would the radiance ever come back?—that was the question.
God, Thou art Love, I build my faith on that:
So doth Thy right hand guide us through the world
Wherein we stumble.
— R. Browning
For two days and two nights Abdul had not closed his eyes, sleep stood far off and taunted him with horrible visions. It had been bad enough while they were travelling. He had had to bribe the luggage-cart driver heavily so that by strenuous efforts they had kept pace by pace with the sahibs’ tonga after the first stop. And Abdul had sat beside the driver, his eyes fixed on the trap in front. He was afraid, that was the truth of the matter, afraid of what lay behind him! Ghosts can travel faster even than the wind. Not once during the whole journey had he dared to look back along the road, and when he shut his eyes dead hands had seemed to clutch at his clothing, a dead mouth had screamed its hate. So fear had kept him wide awake, and when the driver had shown signs of slackness he had seized the reins and driven himself.
This morning they had crossed the water of the harbour, and as the white road along which they had travelled vanished from sight Abdul had known an instant’s peace. Indeed, back in their own bungalow, with work to be done and other servants to order about, he had won back to quite a level-headed sense of placidity. Then night had settled in again, and the rest of the household had taken themselves off to bed. Abdul could not sleep, nor could he stay far away from his sahib, so he had sat himself down to guard Robin’s room, and that was when fear had started to creep back on him.
The night was full of curious soft noises, the white woman’s face peered at him from every shadow, now distorted and fearful as Belle’s had been when she stumbled to her death, now with a grin of seeming triumph taking the place of pain. At first the visions were wavering and unreal, Abdul could tell himself they were but fancy, fancy governed by fear—for he knew himself to be afraid—of what use to deny it? Then, suddenly, even as he struggled with this thought, a terrible silence seemed to descend, and then, very faint, very far off, he could hear the sound of light feet travelling at a run across the ground. The footsteps of the dead! How fast they came. She had crossed the water after them, then, he had a moment’s wonder as to whether her clothes would be all wet and dripping when he should see her. Then everything passed out of his mind except an agony of terror. Nearer and nearer sounded the feet, surely that was a white shadow that came groping through the shadows of the garden. Courage snapped in the heart of Abdul, yet his instinct was still to guard his sahib. With a scream of panic he rose and stumbled into Robin’s room.
Lois was sitting near the bed, a shaded candle on the table beside her. She too had found sleep impossible that night. Robin had had a return of his fever, they had had to send for the doctor first thing on their arrival, and he had shaken his head gloomily.
“A relapse, I am afraid, Mrs. Drummond,” he had said. “I had an idea this young man wasn’t taking proper care of himself. I’ll give him a sleeping-draught for to-night; a good rest may bring his temperature down, if not I should advise a move into hospital to-morrow. I wanted him to do that in the first instance, but he was very obstinate.”
“Surely we—I mean I can nurse him here?” Lois argued.
The doctor glanced at her. “Well, we can see about that,” he said; “perhaps since you are here to take command it would be better not to move him. Anyway, I can’t say till to-morrow.”
So Robin at least slept, his breathing very heavy from the drug that had been given him, and Lois watched beside him.
She rose to her feet quickly at the sound of Abdul’s scream, so that the man met her on his entry and fell at her feet panting out his tale of terror.
“She is here, memsahib, she has come to claim him. Some things one cannot kill. I let her die, I was strong to do that, but I cannot fight against a ghost. She will touch him with dead hands; he will have to rise and follow her.”
Most of this was in Hindustani, and not understandable to Lois. She bent down and put a hand on the shaking figure.
“What is it, Abdul?” she said quietly and sternly, “you must not make a noise like this in here. Get up at once, and tell me what it is that has frightened you.”
Her words acted as a tonic to the man’s jangled nerves; her utter lack of comprehension was reassuring; he pulled himself together and stood up.
“’Tis the ghost of the other mem,” he explained in English, “without a doubt she has followed us from her grave under the trees.”
“Don’t talk nonsense like that,” said Lois sharply.
Abdul wiped dry lips with the back of his hand, his throat was parched, even now he did not dare look towards the door because of the presence which was surely standing just without.
“I will tell memsahib the truth,” he whispered; “listen, memsahib, this other white woman whom my soul hated called to me for help, and I gave it not. The rest of the servants understood not, being fools, but I knew of the snake which must have been in her path and of the death its sharp teeth had dealt out to her. I knew also of what might be done to save her, and I held my hand and did nothing.”
“You let her die?” said Lois—a sudden fear came to her. “Abdul,” she asked, her eyes wide on his, “you did not put the snake there, you did not kill her?”
“Nay,” the man answered, a curious smile stirred across his face; “that, memsahib, was the will of God. I only held back my hand because I hated her.”
“You hated her?” repeated Lois.
“Of a certainty I hated,” he answered. “Had she not taken my sahib’s honour into her hands, to play with as men play with cowries?”
“Then if you did not know the snake was there she would have died in any case,” Lois said. “What could you have done, Abdul, why have you told me this?”
“The ghosts of those who die like that have great power,” he told her. “I tell you, memsahib, she has come to claim him, she will catch at him with her dead hands and we shall be powerless. She wants him, how can we fight against the dead?”
“But we want him too,” Lois whispered. The man’s belief was beginning to take possession of her mind; it did not seem absurd to talk like this. “We shall be strong against her, Abdul, she shall not take him from us.”
“So!” said Abdul. After all his explanation had not been in vain, since the memsahib understood and believed his message. Then his eyes wandered to Robin’s face, and the fear crept back into his heart as he looked. “She is calling him now, even now, memsahib; see how his face alters, she is beside him whispering into his ear.”
Lois followed his glance with fascinated horror. Had Robin’s face really altered, grown sharper and a little blue round the lips, or was Abdul’s fear so acting on her that she saw eye to eye with his vision? Anyway, even at the risk of being deemed hysterical, there was one thing to be done, and she would do it. Their telephone was fixed up on the veranda outside; quick as the thought she had run to it and snatched down the receiver.
“Give me the doctor sahib’s bungalow—at once—quickly,” she called in answer to the sleepy inquiry from the exchange.
How long the pause seemed to be between his indifferent “Very good, memsahib,” and the doctor’s voice. The veranda, too, since Abdul’s vivid description, was full of terror. She kept her eyes shut, and a constant prayer running in her heart. She who had found such little use for God in her life before suddenly discovered that the mere saying of His name brought courage and comfort.
“Hullo, hullo,” Major Bullock’s voice, alert and practical, sounded down the wire. Lois came out of her prayers with a start.
“It is Mrs. Drummond speaking, doctor. Can you hear? Please come round at once.”
He hardly waited for the end of her message; he heard the anguish of her need in her voice.
“I will be round under five minutes,” he called back. “Try and keep calm, Mrs. Drummond. I expect it will be all right.”
Try and keep calm! Lois hung up the receiver and groped her way back to Robin’s room. Certainly he had grown worse even in that short time; he was breathing very harshly, his face was tortured by some dream that held his sleep. Abdul had crouched down in the farthest corner of the room, and with his hands over his head sat very still—the picture of despondent misery. The room, seemed airless on the sudden, very cut off from everything else in the world. Was it altogether imagination? or did she really seem to push against some soft resistance when she bent to put her face close to Robin’s?
She stayed like that, warm cheek against his burning hot one, an arm flung out across his body. Somehow she felt as if in so holding him she was guarding him with the strength of her love, with the power of her new-found trust in God.
Major Bullock was true to his promise. In less than five minutes he was in the room, bringing with him an aroma of common sense. His alert eyes took in the facts of the case in a second.
“Tut, tut,” he ejaculated, “I was half afraid of this, and yet I hoped for the best. Now Mrs. Drummond, I shall want all the help you can give me. No breaking down or giving in please. We must fight every inch of the ground if we are to keep your husband alive. Kick that man of yours awake, or stay, I had better do that for you.” He strode across to Abdul and put his words into deeds. “Get up,” he commanded, “go and get some ice, carry the bath of water in here, and look sharp about it.”
He came back to the bedside. Lois had stood up, one hand still resting on Robin’s.
“He is dying?” she said. The words were hardly a question, so certain was the knowledge in her heart.
“Not a bit of it,” Major Bullock answered, and his eyes met hers, “and we will see that he doesn’t. Come now, Mrs. Drummond, I want your help. There—move him gently and as little as possible just sufficient to slip his clothes off. Now go and hurry up your man with the ice and get up the rest of the servants. We want another bed moved in here; when I have sponged him down we will roll him on to a new mattress.”
Abdul had already thought of all these things. Once roused to action, and fear for the time forgotten, he had seen too many bad attacks of fever among the sahib logue not to know what the doctor would need. Lois found that her share of the work was just to stand by and get the sponges ready for the doctor, and once when Major Bullock stopped his labours for a minute or two to test Robin’s temperature, she herself went on with the sponging.
“It is a tough case,” grunted Major Bullock, after a third pause, “but we are getting the upper hand at last. We shall need hot bottles for his feet next, Mrs. Drummond, and pour out a little of that sal volatile, will you; his heart is keeping wonderfully good, but he is bound to be played out after all this.”
“Now he will surely die,” thought Lois, as she stood watching the long slow shivers shaking Robin from head to foot, while inch by inch the fever was driven back. He seemed so painfully weak; the handling had wakened him to consciousness, again and again his eyes met Lois’ glance, and they seemed piteous in their desire for peace.
“Hasn’t he had enough?” she whispered, “Oh, doctor, surely he is cold enough now?”
“Getting there,” agreed Major Bullock, with a grin, “and I am slightly warm in contrast. I want the beastly thing really driven off at one go, though,” he added; “it is very weakening, I don’t want to have to repeat it.”
“It seems to be killing him,” was all she could say.
Major Bullock laughed at her. “He looks unhappy now, I grant you,” he said, “but he is getting better really. That will do, I think. Is the other bed ready? Now—so—roll him in gently. There, Mrs. Drummond, he is yours to cover up as much as you like. Just raise his head a little and give him that stuff to drink.”
Lois knelt by the bed and slipped an arm under Robin till his head rested against her. They had fought for him and he had been given back to her, that was the thought in her heart, and a great tenderness welled up in her because of his very weakness, because she could hold him so and feel his weight against her.
The shadows had slunk from the room. Day had dawned while they had been fighting; its clear light showed the doctor untidy and very hot, and Abdul’s face still tinged with the blue look which takes the place of pallor in a native’s cheek.
Robin, like a tired obedient child, sipped the stuff held to his lips and fell promptly asleep. The doctor watched them both for a minute, a smile stirring in his eyes.
“Very pretty picture,” he said softly, “but I am going to spoil it. Lay his head as flat down as you can get it, Mrs. Drummond, and let me decorate it with this ice bag.”
“Mayn’t I hold him like this?” whispered Lois, “I am not tired.”
“No, you may not,” the doctor assured her firmly, “it is bad for you and worse for him. He won’t slip out of your grasp now, young lady. I believe you are afraid he will.”
“I believe I am,” Lois admitted. Reluctantly she rose and, despite her brave assurance of perfect strength, the room swayed round her. The doctor had to put a quick arm round her to keep her from falling.
“Just as I thought, madam,” he said. “Now I tell you what you shall do. You shall come out on to the veranda, and you and I will eat a large chota hazri. I have sent off one of the servants for a hospital nurse. Your husband is out of the wood, believe me; I wouldn’t say that if I did not think it, but he will need nursing for a week or two.”
Lois followed him meekly. She was feeling too weak and dazed to resist, and tea, though commonplace, was distinctly refreshing. The doctor left her presently and went to have a look at his patient, putting his head round the door after a second or two to assure her that things were going splendidly. Then the nurse arrived, a trim, confident-looking person with a kindly smile, and after a short talk with her the doctor emerged from the sick-room again, struggling into his coat.
“Can be left with perfect safety now,” he told Lois. “I am going home for a bath and a shave, but will look in again after breakfast.”
“You have been so good——” Lois began; he interrupted her with bluff kindness.
“Good! nonsense, my dear young lady: it is the breath of my body having a good old tussle with the arch-enemy and defeating him. I should feel happier if I could have seen you break down and cry or something before I left you, it has been a hard night for you.”
“I don’t need to cry now,” Lois answered, “and I was too frightened before.”
“Well, anyway, promise me you will go to bed and try for sleep,” Major Bullock said; “nurse will call you the minute your young man wakes.”
Lois promised, and stood on the veranda to watch his sturdy figure disappearing down the drive. When she turned it was to find Abdul at her elbow, his face smoothed back to its usual calm.
“Abdul,” she said, “you had a bad dream last night: it frightened me horribly. I hope you won’t ever do it again.”
“There will be no need,” he answered gravely. “She has gone back to her grave.”
“That is just the sort of thing you are not to say, Abdul,” Lois’ voice was indignant. “It is absurd and ghastly, and in daylight I am ashamed to think I should have believed you when you talked about ghosts.”
“So be it, memsahib,” he salaamed impassively and vanished into the house. Only in his hand tight clutched he held something which he had not deemed it necessary to show Lois, since her mood had veered back to unbelief. It was something that he had picked up on the floor of his sahib’s bedroom, a shrivelled, dried-up blossom from some datura bush!
Because God made you mine, I’ll cherish thee,
Through light and darkness, through all time to be;
And pray His love may make our love divine,
Because—God made you mine.
— E. Teschemacher
Robin’s way back to health was very slow. “Enteric fever quite certainly now,” the doctor told Lois. “At first I couldn’t make up my mind, and your husband was very disobedient, Mrs. Drummond; he left his bed ten days before I meant him to. This time we will keep him there, won’t we?”
For that matter Robin had apparently given up all desire to rebel. His one very bad bout of temperature had left him weak and absolutely played out. Vitality was at its lowest, they had the greatest difficulty in rousing him to take his feeds even. He lay day and night, showing no desire to move, flat on his back, his eyes closed, just only breathing. Their efforts to make him more comfortable, to move him to a fresh side of the bed, only brought a set frown to his brow that stayed there till he had won back to his old position. Otherwise he paid not the slightest attention to any of them, and seemed to recognize no one.
Lois spent most of the time sitting on a chair at the foot of the bed, with her eyes on his face. She had overheard one of the nurses say to the other on an occasion when they thought themselves alone—“I am afraid of him, and that is the truth. Major Bullock is very hopeful, but I always have a feeling that at any moment I may turn round and find him gone. Death is next door to this, isn’t it?”
“Border line,” the other had replied. The memory of their words kept fear awake in Lois’ heart.
“Is he going to die, doctor?” she asked Major Bullock on his next visit. “Please tell me the truth; I am strong enough not to make a fuss, and the uncertainty is killing me.”
“Uncertainty is just the one thing you have got to have strength for,” he answered her. “No doctor could truthfully answer your question one way or the other. As far as my knowledge goes I do not think he will die, the rest is beyond my jurisdiction. Pray for hope, Mrs. Drummond. I am not a religious man, but I find that very consoling.”
So Lois prayed, over and over the same words till they grew to be part of the breath she drew. “Give him back to me, dear God, give him back.” Her thoughts did not run along other lines, she made no effort to put her great need into better words or to plead her love. She was like a child who over and over again repeats words once learnt. “God, give him back to me!” She could find no language but that cry.
One morning about a week later, Major Bullock after his visit of inspection to the invalid, called Lois out on to the veranda.
“I am hoping great things from that,” he said, drawing her attention to the masses of clouds that lay over the sea horizon. “We ought to get our first thunderstorm some time to-day.”
“The monsoon?” asked Lois listlessly. Even her short sojourn in India had led her to know how eagerly the first break of the rains is awaited.
“Yes,” Major Bullock nodded. “Thank God! Do you notice how muggy the air is this morning? wait till you hear the first splash, great heaven-sent drops. Then it will come down in a sort of raging flood, and you will see everything drinking in new life. The face of the sun will be hidden for quite two months. It has had such a beastly glare just lately that seemed to stay inside your eyelids even at night.”
“Will it be good for him?” asked Lois.
“I should rather think so. It is what I am building my hopes on. He hasn’t had a proper chance in this stifling heat.”
His surmise was correct, though indeed the first thunder-storm, which broke with a considerable amount of noise and confusion late that afternoon, brought nothing but the frown of discontent to Robin’s brow. But after the thunder had rolled itself away and the rain had settled down to a good steady downpour, for the first time in his illness he spoke a request.
“I want to turn on my side,” he whispered to an eagerly attentive nurse, “I feel like going to sleep.”
The nurses were absolutely jubilant. “That is the turning point, Mrs. Drummond,” they assured Lois, “he will come through all right now.”
Lois tiptoed out of the room later on, leaving him still asleep, and stood on the veranda watching the rain. Already the paths and roads ran like shallow streams of water, great puddles had gathered under every tree, waterfalls poured from the edges of the roof. There were lights across the way in the Latimers’ bungalow—she had not noticed them on the other nights. Major Latimer must have come back, then. For the first time in the last fortnight she thought again of Belle. Her own lesson in the school of love had taught Lois something of life which she had been blind to before—she had nothing but pity left for Belle’s memory, since Belle had loved Robin and had had to lose him.
As she stood there thinking these things Major Latimer came out of his bungalow, armed with a huge umbrella, and crossed the compounds to her.
“I hear Drummond has been ill,” he said, as he took her hand. “I only came back this afternoon, but I had to come across and ask how he was.”
“Better,” answered Lois; “you don’t know how good it is to be able to say that. And really it is only since this rain began that we have been able to say it. He is asleep now, properly asleep for the first time.”
Major Latimer stood watching her. “It has been an anxious time for you, hasn’t it?” he asked. “You are looking very played out.”
“Oh, I am all right,” she smiled at him. “Won’t you sit down, Major Latimer? how rude of me to keep you standing all this time.”
Major Latimer looked round for a chair, and pulled it up. “Just for a minute then, if you can spare me the time. I want to tell you what I have decided to do, it may help you in the making of your plans later. I am leaving the regiment, Mrs. Drummond.”
“Not because—” whispered Lois; she could not frame her thought in words. “Oh, you mustn’t do that,” she begged; “if any one goes it must be Robin.”
“No,” he shook his head, meeting her eyes kindly, “it is not altogether what you think. There is no real reason why either of us should go. Only I want to, I am tired of India somehow, and then there is Jimmie. I want to take him home, it is time he went to school.”
“Yes, but—” began Lois. Major Latimer interrupted.
“I am telling you about it first of all,” he said, “because I want you to understand, so that you can explain to Drummond later on. Please believe me when I say I shall be glad to go.” He stood up. “Jimmie is coming down from Matheran with Mrs. Rogers to-morrow. We will sail at the end of the week, so this is really good-bye, Mrs. Drummond.”
“I don’t know what to say,” whispered Lois, she stood with her hands in his. “You have been so good to us, and it is not the sort of thing that one can find words for.”
“Don’t try,” he answered; “I hate words. I hope your husband will make a quick recovery now, and that things will be plain sailing in the future.”
He would have turned away, but Lois held him back for a minute.
“Even though you hate words,” she said. “I want to tell you something. Do you remember how you told me that day on the veranda that to forgive and forget was the best way?”
“It is still the best way,” he put in.
“I know,” she agreed, “that is what I want to tell you. As far as I am concerned it is all right between me and Robin.”
“Then the future will be plain sailing,” he answered gravely. “I am very, very glad.”
Mrs. Rogers was an early caller next morning. “Got here at six, had a bath and came straight across,” she told Lois. “Now, my dear, tell me all about it.”
“There is nothing to tell except that Robin has been ill and that now he is better, really better,” Lois told her. “Next week the doctor says perhaps we shall be able to move him out on to the veranda. Oh, Mrs. Rogers, I am so wildly, so deliriously happy.”
Even in the midst of her joy, self-control gave way, and Lois laid her head down on the arm of her chair and burst into a storm of tears.
Mrs. Rogers sat down next her, and patted the heaving shoulders. “Quite so, dear, I understand, deliriously happy. Just you have your cry out; it will do you a world of good.”
It is to be noted to Mrs. Rogers’ credit that though devoured by curiosity—she had heard with the rest of Colaba of Mrs. Latimer’s death—she still forbore to ask any questions. How the Latimers and the Drummonds had all been together on that journey to the hills was the first question she had asked her husband, but he, with an irritating superiority which he generally reserved for regimental matters, had advised her to leave the matter alone, since there was nothing to find out. Mrs. Rogers knew he was telling her something that amounted to a lie; but she also knew there was no use questioning him any further. In good time he would no doubt tell her, and meanwhile there was one thing to be really grateful for, and that was that Mrs. Latimer was dead. A merciful dispensation of Providence, Mrs. Rogers called that.
As a matter of fact, she did not have to wait long for her information. Tears have a wonderful way of opening the floodgates of reserve. With Mrs. Rogers’ arms round her and with her head buried against that motherly bosom, Lois sobbed out her story.
“I thought at first,” she ended, “as if things would never be the same again, as if her spirit would always stand between me and Robin. But since he has been ill——”
“Since he has been ill,” Mrs. Rogers put in, “he has been altogether yours. I know, it is wonderful how their very helplessness seems to take hold of your heart and oust all other feeling. That is the sort of love you have for a baby I always think, and mind you, Lois, we women never really love unless the mother in us has been awakened.”
“When he gets better and able to remember things,” Lois went on, “do you think his thoughts will go back to her? Do you think there will always be something in his mind about which he never speaks to me?”
“Not a bit of it, child,” Mrs. Rogers reassured her. “Men forget quick enough even when they have loved. ‘Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart; ’tis women’s whole existence.’ Those are the only lines of poetry I have ever been able to understand, and they are extraordinarily true. In this case your husband did not even love the woman.”
“It ought to make what he did worse,” mused Lois, “and yet the thought just leaves me glad. A little bit of him stayed always mine, didn’t it?”
“Yes,” agreed Mrs. Rogers. “Well, you just leave matters there, my dear, and don’t be forever probing into what you feel, and why. The block of ice in your heart has melted, you are more human than you used to be.”
Not to be always probing her own feelings, to be content to love because she loved—Mrs. Rogers’ advice took firm root in Lois’ mind. Perhaps more than anything else she was afraid to break the spell of good fellowship which had grown up between herself and Robin during his convalescence. Only very rarely, and on those occasions she kept herself as it were wilfully blind, was she conscious of a shadow of restraint behind their friendship.
Once round the bend Robin had taken rapid strides on the road to recovery. By the end of a fortnight they were able to dispense with the nurses and start on their trial journey to the hills. England, the doctor had ordered, and six months’ leave; but they did not care to take the long sea trip absolutely at once, and it had been decided—dull as Matheran was in the rains—that they should go there for the first fortnight.
They had the same little bungalow which Mrs. Rogers and Lois had shared, and it was on the same veranda where she had listened to the older woman’s wise councils that Lois finally spoke to Robin of the shadow which she had up till then dreaded and ignored.
They had grown to be such friends in the last few days; they had laughed and chattered with each other on the journey up; they had sat opposite to one another and practically alone in the big bare hotel dining-room. Finally they had shared a huge umbrella on their walk back across the compound, and Robin had taken Lois’ hand and drawn her close under the shelter because the rain in Matheran, during the monsoon, is no laughing matter; it comes down in a perfect water spout.
Perhaps it was just this contact or the warmth of his hand on hers which made any more shirking of the shadow impossible to Lois. The something which was tugging at her heart for expression rose to her throat and almost choked her as she stood on the veranda after they had reached its shelter. Robin had stooped to slip off her outdoor shoes; she had to stand with one hand on his shoulder to hold herself steady—it was as if an electric current ran from his heart to hers at the touch. His words when he spoke came as no surprise to her: it had suddenly come to her that they would have to speak of the matter that very night.
“You have been an awful brick to me, Lois,” Robin said, he did not look at her, he stood with head a little bent, “I don’t know how to thank you.”
He would have turned away but Lois put out a hand to stop him. “Robin,” she whispered He could see even in the very dim light of the swinging veranda lamp how exquisitely her face had flushed. “Haven’t you anything else to say to me, nothing that you could ask me for?”
“So much and so little,” he answered swiftly, “and nothing that would be of any use. I can’t take pity from you, Lois, it hurts more than anything else.”
She shook her head, looking at him with wide grey eyes in which some new knowledge had wakened. “No,” she whispered, “that isn’t what I want you to ask, or what I want to give.”
She moved a little to the edge of the veranda and sat down on a chair outside the light of the lamp. “I have got a confession to make,” she said softly, “help me to make it, Robin; don’t look at me, turn your face a little away. I found out when you sent me away that time what an idiot I had been. Oh, my confession goes back further than that even. I had known it long before, only I was too proud to admit to it. But I wanted you, Robin, I wanted you to love me again, I wanted to tell you that I loved you. That was why I came.”
She waited a second, looking across the light at him where he stood a little turned away staring into the rain.
“Robin,” she whispered; had she humbled her pride for nothing, was it after all too late?
He turned at her call. “You don’t mean it,” he said, “it is because you are sorry for me. Because—” his voice broke harshly, “I can’t take what you are trying to offer me out of pity, Lois.”
“It isn’t pity,” she answered. She stood up holding out her hands to him, the light making a halo of her figure. “Oh, Robin, won’t you understand. It’s love.”
Out of the dark, across the light that lay between, he came to her, and, close held in his arms, she could lay her head down on his heart and know the battle won at last.
“And still I have got to ask forgiveness,” Robin said presently. Lois was back in her chair and he was on his knees beside her. “I failed you, Lois, and yet—God knows—I always loved you, dear.”
Lois caught her breath in a sob. “Robin, Robin,” she whispered, “don’t punish me more than you need. Wasn’t it I that failed you first of all, I who was so stupid and blind to all your dreams?”
“And love is like that,” he said simply, “you can’t tie it down to this or that description. It doesn’t just mean the body that has desires or the soul that has dreams, it means——”
“It means—just life,” Lois finished softly. And the radiance of the meaning came to her as she lifted her lips for his kiss.